A wolverine is eating my leg

by Tim Cahill

  That was exactly what G. Ritchie White wanted to avoid. A registered professional forester, White was clearly the best of the competitors with a map and compass. His strategy was to move slowly and silently, using the contours of the land to hide himself. Where another player might run parallel to a creek bed on the straightest line between two stations, White took the more arduous and circuitous ridge route. White planned to engage no one in a shooting battle. It was the winning strategy.

  White emerged from the woods unmarked, holding four flags, two hours and fifteen minutes after the contest had begun. "I hunt deer," he told me, "and you have to concentrate. But there is an extra dimension in this. The idea of being hunted in return. You have to concentrate on every sound, every movement. I was mentally exhausted after the first hour."

  The results of the game were probably inconclusive, but it was instructive to see how people react in a survival situation—even a mock survival situation. Certainly the two city boys in the competition had done remarkably well—better, perhaps, than country boys might have done in a competition that involved a New York subway map and cashing a check in Manhattan on a Sunday.

  "I believe in competition for its own sake," Gaines told me later. "I also believe that we have very little real wilderness left anymore. The outdoors, then, is a backdrop, a screen for what you want to project upon it. You either give in to the concept that there is no more challenge in the outdoors, or you throw your own projection on the woods. I mean, if you climb ice or run rapids, you impose your own rules. And you do this to pull out responses similar to real survival situations."

  Gaines was probably right, at least for those of us who enjoy this constant testing and attendant adrenaline rush. It is a way of finding out who you are, and even those who object to the concept of the game, to its emotional weight, look for the same kinds of answers—by whatever means available. I know for a fact that quite a few of those who said they found the idea "sick" spend twice-weekly sessions with a man who says "uh, yes, uh-huh, and how do you feel about that?"

  It also seemed to me, in the aftermath of the game, that there was something vaguely funny about it, something humorous in a cosmic sense. The invitational letter had ended with a quote from Menander, a Greek: "A man's fate is but his disposition." True enough, until one is maimed by a runaway pie truck or struck by lightning, or buried beneath thirty tons of concrete when a hotel walkway collapses in Kansas City. The game, it seemed to me in its aftermath, was just another way of whistling past the midnight graveyard that exists in all of us, an image one may find frightening or funny, depending on his disposition.

  Menander lived about 300 B.C., and is considered one of the first full-blown comedians in dramatic history.

  N. N. Badoni, a sweet shop owner in this north Indian town of Dehra Dun, suggested that I might consider my swim a religious experience. N.N. was an avid trekker and devout Hindu.

  I am not much of a fan of the Hindu religion, associating it as I do with the pestiferous weenies known as Hare Krish-nas whose panhandling presence in American airports results in such mind-boggling exchanges as "We're giving away copies of this book: it's five thousand years old."

  "Five thousand years?" Stunned disbelief. "It looks brand-new."

  My experience with holy types in India thus far, I told N.N., made the Krishnas seem like a class act.

  N.N. agreed that some of the holy men who populate the subcontinent like rats in a grainery were undoubtedly transparent frauds and despicable money-grubbers. Still, he felt there were teachers of spiritual distinction: teachers who did not come to you. They were men you searched for in your soul. And when you found them, you would know. He mentioned a pair of swamis, now deceased, whose teachings had enriched his life.

  I nodded politely, and N.N. bought me another beer. He was of the priestly Brahmin caste and did not, himself, drink. N.N. had provided research for Gary Weare's book Trekking in the Indian Himalaya, and had spent many years studying the Garhwal region north of Dehra Dun, where I had just been. Located in the lush Himalayan foothills that rise above the blistered plains of northern India, the Garhwal is considered the Abode of the Gods, and is replete with Hindu pilgrimage sites: Gangotri, near the source of the sacred Ganges river; Yamunotri, at the head of the Yamuna river where pilgrims boil rice in the hot springs below the temple to the goddess Yamunotri so that they may eat the "food of the gods;" Kenarnath, the divine resting place of the god Shiva; and Badrinath, the home of the god Vishnu. The Garhwal is the holiest and most sacred area in all of India.

