Man-eaters of Kumaon

Chapter 2

The mountainside spring splashes onto an uneven platform of mud-bricks before continuing its journey into the valley. Remus crouches on the platform and cups his hand beneath the trickle of cool water, drinking thirstily and wetting his face and neck. It is just after noon; the Indian sun is high and fierce, and the air quivers with inescapable heat. He takes a few steps away from the spring and sits on a fallen log, not bothering to wipe away the droplets that trickle down his face.

He has his wand in his pocket and a machete in his belt. Today he's left the men of Pakhari behind, assuring Rakesh that he will not get lost and he has no intention of being eaten. Rakesh was doubtful. Even if the kali vastu attacks only at night, he protested, there are still tigers and leopards in the jungle. Remus doubts this; non-magical predators tend to avoid the territories of magical ones. Retracing their route from the day before, Remus has been thinking, and he has been planning. He knows that he is no Great White Hunter; he hasn't the skill or fortitude of Professor Kettleburn. He has very little idea how to go about finding the kali vastu, and as for what he will do when he does locate the creature, Remus has no plan at all.

But he is fairly certain that the kali vastu lives in the heartwood. All of the attacks, even those on livestock, have occurred at the edge of the dense, wild patches of jungle that remain mysteriously untouched by the villagers. Remus is beginning to think that nothing more exotic that habitat loss may be responsible for the creature's recent appetite. The surrounding hills are carved up in terraces and fields, covered with crops and trampled by buffalo. Remus sees no rhyme or reason to the pattern of jungle patches left undisturbed, but he is not surprised. One cannot simply stand on a hillside and trace the edges of a heartwood.

Remus knows where his mind is leading him. When he tallies up his magical talents, tracking unidentified magical creatures through an alien landscape is nowhere on the list. It is, after all, a rather short list, with "healing charms" and "research of obscure historical topics" at the top.

Followed, very closely, by "mapmaking".

So Remus decides to map the heartwood.

He doesn't even know if it is possible. As far as he knows, nobody has ever successfully mapped a heartwood. His knowledge of magical lands is limited to a few esoteric comments found in various historical and cartographic texts, usually along the lines of: The borders of the Gringleffingham Moor are unknown and continually shifting due to the influence of the powerful magical landscape theorised to exist in within its boundaries. Several ambiguous paragraphs, no more. And, Remus adds, one half-remembered conversation from a frosty morning in the Forbidden Forest. But he doesn't want to structure his task around the misty musings of a centaur.

It can't be more difficult than mapping Hogwarts, he reasons. Even if he is alone now.

Remus sees only two options. One, he can wander about the jungle at night and hope he finds the creature before it finds him. Or two, he can learn its territory, perhaps find a pattern to its attacks, and go after it armed with a knowledgeable advantage.

Today he has brought with him a large length of parchment and an inconspicuous Muggle pen. Rather than following yesterday's route along the hillside north of the spring, he searches for a spot from which he can view the valley below. Such a vantage is difficult to find, as there are few breaks in the thick foliage, but he locates one that will do and settles down on the ground to sketch. He shifts uncomfortably for a few moments, aware of every sound and scratch that might be a six-legged jungle inhabitant welcoming him to its home, but he soon relaxes and begins to draw. He denotes the tiny village of Pakhari as a cluster of little boxes, the road as a line extending from it at either end. The patches of jungle he outlines with primitive trees, and for the fields and terraces he manages a reasonable approximation of furrows. When he has drawn everything he can see, Remus frowns at the childish sketch. He hasn't Peter's skill for drafting, that much is certain, but it will have to do.

In tiny lettering, in each corner of the parchment, he writes a single word: Capere. Then, along the edges, he writes, Terrum. Between the words, on each edge, he carefully traces the Ogham runes nion and ailm--ash and silver fir--then turns the parchment over. He pauses, repeating the words in his mind, remembering the pale slant of autumn sun in the library, two black heads bent over a massive tome across the table, dust, leather and wood illuminated with a soft golden glow.

In the centre of the parchment, Remus writes four lines:

Uncouth and savage was the fir,

Cruel the ash tree--

Turns not aside a foot-breadth,

Straight at the heart runs he.

