Tiger in Sight

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t

BOSTON

PUBLIC LIBRARY

Tiger in Sight

Translated from the Swedish by Joan Bulman

Astrid Bergman Sucksdorff

A Seymour Lawrence Book Delacorte Press / New York

Originally published in Sweden by Albert Bonniers Forlag under the title Tiger i sikte Copyright © 1965 by Astrid Bergman Sucksdorff Copyright © 1970 by Dell Publishing Co., Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in connection with reviews written specifically for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 69-12842 Manufactured in the United States of America First American Printing

Contents

Beloved Enemy 9 Meeting with the Jungle 10 Speckled Beauty 15 The Rain Storm 19 A Smell of Leopard 24 Leopard in the Moonlight SO The Man-Eater of Narainpur S3 A Boy is Killed 41 The Big Drive 48 The Third Telegram 53 Death in the Monsoon 69 The Goat Thief in the Garden 74 The Old He-Tiger of the Peacock Jungle 77 Mostly about Bears 84 The Tigress of Dota 91 A Murderess’ Death 102

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

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Tiger in Sight

Beloved Enemy

The tiger is the king of all jungles, the most beautiful beast on earth. I have enormous respect and regard for the tiger. He is the most beautiful living creature that I know. With his strength and power and sinuousness he gives fresh dimensions to beauty. He is a perfect living being, a sovereign animal. But I can kill the most beautiful creature that I know - because I happen to be on the side of the human race, to whom the tiger can be a terrible enemy. I have come upon a little dead boy, mauled by a tiger, out in the jungle. I have come to a village high up in the mountains where the very air was sorrow and where I met a mother whose grief at the loss of her only son burnt memories in my heart. I have stood in a clearing by a river bed and looked into an old man's face, streaming with tears, while vultures sailed in flocks above two buffaloes killed by tigers. “What can you do now, Seile? Seile, they are dead, my beasts - they were all that I had, all. Now I have nothing. ..." The helpless face of the herdsboy, the tear-stained face of the mother and the old man are the reasons why I must kill tigers, and this is the way I shall always feel, for these faces are always with me. They can never turn pale or fade away at the sight of a tiger, however incredibly beautiful, however sovereign he may be as a beast, as a living creature.

I moved cautiously, trying to avoid the dry leaves on the ground as I peered into the trees looking for birds. I had come out with my shotgun to shoot pigeons for dinner. The ground was hot - I could feel it through the ooles of my sneakers. The air shimmered with heat - it was over a hundred and five in the shade. A brown, white-headed eagle swooped and came to rest in a tall teak tree. Green parrots had been squabbling in the branches of another tree but they all flew off suddenly like arrows shot from hard bamboo bows. Earlier that morning I had seen the tracks of a tiger on the dried-up river bed that twisted like a yellow snake through the parched landscape. It was a solitary tiger but the tracks, bracelet impress of a tigress's foot in the sand, were some days old. Now I was up here walking beneath tall banyan trees and teak trees along the bank of a river, watching a comical troop of langur monkeys with silver-gray fur, little black wrinkled faces and long tails. They were chattering and playing high up in a leafy tree, chasing each other up and down the branches, their faces at once so joyously happy and so tragically sad. I laughed and thought how incredible everything was. Not many days ago I had been in Sweden, still fewer days ago my colleagues and I were in the customhouse in Bombay, trying to retrieve our equipment for two years' work in India. How many hours, how many days did we actually spend in that famous Bombay customhouse, that enormous building overflowing with papers and officials armed with pins, pinning together long lists and documents.