  I had been rafting the Tons, one of the innumerable glacier-fed rivers of the Garhwal. It is a little-known tribu-

  tary of the Ganges, and at its source are the snowfields of the 20,720-foot-high mountain called Bandarpunch, the monkey's tail. The Tons is considered holy to Shiva, one of the most complex of the Hindu gods. Shiva blows hot and cold: he is at once Shiva the Beneficent and Shiva the Avenger. In the homes along the Tons, there are small altars where candles burn below bright printed posters of the ambiguous god. Here is Shiva carrying, in his four hands, a trident, a deerskin, a drum, and a club with a skull at the end; Shiva with a serpent around his neck; Shiva wearing a necklace of skulls. The streak of blue in his hair represents the Ganges, for it is Shiva who brought the Holy River to earth, breaking its fall from heaven by allowing it to trickle through his matted hair. Shiva is usually depicted as having a third eye in the middle of his forehead. When the extraneous eye is closed, Shiva is pacific, and the figure symbolizes a search for inward vision. When the third eye is open, Shiva the Wrathful rains fire and destruction upon the earth.

  N.N. said that these tales of the gods weren't necessarily the literal truth of creation. They were a way of thinking about creation, life, and the meaning thereof.

  It is a commonplace observation that India, and northern India in particular, has been a hotbed of innovative spirituality since the dawn of civilization. Hindus, Moslems, Jain-ists, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, exist side by side and all react one upon the other so that over the centuries, it has become religion—colorful, earnest, variegated—that defines the country. Indians, as a people, are intoxicated with religion, and even a visitor of sharp and jaundiced opinions is likely to be tumbled willy-nilly in the torrent of spiritual concerns.

  N.N. was right, of course. My little swim in the Tons was an exercise in perceived mortality. Food for compulsive thought. I couldn't, for instance, shake this terrifying religious image. It is Shiva as I had seen him in the posters, Shiva the Pacific, the inward-looking. Suddenly, the third eye snaps open and there is piercing fire, nuclear white, and final.

  I thanked N.N. for the beer and the conversation then hobbled off to my room. When you begin to imagine strange three-eyed gods winking at you, it's time to regroup, reconsider, change your religion, even finish the last beer and go to bed.

  Delhi is the capital of India, and its administrative center, New Delhi, is often described as a city of gardens. Unfortunately, I had come to this otherwise graceful city in the worst of times, which is to say, during the month of May. Afternoon temperatures rose to 110 degrees and would hold there for another month until the cooling rains of the monsoon. Dust, fine as talc, floated over everything and colored the sky a dull whisky brown. In the countryside, whirlwinds swept over the baking plain and, at a distance, it was impossible to tell the sky from the earth.

  Delhi's heat, in the month of May, tries men's souls. In 1986, on May thirteenth, a man named Gupta killed his wife because he believed she was sleeping with another man named Gupta. Eight persons—members of a wedding party who had asked for some water at a temple—were injured in a fracas with temple keepers who believed the water would be used to mix alcoholic drinks. A civil servant who had not been promoted at the dairy board killed himself and left a note excoriating his superiors.

  There was a Santa Ana tension in the still, burning air of the city, but May and June are also months of snowmelt in the Himalaya, the months the
foothills erupt in wildflow-ers, the most auspicious months for a pilgrimage to the cool beauty of the sacred Garhwal.

  Sixteen of us were camped in a lush meadow, by a wide eddy on the Tons river, in the Abode of the Gods. There was a scent of rhododendrons in the air, and the temperature, at four in the afternoon, stood just shy of 80 degrees. The river valley was narrow, 400 yards across, and the hills rose steeply and spirelike on either side, obscuring a glittering ridge of the high Himalaya to the north. There were leafy alders on the meadow. Deodar pines, like lodgepole pines, forested the higher slopes. It was a young river valley, recently cut in geological terms, and the Tons, fed by spring snowmelt, was running high and fast.

