Suddenly there was a brief but extremely loud roar in the bushes where the bell hung. Then the string was wrenched out of the hunter’s hand and the bell jangled as something smashed into it sending it flying into the night. Immediately, there was an even louder roar and with that the tiger was gone. What happened was this: after waiting until it became dark, the tiger approached the tinkling bell fully intending to attack the cow wearing it and stood concealed in the bushes under the bell as it discovered the trick. Leaping up in anger as it roared, the tiger struck the bell and then, roaring again, made off into the jungle, leaving the hunter looking askance and fiddling with the switch of his torch which he had not even found the time to depress. Such was the speed with which the tiger came and went!
But to go back to our misadventure of the rain-soaked night and the journey to Dabaora the next day. Moments after reaching there and settling down to tea on the old gentleman’s spacious verandah, a group of his farm labourers came up to the house. The men seemed at their wits’ end, with despair writ large on their careworn faces. The women in the group sobbed freely, paying no heed to their men who sought to admonish, and then comfort, them into keeping down their heartrending wails. It took our host quite some time to extract their tale.
Some of their new, expensive milch buffaloes and another a favourite calf had all been lost to tigers. Cattle-lifters and jungle killers seemed once again at large here. This settlement was in the very depths of tiger country, and the animals came in, lured by the wild boars that inhabited the sugarcane fields in abundance. Even after the wild boar herds strayed and sought refuge elsewhere, the tigers had stayed on, finding easy pickings among the cattle herds of the villages. When tigers displaced from jungles, felled in the north to accommodate colonies and human settlements, came around Dabaora, they stayed on, considerably swelling the infamous ranks of the cattle killers that were already rampant. Whole herds had been decimated by these cattle-lifters of whom, if the villagers’ reports were to be believed, there must have been dozens at large.
As soon as our men reached with our baggage they were sent off, along with the more-than-helpful villagers, to tie out a number of live baits at likely places. A machaan was put up on a tall tree over one bait, and another machaan was built overlooking a game trail nearby, along which cattle-lifters were known to prowl. I took our guest on the elephant to the machaan with the bait and after settling him on it, proceeded to the other overlooking the game trail. With cattle-lifters so rampantly at large in the farm surroundings, our guest stood a fair chance of one visiting the live heifer tied out below him. Pleased at having accorded him the honour of the better place, I dispatched the elephant and my two men on it to await us at a safe distance. Then I settled down on the other machaan to watch the game trail etched out faintly amidst the undergrowth and the trees awash now with the sunset and the tell-tale colours that lingered with dusk. It soon grew dark, the stars began to come out in silent, glittering procession, faintly illuminating the jungle. Birdsong had ceased around me and the silence grew thicker as the night advanced, lying like a grim shroud over the shadows and curiously heightening the small sounds in the undergrowth that never entirely cease. After a mere half-hour, I heard the loud whip-crack of a rifle shot from the direction of our guest’s machaan.
The echoes of that solitary rifle shot smashed back from the hills across the sugarcane fields and no other sound came in its wake. Fully alert, I continued to sit in my place, straining to pierce the dark with my senses. Faint shouts came out of the right from our guest’s machaan and we talked amongst ourselves, fairly certain that he had succeeded in bagging his tiger. So we called out to the mahout on the elephant that had been waiting within earshot. After some time, we heard its careful approach through the starlit darkness of the jungle. We climbed down the machaan into its howdah and were soon making our way cautiously through the branches of the surrounding trees as they chafed and brushed by us above the undergrowth that the elephant negotiated surprisingly without a sound. The sounds of laughter and voices cheerfully raised in celebration fell on my ears when the elephant was still four or five hundred metres from our guest’s machaan. My curiosity getting the better of me, I was just about to yell out a question and to urge the mahout to hurry, when I felt the man behind me on the elephant’s back nudged me meaningfully. I looked back at him and he pointed to the starlit undergrowth overgrowing the trail, saying uncertainly that some animal seemed to be following us. I looked hard at where he was pointing but was unable to see anything, and making a joke at the man’s state of nerves, laughed loudly along with the mahout at him. But the elephant had barely taken a few steps forward when the man nudged me again.
