The Wildest Sport of All Read online

  To continue with my tale, I listened again to the shikari’s report and taken up by the man’s enthusiasm, went back to the spot and the tree where I had passed the night sitting up. The legs of the huge kill had been pulled out and away for a considerable distance from its other remaining portions. The diminished size of the carcass clearly indicated that a large animal had eaten from it during the night. A lesser carnivore, or scavenger, could not have accomplished this as our businessman had so derisively deduced around the camp fire that morning and the signs once again showed it to be the work of a tiger.

  Intrigued at the thought of a tiger, possibly the one I had wounded, visiting the kill and only a night after rifle shots had been fired at the place, I decided to sit up again over the freshly disturbed and eaten kill. It would be interesting to see what the night would turn up. Not having any plans of his own, my elder brother too decided to give me company, and when evening came, he stationed himself atop a tree, some distance away and out of sight from me. Even though desolate and thickly jungled, this forest block had a railway line going through it. A game trail ran below my elder brother’s machaan, serving also as a path for the railway staff unlucky enough to be quartered in this forbidding place. A cyclist now appeared, hurriedly pedalling his way along the game trail. He passed below my brother’s machaan and went up along the trail. My elder brother, who was not at all sure of any game that evening, thought of having some fun at the cyclist’s expense, also to teach him a lesson for being unwary and unarmed at such a time and place. Thinking of putting some righteous fear into him, my brother filled his lungs and, cupping his hands, called like a tiger prowling, which it usually does at that hour of dusk in the jungle.

  I heard his simulated calls in the distance and, not having seen the cyclist, guessed wrongly that he was trying to trick and fool me. Playing along, I too called back a few times, imitating a tiger. The jungle echoed with our full-throated calls, as the cyclist in his sudden hurry to get away from the dreadful place must have presented a truly comic spectacle to my brother. But I was not to know until later that an incredible thing had happened.

  No sooner had I stopped calling, when in the last light of the dusk something heavy came rushing through the bushes and stopped below me where the kill lay. Even before I could attempt to see what shape this sudden visitation had, I heard its agitated and aggressive breathing in the near dark below the tree. I guessed at once that it was a tiger come to fight off another tiger intruding on its kill, having mistaken our calls for just such an intruder’s roars. Awakened no doubt from its slumber in the dense thicket nearby, it had turned up to claim the kill.

  The man with me carried a twelve-gauge shotgun with LG slugs in it and I sported a Paradox gun with similar LG cartridges in its twin, grooved chambers. With the stock of the Paradox against my cheek, I tried my best to pin-point the enraged tiger as it stood in the shadows below. Obviously overcome at the suddenness with which the dread beast had made its appearance, especially when everyone at the camp had been frankly skeptical about any other tiger being in the vicinity where I had wounded one only a night ago, my companion in a purely defensive gesture had shouldered his gun too. I did not know this, busy as I was in determining where exactly the tiger stood in the dark that had swiftly followed dusk. We both seemed to locate its large long shadowy shape simultaneously and by the purest coincidence the guns fired almost at the same time, thus giving the tiger all four barrels from both our double-barrelled guns,.

  The tiger roared mightily and, luckily for us, leapt into the undergrowth. The tree we were sitting on was a short one and well within reach of any hurtling charge it could have directed towards us. The undergrowth crashed and shook a little distance away as the tiger thrashed about in it for quite some time. Then silence returned as the night wore on, with us sitting apprehensively on tenterhooks. Our mahout had heard the gunshots and after a suitable length of time had lapsed, he brought the elephant up to the machaan. Safely mounted on it, we returned to camp.

  Shikaris went out the next morning and found the tiger lying dead where we had heard it thrashing about in the undergrowth after being fatally shot. The concentrated impact of the deadly LG slugs had smashed its chest and a shoulder completely. I reviewed the strange sequence of events, beginning from the night I had wounded a tiger till the one we bagged, and finally arrived at a possible solution to the mystery they posed. The blue-bull had been killed by a pair of tigers and not one animal as we had at first supposed. The animal, escaping after being but lightly wounded on the first night when I sat up over their kill, had been the tigress. The tiger, unknown to me of course, had remained hidden somewhere nearby while its mate had been shot at and injured. The tiger had then lingered in the vicinity of their kill, and abandoning its wounded, fleeing mate, had later returned to eat the kill, thus alerting my shikari.

