The point between the eyes in the tiger’s skull, even though a difficult mark, is generally considered the best spot to hit it in. Luck plays a big role in achieving this mark though. For there is a small pad of hard, roundish muscle right between, and a trifle above, the tiger’s eyes that can completely deflect even the fractionally angled or crooked shot and thus allow the slug to glance off the tiger’s skull instead of penetrating it as intended. The terrific impact of the .500 express rifle’s bullet had served only to save Mukherjee’s life momentarily, as hitting the charging tigress directly in the centre of the chest, from a mere metre-and-a-half away, had literally picked up the huge, powerful animal and hurled it down into the gully’s bed like a flung blanket. The soft-nosed slug was found to have mushroomed ideally against the tigress’ chest at that close a range. But even the tigress’ musculature had proved tense and aggressively hard enough to simply contain the slug without allowing the projectile to break a single bone in that area. The sheer power of the .500 black powder nitro express cartridge had saved our friend’s life, for despite the range, a lighter rifle could not even turn away the charging tiger that the soft-nose bullet did so effectively. The rifle slug was found to have entered the flesh of the chest and burst, scooping a hollow into the flesh as the muscles disintegrated yet resisting even then to keep the slug from penetrating through their formidable hardness to the bones or the vital organs behind them. Only a second shot fired by Mukherjee, from above and through the neck where it joins the chest, could do that conclusively.
Without luck’s intervention, the tiger is very nearly invulnerable and certainly more than capable of turning the hunter into the hunted. That element of pure, raw danger encountered in hunting the tiger grows into a compulsive addiction, over time, for the big-game hunter because survival in the face of danger is the true whetstone to hone the hunting instinct.
1 Kalagarh division was an administrative unit of the Uttar Pradesh government’s forest department. Later, with its location coming under the Jim Corbett National Park administration, and more recently, the state of Uttarakhand, lesser known administrative units such as Haathikund forest block have become obscure. No visitor is able to enter the core areas of the park, nor will any hunter get a permit from the old forest department to ever try his luck in the once well-known jungles of the area.
We were camping at Halduparao in the Kalagarh division when the first of the two alarming and intriguing episodes I describe in this chapter occurred. The third is at best a second-hand account and deserves to be relegated to the end, also because it is so preternatural in its occurrence.
Located deep in the interiors of the terai foothills, this region was thickly forested. The population in the area was scarce, the few villages were widely scattered over the vast, forested hill tracts and their meagre inhabitants badly isolated in the jungle’s overwhelming grip. We found ourselves, therefore, short of bait to tie out for tigers. Whatever young buffaloes and cattle were procured was with great difficulty. Further, a minimum of twelve baits were most certainly required if the entire area in the purview of our shikar permit was to be satisfactorily covered. Despite their unceasing efforts, our shikaris had managed only four young buffaloes. In order to overcome this shortage, the baits were tied in places most likely to be visited by a tiger. Other promising spots were covered aptly when game trails that were the tiger’s regular beats were located and machaans constructed over them on the many grand tall trees commanding the various tiger trails. We sat up on these machaans in the evening in the hope of coming across one. The baits were left unmanned during the night, pending necessary action as and when the tiger did kill any of them.
On the evening of the fourth day, Ram Singh was seated on one of these machaans. A forest road crossed a dry mountain stream, the place being singularly marked by the absence of any tall trees but for a weak and stunted one growing on the left bank of the stream on which Ram Singh sat with a gun-boy with little hope of anything happening that fateful evening.
