The Wildest Sport of All Page 6

  As we sat around the camp on the sixth day, we began to seriously talk about a different course of action. It was unanimously decided to give up the method of tying baits at night. This tactical change was largely due to the fact that tiger shooting in this particular block was more than usual since good, motorable roads had made it easily accessible. More important was the fact that the tying of baits by the neck was the habitual practice of almost every ambitious big game shikar. Consequently, tigers had become wary of baits tied to posts or trees by the neck.

  We decided to try something else. A buffalo calf was tied to an inconspicuous stake with a fairly long rope around its leg. Neck and shoulders free from any restraining bonds, the animal was thus free to graze and convey the impression to a tiger that the calf had strayed into the jungle on its own, and that there was no hunter nearby. Putting out the calf as a ‘natural prey’ brightened our chances of baiting a tiger.

  Further, instead of waiting for the tiger to take the bait and then be tracked down as would have been the procedure if luck had been with us in the last few days, we now had a machaan constructed on a suitably high tree over the bait, and when evening came, two people among us sat up on it. The bait was comfortably straying at the end of the long rope and grazing at leisure on the sparse grass that grew in the riverbed, where the tree with our machaan stood.

  Soon, dusk gave way to starlit darkness. At about half past seven, a spotted deer began to call in alarm, the startled echoes reached us from a densely forested plateau about two kilometres to the north of our machaan. This alerted me, and rifle in hand, I got ready. Still as statues, we waited for about one hour for the tiger to appear. After about fifteen minutes, the deer fell silent. A very tense hour elapsed but no other creature of the jungle seemed to have sensed the tiger on the move and, like the spotted deer, voiced an alarm. Had the tiger seen through our ruse or had it sensed us? I began to feel disappointed.

  A deep, devious silence, as hypnotic as a magician’s mantle, descended over the forest. A miasma of uncertainty lay, like the dark, around our dim, stark surroundings. The slim treetops about the machaan heightened the stillness, as did the stars, glittering undisturbed in the night sky’s infinite depths. But the deer’s sharp cries had been unmistakable, and I steadied my flagging hopes!

  Just then, without so much as the snap of a twig or the rustling of a leaf, a shadowy shape emerged from the forests on the bank and walked, ghost-like, onto the sand of the riverbed, towards the bait. The calf at once became nervous and fidgety, staring apprehensively at the approaching killer beast.

  There is an old, obscure belief that the jungle stands absolutely still when its king stalks its quarry before the final act of finishing the hunt at the end of its long prowl. Indeed, the wind, the trees and their leaves, the bush below them, and each and every creature that otherwise lives fearlessly in the jungle, fall into a deafening silence. The legend is not entirely baseless.

  The tigress, for so it turned out to be, had evidently come quite silently towards the riverbed from where the spotted deer had raised the alarm. For about an hour, it had stood on the bank surveying the bait. Our gamble to have the calf as a natural prey seemed to have paid off as the tigress now advanced towards it. One significant point deserves mention here. It is an acknowledged fact that a tiger will never attack an animal or man as long as the victim’s eyes and attention are riveted on it. Hence, the tigress, when about ten metres away from the calf, which was snorting and trembling but rigidly staring at the marauder’s eyes, waited more than expectantly. The tigress circled around the calf until a convenient bush offered it the necessary concealment. The calf quite naturally became a bit unwary after a few moments, its long rope enabling it to lose concentration and its eyes strayed elsewhere. Unfortunately, the tigress was hidden from me and the view seemed woefully inadequate if I was to bag this trophy. The moment the calf looked away from where the killer lurked, the tigress pounced on the animal, biting through the jugular vein to sever and break it. Low, gargling moans announced the death of the bait.