  The calls we threw about at each other that evening had been somehow accurate enough to mislead the hungry and unwary tiger into supposing that another tiger had come to rob it of its rightful kill. Getting up from its fitful slumber, the tiger had turned up near its unfinished kill to give battle and drive the enemy away, but instead met its end.

  Let me now relate an episode that I hope adequately depicts some of the extraordinary ways and means that fanatic hunters undertook to beat out big game and the unusual occurrences that took place in one such haaka. The more common techniques are rather too well-known by now.

  A member of the old landowning aristocracy of north India having his estate near Kashipur in the erstwhile state of Uttar Pradesh, the Raja of Kothar was an unusual man. The spirit that his one-armed, 6'6" tall frame possessed is unfortunately, or fortunately, nowhere to be found any longer. A reputed marksman, despite possessing only one usable hand, he could dare to sit on the ground and wait for the tiger to be driven out towards him. So great was his confidence that this was the only way he shot tigers. This daring method is perhaps the sole justification for the incredible ruthlessness with which he had his tiger beats conducted.

  A good number of trained elephants were driven through the tall grass that tigers romped through in the jungles below the central Himalayan mountains, where he would usually camp. Often these elephants with their unusually sensitive instinct of smell would baulk in the face of any tiger or panther that they would disturb in the endlessly stretching grass. Tribals, and his own braver staff, were hence made to march behind the moving line of elephants and goad them on with spears they carried in their hands to move forward and drive out the raja’s sport. Those beaters well knew the panther’s flashing speed and the tiger’s deadly, ferocious strength, and their ability to pounce back on the beaters. When elephants in the haaka sensed such a carnivore and came to a stop despite their drivers’ utmost attempts to move them forward through the devilish grass that stood even taller than the pachyderms, those men with spears often turned tail in sheer terror. They fled, disregarding the unusual sportsman sitting somewhere ahead and waiting with his rifle along the cleared track, where he’d had the grass previously trampled down in anticipation for game to emerge so that he could locate and shoot them. To avoid the beat from turning into just a farce, the raja was known to employ his final strategy: One elephant would be stationed to move behind the line of men and the raja’s man mounted on it had orders to shoot any such fleeing beater, with ‘dust shot’ from a twelve-gauge shotgun, but only on the ankles and feet. This ensured the success of the beat through the tall, impenetrable tiger grass that in those days fairly crawled all over with menace.

  Four of our trained elephants had been borrowed for one such beat. There were many more, of course, in the long line of pachyderms that formed ahead of the tribals as the beat moved through the tiger grass on that fateful day. The raja sat on the ground along a previously cleared field of vision waiting for any animal to be driven out and into his rifle’s sight. By and by, the beaters’ drums took on a peculiar tone as a cry went up from the men and the elephant drivers almost as the h
aaka was about to end. The raja shot quickly at the galloping tiger, small enough in size to be mistaken for a large leopard, and in the limited field of vision provided by the trampled grass, the heavy bore slug hit the beast a mere glancing blow. The injured tiger continued on its way through the tall grass on the other side of the cleared line of sight. The raja’s personal elephant and its mahout, who were in the beating line ahead of the spear carrying tribals, now emerged into the firing line, along with our four elephants and their drivers. They stood grouped as the mahouts debated among themselves the wisdom of going into the grassland in the wake of the injured tiger that had just sought shelter in its depths.

