Battle
by Martha E. McCoy
February. The last wild tiger is shot.
There are people (a few)
Who decry this,
Who say the tiger
(The very tiger who died)
Was noble beautiful proud wise,
Had the glint of a higher soul.
Others do not care.
The world is ending,
They said, ice is melting,
The air is choked with heat,
What do tigers matter?
Some people
Hated tigers and are happy
To see this one gone,
They say it is only
Right for humans to be masters
Of beasts, as it should be.
Or they lost
A child or friend to a tiger
(This happens sometimes)
And who can blame them
For smiling now?
No one knew it was
The last, actually,
For a long time
(Not for sure).
Then, when explorers
And hunters and travelers
Never again saw a tiger,
Well. We knew their population
Had been almost zero,
And now it was.
The last wild tiger was female,
And this is important,
Because I have a secret.
I have seen the last wild tigers.
It was I. You can blame me
For their destruction.
---------------
I was walking
A long way from here
My dog was with me.
He smelled them,
Found a nest of them,
And had killed all but one when
I caught up.
The bodies were tiny,
Famished, ribs like knives.
One was mewling, three were silent.
I wanted to kick my dog,
To blame him, to shake him,
But why? For one thing,
We teach our dogs
To hate tigers above all things,
To kill them with a ravening fury.
I picked up the tiger cub,
Its fangs already brushing its chin,
Too heavy for a skull I could cup
In one hand.
Our greatest hunter has a necklace
Of these sabers.
I killed the cub, of course,
Crushed its head. It was easy
Because there was
Nothing else to do.
But then why did I sit
For hours
Next to the dead cubs
Things that were dead
Only because they
Were in turn
Terrible murderers,
Bloodletters.
I think I know why, now.
I know what bothered me.
The cubs were starving
Sick with hunger
Waiting for their mother.
And they waited
Curled up together
When they could have
Killed and eaten each other.
It is a small thing,
I know, a thing that
More or less does not
Matter. I could
Say that in my family,
Brothers kill each other
Often, but that does not
Matter either.
It’s that they—the tiger cubs—
As they waited for their mother,
They each starved and starved
Rather than spend that time alone.
-------------
At home, they
Still talk about the last tiger.
How big she was,
How tremendously fierce,
How perfectly she was hunted.
They say when she was shot
She died in an instant.
The arrow pierced her heart.
|