The Wildest Sport of All Read online

  The pugmarks were barely an hour old. Warily, they began to track the tiger. The animal seemed to be heading for the village. Soon they came upon the patch of quicksand where the buffalo had got trapped earlier. If the placid, slick surface of the bog was any indication where it had eventually sunk, there was no sign of it now. My relative indicated to his men that they should encircle the bog in their efforts to pick up the tiger’s trail. As his men set about scouring the soft ground for the pugmarks, he stood at the edge of the circular patch of quicksand studying the last of the tiger’s pugmarks. They seemed highly irregular to him, definitely embedded more deeply than the ones they’d been following. The gouge marks showed plainly at the end of each pugmark, almost as if the animal had spurted into a sudden burst of activity. An unlikely thought soon began entering his mind. His suspicions were only confirmed when his men returned from scouting the far side of the bog with the news that they had picked up the tiger’s pugmarks there again, but this time the animal seemed to be dragging something heavy, with which it had gone into the jungle.

  My relative looked on askance as he realized that the tiger, attracted by the trapped buffalo’s wailing bellows, had stalked it to the quicksand, where it had pounced upon the luckless animal. Without breaking its leap, it had wrenched the buffalo out from the mud and, landing upon the firmer far side, had carried it away to feast on later in the jungle. The absence of any pugmarks around the circumference of the quicksand along with the deeply imprinted tracks at one end, from where the tiger had jumped at the sinking buffalo, and the drag marks at the opposite end where it had landed, were all indicative of the fact that the tiger had accomplished this herculean feat all in one single leap. Imagine the tiger’s magnificent strength! It had leapt across the twelve to fifteen feet wide patch of quicksand, wrenched out a fully grown buffalo stuck fast in the mud, and in the initial momentum of the same leap, landed on the other side of the quicksand with its prize.

  To say that we were simply lucky that day in the face of the cunning tiger would be grossly understating the facts. It was a huge tiger, as we later discovered, and rightfully deserving of the epithet its depredations had earned for it. The massive development of the beast’s neck and shoulder muscles was silent testimony to its unusual trait of cleanly picking up its kill in its giant jaws without letting the carcass touch the ground or drag along in any way, a fact that had completely baffled all who had hunted the cunning tiger. It measured a good ten feet and four inches. One of its stout forelegs bore a fresh wound and a deep scar of an old one on the inside of a front paw. Significantly, there were healed marks of deeply inflicted gashes near the girth of its waist. In all probability, these were the result of a violent encounter with another tiger and the handicap of the obvious, consequent injuries with which our tiger must have perforce learnt to cope and survive.

  Animals display a variety of cunning. The leopard, in this respect, is even more intelligent than the tiger. A sly beast, this spotted killer can prove the very devil to catch and consequently plays havoc if turned by chance into a cattle-lifter or man-eater. Quick to take fright from even so much as a bawling child, it displays none of the ferocity so characteristic of its striped cousin. But when wounded, it too proves as vindictive as the largest of tigers. Some of the methods leopards hunt by are truly astounding. With the patience of a house cat stalking a bird across your front lawn, the leopard follows jungle fowl in search of a mouthful. Undeterred by the clucking cock and hens as they scamper over the forest floor to get away from it, the leopard’s lithe body, keeping close to the ground, glides swiftly behind them, apparently goading them to take to their wings. As the jungle fowls burst up from the ground in a flurry of feathers, the leopard, with a lightning-fast spring, leaps up after them, and striking swiftly with both its front paws to the right and left, usually succeeds in knocking down one of the birds.

  We were once camping at Dhara, a small village in the Ramnagar forest division. Thickly jungled with sal and mahua trees, this block is situated in the foothills of the Kumaon mountains in Uttarakhand. A guest was due at our camp, and it being imperative to accord him a hearty feast of welcome, I planned to sit up for deer that afternoon. Hopeful of adding venison to our camp fare that night, I went to a place in the forest about two kilometres away from our camp where spotted deer habitually visited. Monkeys lived in the many mahua trees there and the plump fruits they fell off the trees were relished by the deer that turned up, sometimes in huge herds. It was a well-known place among us for getting a good stag. At about four in the afternoon, I made myself comfortable up a giant mahua tree under which the deer usually came.

