Shikar Stories

by Ruskin Bond

  Mangra Sirdar spoke. "Huzoor, as you know there was a marriage held here yesterday. While it was in progress, that bhut of a hati came up unawares. Even our line dogs were silent and none knew of his approach. We conclude he walked up the stream and up to this hut, which he put his head against and began shoving. As soon as the timber began to break, the men rushed out and seeing the elephant standing at the back of the hut, they lost their heads and ran away, leaving the women and children inside.

  "I and Somra, had gone a little way when we stopped and came back. We were too late. As soon as the house began to fall, the hati came to the front and as the women rushed out one by one he caught them in his trunk and dashed them on the ground. We shouted to them to remain where they were. It was useless. The hut already on a bad slant was slowly, but surely coming down. The brute stood ready, he spared no one. Somra and I lifted one side of the hut, after the elephant had gone, and have put all the bodies inside. Come and see."

  I went with him. The sight was heart-rending. The brute had done his work thoroughly and in sheer delight at the destruction emitted those horrible sounds we had heard in the night. I returned home dumbfounded. The Chota hazri laid out on the table I sent away untasted. I poured out a small glass of brandy and drank it down.

  Seizing a telegraph form, I wired to the Magistrate to come over; instead, he had the elephant proscribed, offering a reward of Rs 250 to anyone who would kill it. Many of us have tried, not for the reward, but for the sake of the killing. Five of my bullets are embedded in him and others too claim to have hit him often. The animal seems to bear a charmed life. Five years ago the total number of human lives he had accounted for reached 135 and he still lives.

  I heard his life history from a Nepalese crafter who lives in the Morung or Nepal Tarai. For years he wandered with a herd, the favourite of their leader, a fine female elephant. "One day", said Dalbir, "another young male, sought her favours challenging this one to an open combat. The fight took place in a large clearing in the forest lying between the Chalsa and Jaldakka rivers." "It was a very fierce fight, huzoor," continued Dalbir, "and the pagla hati, as he is now known, broke his right tusk. If you have watched him walking, he limps. The tusk of the younger elephant was buried below the joint. He left the herd disgraced, and, as if the cause of his downfall was due to mankind alone, he takes his revenge yearly on many human lives."

  (1929)

  Hunting With A Camera

  By F.W Champion

  n the left bank of the Ganges, a few miles below Lachmanjhula, in the United Provinces, where the holy river emerged from the Himalayan foot-hills, lies a great forest which forms the home of many wild beasts from the mighty elephant and tiger downwards. Hardwar, that sacred and populous Hindu city, is only a few miles away on the other side of the river, and the pious pilgrims who come from all over India to wash away their sins by bathing in the holy water little realise how often at night tigers stand on the opposite bank of the river to watch with curious gaze the bright illuminations of their festivals, or how these huge beasts even listen to the rumbling o f the trains as they bring the pilgrims to the railway station after long journeys from all parts of India.

  In this forest for many years has resided a very fine tigress, who has so far escaped destruction at the hands of the numerous sportsmen who are for ever pursuing her—and may she continue to do so until old age mars her pleasure in the life which is as dear to her as their own is to her hunters! She is very powerfully built for a tigress and is perhaps as fine an example of her race as is to be found anywhere in northern India. For this reason the hunter who at last lays her low will undoubtedly feel very pleased with himself, although there are some amongst us—an increasing number these days, one is glad to be able to say—who can derive just as much pleasure from hunting with the bloodless camera, which, after all, takes no life and is much less selfish than shooting to kill, in that the resultant pictures can subsequently give pleasure to others in a way that skins or horns can never do even though the skin be stolen from one of the finest tigresses in northern India.

