The Wildest Sport of All

by Prakash Singh

  Each morning brought the same disheartening news. The heifers and calves that had been staked out in different spots throughout the block remained untouched. Changing the places of the baits and the manner of their staking had no effect either. In one instance, tiger pugmarks had been noticed near a bait but there had been no kill. This was, of course, no reflection on the abilities of our scouts and shikaris, who were usually entrusted with the task of getting the tiger to kill a bait. Tigers in this block were treacherously cunning. They did not usually kill a bait, whose purpose they had learnt well to recognize. But if a bait did get killed, the tiger was known to have sensed the machaan and its occupants above the kill, no matter how well camouflaged and concealed, when it did return to feed later.

  Despite all these challenges in the way of a successful shoot, our party had elected to camp and shoot in the Adhnala block. Such was the thrill and excitement generated by the word shikar that we spent days meticulously planning our shoots and invariably selected the most interior blocks in the jungle’s fastness to pitch our tents. There, the hustle and bustle of daily life was blessedly absent. There were no cities and villages to remind us of the world or the demanding rules of civilization. The majestic still forest surrounded us in the day. The nights were full of dark and mystery and the unending calls of savage and timid animals accentuated the cosiness of our tents and the warmth of the company. The Adhnala block was one such desolate place where we felt truly in our elements. And true to form, the tiger too was beginning to elude us now in this jinxed block.

  My companions grew rapidly impatient and tempers wore thin. Lest their wrath fall upon the luckless shikaris, I decided to take matters in hand one morning. Ordering an elephant to be readied, I proceeded on it along the bank of the Ramganga that bordered the Adhnala block on the west. My sole purpose was to locate a hitherto undetected place for tying a bait; a spot so suited to the tiger that it had to make a kill. Gently swaying along with the elephant’s motion, I looked long and hard at the sparse scrub and bush jungle through which we went. Too open by far for tiger, I mused, looking around; especially for cunning tigers. The open watercourse of the Ramganga river curved out of the jungle behind me and ran alongside in a blaze of sun-baked colour. The stream, thinned down by summer, flowed isolated between broad sandy banks that were once again too scantily overgrown to harbour or interest a tiger. This bleak prospect continued staring me in the face of a considerable distance as we went along. But then the hills appeared ahead with a promising stand of trees between the slopes and the river sand, to which I ordered the mahout to take me.

  The bushes in our path petered into grassland. At this point, a footpath that could also have been a game trail forked out to the edge of the grass on my left and continued to run below the hills towards a thicket of trees ahead that it skirted where it met the hill. I told the mahout to take us along the track, for there was something about the aura of the place that spoke of tiger.

  Irregular shoulders and ridges sloped up into green peaks above me as the elephant ambled out from the trail in the grass and onto the forest track that led towards the trees ahead. Countless runnels eroded into the hillsides by rain met my gaze. Many such courses would join somewhere ahead and form a tributary channel to the Ramganga below us. I stopped the elephant when we did reach such a nullah that coursed out between two hills and crossed the track to run shallowly into the stand of trees to my right. The sand in the bed of the nullah was damp, hence I knew there was a pool of water up its course in the hills. When I looked to my right, I could catch glimpses of the glimmering Ramganga sands through the thicket of trees which was only but two hundred metres long and about that much wide. Even though small, this little forest of trees was ideal tiger cover, as the nullah ran through its midst to the bigger river below; the sort of place the tiger usually drags its kill into, to eat and leave it hidden in. Just under the first few trees beside the track, I decided to have a bait staked out for the night.

