The Wildest Sport of All Read online

  With its claws lodged in the elephant’s temples, and its viciously fanged, gaping mouth only inches away from the stupefied mahout, the tiger held on with brute power, severely mauling the elephant in the process. It snapped at the mahout with its open, snarling jaws. This seemed to make the mahout recover enough sense and, in a purely defensive gesture, quite bravely under the extreme circumstances, he struck out at the tiger’s snapping jaws with the iron ankus, or goad, as he tried to keep the dread beast at bay. But this weapon-like hook of solid iron seemed puny in the face of the wounded tiger’s vindictive majesty.

  Our confidence to face the danger was no doubt boosted by the heavy bore rifles and a gun or so amongst us, for the grass spearing up all around over the elephant under attack hid the tiger from us. All that we heard were mind-numbing snarls and growls as evading the mahout’s swinging ankus, the wounded tiger continued to maul our elephant. Our guns might have saved us once the tiger had clawed its way onto the howdah, or elephant saddle, but even being near the tiger on that terrified, tossing elephant, with death only a breath away, was an experience beyond any other thrill.

  In the face of such a savage assault, the elephant, overcome with pain, suddenly bent forward on its knees and started swinging and shaking its head in a desperate effort to throw off the tiger. The reader may well ask, where were we, the experienced shikaris, when all this was going on?

  The events, as you might have anticipated by now, had moved faster than it takes to relate them. The mahout, directly in between us and the tiger, was in the way and we could not even risk a shot. Moreover, the elephant was bent forward into the long grass with the tiger’s weight and its own pain, thus nearly touching the ground with the entire length of its trunk. With the elephant so precariously bent, it was impossible for us to see the tiger. The elephant, determined to shake off the tiger, had become very unstable indeed, and all of us had been holding on to the howdah and its ropes with all our might. Under the circumstances, a fall could mean certain terrible death by the fangs of the wounded tiger, blinded by rage.

  Fortunately, the tiger was thrown off by the elephant. As soon as it fell away in the grass, the mauled and very nervous elephant bolted. It turned right around and, moaning in agony, fled in the opposite direction from the tiger, with all of us helplessly clinging on to its wildly swaying and extremely unsteady back. All of us, except for my young, strapping nephew.

  When the elephant wrenched itself up after shaking loose the tiger, my nephew had been flung off its back. After about a hundred metres on the runaway elephant, Kunwar Rajendra Singh, the only one amongst us who never, on principle, drives a car or carries a gun, seemed to suddenly find his voice. He noticed that our nephew, who had been sitting back to back with him, was now no longer with us. Greatly alarmed at this discovery, he shouted in anxiety and cried out that Babboo had fallen off and into the tiger’s jaws. Our blood ran cold and we all became very nervous. In one voice, we shouted at the mahout to control our disgruntled mount and stop the elephant from going any further immediately. Even though it is well nigh impossible to control a runaway elephant, by god’s grace and our mahout’s efforts, the elephant not only stopped but regained sufficient courage to return to the place where the tiger had attacked and mauled it. Bear with me till the end of this episode when I shall tell you about the elephant’s inborn wariness of the tiger.

  It was reasonable to expect our nephew, if somehow he had managed to escape the tiger’s attention, to be in the vicinity of our elephant’s wary return, as would be the enraged, wounded tiger. Obstinate to the stark hopelessness of the situation, our minds refused to make the obvious connection. The tiger could have by now chanced upon the unfortunate youngster. Hoping against hope, we shouted out to him instructing him to keep absolutely still in his place and that we were coming back to pick him up.

  Unable to see him or the tiger in the choking thicket of grass, we were filled with fear for our young nephew. With great difficulty and goading, the still jittery elephant began taking us back to the dead tree and the dense copse of tall grass around it. Since we did not know exactly where in that tract of grass our nephew had fallen off, our despair grew as the elephant advanced. We kept our eyes peeled, but try as we did, none of us caught sight of him in the fading light. The sun had perceptibly lowered in the time the mauled and bleeding elephant took to retrace its shaky steps to where it had so nightmarishly encountered the tiger. Gradually, the mahout brought it to about five metres from where the tiger had attacked it.

