Rale the Tiger
The diary of Rale, proud tiger of legend.
Chapter 1:
The Edge of the Jungle
The morning dawns, clear, fresh. Sunlight hurts my majestic eyes. I look around; the place is not familiar. It is a clearing, surrounded by impenetrable trees of lushest green, moisture dripping from their leaves as from my lengthy appendages. Nearby, a lone tapir grazes quietly on the swaying tall grass. I eat him and begin to explore.
I step through the soft ground, pawing at this and that, stretching my powerful muscles. I have no recollection of my previous day, and shaking my royal head, I vow never again to drink Jäger on an empty stomach. I growl deeply and take in my surroundings. Enormous plants reach up to my every side, but they are humbled by my sheer bulk, the presence of a king. All around, unseen birds sing their shrill songs. Were I younger, a mere cubling, I would leap into the branches and swipe down these pitiful creatures before devouring their tiny bones with resonant crunches. But alas: I am no longer a youth. My limbs are large and my mind is careful. No more play.
Several minutes into the vegetation, I hear a sound. Voices – voices of humans. Fire stirs in my heart. Humans destroyed my tiger village when I was a child, hunting every one of us for our glossy hides. I, alone, escaped, disguised as an orange. My body was unharmed, but the innocence in my eyes was damaged beyond healing. I will never forget that bloody day.
My claws extend, instinctively. My legs tense, ready to sprint and spring, but I control my raw energy. Slowly, I creep towards the noise.
Chapter 2:
Heart of Darkness
As I edge closer to the voices, I see a fence, tall and mighty, made of the fierce wood of the Betel Nut tree. I mourn the desecration of my bark brother, but hide my grief as I crush the puny barrier with one swipe of my mighty forelimb. I continue, unhindered, unhurt, unstoppable.
Before me, in the muddy calamity of soil and muck, sit four wooden huts, and before them sit twenty humans, laughing pathetically. I narrow my eyes as I crouch and stalk them, circling them so I can run at them from in front. I wish to see my enemies’ eyes as I hunt them.
Without warning, I begin. I lunge directly for the largest human, and rip into his chest. I savor the cry of pain, but I must concentrate. This is no time for play. I turn to the others, and let out a ferocious roar, obliterating ten of them instantly. The remaining humans look at me, trembling, fear pouring from their eyes. I feed on their fear, and moments later, I feed on their faces. With a supertiger power born of Mother Earth herself, I rip one of the huts out of the ground and thrust it deep into the heavens, a warning to the petty human-loving gods. I proceed to trample on the neighboring huts, and to mark my territory.
The camp lies smoldering from my fiery attacks of justice. My work is done. As I walk away, the jungle slowly reclaims this place of darkness. A little bird flies overhead. A golden-mantled tree kangaroo hops onto a piece of timber.
I rest, content in the knowledge that I have made my home a better place. With a soft purr, I fall fast asleep.
Chapter 3:
Tower
I awake. The Sun shines, jubilant and glorious, a pure golden nugget, undeniable truth of the power of nature. I smile at the Sun, for I too am an irresistible power of nature. I dominate a family of muskrats to assert my position in the food chain, but they are bony and dry, powder in my cavernous mouth. Unsatisfactory.
As I pick the meat out of my teeth with muskrat skeletons, I muse again on my whereabouts. The jungle is as unfamiliar as the previous day, but, with my rest achieved, I find my splendid tiger-loins filled with a new energy, and an urge to explore. I set out, quietly crushing the muskrat carcasses at my feet.
The air darkens as my paws tread through untouched vegetation, knifing through plants like a shark through children. Lianas and leaves grasp at my luminary body, but I unearth them with my puissant strides. Moist foliage whips my face and inundating fog threatens to suffocate, but persevering the depressing gloom I arrive at a clearing in the canopy. Above me, out on the horizon, I spot with piercing eyes a grassy plateau rising up through the dense foliage, and atop the mount, a horrible tower of stone, perched menacingly against the bright awesome sky. My mind sharpens. Exploration can wait; my goal is clear.