  While the forest and we in it slept, a young male tiger killed our bait in the early hours of darkness and dragged the dead heifer about fifty metres further into the copse of trees along the shallow tributary nullah. It had eaten well, consuming about half of the kill. As the pugmarks indicated when we gathered there, it had heavily and slowly made its lordly way through the thicket and, in the half-light, had preferred to go along the comparative openness of the forest track. Later, as the day wore, it had gone into the safety of the hills, where it might still be resting in some deep shade near water. Having scouted to our satisfaction, we returned hurriedly to the camp for an early lunch and to make plans for sitting up over the tiger’s kill

  Since tigers in this shooting block were reputed for their cunning, I was frankly sceptical of the tiger ever returning to its kill if we made a machaan directly overlooking the half-eaten carcass. So wary is the gun-shy tiger when it returns to its kill that in addition to approaching as soundlessly as possible, it might stand for hours in cover studying the kill and its vicinity and carefully including the foliage of the surrounding trees in its scrutiny. The briefest hint of danger, or anything foreign to the nature of the place, and the tiger vanishes as silently as it had come, perhaps abandoning the kill altogether. Hence, the cardinal law of shooting from the machaan strongly binds the hunter to be completely immobile and silent as the tiger arrives, and to lift the rifle to aim and shoot only when it has actually commenced eating. The eyes might witness the tiger in full view and with complete clarity as it approaches the kill but, as legend has it, even the flicker of an eyelash at that moment is sufficient to warn the tiger of the impending danger. Keeping the tiger’s alertness in mind, I devised a plan of action that was based largely on my knowledge of the animal and its characteristic ways.

  Early afternoon found us back at the spot on the forest track where the tiger had killed our bait before dragging it into the tree. According to plan, two trees to the left and right of the spot, and equidistant from it, were selected and machaans put up on them. The left-hand machaan stood on a tree close to the hillside and faced the thicket where the kill lay at a distance of about a hundred metres. The right-hand machaan was located on a tree growing on the thicket side of the forest track, but faced the closest hills, with the kill visible to the left, below the trees in the lower level of the nullah. This undoubtedly placed the guns on the machaans a bit out of range for accurate night shooting if the tiger chose to come directly to the kill from the jungle across the Ramganga. But the chance had to be taken. I was convinced the tiger had gone up to the waterhole in the hills, as indicated by its pugmarks, and that while returning in the evening or night would come walking down the forest track in the darkness, or in the cover close to the track if the light was still strong. Hence the machaans had been placed to cut off the tiger’s two most probable routes of approaching the kill. How right I had been in my guesswork I was fated to find out much sooner than I had expected.

  Since silence was imperative in the setting up of the machaans, their construction and camouflage took up the better part of the afternoon. The sun stood slanted over the tree thicket, as I prepared to clamber onto the right-hand machaan. I remember glancing at my wristwatch as I worked my way up from the back of the elephant to the platform hidden in the branches above. It was quarter past five. Pulling up the double-barrelled .470 after me, I signalled to the party waiting below to withdraw. Preceded by my elder brother on the pad elephant1 as they turned back to go to the other machaan, the dozen shikaris and servants set up a forced chatter replete with sudden profanities that sounded unnaturally loud in the jungle’s grim stillness. This was according to plan, for the tiger could well be in the vicinity and so rightfully suspicious of our party, busily bent as we had been on our task. In order to allay the tiger’s aroused suspicions, the men continued to talk and laugh loudly, pretending to be travellers on their way, as they followed the pad elephant down the forest track to the left-hand machaan. They went out of my sight, but their voices
remained loud as ever.

  I looked around in an effort to accustom myself with the field of fire and the general view of things. At once, the undisturbed serenity of the place began to overpower my alertness. Angled downwards in the west, the summer sun had lost its fierce glare as evening came on. Sunshine waxed golden, silhouetting the many different shades and shapes in the leafy canopy around me. Dappled with intricate shadows, the floor of the tree thicket was a riot of colours, sloping gently downwards to my left and dipping sharply to meet the nullah from the hills. The dead weight of the .470 resting in my hands served to dispel some of the mesmeric effect that emanated visibly from the silent forest lit up like a jewel by the rays of the sun. I could see around a slow turn in the nullah and the kill, lying askew under an overhang, was partly visible. The shouts of our men suddenly died in the distance and I surmised that they were getting my elder brother up onto the second machaan.