  When some of us spied him, lying supine amongst the grass clumps on the ground, our relief knew no bounds. A few minutes more and our party was sure to do something foolhardy in our efforts to help him as quickly as possible. The pessimistic pall that had overcome us in the rapidly descending jungle evening began to dissipate from our anxious minds when we saw him, even though he was lying lifelessly, with eyes tightly shut. The mahout was ordered to make the elephant sit down near him. Again, luck seemed to be on our side. A frightened elephant will never sit down at a place where only moments ago it had been severely mauled. As soon as the elephant neared our nephew, and when I saw he was conscious, I called out to him in strained whispers to quietly get up and come towards us. While this was transpiring, the tension grew unbearable, for the furious tiger was certainly somewhere very close in the same tangled tract of grass as us.

  Nervous as he evidently must have been, Babboo, unharmed from his fall ten feet off the elephant’s back, summoned enough courage to stand and somehow stumble towards us, falling along the way and looking around for any sign of the tiger. He reached our elephant, which had been finally made to sit, and we quickly pulled him up. The ever-present uncertainties of mortal life had been revealed to him in a flash by his nearness to the bad-tempered tiger. Consequently, the agonizing suspense and the heart-stopping fear had drained the blood from his features, making him tremble. I whispered to the mahout to get the elephant up and get us out of the place. We turned towards the machaans we had sat up on during the beat, from where I had wounded the tiger.

  Even though no explanation was called for, our nephew told us that in a moment of bravado he had let go of the ropes securing the howdah and lost his handhold as he tried to aim his rifle at the tiger who had been mauling the elephant’s forehead a tempting two metres away from him. Instead of blowing away the tiger in its throes of revenge, he got pitched off and into the same grass that the tiger had jumped from.

  Placing our still slightly shaky young man on one of the machaans with a responsible shikari, we conferred among ourselves. To kill this wounded tiger had now become most necessary and almost a personal challenge for us. Taking the same mauled and scared elephant back to where the wounded tiger was, presumably, was out of question. Yet the spirit of the hunt had taken over our minds, and we decided to get to the tiger’s lair without running away scared once again.

  We managed to reach a hundred metres from the place of the fallen tree and the thickets, where the tiger was still concealed. According to our hastily conceived plan, we placed my friend Mukherjee on a suitably high tree beside the thicket and that fateful, skeletal tree. Some of us remained on the elephant’s back. The object of stationing Mukherjee on the tree was simply this: we planned to disturb the tiger again in its lair this time with twelve-bore shots aimed at its hiding place. The enraged beast would surely charge at the elephant as before. In the event of such an occurrence, my friend could hope to get a steady aim on the charging tiger once it appeared in the comparative openness where the elephant stood, shuffling and swaying.

  One twelve-bore shot was aimed towards the grass thicket and fired, but with no result. A second shot was fired. This time a startled growl from the tiger answered our efforts. After this brief but nerve-shattering growl, the tiger fell silent. The twelve-bore was fired a third time. The tiger, roaring ferociously, charged at the elephant. Flashing through the grass and the bush, it came straight at us for half-a-dozen metres. Then suddenly it swerve
d in a right angle away from us on the elephant. This change of direction brought the tiger directly before Mukherjee on the tree. Unfortunately, our friend, a sensitive shikari no doubt, has never been swift in taking aim and triggering a shot. To be sure of his aim, he followed the galloping tiger through the grass but was unable to take a steady shot. He lost sight of the tiger, as we did. Dusk had crept into the jungle with breathtaking suddenness, so we abandoned the search. Crestfallen, we returned to our camp nearby.