  Hopeful of putting an end to the injured tiger and confident of his master’s unerring aim, the raja’s overeager mahout rallied our four men by shouting that the tiger could not have gone far. Then he led his mount into the grass that now drowned our elephants as well. The tiger, wounded in its hindquarters, had decided to fight it out and lay in wait as it sensed the pursuit. When the elephants came near where it lay waiting in rage, it charged and leapt, as luck would have it, onto the raja’s favourite mount and commenced to bite and lacerate its forehead above the trunk. The elephant at first tried to shake off the mercilessly savaging tiger, but unable to match the injured tiger’s strength and ferocity, it turned swiftly around, swinging about fully with its great weight in a last, desperate manoeuvre. The tiger and the mahout were both thrown off, and trumpeting in blind pain, the elephant sought the refuge of the cleared area where its master and the men who had stayed behind would have its wounds tended to.

  The raja’s mahout was not so fortunate. When he fell off the elephant’s neck into the grass and realized his true predicament, he tried his utmost to run and catch up with his fleeing elephant and scamper onto its back as mahouts are wont to do. His hurry proved his undoing. A shikari, mounted on one of our elephants mistook the shaking heads of the tall grass to be the wounded tiger charging after the elephant. Under the circumstances, this was entirely possible, and taking dead aim at the invisible object causing the grass to shake so alarmingly in the mauled elephant’s direction, he fired his muzzleloader, neatly drilling the raja’s mahout through the chest and stomach.

  Hearing the fatally shot man’s cries for help, our mahouts abandoned the chase after the wounded tiger which, by now had gone further ahead in the grass, and began assisting the raja’s men in getting the unconscious mahout back to the firing line. The raja had him sent off in one of the cars to the nearest hospital, but it was too late for the poor, brave mahout. The loss of such a valuable and loyal man only incensed the raja more. Aware of the fact that the best trained hunting elephants in the herd were ours, he asked our mahouts to go after the wounded tiger with his most reliable marksmen mounted vengefully on them. The four elephants moved out in a line through the grass, hopeful of rousing the wounded tiger. Moving slowly, they reached very much further in from where the raja had at first injured the tiger, and later his mahout had been mistakenly shot.

  The four elephants, advancing through the overwhelming grass, suddenly stopped, their trunks sensitively sniffing at the tangled growths ahead. Our mahouts knew then that the wounded tiger was now somewhere just before them, probably unaware this time of the continuing pursuit. The bravest of the four elephants, and the one with the most experience of this sort, was blind in both her eyes and hence the one most likely to go through the tall choking grass towards the wounded tiger. By doing this it would offer that one chance to the shikari to possibly sight and shoot the injured tiger where it lay, before it decided to leap and attack, as it had the raja’s elephant. While the three other mahouts waited with their mounts, the blind elephant was goaded to go ahead. Without giving a chance to the shikari, the tiger attacked, leaping up from the grass and onto the elephant’s forehead as it tried to get at our mahout who was perched above the elephant’s neck and so a bit out of the tiger’s reach.

  The blind elephant began to shake off the tiger and so aggressive was she in her efforts that the shikari on her back could not let go of the securing ropes, align his rifle and shoot point-blank at the snarling spectre of the tiger sticking to the elephant and trying to get to them. But shake off the tiger she did, and even as the other shikaris on our three remaining elephants looked on, the tiger was thrown off the blind one’s head and fell roaring and growling in the grass. In a flash it was up, and attacked the blind one again, but this time from the rear. Leaping onto the elephant’s back, it savaged her hind legs with its claws while it kept the shikari and his gun at bay with the talons of its wildly swinging forepaws. To shoot and finish off the wounded tiger, on whose account the raja’s personal mahout had been killed and his favourite elephant injured, was the raja’s order. The shikaris on our three elephants, to whom the tiger was suddenly visible as it clung to the blind elephant’s rear scarcely a dozen metres in front of them, now began pumping shots into the snarling tiger that was still trying to get atop the blind one and at the two men clinging onto the howdah ropes on its trembling, agonized body.

