The Wildest Sport of All Page 16

  The larger the tiger, the sharper are its survival instincts. With utmost caution, the mahouts edged our elephants towards the grass at the spot that now stood tense and still with the sound of the bell suddenly gone silent. I made sure our esteemed guest was ready to take the honour of the first shot, but before we could get close enough, the grass erupted in a burst of movement ahead as the alerted tiger leapt away and made off further into the tangled depths.

  The two elephants gathered around the scene of the tiger’s carnage. The dying cow lay brokenly upon the bloodied ground and the trampled grass, its life ebbing away from the ripped jugular along the savaged neck. The elephants were then made to go into the grass in the direction taken by the tiger. After a few hundred metres, they were brought up short at the sight that lay before us. In a trampled area of grass, another cow lay dead, the blood from its gaping wound having hardly had the time to congeal. Clearly, the tiger had killed this one only moments before the attack we had interrupted. Why the tiger had made two successive kills, we found no answer. When we looked around some more in the thick grass hoping to chance upon the tiger, we came across another cow similarly slaughtered and killed. Our surprise grew into chagrin and then pure shock as we came upon three more killed by the tiger and felled a dozen metres apart from one another!

  The tiger, huge and aggressive, had chanced upon the grazing herd and had killed one of their number, preparing to drag away its kill to feed on it. But the cattle, it seemed, had rallied to the wounded one’s bellowing as the tiger tried to make quick work of it. Instead of driving off the beast, as would have been the case with a smaller tiger, they had only succeeded in nettling this huge fellow. Angered, it had charged the herd, before the cattle stampeded, mauling and killing a full six of them, by the time our elephants entered the scene.

  It was mid-morning by the time we had scouted through the grass and pieced out the tiger’s tale from the bloody massacre it had left strewn in its wake. One fact became quite clear. It was a huge tiger we had before us, and a very angry one. The chances of his lying in the grass ahead were bright as tigers rarely leave thick cover during the day, especially with an uneaten kill close by. And there were not one but six such kills here, even though five of them were wanton acts of sheer aggressiveness. We hurriedly held a council of war and a plan was hatched.

  More men were brought in from the camp. With minimum noise, three firing lines were quickly cleared away through the grass at regular intervals of two hundred and fifty metres each, thus taking in sizeably likely areas of grassy cover that the tiger could well be concealed in. The elephant with our honoured guest was stationed along the first firing line, while the other elephants with the beaters alongside moved through the grass, trying to drive out the tiger. The suspense mounted when this first beat finished and positions were taken up for the next stretch of grass to be beaten. The tiger broke out of the tall grass no sooner had the second beat begun, and with incredible swiftness bounded across the hastily cleared firing line, giving our guest no time for even a quick shot.

  Those of us who had seen the tiger’s true size, even in those brief seconds before it vanished into the grass leading up to the third firing line, had to struggle to control the sudden chill that had risen in our hearts at the sight of its hugeness and swiftness, before we went on to take up our positions for the final stretch of grass to be beaten. It was at that moment that our guest’s photographer was found, barely managing to moan through blanched lips, lying where he had fallen under a small tree along the firing line where he had stationed himself with his lenses and cameras hoping to catch a good one of the famous man bagging the tiger. His body had slipped senseless to the ground as his mind ran cold at the huge tiger’s nearness as it bounded out of the grass before vanishing across the firing line. His forearm had snapped cleanly in two, the bone glaring white where it jutted out of the fracture. But unmindful of someone so superfluous, or thinking the nature of the injury trifle, given his toughened military mind, our guest was eager to get on with chasing the tiger. A few of my men had to attend to the unfortunate photographer so miserably out of his element in tiger country.

  The elephant with our guest was moved into position commanding the final firing line and the beaters with the second elephant began harrowing the grass in which the animal had vanished. The huge animal broke cover far ahead of the gun, where we least expected it to. Coming out of the grass, the tiger began to gallop over a bare exposure of the riverbank as it made to cross the streambed and gain the thicker jungle on the far bank. Our guest took a few long shots but the bullets fell short, serving only to hasten on the largest tiger in my experience toward its well-deserved freedom in the forests across the river.

