In the Guardianship of God

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

For this was the Old God.

"What is your grandson's name?" asked the district officer.

It was Baghéla (tiger cub), said Nâgdeo.

It had seemed a suitable name for one born six months after his father had been found lying dead on the top of a dead tigress, his dead lips close to the teats that would suckle her dead whelps no more.

That had been a misfortune, deplorable yet without shame, and due, possibly, to the dead youth's over-soon marriage to a thing feminine; such things being notoriously untrustworthy! Therefore he had refrained from entangling this one with such things feminine, the more so because there were already sufficient of them in the house, what with Baghéla's mother and grandmother. Briefly, the worship of two female things was sufficient for any lad without adding to the adulation by a third!

So, in the evening, when the magistrate's legal work was over, the old man and the young one came up to the tilted tent again, and, after a curious little oath of fealty to the Old God--in the shape of the three-inch tiger--and a vow of war till death against live things that mimicked his shape had been taken from his grandfather's dictation by Baghéla, the latter's name was duly enrolled as hereditary guardian of the Jâdusa Pass, and the two struck a bee-line towards home over the low jungle as if it belonged to them.

As indeed it did; since few travellers, save the keepers of the passes, ventured to brave the tigers dreaming in their lairs, or pacing the trackless wastes hungrily, after dark.

But old Nâgdeo was jubilant over the mere chance of coming across one; not that it was likely, since what tiger ever was whelped which would dare to face him and his grandson? "Men"--here he gave a sidelong glance of pure adoration at Baghéla's height--"who had no backs; who, if they failed, as even pass-keepers must sometimes, were found face up to the sky, face up to the claws, face up to the teeth!"

Of course, sometimes, the accursed brutes who assumed the shape of the Blessed Budhal Pen--the Old God of Gods--would, out of sheer spite, roll a dead man over and claw at his back; but that also was without shame, since dead men had no choice.

So the old man babbled on garrulously, and the young one listened, till they reached the little village at the foot of the pass. The moon had risen by this time, and showed the upright slabs of sandstone clustering under the wide-spreading tamarind trees on its outskirts. Slabs marking the graves of dead and gone inhabitants.