  At dinner, we talked over plans for the following day. It seemed certain that the tiger was badly wounded. Due to excessive bleeding, which its exertions might have worsened, and having eluded us by staying in hiding, it would have had no chance to recover or recuperate during the day or rest at night and would be very exhausted on the morrow. If not already dead, it could certainly be found and shot in the morning with little difficulty. Then again, if its agility in leaping on our elephant was anything to go by, the tiger might only have been lightly wounded. Anyway, hopes ran high among us. We were up early to send off the elephants to the spot from where the search for the wounded tiger would be renewed. At seven, we drove down to join them.

  On elephant back, we scouted the ground outside the five-acre stretch of grass jungle where we had left off in the evening. Our purpose was to determine whether the wounded tiger still lay concealed in the grass or had wandered away elsewhere during the night. To our surprise and dismay, we found pugmarks emerging from the grass with drops of blood trailing beyond them.

  After following the trail for about three kilometres, both the pugmarks and the drops of blood vanished, for the tiger had travelled over a stretch of hard and rocky ground from that point. It was futile to continue the search, since the terrain continued to be so for some distance. This business of tracking had taken up an entire day, and having got used to the idea that the tiger had eluded us, we returned to our camp, tired and dejected. Despite its wound, the tiger seemed to have moved to a more impenetrable hideout. We shot small game for the next two days and tied out baits for tiger in the routine manner.

  On the third day Kunwar K.S.I Singh and his son Padmendra were out for a morning’s ride on an elephant, trying for potluck.2 While crossing a partly dry stream, my elder brother chanced to see a dragmark clearly imprinted across the damp soil of the boulder- and sand-strewn channel. A dragmark in the jungle holds untold fascination until carefully examined and its nature determined. He got down from the elephant and closely inspected the drag. The mark he saw had been made by a tiger. He could also see that what had at first caught his attention was one pug imprinted on the soil with a healthy clarity, while the adjoining paw had dragged its way. His joy knew no bounds as he realized that he had stumbled upon the trail of the same wounded tiger that had escaped us three days ago. Ants had been collecting on the tiny droplets of its blood that were barely visible alongside the drag.

  Hurriedly getting back, he broke the news to the rest of us at the camp. At once we set out for the stream bed, where the wounded animal’s pugmarks had been sighted. Some, though, were not so sure of taking up the trail, as they remembered only too well what a fearful adversary the tiger had proved to be in its wounded state. Duty brooks no such considerations, and around mid-morning, our party stood surveying the partly dry stream and its surroundings. A type of grass called narkul – with tall, fluted, reed-like stems sprouting with bamboo-like leaves, commonly found on damp soils and in and around swamps – was seen to be growing in the bed of the stream. It entirely covered an area, about 300 metres in length, and 100 metres in breadth. The pugmarks entered this tract of narkul.

  The obvious inferences from our survey, albeit peremptory, and the limited stretch of our quarry’s hideout, gave new life to our flagging hopes. We felt sure of discovering the tiger in this place, either completely dead or still alive, but most probably barely so. This certainly did not mean that we contemplated any foolish heroic like entering the narkul to confirm our suspicions, but resorted to the time-honoured technique of dealing with such chancy matters. A machaan was hurriedly tied upstream where the narkul ended. The tiger would be driven towards it. Shikaris were positioned on both overgrown banks of the stream bed in case the tiger jumped out of the dry channel and made for the forests on either shore.

  The beat started with one of our elephants moving through the grass from where the dragmarks entered it. The beating elephant had hardly proceeded a few dozen metres in the direction of the still-distant machaan when a very faint growl was heard. So indelibly were the previous encounter’s horrors imprinted on some of our men that they were thinking of shinning up the nearest tree when that ominous growl came up. But on this day, the sound was low-pitched and full of pain and fatigue, indicating the tiger was near its end. Upon hearing the noise, the elephant, which incidentally was the same one previously mauled by this very tiger, nervously turned around and resisted all efforts to move it in the direction from where the dying tiger’s warning growl had come. Now it became a real problem to investigate, or beat, the grass where the tiger was lying. The elephant would not budge an inch further, and to send beaters, or guns, into the thickly-choked, wild narkul tract seemed even more dangerous. So highly charged was the air with exaggerated expectations of the wounded tiger once again charging at us that blind panic had seized the men with guns on the banks of the stream the moment the tiger growled, causing some shikaris to bolt in utter terror and confusion. A wounded tiger is not a creature to come recklessly close to, especially where boggy grounds from the stream’s channel can seriously impede swift, timely movement. Finally, we arrived at a possible solution.

