The Year of The Tiger

Celebration
yvonne begley
word count: 973

I could not make out why trouble came so suddenly. Maali is a good baby. That is why she worried me so much last month. She never did a lot of crying. She smiled and laughed easily.

Well, it wasn't exactly trouble the way you usually think of it. It just made me feel confused and not quite sure what to think own of my own baby any more. Maybe she is a changeling, a fairy baby switched with my own true baby. I feel like a hen on the shore, watching the duckling she hatched, when it swims away. It doesn't seem natural for my own chick to do what Maali does.

The first time that I began to really worry was last month. Maali was just starting to get up some speed in her crawling. I had felt safe leaving her in the care of Old Shep out in the front yard. It was fenced with nice soft grass for her to crawl on. If Shep was worried about anything Maali was doing he would gently herd her away from it by blocking her with his body. Nothing was going to get past Shep to bother Maali either. The Mail Carrier knew to stand outside the gate and sing out so I could order Shep to sit and stay. Nobody wanted to brave the snarling, barking, hackling monster that Shep turned into when they came remotely near Maali while he was guarding her.

I often looked out the kitchen window just to be sure everything was safe, anyway. Everything was just fine every time I looked out. Until the last time.
Maali seemed to have managed to get into some rope, brown strands looping
all around her. I was less worried about the rope than I was that Shep was nowhere to be seen. A gush of relief entered me along with my held breath.

There Shep was, a few feet away from his usual post. He seemed to have gotten a piece of rope as well. He held it in his teeth and shook it vigorously. Somehow it didn't move like rope when Shep shook it. Something bothered me about the apparently peaceful scene. I couldn't tell what it was until Shep's piece of rope moved on its own. He had a snake in his mouth.

I looked again at Maali. Her “rope” was snakes too. They moved lazily as Maali laughed and played with them.

I was frozen with horror until my fear for Maali launched me out the door. My head was empty of any plan for what to do to save my baby from that horrible pile of writhing snakes. My feet drove me to her by themselves.

Shep had successfully disposed of one of the snakes by the time I got outside. It lay limply in the grass. The rest were still all around my baby.

Shep was thinking more clearly than I was. He crouched down, his belly touching grass blades, as he crept carefully towards Maali and the snakes.

Maali's baby laughter rang like falling shards of glass in the stillness.

I began to creep towards Maali in a slow-motion dream, following Shep's lead.
Neither Maali or the snakes seemed aware of the movements of Shep and I in their direction.

Shep and I crept toward Maali and her coils of snakes forever. We had to have been creeping forward toward her for a year or so, when Maali looked up from petting a snake coiled around her neck and saw me. She laughed in delight and pointed to the snake around her neck.

I motioned to her to be quiet with a barely quivering finger to my lips. I tried to match Maali's smile. She gave me another delighted laugh and kissed the snake around her neck. The snakes moved as if Maali's kiss had been a signal and slithered suddenly away from her and down a nearby hole. They disappeared without even a rustle.

The disappearance of the snakes released Shep and I from our underwater dance. Shep got to Maali first. He slathered her with doggy kisses. I showered her with my own kisses, regardless of dog slobber.

Maali took all these kisses the same way as she took the snakes; with laughter.

I called an exterminator as soon as I checked Maali all over to reassure myself that she had not been bitten. He came right over when he heard my story.

The exterminator was a man of few words. He used a few words to ask me to repeat my story when he was there in person. His face was expressionless as he listened to me again. He looked at me. He looked at Shep. He looked at Maali and she laughed. His face broke into a smile and he laughed with his eyes fanning into wrinkles at the corners. He went out to take care of the snakes. I couldn't watch.

He silently packed a squirming sack into the back of his truck when I could bring myself to look again. The exterminator told me they were poisonous snakes while I wrote his check. He said that the snakes were in a ball inside an old prairie dog hole. They were just waking up from winter hibernation, and I was very lucky that my baby had lived through her experience. I was too relieved to feel chastened.

He had a few final words for me before he left. “This is your baby's year. It is Chinese New Year, the year of the tiger. Take care of your little tiger.”

I looked at my baby in awe. I knew the exterminator had spoken the truth. I was not a chicken who had hatched a duckling. I was a housecat who had suckled a tiger.