by Katy Yocom
She resisted the impulse. If she started down that path, she might not come back. Still, she kept up her journaling after their drives through the park, partly out of habit, partly because she might yet decide to try publishing something.
January 16, 2000
To any creature traveling through it, the grassland is another sort of forest. But what it lacks in view, it makes up for in scent and motion. Whiffs of dust and mice and sun-toasted grains. The movement of insects and snakes and, overhead, in the swaying seed heads, the lighting and taking off of tiny birds. Viewed from above, the passage of a larger animal through the grass creates an unmistakable wake.
When the creator of that wake, a tigress, steps from the tall grass onto the lakeshore, her arrival causes a stir. Tigers are the celebrities of their world, hounded by chital, sambar, wild boar—every variety of prey species, gawking and shrieking like overwrought fans. This morning, it’s a troop of langur monkeys sounding a harsh alarm: Ow! Ow! And so, as usual, the whole gossiping forest knows a tiger is on the move.
The tigress—the forest guards have dubbed her Machli—makes her way around the shoreline, past water birds drawing silvery ripples in the lake’s black surface. She selects a hiding spot in a stand of grass and settles in.
The sky lightens, and the forest comes fully awake. The sun breaks in a brilliant burst, and suddenly the world pops upright, or so it appears: Every tuft of grass, every pebble gains a long, crisp shadow. The monkeys move off. Machli creeps backward farther into the grass, moving in increments of millimeters. Like all tigers, she possesses a genius for imperceptible movement.
An hour past dawn, a herd of sambar deer approaches. According to Sanjay, these are the tigers’ best prey: large, plentiful, and slightly lackadaisical in matters of their own survival. Sambar will ignore the alarm calls of chital and langurs, skittish creatures who’ll raise a fuss about a jackal or dhole. It might be a case of species-wide overconfidence: Sambar know they’re steely beasts, formidable of antler and sharp of hoof. Or maybe it’s just stupidity.
The herd passes by the tigress’s hiding place. She waits, motionless, till the last doe steps past. Then she charges.
A shriek of alarm calls goes up. The water explodes as sambar leap into the lake. The doe bolts. Machli gains on her, gallops alongside. With the swipe of one massive paw, she knocks the deer to her knees, and in an instant the tigress has the creature’s throat in her teeth, crushing. The doe falls. Only when the legs stop kicking and the body goes limp does Machli release her grip.
She opens the haunch, buries her face in glistening flesh, and pulls at the connective tissue. When a tree pie ventures too close, she raises her bloodied head and snarls the bird away. After her meal, she drags what remains into thick cover to protect it from the vultures already surrounding her. If she can keep them at bay, Sanjay says, she’ll dine off this carcass for three or four days.
Well fed, she drinks, then stretches out on the open lakeshore to let the sun warm her distended belly. Across the lake, the sambar graze placidly, fully aware of her but less wary now that the danger has passed.
We watch this scene, totally absorbed until a moment comes when we all realize we’re hungry. We spread our picnic on the hood of the jeep and eat breakfast, observing through binoculars as Machli licks blood from her fur.
“She made it look easy,” I say.
“You’re a good luck charm once again,” Sanjay tells me. “You’ve brought Machli a kill.”
Is he patronizing me? I can’t tell. “Happy to help,” I say, but I wonder if he notices I’m a little annoyed.
She began accompanying Sanjay on school visits. Not that that amounted to doing something, but at least she was learning how Tiger Survival did its work. Sanjay opened every session with a slide presentation, saying nothing. “I want them to think about conservation,” he told her, “but first they need to feel.”
Here was a photo of Akbar, the big male Sarah had seen her first day in the park. He was running, his massive forelimbs reaching, his topline a long, beautiful curve. Next, a fresh pugmark in soft dirt. Akbar’s regal head in profile. And a video clip of a tigress at rest in dappled sunlight, the tip of her tail thumping the ground contentedly. Sarah watched from the back of the room.
