The Hunter Who Fought Arjuna to a Standstill, and the Garland That Gave Him Away

Indrakila

The Pandavas had thirteen years to spend before they could ask for their kingdom back, and Yudhishthira meant to spend them well. A war was coming, and the army waiting on the other side of it had Bhishma and Drona and Karna in its ranks, men no ordinary weapon would put down. Yudhishthira sent Arjuna out from the rest of the family to find something better than ordinary. Indra had already appeared to his son once and told him plainly that arrows and skill would not be enough this time. What Arjuna needed sat in Shiva's hands, and Shiva did not hand it to men who asked politely. He gave it to men who had earned the asking.

Arjuna climbed into the Himalaya alone and picked a stretch of mountain called Indrakila, bare rock and pine and a cold that did not let up even at noon, and there he began to make himself into someone worth Shiva's attention. He ate less each week until he ate almost nothing. He stood on one leg with his arms raised over his head for days at a stretch, rain or clear sky making no difference to him. He stopped speaking, then stopped moving except to breathe, and the animals that had avoided the mountain out of caution started avoiding it out of something closer to awe. Months went by like that, measured out in a discipline so total that the mountain seemed to have accepted him as one more fixed feature of its slope.

The Boar Comes Down the Slope

He was not, in fact, as alone up there as he looked. A demon named Muka had taken an interest in the ascetic on the ridge, less out of malice at first than opportunity, a lone man far from any help being exactly the kind of target a demon likes best. Muka took the shape of an enormous wild boar, thick through the shoulders, tusks yellowed and long, and came down the slope at a dead run aimed straight at where Arjuna stood.

Arjuna heard it before he saw it, the ground carrying the weight of something heavy and fast, and years of discipline did not slow the reflex that had been trained into him since boyhood. He had his bow strung and an arrow nocked before the boar had closed half the distance, and he let it go without a wasted motion.

He was not the only one who let an arrow go. From the trees on the far side of the same slope, a hunter in rough mountain dress had been tracking that same boar for reasons of his own, and his arrow left his bow in what looked, from where either man stood, like the exact same heartbeat. The boar went down hard, rolled once, and lay still with a shaft standing out of its body. Whether it was carrying one arrow or two, and whose hand had put it there, was not a thing either man could settle by looking.

Whose Kill

The hunter came out of the trees first, unbothered by the climb, moving over the broken rock with the easy balance of a man who had spent his whole life on ground like this. He was broad through the chest, dressed in skins, a bow across his back and a look on his face that had already decided the argument before it started. He walked up to the boar, set his foot near it, and told Arjuna without much ceremony that the kill was his.

Arjuna said it was not. He had drawn and released faster than most men could follow, he told the hunter, and the arrow standing in the boar's side was his own work, not some mountain tribesman's lucky shot loosed from cover.

The hunter laughed at that, an open, unhurried laugh with no worry in it, and asked who this soft-handed penitent thought he was, standing half-starved on a ridge and claiming a kill that belonged to whoever had actually been hunting that animal since morning. He was in no rush and it showed. Arjuna, used to men backing off once they understood who they were speaking to, found that this one did not back off at all. The longer Arjuna pressed his claim, the more amused the hunter looked, and the less like giving ground.

The Fight Begins

Amusement was not the same as patience, and it ran out. Arjuna, who had spent months learning to sit still through cold and hunger and had run entirely out of that particular skill the moment his honor as an archer was questioned, drew his bow on the hunter instead. It was meant to end the argument in the way arguments between armed men usually end.

It did not end anything. The arrow struck the hunter's chest and did nothing that an arrow should do. It did not draw blood, and it did not so much as break his stride. Arjuna, certain his aim had failed him, put a second arrow into the same spot, and a third, and kept loosing them in a steady, disbelieving rhythm until his entire quiver had gone into the man standing in front of him with no more effect than rain on stone. The hunter took every one of them without flinching and without losing the same unbothered look he had worn since he first spoke. He seemed, if anything, mildly entertained that Arjuna was still trying.

Arjuna threw the empty bow aside and drew his sword. He had never in his life needed more than one weapon to end a fight, and by the time the blade shattered against the hunter without leaving a mark he understood, somewhere under the panic, that this was not going to be a fight decided by anything he was carrying.

Bare Hands

So he fought with what was left, which was his own body, and he found out inside the first exchange that it was not enough either. The hunter grappled him the way a grown man handles a child who has decided to wrestle him for fun, taking every blow Arjuna landed without much reaction and returning holds that Arjuna could not break out of no matter how he twisted. He was thrown and pinned, hauled upright only to be thrown again. Rock scraped his back and his arms, his breath went short in a way months of fasting had not managed, and still the man who held him showed no sign of tiring or of fighting for his life the way Arjuna very much was.

It went on long enough that Arjuna's arms stopped answering him properly, his grip failing where it had never failed before, his legs unwilling to hold his weight through one more throw. He had come to this mountain believing the test ahead of him was one of endurance and prayer, a contest against hunger and cold that he had already been winning. This test had turned out to be something else, a mountain hunter with an ordinary bow who could not be cut or pierced, and who could not be beaten by a man who had, until an hour earlier, considered himself the finest archer alive. When the hunter finally let him drop, Arjuna lay where he fell, emptied out past anything his training had prepared him to recognize.

The Clay Lingam

He got up slowly, because getting up was still the only thing left to try. He did not go back at the hunter. Something in him, worn down past pride, reached instead for the one practice that had brought him to this mountain in the first place, and with hands still shaking from the fight he had just lost, he knelt by the rock and began working wet clay into a shape, patient in a way nothing else about that hour had been. He formed a lingam out of the mountainside's mud, set it upright, and began the worship he had performed every day since he arrived, laying his gathered flowers over the clay, murmuring the invocation to Shiva that no fight and no exhaustion had managed to knock out of him.

Then he looked up, meaning to lay one more garland across the clay, and saw that the garland already resting there was gone. It had not fallen or blown off. It was around the hunter's neck.

The hunter was still standing where the fight had left him, the boar's blood still dark on the grass a few feet off, and around his throat sat the same flowers Arjuna had laid on his own handmade lingam only moments before, moved there by no hand Arjuna had seen move. He looked at the hunter's face again, the same rough dress, the same mountain ease, and understood at once what had been standing in front of him since the boar went down. No one else on that ridge could have taken a full quiver into his chest without a mark and worn the flowers off a stranger's altar in the same afternoon.

What the Mountain Had Been Testing

Arjuna went to the ground properly this time, not thrown but kneeling, and asked forgiveness for having raised a weapon against Shiva himself. The hunter's shape did not survive the recognition. Shiva stood there in the form Arjuna had prayed to for months, Parvati beside him, both of them having watched the whole contest from inside a disguise that gave away nothing of the fight or the beating that had left Arjuna on the rock with nothing left to swing. Shiva told him the test had never been about the boar or about whose arrow struck first. It had been about what remained in a man once his weapons and his strength were taken from him in turn, down to whatever was left under the pride.

What Arjuna had left turned out to be enough. Shiva gave him the Pashupatastra there on the ridge, the weapon Yudhishthira had sent him up the mountain to win, powerful enough to end the war outright if it were ever loosed without restraint, which was exactly why Shiva made him swear never to use it that way. Arjuna carried it back down from Indrakila along with a garland that had taught him more than the months of fasting before it. Later poets took up the same encounter with more ornament than the Vana Parva ever bothered with, Bharavi's Kiratarjuniya chief among them, but the bones stayed the same in every telling. A man who thought he had come to prove his strength found out, arrow by useless arrow, that strength was not what the mountain wanted from him.