Taken From Him (Kindle Single) (5 page)

One tomorrow of two or three.  Sounds in a morning solitude tomorrow one could not have foreseen.  Sounds so differently surrounded by sunlight and silence and so distinct they are thoughts.  So welcome as, coming round a curve in the Gandhi National Park road — a burst of voices arguing wild among the cylinders of the engine of the yellow van or bus as it nearly runs you down — through those side windows it might be difficult to see quite clearly.  Yet two voices almost known in this remarkable land, an almost empty vehicle it seemed, though three or four passengers — what could the voices be so exercised about? — though suspended a second or two, as he got out of the way.

The driver surely was the man from night before last; and someone shouting Stop, Stop — standing beside him one could tell, after the bus had passed — must be the girl, here a long way from the east entrance she had perhaps forgotten she had once specified, not used to being listened to.

Stop it did not, the bus its own thing here in the forest, shadowy heads looking back as it plunged away into a curve, like another language.  Speaking to one — to him, to you — it came to you, of a person out here in a forty-square-mile protected area nonetheless near suburban Mumbai who had no business hiking alone.  He had no words for it now.

The hopeless hue and cry he still could hear as he walked on or in his memory he understood he had been hearing also for a moment or two before the bus first came into view.  It wasn’t only him the shouts were about.  If him at all.

A hundred yards up the road according to the crude map, he would come to what looked like a bridge and a stream, a reservoir off to his left.  An insignificant stream under the bridge hardly readable.

A trip home out of India approaching but safely at a distance.  Not here for long, the girl had said of you.  Presently, sure enough the road narrowed across a brief bridge with low guard barriers of cement and old stone.  To be alone here at a bridge, the reservoir off somewhere through the trees to the left, which would be west.

How long could it have been before he saw the animal stretched along a tree bough some ten feet above the ground even with the bridge? Couched absorbed in the forest yet in plain view even at this distance not twenty feet off the road a fawn buff coat densely belonging to its strength; off the road yet so near  where the road crossed the bridge it might easily have been visible from a passing van, if you were looking for it; visible from the road, lying along a long-elbowed bough, its eyes almost shut, one back leg coming off the branch hung halfway out easily ten feet above the ground where giant leaves and bush and some blow-down and some fugitive tall grasses kept the depth uncertain.  In fact, as the strangeness issuing from the Park bus careering through the forest and the angry commotion inside it had faded a hundred yards down, hadn’t there been a blurred look to the bus in memory the sense of which now brings into focus, though it needed no greater clarity against the tangle of underbrush beyond with no clear stand of trees but some old growth and hollowing snags, the leopard there in the tree? Its presence more size than scale as one did not take one’s eyes off it in the next few moments — minutes — so relaxed its length in truth, six feet perhaps, belonging and at large here miles possibly from where it might be sometime kept, a leopard, call it a leopard, a big one, cheetah sometimes in this part of the world, but a leopard.

What was it watching?

As quick as it was strong enough to haul its kill up into a tree if it has to.  A pig, a young antelope, a chital spotted deer in these woods, a barking deer said to have been heard. A hornbill’s call then, low and then low and faintly raucous; a flash of blue and yellow looked for in vain with what must be peripheral vision, commonly two birds together A hand now on the bridge cement in this direction — where the leopard lies.  Move hardly at all yet you can.  The cat is still, but, six feet or five and a half, it will move soon.  Has it fed?

If solitary, will this one keep it that way by taking care of what else living is here, or by departing?

Alone, no guest, with no thought except not to make a move, not up the road or back down where you came from, to run away or stand the ground which is not yours.  Seeing the leopard, its shoulder, its flank at rest, its three-foot tail curved not stirring above a half-hanging rear leg and spotted like the back, the haunch with a crowd of small imperfect black rings, the person thinks to step away from the bridge stone, to be further away yet without this low wall between; or to stay.  To be not with the animal, but be what?  The stream moving below could scarcely be heard.  No sound of voice or car in the late-morning humidity.

