The Wildest Sport of All

by Prakash Singh

  The villager finished speaking, the rancour evident in his accusing tale, as a babble of voices shattered the shocked silence that had come upon the assembled village.

  Quick to realize that the yogi could never again be re-transformed into his old shape with human senses, the villagers, harassed to no end by the loss of their livestock, often their livelihood, decided to take the only course of action now open to them. Organizing a hunting party from amongst the armed men in their midst, they set out with their informant’s aid to track the man-tiger and shoot it down. The condemned holy man’s errant colleague led the way and climbed the hill-face to the controversial recluse’s rock-bound shelter. There was a distinct possibility that the man-tiger still inhabited it. They found tracks in the patches of loose soil going and coming from the cave; glaringly obvious was the print of a small tiger’s hind-paws, seemingly printed everywhere in and out of the foreground that led away from the hidden place. The storyteller began to be instantly regarded with awe as the villagers realized that his incredible tale might indeed be true. Dreading the consequences of tempting Providence any further by openly confronting or attacking the yogi-tiger, their earlier resolve seemed to waver. Undecided, they stood whispering together in the gathering, in the stealthy twilight that comes always when one least expects it, often in life but too often in the midst of jungles.

  Suddenly, one of them saw a man coming up the trail to the cave. As they had not been expecting anyone from the villages, the man who saw this sight luckily paid heed to the unspoken thought in all their minds. He noticed at once that the indistinct figure was curiously stiff-legged. He pointed this out to his mates and one of them switched on his torch at the figure coming up from below them. The torch nearly fell out of his hands as they all briefly but clearly glimpsed the snarling face of the man-tiger. Thus interrupted in his prowl towards his cave, the two-legged creature immediately turned around and began scrambling down the trail without even the slightest effort at concealment in the profusely night-stained overgrown surroundings. The armed party returned to the village. The elders, now that matters were more earthly, deputed the most reputed marksmen amongst the ones rich or influential enough to possess a gun to hide about in the forests on the hillside and ambush the inhuman killer. So upset had they become with the chronic lethargy of the forest officials in dealing with their complaints that these villagers decided to take the matter in their own hands. Although mindful of the strictures and penalties that closely followed the death of any tiger or panther, no matter how destructive, they now felt no qualms of conscience in committing cold-blooded murder. But getting rid of the man-tiger did not prove quite as easy as imagined.

  A gun shot was heard in those forbidding jungles on the hillside the following afternoon. A little later a shikari came running to the village to report that he had fired at the ‘man-beast’ and that the bullet had had no effect on his body. He had aimed directly into its chest but the creature did not so much as flinch after the muzzle-loader’s extra-strongly-packed charge hit it. It did not even leave a blood trail after turning away and going into the jungle. The shikari was emphatic in reporting to the group of elders. This was a disturbing development indeed and the village priests lost no time in calling for prayer meetings and prayer sessions designed to propitiate the man-tiger. Immune to bullets, the creature proved deaf to prayers. The cattle-lifting continued, albeit sporadically.

  One of these village-shikaris was made of sterner stuff and so continued to think of a way to kill the beast even when the rest of his companions, faced with that mysterious power, seemed to give up on shooting the man-beast and resigned themselves to fate. The enterprising man hit upon the daring idea of provoking the man-tiger to charge at him, whereupon he intended to shoot his muzzle-loader into the beast’s mouth. He reasoned that the part of the creature’s body which was human was certainly immune to bullets, even though their impact had turned away the man-tiger the few times he had been located by these village shikaris.

  He got the man-tiger to attack him when, after painstaking hours of tracking the beast, he stepped with raised gun directly into the path of the shambling creature one morning in the jungle below the hillside. With wide-open jaws, as it was perhaps still searching blindly for the wooden antidote to his peculiar condition, the man-tiger came striding towards the steadfast shikari. When the barrel of the rifle all but entered the man-creature’s cavernous toothed mouth, the shikari found himself pressing the ready trigger of his carefully loaded and trained musket. The man-tiger was thrown back a few paces into the bush and even as the echoes of the shot crashed around in interminable echoes around the green ramparts of the hill, the creature thrashed about briefly in the bush and, like any tiger, died, chiefly due to the specially prepared lethal lead charge having blown out the back of its skull.