  I will now describe a few episodes which have occurred from time to time during the last four or five years when we happened to be camping within this tigress' domain and have thus had opportunities to hunt her with a camera. The first time we became acquainted with her was several years ago, when she suddenly took to killing the buffloes which the local bamboo-cutters use for dragging their produce down to the edge of the Ganges, where the bamboos are tied together into huge rafts and floated away to distant markets on the banks of the great Ganges canals—those fine monuments of the work of the Irrigation Department in Upper India. During a single week she killed four or five of these buffaloes and always left the carcases to be devoured by vultures after making one heavy meal. Several times, mounted on a tame elephant, we searched the places where we hoped she would be lying up during the day, but she was never there and it appeared that there were two reasons for this. Firstly, she had at the time two or three small cubs to feed, which meant that she had to kill more frequently than usual, whereas an attack of rinderpest had greatly reduced the numbers of the sambar which form her usual food; and, secondly, she had been fired at in a beat and missed, so that she had learnt not to lie near her kills in the daytime. The result was that several natural kills produced no single glimpse of her to enable us to take a photograph, although one day a fine chital stag with his horns in velvet allowed us to approach within a few yards and seemed little perturbed at the click of the shutter as we recorded his picture. His very presence there, however, was a fairly certain indication that the tigress was not where we were hoping to find her. On another occasion, having once more failed to find our quarry, we followed a poor specimen of a sambar stag for two or three hours in the hope that he would stand in a good light and give us an opportunity to take his photograph; but he always moved too quickly from one belt of thick shade to another and all we could do was to snap him standing half-hidden among some bushes. Oh! If only the animal-photographer could explain to wild animals that, were they to stand out in the open for a few moments in a good pose, he would take their photographs, give them an honoured place on his wall or in his collection of jungle pictures and let them depart in peace!

  But we are wandering from the subject of our tigress and must return. As we have already seen, she never seemed to be near her kills in the day-time, and, as she generally left them in the open, they were usually devoured by jackals and vultures long before the evening. She soon gave up killing the dragging cattle, which was as well for her, because, although the loss of these cattle was largely due to the carelessness of their owners, who calmly left them loose at night in places which they knew the tigress might visit, I should otherwise have had to make an effort to destroy her in the interests of my forest employees. We then tried tying up young buffalo-baits in very quiet secluded spots; but we soon found that the only places where she would kill these baits were open cross-roads, which meant that hyenas and jackals—which frequent jungle roads—always smelt them out and fired off the automatic flashlight arranged over the kills early in the evening and long before there was any hope of the tigress arriving. One day she killed a bait in a particularly quiet spot, and, full of hope, we mounted on a tame elephant and stalked the kill very quietly in the heat of the afternoon. Sure enough, we found her at last dozing in the shade of a bamboo clump and thus obtained our first view of her magnificent proportions. But she was evidently sleeping with one eye open, for, although there was ample time for a quick shot with a rifle, she dashed off with an angry "whoof" just as I was getting her into focus on the mirror of my reflex camera, so that once more she got the better of us. This particular kill, however, did not fail altogether as one of her cubs, who was by now three-parts grown, returned during the night and was caught by our automatic flashlight in the act of seizing the kill.