At about half-past eight, when the silent night had become considerably dark, Ram Singh perceived a long, shadowy but unmistakable shape coming down the forest road. That shadowy object took on a clearer form as it stood outlined against the lighter sands of the dry stream where its course crossed the forest road. When the sinister shape had gently padded on to the sands and reached the middle of the watercourse, Ram Singh aimed carefully with the .450 rifle and fired at the nebulous target. The beast dropped in its tracks, flopping noiselessly on to the stream bed. Ram Singh continued to aim the rifle at the motionless form, his finger tense around the trigger. For a long five minutes it just lay there, displaying no apparent signs of life. Elated at their easy and quick success, for who wouldn’t be, Ram Singh and the pahari gun-boy lit bidis, Indian cigarillos. He had quite naturally put the rifle away, neglecting to take another shot at the presumably dead animal for fear of spoiling its coat. Confident of having bagged their tiger, they smoked their bidis, congratulated each other on their luck, and stared at the animal that presumably lay dead below them. Then, one by one, they expectorated loudly, as most bidi smokers do, and casually threw down the little, smoked stubs. It was the last pleasurable thing they were fated to do for the remainder of that night.
Pandemonium broke loose without the slightest warning through the dark. With the characteristic ferocity of its charging roar – which Mukherjee, in the last story, had felt to be like the terrible and prolonged angry sound of earth, rock and the mountains tumbling cataclysmically down – the still form of the tigress, which Ram Singh had been looking animatedly at, came to sudden, violent life! It sprang up from its supine position and roaring, charged at the tree and came right beneath the precariously positioned machaan. Trying to stand upon its hind legs, the tigress grappled ferociously with the tree-trunk, single-mindedly trying to reach up to the machaan with its formidable claws.
The suddenness of the still very much alive tigress’ charge, coupled with those loud, nerve-wracking, blood-curdling roars and its deadly unimaginable proximity, caught the unwary gun-boy by surprise. The shock caused him to collapse in a dead faint, but fortunately, on top of, and not below, the machaan. The torch he had tucked away beneath his legs while smoking and relaxing was trapped under him squarely. Ram Singh, who could distinctly hear the tigress’ claws scraping the trunk of the tree and angrily gouging out splinters of wood from its bole while still roaring terribly, now found himself in an extremely dangerous position, dark as the night was, and bereft, as he had been rendered, of the benefit of a torch or an extra pair of hands to wield it. Unable to reconcile himself to meeting his end passively, as had the gun-boy, he peered over the edge of the machaan and tried his best to determine the tigress’ position in the inky dark beneath the tree and take a second, and much-belated, shot at it. He peered, stared and tried his best to catch sight of the beast through the fearful caterwauling that came from a bit too close below. He had but two more cartridges for the .450 with him which he had been carrying in a breast pocket of his tunic-type shirt. When he was thoroughly engaged in bending over and looking for the tigress, those heavy brass shells fell, suddenly, out of his pocket and irretrievably, into the darkness below! In the left chamber of the rifle, clutched a little more fervently in his nervous hands, only one cartridge now remained.
His first attempt at the tigress had hit it in the hindquarters and missed the heart behind the shoulder, for he had misjudged its speed as it slunk over that short stretch of unshadowed sand before becoming obscure again in the dark along the forest road. The crippling blow from that hard-hitting rifle and its high velocity heavy slug had partially paralyzed both the hind legs of the tigress’, rendering their tremendous coiled power even less than half-effective. Luckily, for Ram Singh! The tree in which he cowered, sheltering now so inadequately, was disastrously short and stunted. Even while playfully engaged in sharpening their claws, tigers are known to reach eight to ten feet up the bole of a tree. The height that an ang
ry one can spring and reach up to can well be imagined. This tigress could jump but partly up the tree, its broken hind legs causing it to slip back to the ground every time it tried to do so. Consequently, its awe-inspiring fury built up to a screaming rage and a roaring so terrible that it resounded through many miles of forest. The tigress came near enough the machaan to bring Ram Singh’s heart to his mouth and render the gradually recovering gun-boy unconscious yet again. With a final cartridge remaining in his rifle, Ram Singh, unnerved as he must have been with the irreparable loss of the two invaluable extra cartridges, abandoned any thought of taking another shot at the tigress, since it could only be a random one in the darkness of the night.
