It was late afternoon on a fine midsummer's day. Shafts of sunlight turned the leaves of the clumps of whippy ash saplings into a golden haze, and splashed on the green ferns and dog mercury that grew in the shade of sturdy grandfather oaks that had been planted in Nelson's day. It was July 1914, the glorious summer before the beginning of the Great War. I was eleven, and I was following my father's gamekeeper, Leach, along a narrow deer path that wound through the undergrowth between the great trees. I was trying to step as lightly and quietly as he did, and carried my air rifle broken open in the crook of my arm in just the same way that he carried his ancient twelve-bore shotgun.
I was the youngest of three sons and three daughters by a good six years. While my mother doted on me, my father was a remote and sternly forbidding figure. He was the local Member of Parliament, and often stayed up in town for weeks at a time. That summer, my two brothers, Charles (who had just graduated summa cum laude from Oxford, and would be lost at sea in the Battle of Jutland) and Harry (who was supposed to start university that year, but would instead join the Glorious Glosters, fight for four years in France, and return home without a scratch) were on a fishing holiday with my father in Ireland. I chafed in the company of my mother and my three sisters - the eldest, Evangeline, was engaged to a much older man who was Something in the Admiralty, and all they could talk about was the forthcoming wedding - and Leach, patient and kindly despite his gruff manner, allowed me to accompany him as he went about his duties.
We had just checked the pheasant cages, and were walking through the oak wood towards the crest of the beech hanger, where in late afternoon rabbits would pop out of the warrens they had dug in the stony soil and start to feed on the thin grass at the edge of the trees, when Leach discovered a set of deep, parallel furrows sliced into the trunk of an oak tree higher than I could reach. A little way off, he found a pile of pungent droppings. 'Scatter a little of this around the edge of my veg patch,' he said, 'and the bloomin' rabbits won't ever come near it again.'
'Is it close by?' I was breathless with excitement, and trying to look in every direction at once.
Leach stroked his mutton-chop whiskers. 'Reckon it was here yesterday, or the day before, judging by the signs. It's probably in the next county by now, but we'll go quietly, Master Edward, just in case.'
Beyond the ash coppices was a wide, grassy ride that cut through the wood. As we stalked towards the ride through a wide stand of bracken, Leach suddenly stopped and with the flat of his hand motioned to me to crouch down and be quiet. Hot sunlight fell on our shoulders as we squatted amongst the pungent bracken; sunlight lay brightly on the grassy ride and on the long margin of yellow elephant grass, taller than a man, on the far side. Shaggy palm trees leaned against a sky bleached by heat; a flock of green parrots took flight from one of them, calling to each other in alarm.
Leach turned to look at me. His kindly, wrinkled face was nut-brown and framed by exuberant side whiskers. He wore his greasy derby low over his eyes, and the collar of his many-pocketed tweed coat rode up behind his neck. I could smell his comfortable odour of Virginia rolling tobacco, boot blacking and old sweat. He put a finger to his lips and said, 'Someone's coming, Master Edward.'
The elephant grass was shaking as something made its way through it towards the ride. I heard the snick as, with a blunt thumb, Leach eased back the safety catch of his shotgun. I raised my air rifle, and something parted the fringe of grass along the edge of the track like a curtain.
What emerged was no ordinary tiger, but a tiger twisted into the shape of a man, with a tiger's low, flat-eared head and whiskered muzzle, and blazing yellow eyes that looked right and left before it stepped into the sunlight. Its back and flanks were striped orange and black; its chest was as white as swan's down. It wore a wide belt above its prominent hip bones, hung with all kinds of shiny tools, and there was a kind of shimmering in the air around it, as if it walked within a soap bubble.
Leach stood up and raised his shotgun. The tiger-man stopped, looked at Leach and opened its mouth in a toothy snarl just as he fired both barrels.
It was an easy shot, and Leach could not have missed. I saw the tall grass behind the tiger-man quiver and fall as shot chopped through it, but the tiger-man did not even flinch, and charged straight at us. While Leach broke open his shotgun and plucked out two smoking cartridges and inserted a fresh pair, I shot at the monster with my air rifle, pumped the slide and fired again. Then, in the bright moment when the tiger-man leapt, Leach's shotgun exploded by my ear.