Meeting with the Jungle 11

Officials - pins - papers. And up in the roof fans a yard wide going steadily around and around to a restless beat, forcing the heavy air to circulate. How many times did we sit there in that stifling heat, waiting and watching, staring at the whirring fans and thinking about what would happen if something went wrong with the current! Suppose all those fans suddenly started going at a furious, whirlwind pace so that they sucked up all the permits and rejection slips and depositions and certificates and put them into a ring dance high up there under the roof. The chirpy black jungle crows which are everywhere in Bombay would, no doubt, make the most of the opportunity to snap up a licence or two. And all the officials would start rushing backward and forward and jump up and down on chairs and tables, snatching at papers as they flew by. In the end, of course, the third or fourth electrician, having been unearthed in some back street after many hours' search, would repair the electrical fault. The fans would slow down to normal and all the rejections and permits would come drifting down and scatter themselves over tables and chairs and officials. Would anyone notice the difference? What blasphemous thoughts come to one in the heat! My Husqvarna rifle, 30.06, with a telescopic sight, my favorite gun, was held up in customs. What a long time and what endless discussions before I got it out! I remember sitting there waiting and wondering whether I should ever get a tiger in front of my gun or whether I should have to content myself with deer and antelope and perhaps a leopard or two. ... I had no idea what was going to happen in this country. I only knew that I had the best part of two years' work as a film photographer ahead of me, and in a part of India where shooting is not merely exciting but positively necessary. For in the Bastar district, which is a large and mountainous jungle area in the heart of India and where the film was to be made, there are plenty of tigers and leopards. It is not always possible to live in a state of peaceful coexistence with animals that pay visits on people in order to make a meal of them. I had an idea that shooting would constitute part of my work. Now here I was in another jungle in the lowland two hundred miles south of the town of Raipur, where our expedition was making a week's halt. Here I was, peering into the treetops for green pigeons, for all the

12 Tiger in Sight

world as though I had been accustomed to doing this before dinner all my life. Something rustled on the ground behind the root of a tree some six feet in front of me. Quickly I lowered my rifle, caught sight of a few coils of an enormous snake as thick as my arm writhing along the ground, fired and hit, but even so, it came squirming straight toward me only a few feet from my foot. I fired again. The snake shivered, was dead. A couple of native boys came running up as soon as they heard the shots. They said it was a very dangerous snake, and I shuddered when they straightened it out - it was at least six feet long. They were delighted with it and laughed for joy. Two yards of snake-beef for supper! As for me, I was a bit shaken up and felt no desire at all to have snake for dinner. I went back to the mud bungalow, the sleeping quarters for Indian foresters and other travelers out in the jungle. Only Kaile Ram, our solemn, mustachioed elderly servant, was at home. He gave me a cup of tea and some biscuits, and after that I went back to my interrupted pigeon shoot. This week in the Kalari district was to be devoted to learning something about the jungle and making contact with the people who lived there. And to shooting. There were several tigers and leopards harrying there, and the village people wanted help against their tormenting spirits. It was the month of May, the worst month of the dry season, and great areas of forest had been ravaged by jungle fires. Occasionally one could still see a glow of red in some tree stump or fallen branch. The ground was charred and the tree trunks looked grim black pillars. It was against such a background that I had seen my first wild peacock rise, a few days before, a cock of shimmering blue with long, billowy tail feathers. It flew off with heavy wing beats between a pair of coal-black teak trunks, the last faint rays of the evening sun glimmering on its golden tail feathers. I can still see that fabulous bird against the blackness. Only a month later and the monsoon would be at its height, the rivers filled to overflowing and the jungle lush and green again. The forester of Kalari, Salim, a strong, jovial Mohammedan, came over from a village not far away to tell us that a tiger had tried to kill a buffalo