  The shikari called out to the villagers, as he was not very far from habitation, and disbelievingly, they gathered around the creature’s carcass. They inspected the curious spectacle and once convinced that their tormentor, this half-tiger, was truly dead and their cattle once again safe, they quickly, ruthlessly chopped the man-tiger into conveniently small pieces and did away with the indestructible remains by interring them deeply. They made sure that nobody would discover their handiwork, especially the forest authorities, for it was imperative that they be considered innocent of the act perpetrated by them all. Despite the conspirators being sworn to secrecy, this astounding tale reached the ever-alert ears of one of our forest guard friends.

  Folklore and traditional legends say such things are possible. Various ancient religious rites were reputed to bestow such queer powers of transformation upon those sincere yogis for whom these miraculous tricks are but steps to consciously merge with the supreme, which is the truly holy man’s one and only objective. About seventy-five years of age, a holy man who lived close to Narauli, where our family and retainers have existed since before the Mughals, was said to have trained a tiger and done the fantastic job so divinely that he used to ride upon it as he would a horse. But what a horse!

  Reason and logic – that bane and blessing of discursive, educated minds – say that such occurrences are impossible. But fact, especially in the jungles, is stranger than fiction. The jungle is a curious place. Everything about it, I mean. You can laugh there, forget everything else and keep alive, or simply, ignominiously, perhaps horribly be torn asunder – your only crime being that you are out of your element, in an unknown place. Over the many years that I have been on these shikars, my belief in a just, pure, and kind god has increased. There is no parallel to god’s goodness in the very illumination that never leaves the air of the forests. Dawn, daybreak, food, water – they are all different in the jungle. An eerie light lingers in the open spaces where the trees are not so thick; a mysterious, inexplicable power emanates from the foliage canopy’s brooding calm – deep, dark and intense. Dread and needless apprehension begin to touch you no matter what weapon you are carrying, or as in those tiger–hunting days, carried. I am certainly not making a fetish of the outdoors, but there are common graces that nature touches the world’s cities and jungles with.

  Contrary to the dictates of reason, I have experienced some strange incidents in the jungle. The tiger, with its supernatural agility and strength, does much to make the jungle a place of not uncorrupted beauty but one where death and the fear of it lurk. Those crisp, hurried mornings when one couldn’t help glance at one’s surroundings – that strange fleeing of the night and its nebulous lights – all are strange as they always have been to me since those tiger-shooting days. Maybe the jungle does harbour some mysterious power about which you have heard many unbelievable tales.

  You must have heard of the Buddha. He found Enlightenment under the deep shade of a giant jungle ficus tree that grew in one of India’s hottest and deeply forested semi-tropical parts. He got all his metaphysical answers, as he himself professed, in one flash. Could it have been because he ingested, perhaps, consciously, or b
y simply living under the tree, the fruit of the ficus that is rich in serotonin? The latter is a hormone that can boost the mind’s powers by enriching the brain, as proved by the cleverest of the avian species, the green pigeon that feed on the ficus fruit.

  The Buddha the world has heard of, but you might not have heard of Dr Edward Bach – a German doctor-scientist in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth century who got really taken up by the idea of disease and good health both co-existing in nature and affecting all creation. At first he found the thought indigestible, but then he went back to it years later. He discovered that most of human ailments, physical or not, exist due to the mental make-up of the sufferers. Dr Bach, who still held on to naturopathy, reasoned that if the cause for diseases existed in the natural world and in its manifestations, so must its cure be present, in some concealed state, also in nature. Luckily for him, he finally found it, after much wandering and blundering among flowers! Today

  Dr Bach’s books on flower remedies are bestsellers. His findings in the jungle’s vast impersonal strangeness have laid the basis for most medicinal formulations in the field of modern homeopathy and naturopathy.

