In
The Forests Of The Night, On Xmas Eve.
Tiger prowls the jungle every night, and Xmas Eve is
no different: Tiger must eat, which means Tiger must hunt, which means
something must die.
It is the way of the jungle.
This night, which was Xmas Eve - -although Tiger did
not know that (yet) – something smelled different in the jungle. Tiger smelled cold, and distance, and something it could not place but which was enticing.
Tiger padded silently through the trees that stretched
up and up and up so high that the stars were almost never visible. The light of
the moon whipped through leaves and vines and branches, flung down upon the
hills where Tiger lived, but by the time it got to the bottom of the jungle,
here, it fluttered and gasped and Tiger slipped easily from shadow to shadow
without being bothered by the glimmers of sky at all.
The air quivered with excitement and that made Tiger’s
whiskers bristle.
Something…
Tiger curled around the last edge of a mound covered
with ancient rotting logs, and its eyes saw in the night a dim glow of a fire
inside a hut.
Something moved…
Tiger crouched and tensed.
The firelight shot tiny sparks up and out, faint
glows, ghosts of light, really – spectres that danced in the edges of the
night. Tiger was not distracted. While its eyes soaked in the scene, it felt
the air with its whiskers and tasted the odors of prey in its keen nose.
Something… icy.
Tiger wondered at that word: icy. As with cold, as
with distant this was something new.
It was what had lured Tiger here. Nothing in the jungle, packed with vegetation
and insects and monkeys and snakes and rivers and everything that teemed here,
was cold or distant or icy.
Something furry…
Tiger crept closer to the hut. The reddish glow of the
embers of the fire made the windows feel awake, as though it were watching him.
Tiger could hear breathing, though, deep and sibilant, and knew that the
occupants were asleep.
Something glimmered…
Something smoked…
Something shook
and jiggled and …
Tiger tensed, ready to leap.
The thing stopped and looked at him.
“Well Well Well, if it isn’t Tiger,” it said to him.
Tiger sat back in the shadows of the grass at the edge of the clearing, blended
almost perfectly into the night. “Well, come out, come out, come out.”
Tiger sat.
The thing stepped another foot forward, leaving the
hut. It held a large bag over its back, and its eyes, even with its back to the
fire, twinkled with starlight. Or… snow.
Tiger licked its lips. Snow.
“What are you doing here, Tiger?”
Tiger finally spoke: Hunting, it replied in the voice
of the jungle, the rushing of water, the whisper of leaves, the flap of bird
wings, the snap of a twig.
“Hunting. Not these people, surely.”
When the thing spoke, Tiger could hear night skies,
wind, moonlight, mountaintops, merriment. When the thing spoke, Tiger felt
dizzy with the onslaught of emotion and sensation. But it did not waver in its stare.
“Not… me,”
the thing said.
Tiger narrowed its eyes in answer, tensed its
shoulders, curled back its lips.
“Don’t you know who I am?” the thing asked.
I don’t care who you are, Tiger told it. Tiger remained perfectly still – the way an arrow is perfectly still the
moment before it takes flight. The way a heart is perfectly still, between
beats.
“I am Santa
Claus, Tiger! You can’t be hunting me.”
Again, that voice: this time it sounded like cinnamon,
it tasted like wishes, it curled around Tiger’s ears like hot chocolate. Tiger
shook its head, slightly, to clear it. These were things that did not concern
it.
I do not know you, Tiger growled back.
“Everyone knows me! I circle the globe on Xmas Eve,
bringing joy to children and happiness to families. People sing of me! People
bring their babies to sit on my lap. People write to me and draw pictures of me
in crayon and leave me cookies and milk.”
Tiger took a half step forward now, eyes locked on the
stranger… the Santa Claus… Tiger’s
fur bristled with the whipping of wind about the North Pole, Tiger shivered at
the loneliness of a man who ventures out only one time per year, and even then
must fly through the night, by himself, creeping into houses and partaking of
the remnants of a holiday eve.
Tiger took another half-step, claws out now, white in
the glow from the windows of the hut.
I do not know you, Tiger said again. And I hunger.