  I stared long at the gaps in the undergrowth, familiarizing myself with their locations. Many years of tiger hunting had clearly taught me to expect the king to appear with heart-stopping suddenness, especially since there were no monkeys about to warn me. The muted shouts of the men wafted over the distance to my ears again as they proceeded onwards from the second machaan to take up their positions outside the tree thicket and wait for our rifle shots to summon them. Having looked long enough at the area around the kill, I straightened my head to study the forest track stretching away from under me. A sudden burst of laughter from the retreating party of men in the distance caused me to look upwards towards the hills looming above the track. Awash with the gently yellowing light, the hills stood out brilliantly, each nook and cranny along their many levels lit up brightly by the sun.

  Lit up likewise and as conspicuous as the proverbial square peg in a round hole, the young male tiger walked slowly over the shoulder of the closest hill! The sheer magnificence of its sleek proportions caught spectacularly in the liquid yellow of the golden sunburst will forever remain imprinted in my memory. With its huge tongue lolling out, the tiger walked slowly into a meadow hardly fifty metres up the hillside form me. The noise of the men still in my ears, I brought up the .470 and aimed behind the tiger’s left shoulder, pulling the trigger just as it began to step down the meadow to come towards its kill in the thicket.

  Struck squarely, the tiger slid back on its haunches and then toppled over to lie stretched out on its side. A deathly stillness fell upon the jungle in the wake of the .470’s ringing crash. The men in the distance, overcome perhaps by this unusually quick turn of events, had fallen silent. On my part, I had trouble controlling my trembling fingers and chaotic thoughts, for even as I watched the tiger for any signs of life, a severe nervous reaction began to overwhelm me. Had I shot a man-eater in the very act of stalking our party of men as they went up the forest track posing as simple travellers? The tiger had certainly seemed to be heading down despite their loud voices. I refused to believe that it had been unconcerned at the presence of human beings in the jungle. Lying still on the hillside the tiger was to all appearances dead. I let out a yell to the men to bring back the pad elephant and began to climb down from the machaan in order to meet them halfway up the track and direct them to where we could conveniently load the tiger.

  Despite its huge pugmarks, the tiger measured just under nine feet. In the prime of life, it bore not a wound or injury on its body and so could not possibly be a man-eater. How then was one to account for its unusually bold behaviour in coming to the kill despite the clear presence of men in the vicinity? The mystery suddenly cleared up when the men set to skinning the beast. The young tiger was unusually full of fat. Four large canisters were brimming with its fat before the skinning was done. This clearly showed that the tiger was overfed and had existed on an assured supply of food. In an age when game was rapidly becoming scarce, especially for tigers, there was only one place that the tiger could have received such generous supplies of food. All the signs now pointed towards the national park just across River Ramganga as being the tiger’s abode.

  This also explained the tiger’s apparent unconcern with human beings that had at first so mystified me. Being a park tiger, it had grown completely accustomed to men and their voices. Used to killing tied baits and unwary tourists gossiping in watchtowers as they watched and photographed it eating the kill, the tiger had shown no hesitation in taking our bait or coming to eat it when men talking loudly were in the vicinity. Bagging this tiger had been mere play and no great sport.

  This happened during summer, when tourists are scarce in the Corbett National Park. A lack of tourists had caused park officials to neglect the tiger’s carefully inculcated habit of regular meals. Crossing over the sanctuary’s boundary in its search for food, the tiger had chanced upon our bait and unluckily killed it. I felt secretly relieved and happy when I heard that soon after we broke camp, the park authorities enlarged the national park’s limits, thus taking in the Adhnala block as well. Lucky for the tigers but unlucky for us!

  1 A pad elephant is saddled with straw- or cotton-filled mattresses padding its back and not the usual bulkier wooden howdah with iron railings.