Mere strides later, I find myself at the imposing intruder’s door. Inside, I hear angry voices, bickering and shouting, tongues ugly as only a human language can be. Berserkergang takes hold. With a crash, I pounce through the door and into the mayhem.
Chapter 4:
Broadcast
The interior of the tower is sizeable – the cruel humans must have ripped many stones from their earthly homes and carved them murderously into this rectangular abomination. The walls of this mausoleum of rock are further desecrated with cataclysms of color: “paintings” so crude that even I could have crafted better, and I have no opposable thumbs. The paintings depict scenes of champions of men locked in mortal combat with each other, holding pathetic weapons of metal and wood to bolster their twig-like arms. I chuckle, deafeningly, at humankind.
Before me in the tower are two of the abominable bipedals. The first is a man tall and lean, wrapped in the hide of a mighty brown crocodilian, poor cousin. I shiver furiously at the loss of jungle life. I eat this man whole, quickly.
I turn my attention to the second man, garbed differently to the first – this is not a man of the jungle, this is a foreigner. He is short, like a half-pint of beer. I prepare to drink him.
“Please…please don’t eat me.”
I smile like a tiger. The man is small, but likely succulent. I approach.
“Please oh god no!” The man holds a bulky grey object before him, an incapable shield against the coming maelstrom. I raise my awesome arm, claws set to mince.
Then I pause and look more carefully at the grey device in the man’s hand. It is smooth and is made of many pieces joined together. I recognize it to be a “video camera” – one I have seen used by humans in my younger days among them as a sleeper cell.
My peerless mind hatches a scheme. I summon my fluency in the human language and speak to the peon.
“Human. This is a camera. You will use it to record a message I have for the human race.”
The trembling preyling, shocked beyond belief at my mercy and my command of grammar, begins to stutter. I lightly bitch-slap him and repeat myself.
Sobbingly the man nods, turns his camera, and films the following broadcast.
Chapter 5:
Esmeralda
My message to humanity now immortalized on his camera, I send the short man out of the tower, after an irresistible nibble under his arm. I think my work to be done. But as I turn, I catch sight of Her.
The world stops.
She is stunning, divine, the very inspiration of Beauty; human though she is, she takes my breath away. Every inch of her is perfect, like me. Her eyes are emerald stars that twinkle and dazzle me with each blink; her hair, soft like long grass in spring, twining like the trunk of a pong-pong tree; her lips, red and plump like a young baboon’s bum.
I, veteran of speech, am speechless. I wish to profess my unending love to her, to bend on one hind leg and offer a diamond ring to her as is the tiger custom, to whisk her away and make her my tiger queen. I try to say something godlike or witty, but instead I cough out a man-sized hairball. Guh, awkward.
She flashes a smile. It melts me, like when Cyclops takes off his glasses in X-Men.
“Easy, tiger, everything’s OK, just stay right there.” Her voice is sweet and soothing, like a tiger singing.
She backs away from me, slowly, and I am immobilized. She has torn out my heart with her smile, just as I often do with my teeth. She finally turns, and as she runs out of the tower, with strides that seem to last a lifetime, I glimpse her name, emblazoned on the back of her clothing.
Esmeralda.
Chapter 6:
Tiger's Vow
Drip.
Drip.
Waterdrops fall through the air, a dull staccato from the canopy above. I turn my muscular neck upwards and peer into the dark trees. They, titans of leaf and bark, shield me from the furious storm beyond, and for a moment I am humbled. I shake away humility and continue to eat the python I have just slain.
It has been three troubling weeks since I met Esmeralda. Her beauty and her smile still haunt me, as does the nature of her being: for she is human. I cringe at the thought of humanity, and despair. Humans slaughtered my family and forced me to live the life of a rogue. I will never forget this, except while blackout drunk.
I furrow my wise brow: I must move my mind to other thoughts. Love is the expression of the weak. There can be no play.
Yet she persists in my mind! The thought of her follows me, hunts me, like I might hunt a spider monkey or a sperm whale, and I, Rale, Gift of Gaia, Bane of Hominids, am powerless, my heart defeated by the very species I swore to crush into a fine cumin-like substance.