“I am the Spirit of Xmas!” Santa Claus said, smiling.
To me you are meat, Tiger said, and even as Tiger’s
howling roar shrieked the word meat into
the air so wildly it rebounded off the faraway mist-covered mountains that surrounded them,
it leapt with a vicious speed that cannot be imagined: it was a blur of orange
and black and teeth and claw, like a flame brought to life and given diamond-sharp
edges.
It came down on nothing.
Tiger spun, bared its teeth, ripped its claws through
the air, spun again, tail lashing like a whip.
Nothing.
From above came the voice again: “I know you didn’t mean that, Tiger!” When Tiger looked up,
the man, this Santa Claus, stood atop
the hut. There were other animals there now, deer of a sort, pawing at the
straw of the roof. Somehow they all fit up there and yet they could not. Tiger’s
eyes balked at the sight, even as Tiger’s back seemed to feel the soft wet of
newly-fallen snow while the man talked. “I
know you are just doing what tigers do, and
so I won’t hold it against you. But surely
even you, Tiger, have something of the
spirit of Xmas in you. Surely even you can find it in your heart to stay in
one night a year, to leave off with killing for one day, to pad your way through
the jungle and merely nod at the animals you see, to allow humans to walk by
unscathed, to give the one thing you can give to your fellow beings: to spare them.”
In those words, Tiger felt the weight of a billion billion
gifts, built by tiny hands, carried through the air on the back of a sleigh,
placed delicately underneath trees that glowed like they were filled with stars
themselves. Tiger saw the gleam of shiny paper and the soft curl of ribbons.
Tiger heard the giggles and shrieks of children, the soft gasps of parents.
Tiger smelled love in those words.
“Surely you, Tiger, now know what Xmas is, and what it
means,” Santa Claus said, and he was again standing before Tiger, red and black
and white and round and smiling, his eyes reflecting Tiger’s own sharp face and
green gaze.
Santa held out a mittened hand, palm up, before Tiger.
Tiger looked down into it, this black mitten. Tiger saw there a tiny white shape,
and as its eyes focused on it, Tiger saw that the shape had points, and whirls,
and creases, and folded in and out upon itself, and gleamed white and… icy … in the palm of Santa’s hand. Tiger
saw itself reflected back from many facets of the tiny snowflake. When Tiger
looked back up, Santa was smiling.
“Merry Xmas, Tiger,” Santa said, and laid a finger
alongside his nose.
Tiger blinked.
The man, Santa, was
gone.
Tiger stood there in bewilderment for a moment, and
then felt a breeze stir up. Tiger’s nostrils flared, and his ears circled back
and forth. The breeze whipped through his whiskers and danced around, growing
colder and colder. Tiger shivered at first, and then stopped as snowflakes
began falling all around him.
In the heart of the jungle, in the clearing by the
tiny hut Santa had just left, snow began falling more and more heavily. It fell in great gleaming wet flakes that
coated Tiger’s whiskers and lay heavy on his back. It formed drifts and hills
in a short time. Tiger jumped through the
hills and rolled in the valleys of snow. Tiger ran in circles into the wind and
against it, feeling the snow sting his eyes and pelt his nose and ears. Tiger burrowed into the snow and came up
covered in it, shaking it off in great clumps. Tiger licked and ate the snow
until his tongue was numb and his belly sore with icy glee. Tiger sat and
stared up into the sky, watching as the snowflakes drifted down from the stars
above to gently flare past his vision and join their fellows on the ground.
Tiger kept at this until the sun started to rise and
he heard the children in the hut begin to stir. Looking, Tiger saw in the doorway two small children, a boy and a girl. They had frozen at the
sight of the large cat. Their eyes were wide with terror. Tiger’s stomach
rumbled with hunger and his nostrils flared at the scent of the meat that stood before him.
But Tiger's mind remembered the man from the night, the single snowflake in his palm. Tiger's ears recalled the words he had heard; Tiger's heart still held the feel of the visit.
Merry Xmas, Tiger whispered to the children, and
padded off into the jungle, the snow melting behind him.
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