The Winged Tiger

Stories for Another Day

In a land far away there is a place where three great rivers come together at the edge of the sea. Mangrove trees grow in the rivers and their roots grow upwards like black fingers in a sea of mud.

One day, a long way upriver, a melon fell off the back of a farmer’s cart and tumbled into the water. It floated and bobbed a long way downstream until it came to the place where the three rivers meet. A small eddy in the water pushed it towards the bank, where a tiger happened to be prowling around, looking for something to eat. The tiger, Kandaar, pulled the melon up onto the bank. It had thick, green rind so he couldn’t eat it himself, but gradually an idea grew in his head.

He pushed the melon with his paws and nudged it with his snout along the bank, until he came to where the old hawksbill turtle, Shukshu, was stripping green shoots off a riverbank plant and eating them.

Now Shukshu was old, the oldest and wisest of all the creatures that lived in the waters or on the banks or among the trees. He knew Kandaar, and he knew that he was vain and a coward. He went on quietly eating, and he waited for Kandaar to speak.

“Shukshu! Greetings, old friend!” Kandaar said heartily.

The turtle said nothing, only munched on his green shoots.

“Look at this fine melon I have,” Kandaar went on. “Doesn’t it look ripe and juicy?”

Shukshu nodded. “Indeed, it looks like a very good melon,” he said.

Kandaar said, “I’m not hungry just now – I had a big meal of young crocodile not long ago. Would you like this melon?”

Now Shukshu was very partial to a sweet, green melon, so he took it. He broke it open with his horned beak, and he ate the sweet, pink melon flesh inside. But every animal knows that a gift given means that a gift is expected in return. Shukshu ate the melon, and waited to see what Kandaar wanted in return for it.

“Shukshu, you are the wisest and cleverest of all the creatures hereabouts,” Kandaar began.

“What do you want, Kandaar?” Shukshu asked, cutting him short.

Now Kandaar was not the biggest tiger, nor the strongest, nor the cleverest. He disliked swimming, so he could not catch the fish and other water creatures that other tigers did. He often watched the river dolphins laughing and playing, jumping out of the water and tumbling in the currents, and he often thought how he would like to sink his teeth into their shining, meaty flesh and eat them.

Besides, once he had been trying to catch fish at the side of the river and slipped in the mud and fell into the water, splashing and flailing about, and the dolphins had seen him and laughed at him, and he hated the dolphins for it.

He said to Shukshu, the turtle, “O mighty one, I have always had an idea that I would look well with a pair of wings.” For he knew that dolphins are all but blind, and he dreamed of flying over the river and swooping down to catch one.

Shukshu threw back his head and laughed and laughed. “A tiger with wings? Seriously?”

Kandaar grew very angry, and he would have smacked Shukshu with his heavy paw and broken his old, tired neck, except that he remembered in time the sharp claw that the turtle had on each of his flippers. Instead, he forced a smile onto his face.

“Why, yes,” he said. “I think a pair of elegant wings would suit me very well. I have heard tell of horses with wings, and even pigs are said to fly from time to time.”

Shukshu knew very well what Kandaar had in mind, how he hated the dolphins, and how he was looking for an easy way to hunt them. He said, “Wings? Like a butterfly, or a blowfly?”

Cold anger filled Kandaar and he opened his jaws and bared his teeth. But he remembered in time that the hawksbill turtle eats almost everything, even the deadly Portuguese man’o’war, which makes their flesh poison to other animals, so he turned his growl into a smile and said, “No, of course not. I want wings like the great eagle who soars above the trees, noble and majestic.”

“Very well,” the turtle answered. Then he paused. “Do you mean the greatest eagle of all, the Whistling Eagle, whose talons whistle as the wind streams through them as he dives on his prey, striking terror into their hearts so they are frozen to the spot?”

Kandaar liked this idea very much. “Of course,” he said.

When he looked again, he had great, feathered wings on his sides. He flexed his shoulder muscles and sprang from the ground. His new wings carried him up and up, far above the trees, high into the sky. He laughed to himself, beating his wings in the warm air, soaring up, circling and dropping down.

Far below he could see the waters where the three great rivers meet, and he could see the dolphins swimming in packs. He picked out one that was a little behind the others, and he dived. The wind shrieked through the tips of his feathers and he laughed to himself.

Now Kandaar did not know, but Shukshu did, that although the river dolphins are all but blind, their hearing is excellent. They find their food and find their way by listening to the sounds around them, and how the sounds bounce and echo. When they heard the tiger dropping through the sky, his fur rippling, his wings beating and his talons whistling, they easily rolled out of his way and swam swiftly to safety.

But the river crocodile, Sunda, also heard the tiger plunging through the air, not with the grace of an eagle but heavily and clumsily. She slid silently off the bank and lay in the water, almost invisible, waiting for Kandaar. For she remembered that not so long ago it was Kandaar who had killed and eaten her young, just as they were hatching out of their eggs, and she hated him for it.

Kandaar came screeching down out of the sky, but his wings were heavy and cumbersome and he did not have the skill to turn or to lift himself up again. He crashed into the waters with a mighty splash. Fish, crabs, dolphins, all scattered quickly, but the Sunda the crocodile shot forward.

Her jaws fastened onto Kandaar’s leg and he gave a terrible scream. They wrestled in the water and the mud, crocodile and tiger, until Kandaar wrenched himself free. He slunk away through the mud, his wings shredded and one leg so damaged that he could never hunt again, but had to skulk in the mud at the water’s edge, feeding off crabs and beetles and the occasional dead fish.