It was James' idea to use Cad Goddeu to tie the edges of the map together, when they first realised that the spell had a tendency to escape the parchment and apply itself to any available surface. Remus doesn't remember his justification, but, like most of James' wilder ideas, it worked, and it prevented a recurrence of the unfortunate experiment that left Peter with a map of the Gryffindor boys' toilets on his forearm for three days.

Remus shoves the pen into his pocket and takes his wand in hand. He turns the parchment again so he is looking at his crude map and touches the wand to the centre.

"Designa tabulam," he says.

A shimmer of soft golden light passes over the parchment. The lines and shapes wriggle in its wake, stretching and bending, then snapping back into place with a barely audible twang, shivering for a few seconds before falling still. The light fades and the parchment looks as it did before, a childish scrawl of a map.

It is late afternoon, now, and diabolically hot, but Remus wants to test just one landmark before stopping for the day. He climbs back along the hill to the spring and is not surprised when the distance seems much further than it had before. He sits again on the fallen log and sketches a makeshift spring symbol on the map. He touches the tip of his wand to the symbol and says, "Designa primolocum." Light washes the map again, pale blue now, and the lines shiver into place. The spring symbol seems to fade and settle, becoming something old and dignified, grandfather to the other markings on the parchment.

Remus rolls the map carefully, puts his wand in his pocket and starts down the hill.

* * *

Slowly, the map takes shape. It is much harder with one person than it had been with four, but Remus does not dwell on that. Working alone simply requires that he retrace his steps often to tie one point to another, rather than being able to cast the location charm simultaneously in more than one place. The villagers ask him what he is doing, and he explains that he is tracking the creature's movements, which is only a partial lie. Sometimes young boys from the village will join him, and he is forced to spend the day peering at broken twigs and trampled ground, pretending to know the first thing about tracking a magical predator through an Indian jungle. He quickly learns, however, that if he promises to play cricket with the boys in the evening they will not bother him during the day, and he soon finds himself looking forward to their scrabbling twilight games. All of the schoolchildren know some English, and Remus enjoys answering their questions and teaching them harmless insults like berk, fool and brother of a monkey. He is growing used to the adults in the village, too, greeting them by name when he passes through their fields. Many of the men invite him to eat at their homes, and he happily accepts, although he privately prefers the smiling silence of Rakesh's mother.

Rakesh knows he is a making a map of some sort, and Remus suspects that Rakesh knows he is mapping the heartwood. But the young man does not ask him about it. Remus does tell him to make it very clear to the villagers that they must stay away from the dense stands of jungle after dark, and Rakesh nods in that peculiar Indian way, a rolling motion of the head that looks more like a negative shake than a positive nod.

It takes only a few days for Remus to identify the challenges the heartwood presents for an amateur cartographer. At Hogwarts, they mapped only the edges of the Forbidden Forest, their primary purpose being to avoid detention and Slytherin tell-tales. Even then they noticed how the map seemed to shy away from the Forest, refusing to settle as a location, until they decided to simply freeze the Forest boundaries and not worry about it. Remus doesn't have that option now, but he believes he can devise a method for working around it. He spends his days wandering the hills, locating and charting the jungle and fields with increasing accuracy, and he watches in fascination as the map morphs and grows. There are no people on it--he hasn't bothered with the complex tracking charms--but the blank regions of the heartwood are becoming ominously clear.

Each night he bathes at the village pump; the villagers have grown used to his eccentric habits. By wandlight he teaches himself to say shurkriya and koi bat nahi to the cockroaches, politely imploring, "Kya ap ko angrezi ati kai?" To which the cockroaches respond by scurrying under the bed. He reads through Fangworthy's Guide with amusement and dismay, pitying the unsuspecting traveller who arrives in India expecting to find the bejewelled and storied land Fangworthy describes.

Remus has only one other book, purchased in Delhi on his first miserable, bewildering and terrifying day in India. He arrived by Portkey at four in the morning and spent the next five hours sitting in uncomfortable chairs in shabby offices, meeting with men who held titles like "Administrator of Magical Compliance, Northern Tourism Division" and "Undersecretary of Travel Restrictions, Subcontinental Enforcement Squad".

