Mrs. Packletide's Tiger by Saki
Quick answer: Mrs. Packletide's Tiger by Saki: full summary with the ending, the staged tiger shoot, Miss Mebbin's blackmail, and the themes of vanity and rivalry.
Mrs. Packletide wants to shoot a tiger for one reason with several layers of varnish on it: Loona Bimberton has lately been carried eleven miles in an aeroplane by an Algerian aviator, and society talks of nothing else. Mrs. Packletide's Tiger, from The Chronicles of Clovis (1912), is Saki's definitive satire of fame hunted for rivalry's sake, complete with a rigged safari, a goat, and the most quietly lethal paid companion in English fiction.
Indian school syllabuses have kept this story in steady circulation for generations, and it earns the place: the satire is transparent enough to teach and sharp enough to draw blood, and the plot springs two traps where most comedies of vanity settle for one.
The story in brief, ending included
Mrs. Packletide's ambitions are specific: a tiger shot by her own hand, a press photograph or two, a tiger-skin rug at her luncheon party, and a tiger-claw brooch for Loona Bimberton's birthday, each item a measured insult to her rival's aeroplane celebrity. Opportunity is purchased rather than sought: the headman of a convenient Indian village accepts a thousand rupees for the use of a tiger that has taken to frequenting the neighbourhood, an animal of advanced years and declining powers that has abandoned wild game in favour of small domestic animals. The village enters the project with enthusiasm, herding children indoors, leaving cheap goats about to keep the tiger interested, and posting watchers to make sure it does not wander off before the paying guest can shoot it. On the appointed night Mrs. Packletide waits on a platform in a tree with her paid companion, Miss Louisa Mebbin, a tethered goat below them as bait.
The tiger arrives, elderly and unhurried. Mrs. Packletide fires; the tiger springs sideways and rolls over dead, and the goat, it emerges, is dying of a bullet wound: she hit the goat, and the tiger, startled by the report, has died of heart failure. The villagers, keen on their thousand rupees, happily support the official version, and Mrs. Packletide proceeds to her photographs, her luncheon rug and her claw brooch, savouring Loona Bimberton's strangled congratulations. Then the second trap closes. Miss Mebbin, whose protective attitude toward money extends to other people's, observes how amused everyone would be if the true story got about, and mentions, in the same breath, a weekend cottage near Dorking she has seen for sale. Mrs. Packletide buys it for her. Miss Mebbin names it Les Fauves and fills its garden with tiger lilies, and tells admiring friends it is the fruit of unexpected good fortune. Mrs. Packletide gives up big-game shooting; the incidental expenses, she explains, are so heavy. That is the ending: the lie holds, the blackmailer prospers openly, and the huntress pays for her tiger twice.
The characters
Saki hands each figure one appetite and lets the appetites transact.
Themes: vanity's economy, and the cheaper predator
The named theme is vanity, but the exact mechanism is worth stating: fame here is manufactured, not earned, and every stage of the manufacture is a purchase, the tiger rented, the witnesses retained, the narrative bought. Saki's satire is economic to its bones; the story reads like an invoice for celebrity, itemised. The rivalry frame sharpens it further: Mrs. Packletide does not want to have shot a tiger, she wants Loona Bimberton to have not been the one talked about, a distinction the opening paragraphs make with actuarial clarity.
The sharper observation is the transfer of the hunt. The story's real stalking is done indoors: Miss Mebbin observes her employer's weakness from the platform, waits for the trophy photographs to circulate, and strikes when the prey is fully invested in the lie. The tiger dies of fright; the huntress is brought down by a companion on a modest salary. An essay that maps the predator language onto the human transactions, who stalks, who baits, who feeds, will find the story has already done most of the work, down to the cottage named Les Fauves, the wild beasts, as the blackmailer's little joke about herself.
The craft: the double spring and the offstage rival
Structurally the story is two comeuppances in series, and the sequencing is the lesson. The first twist, goat shot, tiger dead of heart failure, deflates the heroic narrative for the reader while leaving it intact for the world; this split creates the pressure the second twist spends. Because we know the truth and society does not, Miss Mebbin's quiet observation arrives loaded, and the blackmail can be conducted entirely in polite subtext, cottage prices discussed in the same tone as weather. Writers should study how the two reveals share one piece of information: a single fact, misdirected fire, powers both the comedy and the extortion, which is compression of the kind that makes short fiction feel inevitable.
The other device worth stealing is the entirely offstage antagonist. Loona Bimberton never appears; she exists as reported achievements and imagined reactions, and is therefore perfect, a rival constructed by the protagonist's envy and thus unbeatable. Keeping the rival offstage keeps the satire's aim true: the story is never about two women competing, it is about what competition does to the one we watch. The final line completes the accounting with Saki's typical indirection, a financial euphemism, incidental expenses, standing in for the whole buried story.
Why this satire keeps its edge
The props date, aeroplane rides and tiger shoots belong to 1912, but the transaction is contemporary to any era: an experience purchased for its shareability, witnesses managed, the achievement performed for an audience of one specific enemy. Modern readers translate it instantly and correctly. The story also keeps a small permanent lesson about hired eyes: the companion paid to be present is the audience no performance fools, and economies of vanity always include someone taking accurate notes. Saki's last word gives the satire its title deed, since the tiger, the only innocent in the enterprise, is also the only participant who never lies about what it wants.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, quote the motive structure: actions governed by dislike of Loona Bimberton, envy as engine, not love of sport.
- State both twists in sequence and note they share one fact: the shot that hit the goat.
- Use Les Fauves and the tiger lilies as evidence of Miss Mebbin's self-aware predation.
- Writers: keep a rivalry's second party offstage to keep the satire aimed at your protagonist.
- Conduct blackmail, and other ugly transactions, in polite subtext; menace survives translation into small talk.
- Close on a euphemism that the whole story has taught the reader to decode, as with incidental expenses.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character purchases an achievement, a summit, a rescue, a record, entirely for the effect on one offstage rival, and stages it successfully for the public. Let the single witness who knows the truth extract a comfortable price in a conversation that never once names what is happening.
Questions
How does the tiger actually die in Mrs. Packletide's Tiger?
Mrs. Packletide misses: her bullet hits the tethered goat. The elderly tiger, startled by the rifle's report, dies of heart failure. The villagers, paid a thousand rupees, support the official story that she shot it.
How does Miss Mebbin blackmail Mrs. Packletide?
She remarks how amused everyone would be if the truth about the goat came out, and in the same conversation mentions a weekend cottage she fancies near Dorking. Mrs. Packletide buys it for her, and Miss Mebbin names it Les Fauves and plants tiger lilies.
What is the theme of Mrs. Packletide's Tiger?
Vanity and rivalry as purchasable performances. Fame is manufactured through payment at every step, and the story's final irony is that the huntress becomes prey to a sharper predator, her own paid companion.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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