  Bad luck seemed to be dogging our party on this particular shoot, despite the fact that we were camped in one of the best hunting grounds in the country. The sprawling, densely forested ranges were well stocked with game as they have been since time immemorial at that location, which roughly corresponds to the area now known as the Jim Corbett National Park. The camp larder, consequently, was never lacking for the choicest of birds and venison, but the true quest of all big game hunters – the tiger – had completely eluded us. Our baits remained untouched. Every day our scouts returned with the same dreary, hopeless results.

  Then, a few days before our shikar permit expired, we had an apparent stroke of luck. One of the men, ranging far and wide and into the forest depths, came across a wild boar that had been killed and partly eaten by a tiger. I hastened to the spot with a guest and had a machaan hurriedly put up scarcely ten feet up on a stunted, bent tree, the only one available that overlooked the tiger kill. Much to the chagrin of our experienced shikaris, of course.

  The vigil that followed as we sat up later in the day to await the tiger turned out to be the most nightmarish in my experience. Day gave way to dusk without any incident. But dark rain clouds closed in over the jungle with the night. It grew darker than the deepest night. There was no trace of twilight. We could scarcely see ourselves on the machaan. It soon began to drizzle and the gloom intensified. Having shot most of my tigers by the light of the early stars, I had neglected as usual to bring a torch, and I missed it sorely now. The tiger came without warning. As it proceeded to take up its unfinished meal, the unmistakable sounds of bones crackling and meat being munched were all that warned us of its sudden presence, enshrouded as we were by the incessantly drizzling rain and the intense night. It was so dark that we could not see beyond our noses, let alone the kill or the tiger in the glade below, situated as it was in the shadow of a high, wooded embankment.

  The rain drizzled without letting up as we sat, getting ever more keyed up with the crawling, passing moments in the tiger’s proximity and our own complete impotence to do anything about it. The tiger made a merry meal of the remains of its kill. Just as we were beginning to think it had perhaps finished and thankfully wandered off, it cracked a few bones from the pitch darkness below. The tiger continued to lounge thus for a good many hours and the tension built up unbearably within us at being so dangerously close to it. I feared that the continuing rain, with heavy clouds scudding across the inky sky overhead and the many hours of the deep dark that stretched before us, with the devilish tiger so close by, would rob us of our reason and impel us to give ourselves away to the tiger. I dreaded to think of what lay in store for us, should this indeed happen.

  Whenever a lull occurred in the tiger’s noisy meal, my spine would prickle at the thought of it having perhaps sensed our machaan. Maybe it was stalking us in the dark, creeping ever closer? I began to wait for the nerve-shattering roar with which it would leap with its death-dealing attack on us, up on that small tree. Taking a grip on myself before complete panic seized me, I decided to have a try at scaring the tiger off. Loudly clapping my hands, I gave a stentorian yell and was joined by my guest in this unusual pursuit of trying to frighten a tiger. We shouted together a number of times. In the night below, the bones stopped crackling.
The rain dripped off the verdure and sizzled on the leaves, heightening the spell of sudden silence. When the quiet lasted, we began to think of yelling out for our elephant stationed at a distance to come and relieve us from this cold, nerve-wracking misadventure. Just then, the tiger calmly commenced chewing on bones below.

  This time we shouted loud and long and succeeded in driving away the tiger. When I was sure that it had gone, I expended more of my lung power in shouting and signalling for our mahout to bring the elephant and get us off. Eventually, we heard an answering shout. Then the sounds of the elephant’s footfalls through the jungle drew nearer in the dark. Cocking a ear towards the tiger’s kill, I could hear no movement near it and felt thankful that we would soon be snug and dry back in the camp. We began preparing to get off the machaan. Then the sounds made by the approaching elephant seemed to stop, replaced instead by the exasperating, rain-permeated silence. The elephant’s footfalls came through the jungle again, but this time the sound was fading progressively, drawing away from us and it became clear that the elephant was going away from the machaan! The place was such: difficult to get to even in the day, this nook in the dense jungle had become impossible to locate in the drizzle and the dark. When the elephant circled a few times blindly around our machaan and then went out of earshot, there was nothing for us to do but wait for dawn, a good many cold and wet hours away.