Remus doesn't know what exactly the Brits left behind when they vacated India some thirty years before, but Indian Ministry of Magic makes its blundering, bumbling British counterpart seems almost efficient by comparison. The Indian Ministry has done everything in its power, and few things Remus wouldn't have thought possible, to make travel difficult for magical visitors to India. Apparition is forbidden, as are Portkeys; broomsticks and carpets are controlled by usurious deposits and licensing fees. There are a dozen pamphlets explaining all of this in all eighteen official Indian languages, including Sanskrit--Remus wonders if there are wizards in the world who actually use Sanskrit in everyday life--but Remus simply admits defeat and agrees to travel by Muggle transportation only.

"The trains are very slow, however," says the Undersecretary of Travel Restrictions, a Sikh with a black turban and the unlikely name of Patrick O'Malley Singh. "And the drivers are not trustworthy. They will take you to some place and demand your money."

Undersecretary Singh has just spent forty minutes explaining to Remus the impossibility of travelling by magic. Remus inhales very, very slowly, and repeats, "I think the train will be just fine." It is what Kettleburn's friend in Nainital suggested, anyway, and Remus has the name of a man who can drive him to Pakhari from the train station in Kathgodam.

The one thing that has kept Remus from shouting during the last four hours is the Galleon-rupee exchange rate, which has him feeling a great deal richer than he was when he when he left England, and well able to afford train tickets.

He asks, "There are a few things I would like to buy before I leave the city. Can you point me to some shops?"

This is something Undersecretary Singh is prepared to do. He shows Remus an incomprehensible map and points quickly, "You are here, on Janpath. There are shops here, at Connaught Place." He advises Remus to take a taxi, and before he can launch into a lengthy discourse on the dangers of travelling by rickshaw in Delhi, Remus thanks him and bids him farewell.

Remus leaves the Indian Ministry of Magic, sheaf of official documents in hand, and steps into the sweltering heat. It is barely nine in the morning, and he begins to sweat immediately. The exterior of the Ministry is no more attractive than the interior: a low, unremarkable concrete building, surrounded by uniformed guards and palm trees, with a high iron fence protecting it from the road. Janpath is surprisingly wide and very nearly pleasant, lined with trees and fences, official-looking embassies and residences. He walks for a bit in the direction of Connaught Place before deciding to brave a lift in one of the three-wheeled diesel rickshaws belching black smoke into the shimmering, strangling air, which already smells strongly of petrol, rot and human waste. It takes a few tries before a rickshaw swerves to the curb at his raised hand, and before he climbs in, Remus asks, "Connaught Place?"

"Twenty rupees," the driver says.

Remus climbs in, hauling his case onto his lap, and the driver veers into traffic.

After two minutes, Remus surreptitiously reaches into his pocket and grasps his wand. Laws against Apparition be damned; if it becomes apparent that death-by-traffic-accident is imminent, he's Apparating out of this careering coffin as fast as he can think the spell. While Remus' knuckles become whiter, gripping his case and wand, the driver guns fearlessly up the Janpath, oblivious to the autos, buses, bicycles, rickshaws, motorbikes carrying entire families of five, buffalo-drawn carts and occasional stationary cow on the road. Some interminable time later, the traffic has clogged to a halt and the driver twists around to look at Remus. "Connaught Place. Fifty rupees."

Remus frowns, climbing out and noting that he is in the middle of a jammed road. "You said twenty rupees."

"Fifty rupees."

"We agreed twenty."

"Too long. Sixty."

Remus rattles through the coins and tattered paper notes in his pocket and comes up with thirty rupees. He gives it to the driver, who scowls and continues to argue as Remus hurries to the side of the road. There do appear to be shops everywhere, although he has no idea if this is his intended destination. He begins to wander, following the front of a massive, curving white building that, he supposes, was once quite spectacular, though now it is now merely large, worn with decay and grime. He pauses for a moment to mutter a binding spell on his case and a protection spell on his money pouch, and thanks Merlin he was born a wizard rather than a hapless, vulnerable Muggle.

