The Wildest Sport of All

by Prakash Singh

  Since this tigress’ daily route was so unmistakable, we thought it best at first to sit up on trees in its path and thus shoot it without much difficulty. But the tigress seemed wise to this ruse. The way it sensed the carefully concealed hunter in the treetops waiting to ambush it in the darkness of the night was uncanny indeed. The tigress used to come calling down the game trail, or watercourse, but instead of continuing along its prowling beat, would stop a hundred metres or so from the tree where one of my elder brothers, or me, sat waiting with the rifle. Then its calls would abruptly cease and the tigress would invariably vanish, returning silently to the fastness of thicker jungles beyond the grasslands. Many a morning found us frustrated and bewildered, retracing our steps blearily back to the camp. This continued for the remaining duration of our stay at the place and baffled us more than I would care to admit.

  Tigers usually conform to a code of behaviour which signifies their definite presence or handiwork even when no other clues are available to the hunter or tiger watcher. Within this general code of conduct are oddities of nature but tigers are not that well known for their inherent arrogance, simply because not many hunters or naturalists are fortunate enough to witness this trait in them, or to live to tell it. A male tiger trying to impress a tigress during the mating season is, however, a terrible show-off and often terrorizes villagers and animals of the jungle alike without the slightest provocation. There are a few recorded instances of big-game hunters who have come across such an arrogant tiger. Hugh Allen’s The Lonely Tiger is one such book.

  Once an elephant of ours had been proceeding to the next campsite with a large bell slung around its neck. The peals of the bell brought a pair of tigers on its trail. They took the tolling of the bell to indicate the presence of a herd of cattle, for cows in a herd wear similar bells to prevent them from straying unnoticed. Much to the mahout’s chagrin, this tiger pair kept coming close to the marching elephant and trailing it in sheer arrogance for three or four kilometres, before the hubbub of camp that was being pitched drove them away.

  The tigress being described in this story was, according to the evidence at hand, gun-shy, or more appropriately, ‘man-shy’ to an extreme degree. When we returned to this grassland in Kashipur the next year, hearing the sound of the tigress’ familiar calls put us once again on its trail. Its finely honed instincts for survival had kept it alive and, at that time it seemed, only for us.

  From the day the camp was pitched, baits had been tied out on the paths that it routinely prowled. But the tigress showed the same wariness as before. It never came close to any of the baits or even attempted to make a kill. Its peculiar moaning call came out to us in the still silence night after night, seeming to taunt our very abilities as big-game hunters. My eldest brother gave directions to the shikaris to locate a likely place for tying up a heifer and for constructing a machaan on a high enough tree for him to sit up on. He had decided to try get the tigress as it neared the bait, before it could even prepare to flee. A large clearing was found with a medium-sized tree to one side of it. For the lack of a taller tree, the shikaris put up the machaan on this solitary one. A heifer was tied in the clearing close ahead. Dusk found my elder brother in position on the machaan, completely hidden under a screen of leaves and boughs. He did not have to wait long, for soon afterwards, at the edge of the clearing directly opposite his machaan, there was a short startled roar and an angry growl as the tigress, coming to look at the tied bait from the tall grass at the clearing’s edge, became suddenly alert. As was its nature, it growled nervously and turned around, fleeing and vanishing into the grass and the gathering night. The speed with which the tigress fled gave no opportunity to my elder brother, an unusually keen shikari, for even a quick try. This proved conclusively that our quarry would never be bagged in this manner.

  That evening, one of our shikaris thought up a plan, which, for the lack of anything better, we all decided to implement. A heifer was to be tied close beside the path over which the tigress prowled every day at dusk. Four or five metres in the thick standing grass beside the game trail, they tethered the heifer with a short enough rope and left it standing and stomping, straining at its stake in order to graze and thus making the sort of noise so necessary to the successful working of the plan. The tigress, hearing the sounds in the grass the heifer moved in, might sense a sudden danger from that quarter and deem it fit enough to attack in a surge of aggressive temper, or simply take the sounds in the grass to be those of some wild animal fit to kill and eat. Luck was with us, and the plan of bluffing the tigress worked. A tracker returned from his rounds the next morning with the news of the tigress killing our bait and informed us that at that very moment it was engrossed in eating the kill near a watercourse that crossed the game trail further up from where the bait had been placed.

