Worlds That Weren't

The blind where they’d been waiting all night was woven of swamp-reeds, on a hillock of drier ground. The wild-cow yearling they’d staked out was beginning to smell pretty high, and all their night had gotten them was the sight of a couple of cougars sniffing around, and two red wolves who’d had to be shooed off. Forest stood at their back beyond the swamp, tupelo and live oak and cypress knotted into an impenetrable wall by brush and vines, the trees towering a hundred feet and more overhead. Even on a cool autumn morning the smell was heavy and rank, somehow less cleanly than the forests where he spent most of his time. Wisps of mist drifted over the surface of the Black River where it rolled sluggish before them; the other bank was higher than this, and thick with giant pine higher than ship’s masts.

“No, you can’t,” Eric King said, infuriatingly reasonable. He sighed. “I don’t expect that tigers of any sort are too numerous here, although it’s perfect country for them.”

“They aren’t common,” Robre agreed. “Weren’t never seen until my pa’s time, when he was my age.” Then he puzzled at the way the Imperial had said it. “Why shouldn’t there be more tigers here, if it’s such good tiger-country? And how would you know?”

King pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket-that cloth coat had a hunting shirt beat all hollow, and Robre had decided to have a seamstress run him up one-and offered one to his guide. Robre accepted; they were tastier than a pipe, and a lot less messy than a chaw. For a moment they puffed in silence, blowing plumes of smoke at lingering mosquitoes: it didn’t matter now if the scent warned off game.

“There weren’t any tigers here before the Fall-before the time when Olsaytn stole the Sun, you’d say.”

Robre’s brows went up. Odd, he thought. When he thought of the Before Time, it was simply as very long ago, the time of the songs and the heroes; certainly before his grandsire’s grandsire’s time. The Imperial seemed to think of it more as a set date, as if it were something that had happened in his own lifetime. Odd way to think. Mebbe it’s all that writing they do.

“Why not?” Robre said. “Plenty of beasts a tiger can tackle that a cougar or wolf can’t. What were those fancy words you used last night… ecological niche?”

King shrugged. “I don’t know. There just weren’t, or so our books say. Why are there elephants in India, and not here? Nobody knows.”

Robre grunted noncommittally; he wasn’t quite sure if he believed in elephants yet.

King went on: “No lions either. When the fall came, they-the ancestors of the ones you’ve got now-probably escaped from circuses, or zoos.”

They thrashed out the meaning of those words. Robre rubbed his chin, feeling stubble gone almost silky and reminding himself to shave soon. “Wouldn’t folks have eaten them?” he said.

“They probably did eat the elephants in the menageries.” King grinned. “But a few predators would have been turned loose before people realized how bad things were going to get. Then, in the chaos, when every man’s hand was against every other’s…well, hungry tigers used to being around people, they’d be good at picking off stragglers, wouldn’t they? And most of the dying happened fast; by the third or fourth year, people were scarce again in these lands, very scarce. Other things-game and feral livestock that survived in out-of-the-way corners, or country farther south-bred back faster than humans, spreading over the empty lands as the vegetation recovered, and so gave the big cats plenty to hunt. They breed quickly themselves, so even a few pairs could produce a lot of offspring. Eventually they’ll fill all the land humans haven’t taken over again, but that will need another century or two.”

Robre nodded. It made sense in a twisty sort of way, like most of what King said when he wasn’t doing an obvious leg-pull. It still made his head itch on the inside…

“And because they’re descended from so few, they’ll have a lot of mutants…freaks, that is, due to inbreeding. Like the black-with-yellow-stripes you shot…What’s that, by the way?” King said casually, pointing with the hand that held the cigarette.

“What’s what?”

Robre turned and looked upstream, across the Black River. Then his eyes grew very wide, and he whipped the cigarette out of his mouth, crushed it out, did the same with King’s. The Imperial froze as Robre laid a hand across his mouth, and they crouched watching through the slits in their blind.