The Understory, page 6
On the ninth evening after the new moon in the first month of 2427 BE, I was rowing our boat to pick up Mae Duangbulan, who was out harvesting alone in the fields along the stream to the south of the village. I was ten years old. I’d done the same for days and had developed a routine: I’d help her load the sheaves of rice onto the boat and then take her home. I rowed the boat leisurely, letting it drift along the water. On both sides of the stream were forests dense with large, imposing trees; their branches arched and met in the middle, forming a seamless canopy threaded together with an assortment of vines, turning the passage underneath into something like a tunnel. On the ground, an underbrush of weeds and grass grew on top of each other. Back then I never worked hard when less would do, and soon enough I let the water carry the boat at its own lackadaisical pace as I lay prone, chin hooked on the gunwale, peering through the limpid depth of the stream—haste was the last thing on my mind. The world beneath the water was soundless, peaceful, and cool to the eye; it was full of grass, seaweed, duck lettuce, and lotus clusters, full of shrimp, mollusks, crabs, and fish. I gazed at the river snails latched to the stems of reeds, at the striped snakeheads suspended among the duck lettuce, still but for the fins fluttering by their ears and the tails wavering just at the tips. I gazed at the crabs scuttling clumsily on the muddy bank. I gazed at the hydrillas swaying in the soft current like tree branches blowing in the wind. All of it was novel and sublime, strange and beautiful, tranquil and intriguing, and refreshing to look at, and I lay in enraptured reverie, as I always did on this journey. One giant mudfish, a new mother, patiently took up the rear behind her children—there must have been a hundred of them, tinier than matchsticks—and with my boat approaching, she gaped her mouth open for all of her offspring to take shelter within as I watched, wonder-struck. A school of red-tailed tinfoil barbs swam wiggling back and forth around a patch of blue lotus flowers; with their bright silver scales dazzling, they looked as though they weren’t living things but rather jewels fit for a splendid heroine. Now hampala barbs shot through the water like pewter fireworks. With all this wonder beneath and around me, I didn’t notice the strange silence that had fallen over the world above at all. Under a cluster fig tree at the edge of the fields—this tree was so enormous it would take two people to wrap their arms all the way around the trunk—I steered my boat so that it would skim the shore, grabbing hold of grass as I readied to moor. A drop of dark red liquid splatted onto my left forearm. Nectar from the fig tree, I assumed. Another red drop landed with a splat, again on my left forearm. Still, I thought it must be nectar from the fig tree. I used my hand to wipe the two red spots, rinsing everything in the moving water. It was then I smelled the unmistakable odor. Blood! With a sinking feeling, I looked around myself: stillness, unsettling stillness. Then, a noise, and one that nearly frightened me to death: what sounded like soft retching was coming from somewhere above. Before I could summon the bravery to look up, right before my eyes an ear fell into the belly of the boat, a human ear with a ruby earring, lustrous and flushed, attached at the lobe. As I looked up, I saw her graceful arm dangling down, saw her long, comely fingers tensed into a claw, saw her smooth gold ring bouncing light in the declining sun, saw her long, black tresses, saw her face drained of life, and I saw the terror in Mae Duangbulan’s eyes as her body lay on its back, her head hanging down, her mouth frozen agape. Above her body, hovering conspicuously between the fruit-studded branches of the fig tree’s fork, was the enormous face of a tiger, its fangs and teeth covered in blood, its mouth covered in blood, its white whiskers covered in blood and vomit and fanned out into a sneer, its eyes sleepy and serene from satiation. I leapt onto the shore. I screamed something primal. I lost my mind for seven whole days and nights. I had nightmares again and again. I mumbled things no one could make sense of. Luang Paw Kom, the then abbot of Praeknamdang Temple, had to make holy water for me to drink and bathe with for over a month. I refused all food and was wasting away. Word among the people of Praeknamdang was that the tiger had claimed two lives in that incident: Mae Duangbulan’s and her son Kwantien’s. But I survived, I reemerged into reality. However, I couldn’t break free of that sheer, indescribable terror. It would take me ten years to conquer it, and the victory came at a steep price, perhaps too steep. In response to Mae Duangbulan’s end, Old Man Junpa became a mighty tiger slayer. Two days after her death, instead of staying and looking after me, his ailing son, he left me in Luang Paw Kom’s care and returned to that same fig tree, where he captured the murderous tiger. He showed no attachment toward Mae Duangbulan’s body and used none other than her corpse to bait the tiger. That was how much he wanted revenge. And how heartless and barbaric he could be. He didn’t kill the tiger with a single shot. His Ninlagaan tame in his