The Cutting Room Floor

Chris Jones for Esquire magazine:

Blake remembers one kill especially. The memory of it still slips into the front of his brain at the strangest times, without warning. He closes his eyes, and it’s right there in front of him again. Night was falling fast, and there was a tiger trapped in the edge of his headlights, up and to the right. The beams were just spilling onto its fur. The men in the back hollered for Blake to stop. He had learned by then to sink his ears under his raised shoulders in a mostly vain effort to stop the ringing, but he hadn’t yet learned to look away from the intended target. He stared at the tiger — “They’re just such beautiful animals,” he says — and then the shots rang out. Blake watched a patch of fur, like a leaf of paper caught in the wind, blow clean off the tiger’s back. One moment that patch of fur was there, thick and orange, and then it was gone, grabbed by the coming storm and scattered across the grass like seeds. Now his headlights caught a flash of the tiger’s disrobed spine instead, a thick column of white stripped down to its core. Blake saw the architecture of a tiger in the instant before it collapsed. “I just never seen anything like it in my life,” he says.