My stomach is a tempest; I have no appetite for the python, juicy and tasty though I know it to be. My head spins, my muscles ache, and the soft drip drip drip of the rain sounds like an elephant with timpani-shoes. My claws extend and retract, uncontrollably, rebellious daggers of my furied physique. My vision is misty, damp, yet my eyes aflame with burning of every color. My breath: a jackhammer.
Suddenly, in the midst of the frenzy, it becomes crystal clear to me: I know what I must do. The same pain that squeezes my heart should in fact be its fuel, and my whirling torture should be my just crusade. The human-woman that arrests my senses and inflames my claws should be my guiding purpose and destiny. I rear up on my hind legs, now tall as a mountain, and bellow:
“Esmerelda, I hunger for you! I will seek you and you shall be mine and we shall create all-powerful tiger-human progeny and our family shall eat many things. No matter where the Fates may carry you, I will follow, and our loving union will be holy and eternal despite being scientifically improbable.”
The raw resonant essence of my vow brings the very trees to their knees, and completely defeathers a nearby colony of toucans. The tremor wakes the jungle for hundreds of miles around, and all inferior living creatures bear witness to the unalterable proclaimation of a god.
My path is set. The storm brews like a Keurig machine. With a single immeasurable bound I leap out of the jungle and begin my search for Esmeralda, Woman of Tiger.
Letter 1:
Life of Rale
Dearest Esmerelda,
I come for you. I have borne my supernoval heart ever closer to yours across the seven seas. A magical and harrowing tale has befallen me these seaborne days, my sweet Esmeralda, which now I recount to you.
While following your scent, I stumbled upon a human cargo ship carrying a “zoo” of many cruelly imprisoned plebeian species. I gazed out over the pitiable mammals, captives within the hold, and I was painfully reminded of how, without my darling Esmeralda, my soul is imprisoned within my sleek and overwhelmingly majestic hide. I let out a battle cry spawned from the deepest recesses of my being, but the fellow jungle creatures, drugged by human seamen, were unfazed by my roar, save a lone spectral tarsier who screeched back. Startled, I inhaled him with a mighty sniff.
I then ate a pallet of chestnuts and the ship’s crew.
Reliving the game of “Tigers and Sperm Whales” I would play as a little cub, I donned a seafaring hat and pretended to be the ship’s captain, cavorting about the vessel’s bridge like a kitten. However, crewless, the ship collided with an iceberg and sank.
I survived, immortal as I am, escaping by eating much of the sinking vessel’s metallic carcass, but possessing little craft in swimming and weighed down by my iron bowels I was relegated to a lifeboat. Incidentally, this lifeboat had rescued another life from the cruel floating prison – that of a scrawny human-child, named Pie. I scoffed at this boy and endeavored to eat him, but discovered I was too full from my recent feast of steel. The insolent boy, sensing my incapacity to consume, proceeded to prod me with one of the lifeboat’s oars. I contemplated pulling the trigger to clear space in my stomach, but I didn’t want to break my no-vom streak since senior year at Tiggy University. Instead, summoning a belch born of a thousand rivets, I sent him into a deep slumber and drew on his face with a Sharpie.
But oh my, Esmeralda, what sights I saw upon that ocean, what wonders I tasted! Over the next many days, I watched sharks dance and told jokes to applauding seals; I roared in pleasure as winged fish flew directly into my Adonic mouth; I rode a chariot of dolphins as I slew schools of sperm whales and engaged in hand-to-tentacle combat with a Colossal Squid. Never before had I thought that a place of wonder could exist outside the jungle, amidst a world of humans and pollution and Arby’s, but I was wrong, Esmeralda – the ocean is an alien planet and I am a millionaire space tourist.
After a hundred days, the lifeboat washed ashore, and I leapt out. The boy Pie watched with a heavy heart as I galloped away, not looking back at him once. Later I crept up to him and ate him.
I sculpted a bust in your likeness out of glowing plankton (Noctiluca scintillans). Your joy will be great when you receive it, fair Esmeralda.
Yours majestically,
Rale the Tiger