  At first modern cities, their populace and their ways, seem glamorous. Then their appeal begins to fade and the impersonality of mega-buildings becomes claustrophobic for anyone with any soulfulness. The glitter of expensive things become meaningless. It is bad to lose touch with nature because it continues to exist, for it is not only older than our cities but certainly is a vast resort of rest, freedom, and civilized scientific research and study. Most of the real social ills, whose all-around importance in world affairs cannot be completely denied, are sown, germinate and take root in the stressful world of our cities and not in the mysterious interiors of the jungle. Where did our fondness for the jungle really stem from? From the strangeness of its looks and ways. The omnipresent atmosphere of beauty and danger was a wonderfully heady mix – life in the forests seemed meaningful and completely different from the drudge of daily existence.

  Ramnagar is a small town in the south-western part of Nainital in Uttarakhand. To this day, the foreboding terai forests troop down close to this settlement, fringing its suburbs. They were much thicker four or five decades ago and grew even closer to the town. My two older brothers and me, a close group of friends, along with a host of servants and baggage, were on our way to camp at the Chilakia range for which we had obtained a shikar permit. In Ramnagar we called upon an old family friend, Rai Bahadur Belwal, who happened to be a noted shikari of this region. He was a man possessed of invaluable experience since the days of the British, who he took out for very successful shoots. He was awarded eventually the title of Rai Bahadur, in return mostly for his expertise at the science of shikar.

  We were his guests for the day and his gracious hospitality soon put us at ease, enabling us to quite forget the grueling, long drive through the dusty plains the previous day. Now eight kilometres away from Ramnagar, there were a few farms situated right at the edge of the jungle. One of these happened to belong to the Belwals. So, when at the end of the afternoon, the Rai Bahadur suggested a drive down to his farm, we eagerly welcomed his offer, for deer, jungle fowl and wild boars were found in abundance in the farm’s precincts. Accordingly, we motored down, and soon the jungle’s aura was about us as the road began to be rapidly hemmed in by the undergrowth and the occasional thickets of trees. Dusk began its lingering descent at the end of that long, summer day.

  Three kilometres before we reached his farm, some animal, visible to us as an indistinct, shadowy shape, slowly crossed over the forest track a good hundred metres ahead of our jeep. Taking it to be a sambar or a wild boar, Rai Bahadur Belwal snapped a quick shot at it with his .405 bore rifle. In the vague dimness of twilight, none of us could claim confidently that our host’s unerring marksmanship had scored a hit. Nevertheless, the jeep fairly leapt over the rutted road in the general anxiety to find out. When we had the jeep stopped at the point where the animal had crossed the track and had been fired upon, I gazed, crestfallen, at the open spaces between the forest road and the undergrowth. The animal seemed to have got away. A shikari went to scout around in the bush as sometimes a boar or sambar stag can collapse some distance from where it might have been fatally shot. But he too seemed to have found nothing, for he soon returned, shaking his head. One of our party members had been scrutinizing the track and studying the dust on it, when the agitation suddenly obvious on his features made us gather around him. Imprinted on the loose earth of the track, the round, unmistakable pugmarks of a large, male tiger stood clearly revealed in the glare of our vehicle’s headlights. This was a totally unexpected development and caught us by complete surprise since tigers were not known to appear so close to our host’s farm. Coming across one, and shooting at it, was quite another thing from the sambar or boar that it had been initially mistaken for in the indistinct light.

  This time I accompanied the shikari and we went carefully forward into the bushes, continuing to scrutinize the signs on the ground. The jungle that had seemed harmless to our sporting enthusiasm for small game, suddenly took on a different, grim and sinister complexion.