  It was our first day on the river, and Jack Morrison laid it out for his nine paying passengers. Jack is the president and chief guide of White Magic Unlimited, a rafting and trekking outfitting business out of Mill Valley, California. He had made a first descent of the river five years ago. The original plan had been to raft the more well-known Yamuna River, of which the Hindu scriptures say: "No mortal mocks her fury; no mortal stops her onward flow." But the Yamuna had struck Morrison as a pretty tame ribbon of water—about class II Whitewater: "rapids of medium difficulty with clear, wide passages"—and he didn't think American mortals would be willing to travel all the way to India for a gentle float trip. Hiking east, over an icy ridge, he came upon the Tons. It was his dream river, the river he could build his company around.

  As Jack spoke, local people from the nearby village of Mori gathered about. The children came first, followed by old men, and finally, men who seemed to hold positions of authority in the village. They wore clean western-style clothes in subdued colors. Women did not come into our camp. They sat on the ridges in tight little groups, and occasionally the wind would carry the tinkle of giggles down into the meadow where we sat.

  This would be the fourth time the river had ever been

  run, Jack said. The trip was really "a commercial exploratory," which meant there would be a lot of time spent scouting the rapids ahead and deciding on strategy.

  There was plenty of big water, but what set the Tons apart from other big-water rivers Jack knew—he mentioned the Bio Bio in Chile and the Zambesi in Zambia— was the "consistency" of the white water. "It is one rapid after another," he said, "almost eighty miles of class III and

  IV and even class V rapids. The Whitewater sections are separated by one hundred yards or less of flat water, which are probably moving at five to seven miles an hour." Class

  V rapids are defined as "having extremely long, difficult, and violent rapids that follow each other almost without interruption . . . plenty of obstacles, big drops, violent current and very steep gradient." The obstacles and drops on the Tons meant the rafts would have to do a lot of evasive maneuvering in heavy water. It was a very "technical" river.

  The major danger, of course, was being thrown from one of the rubber rafts or having it flip. A person might be held down for some time in a big hole, might be thumped up and down in a circular motion—"Maytagged"—but the more deadly situation would be to be swept through several consecutive rapids. "On most rafting rivers," Jack said, "there will be a quiet pool at the end of a rapid." On the Tons, however, the rapids were "closely linked," and even the strongest swimmer could be swept from one rapid to another. "The water is cold," Jack said, "it's all spring snow-melt now, and the longer you're in it, the more it saps your strength. Swim too many rapids, and you'll be too weak to make it to the bank. If you go in, do everything possible to get out after the first rapid."

  Such was the nature of our pilgrimage.

  A man feels a fool. Here I was, sitting under one of the alders, trying to read a book entitled Hindus of the Himalayas and getting absolutely nowhere because I was surrounded by a hundred or so Hindus of the Himalayas who wanted to know what I was reading. The book, an ethnography of the region by Gerald Berre-man, said that the plains Brahmins consider the people of the hills to be rude bumpkins. They live in this most religiously significant area of India, but according to Berre-man, they engage in "frequent meat and liquor parties . . . are unfamiliar with scripture, largely ignore the great gods of Hinduism, marry across caste lines," and do other things that made me think I'd enjoy their company.

  I read that passage to a man named Ajaypal Rana who declared it "blasphemy." His tone was mild, unconcerned. He might just as well have said the passage was "interesting" for all the passion in his voice. I read on. "Says here that people 'conceal these activities' and they 'project behavior indicating adherence to the accredited values of society.' "

  Mr. Rana smiled and asked if our rubber rafts were inflated with helium. "Just air," I said. My friend seemed disappointed by the technological poverty of this arrangement.

  The night was just cool enough for the thinnest of sleeping bags, and I had laid mine out under one of the leafy alders, in a field of calf-high marijuana and mint. The breeze felt like velvet, and the stars swirled above in the clear mountain air. Far to the south, the sky flickered electric blue as heat lightning shimmered over the baking plain of the Ganges River. We had talked for several hours, the Hindus of the Himalayas and I. There were men with obvious physical hand-

  icaps among the villagers, but they had been teachers or farmers or tailors. There were no beggars among the hill people.