“‘When you see a tiger, it is always like a dream,’” Sanjay said, looking at the screen. “The zoologist Ullas Karanth spoke those words.” He turned to the children. “A hundred years ago, one hundred thousand tigers roamed all across Asia, from Siberia to Java, from China to the Caspian Sea. And how many wild tigers do you suppose there are now?”
He clicked to a photo of a construction site, captioned Encroachment. When humans moved into an area, wild lands disappeared, falling to agriculture (click: a mustard field) or urban sprawl (click: new housing). Humans poached prey species, leaving the tiger little to eat. Land development cut off natural corridors for dispersing tigers, stranding populations in disconnected patches of wilderness (click: aerial photo) that became genetic islands.
Click: a warehouse of stacked tiger bones and severed heads. Caption: Poaching. Gasps and shouts from the children.
“The legacy of Mao Tse-tung,” Sanjay said. “Perpetrator of genocide against the tiger in the sixties and seventies. He paid for their carcasses.”
The children’s eyes popped at this news.
“Mao’s anti-tiger policy has wiped the South China tiger off the face of the earth, except for the tiniest remnant population—thirty individuals at last count and sure to die out completely. Meanwhile Mao stockpiled the body parts of thousands of tigers for medicinal use: tiger-bone powder for pain relief, tiger brains for acne and laziness, whiskers for toothaches.”
He refrained from mentioning tiger-penis soup for virility, Sarah noted, or that the Sanskrit word for tiger was viagra.
“In the 1980s, Mao’s stockpiles ran out, and suddenly poaching became a crisis in India. In the early 1990s, fully half the tiger population of Ranthambore was wiped out. Half,” Sanjay said. “Imagine it. And now there are only about three thousand left in the wild, anywhere in the world.”
A little girl in glasses raised her hand and asked whether the tiger was doomed to go extinct in the wild.
“That is up to you,” he said. “The only way the tiger will survive is if the government creates tiger-friendly laws and enforces them to the maximum. It is up to the citizens to demand that they do. The future of the tiger belongs to you. You are citizens of the largest democracy in the world. You must demand that your rightful inheritance be preserved.”
“Nicely done,” Sarah said on the drive back to the office.
“It’s one of my favorite parts of the job,” he said. “I love their idealism. I love that it’s my duty to bring them hope, whether or not I can find it in my own heart.”
They exchanged a smile, but then he grew silent and formal, as if he suddenly regretted their conversation. It irritated her.
“Why did you say that thing yesterday?” she asked.
He glanced at her. “What thing?”
“About me being a good-luck charm. In what scenario does my presence help Machli take down a sambar doe?”
He looked at her quizzically. “I just meant that the odds are against it. A tiger only gets a kill in something like one in every twenty hunting attempts. So Machli had good luck on that try, and we were lucky to see it. Just like we were lucky to see Akbar your first day in the park.”
She wasn’t sure that explanation quite answered her question, but she wasn’t going to argue the point. “You’re really great with kids,” she ventured.
“They’re my favorite kind of people.”
“Do you have any of your own?” she asked.
He merely shook his head, which meant he wasn’t telling the truth or he just wanted her to quit prying. Fair enough. She’d find out some other way.
S
he asked if they could stop by the post office. Eighteen letters this time. She could feel Sanjay’s curiosity, but he didn’t ask, and she offered nothing. She tucked them in her messenger bag to open at home that evening.
When she’d placed the classified ad, she hadn’t considered the confusion and disappointment that would come of weeding through the responses. All were off base (“I was ayah to four children of a British family”); many told tales of tragedy (“since you left, my husband has died, and also all three of my children, and I am too crippled from arthritis to work”). Some asked for money. Sarah had supplied her own first name in the ad, but no last name and no mention of Quinn and Marcus. At the very least, Ayah would be able to give her that.