This time his voice was lowered and carried conviction as he pointed to a spot in the darkness, a dozen metres away behind us, saying that the animal still seemed to be there. I was about to dismiss his fears as groundless and urge the mahout to hurry on to where the sounds of celebration grew ever louder, when the thought struck me that it could well be a spotted deer or a sambar stag behind us in the jungle and, if shot, would prove useful to the villagers in their festivities. I asked the man if he was absolutely certain of something being there for try as I might, I was unable to see anything distinctly. He nodded and pointed to the darkness behind us again. Getting a fresh grip on my .475, I asked him to use his torch and shine it over the place where he thought the animal to be. He did so at once. Two iridescent orbs gleamed back at us from the bushes as the animal’s eyes reflected the weak glow of the overused batteries in the torch. There was something distinctly sinister in the lustre and size of the eyes shining out of the night behind us. Instinctively, I raised the rifle and, aiming swiftly between and a fraction below the gleaming eyes, depressed the trigger. The .475 boomed and the eyes vanished. When no thrashing sounds followed, nor the undergrowth rustled to indicate the animal’s probable size and identify its whereabouts, I surmised that I had missed and it had got away. The laughter and the merry-making subsided in the distance as the echoes from the shockingly loud .475 rolled about the jungle and faded away. A shout rang out, inquiring nervously what we might be up to. I asked the mahout to hurry up and get us there fast.
A very concerned and anxious group of villagers, with our guest among them, surrounded us when we reached the machaan and nervous questions were thrown at me. I allayed their fears by humorously telling them that the man with me was suffering from a bad case of nerves and had induced me to fire blindly and probably at nothing but a figment of his overwrought imagination. The villagers then trooped back to the large tiger lying slumped over the dead heifer’s neck, joyously cursing the killed cattle-lifter and recounting its particular depredations. They seemed to possess a personal, vindictive bond with it. My guest told me that the tiger had attacked and killed the bait and was engaged in sucking its blood as the life ebbed out of the heifer, when he had aimed the rifle at the tiger’s neck and drilled it neatly and fatally through. I remember finding this account incredulous at that time, never having heard of a tiger sucking the blood of its kill, even when the villagers told me that the tiger’s jaws had to be pried open from around the dead heifer’s neck and jugular vein. It was only years later, when such a similar incident occurred again that I began to believe that this habit of blood-sucking, exhibited only by panthers and leopards, was a particular forte of the cattle-lifting tiger too. Lethally shot, my guest’s tiger had died at once. In the excitement of the moment, I paid little heed to the shot that I had fired from the elephant’s back at the dimly seen eyes on the game trail in the dark, or to its results. In any case, I put off investigating it till the morrow in the hustle and bustle of getting the large tiger back to our host’s bungalow before dinner and a good night’s sleep.
Jungle fowl had been clucking temptingly from all around since the dawn of the next day and I rode out on elephant hoping to get a brace before breakfast. We crossed a game trail and I found something vaguely familiar about the surroundings. Looking around, I
recognized it to be the same spot on which I had loosed off the rifle at the dimly glowing eyes last night. Locating the exact place on the trail, I got down from the elephant and stepped into the undergrowth, following the telltale marks on the ground that led to where some animal had dragged its way over the carpet of littered sal leaves, disturbing them considerably. The man had been rightfully alarmed and neither had I missed my aim, for soon I came upon a blood trail. Stepping warily around a wall of lantana bush, I stopped short in shocked surprise. A large tigress lay prone upon the ground, still and stone dead. The bullet had entered the tigress’ chest, smashing through it completely. It was only the beast’s brute strength that had made it drag itself half-dead, for another two hundred metres before succumbing to the fatal wound and expiring noiselessly on the spot.