  The mahout was hopelessly lost. I hoped he would not look too hard for us in that forbidding dark without his proper bearings and consequently wander off somewhere far away. This was my first experience of ‘shooing off’ a tiger and, try as I did, I could not completely convince myself that the beast was indeed gone and not lurking about, having got wind of our presence. The suspense and tension grew unendurable, worse than when the tiger had actually been about the god-forsaken place. It was only later, when darkness began to lift from the jungle, that I realized that the only thing we had been afraid of was fear itself!

  Morning found a couple of very cold, disgruntled and harassed-looking hunters shivering atop the soggy machaan, low enough for the tiger to have attacked and emptied in one determined charge. Despite our rifles, experience and intellect, the rainy, dark night had held us completely at the tiger’s mercy.

  The day grew on and still we sat, looking around and wondering, still not really sure that the tiger was not lurking about in the thick undergrowth near the kill which it had so reluctantly relinquished the previous night. Then, as we sat waiting for the elephant to locate us, the sound of a jeep’s engine came to our ears. Recognizing the horn when it was honked a few times through the distance, I realized that it was my elder brother come to see what could have gone wrong, for the elephant and we were long overdue at the camp. Unable to get ourselves down and walk the half-mile or so to the jeep with the tiger still unaccounted for and our consequent state of nerves, we waited an hour more for the elephant to return from wherever it had got lost and come and take us to the jeep. But hunger and shivering fits drove us down, compelling us to risk the walk. Once afoot, it was a good two hours before we could locate the jeep, for despite the broad daylight we walked for a long time in indeterminate circles, having succeeded, like our elephant the night before, in getting lost hopelessly and completely in that jinxed, impenetrable corner of the jungle. It was a curiously humbling experience, and there was not a note of regret for leaving in any of us when we moved the camp later that day.

  It was imperative that our guest bag a tiger. Not only was he a near relative, but he was also a keen sportsman and we had very little choice in the matter as we directed our baggage, elephants and staff further north, into even more rugged and deeper jungles.

  In Dabaora1, a family friend farmed vast tracts of land that he had reclaimed from the forest and his huge agricultural spread was known to harbour any number of tigers. His sugarcane fields, known for the quality of their produce, were located right in the heart of the hunting country and his farmlands and labour settlements stood surrounded by heavy forests and the mountains of Kumaon. Despite still being badly shaken, I was eager to lose the unsavoury taste of my last experience with a tiger. So it was to Dabaora that we now went.

  The dense forests to the north of Dabaora had been cut down and the area colonised by the British. Tigers displaced from their chosen territories in the cleared jungle there had found a happy hunting ground in Dabaora. This area, with its many fertile open spaces, was ideal grazing ground for village cattle from many miles around. Hence, the dense cover of grass in the swamps beside the river Kosi was thick with tigers, as were the forests which fringed the cattle pastures of Dabaora. Each one of the many tigers here was a confirmed cattle-lifter. Looking for sport, I have visited Dabaora countless times, and on each occasion have learnt something new here. I distinctly remember one day coming across a track made solely by countless tiger pugmarks on the ground beside the Kosi.