At home, she sat crossed-legged on the low sofa. One story she had never told anyone. It had happened during the liminal months after she’d decided to leave journalism and before she’d found Tiger Survival. Finishing up her journalistic fieldwork, she’d come to be a little scared of herself. I’m not really here, she’d thought more than once, and I’m going to get somebody killed.
On a hot, humid morning during her last assignment—it was in Panama—she took half a day and drove alone to a wildlife rescue center. The woman who ran it claimed she had some kind of mystical connection to the animals. Sarah had heard she had a tiger.
The woman wasn’t what Sarah had expected. Brown skin wrinkled like a withered apple, white hair, about four and a half feet tall. They came to an enclosure where a beautiful young tigress, rescued from a traveling circus, lay submerged to the shoulders in a metal water trough. Flies buzzed around her eyes. She seemed at peace with her lot. The woman asked Sarah in Spanish if she wanted to go inside.
“This one’s special,” she said. “You can touch her.”
The tigress gazed in their direction, then looked away. Like all cats, she didn’t traffic much in eye contact.
There could be no excuse for what Sarah did next. She couldn’t call it immersion journalism. She couldn’t call it journalism at all, just pure stupidity, the act of a woman who has lost her grip on her life. She walked into an enclosure with a tigress, thinking, Maybe this changes my life. Maybe her story would end here, in a ramshackle rescue center deep in the Panamanian jungle. Maybe that was okay.
She tried to unthink that thought. She cupped her palm around the occipital protuberance at the back of the animal’s head. The tigress allowed Sarah’s touch as if she knew something about her. Her hand fit that head so perfectly it made her ache.
She could just imagine how that story would go over with Geeta.
The letters lay spread out on a carved end table. Each time she opened a new batch, it surprised her how thoroughly the task drained her. She set to it with a sigh, using her finger as a letter opener.
Nothing. Nothing but an empty place that remained empty.
She could do more, of course. She could hire a private investigator, put her own reporting skills to use. But she wanted to let this play out. She had put the thing in motion. Now it was up to the universe.
.
On their days off work, William, Sarah, and Sanjay began riding in the park with a British film crew. They’d met the crew one night at the Ranthambore Regency, a gathering spot for locals who worked in conservation and ecotourism. The film crew respected Sanjay’s skills as a naturalist and subtly fawned over William as an elder statesman. Sarah knew they considered her unnecessary until someone noticed they had better luck spotting tigers when she rode along—one tiger in particular. After his appearance on Sarah’s first day, Akbar had apparently decided he liked the visibility. Seeing Akbar was nearly routine for Sarah—though William and Sanjay felt compelled to emphasize, each time he appeared, how unusual it really was. “He’s developed a crush on you, Sarah,” William joked. She shrugged modestly, but she had to admit she felt rather jaunty about the whole thing. Whatever the attraction, the film crew were happy to capitalize on it. They took hours of footage. They talked about Akbar as if they’d discovered a handsome farm boy and were about to make him a filmi hero.
Sarah watched Sanjay from her usual spot in the back of the jeep. He didn’t have children; she’d confirmed this with William. She and William had shared a laugh with their eyes when she’d inquired. The perks of being a journalist: If you want to know something, you just ask.
February arrived. With the warmer weather, flame-of-the-forest trees burst out with scarlet flowers, painting whole valleys in brilliant swaths. Babies abounded: a litter of porcupines waddling after their mother; a newborn chital fawn practicing the delicate art of walking on long, wobbly legs. Rajbagh Lake whistled with the peeps of ducklings. One gorgeous spring morning, Sanjay spotted Machli crouching in the grass, stalking chital. Sarah raised her field glasses for her first close-up view of the tigress. Machli was particularly beautiful, she realized, with markings on her cheeks like chrysanthemum petals and a slender necklace of black that came to a point on her white chest. But her ribs stood out sharply. “She seems thin,” she said.
“It’s a good sign,” Sanjay said. “My guess is she’s nursing a litter.”