And now, drawing its forelegs under, the leopard dropped down into underbrush out of sight along the stream, below the level of the bridge, the road.  A path of half-seen leaf and bush swayings to be traced where for a moment or two one can even see yet not, and so it is time to move back from the low wall. Not to be looking directly down at the head, the hide, the eyes, the round pupils. Where is the leopard?  What would it hear under the bridge?  Where does it place its feet?  Its sudden paws.

Has it lain in the sun right here on the bridge wall another day? Today?  What is fear, intervening upon time so time is gone, is it even fear turning to softly tread the dirt road between the two low walls of the brief bridge?  Does it eat your heart?  Does what eat your heart?  Tear your shirt; eat your clothes, like a goat — even, in one’s own experience, a dog obsessed with the smell of a sweater?  The leopard likes blood, we know that.  Even ours.

Experience alive, yet nothing.  The reservoir in the other direction behind you, The camera must not click.  An alarm intervening to make another time from this, though what?  The visitor has crossed slowly the little roadway of the bridge, looking back also and around, around, fear welcoming curiosity stupidly.  Reaching the other low wall reluctant to look down on the far side — but now to find, ten yards beyond — so a hand reaches for the cement, interrupts the camera swinging forward on its strap, leaves the camera somehow even more useless — the rust-reddish back of the animal in shadow, a white mark visible on the rump, its tail up, which might mean it has fed.  On its way, already gone.  Toward the reservoir out there glimpsed.  On the move, in the viewfinder, the leopard scarcely stirs leaves it passes under toward the reservoir not a hundred yards off the road.  This leopard has passed from beneath the bridge you stand on and along the hardly visible glint of the stream.  We had to keep the creature in our sights or it’s gone, like a deer, and like its tread following its made path.

Will the ears hear, will the brain of the cat hear and take action, turn back, seeing us come down from the bridge near the stream? or be gone sooner, knowing a man follows it?  Leopards will swim but when?  There was a path, some packed earth half-hidden by arching ferns, a large, isolated basaltic rock in the way to make us forget the leopard might be coming back, the clumsy noise we make.

The light is of the clearing and the wide water.  At the shore this is like a lake we know. Is the leopard suddenly forgotten?  How is that possible?  A long, low, modest dam one might walk along carefully while on the down side falling water precipitated into a stream turning off into the forest.

Leopards will swim.  Up the shore on the right, the lone head, the ears, of the still great and heavy cat above the water, black markings behind the ears, centerless rosettes — as steady as an eight-point buck swimming a New Hampshire lake at dawn or across the tidal strait of Arthur Kill from Perth Amboy to Staten Island: a predator, though, and, no, the head does move, the shoulders surge with intent.

The engine coming without warning you try to see through the woods between here and the bridge.  And find through some moment of time framed by branches, trunks, leaves of silence a yellow fragment in sunlight of the bus and hear nothing else as the motor cuts off. Straining with memory, too, to see who it is, you find a scrap of blue you know, And hear no talk, no strife, and think.

Yet then, for we’ve lost touch, the leopard is gone, gone ashore somewhere known further up the forest shore.  This is not the reservoir where a crocodile was seen.  That would be a larger lake also supplying water for the City.

The bus parked diagonally blocking the little bridge, you could smell it  and see now what had been recalled as some speeding opaqueness, the side windows tightly fenced from outside to protect the passengers, not built-in wire in shatterproof glass, nor finely barred, though like a Corrections van in New York.  The girl is alone.  “I took the bus,” she said, perhaps hearing the joke but it is more.  “I thought he would follow me.  It was an emergency, I never did this
be
fore.”  In a near whisper, “You will tell me
what
happened, I know you
have
b
ee
n with the leopard.  They saw it lying on the wall of the bridge in the sun one day.”  Looking at her watch, “You have time
to
catch a taxi and meet your people, they are vis
it
ing the architect I told you of right downtown in New Mumbai.”  She names him, an important name.  “It is al
most
your last stop in India.”

She was telling him what he knew but had nearly lost interest in, listening for a Vespa, feeling the weight of the camera.  Her eyes are brave.  Her body.  What will happen to her?  “Tell me what happened,” she says.  “Tell me.”