Mrs. Packletide's Tiger

"Mrs. Packletide's Tiger" is a satirical short story about an English socialite, Mrs. Packletide, who arranges a tiger hunt in India purely to outdo her rival, Loona Bimberton, who has been basking in attention after riding eleven miles in an aeroplane. Mrs. Packletide pays a thousand rupees to a village that has corralled an elderly, feeble tiger for her to shoot from a safe platform in a tree. When she fires, she accidentally kills the tethered goat instead, and the decrepit tiger dies of heart failure from the noise. Her paid companion, Miss Louisa Mebbin, discovers the truth and uses it to blackmail Mrs. Packletide into buying her a weekend cottage. The story ends with Mrs. Packletide swearing off big-game shooting because "the incidental expenses are so heavy" — referring not to the hunt itself but to the cost of keeping Miss Mebbin quiet.

The story explores several interlocking themes. Social vanity and one-upmanship drive the entire plot: Mrs. Packletide does not want a tiger for sport or trophies but solely to eclipse Loona Bimberton's aeroplane ride in the eyes of their social circle. Hypocrisy and appearance versus reality pervade every scene — the "hunt" is a staged performance, the tiger is ancient and harmless, and Mrs. Packletide's celebrated marksmanship is a fiction. Greed and exploitation appear at every level: the villagers exploit the situation for money, Mrs. Packletide exploits colonial India for social capital, and Miss Mebbin exploits Mrs. Packletide through blackmail. Finally, the hollowness of colonial prestige is a quiet undercurrent, as the entire enterprise — the memsahib's staged hunt, the compliant villagers, the press photographs — satirizes the performative nature of British imperial culture.

Saki deploys a dense web of literary devices that give this short story its comic precision. Situational irony is the engine of the plot: Mrs. Packletide sets out to shoot a tiger and instead kills the goat, while the tiger dies of fright — the opposite of a heroic hunt in every respect. Verbal irony saturates the narration; when the story says "it seemed a fitting and appropriate thing" for Mrs. Packletide to dress as Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, readers know her "kill" was a complete sham. Dramatic irony builds after the shooting, since readers know the truth while London society celebrates a fiction. Saki also uses understatement — the closing line about "incidental expenses" hilariously reduces blackmail to a budgeting inconvenience — and satire throughout, targeting Edwardian high society's obsession with status over substance.

The story is built on multiple layers of irony. The central situational irony is that Mrs. Packletide, who arranged an elaborate, risk-free tiger shoot, hits the wrong target entirely — she fatally wounds the goat while the tiger dies of heart failure from the gunshot's noise, "accelerated by senile decay." There is also dramatic irony in the aftermath: Mrs. Packletide poses for press photographs, gives Loona Bimberton a tiger-claw brooch, and attends a costume ball as Diana the huntress, while the reader knows none of her glory is earned. Verbal irony fills the narration — the tiger is described with mock formality as a beast of "respectable antecedents," and mothers are said to hush their singing so as not to disturb "the venerable herd-robber." Perhaps the deepest irony is the ending: Mrs. Packletide's plan to humiliate Loona Bimberton ultimately costs her a £680 cottage, making her the victim of the very social scheming she set in motion.

Louisa Mebbin is Mrs. Packletide's paid companion and the story's most calculating character. From her first appearance, Saki establishes her defining trait: an obsessive attachment to money. She adopts a "protective elder-sister attitude towards money in general, irrespective of nationality or denomination," and her instinct is always to minimize expenditure — she urges Mrs. Packletide to shoot before the tiger touches the goat so they will not have to pay for the bait. It is Miss Mebbin who notices that the goat, not the tiger, has a bullet wound, and she shrewdly saves this knowledge for future use. When she later threatens to tell Loona Bimberton the truth, she does not ask for money outright but instead mentions a "pretty weekend cottage near Darking" costing six hundred and eighty pounds — a masterstroke of indirect blackmail. The story closes with Miss Mebbin's cottage, which she names "Les Fauves" (French for "the wild beasts"), bordered by tiger-lilies — a private joke at Mrs. Packletide's expense.