  A few of their shots hit the tiger, but such was its vindictiveness that it clung all the same to the hapless squealing, trembling elephant, which three of the many random rifle shots had hit, but luckily for it, in the hind parts. The shikari on the suffering elephant, unnerved by the tiger’s closeness and the rifle bullets that had missed both the tiger and the elephant, was unable to fire even a round into the tiger. It was the quick thinking of our experienced old mahout which saved the day. He swiftly realized the danger all around, to themselves and to the blind elephant, in the face of the hastily fired rifle shots that continued to come from the three elephants in their rear. He yelled to them to stop the indiscriminate firing and to let his brother, a mahout of ours on one of the three elephants behind, to handle the situation. His brother rallied to the call for help from the doubly endangered man ahead of them, and goading our bull elephant forward, he got him to see the blood pouring off the blind one’s back and the damage that the growling, roaring tiger mercilessly continued to do to her. The instant our bull elephant, with his own peculiar possessive instincts, saw and realized what our mahout wanted him to, he charged furiously at the tiger still clinging onto and assaulting the blind elephant’s back. With all the fury and strength of its loyal kind, it rammed the tiger squarely, battering it boneless with the brutal impact of his forehead. The tiger fell down dead in the grass. Our mahouts with the help of the other men, began to see to the blind one’s wounds, and many were the pieces of shredded bone and cartilage that were pulled out of the gouged holes where the rifle shots had struck her. The memory of that one tiger beat remains with our old mahouts even today.

  Tigers are known to get browbeaten and flee from their victims, cattle or human, when prevailed upon to do so. Many are the instances when a determined group of villagers has driven away the striped marauder as well as of cattle, when roused, to have effectively used their horns against the hunting tiger’s ferocity. The exception to this rule occurs in rare instances – as in the case of a young male tiger in the company of a tigress, or a wounded tiger, or when a tigress teaches her young ones to hunt for themselves, or with an unusually large specimen of the species. Since I have already written about two wounded tigers, let me now get to an extremely large and aggressive one.

  Our scouts had come across its tracks and their conclusions about this tiger’s probable size hastened our party on its trail. As we measured the tiger’s pugmarks, I could clearly see that they were not exaggerating. An old family friend, also a very important person, was camped beside our block, and as he hadn’t had much luck, I sent word to him about our find. We then repaired to the camp to await his arrival. He turned up with the usual pomp the next day, complete with photographer, aide-de-camp, valets, cooks and batmen, as befitting a top-ranking military general, which he very much was, whether on leave or on duty. Close upon his arrival, a few members of both our parties mounted on two elephants and moved out to the vas
t grasslands bordering the river that came down from the mountains and ran through the forests.

  Our quarry was known to haunt these level spaces jungled with tall tiger grass and had acquired something of a reputation killing and feeding off the cattle villagers invariably brought to such a place to pasture in. Almost at once, there were nervous cattle running away from our elephants and stampeding out of the clumped growths of tall grass around us. The mahouts halted our mounts at the edge of the grass tracts from which the cattle had come and I took in the situation. The river coiled through the distance and the grassland stretched for a fair length along the bank where the two elephants stood. There were cleared areas as well, where the villagers had burnt down the grass to allow better grazing for their cattle. I was eager to get ahead with our guest, for the grassland’s outskirts was where we had last seen the tiger’s pugmarks. Thinking the nervously scattering cattle have been spooked by our elephants, I did not pay them much heed. But the true reason was surprisingly different, as we soon discovered on entering the tall, tangled grass.

  The herd of cattle had run away but a straggler seemed to be around, for we could hear its crude iron cow-bell clanking in the sea of grass ahead of our elephants, even though we could not see it. The elephants moved further in and something about the arrhythmic, almost frenzied and abrupt, tolling of the cow-bell gripped my attention. The sounds were most unlike the gentle tones produced by the bell around the neck of a cow when grazing. The mahout stopped the elephant again when I nudged him, while one of our companions stood up to have a better look. Noticing his mystification, I strained my eyes, studying the area of grass from where the bell fitfully tolled. The grass shook abruptly, and then some more, as the bell jangled discordantly. Soon it became clear that something was thrashing about in the grass at that spot. I realized we had chanced upon the tiger in the very act of killing one of the cattle. That explained the stampeding herd. Regaining our wits, we waited for a while so that the tiger could settle down to feed as it was unlikely to drag away the kill from such a desolate place.