The Wildest Sport of All

by Prakash Singh

  We scouted around in the vicinity, but other than a badly shaken man and his ripped, dusty quilt, we found no sign of the animal. The tiger, if it indeed was one, had carried on in the course of its nightly prowl and could now be just about anywhere in those immense forests girdling the foothills of the Kumaon.

  The significance of the incident did not escape me, however, and on returning to our camp, I sent off men to the more distant forest outposts to seek information of any man-eater at large in the district. Three of the men returned by the evening from different directions with the identical news that there was no alert for a man-eater among the forest dwellers they had met. But the man who travelled the furthest along the jungle trails came back the next morning with the grim news that recently a tiger had killed and carried away a village woman who had been out in the forest for the day, cutting grass and fodder for her cattle. Our permit unfortunately limited us to hunt in only a certain section of the vast reaches of the forest, so we were unable to act on this information. I shuddered involuntarily at the thought of the labourers in the jungle’s fastness without weapons or even a good enclosure to fend off this roving man-eater. Till the time I heard from them again, I had to put the matter out of my mind.

  Young, male buffaloes had been tied out in promising spots to bait a tiger with. Our camp had been pitched but a few days ago, and despite the initial reverses, we were hopeful of bagging a good trophy. The information brought by the labourers had sent us off on a tangent, but we soon resumed our daily routine of hunting small game and birds with which the block abounded. In the meantime, we waited for a tiger to kill and take one of the live baits.

  Luck was with us, and before long, a shikari brought us good news. A tiger had killed one of the buffaloes during the night. Mounted on two elephants, we followed the shikari to the spot. The bait had been secured to a peg beneath a belt of tall trees that fringed the thicker jungle beyond the comparatively clear area. The barely eaten kill now lay in this sparse undergrowth below the trees, very close to where it had been left grazing when alive. Flies buzzed over the buffalo the tiger had torn apart. The livid, exposed flesh clearly showed that the tiger had made its kill only a few hours ago. There was something very seriously wrong here and I gave it careful thought. Tigers carry their kill to thick, almost impenetrable, forests before commencing to eat. Moreover, they consume almost all of the kill, leaving as little as possible for the scavengers, which surely arrive soon after the tiger has eaten and is slumbering. Because the tiger usually returns to eat the remnants of its last meal soon after resting, it covers the remaining portions of the kill with dried leaves and twigs to ensure it being there when it returns from its rest, which is usually far away from the kill.

  The partly eaten carcass of our bait lay in the sparse undergrowth, uncovered and almost as if discarded. The tiger had eaten only fitfully from its kill, without bothering to first remove it to the safety of thicker jungles that began from just beyond the trees below which it had abandoned the kill. We seemed to be up against a gun-shy tiger. Only tigers that have been unsuccessfully shot at usually from machaans moments after attacking and making a kill of the tied bait, or after returning to eat the remnants of their kill, become gun-shy and tend to abandon their meal as fitfully as the one that had killed our bait. The chances of it coming back to feed seemed remote. Trying to track down the tiger would not only be tiresome, but also impossible in the sort of terrain that lay before us. Yet try as I did, I could not quite shake off a disquieting thought that all the parts of the jigsaw puzzle presented by the unusual state of the tiger’s kill did not quite fit – and that there was something terribly wrong about it all.

  So there we were, a picture of true gloom, with the long, bright hours of the day that still lay before us and no prospects of the tiger returning to the kill. However, the fresh wounds on the kill that clearly indicated the short time that had elapsed since the tiger had hunted presented a ray of hope. There was a chance, a slim one, of the tiger not having got the time to move off, and might still be somewhere close by even now, possibly lying up in the thicker growths of tree and tall wild grass that stretched beyond the trees, below which the kill lay. The only hopeful course for us to take was in driving a beat through this thicker jungle. We could certainly pick up a few jungle fowl and wild cocks if nothing else. A few among the party went further up along the tall grass, stationing themselves with shotguns at convenient places to pot the birds as they were beaten up and flew by. Rifles were readied and mounts selected. The elephants, abreast of each other, moved into the thicket of trees and grass as the beat commenced.

