The scream came again, slicing through the green-leafed forest canopy and knifing into his ears. Longer and more chilling than the first. The dark priest halted for the briefest of moments. Not for the first time, he thought on the irony of jungle living. The scream that sounded so like a snake-bitten maiden, or a child being beaten, made the staid little burros tremble. Shy monkeys leapt even higher up the gnarled branches of the mahogany trees, where they swayed like drunken sailors. But it was no human victim; it was the fiercest of predators in the Chiapas undergrowth, the tigre.

Was the stealthy cat warning them he was coming, or making triumphant announcement of his latest kill? The priest never had discovered a pattern to the predator's cries—not in thirty years of jungle life. He only knew that where the fanged beast was, man should not be.

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