“Ah, good for you, Machli,” William said, with sorrow in his voice. “Her last litter didn’t make it through the drought.”
Sanjay lowered his field glasses. “We won’t see these new cubs for a few weeks. At this age, they’re easy prey for predators. Machli will keep them hidden while she hunts, and they’ll stay totally silent while she’s gone, unless they get hungry and cry.” He paused. “It’s high pressure for the mother, but otherwise these early weeks are the easy part, because she only has to hunt for herself. When the cubs start eating meat, she needs to bring in more prey, and her job gets much more difficult.”
William cleared his throat. “Well. The film crew’s got to be thrilled about this development. A litter of cubs provides a built-in storyline one way or the other.”
Their forays through the park turned up no sign of the cubs from the Semli Valley, the ones William had mentioned the day Sunil was killed. Their absence might have meant they had dispersed. If so, they had entered the most dangerous time of their lives. Their options were limited: They could spend the next few years skulking around the park trying to avoid the resident male till they were big enough to take him on, or they could leave and try to make a living out in the prey-poor, dangerous world.
Sarah thought of Sunil, mistaken for a bullock. And of the stories Sanjay had told her of the tigers who strayed outside the park, who ended up getting hit by cars or starving to death. There simply wasn’t enough food to sustain an animal so large. The previous year, a Ranthambore subadult had been found alongside some railroad tracks, 200 kilometers to the south. The autopsy had found his stomach empty but for three crickets.
.
May 3, 2000
Machli’s twin daughters are about ten weeks old the first time we see them. They’re no bigger than housecats, all bright eyes and stripes. She has started leading them on walks through her territory. They follow her on shaky legs, heads bobbling as they hurry to keep up. This is a classroom experience, Sanjay says. She’s teaching them their world.
The weather is growing hotter by the day. Green things are burning up. Lake levels are dropping, ringing the water with mud flats that dry and break into flakes, and rivers have started to disappear entirely. Prey animals are hewing more closely to the water holes, which makes for easier kills, maybe, but poorer ones as the animals lose condition.
Machli leads her children one afternoon into a shaded glen and lies down to rest. Despite the heat, the cubs clamber over her, their hunting instincts coming into play. One hides behind Machli’s head while the other flattens her ears to stalk and pounce. A swatting match ensues. Within minutes they collapse into a pile between their mother’s paws and fall instantly asleep.
In the jeep we’re congratulating one another on the terrific sighting when suddenly Machli senses s
omething. She gets to her feet and stands at attention, sending the cubs to hide beneath a bush. She calls out: aaooongggh. And Akbar steps into the clearing!
They rub their heads together and turn toward the streambed. Machli summons her children, and the four of them pick their way over the dry stones of the nullah till they arrive at a muddy pool. The adults back into the water to keep drops from splashing into their eyes. The babies bound in, heedless.
The cubs keep their distance at first from Akbar, but soon the bolder one can’t resist. There is a meeting of noses, and the big male chuffs deep in his throat. The cub pats her father’s shoulder with her big front paws and leaps away.
Sanjay says he’s never seen them together before. But he expects they’ll keep up this routine as the rainy season approaches.
He asked me whether I should get credit for the sighting. I laughed and said, “Why not? I’ll take it.”
.
The month of June was nearly intolerable in Rajasthan. The heat refused to relent, even at night. The markets reeked of sweat and rotting food. Dust invaded every crevice, down to the faint lines at the base of Sarah’s wrists.
All throughout Sawai, people carried on the same conversation. They watched the sky, talked about it, smelled the air for rain and choked on dust instead. Individually they came to realize that other people had grown stupider and more annoying. Sanjay criticized Sarah one day for yawning, and she snapped at him.
Signs of the monsoon appeared early that year. In the first week of June, clouds began to gather in the late afternoon and paced across the sky all night, obliterating the stars in restless swirls. Mornings dawned low and overcast, though by nine o’clock the gray burned off, and the rest of the day shone bright and hard as nickel.