I felt exultant. We had bagged two tigers within the space of an hour. When the villagers heard of this, their joy knew no bounds. They gathered around the dead tigress to revile the cold yet oddly menacing corpse as they had around its mate the previous night. Beating the animal with their shoes and sticks they vent their fury on its lifeless form in grim repayment for the cattle it had robbed from them. Soon the villagers melted away and went back to their work and their huts. So panic-stricken were they all that I knew, not without a twinge of disappointment, that our efforts had only momentarily dispelled their constant anxiety. The terror and damage let loose on them by cattle-lifters was to be with them for a long time, the fear now an integral part of their haunted lives. The air of brooding melancholy would never leave them. A pair of cattle-lifters must have done incalculable harm to this village of poor farm labourers. Fate had thrown the culprit pair across our path, and luck being with us, they would now never kill again. I fervently wished at that time to stay on, despite our guest’s programme, and account for each one of the tigers that had taken to cattle-lifting. Later I did come back to Dabaora many times. Of the cattle-lifters we missed very many and shot very many, but that is a different story.
Tigers that take to exclusively killing cattle become extremely bold and aggressive. Going after a cattle-lifter can prove to be a truly wild sport, as my friend and relative, the youngest Kunwar of Doonga in the Doon valley once discovered. He had been out in his jeep seeking information about a tiger that had terrorized villagers in the stately forests between Haridwar and Dehra Dun in which the beast had roamed with complete impunity to satisfy its ever-increasing hunger for village cattle. Stopping the jeep at the bank of a broad, boulder-strewn watercourse, he made his way through the bushes overgrowing the wide, arid riverbed, towards where he had seen some cows and bullocks grazing on the winter grass with a villager attending them. He questioned the man about the tiger’s whereabouts but could learn nothing substantial from the ill-informed herder. However, in the course of conversation he did discover that the man was as avid an angler as he was and so embarked upon a lengthy discourse with him about fish and the best spots to cast in upriver.
The afternoon waned and Sacchu, as I shall refer to my relative from Doonga, was about to leave the spot for his jeep when he heard a peculiar roaring, lowing sound coming from the jungle on the bank, below which the cattle grazed. As he listened, the sound was abruptly choked into a gurgling rattle and he could not help notice the cow-herder’s sudden agitation. Sacchu, who did not then have any experience with tigers, was frankly mystified, but not for long. The herder boy squatted down in the sand and told him that the cattle-lifting tiger he had been inquiring about had, at that very moment, killed one of the cows that had strayed up the riverbank. The sound they had heard was the cow’s dying protest as the tiger’s fangs ripped into the throat to twist and drag the animal down.
Sacchu returned at once to where his party was camped. He sent out his shikaris with instructions to locate the tiger’s kill and get a machaan up over it. They returned before dark and told him that the tiger had dragged the kill to a more thickly overgrown bend in the river, barely three hundred metres away, eating but perfunctorily from it before going away to rest. They had erected a machaan on a tall tree on the riverbank directly in front of the kill and were fully expecting the tiger to return to eat again before morning. Sacchu lost no time driving back to the place and getting up on the machaan. Nothing happened that night. Towards dawn, as Sacchu waited for the day to brighten enough for him to get down and pick his way back to the jeep, he distinctly heard dead leaves loudly crunching under the tread of a heavy animal in the thick forest behind his machaan. The sound went away from him and after fifteen minutes he suddenly saw the tiger slinking through the bushes towards the kill. It was only a momentary glimpse, but it suitably alerted him. Shouldering the rifle, he waited for the tiger to emerge from the screen of undergrowth at the edge of which the kill lay, below two closely growing trees.
The tiger perhaps sensed him, too, but instead of fleeing as would another tiger, the cattle-lifter paused in the last of the bushes before the kill. The minutes passed swiftly by and Sacchu began wondering if the rapidly changing light had tricked his eyes and whether the tiger he had seen was an optical illusion. He became somewhat off-guard and just then the tiger’s head and shoulder darted into view between the two tree trunks, while the rest of its large body remained concealed in the dense bush. Then the tiger quickly gripped the kill with its teeth and tugged at the carcass in an effort to drag it back into the bushes. Sacchu, realizing that he had his chance, brought the rifle up, but the tiger at once withdrew its fangs from the kill and slid back into the bush. Sacchu waited motionlessly, and sure enough, the tiger’s head and shoulder appeared again as it tried to drag back the kill. Sacchu fired and, as he later discovered, missed. The tiger, of course, bolted into the jungle.