  The man with me switched on the torch. The tigress somersaulted away from the dead calf the moment the torchlight shone downwards, dappling the dark ground. The man handling the torch was obviously not very adept at it and could not dazzle and hypnotise the tigress with its light in the one opportunity that he got. As the tigress leapt off the kill, I snapped a shot at the fleeting mark it momentarily provided. The .475 by Cogswell & Harrison is a perfectly balanced weapon and I had been aiming it correctly, in fervent anticipation. The tigress collapsed in the sand and began growling ferociously. This terrified the man with the torch and the friendly circuit of light somehow got doused. In spite of my repeated half-cajoling, half-angry efforts to get him to switch the light on again, I was unable to do so, for he fumbled and looked around but could not even find the torch. The maddening ferocity of the wounded tigress’ roars had shaken him, completely stupefied him, and after five or six valuable seconds, the tigress made off into the darkness of the jungle on the banks of the shelving riverbed.

  An elephant had been kept waiting about a kilometre away from that place to come and collect us if and when the need for it arose. After some time had elapsed, the mahout, who must have heard the single, ringing rifle report, brought our mount to the riverbank and signalled his arrival over the dense cover with a loud, yet totally incongruous, animal- or bird-like, shout. The severely wounded tigress, as the trail of blood and other signs showed, seemed to have made off into the deep forests covering the hillock that rose up from one bank of the dry river. There was something menacing about that spot. The jungle grew wild and thick, sprawled profusely over a stretch of broken ground between the river and the hillock, and even more lushly, over the country beyond. The tigress could be anywhere in there. It being too dangerous to track the wounded beast in its own element, the jungle night, and through such country as it had got away into, we returned to the camp, firmly overriding the devil-may-care suggestion of a few of our specially favoured companions who had wanted to go after the tigress’ spoor at once. Early the next day, when we reached the machaan to commence the chancy business of trailing the tigress, the large splatters of blood on the sand and disturbed clay where it had thrashed about after being shot met our eager sight. We began to follow the direction the tigress had fled in. The line of blood wound through the dry watercourse of the river for about a kilometre and then it began to progressively diminish.

  My hope sank at this discovery, for it could only mean that the tigress was recovering from its wound and would lead us into the jungle’s wild fastness, exacting much from our spirit and nerves in the process, but our trackers and scouts being reliably efficient, the pursuit was doggedly kept up. Our one hope lay in not letting the trail get cold or the tigress too far ahead of us. Then the faint trail of the tigress’ blood deviated from the wind sanded riverbed and into a gully or nullah. The jungle grew thick over the hillock in the distance and the gully wound down through impenetrable tangles of trees and bushes. The nullah and its surrounds were etched and scoured by the torrential flow of the tributary stream that came through the runnel each monsoon to feed the river whose openness and comparative safety we were now leaving behind. The tigress seemed to have gone up the nullah. My elder brother and I had been mounted on an elephant as we tracked the wounded tigress through the wide channel of the dry river, and once the blood trail entered the nullah, we continued into it on elephant back as it was wide enough to permit our mount’s entry.

  Our companions were Mr Mukherjee and Ram Singh, who was outdoing himself in the role of our expert tracker and chief shikari, with two gun-boys following the elephant warily on foot. Keeping a sharp lookout for any other indications of the wounded tigress’ passage, since the blood trail had practically stopped, we proceeded perplexed up the nullah for another kilometre or so. Ahead of us, a bend appeared in the gully. In order to take a short-cut towards the wider, more accessible, part of the nullah where its cour
se straightened out again after this sudden bend, the elephant was made to ponderously climb up the nullah’s left bank. Mukherjee and party, who were on foot behind us, continued to look for the blood trail on the nullah’s floor and along the bend that we, on our elephant, had avoided by sheer chance. The day might have ended differently had we continued as before, up the gully, and forced the elephant into that tangled growth smothering the bend in its course, ahead of those on foot.