  The methods we used to hunt tiger were of the most dangerous sorts. In seeking out the tiger from elephant back, we took unimaginable risk. Strange as it may seem, this method is perhaps even more perilous than stalking the tiger on foot. There are but two courses of action open to the elephant being used in a tiger beat when charged by a tiger. Either the elephant might elect to meet the tiger’s headlong charge squarely and then commence to forcibly shake off the striped beast clinging tooth and claw to its head, shoulder or withers, before kneeling on the tiger and swiftly trampling it to death. Those atop the elephant can then only hang on helplessly to the pad ropes and howdah rails, fighting the elephant’s movements to cling on for their lives, despite it being comparatively easy in those fateful moments for the tiger to crawl up into the howdah and wreak havoc on the occupants. Or alternately, the elephant, sagacious but always unpredictable, might turn tail at the tiger’s earliest warning growl or charge and bolt uncontrollably through the jungle, unmindful of obvious obstacles such as low branches and sudden, deep nullahs along its way. The hunter atop the stampeding elephant is then ideally placed to be fatally swept off his perch or be thrown into a watercourse. He may get crushed to death in the tumble or be pitched out of his seat by the extreme unsteadiness of his frightened mount and into the very jaws of an angry tiger. Yet vast tracks of spear grass or cane and long stretches of unending rows of trees that are the tiger’s habitat are not always negotiable on foot and necessitate the use of elephants in this wildest sport of all.

  To continue with the story, the suspense in the hearts of those of us on elephant-back was intense, stretching our nerves to snapping point. At the back of our minds lay the tiger and the truly difficult adversary it might prove to be if the eerie manner of its killing, eating and abandoning our bait was a clue to its nature.

  Our doubt turned into certainty when the elephants gradually became restless and stopped all together further up amid the high grass. Blowing nervously, they began knocking their trunks on the ground and stamping their feet, indicating that a carnivore lay concealed in the undergrowth before them. The shotgun began to feel strangely light in my hands and I hastily exchanged it for my rifle. A man was sent off to warn the bird shooters at the edge of the grass ahead. The mahouts now began to force the elephants further into the thickening stands of wild grass. Some distance ahead of us, wild fowl rose up from the ground, clucking in a manner far different from when they simply decide to flee in alarm before an oncoming beat. This could mean only one thing: The tiger, or leopard, had sensed the danger and had got up from its rest. Soon it would break through the grass in an attempt to escape from the area. I strained my eyes, keeping a close watch on the pale, indeterminate mass of the dense, reed-like grass growing all around us. Jerking and jinking nervously, the elephants proceeded further into the tangle, their progress marked by the hypnotizing music of the susurrating grass and the prickling of cold sweat breaking out on our faces. Wild fowl flew up from the ground and began to sit on the few grass-choked, stunted trees, continuing to cluck almost in annoyance, possibly at the sight of the carnivore as it got up in the grass. The fact that jungle fowl exhibits this annoyance at even smaller animals such as a hyena or a bobcat only added to the electric suspense of that unforgettable moment.

  Then, without warning, a long orange-yellow shape flashed through the grass, leaping past one of the
elephants. Snake-like, the grass writhed above the fleeing tiger as it moved like lightning through it, too swift for any of us on elephant back to even turn around and take aim. The mahouts had all but bent their iron goads over the frightened elephants’ skulls as they tried to turn them around and go after the tiger. One of them did turn about and had advanced but a little distance through the grass when my brother-in-law, an ex-ruling chief to whom tiger shooting was but second nature and who was on that elephant, caught sight of the animal as it emerged from the tangled grass, slinking through a thinly overgrown spot before vanishing once again into the lantana bushes in which lay the kill. He told the mahout to take his elephant in. I kept a sharp lookout, as the undergrowth was not too dense. A bush briefly shook ahead of us but, try as we did, we could not see the tiger. I fully expected the tiger to now leave the area by entering into the thick sal forest that grew just beyond the lantana and the kill. I looked now in that direction and studied the growths underneath the sal. All seemed still. The elephant moved further ahead along the fringe of lantana. Suddenly our brother-in-law was nudging his mahout and pointing towards the belt of grass through which we had flushed and followed the tiger. He said he had caught sight of the tiger’s lifted tail as it leapt out of the lantana and once again took to the tall grass. The tiger had led us a full circle around its kill without giving us the chance to take a certain shot.