hands, he shattered its legs one by one, bullet by bullet, calmly, intending to kill it slowly, bent on a cold revenge. The tiger thrashed on the ground, growling ferociously as it sent grass whipping in every direction. Old Man Junpa shot it twice more, in the flank and in the spine, methodical enough not to kill it and mindful enough not to leave it able to attack him. He cut down a vine, looped it around the tiger’s neck, and dragged the creature out of the forest, all the way to the clearing in the middle of the village, mouthing curse words the whole way. In the clearing (or so went the story going around Praeknamdang at the time, which matched the account later shared with me directly), he hammered down two posts and tied the tiger’s two forelegs and two hind legs tight to each of the posts. He ran a flame along its skin, he pricked it with thorns, kicked it with the front of his foot, with the back of his heel, spat on it, pissed on it. He’d gone mad, and he looked it, his hair wild, his eyes raging and bloodshot, his whole body quivering with tension and cruelty. For days, he never wandered far from the clearing, nor left the tiger’s side for long, not changing clothes or eating a thing. He drank relentlessly, though, to the point of utter inebriation and beyond. And he paced back and forth near the tiger, now reduced to a wounded captive, and stopped only to torture it again and again with various methods of his devising. The tiger convulsed, growled, groaned, stared at him with vindictive eyes. Old Man Junpa then set up a mousetrap, and twelve mice were caught, some quite large. He placed the whole dozen into a bamboo tube with the node hacked off only on one end, held the opening against the tiger’s rear, and set fire to the side left sealed. As he fed the flame, the mice scampered in complete chaos within the bamboo culm. In their suffering, they were utterly panicked. And their only way out was to gnaw and dig and make themselves disappear into the tiger’s rear end, up its back passage. But only eight of the mice managed to reemerge, all of them soaked in blood from head to tail. The other four were stuck somewhere inside the tiger’s body, and that was how the tiger died. From then on, Old Man Junpa would slay every tiger he could get his hands on. Whenever somebody from a nearby village or district came to fetch him with the request that he go after a tiger, he’d abandon all his other work mid-task and, gleeful, hurry out with the caller. His Ninlagaan was always impeccably cared for, and there always had to be plenty of gunpowder and percussion caps on hand, which were always properly stored. He slaughtered so many, he stopped keeping count. He slaughtered babies and elderly ones; slaughtered nursing tigresses and strapping young males. Whenever anyone mentioned tigers in his presence, he’d hawk a loogie and say, “Bah! Those mangy cats!” He looked down on them, and in his disdain he grew bold and cocky, going after tigers with less and less caution. He was sure of himself, for he’d never been pursued by a tiger. He set up a gun trap strung to a tree, its sole aim being to kill tigers. He built cage traps tirelessly, and time and time again he left the unlucky tiger to rot right in the contraption without ever dismantling it. He once snatched tiger cubs from their lair after waiting for their mother to go out in search of food, and noosed their necks with vines and hung them in a row over the mouth of their den. He went out and bought me a percussion rifle of my own, which he named Sai Fah Faad—Thunderbolt—and by training me himself, made a sharp, agile shooter out of me (when I was new to it, Sai Fah Faad kicked me over and over, nearly knocking my shoulder out of joint). He had me accompany him into the jungle, teaching me how to follow tiger trails and hunt like a grown man. But when the moment came to shoot a tiger, I could never muster the courage to do it. Every time I was about to pull the trigger, my mind couldn’t help but flash back to the shock and horror, the pain and suffering, that Mae Duangbulan had had to endure. Deep down, I always thought I’d be dealt the same fate as Mae Duangbulan, and instead of driving me on, the thought paralyzed me. Every time I had to shoot a tiger, when the moment of truth came, Old Man Junpa had to step in and do it. He grew beyond exasperated with me, and, using the harshest, crudest words, would chastise and belittle me, right there over the body of the tiger he had just shot on my behalf. For the most part, Old Man Junpa’s strategy was to trail a tiger and shoot it in the daytime, but sometimes his tactic was to sit in wait up on a machan at night, near to where he’d found a tiger’s prey, particularly when the moon shone bright enough, because tigers tend not to polish off their prey in one go; instead, they usually retrace their steps and come back to eat the rest later. I’d help him set up the machan, camouflaging it with greenery, and then we’d get ourselves up there and sit from the first hints of evening, and keep on sitting in the same position, however stiff we got. Every time you wanted to shift any part of your body, you had to do it as quietly and carefully as possible. Horseflies and mosquitoes and midges and mites would crawl or land on us and suck our