Before the tarmacked road ended, a footpath veered off it steeply down through a rubber plantation. Where it reached a creek, and before the next climb, there was a waterhole by a cluster of rocks and a bamboo thicket. Kuttachan was convinced that the buffaloes were at that spot.

‘Don’t you all come rushing down,’ he said as he walked down the slope, gun held firmly in his left hand. ‘You want to come?’ he asked Raman, an old footballer, holding out the bag he had slung over his shoulder. ‘Just hang on to this.’

At the end of the footpath, they walked silently to the cluster of rocks with their torches switched off. The bamboo thicket rustled as though there was an elephant in it. Crouching, they stepped carefully towards it.

Distracted by a strange noise, Raman looked behind him, and when he turned back, he felt that Kuttachan, who had been to his left, was not there any more. He put his hand out and searched in the dark. Nothing! Perplexed, he stood there unsure whether to move forward or go back. Suddenly, eyes glowed in the darkness in front of him. Before he could figure out if it was man or buffalo, before he recalled that it was him who had told the police about Kuttachan all those years ago, Kuttachan plunged the two sharp sticks he had brought with him when he came to the hunt into either side of Raman’s stomach.

As the others heard the screams and started running down the footpath, Kuttachan came up towards them carrying Raman over his shoulder.

‘The buffalo got him,’ he said, laying Raman on the road.

‘Buffalo can’t gore from both sides like this,’ Anthony said.

No one paid him any attention. ‘Are you here to catch them or to protect them?’ someone asked. The cow-buffalo’s escape had made them suspicious of his intentions.

The calamity at the well and Raman’s stabbing had taken place in the second half of the night, and yet the news reached far and wide in a matter of minutes. It sent the entire community into a mad panic. Expecting an attack at any moment, the elderly in the houses sat wide awake behind locked doors. Some set bonfires in their yards to keep the animals away, while others banged on tin cans and created an almighty ruckus. The police station and the fire station were inundated with phone calls. Even those who usually stayed well clear of everything except what affected them directly began running around all over the place, armed with lengths of firewood, machetes, hatchets, crowbars and objects with dubious usefulness under the circumstances such as cluster-hooks used to retrieve things from wells, chopping knives, pickaxes, iron pots, ropes, hoes, sickles and shovels. It was not clear from their actions whether their intention was to capture the animals or to drive them away because even as they wielded weapons, they created a racket screaming and shouting, and banging on things. Raman’s brothers announced that, when caught, the animals should be released to them so that they could torture them to death. One of them tried to beat up Anthony. The whole land was awake and excited as never before, not even for the annual festival at the church. Houses were drenched in light and songs and celebratory shouts rang out.