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.'