It doesn't take long for Remus to find the things he wants to buy: a couple of shirts, because they're quite affordable and he knows the sweat and dirt is going to ruin the few he has, some Muggle pens and a notepad of plain paper. He has a few hours before his train leaves for Uttar Pradesh, and a faint anxiety is growing in his gut. When he spots the bookstore, his face breaks into a relieved grin. The shop is small, but crammed with shelves, and most of the books appear to be in English. Remus browses enthusiastically, sternly reminding himself that he has only so much money.

But one title catches his eye. He buys it, tucks it away in his case, and goes to find something to eat before braving the train station.

In the village, cool from his nightly bath and comfortable in the wandlight, he opens Man-eaters of Kumaon and begins to read.

Remus spent his childhood reading the lurid tales of werewolf hunters through the ages. His parents thought it an exceptionally disturbing habit--and they were right--but as most of those tales were tied to the rumours and myths they themselves followed in their quietly desperate search for a cure, they could hardly scold him. He spent his adolescence listening eagerly to Professor Kettleburn's stories of adventure and intrigue, lengthy tales of tracking magical beasts in far-away lands. But by the time he left Hogwarts, his interest had faded, replaced by a jaded, disappointed and cynical view of Kettleburn's colleagues and predecessors. He decided they were a disagreeable, delusional lot, the Francis Macombers of the wizarding world, measuring the worth of their lives by the number of trophies and talons they claimed, plunging into danger certain they would discover the ultimate religious, spiritual, physical and sexual satisfaction by firing off a flashy Felling Spell just moments before the graphorn charged.

Mapping the Pakhari heartwood--as he has begun to think of it--Remus tries to ignore the growing worry that he is no better than these men. He tells himself that mapping a heartwood has a magical purpose entirely separate from deliberately and systematically hunting a creature that is doing nothing more than reacting to adverse circumstances by expanding its diet and range.

But in his shabby bungalow at the edge of the jungle, accompanied by cockroaches, geckos and a beetle that looks as if its exoskeleton was fashioned by a Muggle automobile designer in the 1940s, Remus is enraptured. He finds himself wishing he could have met this Colonel Corbett who so earnestly praises his quarry as a "large-hearted gentleman with boundless courage". Remus has no fear of tigers, but the poetic words and ruthless images have him sitting upright and turning pages well into the night, until his eyes smart with exhaustion. Finally, he sets the book on the floor beside the map, speaks, "Nox," and lays back to sleep.

A line slips into his mind, a sentence he quickly passed in his eagerness to find the Champawat man-eater, that bold tigress responsible for over four hundred deaths. Sitting up and whispering, "Lumos," Remus retrieves the book from the floor and thumbs through the first chapter.

I have a tale to tell of that bungalow, Corbett wrote, but I will not tell it here, for this is a book of jungle stories, and tales 'beyond the laws of nature' do not consort well with such stories.

Remus looks up at the geckos on the wall. He wonders if they are the same two lizards, every night. They have no distinguishing characteristics, as far as he can see.

He closes the book, sets it down and extinguishes the light.

A curious thing for a Muggle hunter to write, he thinks, slowly shutting his eyes.

* * *

Remus is late returning to the village. He has found a large, complex section of heartwood and is doing his best to trace its borders without becoming mired in the boundary region. But mired he becomes, unwilling to give up. The moon is waxing and in a few days a driver will come to bring him to Nainital, where, a letter from Mr. Chandrasekhar assures him, "Arrangements have been made." It is growing dark when he makes his way out of the jungle and onto the road, a mere mile from where he had entered eight hours before but tired enough to know he has trekked ten times that distance.

A young woman is walking along the road in the opposite direction, a dark shawl covering her face. Remus nods his hello, which she shyly returns; he recognises her but does not know her name. The women of the village and surrounding hills are not as eager to talk to him as the men and children are.

Kicking at the dusty road, he lets his thoughts wander, wondering as he does each day about the curious spatial and temporal characteristics of the heartwood. He has been unable to determine if the jungle actually folds back on itself or merely stretches and shifts to frustrate nosy explorers. There are numerous theories in the magical world to explain how a man could walk for ten days across heartwood and emerge on the other side no more than a league from where he entered. But they are all just that: theories.