Meeting with the Jungle 13

there two days ago. A small boy had been herding three buffaloes a little way from the village when the tiger had rushed up roaring and hurled itself upon one of the buffaloes. The other two had immediately turned on it with lowered horns and it had thought it best to return to the jungle again. But the buffalo had been badly injured. The terrified boy had driven his animals home. We drove to the village, a little collection of mud huts on the edge of a dried-up river bed. People came flocking around, men with narrow, longshafted axes over their shoulders, women with big, watchful, curious eyes, and children, of course - bright little children, dressed in a piece of cloth wound around their stomachs or just a necklace of bright-colored glass beads. All of them gave us happy, flashing smiles, in various sizes according to age and temperament. It was not at all difficult to make contact with the women. They were delighted to show off the babies they carried at the breast and were anxious to know whether I had any children and how many. We spent a very happy time down there on the river bank, while the men talked about tigers and leopards. Then the herdsboy’s father showed us the mauled buffalo, which had a nasty wound on one hind led and a long, deep tear at the throat. The first thing was to find out where the tiger had his lair by day and where he drank. We hoped to get him either by arranging a beat or else by tethering a decoy animal in his path, which he might be expected to strike. It was better to sacrifice one animal and manage to shoot the tiger that way than to let him go on killing all the villagers’ cattle one after the other. We drove out to all the tiny villages in the jungle and asked news of tigers. We searched dry river beds and the courses of mountain streams for tracks but without result. We tethered decoy animals at strategic points in the jungle where the tigers were likely to pass, but not a trace did we see. We organized drives that were always thrilling: Would a tiger come straight out or would the beaters raise nothing but a few wild jungle fowl, some monkeys, a peacock or a deer or two? The men in the villages were always keen to beat; for one thing they earned a few annas, for another there might be some meat. And then, of

14 Tiger in Sight

course, it was exciting. In one village, twenty-eight hopeful young tenyear-olds had just assembled in the schoolroom when the young teacher heard about the beat; he took one leap over the palisade that surrounded the school and placed himself among the beaters. We drove in the jeep along winding stony paths, over sandy river beds and along freshly-swept fire roads. Along all the main roads through the woods there were little leaf huts at regular intervals where the fire watchers lived with their families. Each morning they had to sweep their section of the road free of dry leaves. They have platforms, too, high up in the trees from which they keep watch. They are all skilled archers. Whenever they get the chance they shoot deer and antelope in the jungle and they also knock birds down from the treetops with special bird arrows, which have a wooden block instead of an iron head so that the arrows will not get caught in the branches if the huntsman misses his aim. They are hot tempered, these hunters. One fire watcher, who came to tell us that a tigress with young had crossed the road just in front of his hut, had a brother in jail in Jagdalpur, more than a hundred miles away. He had come back from the jungle one day after an unsuccessful deer hunt. His wife had climbed a tree and was picking fruit. The man was hungry and shouted to her to come down and get him something to eat. But she wanted to pick a little more fruit first. “No, come down at once/’ shouted the man. ‘Tm in such a good spot, I'll just pick a little more. ...” The man flew into a rage, set an arrow to his bow, pulled it and shot. His wife came down at once - dead. One afternoon Salim arrived with fresh tiger reports: outside a village four miles away two cows had been killed by a tiger the previous night. The village men believed it was actually two tigers working together that had done the killing; they had eaten very little of the prey. The men were already busy building a machan, as they call a shooting platform, in a tree above the dead cows. That night the tigers would presumably come back to continue their meal.

We made our way in the jeep, by four miles of almost impenetrable jungle paths, to the village where the man had lost two cows to the tigers. We went on by foot across a small rice field, and then through a sparselywooded jungle of tall banyan trees. As we approached, it was not really difficult to find our way; it was merely a question of following our noses toward the terrible stench from the cows, which had lain a whole day in the burning sun at a temperature of nearly a hundred and four. A number of men were busy putting the finishing touches to the machan, a firm little platform about twenty feet up in a tree. This was where I was to spend the night and I was to have the heavy double-barreled rifle, the Holland & Holland 475, up there with me. I remembered how scared I had been of practicing with the 475; it had a terrific kick and my whole shoulder was always black and blue after using it. But as soon as I saw a tiger in front of me, I knew I would forget all fear. I climbed briskly up onto the machan, and one of the natives brought the gun up to me. The men left me, talking eagerly on their way back to the jeep. It was a deceptive “withdrawing” sound, which must have convinced all the animals in the vicinity that all the humans had gone away. I loaded the rifle at once with two cartridges as thick as my thumb and almost four inches long. I put two spares in the pocket of my shirt and then loaded the revolver, a good heavy Smith & Wesson. A revolver gives a sense of security when one is sitting alone up on a machan. If a tiger or a leopard were to climb up, one could pepper it with six shots, without