blood until they were full and swollen. You couldn’t risk making a noise by hitting or slapping them and had to try and brush them off gently with your hand. If you needed to piss, you had to piss into a bamboo tube. If you needed to shit, tough luck, you had to hold it. And you couldn’t come down from the machan until day broke, and as far as I could see, the machan was always perilously close to the carcass—only about three or four arm spans away sometimes—and to me, the machan we were on never seemed high enough, it always seemed a tiger could leap right up onto it in one go, and boy, the sickening odor of the prey! In the moonlight, so full of illusions, and amid the silence, after a long, excruciating wait, I’d eventually hear a tiger approaching, returning to its meal. Tigers haunt the day too, but of course their might burns brightest at night, and in that moonlight so full of illusions, I’d spot a pair of petrifying, scintillating emerald eyes among the trees, eyes that had the ability to stun and mesmerize me as if they could actually hypnotize. They were eyes more powerful than any other animal’s, far more powerful than humans’. Those eyes seemed to say to me: “Come, come close. Come and have a good look at me. I’m a thing of wonder. Or would you rather I go up there to you?” and then in me would arise the desire to climb down to the owner of those eyes, or else have the owner of those eyes come up to me. It was that way every time I saw a tiger’s eyes at night. I was spellbound; it was as though I were sleepwalking, unable to distinguish between illusion and reality, fixed in a mesmerized state as though I were hypnotized, my mind thinking of nothing but Mae Duangbulan, thinking about nothing but what her reactions would have been, what her thoughts, her feelings would have been when she was faced with Yama, the King of Hell, in the form of a tiger. I was always trapped in that mesmerized state—until an eruption from Old Man Junpa’s gun snapped me out of it. It was tiger hunting the hard way, truly. And it was a true, cold courage on Old Man Junpa’s part—or else madness. He didn’t own a modern gun, he didn’t even own a flashlight, but his method worked. His Ninlagaan was superbly accurate, even though it was nothing more than a shabby old percussion rifle. Those emerald eyes would then be extinguished, and in the morning, when we climbed down from the machan, there would be the tiger, dead, a hunk of its skull blown off by a bullet ten saleungs in weight. There were a very few times when Old Man Junpa fired a poor shot and the tiger didn’t die instantly, but it’d still be mortally wounded and would stagger off to die somewhere not too far away. There were only ever three tigers that Old Man Junpa had to spoor afterward. But those weren’t in any way risky or arduous hunts. One evening, in the summertime, as Old Man Junpa and I were on our way back from a hunt in the western part of the jungle, Old Man Junpa stopped without warning, raised his rifle, aimed, and fired. It was such a swift, sudden move—an abrupt shot at close range—that I didn’t even realize what was happening, especially because in that moment I was struggling to balance on my shoulders the big muntjac I’d killed during the hunt. Right beside me had been a tiger, which Old Man Junpa had now shot in the right foreleg, a little below the shoulder. It had smelled the muntjac’s blood, and it had tracked the scent, and had marched right up to snatch the carcass from me, or maybe it’d been plotting something even bolder, which is to say, killing me first—who knows—perhaps by lunging in and clawing me at the base of my neck and sinking its teeth into my throat. Had Old Man Junpa not been with me that evening, who can say what might have happened? I could be a dead man. I’m getting goosebumps just from telling the story. Here, look at my arms! I’m getting tingles down the front of my neck, too, thinking how close I came to having those fangs in my throat. That cursed tiger, struck by Old Man Junpa’s ten-saleung lead bullet, was sent writhing on the ground below a big makha tree. The creature was stunned, it was furious, it was in horrific pain. It attempted to get back on its feet, it eyed Old Man Junpa, it eyed me, and made as if it was about to spring at Old Man Junpa, but then it staggered and keeled over once more, letting loose an earthshaking roar. Then all of a sudden, it lost interest in Old Man Junpa, who was hurrying to repack his rifle with gunpowder and a new bullet, lost interest in me, who the whole time had been standing there stunned, with a dead muntjac draped over my shoulders, wet and sticky with blood from the carcass, awkwardly frozen like a coward—it lost interest in us completely. It thrashed about, now rolling onto its stomach, now rolling onto its back, and it groaned and growled in agony, its body contracting and expanding, its long tail flailing and out of control—and that made it livid. It curled its tail toward itself, its body arced, and it bit down on its own tail and chewed without mercy two or three times. But then it realized, no, its tail wasn’t to blame for its host of impairments, it was rather its right foreleg, which now hung stiffly, it was rather this limb that was the culprit, this limb that failed to respond, that no