  Breakfast forgotten, we hastily accompanied him. My elder brother found a tree suitable in height and location to sit up on and a beat was conducted through the grass where the tigress fed, leading in the direction of the tree with the gun. The tigress took alarm and, abandoning its kill, raced through the tall grass behind my elder brother and broke cover, coming out into the watercourse far ahead of the tree he was on. Despite the long range, he shot quickly. With a series of terrifyingly loud, roaring howls, which implied that it had been hit, the tigress vanished, crashing into the thickets of grass on the other side of the little watercourse. We had time to install stops1 further ahead, and the fleeing, wounded tigress collapsed in a broken, rocky depression at the very edge of the thicker cover of trees just below one of the stops. Unable to bear the torment of the hole gouged out by the heavy rifle bullet in its stomach, the tigress began to tear out its insides as it fought the agony. In a mad moment of frenzied roaring, it began to bite at an offending foreleg, chewing it through as it might an enemy.

  Witnessing the death throes of the tigress at such close quarters, the stop was badly jolted, and in sheer nervousness, lost his turban, which fell near the demented beast. The tigress seized it at once, tearing it to shreds between her gnashing fangs. The stop continued to watch aghast, as the tigress resumed biting and tearing at its own body and roaring angrily in the most blood-curdling manner. Then, having damaged itself more effectively than any rifle bullet ever could, it ceased roaring slowly and began to moan. Mercifully, the moans faded away after some time, as death came to the heaving breast.

  A modest 9'6", it was the most gun-shy tiger anyone of us had ever seen or bagged. Normal methods having completely failed, the novel ruse of placing the bait in camouflage beside its beat finally worked for us. The tigress had led us on a merry chase for several years, bringing us many a time to the very end of our individual and collective wits.

  Today those grasslands in Kashipur are not to be seen. Ploughed under by civilization for their natural fertility, the bare land now boasts of relentlessly expanding, mechanized farms. Tractors now noisily churn up the soil where once the tiger’s roar reverberated through the unending ranks of grassy jungle.

  1 Stops refer to shikaris, or men who knew the jungle, were placed according to the tiger’s expected line of flight from the hunters on machaans, to turn the animal away from its escape route and towards the hunters. They would do this by knocking their axes lightly against the tree they were sitting atop or by gently clapping their hands once or twice.

  The celebrated naturalist and hunter, Jim Corbett, was known to have called out and communicated with tigers. Others even claim to have developed the sport of ‘tiger-calling’ to a fine art.

  It is by no means an incredible claim, although it might seem so to someone who does not know the jungle. My experience in this regard is quite unique, and this is how it happened.

  Our shikaris discovered a tiger’s natural kill. The tiger had killed a blue bull and eaten but sparingly from the carcass. The partly eaten remains were a certain indication of the tiger returning to feed again. The chances being bright, I sat up over the kill on the very evening the shikaris
had chanced upon it. Soon after dark and with the barest hints of its presence, the tiger did return to eat again. Peering through the murky twilight, I tried to determine its location among the blurred shadows. There seemed a sudden lull in the twittering of insects and the silence closed in on me,. Transfixed, lest any movement on my part gave me away, I continued to look searchingly at the shadows but to no avail. The moments ticked on.