  Utterly unknown to us, the wounded tigress had been lying in the undergrowth in the nullah’s channel just where it twisted into the bend and towards which Mukherjee and the others were now proceeding. The moment our elephant strode up the left side and began to force its way through a wall of bush, our elevated position made us visible to the tigress in the nullah below. The tigress gave vent to a roar of rage, a murderous, blood-curdling sound typical of all big cats when they are about to launch their lethal charge.

  Up on the elephant, we caught a bare glimpse of the tigress as it roared, its tail lashing about menacingly, preparing to charge at those intruding on the grim seclusion of its chosen retreat. While we were reasonably safe from the wounded animal’s fury, those afoot were now completely at its mercy. Mr Mukherjee and the others, assuming that the tigress was coming charging along the nullah itself, split up, scattering from sheer terror. Ram Singh and the two gun-boys fled onto the right bank of the nullah.

  So suddenly invincible seemed this tigress that the staunchest amongst us felt misgivings for having got ourselves into this deadly situation. Human beings, with their supposedly superior minds, are largely known to tame beasts, override and coexist with them, and domesticate them. Some of these men are known to have anticipated and won hand-to-hand, unarmed combats with tigers, more by wrestling with fierce straightforward tricks than with the fatal finesse of a jiu-jitsu combatant!

  In his much-acclaimed Autobiography of a Yogi, spiritual guru Paramahansa Yogananda devotes one full chapter to a certain yogi, or saint, with extra-terrestrial powers, who used to fight caged tigers, or in an arena, as suited his audience, who were mostly foreigners, kings, queens and the nobility of India during the British raj. Not only did he outwit the tiger’s brutishness with the help of his extraordinary powers that helped him anticipate the animal’s moves and reactions, but he also won many fights decisively. He was well known – despite the gory, incapacitating, lashing wounds that he bore with equanimity – for rendering his tiger opponent completely immobile on the ground, the total strength of man and beast fully pitted against each other till they were forced by a trained crew to part when victory or defeat was universally conceded by those attending that fantastic show. The maharaja of Cooch Behar was reputed to hold it every time the holy man happened to be in his state capital.

  One of our acquaintances, Prof. Amar Singh of the English department of Allahabad University, cites an unforgettable incident from those days before the rebellion of 1857, of a 6'7'' tall, sturdy Rajput army sergeant–major, or jemadar, serving under the British. He was a veritable legend in those days not only because of his height, but also because he was a chieftain, a landlord, and a real local bigwig. This jemadar sahib’s commanding officer (CO), fresh from England and quite put out by the jemadar’s physical size – which shamed many a lusty highlander, including the CO himself, giving the jemadar much respect amongst the ranks – challenged him to wrestle with a tiger.

  The cause of this diabolical challenge was that one night in the barracks, the jemadar had deftly flipped the CO over his waist and onto his back in a neat wrestling trick. The CO himself, of no mean size, had coaxed him into a fighting match which would decide in front of the men who was the stronger of the two giants. Strange as it might seem, the Rajput jemadar took on the tiger, with the CO secretly wishing that the animal should conveniently do away with the man who had so shamed him in the barracks. But the stout, old jemadar, when the time came, held the tiger at bay, physically grappling with the assaulting beast to successfully keep him away. The other English officers with the CO on his machaan, above the clearing where the tiger had been lured with a tied bait earlier to bring about the wrestling bout, said that they had seen enough and requested their CO to allow the tiger to be done away with. Their repeated pleading for the brave jemadar’s life caused the CO to relent. The tiger was shot at once by the waiting guns and the Rajput jemadar rescued.

  The yogi could fight tigers because god had given him the gift of anticipating their attacking moods and moves, or the jemadar, brave and nonchalant as he must have been temperamentally, could grapple with one! My friend, Mr Rana, had also got away from another he had wounded. They all carried, or still carry, scars deeper than the body shows, in their souls, from their face-to-face life-and-death struggle with the king of the jungle.

  To return to my story, the tigress lying in wait, with her wounds congealing slowly, must have been angry and in pain, and was

  surely in a cold mood by then – revenge tastes best when it is cold. With lashing tail, it was coming straight out of that nullah towards our elephant.

