A Planet for Rent

The Sacred Tigers

The Ussuri or Amur tiger, Panthera tigris altaica, is the largest feline on Earth. And, after the polar bear, the most powerful living terrestrial carnivore.

It is a tiger subspecies adapted to the cold taiga, its dense fur nearly white with pale brown stripes. It can weigh as much as 650 pounds and measure some ten feet from nose to tail tip.

A beautiful animal that had almost no natural enemies, it was the indisputable king of the taiga—until the advent of man.

Hunters and herders from the Yakut, Buryat, and other Siberian ethnic groups, who had no weapons but their bone arrows and spears, respected and admired the tiger as the ruler of beasts. To their shamans it was a sacred animal, both tutelary deity and demon, and the highest proof a man could give of his bravery was to hunt one alone.

Then the white man arrived with firearms and money and alcohol. The fur hunters.

Attracted by the high prices fetched by the valuable black-and-white coats of their gods, hired guns from all over the world joined the semicivilized sons of those very Siberian tribes that so revered the Amur tiger to decimate their numbers, never very large to begin with. Directors of zoos, in whose cages the immense felines played such an important role and attracted such large crowds, took care of the rest. No protective legislation could prevent the disaster.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the fifty-four remaining Ussuri tigers were living in captivity in various zoos and private parks across the planet. Each was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Then came Contact…

As part of their plan for restoring the ecology, the xenoids skillfully crossbred and cloned the fifty-four survivors, and in a matter of twenty years the population of Siberian tigers had grown to several thousand. Though their genetic diversity had diminished somewhat, the subspecies could be considered rescued.

Nonetheless, P. t. altaica continues to be categorized as a “protected species.” Each specimen is carefully tagged at birth with a locator-transmitter that allows the appropriate department in Planetary Security to track its location and health status second by second, monitoring them with dedicated satellites.

Pity the human who dares hunt one of these priceless white tigers. The minimum penalty, if extenuating circumstances such as self-defense or something along those lines can be proved, is two years in Body Spares.

Local reindeer herders have learned to tolerate the overpopulated great cats’ constant depredations as a necessary evil. They try to keep their herds away from the areas where tigers prowl, but in any case they always expect a certain loss margin in the heads of cattle that will inevitably be taken as prey.

Hunters in the region avoid the tigers like the devil; regardless of how desperate they get, regardless of how few animals they have taken, they never shoot them. They even keep a close eye on their snares and traps to save any cubs that may have accidentally gotten caught in one.

Once more, though in a very different sense, the great cats are sacred to the sons of the taiga.

For the Ussuri tigers, life is easy and comfortable now. Domesticated reindeer are easier to bring down than their wild cousins or the giant elks. They reproduce unafraid that wolves or bears, decimated by hunters, could wreak havoc on their litters of cubs. No one hunts or harasses them…

Most of the time.

Three or four times a year, men from Planetary Security land on the taiga en masse. They serve as bodyguards to some visiting xenoid VIP, almost always a grodo or an Auyar who previously expressed a desire for some relaxation. And who paid a generous sum for the right to get it…

And what better entertainment than hunting the largest feline on the planet? Exciting, primitive, and… utterly exclusive.

The hunting party is organized with mathematical precision, with beaters, spotters, and tall hunting platforms from which the xenoids may fire their projectile or energy guns at their leisure, free from any risk that the desperate cats might leap high enough to reach them.

Generally, the tigers shot by each visitor number in the dozens, though it is said that some grodo or other who was an exceptionally good shot once managed to rack up a hundred kills.

Sometimes, if the top brass of Planetary Security, or of the Planetary Tourism Agency itself, deign to join the fun, by the end of the hunt the feline carcasses carpet the frozen ground so thickly that the snow, packed hard by the huge paws of the tigers as they tried to escape, is more red than white.

Occasionally guests from other worlds will capture a live cub and take it home with them on their hyperships, like some exotic striped souvenir of their trip to Earth.

They always leave loaded down with pelts, after the beast’s carcasses have been quickly and skillfully skinned by the experts from Planetary Security (who in the process recuperate the locator-transmitters). The rest of the pelts, either entire or reduced to handicrafts, along with the claws, teeth, and bones, become “luxury items” to be sold for steep prices in exclusive boutiques to the wealthiest xenoid tourists. Or they are exported to other worlds, to the same end.

When the humans who control the planet and the visitors who control the galaxy leave the site of the hunt, the wolves and birds of prey feast grandly on the formless skinned bodies of the dethroned kings of the taiga.

The shamans of the local tribes also rummage patiently through the trampled snow, recovering every fragment of skin, every hair, every tooth, every precious remain of their fallen gods, to use in making their time-honored protective amulets.

They jabber in their ancient tongues, which they still insist on speaking in addition to Unified Planetary, caressing the remains of the hunted cats. No one knows what they say…

But there are tears in their eyes and rage in the movements of their wrinkled hands when they drive their knives into the snow, and when they look to the sky, as if they are waiting for something…