Remus' stomach grumbles and he thinks ahead to the hot, simple meal in Rakesh's home, with endless saucers of spicy chai poured by Rakesh's smiling mother. He will mention to Rakesh tonight that his is going to Nainital in a few days to meet with Mr. Chandrasekhar, the man who is funding his endeavours in Pakhari. He looks forward to bathing at the pump, to washing his shirt and hanging it to dry, to reading Jim Corbett by wandlight and falling asleep.

A scream shatters the night.

Remus spins around. His heart accelerates and he takes a few running steps before stopping and forcing his mind to catch up with instinct. The scream definitely came from behind him--ahead of him now--down the shadowed stretch of road he has just passed. The road where the young woman is walking.

There is another scream, long and high and chilling.

From the opposite direction, Remus hears shouts from the village, and he begins to run. The woman screams again--woman or creature, he cannot tell--and he quickens his pace, ignoring the protests of his tired muscles. The road enters a stretch of jungle, the same heartwood edge he mapped less than an hour before. Remus lifts his wand and shouts, "Lumos!" A faint light shines ahead of him.

He sees her feet first, on the side of the road, and his heart leaps into his throat. A few more steps and he realises she is still attached to her feet, but the rest of her body is obscured by a black shape. Remus stops abruptly and points his wand.

"Stupefy!"

The creature flows. It does not so much move as shift, a rippling shape blacker than the night, curving down and lifting its head all at once, resting its forelegs on the ground and arching, cat-like, when the spell strikes. Long claws carve deep furrows into the road. Two yellow eyes meet Remus', glowing from a face that is shockingly human despite the fangs curving upward from its lower jaw, despite its shimmering, rippling, mesmerizing black skin, a face that has no edge, blurring seamlessly into the shadows. Between its forelegs, the woman is dead, her head crushed, one of her arms mangled.

Remus raises his wand again as the creature folds back on itself, and shouts, "Laqueus!" A web of golden thread leaps from the end of his wand, enveloping the creature and shrinking to ensnare it. With a shriek of frustration, the kali vastu lashes out with its forelegs--Remus sees the claws, long, black and shining with blood--and it rips through the magical net as if it were cobwebs.

Remus tries to Stun it again as the creature leaps toward him. He takes a stumbling step backwards, but he is not fast enough. The kali vastu knocks him to the ground and crouches over him. A wild fury explodes in Remus and he struggles violently, kicking at the creature's hind legs. Its breath is hot on his face and smells of earth and blood.

Even though one clawed foreleg has his right arm pinned to the ground, Remus twists his wrist and gasps, "Sanguinis!"

A shimmer of red light passes over the creature, illuminating the inside of its mouth as it takes in a breath to shriek again, and its cry this time is one of pain. It reels, spraying hot blood on Remus' face as the Bleeding Curse strikes, and bounds backward. Gathering the woman's body in its front legs and rolling smoothly away, it vanishes into the jungle.

Remus scrambles to his feet and darts after it, throwing light ahead of him. He doesn't see the kali vastu until it leaps, ape-like, bounding off the trunk of a tree to his left and knocking him sideways. His head strikes a tree as he falls to the ground.

Men's voices on the road rouse Remus from his daze, and he struggles to stand. Remus growls in frustration; the creature is gone, its rich, dark scent faded. When he bends down to retrieve his wand, a wave of dizziness washes over him, and he leans against the tree for support. One of the men ventures off the road to help him, asking, "Mr. Lupin? Kali vastu?" The terrified group stares at him with wide eyes. Remus frowns, then realises that his face is covered with the creature's blood, as well as some of his own from where his forehead struck the tree. One man says something and motions to the others.

Remus barely hears their words. He is watching the jungle, fighting the predatory urge to chase the creature into the night, forcing himself to listen to the sensible part of his mind that knows he is too unsteady and too shaken to follow.

"Mr. Lupin. Mr. Lupin, here."

The men have formed a tight half-circle near the edge of the road.

The woman's shawl is tangled in a bush, wet with blood. In the dirt beside it, in its own crimson patch of mud, is a single torn, delicate, curving finger.