Hold the Enlightenment Read Online Free PDF

shop where they could resole one of Tommy’s boots. The cobbler, Mustafa, talked as he worked. He had never seen a tiger, or any evidence of one, around Lake Van and he hunted birds in the mountains quite often. Still, Mustafa said, if we liked, he could call the most avid hunter he knew and invite him down to the shop to talk. Halim was a man of fifty-six, a Jack Palance look-alike with long arms and hands the size of canned hams. He agreed that there were no tigers anywhere nearby, and hadn’t been for many years. He had heard rumors about tiger sightings to the east, however. We should talk to his hunting partner, a baker named Hamiz Kaya.
    “Where does Hamiz Kaya live?” Tommy asked.
    “Shemdinli,” Halim said.
    We drove southeast, passing from checkpoint to checkpoint, and moving ever deeper into the mountains. The road took us over a pass in what might have been the Swiss Alps, with the snow several feet deep. Far below, a narrow valley stretched out as far as the eye could see, and at its farthest extent, hard up against the mountains rising abruptly behind, was the little town of Shemdinli. Tiger town, terror town, take your pick.
    We drove down the main street, an amalgam of two- and three-story buildings of the type that collapse during earthquakes. Small patches of sooty gray snow lay in the street. We parked next to the bakery, and asked if Hamiz Kaya, the bread maker, was there. Once again, we were surrounded by townspeople, a dozen or more of them: tall, slender men with hawkish faces wearing baggy pants and cummerbunds. Kurds.
    Were we here to talk about the terror? they wanted to know, and we said, no, we were here to talk about tigers. We had read reports that there had been several recent sightings. Hunters, the paper said, had seen the animal in these mountains.
    “Then they lie,” one man shouted. “No one hunts here.” The dangers, men on all sides explained, were simply too great. The mountain trails were mined. A hunter could be mistaken for a terrorist and shot by the military; or he might be mistaken for a militarycommando and shot by the terrorists. Since the insurrection began in 1984, more than thirty thousand people had been killed. “No one hunts here,” a man insisted.
    “I have been in the mountains,” said a distinguished-looking older man wearing a wool sport coat over a pink sweater.
    Musa Iren, seventy-two, said he had seen a tiger in the mountains not far away, near Yaylapinar. That was eight years ago, and he had tracked it through the snow for two days.
    “Do they make a sound?” Tommy asked.
    “Like a donkey,” Musa said. He made an “ahhhh” sort of sound. “Describe the tracks.”
    “The tracks were like that of a cat, but as big as my hand, and the talons were as long as my index finger,” Musa said. Tommy and I passed a significant look.
    “Anything else?”
    “Yes,” Musa said, “when the tiger walks, he ‘seizes’ the snow and leaves a small ball of packed snow in the middle of the track.”
    “This is true,” said another older man named Cirkin, who said he shot a tiger, also near Yaylapinar, forty years ago. It required thirteen rounds from a shotgun to kill the animal, and it took three men to carry it.
    “These animals are not extinct,” Musa said. “I guarantee you they are up there. Not just one or two, but many.”
    There was some general scoffing about this. Another man came to Musa’s aid: “Because no one hunts—it is sixteen years now—the animals are coming back. Even here, near town, we see more bears and wild goats and wolves and wild pigs. Why not tigers?”
    There were now fifty or sixty men gathered about, all shouting out their opinions, mostly negative. “Listen to me,” Musa said, “you know the village of Ormancik, the little forest, on the border with Iraq? Four years ago a man of that village, Haji Ak, killed a tiger. He brought me the skin, and I had it in my shop for two years. I could not sell it and gave it back to