We were silent for a time, and then a half-breed crept up to a hammock and spoke in Spanish to the doctor. The doctor laughed, and the fellow went away. “He’s asking for a piece of that onca to eat. He says it will make him strong.” They began to talk of that, and the talk went on to what the Indians say of the mai d’aqua, the mother of the waters, who frequents islands in the rivers and is the ruin of young men, and of such dreads as the jurupari, and the curupira, and the maty tapéré.
They admitted it was easy to imagine such things into the forest. It wasn’t what was seen there. Only the trees and the shadows were seen. But sometimes there were sounds. One of us, when alone making a traverse in the forest, had heard a scream, as if a woman had been frightened, and then there was no more sound. The camp doctor began to talk. He was an Englishman. He sat upright in the middle of his hammock, swinging it with one foot. “There was a curious yarn I heard about a tiger in Hampshire. Ah! Hampshire! I had a practice there once, you know. It made me so busy and popular that at last I began to wonder whether I wasn’t altogether too successful. It was the practice or me. As I wanted to live on and do some useful work I slew the practice. I’ve got one or two ideas about that beri-beri you chaps die of here. A doctor cannot serve God and a lot of old women with colds.... Oh yes, about that tiger. Well, one of those travelling shows came to our village. I could see the steam of its roundabout engines from my surgery windows, and I told the farmer who rented the field to the showmen that if he let a mechanical organ come anywhere near my place again he could take his gallstone somewhere else in future.
“Late one night I got an urgent message to go over to the show. There had been an accident. I was taken into a caravan. There was a fat woman dressed as a pink fairy kneeling over a man stretched on a bunk, shaking him, and crying. The man was dead all right. But I couldn’t find a mark on him. Diseased heart, I supposed, but he looked a good ’un. Some of the well-made, powerful chaps have most unreliable hearts. The woman kept crying out something about ‘that beast of a tiger.’ Curious sort of remark, and I asked the boss afterwards what she meant. He shuffled about a bit, pretending that she was talking silly. ‘Nothing to do with the tigress,’ he said, ‘although the man was found unconscious in her cage.’ ‘It’s such a tame thing,’ said the showman. ‘Anybody could handle it. Never shows vice. Old Jackson’—that was the dead chap—‘he’d been inside tinkering with a partition. When we found him she was lying in a corner as if asleep, and only sat up and yawned when we got him out of her cage. Come and see for yourself.’
“I went. There was nothing to see, except a slit-eyed tigress sitting up in a corner of her cage, blinking at the lantern, and looking rather spooky. A rather small creature, and prettily marked—one of the melantic variety.
“Well, the chap was buried after an inquest, and that inquest made me ask a lot of questions afterwards. It was a simple affair, the inquest. Death from natural causes. But there was something behind the evidence of the man’s wife, and I wanted to find out about that.
“She told me she had a little girl, who got one night into the tent where the big cats were kept. Nobody was there at the time. Next morning she said to her mother, ‘Mummie, who was the funny lady in Lucy’s cage?’
“Lucy was the name of the tigress. The child said that there was only the lady in the cage, and the lady watched her. And that was all they could get out of the kiddie. The funny thing about it is that once before the child had come back with a yarn like that, after straying into the menagerie tent late at night. The wife’s idea was her husband had died of fright.
“Don’t ask me what I want to make out, boys. I’m only just telling you the yarn. There you are.
“Well, before the show left our village, I heard they’d got a nigger to look after the big cats. He was with the show two days. On the third day he was missing. He went without drawing his money, and he had left open the door of Lucy’s cage. She hadn’t attempted to get out. The nigger was found some days after, wandering about the country, and a little cracked, by all accounts. And that’s all.” The doctor struck a match, and then hoisted his legs into the hammock. Somewhere far in the forest the monkeys were howling.
“That doctor is a good body mender,” said Hill to me. “He is the most entertaining liar on this job.”