The Wildest Sport of All

by Prakash Singh

  A cousin of the Belwals’, a brave but less experienced shikari, found this careful method of tracking the wounded tiger too slow and dull for his taste, aroused as they undoubtedly were with excitement and enthusiasm. He repeatedly asked Anand to hurry up. When his words had no effect on our tracker, who turned around and looked quizzically but indulgently at him, the man lost his patience completely. Taking the twelve-bore from Anand, he went hurriedly on ahead after the blood trail, leaving all of us well behind.

  Fearful of alerting the wounded tiger and thus hastening his, and perhaps our, end, we could not even shout to admonish him or tell him to stop and return at once. The silence that we had so scrupulously maintained throughout those difficult, tense miles had been broken by our inexperienced companion’s haste and our position had probably been given away to the tiger. We were now completely at the beast’s mercy; not that it would be in any mood to show us any. Instead of simply standing around well exposed to every conceivable danger in the jungle that the impatient fool could let loose on us as he noisily followed the trail over the rough, broken ground ahead, we thought it safer to climb up the short trees around us and watch our foolhardy companion’s dangerous, headlong progress.

  He must have proceeded for another fifty metres when he come upon a dry ravine with many more bush-choked, smaller nullahs debouching onto the desolate expanse of the larger, dry watercourse. The blood trail had all but vanished on the loose sand and grit as it led across the ravine and it seemed a likely enough place for the wounded tiger to be lying hidden in. Pointing the gun in the general direction of the banked undergrowth along the smaller ravines, he shouted out to Anand, who was obviously visible to him from the lower level, that the tiger must be thereabouts somewhere. No sooner had the words left his lips when, from behind the fallen tree lying a mere five metres away on the bed of the ravine from where he stood hesitantly, the tiger charged at him.

  Anand and I were up on the same tree and we looked on helplessly at this sudden turn of events as our worst fears were rudely realized. With a terrific roar, meant mainly to paralyze its victim’s nerve centers and thus freeze it in its tracks, the wounded tiger leapt upon the helpless man. The brave but foolhardy man managed to fire both barrels of the twelve bore, their muzzles almost touching the massive, striped, hurtling chest. But it was kill or be killed with the enraged beast, and apparently unmindful of the slamming impact of the buckshot and ball from that lethally close range, the tiger fell upon the man who had disturbed it and then dared to withstand its charge.

  Trying to duck away from the extended claws and killing fangs of the tiger, the shikari collided with the animal’s shoulder and was cleanly knocked down. Quicker than a flash, the tiger sprang around and reared up, towering over the helpless man, with wide open sabre-toothed jaws and eyes that were sparkling with the lust to kill. Puny in comparison, the man tried to fend off the monster killer with but an empty twelve-bore.

  Grasping the still hot barrels of the shotgun in its jaws, the tiger wrenched the twelve bore from his luckless grasp and tossed the gun aside. One of its front legs and the huge paw had been shattered by the Rai Bahadur’s snap shot, but it used the good one to sweep the man off and hug him in a deathly embrace, helplessly pinning him to its side. Then squatting back on its haunches, the growling tiger proceeded to bite down on his head, tearing and chewing it to unrecognizable shreds within seconds and killing him on the spot. We looked on askance as the tiger, hit squarely in the chest with the ball and LG slugs from the shotgun, also died, collapsing and ceasing to breathe gradually beside the man it had vengefully killed minutes back. Considering the man’s unreliable temperament, it must be said of him that he faced the tiger’s ferocious attack bravely and those twelve-bore shots he fired at the tiger were quick and good. But not good enough. The king of the jungle is magnificently strong and remarkably resilient as a fighter; a wounded one even more so.

  How quickly it all seemed to have happened, for it had not taken the tiger many bites to accomplish such destruction. Anand and I were without a weapon between us but we did try to drive away the tiger even as it was about to grasp its chosen victim with shouts and by clapping our hands from our perch on the tree. But death had been instantaneous for the foolhardy man. And what a way to go! This story might have ended differently, if he had only allowed Anand to track the wounded tiger in the recommended slow, but sure, manner.