The tigress continued to growl close to the machaan, and created the most thunderous uproar, enthralling the forest and its petrified denizens with the noise, as it repeatedly clawed the tree in its furious attempts to reach its tormentors up on the machaan. That mysterious entity who rules alike over the affairs of men and animals, makes their minds terribly keen or dumb when he puts their life at stake. Ram Singh needed to save the final cartridge for his own survival in a last-ditch stand, and waited for the tigress’ head to come within his certain sight. To add to his misery, about half an hour later, another tiger came bounding out of the thick jungle, running along the stream bed, directly towards the machaan. Approaching the wounded tigress, which was still grappling with Ram Singh’s tree, trying its best to climb it, the tiger sniffed and snorted at the writhing female. The tigress roared even more loudly and angrily, perhaps at this sudden, uncalled-for intrusion, and the recently arrived tiger made off the way it had come, growling, as though smarting from a rebuff – as far as Ram Singh could perceive.
Strange as it might seem now, and certainly as it did to Ram Singh then, yet another tiger this time from the opposite direction came running towards that machaan. The howling, wounded tigress got rid of this one too, very much in the same frightful manner as it had the first one, mere minutes ago. Ram Singh’s lease on life seemed a tenuous one to him then. Utterly shocked at his helplessness in the face of such grave, unimaginable dangers, his rifle remained clutched woodenly in his hand and he stayed a silent witness to this nerve-wracking, mind-boggling yet truly unique spectacle.
The moment the intruders had gone, the tigress resumed trying to claw the machaan off the tree. With difficulty, Ram Singh kept control of the rising tide of pure, paranoiac panic that now began to threaten his better sense, judgment and perspective, as the night wore on. Then more suddenly than before, both tigers turned up from their respective hideouts, converging about the wounded tigress, who was oblivious to their return perhaps in the blind grip of its pain and increasing anger. The tigers now began to growl terribly as they confronted each other. They then sat on each side of the tigress, the ferocity of their reciprocal male growls slowly increasing as, above this grim drama, darkness began to lift from the jungle and the elusive rays of mystic light began to pale into the early shades of the impending day.
The combined commotion of their terrifying growls to which the wounded tigress added her own earthshaking roars not even a dozen feet below the ill-concealed machaan must have turned the otherwise rare experience into a grim nightmare for our expert tracker. The gun-boy beside him occasionally recovered from his terror-induced stupor, only to relapse many a time during the course of that fearful night. As day dawned, stark and unreal, the two still-snarling tigers made off into the thick undergrowth and the silhouetted trees beyond. The wounded tigress abandoned the untouched enemy in the tree and dragged its wounded way over a hillock that rose up in a sort of hump behind the tree on which Ram Singh’s machaan stood askew. The tigress’ efforts at covering the rough slope of the hillock proved a bit too much for its weakened state and it collapsed into a pool of water on the other side of this promontory, out of Ram Singh’s sight.
While the tigress was struggling up and inching its way over the hillock, Ram Singh could have easily killed it with that one shot from his rifle. But the events of the night had unnerved him so completely that he did not. Even in their aftermath, he remained thunderstruck, his numbed mind unable to comprehend that the danger had passed. Sport and hunting were far away from his thoughts then, and in the interests of survival, he thought it better to retain the remaining rifle cartridge at all costs and not expend it on the tigress as it struggled in the clearing light over the hillock, for he had seen two or more tigers in the vicinity.
The camp being far away from this place, none of us had heard the report of Ram Singh’s rifle during the night. When we reached his machaan in the morning, we saw a pale and haggard Ram Singh peering gratefully at us, and a dumb-stricken gun-boy, still atop the machaan. We beckoned, but they were staying put. They seemed very reluctant indeed to leave the comparative safety of their elevated perch, despite the glaring fact that the whole structure listed precariously away from the tree to which it had been lashed and tied. Its bole had been considerably lacerated, torn and rent by the furious tigress. The stony forest floor it had stood on, and used as a springboard to try and reach the shikaris, had been turned into powdered grit in many places by the beast’s claws where it had thrashed about at the foot of the tree.
