Thieves of the Black Sea. Joe O'Neill
got the shot, Foster, take him down!” his father shouted.
Foster pressed the butt of the rifle against his shoulder, allowed his right index finger to caress the trigger, closed his right eye, and brought the tiger within his sight.
The tiger growled, but it did not attack. Perhaps a hundred feet away, it stared at Foster and growled again. Looking into the tiger’s eyes, Foster felt a strange, otherworldly connection to it. For a moment, Foster could swear he could hear the tiger’s thoughts.
“Take the shot!” his father ordered.
But Foster did not shoot. He thought of all those animal heads in their trophy room in their cold castle. He looked at the tiger and something from deep within his soul told him not to shoot—he just couldn’t see a reason to. All this time, all he wanted to do was please his father, but in that moment, he didn’t care about his father’s approval at all. He knew, intrinsically, what he was doing was wrong.
Lowering his rifle, he looked up at his father.
“No,” he whispered.
His father hit him in the face with the back of his hand, knocking Foster down, then grabbed the rifle, brought it up and pointed it at…nothing.
The tiger was gone.
His father glared down at Foster, his rifle in his hand, in disbelief that his son had passed up such an easy shot.
“An albino tiger! You passed up an albino tiger! A once in a lifetime animal. You ever pass up a shot like that again, I’ll shoot you myself.”
He threw down the rifle at Foster, who was now bleeding profusely from his lip.
The next day, the sherpas packed up the camp to move to higher ground. Foster’s father hadn’t spoken him to him all night, and Foster traveled in the rear of the caravan—away from the sherpas and his father. It was as if he had been banished by his father. Walking far in the rear, the snow crackling beneath his feet, and his breath dissipating in the mountain air, Foster felt so very alone. He should have felt safe being with his father, but instead, he felt as if he were unwanted. That his father wasn’t just disappointed in him—more that he was no longer wanted on the hunt at all.
They trekked through the snow all morning and then came to a narrow crossing that required the group to walk in a single-file line. Foster stayed in the rear, still fearful of his father, who gruffly barked out orders at the sherpas.
After a few moments, Foster’s father proceeded across the narrow path, followed closely by the two helpers. The crossing was only about eighteen inches in width and required each climber to press his back against the cliff behind and sidestep down the path.
As his father and the sherpas moved farther away from him, Foster felt a tinge of fear as he looked down the sheer face of the cliff. It was at least a thousand-foot drop to the ground below.
Foster felt a gust of wind and his entire body froze in paralysis. His palms instantly became clammy and wet. He realized that one false move would send him plunging to his death. He tried hard to control his shallow, nervous breathing.
His father called out to him as he was about halfway across the pathway.
“Foster, hurry up, we don’t have all day!”
Taking a deep breath, and steadying his gaze to focus on nothing but the trail, young Foster was about to take his first step when, suddenly, his father let out a horrible scream followed by the terrified screams of the two sherpas.
Just one moment before, Foster had been staring at his father and the two men, and the next moment they had dropped from sight.
The path had given way under the weight of the three men!
His father continued to scream as he was plunged down the mountain. Foster watched in horror as his father and the two sherpas fell faster and faster until they landed with a ‘thud’ on the snow-packed ground a thousand feet below. As Foster watched, everything seemed to move in slow motion. It felt like an eternity before his father hit the ground.
Aghast, Foster stared down at his father’s unmoving body, splayed out in an unnatural position on the cold plateau of the Himalayan tundra.
“Father!” Foster yelled, but his father’s body didn’t move an inch.
“Father!” he yelled again, his voice bouncing off the cliff and echoing in the valley below.
His father’s body never moved.
He was dead, as were the two sherpas.
After standing there for ten minutes, still in disbelief about what had just happened, Foster finally managed to move his legs and looked around. He couldn’t possibly move forward as there was now a fifteen-foot gap in the narrow path. His only solution was to return to the place they had camped the night before.
Slowly, Foster moved away, taking one last look at the lifeless figure of his father. Another gust of wind blew through his hair, and Foster noticed the complete silence around him. Nothing moved. Everything was still as though frozen in time.
For three hours he walked until he found the spot where they’d been the night before but now it was just an empty, snowy patch of land. Foster sat down and pulled out a hunk of chocolate, took a bite, and then returned it to his pocket. He really wasn’t hungry.
It was still daylight, so he decided to keep moving to keep his body warm. He didn’t think of his father. He didn’t cry. He just wandered in solitude along the mountain trail, until he came upon a strand of Buddhist flags stretched between two rocks. The flags were somehow peaceful, colored like a rainbow. They flickered in the wind like the flames of a candle.
He was completely lost, but at least now he’d seen a sign of life.
All of his gear had been lost. He no longer had a tent, a sleeping bag, a stove, or even a lantern. Fortunately, he was dressed warmly enough, but the only supplies he carried on his person were a hunting knife, a compass, and some chocolate.
Foster stood there, watching the flags snapping in the wind, when he was suddenly awed by the sight of the Himalayan mountain range in front of him, like gods emerging from a mist. He had never bothered to notice their beauty before, as his father would have admonished him for such novelty.
He spent the rest of the day constructing a snow fort, as his father had taught him, then dragged himself inside to settle in for the night.
Lying in the snow, his back against a rock, Foster hugged his knees and brought them up to his chest. The snow was a bit cold underneath him, but his wool pants did an excellent job of keeping him warm. Pulling his hood even further down his face to block the cold, he slowly felt himself fall into sleep as the sun descended and the day turned to night. It was a fitful sleep, and he awoke a dozen times during the night to the sound of the wind swirling around him in the starkness of the night and the snapping of the Tibetan flags. After hours of tossing and turning, he finally managed to drift into a deep sleep.
He awakened with a start to someone smashing through his snow fort with a stick and then poking him in the shoulder.
Looking up, he saw a man dressed in a brown jacket made entirely of yak fur. A brown hood partially covered his face. The man stomped into the fort, wearing massive brown leather boots lined with yellow fur and caked with mud, and waving a long stick made from a mangled piece of wood with a huge knot in the middle.
The man looked like some kind of snow yeti.
He poked Foster again.
Foster immediately stood up and realized he was just an inch or two shorter than the man in fur. The man reached into his pocket, causing Foster to take a couple of nervous steps back, but instead of a weapon, the man brought out a large hunk of yak cheese, called chhurpi and offered it to Foster. Foster took the cheese and practically inhaled it, he was so hungry.
The man pulled back his hood and Foster could see that he was an older Nepalese man, maybe sixty. His head was bald, but his eyes were the