At the camp, Sacchu expressed the difficulties he had encountered in sighting and shooting at the range the kill lay and its location below the trees, in the densely packed bushes nearby that rendered it largely obscure. His clever shikari, conversant with the characteristic boldness of cattle-lifters, was quick to think up a plan and act on it. When Sacchu went there in the afternoon expecting the tiger to return to the kill, he found that the shikari had dragged the kill out of the bushes and secured it to a stake in the clearing directly blow the machaan. Sacchu was skeptical of the tiger coming back to a kill that human hands had so thoroughly disturbed. His shikari though knew better, as he soon discovered an hour or so later.
The cattle-lifting tiger came back to where it had left the kill, slinking through the undergrowth in the same manner as before. Then pausing in the bushes, it studied the changed scheme of things and stayed put in its place of concealment, watching the kill where it lay across the clearing. Sacchu saw the tiger just as it walked out of the bushes and came towards the kill under the machaan. Picking up his rifle, he aimed and pulled the trigger and then occurred that inexplicable event on which often the fate of the hunter and the hunted depend. With a flat, resounding click, the cartridge misfired! The huge tiger came to a standstill. Then baring its fangs in a blood-curdling snarl, it looked up menacingly at him. Before Sacchu could recover enough sense to uncoil his nerves from their state of temporary paralysis brought on by the unexpected misfire and think of using his rifle’s second barrel, the tiger flicked its swaying tail with a loud whip-crack and crouching, jumped onto the kill. Taking hold of the carcass in its jaws, it jerked its dead weight free from the stake and bounded away, dragging it into the jungle and out of sight. Incidentally, only a cattle-lifter is bold enough to perform such a feat. Any other tiger would have abandoned its kill at the first hint of man and machaan. In shocked silence, Sacchu regarded the foreleg of the kill that the tiger had left dangling from the stake when it had wrenched out the remaining portions and fled.
Nor was that the end of the tiger’s boldness, for it commenced noisily eating the kill merely fifty metres away, in the dense cover of thick lantana bushes. For an hour or so, Sacchu had to remain content with the sounds of bones cracking as the tiger continued to eat. Then it departed. Lat
er, fondling the misfired cartridge, he too made his way back to the jeep.
He now changed his tactics and decided to track the tiger to its lair in the forest on elephant back. When the elephant reached the fringes of the forest of trees in which the tiger was reputed to live, a loud roar from the tiger sent the elephant stampeding back. The mahout was urged to take the elephant once again into the forest. This time the tiger came charging out, roaring mightily through the trees as it leapt bounding towards the elephant. The poor untrained elephant turned tail and ran, hurrying out of the jungle. The tiger, roaring thunderously, followed, chasing the elephant until it was a good half-mile away from the forest. Then the tiger sat down in the bushes outside the forest and looked at the elephant standing and trembling in the distance.
After two days, the tiger killed another cow, and this time, when Sacchu sat up for it, he shot it without much difficulty. He has bagged only one tiger but says that the thrills he encountered in hunting even one are enough to last a lifetime.
1 Located in the fertile grasslands between the Kumaon foothills and Kashipur, Dabaora was an important outpost of my family’s ancestral zamnindari lands that lay about 200 km away from the family seat of Narauli in Moradabad district of Uttar Pradesh.
Bagging a tiger in the Adhnala block of forests in the Ramnagar division was no mean feat. Gone were the days when tigers, as many foreigners popularly believed, were to be found behind every bush, tree and lamppost! Beset by an inexorable tide of lumber companies, shikar companies and agricultural companies rapidly encroaching on its dominions, the king of the jungle retreated into the comparative safety of the small national park that had been founded in the heart of the shooting country. A small but firm step towards wildlife conservation, the Corbett National Park had just been set up in those days in the mid-1930s. Shikar was even then permitted in the jungles surrounding the limited park area. Consequently, the tigers that still roamed outside the park were the wiliest of their tribe, having become seasoned veterans in the campaign that hunters so relentlessly waged against them. This had become especially true of the Adhnala block adjoining Corbett, lying on the eastern side of River Ramganga. Among us, it was considered almost impossible to get a tiger in the Adhnala block.
The Wildest Sport of All Page 17
