It was Mrs. Packletide's pleasure and intention that she should
shoot a tiger. Not that the lust to kill had suddenly descended
on her, or that she felt that she would leave India safer and more
wholesome than she had found it, with one fraction less of wild
beast per million of inhabitants. The compelling motive for her
sudden deviation towards the footsteps of Nimrod was the fact that
Loona Bimberton had recently been carried eleven miles in an
aeroplane by an Algerian aviator, and talked of nothing else; only
a personally procured tiger-skin and a heavy harvest of Press
photographs could successfully counter that sort of thing. Mrs.
Packletide had already arranged in her mind the lunch she would
give at her house in Curzon Street, ostensibly in Loona
Bimberton's honour, with a tiger-skin rug occupying most of the
foreground and all of the conversation. She had also already
designed in her mind the tiger-claw brooch that she was going to
give Loona Bimberton on her next birthday. In a world that is
supposed to be chiefly swayed by hunger and by love Mrs.
Packletide was an exception; her movements and motives were
largely governed by dislike of Loona Bimberton.
Circumstances proved propitious. Mrs. Packletide had offered a
thousand rupees for the opportunity of shooting a tiger without
overmuch risk or exertion, and it so happened that a neighbouring
village could boast of being the favoured rendezvous of an animal
of respectable antecedents, which had been driven by the
increasing infirmities of age to abandon game-killing and confine
its appetite to the smaller domestic animals. The prospect of
earning the thousand rupees had stimulated the sporting and
commercial instinct of the villagers; children were posted night
and day on the outskirts of the local jungle to head the tiger
back in the unlikely event of his attempting to roam away to fresh
hunting-grounds, and the cheaper kinds of goats were left about
with elaborate carelessness to keep him satisfied with his present
quarters. The one great anxiety was lest he should die of old age
before the date appointed for the memsahib's shoot. Mothers
carrying their babies home through the jungle after the day's work
in the fields hushed their singing lest they might curtail the
restful sleep of the venerable herd-robber.
The great night duly arrived, moonlit and cloudless. A platform
had been constructed in a comfortable and conveniently placed
tree, and thereon crouched Mrs. Packletide and her paid companion,
Miss Mebbin. A goat, gifted with a particularly persistent bleat,
such as even a partially deaf tiger might be reasonably expected
to hear on a still night, was tethered at the correct distance.
With an accurately sighted rifle and a thumbnail pack of patience
cards the sportswoman awaited the coming of the quarry.
"I suppose we are in some danger?" said Miss Mebbin.
She was not actually nervous about the wild beast, but she had a
morbid dread of performing an atom more service than she had been
paid for.
"Nonsense," said Mrs. Packletide; "it's a very old tiger. It
couldn't spring up here even if it wanted to."
"If it's an old tiger I think you ought to get it cheaper. A
thousand rupees is a lot of money."
Louisa Mebbin adopted a protective elder-sister attitude towards
money in general, irrespective of nationality or denomination.
Her energetic intervention had saved many a rouble from
dissipating itself in tips in some Moscow hotel, and francs and
centimes clung to her instinctively under circumstances which
would have driven them headlong from less sympathetic hands. Her
speculations as to the market depreciation of tiger remnants were
cut short by the appearance on the scene of the animal itself. As
soon as it caught sight of the tethered goat it lay flat on the
earth, seemingly less from a desire to take advantage of all
available cover than for the purpose of snatching a short rest
before commencing the grand attack.
"I believe it's ill," said Louisa Mebbin, loudly in Hindustani,
for the benefit of the village headman, who was in ambush in a
neighbouring tree.
"Hush!" said Mrs. Packletide, and at that moment the tiger
commenced ambling towards his victim.
"Now, now!" urged Miss Mebbin with some excitement; "if he doesn't
touch the goat we needn't pay for it." (The bait was an extra.)
The rifle flashed out with a loud report, and the great tawny
beast sprang to one side and then rolled over in the stillness of
death. In a moment a crowd of excited natives had swarmed on to
the scene, and their shouting speedily carried the glad news to
the village, where a thumping of tom-toms took up the chorus of
triumph. And their triumph and rejoicing found a ready echo in
the heart of Mrs. Packletide; already that luncheon-party in
Curzon Street seemed immeasurably nearer.
It was Louisa Mebbin who drew attention to the fact that the goat
was in death-throes from a mortal bullet-wound, while no trace of
the rifle's deadly work could be found on the tiger. Evidently
the wrong animal had been hit, and the beast of prey had succumbed
to heart-failure, caused by the sudden report of the rifle,
accelerated by senile decay. Mrs. Packletide was pardonably
annoyed at the discovery; but, at any rate, she was the possessor
of a dead tiger, and the villagers, anxious for their thousand
rupees, gladly connived at the fiction that she had shot the
beast. And Miss Mebbin was a paid companion. Therefore did Mrs.
Packletide face the cameras with a light heart, and her pictured
fame reached from the pages of the TEXAS WEEKLY SNAPSHOT to the
illustrated Monday supplement of the NOVOE VREMYA. As for Loona
Bimberton, she refused to look at an illustrated paper for weeks,
and her letter of thanks for the gift of a tiger-claw brooch was a
model of repressed emotions. The luncheon-party she declined;
there are limits beyond which repressed emotions become dangerous.
From Curzon Street the tiger-skin rug travelled down to the Manor
House, and was duly inspected and admired by the county, and it
seemed a fitting and appropriate thing when Mrs. Packletide went
to the County Costume Ball in the character of Diana. She refused
to fall in, however, with Clovis's tempting suggestion of a
primeval dance party, at which every one should wear the skins of
beasts they had recently slain. "I should be in rather a Baby
Bunting condition," confessed Clovis, "with a miserable rabbit-
skin or two to wrap up in, but then," he added, with a rather
malicious glance at Diana's proportions, "my figure is quite as
good as that Russian dancing boy's."
"How amused every one would be if they knew what really happened,"
said Louisa Mebbin a few days after the ball.
"What do you mean?" asked Mrs. Packletide quickly.
"How you shot the goat and frightened the tiger to death," said
Miss Mebbin, with her disagreeably pleasant laugh.
"No one would believe it," said Mrs. Packletide, her face changing
colour as rapidly as though it were going through a book of
patterns before post-time.
"Loona Bimberton would," said Miss Mebbin. Mrs. Packletide's face
settled on an unbecoming shade of greenish white.
"You surely wouldn't give me away?" she asked.
"I've seen a week-end cottage near Dorking that I should rather
like to buy," said Miss Mebbin with seeming irrelevance. "Six
hundred and eighty, freehold. Quite a bargain, only I don't
happen to have the money."
. . . . . . . . .
Louisa Mebbin's pretty week-end cottage, christened by her "Les
Fauves," and gay in summertime with its garden borders of tiger-
lilies, is the wonder and admiration of her friends.
"It is a marvel how Louisa manages to do it," is the general
verdict.
Mrs. Packletide indulges in no more big-game shooting.
"The incidental expenses are so heavy," she confides to inquiring
friends.
_________
-THE END-
[Saki]Hector Hugh Munro's short story Mrs. Packletide's Tiger
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