  Then a familiar sound fell upon my ears. The tiger had commenced eating and its unmatched gusto sent a medley of horrid sounds through the air. With these sounds I located the tiger, an indistinguishable form in the darkness below the trees. Once more regretting the absence of a good torch, and with a silent prayer, I brought the heavy rifle to my shoulder, I aimed the .475 at the tiger, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle’s bellowing report was closely followed by a short, grunting roar. Something flashed below me in the darkness and the undergrowth crashed heavily as the tiger somersaulted off its kill, leaping and getting away through the bushes and into the night. Knowing that I had hit the tiger, but uncertain of how effectively I had done so, I continued sitting up through the remaining hours of darkness, straining all the while to hear something of its wounded presence in the thickets below.

  I passed a sleepless night atop the little platform on the tree. Not once did I hear or see anything even remotely connected to a tiger, wounded or otherwise. Then suddenly a breeze, whose incredible freshness I could reach out and touch, began to blow through the forest and the leafy boughs above me. The scattered stars dimmed above the eastern horizon and the false dawn blossomed in that part of the gun-metal blue sky, congealing slowly into the first rosy flush of an ever-expanding halo of crimson fire. Below, the starkly outlined, endlessly stretching trees began to await the rising sun. On the ground, shadows lay thick, and even as I watched, the undergrowth began to spring into form and colour. An ever-swelling crescendo of birdsong emanated from around me now as the shadows lifted and day lay like a kind benediction over the rugged face of the jungle.

  Dawn brought the elephant to take me back to the camp, but the game was far from over. As I prepared to get down from my perch, the shikari who had been scouting around in the bush below, came upon a distinct blood trail. We followed it, but the dribbled blood progressively lessened, and after a distance, vanished altogether on the sun-dappled forest floor. I dearly wished to scout further up in the hope of picking up the blood trail again but the land ahead was extremely rugged, being composed largely of broken, sharpened rocks piled close together, overgrown with thorn and other hardy bushes and stretching widely till the hills in the north-west. This broken terrain made it impossible for my elephant to go any further. The wounded tiger could only die in the sort of jungle it had blundered into or, as the blood trail indicated, the wound may have been superficial and it had recovered and got away altogether. The sun searing our necks, we abandoned the trail reluctantly and returned to the camp, downcast at our fruitless labours.

  The next morning, as we sat around the camp fire and the singing kettle of tea, discussing plans for more sport, my shikari came and told us that the blue-bull carcass had been disturbed by some animal in the course of the night, the seriousness of his tone implying that perhaps a tiger was afoot again. The poor man narrowly missed getting his beard singed for his pains as one bespectacled and rather thickset man about the fire snatched up a burning brand from the ashes and brandished it about the shikari’s head. The man yelled exaggeratedly and attempted to drive him away from the merry company around the camp fire and the pleasant plans that were being made to beat for wild fowl that the shikari had just interrupted with his serious news. As we guffawed, the peeved shikari came and squatted near me with a baffled look of incredulity. My brothers and I could not contain ourselves and laughed loud and long at the comedy of the situation, while the businessman and the shikari regarded each other in sullen silence. The very mention of the word tiger is anathema to our businessman friend, being the butt of many cruel jokes ever since our experience with him on a certain tiger shikar.

  A few years ago, my eldest brother had been on his way to sit up over a bait a tiger had killed the night before. This businessman, though an old friend, was a new recruit to our jungle expeditions and full of bravado as he strutted about the camp with his shiny, new gun. Alas, he was fated to soon to learn that risking his money in business ventures, from where he no doubt derived his stoutness of heart, was quite different from risking his life in adventures in tiger-infested jungles. Hitching up his pants, he insisted on accompanying my brother to the machaan and sitting alongside him for the tiger. We tried our best to dissuade him, offering him instead an exclusive elephant ride after small game. But no, he was insistent that he would go with my elder brother, and disregarding our pleas, began to entreat him earnestly. Exchanging meaningful looks among ourselves, we let him go, our thoughts full of misgivings. The businessman’s inexperience might well mean a good chance thrown away and an empty-handed return.

