Once upon a time in Manchuria, when animals and humans could understand each other's languages, there lived a girl and a tiger. Hunters had killed the tiger's mother when he was only a few weeks old, and then given the orphaned cub to the girl. When this happened, Altis herself was still very young, only about ten years old, living in the forest with her father, a woodsman, who made his living by carving furniture and animals from the wood of forest trees.
Altis, whose name means "golden", was allowed to raise the tiger as she saw fit. He soon outgrew the milk she fed him from her father's cow, and would have eaten the cow instead if the hunters had not kept him supplied with fresh meat. He was a resplendent, ferocious-looking tiger, but Altis had taught him so well not to harm humans or their domestic animals that he curbed his natural instincts for her sake.
As he grew larger and fiercer and more independent, he learned to hunt for himself. He would go off in search of prey, and return when he was no longer hungry, sinking to his haunches and stretching out with a deep, satisfied purring sound in front of the woodsman's fireplace.
He would watch over Altis as she slept - a most unusual thing for a tiger to do, but this was in fact no ordinary tiger. In a past life he had been a young hunter, the most renowned in the taiga, but he had abducted a shaman's daughter and, as a punishment, the shaman had stolen the young man's spirit and given it to an unborn tiger cub. So although he had the form of a tiger, his spirit was that of a fearless young hunter whose audacity had cost him his life.
Altis knew nothing of this. She only knew that the tiger was her dearest friend, who accompanied her whenever she went into the forest and protected her from danger. The hunters recognised her tiger, and took care not to harm him.
When Altis turned sixteen, her father went to see the matchmaker who lived on the edge of the forest, to ask her to find his daughter a suitable husband. But when the prospective bridegroom, bearing gifts, was brought to their cottage, the tiger growled a warning at him and prepared to spring at the young man's throat. As the bridegroom reached for his weapon, Altis leapt in front of the tiger, spreading her arms to protect her beloved companion.
The bridegroom fled, humiliated and enraged, vowing his revenge on the tiger. Altis stroked her pet's head, and two tears fell on his soft, deep fur.
"Don't be sad," growled the tiger. "I'll never leave you."
Altis knew her father would not rest until she was safely married, and she feared for her tiger at the hands of a jealous bridegroom. She knew she should also be worried about the bridegroom, as the tiger was equally prone to jealousy. She did not know what to do.
One morning soon after this, the tiger accompanied her into the forest as if to guard her while she gathered berries, but then led her on a long journey to where the shaman lived. They reached the shaman's tent only at nightfall. He emerged, dressed in animal skins and looking more like a beast than a man.
The tiger behaved very strangely, crouching in front of the shaman and creeping towards him on his belly, hanging his head as if begging forgiveness.
The shaman folded his arms and looked down sternly at the unhappy tiger, then strode off into the darkness for a time. When he returned, he looked deep into the eyes of first the tiger, then the girl. He was silent for a long while, as if pondering something, then he bent to whisper something in the tiger's ear. The tiger glanced up at the girl in sorrow and wonder.
With a sign, the shaman took the girl aside and sat with her for a long time without breaking his silence. When he finally spoke, she listened closely to his words, then she, too, lapsed into a profound silence. At last she sighed, like someone who has just come to a difficult decision, or someone just awakening from sound, refreshing slumber. She looked up at the shaman and nodded slightly, as if in assent.
Gesturing to them to follow him, the shaman showed the girl and the tiger to a special tent whose interior was lined with rugs, their rich colours quickening in the flickering light of oil lamps. Then the shaman withdrew, murmuring to himself in a manner half way between speech and song.
Altis took off her kerchief and unbound her long, thick, golden braids, which appeared to be burnished to a deeper, richer, copper hue by the mellow lamplight, and barred with darker shadows.
They could hear the whisper of the shaman's moccasins as he wove in circles around the outside of the tent, his voice intoning incantations in a language neither of them could recognise, to the sporadic accompaniment of little bells he wore on his wrists and ankles. But as their trance deepened, the tiger and the girl heard only each other's breathing, like the gentle exhalations of a young birch forest in spring, and saw only each other's eyes, catching the light like forest pools where moonbeams filter down through the canopy.
Altis could feel her arms becoming stronger, her torso melting as if taking on a different form, long and lithe and silky, barred with velvet stripes of shadow, and then she seemed to sink into a deep, mysterious dream-state, in which she imagined she was coursing through the wooded valleys with her tiger, weightless with joy.
As the morning light stole gently through the leaves, the shaman watched with narrowed eyes as two sleek shadows left the tent where his guests had spent the night - two tiger forms that moved with grace and strength, until, striped in the bars of morning sun, breaking into a joyous, loping stride, shoulder to shoulder they vanished into the forest whence they had come.
*I am indebted for the idea for this story to Sergei Bodrov (senior's) film, "Bear's Kiss", under whose spell the story was written.