  As the elephants re-entered the tract of grass, the tiger, who must have been moving very cautiously indeed, suddenly dashed through the middle of the grass. The tall stems shook furiously for a few seconds. My eldest brother saw its tail and hindquarters, as the tiger re-entered the lantana around its kill. Any other tiger would have certainly cleared away from an area through which it was being so determinedly tracked by hunters on elephants, but not this one. In our minds, doubt began to turn to chilling certainty. This was no ordinary tiger, as it certainly was not wary of humans. It continued to lurk in the area despite us and our elephants and seemed to be waiting for a chance to attack one of us – a victim that would be more to its taste than the bullock which it had killed but barely eaten. This seemed to be the man-eater that the labourers had complained of a few days ago. That mysterious, nagging feeling which had troubled me when I had first seen its kill that morning was now explained. Our elephants traversed the lantana entirely, but again the tiger gave no hint of its presence. The second elephant with my brother-in-law on it moved alongside ours and, eyes skinned for a sight of our quarry, we once again moved warily to the edge of the long grass tract.

  As before, the tiger seemed to be leading us in a circle around its kill. Then I saw the grass begin to shake in sinuous agitation some distance ahead of our elephant. The tiger was once again moving through it, when the movements suddenly stopped. Our mahout prodded the elephant on towards where we had last seen the movements. Tense moments fleeted by. Then the grass exploded into agitation as the tiger, throwing caution to the wind, decided to make a run for it. Dashing through the closely growing ranks of grass, it angled across the dense tract in the opposite direction from where it had twice led us in a circle. Breaking out of the grass tract, the tiger scrambled across a dry ravine, trying to gain the thicker cover on the other side. Aligning his .500 express a good hundred metres away, our brother-in-law snapped a shot at it even as it disappeared into the jungle on the ravine’s far bank. The rolling, echoing rifle shot was followed by a short, tense moment of nerve-wracking silence. Then loud, angry roars and growls tinged with unmistakable overtones of pain erupted from the jungle the tiger had jumped into. The shell appeared to have hit the tiger, wounding it seriously.

  I got the mahout to take my elephant alongside my brother-in-law’s mount and we waited in the grass, trying to gauge from the wounded tiger’s roaring howls the nature of the blow that had been inflicted on it. Gradually, the angry roars changed to low growling and sobbing; horribly sustained, drawn-out sounds that ceased entirely after a whole minute. We took the elephants to the edge of the ravine and proceeded to find out whether the tiger was still alive and dangerous, or if it had recovered enough to slip away through the jungle. Four twelve-bore shots evenly spaced over the cloaking cover were fired across the ravine. The mad charge from the wounded tiger we half-expected did not come and silence lay heavy and undisturbed over the jungle. We now felt bold enough to take the elephants across the dry ravine and enter the bush on the other side. Soon, before us, just beyond a small clearing in the dense undergrowth, the still form of a tiger lay lifeless, its head and chest hidden in the larger bushes it had been attempting to gain.

  Closer investigation revealed it to be quite dead. The .500 express had luckily hit it in the heart, smashing through its rib-cage and into the vital organ. A fairly large tigress, 9'7" in length, its left foreleg bore the scars of an old jungle battle and its right forepaw had turned septic, a large porcupine quill embedded inextricably a little above the festering, almost useless appendage. The shape of the tigress’ body was very unusual as well. Despite its chest and shoulders being normally developed, from waist downwards its hindquarters seemed afflicted by a mysterious malady. The wrist was under-developed and the hind legs were thin and stringy, curiously bent out of shape, as if those all-important muscles had atrophied under the debilitating effects of the disease. Thus incapacitated, we conjectured, the tigress could very well have taken to hunting human beings, the slowest and most defenceless of all creatures. This partly explained the queer manner in which the tigress had killed, eaten and carelessly abandoned the bullock used to bait it with. Realization dawned only when the tigress’ insides were opened up, revealing bits of cloth and a half-digested, almost unrecognizable human toe, complete with its nail, in the carnivore’s stomach. It was the man-eater!

