Who Goes There?

Lucius Shepard had one of the more unusual career trajectories for an SFF writer of his generation, and it shows in his work. He was born in 1943 and apparently wrote some juvenilia as a highly precocious preteen, but didn’t start writing fiction as an adult until he was deep in his thirties, having spent the intervening years on a series of very odd jobs. (He was part of several small-time rock bands in the ’70s and even claimed to have been a gun runner at one point—so he claimed.) His stories often take place on Earth but outside the US, starring an American expatriate or a local of the land, the latter being the case with today’s story. Shepard traveled often and his experiences abroad certainly inspired his fiction. The inspiration seemed to come fast too, since once he started writing in earnest he rarely stopped (he took a break for much of the ’90s, but was otherwise prolific), such that between 1983 and 1985 he produced a healthy platter of short fiction plus a novel. His early output was so strong and consistent that it won him the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 1985.

I’ve read enough Shepard at this point that I can sort of predict his movements, which you could interpret as an insult or the sign of an artist with a unique vision. It’s like calling Wes Anderson’s movies predictable. The thing with Shepard is that he has a “type,” i.e., a set of tropes and ideas he likes to return to again and again—with the flaws that come with them. I highly recommend “The Jaguar Hunter” as one’s first Shepard story because it neatly encapsulates what makes his writing different from what other genre authors were doing in the ’80s, for both good and ill. It’s a bit orientalist and more than a little misogynistic, but it also has a moodiness and an erotic intensity that identify it as a fable for adults. I found it a captivating read almost in spite of its problematic elements.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1985 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), The 1986 Annual World’s Best SF (ed. Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim), Killing Me Softly: Erotic Tales of Unearthly Love (ed. Gardner Dozois), The Fantasy Hall of Fame (ed. Robert Silverberg), Tails of Wonder and Imagination (ed. Ellen Datlow), and the Shepard collections The Jaguar Hunter and The Best of Lucius Shepard.

Enhancing Image

Esteban and his wife lncarnación are not doing so well in their marriage: they don’t fuck much anymore, Esteban suspects lncarnación envies his looks and talent, and perhaps most importantly, the wife has a nasty habit of buying things she can’t afford. As such, Esteban owes Onofrio and his son Raimondo money for a TV his wife had bought—but he can clear that debt, and even earn a hearty paycheck on top of that, if he does a difficult job for them. A black jaguar has been stalking Barrio Carolina, not killing anyone just for the fun of it but only hunters who have been paid to go after it. We can infer here that the jaguar is acting in self-defense, not like that matters much to Esteban. This particular jaguar is tough, with a body count, but Esteban is a veteran hunter (albeit one who would prefer to not go back to hunting to make a buck), and he has a special technique that’s earned him kills in the past which other hunters are unlikely to use. So to clear the debt and maybe please his wife along the way (after all, sometimes baby needs a new pair of shoes and sometimes baby needs a new house), he ventures out, solo, expecting to meet his toughest enemy yet.

In the first few pages we have a clean setup, and it’s a pretty good one. The setting is Honduras, which I don’t think is explicitly stated in the text except for the fact that the currency is lempiras (“ten thousand lempiras” being Esteban’s check), but it’s apparently a country Shepard had visited, and Esteban himself is inspired by an actual hunter Shepard knew. The setting is vividly realized, like something out William Friedkin’s Sorcerer or early Kipling, even if it runs the risk of orientalism. This is a risk to be expected of any white American writer depicting places and cultures he may or may not have had any personal interaction with, which is a risk Shepard does sometimes run afoul of, although here I think he’s pretty good about it. What’s more conspicuous is the misogyny, which will only become more apparent as the story goes on and which is arguably baked into the story’s DNA. We get to know very little about lncarnación, but what little we’re told points to her being a massive shrew whom Esteban is probably better off without—and then there’s the other female character, who we’ll get to in a second. I suspect Shepard wrote Esteban as having standoffish relationships with women for symbolic purposes, which I’ll elaborate on, but the point is that this is not by any means a feminist narrative.

(I’m gonna digress for a second here to clarify where I stand on misogyny in fiction, because when I see fellow reviewers harp on it there’s this sense at times of coming from a holier-than-thou position, as if the writer has or had never indulged in misogynistic behavior. I think this is dishonest in some way, or at least gives the wrong impression. When I critique woman-hating in my fiction it’s from the viewpoint of someone who, unfortunately, spent his college years as what you might call an alt-righter or proto-fascist. Such a phase would have a major ripple effect on my life and to this day it creeps up in my interactions with people, especially women and non-white folks, in ways that unnerve me, even if this discomfort is unbeknownst to the other party. As such when I see misogynistic or generally bigoted writing I critique less from a “how dare they” position and more from the fact that I see a little dark part of myself in this writing.)