  In an earlier story I had talked of the grasslands near Kashipur but no amount of recounting is enough to describe the true beauty of that singular tract of jungle that once was and is now no more. Spotting game proved difficult enough amidst those featureless, undulating levels of elephant grass, also referred to as tiger grass by some hunters and naturalists. Bringing down an animal with a rifle or shotgun proved a formidable task requiring real skill or fantastic luck. Very often, the quivering tufts that crown the golden-green fronds of the grass cover was all that one had to go by whilst sighting to shoot the quarry dashing through the closely growing clumps. We shot a large number of fair-sized boars, swift antelopes and deer in this manner, but the tiger was another matter altogether. The chances of wounding one were many and not worth risking simply for sport. The tiger had to be firmly in view before being fired at. It would be murderous to wound a tiger, especially since a number of villages had begun to crop up in those areas where the grass thinned out. Yet the king of the jungle was ever-present in our minds and it was him that we mainly sought to bag whenever we went out hunting on our elephants.

  Let me tell you a bit about my brother-in-law, the Durbar Sahib of Amaliara. You might remember him from an earlier story when a man-eating tigress had fallen to his rifle. A true relic of a glorious era gone by, he is still young at heart. The kingly life that he led in his youth lingers in his blazing eyes and gentle manner. He maintains that the only complete cure for gout, otherwise considered an incurable disease, is a medicine made from the flesh of a tiger’s neck, concocted according to a formula mentioned in some ancient texts. A small portion of the meat from a tiger’s neck is dried under strong sunlight and then ground into a powder. The patient is then fed small portions of this meat powder every day for a week, mixed with porridge or any preparation of wheat, at breakfast. At the end of the week, says Durbar Sahib, the sufferer is completely cured. He knows of innumerable instances where the cure has been thus effected.

  But to return to my tale: Durbar Sahib was the most experienced tiger-hunter amongst us in those early years of our shikar expeditions. The following account would show what I mean.

  One morning Durbar Sahib, my eldest brother, Kunwar K.S.I. Singh and I set out on an elephant for a jaunt through the grassland that began close from our camp at Dhakion near Kashipur1. Our better-trained female elephant, with our tracker Ram Singh and another shikari atop it, moved out alongside our older mount, and we swished our way through the dense, tall clumps of grass. Very soon tiger grass reared up about our elephants, their silver plumes towering all around us. I could not help noticing Ram Singh’s shotgun occasionally showing through that devilish grass that had obliterated any other signs of his or his elephant’s presence alongside ours. We wound our way thus, susurrating through the jungle of grass until the ground shelved before us. The g
rass shot up even higher and the water gleamed unmistakably in the bed of a shallow nullah ahead. Our mahouts now began to walk the elephants beside this running stream and I found myself looking around with renewed interest at the comparatively clear field of vision afforded by the lack of cover in the watercourse on our right. It seemed more heartening for shooting purposes than that dense blinding thicket that our elephants had just tramped through.

  Suddenly Durbar Sahib was leaning over across me and tapping the mahout’s shoulder in a silent signal to stop. I glanced at him and saw his body visibly tense in a half-slouch. Shading his eyes with his hand, he looked intently at the sands on the other side of the stream. Excitement prickled at my neck as I saw what Durbar Sahib was looking at. Large pugmarks, deeply embedded in the soft damp sands led up the far bank where a tiger had drunk from the stream and then gone up into the grass. In a low voice, Durbar Sahib told us that the tiger was close ahead in the grass across the stream, as he could clearly see the drip marks on the sand where the water had flowed off the tiger’s whiskers and coat. He drew our attention to the faint but unmistakable dark line in the sand that ran intermittently between the deeply gouged pugmarks. This was better luck than we had hoped for. As our elephants waded across to take up the tiger’s trail, every fear about the dangerous nature of the game afoot was firmly pushed out of our minds by the thrill in our hearts.