The Tiger King and the Tiger Crown

The ruler of that land was called the Tiger King.  He lived in great luxury and had utter sway from harvest to harvest.

When the harvest was in, he stepped down.  The time for choosing who would next wear the Tiger Crown came.

The choosing went like this.  They had a certain large field where they held a combat.  The last man standing among all the aspirants took the Tiger Crown for the next year.  But this was no ordinary combat.  Each man had to be mounted on a tiger.  Either his own, or one that would be provided.

More men were laid low by their own tiger then by another’s blows.

Their was a bit of an arms race in development.  Each year, promising new harnessing techniques or padding or armor or taming would be seen and start to spread to other contestants in the years to follow.  But still the tigers were as dangerous even to their own riders, as were the men.  Each contest was a sharp and savage hour of chaos.

One year the winner was a man who’d tried something new.  He had a kind of one-man fort that he had lowered onto the tiger’s back.  It was so heavy that it held the tiger unable to move.  He then fought in perfect safety from his tiger from the security of his fighting position.  He won easy.

The next year he entered the contest again, which was unusual, confident in his ability to win again.  That year, however, several contestants brought their own forts.  Unable to move their tigers and unable to leave their platforms by the rules of the contest, no one won.  Their was no Tiger King that year.

Moral: you tell me.

Postscript:  I wonder if the contest is still going.  It really is a wide open contest with very few rules.  So I wonder if the guys in forts are there yet, crouched in little forts over the corpses of decaying tigers, eating the food that friends and allies bring to them, waiting for the other contestants to give up or die.