  After a half hour of animatedly watching the scene, I suddenly heard the sharp call of a chital from the jungle on my left. This boded ill for my plans, as it was a clear call of alarm and its message was unmistakable. The deer wouldn’t come that day as they had sensed a carnivore on the prowl. My better judgment told me that this was bound to be a frequent occurrence in the vicinity of the deer’s feeding ground, so I continued sitting, waiting with bated breath for the deer to return. A curious frenzy had seized the quietly swaying and swinging monkeys in the trees across from me and they began scampering amidst the branches. Suddenly a leopard ambled into view, slowly walking towards the monkeys on the trees. My gaze was drawn at once to the leopard’s large size and something about its gait gripped my attention.

  The leopard weaved about drunkenly and wavered towards the mahua trees. When it got there it collapsed on the ground, lifelessly rolling onto its side. To all appearances, the leopard seemed to be suffering from an advanced stage of fatigue and exhaustion. Though no visible wounds marred its glossy, patterned coat, the possibility of it being injured somewhere else in the forest by a hunter’s bullet could not be discounted. What could account for the leopard’s fatigue and apparent lifelessness, as it continued to lie prone with the jabbering monkeys scampering about above? Was the animal desperately sick? I wracked my brains in search of a clue to its behaviour. The monkeys screamed and chattered in panic as the urgency for escape to other trees, far away from this spotted demon, overtook them.

  They soon became bolder, however, and scouts ventured down the tree, skipping up close to the lifeless form of the leopard and then immediately scampering back up the nearest tree in sheer terror. The rest of the monkey tribe continued raging about in the trees, waiting to see if it was safe enough to get down and flee to the shelter of trees further away. A strong looking monkey even ventured to pull hastily at the leopard’s inert tail and when the marauder showed no response, went on to touch its middle before scampering back up the tree. As the leopard lay completely lifeless, this one monkey felt bold enough to come around the still form and touch its muzzle. Quick as a flash, the leopard came to life, striking the big monkey with its paw and killing it instantaneously. Then grabbing its kill in its jaws, it jumped back into the undergrowth and vanished from sight! The leopard or panther relishes monkeys and dogs. I have yet to see such nerve or cunning even amongst hunters possessed of human intelligence.

  1 Doguddha is a township in the forested foothills of the Garhwal and the adjoining Kumaon Himalayas. It became well-known due to the depredations of the man-eating leopard at large in the area during the early 1980s.

  The very first step we took on reaching the rugged mountainous forests of the Adhnala range and selecting a campsite was to send out our shikaris to tie out a live bait for tiger. The news of a large male tiger seen frequenting a heavily forested tributary stream of the Ramganga had reached us and we now acted promptly on it.

  Fortune smiled upon our promptness, for the next morning our scouting shikaris brought word that during the night the tiger had killed the buffalo bait. They now reported that the tiger had eaten about half of the kill and could be expected to return to eat the rest by nightfall. At once Ram Singh, our faithful retainer, expert scout and shikari, was summoned from his tent and sent off to the site on one of the elephants. With him went all the odds
and ends necessary to set up a machaan on the fairly high tree which, according to the shikaris, grew out of the bed of the dry gorge that the tiger had dragged the buffalo into. The place being but two miles away from our camp, we told Ram Singh to hurry up with the machaan as we would get there soon after lunch to sit up and await the tiger’s return.