  The next stage in our efforts to secure her photograph involved sitting out all night over a live-bait tied near
an old kill, which we hoped would attract her to the spot and perhaps induce her to attack the living bait, over which the flashlight apparatus had been arranged during the day time so that it could be fired by pulling a cord from the machan. The reader will now accompany me in thought to this machan and in imagination spend the night with me in the tree. We will assume that the difficult adjustments of the flashlight apparatus have already been done—they take several hours and we are now mounted on a tame elephant and approaching the chosen spot at about 4 p.m. on a fine warm afternoon. As we draw near the place, we move very slowly and approach carefully under cover, since tigers in general and this tigress in particular have a habit of doing the unexpected and who knows but that we may now find her calmly eating her kill in broad daylight. But no: she is not here at the foment. A short distance from the old kill stands a dead tree on which are perched a number of vultures, evidently resting after their disgusting meal of putrid flesh, and above in the crystal clear sky, is circling a kite, also attracted by the prospect of food. We pause for a moment to watch the wonderful grace of the movements of his forked tail, which is a hundred-fold more efficient than the rudder of any ship or aeroplane invented by man, and then we move on again, noting as we approach the stealthy retreat of a pair of jackals, who have been stealing a meal during the absence of the rightful owner of the kill. We now climb up to the machan and, sending the elephant back to camp, settle down to the prospect of the deep enjoyment of a moonlight night spent absolutely alone in the heart of a great forest. All around us is a vast jungle containing no human being for miles in any direction, yet positively alive with wild animals and birds of every kind and description. Only a day or two previously a herd of about 20 wild elephants, including two or three tiny babies, passed under the very tree in which we are now sitting, and the place is notorious for sloth-bears, which come from long distances to feed on the luscious crop of berries now ripening on the ber bushes all around us. The local sambar have been sadly thinned out by a recent attack of rinderpest, but chital are common in the neighbourhood, which, among many other species, even holds a few of those curious four-horned antelope nowhere common in the Himalayan foot-hills. And the birds! Who can give any idea of the marvellous beauty and variety of the feathered denizens of the foot-hill forests? All around us are scores of peafowl, attracted like the bears by the ripening of the jungle fruits; green paroquets in hundreds are dashing about at a tremendous pace in every direction and screaming with joy in harsh raucous tones as through they are revelling in the thrill of their rapid motion through the air; bulbuls are twittering on almost every bush; plover of two or three species are running about the dry sandy raw bed in front of us; two or three kites are screaming in the air above us; a pair of fantailed flycatchers are pirouetting from twig to twig of the very tree in which we are sitting; and a host of others of every conceivable shape and colours are to be seen and heard in the directions. All seem bubbling over with a happiness which finds ready expression in song and play. And yet some naturalists claim that all Nature is intensely cruel! Those of us, however, who enjoy watching rather than destroying wild creatures do not find Nature cruel—far from it. Sudden death appears at intervals, it is true, but it is only our vivid imagination and fear of the hereafter that make us afraid of death. Wild creatures do not know what death is and are not troubled by thoughts about Heaven and Hell, so that the sudden passing of one of their number as the result of the advent of some flesh-eating animal or bird is but a fleeting incident soon forgotten by the survivors. But once again we are straying from our subject.

  We sit happily on in our machan, hoping against hope that at last the tigress will give us our chance to take her photograph and imperceptibly the day passes away to be replaced by the full glory of a jungle night. Once or twice we hear the alarm cry of a kakar or chital in the distance and hope surges up in our hearts, only to die down again as the cries soon cease. Then a curious rumbling comes from the direction of Hardwar, some distance away, and we wonder what tamasha there can be making such a disturbance. But the noise seems to be increasing, and, at last, straining over the edge of the machan, we realise with dismay that a heavy storm is rapidly approaching from the west. What are we to do? We have no mackintosh and little bedding and our camp is several miles away, with a jungle full of. wild beasts in between and no lamp or path to help us get there. Yet if we stay in the machan we are bound to get wet through and thoroughly chilled, which will inevitably result in a bout of fever. Even as we consider the problem the moon disappears, dazzling lightning flashes across the sky in all directions, a strong wind begins to blow, and down comes a tropical deluge of rain which soon soaks the camera, flashlight, blankets, and finally us. All hope of our long-sought picture has gone, and, feeling distinctly nervous of being struck by lighting, we see in imagination our tigress hugging herself with glee at the thought of how well we are being punished for having had the impertinence to continue for so long in the vain pursuit of her photograph. At long last, after we have become resigned to spending a night of misery, we hear a curious whistling which does not seem to come from any animal or bird we recognise. Surely we are not beginning to get a little light in the head as a result of our nerve-racking experience? No: the whistling continues and increases in volume so that at last we realise, with a thrill of joy, that it must be one of our tame elephants, which, despite our orders to the contrary, has been sent out by my wife to rescue us from our predicament. We eagerly call up the elephant, thankful to escape from our chilly damp perch, and rapidly return to our comfortable camp 4 miles away, which we reach about 1 a.m. Shortly afterwards, fortified by hot Bovril, we are dozing in a comfortable warm bed and dreaming of new schemes for obtaining the photograph which had now become a fetish with us.