  Mukherjee climbed up the rock littered bank on the left side, barely three or four metres in front of our elephant. The tigress’ shattering roar unnerved the elephant. Turning right about, it stampeded through the scrub, away from where the tigress had roared in frenzy. My elder brother twisted unsteadily around on the elephant’s jolting back. Grinding his rifle to his tossing shoulder he chanced a very difficult and desperate shot at the tigress in the gully below. The .500 express bullet hit the tigress on its right, gashing through the waist and lodging in the upper part of the hind-leg, as was later discovered. The tigress, mainly enraged at the elephant whom it saw first, now prepared to charge at its fleeing bulk, despite the near-incapacitating blow to its right hindquarters from the high-powered bullet. Hurtling through the bushes, it bounded around the bend and scrambled partly up the nullah’s left bank. Seeing the elephant bolt away out of immediate reach, it stopped with its front legs on top of the gully’s bank and its wounded hindquarters bunched up beneath.

  Events seemed to have moved too fast for Mukherjee, unlike his companions, to flee anywhere else. Nervous, or heaven knows what, he stood rooted above the spot only a metre from the gully’s bank and straight in front of the charging tigress. It seemed an unfair joust to the death between unequal, unmatched fighters. We caught sight of Mukherjee transfixed before the tigress completely blocking any attempts from our guns at it. The tigress’ eyes were still fixed on the ludicrous sight of the runaway elephant, its gaping jaws dripping angrily with foam and froth that dribbled onto the ground a metre or so away from the shocked man, riveted in paralyzed nervousness to his place. Seeing the elephant flee out of reach, the tigress lowered her murderous eyes and at once saw Mukherjee. Shocked, surprised perhaps, at seeing a human being at such close quarters, the tigress paused for the briefest moment before leaping on him to seek revenge. Our friend seemed frozen in his tracks and beyond any earthly help.

  The tigress’ surprise at suddenly seeing Mukherjee and her brief pause for that fraction of a second gave Mukherjee the opportunity to recover enough sense to lift and shoulder his rifle and fire a near point-blank shot into the tigress, just as it sprang over the nullah’s bank at him. That brief pause of a second that the tigress allowed him, and the fact that Mukherjee has shot seven more tigers and all of them on foot, proved the redoubtable tigress’ undoing. Another man could have easily, thoughtlessly, turned tail, or collapsed in a nervous heap under the strain of that moment of truth. The fact that Mukherjee retained his presence of mind in such a situation is tribute enough to his courage.

  The high-velocity .500 express bullet hitting the wounded tigress dead-centre in the chest from that close a range, smashed it back and down into the bed of the nullah. Mukherjee, undoubtedly encouraged by the sight of the tigress falling back over the verge, went closer to the edge of the gully to get a better look at the animal and was surprised to find the tigress still mobile and attemptin
g to gain the broken edges of the bank where, seconds before, he had thought he could safely look down from. He shot it carefully in the neck, putting an end to it.

  Thinking back on it, I can imagine it could have easily been the other way around. When the dead tigress was brought to our camp, we were overcome by its strength and tenacity. Although a modest 8'9'' in size, it had unflinchingly taken four high-powered, high velocity, hard- and soft-nosed rifle bullets, before succumbing to the havoc the projectiles wrought whilst tearing through its body. These had broken a front and a back leg initially, smashed through the flesh of the

  chest and finally, fatally, penetrated the thick of the neck to destroy the brain.

  Hunting history is replete with instances of the adventurous who were unable to stand up to the tiger’s hurtling charge. For no fault of their own, of course! The odds against them were just too great. The tiger is incredibly strong and in its astonishing capacity to bear bullet wounds and high-velocity impacts, outranks many sturdy four-footed animals. It is equalled in this only by the grizzly bear, the bull-elephant and the rhinoceros.