  It was in Dabaora that I learnt something startling about tigers. Contrary to usual belief, I witnessed here the fact that tigers co-existed barely furlongs away from each other without any dispute about separate and distinct territories. Undoubtedly the ease with which they managed to kill and eat from the hordes of village cattle was a crucial factor for there being so many tigers in one area. It was clear from the state of affairs in Dabaora that the golden rule amongst tigers, about each maintaining its own separate territory, holds good only for tigers living and hunting naturally in the jungle, but not for cattle-lifters. It was also in Dabaora that fourteen of our live baits were killed consecutively by fourteen different cattle-lifting tigers, but as luck would have it, only one of them fell to our guns on that occasion. It was here too that one member of our party witnessed from his machaan a cattle-lifter attacking and killing his live bait by getting astride the heifer’s back, then clamping its fangs into the animal’s nostrils and actually beginning to suck its blood before he shot the tiger fatally through the spine. This again was contrary to what we believed was the tiger’s usual mode of making a kill, that is, by breaking its prey’s neck, and showed a new facet of the cattle-lifter’s different style as compared to tigers living naturally in the jungle. The following incident might show you conclusively that the cattle-lifters of Dabaora were indeed unaware of any other animal in the forests except for the village cattle and that they really were a breed apart from the other tigers in the terai.

  So complete was the destruction caused by these cattle-lifters that no man in the village of Dabaora had a spare calf, bullock or buffalo to sell us when we had once run short of live baits. The herds that grazed freely were considerably trimmed by these tigers and the remaining cattle were tightly protected by the village folk who had discontinued their grazing in the pastures by the Kosi river. Still the villagers and their cattle knew no peace or security. Cattle-lifters are usually bold and those in Dabaora were even more so. Stray incidents of cattle stockades usually located in the village outskirts being attacked by a tiger began to occur. The villagers, neither adequately equipped nor trained to deal with such exigencies, began locking themselves in their houses as soon as night fell, with the result that the cattle-lifters then had free run of the place. Cattle stockades came increasingly under attack and many were the complaints of a tiger crashing through the thorn barrier protecting the cattle to drag out a cow or a calf and then, emboldened by its success, of having returned in a day or so to repeat the carnage. Members of our party had missed many chances of getting these cattle-lifters. The only damage done had been to our precious baits that these bold, wily killers had on every occasion snatched away from a dozen metres in front of the hunter. So when a cattle herder came to me with the most woebegone expression, having no bait to tie out for the tiger troubling his stockade, the encounter really rankled deep with me.

  Having listened to the man’s tale of despair and after giving it serious thought, one of my companions came to me with a singular idea, which, at that time, I frankly found preposterous. Since the tiger was known to haunt the jungle
close to the stockade, waiting for cattle to stray out of it during the evenings when the men were kept busy with many other things, why not trick the beast into coming out before a gun? He suggested hanging a cow-bell in the bushes close to the stockade that could be rung by a string tied to the bell’s clapper from the hunter’s finger from his place of concealment in a nearby tree. The sound of the bell would fool the tiger into supposing that a cow or buffalo was grazing in the bushes. My companion had gone to considerable lengths to think up this ruse and I conceded the chance to him happily because I did not think the plan would work.

  They rigged the bell much before evening and the hunter, replete with torch and rifle, hid himself in a tree about fifteen metres from the dense lantana bushes amidst which the bell dangled on a stake, some five or six feet above the ground. My companion began to tug at the string in his hand, intermittently causing the bell to ring gently, as a cow wearing it would while grazing. He kept this up for the rest of the hour before evening came. Close to dusk, a clump of grass some hundred metres away from the bell in the undergrowth visibly shook and then immediately the wall of lantana bushes that the grass gave onto was very briefly agitated. There was another movement in the lantana, a bit closer to the bell. The hunter became sure that the tiger had come and was stalking the supposed victim from the sounds of the ringing cow-bell. At regular intervals, he continued to tinkle the bell at the end of the string. The tiger was thoroughly painstaking in hunting its quarry. Darkness had come stealing over the bushes when my companion at last detected the tiger in the lantana, about fifteen metres away from the bell. The tiger lay low, for cattle lifting from the village’s environs had taught it to be extremely wary. By then night had come, even as the hunter continued tinkling the bell, blotting out the jungle.