Mrs. Packletide has a great pleasure and intention: to shoot a tiger in India. She wasn’t born with this desire nor had she suddenly gone native in some strange way that had overcome her normal disposition with a sudden aching desire to spill the blood of beasts. No, there is a very definite and precise provenance for this sudden left-hand turn in her Mrs. Packletide’s life that seemed to come from nowhere. Far from coming from nowhere, it actually came from somewhere also quite definite and precise: the interior of a plane operated by an aviator from Algeria. The thorn in Mrs. Packletide’s side known as Loona Bimberton had also been inside that plane and since landing back on terra firma had spoken on almost no other topic.
Mrs. Packletide had reasoned that this achievement—if such it can be properly described—could only be countered effectively by one thing. And that thing was the skin brought back from India which once belonged to a tiger until said tiger had been confronted by the dark side of a hunting rifle. She could see it all plainly in her mind as it was a flickering image projected onto a screen: the personally procured tiger skin rug as the center of attention during a party held at her home on Curzon Street. The capper being, of course, that the party would be given to honor…Loona Bimberton.
Mrs. Packletide gets serious with her plans to carry forth this intention. A thousand rupees to anyone who could genuinely offer the opportunity to take down a Bengal tiger. As long as the exercise of this takedown did not require too terribly much overexertion and carry too great an authentic risk of the tiger claiming victory after the confrontation. It just so happens that fortune is smiling upon Mrs. Packletide as a village sends word that there just so happens to be a tiger known to the community at large which would be just the thing a woman like her is looking for. Not just close to being tamed, but elderly to boot. It seems that practically the entire village has joined in the effort to help out Mrs. Packletide by doing whatever is necessary to ensure said tiger remains within the village boundaries until such time as she can arrive and carry out the execution. (In fact, the villagers are primarily operating on the hope that the tiger just manages to stay alive until then.)
Also along for the trip is Mrs. Packletide’s long-serving paid companion, Louisa Mebbin. Practically the first words out of Louisa’s mouth are complaints about the excessive fee being imposed for what is, after all, a task which must surely be viewed as a public service by the villagers. After all, what respectable Indian people would want to be known for being home to an old, feeble and quite possibly unwell tiger? Revealing the depths of her character, Louisa even cries upon seeing the tiger for the first time “I believe it’s ill” in perfect Hindustani. Mrs. Packletide shushes her complaints and commentary and set her aim upon the predatory prey.
At the loud explosion of the rifle’s report, the tiger springs to the side before rolling over and seeming to settle into the stillness that is known as death. Instantly, the villagers rush en masse to the scene and their excessive zeal in shouting celebration acts like a grapevine carrying the news of the tiger’s death at the hands of Mrs. Packletide from throughout the rest of the community. As for Mrs. Packletide, she was already hard at work entertaining visions in her mind of the party soon to make her home on Curzon Street the talk of London.
Louisa, always the damp blanket tossed onto already freezing victims, is naturally the one single person among them all who first points out the obvious: the goat which had been set out as bait for the tiger reveals a bullet wound but as for the tiger itself, not so much. The only logical conclusion: Mrs. Packletide had shot the goat to death with the collateral damage being a tiger brought down by sudden cardiac arrest. Temporarily perturbed that the actual reality did not coincide with the fiction which she would create from it, Mrs. Packletide quick reasserts herself to the important task at hand: using the dead tiger’s skin to jam it straight up Loona’s…Bimberton. She knew instantly that there was nothing to fear from the villages who would be all too happy to sacrifice their knowledge of what actually happened in exchange for thousands of rupees which would otherwise be withheld.
As for Louisa, well, she was, after all, a paid companion and with great recompense comes a great lack of any responsibility to tell an inconvenient truth. And with a light heart and even lighter burden of guilt, Mrs. Packletide poses for the camera as it snaps a picture of her soon to be on the front page—or somewhere deeper within—of newspapers and periodicals from Texas to St. Petersburg (the one in Russia). An addition element of joy came Mrs. Packletide’s way once she learned that Loom Bimberton had steadfastly refused even to set her eyes upon any publication for several weeks afterward. Although she graciously accepted the gift of a tiger-claw brooch with appropriately suppressed displays of any emotion whatever, Loona subsequently did manage to throw a monkey wrench into the entire plan by declining her invitation to attend the party at the home on Curzon Street.
The tiger-skin rug itself did, indeed, become a subject of great interest and conversation and admiration. Riding high upon her victory, Mrs. Packletide even took things to the next level by attending the annual County Costume Ball as none other than Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt. At the vulgar suggestion that a primeval dance party be held requiring all attendees to show up in the skins of the various creatures which they had personally brought down, she drew the line in the sand separating bad taste from mere exhibitionism.
Just a few days following the grand triumph of the Costume Ball, Louisa mused out loud to Mrs. Packletide about how amusing it would all be were the truth ever to be known. Somewhat alarmed, Mrs. Packletide inquires of her paid companion what she meant by that remark to which Louisa—seemingly unnecessarily—recounts the actual course of events which took place that fateful day in India. Mrs. Packletide’s response is that no one would believe such an outlandish story anyway. Mrs. Packletide’s face turns a sickly shade of white with vague greenish undertones when Louisa suggests that Loona Bimberton would certainly be amenable to believing it. This transmogrification of complexion betrays her studied casual response in kind: “You surely wouldn’t give me away?”
Louisa does not explicitly answer this question. Some indeterminate time later, however, friends admiring her new week-end cottage which she has christened under the name Les Fauves wonder aloud at the precise mechanism which lies behind the mystery, content only to universally agree how it is truly “a marvel how Louisa manages to do it.”
As for Mrs. Packletide, she no longer has any pleasure or intention to set off in search of bigger and greater game. When asked why, she distractedly replies only with a complain about how the incidental expenses have become too great a burden to make the effort worthwhile.
