Prologue
The roar cannot be confused with anything else when you hear it. You could call it a premonition of death, as when I heard it, I thought, ‘The tiger is going to kill us.’ The sound fills the night, the echoes carrying through the dense forest. God willing, you will never hear it. Certainly not when you are asleep in the jungle with a woman you love lying next to you. This roar snapped me from a deep slumber, my hands shaking.
Annabelle wakes and reaches for her headlamp. I pull her against me and hold her tight. Twigs snap under the tiger’s weight, as it pushes its muzzle against the tent wall directly above her head. The tent fabric tightens like a drum under pressure as it presses its head forward and down directly above us. We can see the outline of its nostrils as they brush across the tent, the single layer of material, the barrier between us, and an inevitable death. The movement stops, and there is a sound, a brief, rushing inhale—the kind a child would make to extinguish candles on a birthday cake. But there is something different about the volume of air being moved and the force behind it—something larger and more profound. It is a primal sound, of a tiger inhaling the scent of prey.
The tiger roars a second great roar leaving me frightened and paralyzed. The roar is guttural and intense, a sequence of abrupt growls that reverberate through the air, creating ripples of sound waves. It gives meaning to the expression “the fear of God” and sounds like an explosion or a building collapsing. Each growl rises in pitch and volume, building to a crescendo before tapering off. It is a sound I can feel as much as I hear, the low frequencies causing a visceral vibration in my chest and the air tingling with raw power.
The roar fills the space around us in all directions and I do not know if the tiger is a hundred yards away or standing just outside our tent. From this distance, the experience is overwhelming and has the effect of separating you from yourself, of scrambling the very neurology that is supposed to save you at times like this.
From its growls and the low guttural sounds, I place the tiger near the giant tree, close to the shed where the porters are sleeping. It is agitated, its calls cutting through the air, declaring its dominance, and warning that we who have trespassed will suffer its wrath. Able to kill an animal many times its size, the tiger possesses the brute strength to drag an awkward, thousand-pound carcass through the forest for a hundred yards before consuming it. No creature in the forest is off limits to the tiger; it alone can mete out death at will.
The tiger uses its paws to slam against the shed’s wooden door, and each strike sounds across the night. I can hear the wood tearing as it hunts the men inside. I imagine that the strands of wood are being stripped away, inch by inch and that when the door is no more, the night will be broken by screams, raw and full of primal terror, followed by a combination of growls, tearing flesh, and the final whimpers of dying men.
Unable to access the house, I can sense, more than hear, the tiger as it moves towards our campsite. We lie frozen in our sleeping bags, breathing shallow breaths, listening to the thuds of its paws meeting the ground. Despite the cold, sweat breaks out on my forehead, palms, and back, and every muscle in my body tenses, poised for flight. ‘Run, Run,’ my mind screams to run and seek shelter behind the thick mud walls and the heavy wooden door. Perhaps if she goes first, Annabelle might make it to the old house. These animals can leap forward 25 feet in a single bound, and I would have no chance of following her out of the tent.
The breathing of the tiger, the muzzle as it moves slowly back and forth— slow the seconds into eternity. There is a sound of a stick cracking as the tiger moves. Annabelle pushes against me, and I hold her tighter as if I can somehow protect her. We lie in the darkness, clinging onto each other, afraid even to breathe, listening intently for the sound of the approaching tiger.
The fabric tearing is a sharp, ripping sound, a clear and sudden disruption in the quiet of the night. A sharp, piercing cry cuts through the air, the raw, unfiltered scream of extreme distress and the horror of a man waking to a lethal predator. The tent rustles back and forth, and sticks and twigs snap as something is dragged into the brush. Sometime later, a roar bounces off the rock walls of the valley, cutting through the air with an imposing resonance, a roar that fills the forest with the force of an ancient angry god.