  Thus the campaign continued for some years, but always without success. We could never find her again by stalking in the day-time; she always seemed to discover our presence if we sat in machans over her kills at night; and, if we arranged our automatic flashlight apparatus over her kills, she waited until hyenas and jackals had spent some time there first and thus fired the flashlight before she was due to appear. It seemed as though she were going to win in this contest of wits, and then, at last, we had a brilliant idea. We had a kill one day on the edge of a broad rau bed and we had noticed previously, from a study of her tracks, that she had formed the habit of hugging the foot of a low bank on the edge of this rau bed when passing this particular locality. How would it be if we were to arrange a tripwire at the edge of this bank, some distance from the kill, and thus avoid the risk of the chance being ruined by the inevitable jackals and hyenas? There seemed some hope of this method proving successful, especially as we had a good idea of the direction from which she was likely to arrive and could thus probably guide her, all unconsciously, by means of a judicious arrangement of cut branches, to the exact spot where our photographic trap was to be set. We decided to carry out this plan and arranged our apparatus with extreme care, even to the last detail of a trip-wire carefully matched to the colour of the surrounding ground for she had seen one of our trip-wires once before and carefully stepped over it without touching it! We then returned to our camp with a sneaking hope that at long last we stood a fair chance of winning in the long-drawn-out battle of wits. About midnight we heard the familiar boom of the exploding flashlight and we were so excited that we jumped out of bed and hurried out to the spot by the light of a lantern. Had we really succeeded at last, or had those ... hyenas and jackals once more ruined a good chance? After what seemed a tremendous time, although in reality the distance was quite short, we at last reached the spot and—hurrah! There were the tell-tale claw marks in the gound as she had involuntarily extended her claws on being startled by the noise and light of the exploding flashlight. Yes: the complicated mechanism of tripping the shutter had also Worked without a hitch—it does not always do so—and at last cur plate had been exposed. Now for the final stage of development. We rushed back to our camp, and, althoug
h it was the middle of the night, out came the developing chemicals, and before many minutes had passed we had the tremendous satisfaction of seeing a fine negative appearing in the developing dish—a negative which, except for a slight fault in one of the fore-legs, is as good as we had ever hoped to obtain even in our most optimistic moments.

  Thus ended the hunt for the first negative of this fine tigress, to whom we take off our hats with heartfelt thanks for having given us such a fine run for our money. We could have shot her years before when we first saw her, and, had we done so, all would have been over except for a skin which would have begun rotting away by now under the effects of this trying climate. Yet she lives on and may still provide us with more harmless pleasure, so who can now say that, once we have overcome our primitive and savage lust of killing, hunting with a camera is not the peer of any form of blood-hunting that the world can produce.

  (1929)

  Drought in the Jungle

  By F.W Champion

  "Of sapphire are the skies, but when men cry Famished, no drops they give."

  LIGHT OF ASIA

  oon has passed some hours ago and the heat is now reaching its dreadful climax in the middle of the afternoon. A dull haze envelopes the whole jungle and the surrounding hills are but vaguely outlined against the sky, which, as though feeling in disgrace for having failed to produce one single drop of rain for a period of months, has now turned a dirty yellow colour—sullen and menacing. The previous monsoon has been a failure; the winter rains, which might have helped so much, were a bitter disappointment; the hot weather storms—the last hope—are still awaited. The inevitable result of such a shortage of the life-giving rain is that drought, cholera and famine, that dread trio, are now stalking forth, arm in arm, to take their fearful toll from man and beast, bird and fish, tree and plant alike. The trees have already dropped most of their leaves, in their valiant effort to save their lives by stopping transpiration of the little moisture which their far-spreading roots can suck up from the parched ground. The green grass, which should have sprung up after the winter-burning of the low-lying grassy areas, has completely failed and the hordes of half-famished cattle and herbivorous jungle animals are wandering aimlessly from place to place in their forlorn search for the food which practically does not exist.