In 1917 during the Mexican Revolution, a 13-year-old girl lives on her family farm with her mother, her sickly brother Melchor, and her siblings and cousins. Her father and uncle went off to fight in the revolution. Every few weeks, soldiers pass through their village and the children are sent with the animals to hide in the caves. To pass the time, the narrator’s brother reads her mythical stories and the two of them make taxidermy animals. The next time the soldiers are nearby, the narrator and Melchor are sent to the caves with their farm animals. Her brother is sick, and she worries about him. That first night, Melchor reads to her from one of his books and they fall asleep. Waking her in the middle of the night, Melchor says that he heard something walking outside the cave. They fear it might be a soldier, or a nahual—a shapeshifting spirit. The next day, Melchor’s fever is worse. The narrator lights a fire at night, even though it might alert the soldiers, and falls asleep. When she wakes, the fire has gone out, but she hears a noise in the cave. She holds up her lantern and sees a tiger. It moves toward her sleeping brother and roars, waking him. The narrator fires her brother’s pistol at it, but misses. The tiger jumps on her, pinning her to the ground and diggings its claws into her chest. She believes she’s about to die, but her brother needs her, so she summons the courage to shoot the tiger in the head. Afterwards, she and Melchor inspect the dead tiger and discover it’s missing a tooth. A neighbor arrives to bring them home. The narrator makes her cousins drag the dead tiger back to the farm so she can taxidermy the head and mount it. Her family eats the meat, even though its tough. The narrator earns a reputation in her village as the girl who killed a tiger. Her father and uncle never come back from the war and her brother Melchor remains sickly and dies at twenty-one. After her brother’s death, she leaves the farm to work as a house cleaner in the city. When she returns home many years later, her cousins have sold all the taxidermy, including the tiger’s head. But she still has the scar on her chest as a reminder of what happened.