  My eldest brother derives no pleasure in recalling the events which subsequently followed. The businessman blanched visibly as the elephant he and my brother were on proceeded deep into the lengthening shadows under the dank canopy of trees as the sun sloped down over the forests. The staunchest heart thinks twice when faced with the grim prospect of being in the green desolation of the jungle at dusk, with the dark night fast coming on. Throw a tiger into that bargain and the entire situation becomes nightmarish. The businessman must have suddenly had some of these epiphanies, for when the elephant carrying them left the comparative openness of the watercourse to wade into a dense bush and tree thicket in which the tiger’s kill lay, he glanced frequently about at the green slopes of the rugged hills and gulped nervously.

  On reaching the previously tied machaan, my brother lost no time in getting into it, despite the businessman’s weak protests at its height and the discomfort of clambering up into it. Sending off the elephant to await his summoning signal at a pre-arranged distance, my brother then admonished the businessman and cautioned him against any further noise. The worthy nodded earnestly, having recovered some of his usual composure after seeing how high he was from the terrors of the forest floor, with the comforting presence of my brother and the rifle close beside him. But he could not help wrinkling his nose at the smell from the festering kill in the bushes below.

  Then the breeze fell and the evening began to fade into dusk. Birdsong ceased; an eerie silence descended like a gloomy shroud over the place as shadows began to merge with an ever-increasing, far greater shadow. Suddenly a sambar stag belled from close up on the hillside, its short and strident call cutting through the stillness, effectively indicating to my brother that the sambar had seen the tiger perhaps walking down the watercourse and coming towards the kill at that very moment. Then the sambar’s hoofbeats clattered over brittle leaves in the distance as it dashed down the hill. My brother strained his senses as he became alert to the sport at hand, but it was not to be. The sambar’s sudden call, unnaturally loud and close in the palpitating silence had neatly snapped the veneer of courage with which our businessman sat apparently stolidly, facing the kill. He jumped up a good ten inches, his eyes wide with a nameless dread, his muscles loosened by the sudden surge of nervous energy causing him to break wind sharply at the exact moment he jumped up, scant seconds after the sambar had belled in alarm. My brother suppressed an overwhelming sense of regret for having listened to the man’s pleas against our better judgment, for the flimsily supported machaan began to shake and sway and creak alarmingly, creating an unforeseen state of emergency. Clutching the businessman’s arm and pressing him back into his place, my brother motioned to him that the tiger was on its way and that he’d better sit still. But the demon of fear had entered his stomach and now played havoc with his gastric juices as the businessman resumed sitting and restlessly watching the deepening gloom.

  Then, from the undergrowth immediately in front of the tiger’s kill, the sambar stag belled again.
Up jumped the businessman at the sound, passing wind even more forcibly than before and causing the machaan to sway and creak again. My brother looked askance at him, but the worthy only rolled his eyes helplessly in reply. About to curse him for repeating the mistake, my brother was forced to look away at the jungle and to take a fresh grip on his rifle, as the sound of a heavy, steady crunching over dead leaves some distance away came fleetingly to his ears. Casting his eyes towards the blurred bushes leading up to the kill, my brother awaited the tiger’s appearance. A different, oddly wet, pattering sound from very close beside him startled my brother considerably. When he glanced at his companion, the man had turned aside a fraction and, head bent in single-minded purpose, was urinating through the gaps in the rope-string machaan! For a full minute the man urinated in fits and starts and the loud pattering below the machaan caused by his involuntary action served to completely drown any further sound from the jungle. My brother cocked a fist at his head in an effort to make him stop but turning towards my brother, as he eventually finished, the businessman indicated his rotund stomach, now grown perceptibly rounder under the tension of the nervous butterflies distending it, and said he could not hold back any longer. The tiger, of course, sensed something amiss and never came to the kill. I dread to think of the reception our businessman would have involuntarily accorded the tiger had it indeed come to the kill! In time, he overcame his initial responses to the jungle, but his ragging at our hands has never ceased since then.