A Tiger's Skin

"A Tiger's Skin"
Short story by W. W. Jacobs
Text available at Wikisource
Country	England
Language	English
Genre(s)	Crime, Horror, short story
Publication
Published in	The Lady of the Barge
Media type	Short story collection
Publication date	October 1902

"A Tiger's Skin" is a horror crime short story by W. W. Jacobs. It was previously unpublished up until Jacobs' short story collection, The Lady of the Barge. It follows an England town in distress after a tiger is released upon them, and begins to terrorize them.

Plot

A painter is making a new sign for a bar called Cauliflower in a town called Clayburg. An old man watches the painter as he tells a story.

On a trip to a nearby town called Wickham, a roadside circus driving by on a train crashes down. They set up in Clayburg, hoping to make business. It succeeds, and they pack up after a week. For a week there was silence, before one night at the Cauliflower before Bill Chambers reads that the tiger has gone loose. They close the pub's doors, just as a tramp comes begging to be let in. Herbert Smith, the owner of the Cauliflower, locks the door and declines the tramp's insistence to be let in. John Briggs, the blacksmith, comes from the back kitchen, wondering what the matter is. Enraged by Herbert's ruckus, John grabs Herbert's gun from off the wall and demands to be let outside to hunt the tiger. Herbert refuses, so John slaps him on the side of the head with the stock of the gun. Herbert falls to the ground, fainting as the tramp rushes through the door. The tramp explains that the tiger chased him for over a mile, and that he saw it while washing his shirt in a creek over a hedge.

For the next week or so, Clayburg is under constant threat of the tiger. Kids don't go to the school and men and women are afraid to go to work. Sooner or later, livestock starts getting killed off. Frederick Scott, a hen keeper, finds most of his hen slaughtered in the night by the tiger. He reports it to William White, the local policeman. The next day, Peter Gubbins' pigs are found dead.

All panic is let loose for about a week. No one can really decipher what to do until George Kettle organizes a militia in the Cauliflower after his ducks are found dead. The men––Herbert Smith, John Briggs, Bill Chambers, Peter Gubbins, the narrator, and George Kettle––bring two guns, pitchforks, and scythes to the forest as they walk along the path. Eventually, George and his men encounter an old man walking alongside the road. The old man tells that the tiger went into the house of Bob Pretty, the so-called black sheep of Clayburg who declined legitimacy of a tiger around.

The men go up and break into Bob Pretty's house. Bob Pretty, confused, is wondering what is going on when the men smell something pungent. They open the kitchen door and find out that Bob's kitchen is essentially a butcher shop; pork and duck bodies are hung on meathooks. The men insist that they will get Bob for his crimes, and demand someone to go get Mr. White. Bob tells them that they won't press charges, because the militia broke into his house. Ultimately no charges are pressed, and its revealed at the end that Bob Pretty and the tramp were friends.