  It was well past midday when my eldest brother, Kunwar K.S.I. Singh, our brother-in-law, the Durbar Sahib of Amaliara1, an acquaintance who is also a keen shikari and I set out on the other elephant. Wending our way through dense thickets of sal and kikar trees, their golden-green foliage ablaze with the spring sun, and over the dappled carpet of the forest floor, our mount worked ponderously down a gentle, rock-strewn incline. Below us lay a fairly wide valley, wild with chest-high lantana and briar bushes. Out of this solid green fragrant wall of undergrowth stood out in stark contrast ranks of wild jamun trees that grew all along the valley. Their leathery, pale-green leaves were unmistakably distinct where the trees interspersed with the undergrowth. Reaching the level ground, our elephant stepped warily through the lantana and I found my hands seeking a firmer grip on my .470. The very air seemed to be palpitating with an incredible menace and an overpowering sense of danger filled us, for these were the hunting grounds of the king of the jungle – our quarry, the tiger.

  We angled across the level forest of lantana and jamun and when we reached a dry nullah that ran down the middle of that wild valley, our mahout began to goad the elephant along one bank of this watercourse in keeping with the directions our shikaris had given us earlier. We now proceeded upstream of the nullah where somewhere ahead lay the tiger’s kill. Believe me, forging through that lantana on our way to where Ram Singh awaited us jaded my nerves completely. Mercifully, the undergrowth thinned out further on. The ground turned rocky and beside us the nullah looked steeply sunk into the valley floor as the land rose ever so gradually towards the grand majesty of the Kumaon Himalayas. We had reached the gorge that the shikaris had told us about. We spied Ram Singh’s elephant standing and swaying on the same part of the bank as us. Our elephant was made to sit down and we all dismounted. Ram Singh came nimbly to us to say the machaan was ready.

  Unnoticed by us, the shadows had lengthened around us as daylight began to lift off the face of that mountainous land, covered by forests. We lost no time in proceeding to the machaan and, led by Ram Singh, scrambled down the side of the gorge and quickly reached the giant old jamun tree that grew from the base of the gorge’s stony side. A dozen feet in front of it and about fifteen feet below the camouflaged machaan in its sparse boughs were the insect-infested remains of the tiger’s kill. With our shikari acquaintance having opted out of the gruelling vigil on the machaan, my elder brother, our brother-in-law, Ram Singh and I climbed up to the machaan and found places for ourselves in its apparent security. I signalled to our mahouts to take the elephants away to the higher ground of the foothills that we had earlier descended on our way to this valley. From the bank of the gorge, the mahout signalled back his assent and I watched them mount their elephants and move off. I continued to watch them for some distance as the descending sun flooded the scene with liquid gold. Our elevated position up on the tree in the gorge overlooked a large part of the lantana covered ground we had earlier traversed. What had completely escaped our notice was the grim fact that the banks of the ravine with which our machaan stood level were barely eight or ten feet from us on both sides. In keeping with our experience, we fully expected the tiger to come up the dry nullah to its kill. As we were soon to discover however, not all the ways of the jungle or of its fierce, striped king were known to us!

  A clump of wild jamun soon hid the elephants from sight. A thick silence quickly descended over the gorge. The sun had slipped down the green ramparts of the mountains towards the west and a river of dense shadows seemed to be flowing slowly into the valley from that direction. There was still a lot of light in the fiery spring sky though, translucent and clear over the unpolluted expanses of the deep jungles.

  Durbar Sahib first saw the tiger. It was fortunate that he sighted it as it came, since no other denizen of the jungle called in alarm along the route it came prowling. The silence was unnatural and we would have had no warning of its deadly approach. Durbar Sahib saw the massive tiger clearly four hundred metres away, as it came majestically walking through the sparse lantana along one of its banks that lay on a level with our machaan and not over the bed of the gorge as we had expected. He whispered to us. We were not unduly perturbed, as we fully supposed, even then, that the tiger would soon jump down into the nullah and approach its kill through the gorge. Durbar Sahib, trying to catch sight of the beast again, saw the tiger had vanished. Nodding to each other, we supposed that the tiger was making its way into the nullah and would soon come prowling up the gorge. Rifles ready and eyes peeled, we waited. The light dimmed about us, but its quality was still sharp, and more time would pass before it softened into dusk. Ram Singh was sitting on one side of the square machaan, while I occupied the other. Between us sat Durbar Sahib and my elder brother.

