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costume, and sometimes they spoke Kurd, which would have made it difficult for me to write a cuddly Kurd story about how the Turkish military was suppressing the dress, language, and culture of the people. We were sitting in the officers’ club.
    The men had been out hunting wild goats in what are called the Honeycomb Cliffs, about six kilometers north of the village. It is a labyrinthine area, very steep and rugged. They had taken the central gate into the mountains. The youngest of them, a thirty-year-old named Nuri Durmaz, moved off to the west, alone. “There wasa little snow,” he said, “not a lot. I was about halfway to the peak. There was an overhanging wall, like a cliff, and I saw something one hundred meters away. I couldn’t see its head, but it was big. It would have taken two, maybe three men to carry it.”
    “What color was it?” Tommy asked.
    “Like my pants,” Nuri Durmaz said. He was wearing beige pants. “It had black stripes on the legs and resembled a large cat.”
    “Did you shoot it?” I asked.
    “No. It was in a bad place. If I only wounded it, it could have torn me apart.”
    “What did you do?”
    “I went to get my friends.”
    And here Nuri’s friends chimed in with descriptions of the tracks: talons as long as a man’s finger, the little ball of snow in the center of the track. There were other such animals up in the Honeycomb Cliffs, said a man named Bedri Geokalp. He’d seen the same tracks in about the same place almost exactly a year ago.
    I brought out some pictures I’d copied for just this purpose. There was a depiction of the Anatolian panther, a kind of leopard, also thought to be extinct; a photo of a lynx, which exists in these mountains; and another photo of a Caspian tiger taken many years ago in an Iranian zoo. Nuri discarded the panther and the lynx. “This one,” he said, holding up the picture of the tiger.
    “What do you think,” I asked Saim, of the Forestry Department.
    “I’d say fifty percent credibility.”
    The Duck and I both thought it was a 70 percent sure thing. The colonel said, “I don’t have an opinion to be expressed in a percentage, but I believe in nature. This is a wonderful thing for Turkey and the world. I will inform my lieutenant in charge of the area to monitor the situation. I will give him a camera and ask him to use his night-vision goggles whenever possible.”
    Nuri said, “The next time I see this animal, I will kill him for you.”
    “I don’t think you should do that,” the colonel said. This opinion was expressed as an order. But then the colonel softened his voice: “If these men publish an article, and if peace is established, you willfind that people with cameras will come here, and, to your delight, they will put much money in your pocket.”
    “This is true?”
    “This is true.”
    “I can almost smell that tiger,” Tommy was saying. We were on our way to Iraq, in an effort to enter the Honeycomb Cliffs from the south side of the range. The colonel had been kind enough to give us a glimpse of a classified map. The Honeycomb Cliffs were a tangle of closely spaced topographic lines stretching about ten kilometers east to west, and four kilometers north to south. The highest point was 2,173 meters, and the tiger had been sighted at about 1,200 meters, call it 3,600 feet.
    The colonel had told Saim that—if he were ordered to do so—he could use military resources to search for the tigers: super-night-spotting scopes, sensitive remote cameras, helicopters, and—most important—manpower. If Saim, acting as a Forestry Department official, were to write to the colonel’s superiors, that order could come through in as little as three or four months.
    “What is the best way to word such a request?” Saim asked.
    And the colonel dictated the letter for him.
    For now, however, our search was over. The Honeycomb Cliffs were ground zero in the war against the PKK, and there was no way we were getting in there. On