  A short distance away from our companions in the jeep, we came across a blood trail on the ground leading off from under the thicker undergrowth. The shikari and I retraced our steps to the safer proximity of familiar voices in the jeep. As darkness was now about us, we postponed any further following up of the wounded tiger’s blood trail till the morrow. It would be safer and we stood a better chance of ending the beast’s agony in daylight. To attempt to do so right then would be suicidal. We carried on to the Rai Bahadur’s farm and after a cup of tea there drove back to his home and our temporary quarters in Ramnagar.

  Upon reviewing the situation we had unwittingly landed in, it was found necessary to employ an elephant for trailing the tiger from its blood spoor that I had seen leading further on into the jungle. Having shot all our lives from elephant back, the comparative safety of such a technique was invaluable to us. Further, to face the wounded tiger on foot and in its own terrain, especially a large-sized, young male, and the invincible fury of the retaliatory attack that it was certain to launch upon being located, were disquieting thoughts indeed.

  At dawn, a man was dispatched with instructions to try and procure an elephant. Our party waited anxiously for his return, and towards the afternoon he did come back, but without any elephant. The wounded tiger in the meantime was certainly getting away into deeper jungles with sufficient time to recover from the crushing impact of the heavy rifle slug and hence become more dangerous to track. It all depended on where the shot had hit it. The implications of abandoning the tiger to its own fate so close to Ramnagar and in the immediate vicinity of the busy farms, our host’s among them, was not only grim but ghastly, and none of us would ever be able to live it down. At this point, the obvious task ahead of us ceased to be merely sport, but there was no getting around our inextricable predicament. So trusting all to luck and with staunch hearts, we looked to our guns and prepared for the coming tryst with destiny.

  Mr Belwal, his two sons, a brave but considerably less experienced cousin of them and me, along with four local shikaris, now motored down to the forest’s outskirts where the chance shot had wounded the tiger. The lack of an elephant made us go against our misgivings and our better judgment about tracking the wounded beast on foot. So taking all precautions for our safety, we began to follow the clear blood trail through the dense undergrowth. The tiger had bled inconsistently but still there was a sort of continuity in the spoor. The confounding, infrequently occurring, larger splatters of blood that we found on its trail made it difficult to determine the seriousness, or the exact nature, of its wound though. The blood too had coagulated darkly upon the ground by then and showed in too few spots for us to even make any guesses. Certain knowledge of how badly or lightly the tiger was incapacitated might mean the difference between success and
failure for our strategy – and between life and death for us. Try as we did, this important deduction eluded our minds with the paucity of evidence on the ground before us – until we actually met the tiger.

  Anand Belwal, the Rai Bahadur’s elder son, led the party with a twelve-bore, his younger brother bringing up the rear with another twelve-gauge gun. Experience has taught us that LC slugs fired from a shotgun are more effective than a rifle’s single, even though more powerful, projectile, when facing a sudden onslaught from a tiger or a leopard at close quarters. But my belief was to be badly shaken only a few hours later. Anand tracked rather slowly, as he followed the large blood splatters closely and carefully. He was a good tracker and it was the only safe way of going about the deadly pursuit, fraught as it was with unimaginable dangers.

  After kneeling near the blood trail and scrutinizing it to his satisfaction, he would carefully examine the undergrowth into which the spoor relentlessly led, before stepping into it and picking up the trail again. Then he would begin this time-consuming procedure all over again. The silence that we found absolutely necessary to maintain slowly grew on us and with it, a kind of dread of the jungle – and of every blind corner and thicket that the dripping blood trail splattered over. Suddenly we had become strangers in the very jungle we had prided ourselves in knowing well. Instead we were simply guests, very unwelcome ones, of the wounded tiger. Our only hope for emerging safely, and successfully, from this ordeal was in trusting our friend and tracker to do his bit. In this painstaking manner, we proceeded into the jungle’s grim fastness for about four kilometres behind the blood splatters, the task of following them doggedly becoming tougher with each passing minute as the tiger’s trail became fainter and fainter, gradually leading into more rugged country – the beast’s true domain, where it would most likely find a suitable lair to lie in and ambush us from.