The ending unfolds in two stages. First, at a ball, Miss Mebbin casually remarks, "How amused every one would be if they knew what really happened," and reveals she knows Mrs. Packletide shot the goat and merely frightened the tiger to death. When Mrs. Packletide insists "no one would believe it," Miss Mebbin delivers the devastating reply: "Loona Bimberton would." This is enough to extort Mrs. Packletide into buying Miss Mebbin a £680 freehold cottage near Dorking. The final paragraphs show Miss Mebbin comfortably installed in her new cottage, which she names "Les Fauves" and decorates with tiger-lilies — a mocking reminder of how she obtained it. Meanwhile, Mrs. Packletide tells friends she has given up big-game shooting because "the incidental expenses are so heavy," an ironic understatement that conceals the real cost: not bullets or permits, but blackmail.

Mrs. Packletide's motivation has nothing to do with sport, adventure, or love of hunting. Her sole reason is social jealousy. Her rival, Loona Bimberton, has recently been carried eleven miles in an aeroplane by an Algerian aviator and "talked of nothing else." Mrs. Packletide decides that "only a personally procured tiger-skin and a heavy harvest of Press photographs could successfully counter that sort of thing." She has already planned the victory lap in detail: a luncheon at her Curzon Street house with the tiger-skin rug dominating the room and the conversation, followed by the pointed gift of a tiger-claw brooch to Loona on her birthday. Saki makes this petty motivation explicit in one of the story's most memorable lines: "In a world that is supposed to be chiefly swayed by hunger and by love Mrs. Packletide was an exception; her movements and motives were largely governed by dislike of Loona Bimberton."

"Mrs. Packletide's Tiger" was first published in 1911 in The Morning Post and was later collected in Saki's 1911 volume The Chronicles of Clovis, one of his most celebrated short story collections. The collection features Clovis Sangrail, a witty young man who appears as a minor character in this story, suggesting a costume ball where guests wear the skins of animals they have slain. Saki (the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro, 1870–1916) was a British writer known for his razor-sharp social satire. He was killed in action during World War I at the Battle of the Ancre in November 1916. His short fiction, including favorites like The Open Window, Tobermory, and The Interlopers, remains widely anthologized and studied in schools worldwide.

While the story's primary target is Edwardian social vanity, its Indian setting exposes the absurdity and exploitation inherent in colonial culture. The entire village becomes a stage crew for a wealthy English woman's vanity project: children are posted as sentries, cheap goats are scattered "with elaborate carelessness," and mothers hush their babies so the old tiger can rest. The villagers are motivated solely by the thousand-rupee reward, turning their community into a service economy for one memsahib's photo opportunity. The tiger itself — elderly, toothless, confined to killing domestic animals — is a darkly comic emblem of the "big game" that the British raj claimed to master. Mrs. Packletide's hunt is not a test of courage or skill but a commercial transaction in which danger, wildness, and even the kill are all purchased and staged. Saki's satire suggests that the glamour of empire, like Mrs. Packletide's tiger-skin rug, is built on elaborate fiction.

"Mrs. Packletide's Tiger" is quintessential Saki — compact, wickedly funny, and driven by a surprise reversal. It shares his signature blend of social satire and dark comedy found throughout his work. Like The Open Window, the story turns on a character being duped by someone cleverer than they appear — in that case the teenage Vera, here the seemingly servile Miss Mebbin. The theme of animals exposing human folly connects it to Tobermory, in which a cat that learns to speak reveals embarrassing truths about dinner party guests. The Clovis Sangrail character who makes a cameo here is the protagonist of stories like The Storyteller and The Lumber Room, where children and young people consistently outwit smug adults. Saki's influence can be seen in later satirists like Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh, who similarly skewered upper-class pretension with elegant wit.