What We Fed to the Manticore

© Matthias Ripp, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr, and lettering by F. Morgan Davis

THEY SAY THAT LIFE IN THE SUNDARBANS revolves around two things: the tide and the tigers.

We are not the tide.

We are the tigers.

It was not what we ate that troubled the villagers, because we had been eating very little. It was what we fed to the Manticore. He arrived hungry. And he could never be satisfied.

WE WERE GATHERED IN A GROVE of mangrove trees that I had come to think of as our own. They had been special to me. The villagers called them sundari trees, but I knew them as looking-glass mangroves. Their exposed roots stood perpendicular to the ground, like curved knife-edges, wandering in the shape of little rivers. Secretly, I had begun to name each of them—I hadn’t told the other tigers. I named one for my mother, and one for the sky. I imagined that they had their own name for me, but they never told me what it was. These mangroves offered a sanctuary I could hide in. I could curl behind the bend of a root blade and stay there for hours, unnoticed. They used to be within my territory, and I loved winding my way among their pale trunks, alone, scratching the bark and rubbing my face against them.

They were mine until they weren’t anymore.

I DON’T REMEMBER when we came together. At first it happened little by little. Brother returned to me. Then Small One. And then all at once, there were five of us. The water had become saltier, and sometimes I couldn’t drink it without retching. Some of the plants were wilting. All of us had been struggling to find prey. I had been looking for deer tracks, but everywhere I went, I was the first to press my feet into the smooth silt. And so we gathered, dry-tongued, listless and hungry. Drawn together for comfort, or something like it.

WE LAY SPRAWLED ON A STRETCH OF DAMP SILT a few yards from the bank of a nearby tributary, leaving impressions of our bodies in the earth, so that a villager walking through might understand that a tiger had lain here, or here. The canopy of the trees filtered the sun and cast a moving pattern of dappled light everywhere I looked. If I narrowed my eyes and tilted my head, I could almost see a small deer or a flying fox. But shadows do nothing for hunger, and we were ravenous.

WHEN HE CAME TO US, it was dusk, and he was a stranger.

THE AIR WAS DENSE and we had not eaten in thirteen days. We were lying among a peculiar field of roots that reminded me that the trees will thrive even as we are wasting, that the mangroves are resourceful in ways we have never been. Some of the trees send pneumatophores, traveling root branches, to collect air for them. They pierce the mud and reach straight up so the ground is stippled with breathing spears. This was the space where the stranger found us.

“Sister, who is that?” asked Small One.

“I don’t know,” I said, bringing myself up a little higher. “It looks like a tiger.”

“Are you certain?” asked Notched Ear.

“It is either a tiger, or it is food,” said Crooked Tail. Her tail had taken on a permanent bend after it had been broken during a fight with one of her litter mates when she was a cub. She licked her paw and then turned her head to lie on it.

Small One squinted, trying to make out the loping form that was growing in our field of vision. “It looks too large to be a tiger. What if it thinks that we are the food?” She moved closer to Crooked Tail and started chuffing, looking for comfort. Some of us still thought of her as a cub.

“Maybe it isn’t a tiger,” I said. I...