  We had heard of some Kanjars, or tribal people, camping nearby with their hunting parties and dogs. We decided to employ their excellent shikari dogs which could go into the tall grass and provoke some sort of a reaction from the tiger and so let us know whether it was alive and still dangerous. In order to get the Kanjars to cooperate with us, for the jungle has taught them to be instinctively wary, we had to conceal the fact that a wounded tiger was our quarry. Instead, we told them a very big wild boar had been wounded and was sheltering in that grass.

  Boars are safely hunted with dogs. We asked for their use without any risk to human life, either ours of that of the Kanjars. When we further told them that our elephant could not go after this fictional wild boar as there was quicksand in the grass, the tribals, quick to take the proffered hint about a substantial share of the boar’s meat, readily agreed. They incited their dogs, when we asked for their use, and let them loose into the grass. For a few moments we waited on tenterhooks, but nothing happened. Then, as one of the dogs entered the narkul, it gave a startled yelp and jumped back, coming to cower near its mystified master. The dog had smelt the tiger’s presence and it refused to go in any further.

  The Kanjars instantly guessed that some carnivore lay concealed in the grass and took their precious dogs away to their encampment. A wounded tiger, when cornered by a pack of the best and most gallant hounds or hunting dogs, can rip apart the entire lot, killing or irreparably damaging the dogs. The tribals, always short of meat, depend to a great extent on their dogs to lead them to it and often run the hunt down for them. They were in no mood to put such valuable creatures at risk.

  Evening was on us and there we were, not knowing what to do. It seemed for a few anxious moments that the tiger would again slip away from us during the night if we gave up the chase now. But another idea, hastily voiced by a scout, came to our rescue. There were some cattle grazing in an open stretch of the forest nearby. Our shikaris hurriedly collected the cattle and drove them towards the narkul tract in the stream bed. The tame beasts hesitated after a while, from straying deeper into the grass. Our shikaris tried their best to get the cattle to go through that dense stand, but in vain. The moment they smelled the tiger, the cattle panicked and in utter disregard of their cursing, pursuing herders, they did not stop running. That was the last we saw of them. Darkness had closed in rapidly over the jungle a
fter sunset, and we were compelled to abandon our efforts to kill the wounded tiger. We returned to our camp at the bungalow.

  After a hurried breakfast the next morning, we reached the place again. We now put the previous night’s carefully thought out plan into operation. Two elephants were stationed on both banks of the narkul grass and a line was rigged between them. This rope, attached to the saddles of the elephants, hung across and over the white-tufted, thick-stemmed grass and from it dangled tin canisters half-filled with stones. These tin cans rattled terrifically as soon as the elephants started to beat. We had stationed ourselves along one bank of the nullah, a dozen metres apart from each other, our rifles and guns at the ready. The tiger, if there at all, would break out of the cover disturbed by the stone-filled rattling tin cans and thus come to the front of our extended position. Then the unexpected happened! Right in the very middle of the grass, the elephant closest to our side stopped, turned around and, with trunk and tail lifted up high, began rushing out of the bush. The other elephant followed suit. This rushing retreat triggered a pent-up feeling of raw fear and deadly danger in our hearts, for the tiger was all that time very much in our minds and something seemed to go out of our combined resolution to face a wounded tiger that the elephants had run away from in fright. I remember looking around in complete confusion as every path through the grass from which the elephant had so nervously rushed out seemed suddenly full with a troop of striped, angry killers. Pandemonium reigned unchecked for those