  Despite the great reliance placed on the lethal, cannon-like velocity of the twelve-bore when used from a close enough range, experience has taught me that this belief is not wholly applicable to all the occasions that might befall a hunter in the jungle. The twelve bore, at short distances, can indeed knock down or blow apart and kill like a cannon might, but only an unwary tiger whose muscles and mind are relaxed and otherwise engaged in bathing or play or in eating. It requires a .300 or heavier grained, high velocity and highly expansive rifle slug, like from a .500 bore, to knock down a charging, wounded tiger and deflect it from its vengeance effectively, in spite of its strong sinews, muscles and nerves. And that too with a lot of luck.

  The Serbian tiger is reputed to attain a phenomenal length and is legendary for its size. As it migrates southwards, closer to the Equator, into the great bamboo forests and the sub-mountainous forested tracts, its size is seen to relatively, or genetically, diminish. Changed weather conditions, along with the differences in topography and survival conditions, affect the colour of its coat and size, and the tiger starts looking wiry. Deep reddish-brown, accentuated by the absence of fur thicker than the starkly beautiful coat of the tigers in the mountain forests, the tigers of central India are known for their speed and ferocity. The heat only serves to make them more so, despite the obvious conjecture that the cold should suit tigers naturally better than any other weather condition.

  Genetic freaks are known to occur amongst tigers in the Himalayan foothills, especially in the fastness of the great forests of Assam and further east. They are also found in the Shivaliks, in the last of the mountain forests south and west of the river Ganga, and in the hot, dry forests of central India, the latter being better known. Richard Lydekker in his book, The Game Animals of India, Burma, Malaya, and Tibet (1907), records the instance of a black tiger that was found lying dead in Chittagong in the 1830s. The obvious inference that can be drawn from this is that perhaps melanism does occur in tigers, as it does more frequently in panthers. Most of you have heard, or read, about black panthers but have never thought about the same phenomenon taking place among tigers. Colonel H.S. Wood, who wrote about shikar in British India, seems to have the most plausible explanation. He says that nature ensures ‘uniformity of species’ by endowing tigers with cannibalism and thus enabling the parents to eat and exterminate the odd complexioned or albino cub. Commendable work has been done to preserve and propagate the white tiger of central India since a few decades. But the ‘chocolate’ tiger that was once seen in the Doon valley might never have been heard of, or even imagined, by many naturalists.

  Do I sound facetious? I certainly don’t intend to!

  It happened in a stretch of thick forests near Haridwar that Mukherjee, whom I spoke about, happened to be on a tree during a hastily organized tiger beat.

  As there had been no time to put up strategically placed machaans prior to the haka, Mukherjee had simply clambered up a tree and stood up in the nook where the branches forked outwards. Keeping in mind the shockingly heavy recoil of his .500 express rifle, he clamped his left arm around a lesser branch to help him shoot comfortably, should he find a chance to use the rifle. He stood alertly as the beat began. But his field of fire was badly limited by the girth and angle of the branch he stood supported against. Hence, when a large male tiger broke out of the jungle ahead of the beaters and went past below him, running lightly and seeming to flow in superb motion that only the prime of life can impart, he could but only gape and stare.

  The branch he had passed his left arm around in preparation for this very mome
nt now obstructed the rifle’s swing to the left and it was brought up short against the wood as the tiger went by. If he let go of the branch and took a fresh, unhindered grip on the .500 bore to aim freely at the tiger still clearly visible as he craned his neck over the branch, the recoil would certainly sweep him off his own two feet from where they were balanced on the rounded bole of the branch he stood on. He wasn’t prepared to risk falling into the tiger’s jaws, so he did not fire, but only looked. And it was fantasy well worth staring at. The young, male tiger was a huge one, and beyond the whiskers aggressively ruffled and bunched behind its ears and the nape of its massive neck, flowed the usual, slashed stripes over the brawny musculature of the furry body. There its similarity with other tigers ended drastically. The vertical stripes were unusually dark-black as was the hairy background they were imprinted on, for that was a rich chocolate-brown over the entire length of the tiger’s body!