  Which had not been the case in Delhi. On the streets, the heat pounding down from above then rising up off the concrete kept battalions of beggars working feverishly. There was no shade, no place to sit, and so the horribly mutilated hopped or rolled or lurched along, hands (or what passed for hands) out, beseeching looks on their faces. The novelist and travel writer V. S. Naipaul, a West Indian Hindu who wrote two brilliant books about his travels in India, the land of his grandfather, found the sheer numbers of beggars particularly distressing. In India: A Wounded Civilization he wrote: "The very idea of beggary, precious to Hindus as religious theater, a demonstration of the workings of karma, a reminder of one's duty to oneself and one's future, has been devalued. And the Bombay beggar, displaying his usual mutilations (inflicted in childhood by the beggar-master who had acquired him, as proof of the young beggar's sins in a previous life) now finds, unfairly, that he provokes annoyance rather than awe. The beggars themselves, forgetting their Hindu function, also pester tourists; and the tourists misinterpret the whole business, seeing in the beggary of the few the beggary of all."

  There had been, in Delhi, a young man, nearly naked but for a white loincloth. He was lean and dark, starkly muscled, and his right leg had been amputated just above the knee. He saw me—an obvious tourist—across a wide boulevard choked with the chaotic late-afternoon traffic that, in India, is a form of population control: that day, in Delhi alone, three died in accidents and seventeen were injured. The man came for me, threading his way nimbly through the cars, hopping on one bare foot and a crutch fashioned from the branch of a tree. I was amazed at his dexterity, the athletic fluidity of his movements.

  The beggar hit the sidewalk, and just for a moment I saw triumph in his face, and a kind of joy. But as he fell into hop-step beside me, the light died in his eyes and he stared fixedly with a wet and pathetic spaniel-eyed beggar's gaze. "Alms," he said.

  I am a man who habitually doles out spare change to winos, I suppose because I see the possibility that I might, one day, total my karma and find myself sitting in alley behind a tattoo parlor, swigging muscatel from a bottle in a paper bag. But this idea of sins in the previous life resulting in the mutilation of children by beggar-masters and misery pimps—I would not, I decided, perpetuate this system. I would not, as a matter of principle, give money to beggars.

  "Alms," the one-legged athlete moaned.

  I stared through him and silently chanted the mantra that makes beggars disappear. "You are invisible. . . ."

  He hopped along by my side for three city blocks—"you are invisible"—then peeled off and made for the other side of the street, playing picador with the t
axis.

  I kept replaying the encounter in my mind and it was keeping me awake. His misfortune wasn't his fault. Giving him money: the penny or so he wanted, would it be such a sin? I thought: it would be like standing on the brink of hell and tossing in a wet sponge.

  The first day out of Mori was the easiest. There were rapids without a lot of rocks. The people had gathered by the hundreds to see us off. It is a romantic conceit, but I had rather hoped they might regard us with awe. "Crazy brave fools risking watery death for naught but glory . . ." That sort of thing. As it was, we had severe competition because a band of Gujars, seminomadic Moslem herdsmen, had come in that morning. I heard them driving their cattle along the trail above our meadow and saw them in the pale light of false dawn: fine tall people with aquiline features, shouting and laughing on the hillside above. The women wore intricately patterned pant-and-tunic combinations and covered their heads with colorful scarves of bright red or green. The older men dyed their beards red. All the males, men and boys, wore red skull caps embroidered with golden thread and topped by a red pom-pom on a braided stalk.

  There had been Gujars among the Hindus the night before, but this was a special group. Their clothes were finer and brighter, the women wore more bangles, their cattle were fatter, and their dogs were bright-eyed and well fed. They were, I learned later, show-biz Gujars.

  The group, about eighteen of them, set up in a meadow not far from us, and the people of Mori abandoned us for the Gujar show, which was undoubtedly more interesting than watching people load rafts all morning. The Gujars had with them several dusty black Himalayan bears, sometimes called moon bears for the white or orange-yellow crescent on their chests. The bears were controlled by a long rope that ran through the nose and out the mouth, but they seemed to respond to verbal commands. There was "sleeping bear," who lay on his back with his paws in the air, "smoking bear," who sucked on a six-foot-long stick of bamboo, "disco bear," who danced, and "hugging bear," who gently embraced a local child. The people of Mori laughed, threw coins to the Gujars, and strolled back to watch us cast off.