Chapter 2 — Mrs Packletide's Tiger

The story is written by Saki, whose real name was Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916). The textbook describes him as a British writer whose witty stories satirized the society and culture of his day, and as a master of the short story.

Mrs Packletide wanted to shoot a tiger not out of any love of hunting, but because her social rival Loona Bimberton had recently been carried eleven miles in an aeroplane by an Algerian aviator and talked of nothing else. Only a personally procured tiger-skin and a heavy harvest of press photographs could, in Mrs Packletide's view, successfully counter Bimberton's fame.

Miss Mebbin (Louisa Mebbin) is Mrs Packletide's paid companion. She is portrayed as extremely money-conscious — she begrudged every rupee spent and even suggested the tiger should be cheaper since it was old. During the hunt she witnesses that Mrs Packletide shot the goat, not the tiger, and later uses this knowledge to blackmail Mrs Packletide into buying her a weekend cottage worth six hundred and eighty pounds.

No. When Mrs Packletide fired, her bullet fatally wounded the tethered goat. The tiger died of heart-failure, caused by the sudden report of the rifle, accelerated by senile decay. Miss Mebbin noted that no trace of the rifle's work could be found on the tiger. The villagers, anxious to receive their thousand rupees, gladly covered up what really happened.

The villagers, motivated by the thousand-rupee reward, posted children day and night on the outskirts of the jungle to prevent the tiger from wandering away. They left cheap goats around to keep the tiger satisfied and tethered a particularly loud-bleating goat during the hunt as bait. After the tiger's death they also concealed the truth about what had actually been shot.

"Les Fauves" is French for "The Wild Animals." Louisa Mebbin christened her weekend cottage near Dorking with this name and filled its garden with tiger-lilies — a private allusion to the tiger episode through which she obtained the cottage by blackmailing Mrs Packletide. The name is a sardonic joke that only Mebbin and Mrs Packletide would understand.

The story satirizes social vanity and jealousy. Mrs Packletide's elaborate and expensive scheme to outshine a rival ends in humiliation: she did not actually shoot the tiger, she is blackmailed by her own companion, and she abandons big-game shooting entirely. Saki uses irony and humour to expose how far people will go — and how badly they can fail — when driven purely by the desire for social status.

The story is built on multiple ironies. Mrs Packletide arranges a hunt to project bravery but shoots the wrong animal; her companion, hired to serve her, ends up as the real winner; the tiger-claw brooch meant to humiliate Bimberton produces only "repressed emotions" rather than open envy; and the story's final line — "the incidental expenses are so heavy" — is a bitterly ironic understatement for the blackmail payment she continues to make.

Saki creates humour through irony, exaggeration, and deadpan understatement. Comic effects include: Miss Mebbin's obsession with saving money even mid-hunt ("if he doesn't touch the goat we needn't pay for it"); the tiger dying not from a bullet but from heart-failure; the villagers cheerfully conspiring in the fiction; and Mrs Packletide's face changing colour "as rapidly as though it were going through a book of patterns" when threatened with exposure.

She plans to host a lunch at her house in Curzon Street, ostensibly in Loona Bimberton's honour, with a tiger-skin rug occupying most of the foreground and conversation. She also intends to give Bimberton a tiger-claw brooch on her next birthday — both gestures designed to display her achievement and make Bimberton feel overshadowed.

Bimberton refuses to look at an illustrated paper for weeks after the hunt. Her letter of thanks for the tiger-claw brooch is described as "a model of repressed emotions," and she declines the luncheon party invitation — the textbook notes that "there are limits beyond which repressed emotions become dangerous." Her reaction is a comic portrait of jealousy barely held in check.

The story uses satire (exposing vanity through ridicule), oxymoron (the textbook explicitly asks students to find oxymorons in the story), understatement ("the incidental expenses are so heavy"), and allusion (Mrs Packletide is compared to following "the footsteps of Nimrod," the Biblical mighty hunter). Saki's prose also features comic exaggeration to heighten absurdity.

Yes. The NCERT Literature Reader for Class 10 English Communicative is available as a free PDF from NCERT's official website with no sign-up required. You can also read individual chapters, including 'Mrs Packletide's Tiger', directly on this page.