  Mukherjee couldn’t believe his eyes. The overtly chocolate coat was glossy, shiny, and obviously clean. He could not have mistaken an ordinary tiger with muddied, caked flakes of soil and sand on its body from around a drinking spot’s edge, thus altering its colouration.

  Soon the beat ended, with the tiger having cleanly got away. Still dazed at having seen such a differently coloured tiger, Mukherjee met up with his friends and was greatly relieved at noticing the unmistakable expression of sheer disbelief writ large on his their features too. Without the undeniable benefit of a stable platform to shoot confidently from, one of his friends had found himself similarly handicapped.

  Tigons, or straight cross-breeds from the tiger and the lion, have occurred and thrived in the subdued world of zoos and captivity. For a long time, the Doguddha man-eating leopard was considered to be a cross between a tiger and a panther until it was discovered for what it really was – a very old, flea-bitten leopard!1 The black panther is a common genetic freak found to occur in nature. And so, too, the white tiger. The chocolate tiger has not been heard of ever since, but it can be safely added to a zoologist’s list of freak tigers. Animals, especially carnivores, display a variety of off-beat traits in their emotional capacities or incapacities. Colonel Jim Corbett has recorded the astonishing incident of a hungry tigress stalking a few months’ old goat kid by the clear sounds of its nervous bleating and then walking away from it, leaving the shivering kid untouched after coming face-to-face with it. Such kind regard for a helplessly bleating kid in the most savage breast of all! It does seem unusual but not beyond belief. In captivity, where co-existence is compulsorily bred into the inhabitants of a zoo, often for reasons of research and inquiry, carnivores show a radically different lifestyle from what they normally, zealously live in nature. Witness the mating of lions with tigers of which the tigon (later known as the ‘ligon’) is the natural outcome. Under conditions of physical stress, particularly when in heat in the marked absence of the female of the species, carnivores again display an unusual trait about which very little is known outside the realm of pure zoological research. Before March 1982, most of this was virtually unheard of. Let me tell you about it.

  Rampurhat is a small town in West Bengal and some of the villages around it lie outside the Massanjore forest range, which properly constitutes the eastern limit of the great forested area of the Chota Nagpur plateau. The police officer in charge of Rampurhat was one day entreated by a group of very distraught villagers to come with them and save them from a leopard that was allegedly sheltering in a broken-down house on the outskirts of one such village called Boidhara. That very morning it had attacked and injured a cow and severely mauled the cattle-herder, a mere lad, when he had shouted and bravely rushed at the leopard in a desperate effort to get the leopard to leave his prized cow. It was in the process of clawing and biting through the poor lad’s shoulders and back when the boy’s father, who was on his way to gather firewood, heard the commotion and almost immediately came upon the gory scene. Despite the horribly growling leopard, the man rushed up to where it lay, striking and raking at the prone figure of his son, and he dealt the leopard a severe blow with his small axe, cutting through a large part of a back leg. Howling, the leopard scampered away from the boy and, making for the first bit of available cover, jumped into the ruins of an abandoned house close to the scene of the carnage. There it had remained ever since, instilling terror in all by its very presence and by the fact that it was wounded and hence, angry and very dangerous. Life in the village had come to a standstill, with the grim threat of the wounded killer hanging over the cluster of huts and the people in them.

  P. Ghosh, the police sub-inspector, reached there and proceeded to the abandoned house where the leopard lay sheltering. He acted with commendable presence of mind and great courage, for to draw out the leopard directly would have been suicidal. Instead, he climbed up on a wall of the house and spied on the leopard through the gaping hole where the roof had once been. The leopard saw him at the same time and gathered itself to spring on him. The sub-inspector opened fire at the beast below with the .303 service rifle. Its head shattered, the leopard collapsed on the ground, thrashing madly around. Another round passed through the leopard’s heart, killing it finally. The villagers gave Mr Ghosh a hero’s send-off when, after putting them at ease, he returned to his police outpost.