I’m putting this all up front because the rest is positive; to say this is an evocative story wouldn’t quite be doing it justice. Shepard is often called an SF writer, but “The Jaguar Hunter” starts off as realistic fiction before slowly becoming something else—not science fiction, but a kind of supernatural fantasy that would probably have a hard time getting published anywhere in the ’80s except for F&SF. We expect, going into this as an SFF story, that the black jaguar will not be just a jaguar—only the question then becomes what it could possibly be. (Incidentally I had a bad dream the other night where I thought I had encountered a jaguar in the hills, but someone [who?] beside me told me that this supposed jaguar was in fact, somehow, a bobcat with a night-black coat. A big cat masquerading as an even bigger cat? But why?) This is where the last main character comes into play, in the form of Miranda, a woman who lives by herself on the coat, in what is supposed to be the jaguar’s territory. Now, I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying Miranda and the jaguar are connected, because the instant she appeared I felt something was up. It’s one of those “twists” that’s so easy to predict that Shepard doesn’t even treat it as a twist, but rather part of something greater. That the woman and the jaguar turn out to be the same is not the big reveal but only the first major step in the narrative’s arc.

“The Jaguar Hunter” is in essence a love story—not between Esteban and Miranda but between Esteban and death. Esteban is a hunter who has been on quite a few expeditions in his time, and despite being wary of taking on the role once again at the story’s beginning he does take a certain pride in his work. He explains to Miranda (who turns out to be the very jaguar he’s after) in detail how he plans on taking down this fierce animal—by drugging himself and playing dead, only to stab the jaguar between the ribs once the beast gets close enough. Miranda, like a siren, tries to mislead Our Hero™, but Esteban is not swayed until the two meet under different circumstances. Esteban is super-horny for Miranda when they first meet, but it’s only when she reveals herself to be the jaguar in human form (or maybe both the human and jaguar forms are disguises for something else) that he completely falls for her. This is a curious duality, the woman standing in for both eroticism and death. Esteban told Onofrio that if he didn’t return with the jaguar in a week that something must’ve happened to him—and he’s not strictly wrong there. He spends over a week with Miranda, apparently having given up on lncarnación, the two in a state of paradise.

There Be Spoilers Here

Unfortunately paradise, like a euphoric state for a manic-depressive, does not last. Onofrio and Raimondo drive to the territory in search of Esteban, or what they think will be his corpse; they are not pleased when they find their hunter alive and apparently slacking on the job. Esteban kills Raimondo with a machete and provokes the wrath of Onofrio’s goons, and there’s seemingly no way out of this problem. The good(?) news is that Miranda is not an ordinary woman, nor even a werejaguar, but a member of a magical race perhaps akin to the fair folk, who can open portals between the realm of humans and the realm of these magical beings. The story ends on an ambiguous note, with a wounded Esteban jumping into a seemingly bottomless river, chasing after the portal Miranda had opened, in the hopes it will not have closed before he reaches it. Tellingly, we’re not told if Esteban succeeds or not. He’s between a rock and a hard place: if the portal is still open then Our Hero™ will be entering a world totally unknown to him, and which he might not be able to adapt to; and if the portal is closed then he’s a dead man, plain and simple. Shepard’s writing at its best captures what Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness called “the dream-sensation” (Shepard undoubtedly took inspiration from Conrad, although Conrad was the better writer), that borderline between the realistic and the mystical. “The Jaguar Hunter” crosses this borderline with a lustiness that befits Esteban and Miranda’s steamy affair, connecting sex and death with an explicitness that Conrad could not (and would not, even had censorship been more lax in his day) have tried. The result is grim, but magical.

A Step Farther Out

To give Shepard credit, he sticks to what he does well. “The Jaguar Hunter” is the prototypical Shepard story, in that it tackles his pet ideas, plus a grizzled protagonist, plus an exotic locale, all in a neat package. It hasn’t aged so much as its problematic elements were so from day one, but as a result it’s also tempting to call it timeless. I think it also helps that Shepard had the habit of writing about Vietnam, explicitly or in an allegorical fashion, and “The Jaguar Hunter” has nothing to do with Vietnam except taking place in a country with a similar climate. This is a story that blurs the line somewhat between fantasy and SF, although I’m much more inclined to go with the former label. If you’re curious about Shepard, this is a good start.

See you next time.