After they had recovered sufficiently from their experience, we tracked the copious blood trail to where the tigress had fallen into the pooled water. For four of five kilometres we patiently followed the tigress’ blood trail and the obvious marks its dragging hindquarters had left on the forest bed. But after leaving the water, it had got away and gone into the jungle’s forbidding depths. Since our permit for shooting in that particular block was expiring the very next day, we cold-bloodedly abandoned any further attempts to track the tigress. When morning came, we broke camp and left the forest to where more important matters awaited us, but not without a backward glance.
It is not at all rare or mysterious for two or more tigers to be so close at hand in a limited area of the jungle. Even the predatory instinct, which tigers possess in abundance and which—in logical, human terms—is diametrically opposed to the occurrence of such a phenomenon, does not interfere in such a case. Yet, no less than kings or sovereigns in their own right, tigers command well-defined, large tracts of the forest, of usually around thirty square kilometres, adjacent to each other and are acutely aware of any other male tiger wandering about in the particular area or their own special territories and of the females that may languish in them. The tigress’ degree of response to the male’s overtures of love and breeding is never lost on the male, for the positive or negative signs decide its future course of actions, as tigresses are ready to mate only after whelping and rearing and bringing up their cubs, which might take two or three years, but never before. This is an odd fact. Tigers keep a careful tab on tigresses in their territories for this very reason.
Since these felines cannot multiply fast, conservation schemes like Project Tiger that seek to restore idyllic conditions for the tiger to live and breed in have found popular acceptance. Hence, unlike human beings with mortal failings specially when in contest over the fairer sex and so very often the root cause for short-sighted governmental schemes and the consequent socio-political chaos, the monarchs of the jungle exhibit a singular conscious nobility. Lacking the faculty of a free will and its attendant pitfalls, they adhere strictly to the codes formulated by those simple yet ferocious needs to merely survive even in the so-called uncivilized state. Political monarchs, if I may say so, could have avoided much chaos, mass suffering and tyranny that their subjects put up with, by taking a lesson or two from the monarchs of the wild, instead of holding them in ignorant ridicule or as targets in an unfair shooting match.
The two tigers Ram Singh had encountered (although he claims that there were five or six of them), in addition to the tigress wounded by his gun, quite possibly had mistaken the wounded one’s howling roars of agony for the desperate mating calls of a strange tigress perhaps wandering, unknown to any of them, across and through their separat
e territories, it being April and the final days of their mating season. Tigers could get curious enough in such a case, and disregarding each other’s frontiers, come around to investigate and perhaps woo the apparently over-ardent, strange tigress and try to lure it into their own territory. Very much in the manner of kings and gallants contesting in the old days over a specially well-advertised prospective bride, they seemed to have gathered around and vied for her attentions. Then again, and strange as it might seem, it is entirely possible that they had perceived the pain in the wounded tigress’ angry roars and had come out of sheer curiosity and stayed to help in any way that they possibly could. As to how they indeed could do that certainly remains to be seen, not only by any of us but by many behavioural scientists as well. Tigers are gentle giants and, despite their great strength, are rarely known to misuse their ferocity except when they are too old or incapacitated. A young male tiger never kills an old stag or hind for no apparent logical reason. Then, too, tigers are known to spare weaker animals or innocent children, especially the Royal Bengal tiger. Its bigness of heart has earned for it the name. Indeed, since they do possess an emotional capacity, it might have been a rare revelation to see what those two tigers could have done to ease the tigress’ pain. For lack of a substantial explanation to all these happenings, it is best to leave it to providence to resolve this mystery concerning Ram Singh’s inexplicably odd encounter with tigers on that night of terrors.
The second mysterious occurrence concerning tigers took place in the Adhnala forest block, located on the left bank of the Ramganga river in the mighty forest of the Kalagarh division. All these areas today form the Corbett National Park. This place has long been a favourite campsite and many have been the experiences gathered by us all in its wild fastness. And yet this mystery, when it did occur, caught us totally unprepared, for never had anyone of us seen anything like it in all our years as hunters.
The Wildest Sport of All Page 7