  Now comes the interesting part. After a month or so, he happened to be in the vicinity of this same village and wanting to know whether the mauled cow-herder had pulled through or succumbed to the agony of his terrible wounds, he went there and sought out the boy’s family. The father took the sub-inspector to the village’s outskirts where the boy was once again tending to his cattle as they browsed contentedly. Timely medical attention had saved the deep wounds from turning septic and all that was left of the fearful, near-fatal experience were the deep, swollen weals of scar tissue all over the boy’s disfigured back. Then the boy pointed out a cow that bore not a scar and told him that this was the one the leopard had jumped on. The boy then went on to describe what the leopard did when it mounted the cow from the rear. The sub-inspector burst out laughing, for the boy’s description was more befitting what a rutting bull does to a cow and certainly not a leopard bent on killing to eat! The boy looked crestfallen, for no one in the village had believed him and now not even the village’s saviour. The sub-inspector came away thinking that the village lad was having some fun at his expense now that the danger was past.

  When the sub-inspector found occasion to visit Calcutta next, he made it a point to go and see a renowned animal expert at the Alipore Zoological Gardens, for he had never really been able to forget the sincerity in the cow-herder’s voice and eyes when he had related the incredible tale to him. The animal expert, M.C. Sarkar, told him that the boy’s tale might well be true!

  What I think is that the leopard could have been in heat and infuriated by the lack of a mate, attacked a cow to try and mate with it, but then changed its mind at the last moment to kill and eat it. There are singularly few carnivores and herbivores in that part of the Massanjore forests and the lack of an available female perhaps best explains the leopard’s waywardness. It is unfortunate that the leopard was disturbed before it could accomplish the dictates of its overheated nature and that the cow did not conceive. A very interesting cross-breed could well have been the result! Anyway, the ‘chocolate’ tiger was certainly not the result of any such liaison.

  The young male tiger that both Mukherjee and his friend saw that day was perfectly normal in every way except for its coat and distinctive colours. What could have caused it? How many generations ago had that ‘chocolate’ colour come into its heredity? We will never know, for the chocolate tiger has never been heard of again. It is reasonable to assume that the geography and climate of the Himalayan wild tracts, where it was so briefly glimpsed, could very well have caused its beautiful, rare colouration.

  At the very edge of the landmass that extends from southern Russia to the Bay of Bengal which constitute its realm, the tiger inexplicably exhi
bits some of its Siberian characteristics, as seen in the Royal Bengal tiger. The Sunderban lowlands, crisscrossed by the deltaic formations of the mighty Ganga as it flows into the Bay of Bengal, are full of lush forests bounded by great swamps. The eye cannot discern where the mainland ends or from where exactly the forested islands take over. Colonel Arthur Locke has made similar observations in his book, The Tigers of Terengannu. The Malayan tiger, he writes, is definitely smaller than the Siberian and the Indian tiger. He says that with the change in its habitat, the tiger too undergoes a transformation. Just next door to the smaller Malayan tiger, the Royal Bengal tiger seems very much at home in its watery environs, as indeed anywhere else, be it in mountains or deserts. No wonder, then, all jungle creatures big or small acknowledge the tiger’s presence as it moves about and salute it with their calls and cries as subjects do to a monarch.

  The preface to this book mentions the tiger’s cunning, as displayed in its predatory instincts. The word ‘cunning’ is used colloquially here, for relative to the tiger’s size and strength, its prowess as an unerring stalker, silent prowler and deadly hunter par excellence, inherited directly from the cat along with an uncanny sixth sense, seems quite beyond the grasp of rational, civilized minds – at least at a glance. Tigers that inhabit hills and mountains are generally sly and more cunning than those found in the jungles of the terai and the plains. Coupled with its unimaginable strength, its wily cunning makes the tiger a truly formidable beast and a very dangerous adversary.