From above the clouds he heard her call. The sound was ferocious and fearful all at once. If sentient eye could have seen him here he would have been only a tiny bright dot moving with the night stars.
Plunging through the rain-heavy clouds Garuda saw the tigress and countless eons of memories moved through his heart. Her back was to a sheer cliff, legs almost out of stone to perch upon as she snarled and swatted at the poachers.
The men stood in a half circle around her, blocking her path to freedom. They held rifles and torches, shouting at her in a language she knew nothing about. She only understood that they meant her harm. The men did not want her dead, she was worth much more if they could bring her in alive, but either way, they would take her. Greed pushed them forward.
In what the men would later recount as a falling star, or maybe a comet that came too close to the Earth, the rainy night suddenly turned bright and silent. Gone was the sound of the rain and thunder, gone was the wind and shouting. It was all replaced with the silence that both preceded and followed close behind this blur of light. When the men regained their composure the tigress was nowhere to be seen.
In an instant Sri Garuda landed on the far side of the mountain. The tigress looked into the cloudless night skies, and then slowly, gently, turned to acknowledge her benefactor. Before she could properly thank him he was already aloft and moving again.
The tigress looked again into the night skies, smiled at the moon and then quietly disappeared into the jungle.
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