  We were all staring in front at the kill lying in a damp shadow and the blind corner of the ravine around which we fully expected the tiger to soon come. I distinctly remember that all our weapons were pointed to the front. A wild cock whirred up from down the gorge. Was that a stone dislodged by the tiger’s paw that I had just heard or had I imagined the sound? Doubt and tension plagued me as the minutes ticked by and the tiger failed to appear.

  Time seemed to crawl. I continued to stare ahead through the leaves stuck onto the frame of the machaan. Suddenly my elder brother shifted, his elbow digging hard into my ribs. Keeping the .470 trained ahead, I glanced swiftly in his direction. A hair-raising sight met my eyes. Beside my elder brother, Durbar Sahib was gulping nervously and looking hesitantly sideways. Ram Singh beside him had ducked down below the level of the leaves camouflaging the machaan on that side, his hands defensively raised around his lowered head and his shotgun completely forgotten in his lap! On a level with his crouching figure and a mere stone’s throw away on the nearest part of the gorge’s bank stood the tiger. On splayed paws, the heavily muscled tiger stood, long tail menacingly flicking, as glaring eyes looked straight into the machaan through the thin cover of leaves and right at us. I remember feeling curiously exposed and helpless. Some instinct for survival caused me to remain completely immobile as I clutched my rifle woodenly and retained my previous posture, looking at the apparition from the corner of my eyes. Slowly and ever so gently, my elder brother was trying to bring up his .500 express rifle to bear on the glaring tiger standing so close to us. But Durbar Sahib’s hand shot out and firmly clamped my elder brother’s wrist, forcing the rifle down as his pinched face looked aghast at us clearly indicating that to attempt a shot at the tiger then would be to court certain horrible death.

  How did the tiger come to be where it stood, flagrantly upsetting our expectations about the route it would come along? Obviously it had sensed something seriously amiss. Its suspicions fell on the tree, and keeping clear of the gorge, it had come bounding out of the lantana on the banks of the ravine to stand at its very edge and bring our hearts to our mouths! In those brief seconds, while the tiger stood looking into the machaan we scarcely breathed or moved. We sat frozen, blending into the eerie stillness. Had the tiger launched itself into the tree before or after being fired at, we would have suffered a terrible fate. Then, without a sound and as mysteriously as it had come, the tiger turned about and rapidly strode into the undergrowth. A good fifteen minutes passed before the cold sweat dried from my brows and life returned to the limbs of my companions. We waited through the evening for the tiger to return to its kill, but that one appearance was all that we were fated to get.

  Dusk paled into the dark and still it did not come back. Realization dawned that having sensed our presence, the tiger had abandoned its kill and would never return perhaps. Fortune favours the brave and the tiger’s boldness in having come
right up to the tree and our machaan had cost us a trophy, saved its skin, and had us nervously squirming for the time it had stood there. We then summoned our elephants, and thanking our lucky stars, retraced our way back to camp.

  Emerging from my tent the next day into the cool bracing air of the Adhnala forests, I was surprised to see a party of men waiting to speak to me. They were labourers employed by the government in the very depths of the forests and had an interesting story to tell. In the late hours of the night just past, while the labourers had been slumbering, an animal had come into their camp and attacked one of the sleeping men. Luckily it did not succeed in killing him, managing only to snatch away the unwary fellow’s quilt. But afraid for their lives against this nocturnal visitor, they had come to seek our assistance. Offering them tea where they sat grouped on the ground around the camp table, I considered the situation between welcome sips of the invigorating brew. It seemed to be a tiger and one bold enough to venture this close to human habitation might well be that most dreaded of all creatures – a man-eater. In that case, it would most certainly return to their camp in the dark hours and continue to haunt them, severely crippling their work and decimating their numbers, unless dealt with at once. Calling out to two of the shikaris helping the cook with the breakfast – they having returned rather early after checking up on the kill which the tiger had abandoned since our escapade of the last evening – I accompanied the labourers to their camp.