longer obeyed its command, and so it rolled over and laid its belly flat against the ground, opened its jaws and bared its fangs all the way, and bit down on its right foreleg as hard as it could, above the paw, which caused its paw to be severed off, its paw which it then cast aside without any sentimentality, and it bit down once again just as hard on that same leg, higher than before, sinking its teeth in as deep as it could, but this time, no more leg was severed off, so it yanked, its body starting to go in circles; the whole time, it both groaned and growled, crazed. Old Man Junpa, who at that point had finished loading his gunpowder and bullet, calmly walked straight up to it, his rifle pressed on his shoulder with the hammer cocked back, his finger ready on the trigger. Old Man Junpa was in its eyeline the whole time, but the tiger, lost in its own world of pain, didn’t pay him the slightest attention, not even when Old Man Junpa held the mouth of his gun’s barrel to its immense head, which was still caught up in its own chaos of tugging and yanking, and shot it execution-style. With the burst of the gunshot, the tiger’s groans and growls were suddenly extinguished; the entire jungle became soundless, with the scent of gunpowder hanging in the still, heavy air. I remained standing there like a statue, the scene that had just taken place seeming like something that had happened in a dream, and it was only when Old Man Junpa walked over to me and handed me his hunter’s knife for me to skin that tiger that I snapped back to my senses. He usually had me be the one to skin the tigers he shot. Their pelt could be sold, and sold at a handsome price if in good condition. Their bones, too, could be sold, to Chinese herbal apothecaries—they used them as an ingredient for some kind of medicine. Their teeth and nails, too, could be sold. Whenever he needed money, Old Man Junpa would take these things into town and sell them, traveling by boat if it was the monsoon season—our own boat—or, if it was summer, by oxcart, which he borrowed from a neighbor. Even their whiskers could fetch a good price. Their whiskers are very stiff and the strands are very thick and people can use them as tips for their cattle prods, instead of metal spikes, although if people learn they’ve been used, they’ll refuse to eat the meat, saying meat from cattle jabbed with such a prod tastes wrong. Old Man Junpa would often grow exasperated with me and say, “Why are you going to let tigers make you shake in your shoes? All they are is a kind of cat,” and he was convinced of it too. He liked to leave me with a tiger’s carcass for long stretches at a time. I’d try to get used to the dead tiger, try to overcome my fear, and every time I was about to have to get in there and skin a tiger, although I’d start by standing some distance away and hesitating and staring at the dead tiger from that distance and taking much too long to work up the nerve, eventually I’d approach and squat down next to it and, after hesitating for a long while more, pry its maw open, study its fangs and teeth, study them with care, study even its red and incredibly rough tongue, study its claws, those big, sharp, hornlike claws, those claws concealed within its paws and once ever ready to unfurl—I’d study and touch and feel them; and I’d pull apart its eyelids to study its eyes, which had the color of yellow sapphires in the daytime and which morphed into the deep green of emeralds at night; I’d run my hand along its fur, reversing from its hind to its head, and study in detail the yellow portions and the black portions along its spine and flanks, and the white areas under its belly, under its chin, under its neck, all of which sometimes had fleas buried within, and study and touch its skin (it’s a thin-skinned animal), study its long, curved tail, which consisted of a column of bones stacked from large to small, and study its nipples, which both male and female tigers have, and lift up the tail to study its behind, study its rear hole, lift up its leg and hold that high to study its pathetic penis and testicles (or, in the case of a tigress, study its yoni), and I’d skin it and carve open its belly to study its intestines, its stomach, its liver, its lungs, its heart (I’ve been tempted to eat a tiger’s heart before, eat it raw, eat it so I’d never again fear another tiger in this world), and with my knife I’d slice and dig and scrape so I could study its tendons and bones, and I’d sniff its crimson blood, which was gamey and as far as I could see, no different at all from the blood of cattle or boars or muntjacs or larger deer. I was always fascinated by the ears on a tiger, ears being the homeliest part of a tiger’s form—rather rounded, rather squat, rather short, not well proportioned to its body—the same way that elephants’ eyes are the ugliest part of elephants. All of this I did in an effort to convince myself that tigers, too, were just regular animals—they had to eat, to shit, to piss, to breed like all of the other animals out there; they weren’t some kind of demon to be feared. I have to say, it never quite worked. By the time I married, I’d butchered seventeen tigers in all, but even so, for me, the fact remained that dead tigers and live ones were different, so very different.