  We gathered around the men skinning the tigress, our extreme mystification at the unusual find of a human toe in the man-eater’s innards making us unmindful of the fearful, all-pervading smell that emanated from the dissected animal. This was extremely unusual. It is widely believed that man-eaters never eat the hands and feet of their human victims. Was this case before us then the golden exception which proved the rule? A closer look at the useless, atrophied hindquarters of the tigress clearly showed that the unfortunate animal could not have been able to kill naturally and had therefore taken to eating as much of its kill as it could, thus deviating from the general rule about man-eaters. The rule of the jungle is that there are no rules. Animals, particularly tigers, have certain predictable habits, but what we discovered often pointed to the contrary.

  1 Amaliara was the capital of a ruling principality in Gujarat. Its last ruler, my late brother-in-law H.H. Prithviraj Singhji, abdicated in favour of the British government some years before the secession of the Indian native states to the Indian Union. The ruler of Amaliara was traditionally known as the Durbar Sahib.

  There was a big stretch of elephant grass in the Kumaon foothills that in the old days teemed with game. This land was in our zamindari and so there was no need for us to obtain the government’s permission when we camped there annually, sometimes even twice a year. Our pack of greyhounds never failed to provide us good sport in this great tract of tall, unending grass as they chased after wild boar, dragging them down and eventually killing them. But not without damage. The wild boars in that area were some of the biggest we have seen and many a valiant hound had to be left behind buried under the grass, ripped to shreds by the curved tusks of some lone boar.

  A particular tiger had been outwitting us for two or three years in this area. All the known methods of bringing the tiger before a machaan had proved unsuccessful. Small animals, such as boar and deer, were killed and placed strategically in the path of its prowling beat, but even this ‘natural’ kill failed to attract it. This tiger’s great wariness told a tale of its own. Somewhere in the course of its savage life, it had been fired on or had a brush with death at the hands of poachers or hunters and had received a bad fright that it never entirely forgot. The instinct
for survival had taught it to mistrust the slightest unnatural occurrence.

  While camping in those vast grasslands at Kashipur in Uttarakhand, we had heard it moving around our tents and calling repeatedly from a distance like some damned soul, night after night. When our shikaris located its pugmarks, it was discovered to be a tigress with unusually elongated paw prints that were quite different from the large, round imprints generally exhibited by others of that ilk. The lure of its repeated calls proved irresistible to us and we resolved to go after it. The task proved more stupendous than it seemed.

  Elephant grass grew everywhere in this area, extending over five square kilometres. Tall enough to completely conceal riders and elephants, this wild grass grew especially thick around the many ravines and watercourses that crisscrossed the broken plain on their way from the hills. Occasionally, the grass thinned out, giving way to small stands of slender sagon and sal trees – the sole remnants of the majestic forests that once covered this plain. This wild grass was quick to spring up wherever trees were felled and so profuse was its growth that the trees did not stand a chance of ever regenerating again. The grass was fast choking the remaining thickets that illegal tree-felling and increasing population pressures were anyway thinning down. But fiery sun-ups and sun-downs were incomparably serene in this setting and wild horses could not have dragged us away from pitching our tents in these grasslands whenever we found the time to do so. The wildly shaking stems of the grass and their waving tufted tops were all the mark that the boars and prong-horn antelopes provided to our guns when we were out hunting them. In the beginning we missed a great deal, but in time, mastered the art of shooting them by aiming at their movements in the grass. A tiger though was an entirely different proposition and no one in his right senses could afford to chance a shot at the beast by aiming at the barely shaking grass that the tiger’s characteristic gait leaves in its wake.