16 Tiger in Sight

reloading. It is considered foolproof, for it has no safety catch! You have no chance, they say, to reload a rifle in such circumstances. I aimed the rifle with its attached searchlight on one of the cows and kept the butt against my shoulder and the barrel resting on a crosspiece in front of me. The angle of fire to the first carcass, which was only thirtyfive to forty-five feet from my tree, was not very good. It was too sharp. That cow was a brown one and strangely enough only one shoulder had been eaten - normally tigers begin with the hind parts of an animal. The second cow, on the other hand, which shone white in the glow of dusk had had half of one of the hind quarters eaten. Now there was nothing to do but sit absolutely still and wait. I did not have long to sit there listening to all the sounds about me, to the warning note of peacocks far in the distance, the eerie laugh of a nightjar, to the howling of the jackals and the rustle of wild fowl out in the rice field, the eternal whirring of thousands of cicadas. ... For there below me, only a few yards from my tree, a beautiful, sinuous beast was approaching. Without a sound it crept toward the nearer cow: a superb leopard! I held my breath as the leopard looked around from one side to the other - just two more steps and I would be able to shoot. My heart was beating furiously but I kept absolutely still. Suddenly the leopard turned its head upward - and those shining, amber-colored eyes met mine with a burning intensity. I stared into them as though hypnotized; they blinded me, held me spellbound and everything else ceased to exist for me, all the sounds, that sickening stench. ... In the end I could endure it no longer - I dropped my eyes. And immediately the leopard turned and disappeared into the jungle again with long, swift bounds. I believe it was a leopardess at the height of her prime, a dazzling beauty. Her image had burnt itself onto my retina for all time - a beast that was utterly beautiful, her coat speckled in gold, black and white, her sinuous lines, her movements at once swift, controlled and gentle, her eyes gleaming sharp and hard. But why had she turned her head up at me? Neither tigers nor leopards have a highly developed sense of smell. And I was sitting very high up. Was it intuition?

Speckled Beauty 17

In the end I relaxed; whatever had happened the leopard was gone. The sweetish stench was back again, the cicadas, the birds. . . . It was only half past six. Perhaps it was not tigers that had killed the cows - perhaps it was the leopard. But two cows? I sat puzzling about it while the dusk slowly encircled me, blotting out trees and branches and ground and deepening to a soft darkness, in which only the white belly of the farther cow gleamed faintly. Then came the night sounds and the night animals. There seemed to be rustlings everywhere. Some large animal was stirring about in branches and brushwood just behind me. I wondered if it could be a wild pig or possibly a bear. Now it was around in front of me, not far from the farther cow. It must be a wild pig; it could hardly be a hyena or it would have gone up and tom at the cow. Another animal barked like a dog straight beneath me - but I had not heard anything come! Suddenly something flew past my face, barking. I started but calmed down again when I realized it had simply been a little owl, whose night cry actually sounds like a bark. Far away an axis deer sounded a warning note. Surely the leopard was not coming back again? No, I did not really want it to - gladly another leopard, but not that one. ... I did not want to sully the image of beauty I had in my mind with memories of blood, the business of skinning and vultures tearing at naked flesh. Suddenly a terrible din broke out a few hundred yards ahead of me, a little to the side. Probably a leopard catching some animal. It sounded as though a fox had broken into a hen house, and all the hens had bass voices. Could it have been a herd of small deer, or monkeys, or birds? I had no idea. A thin sickle of moon lay on its back in front of me; I could just make out the white cow in the darkness. It was a little past nine. The great prowling animal was there again, some fifty or sixty yards in front of me. Just beneath me some other animal was breathing heavily. It sounded like a large dog, lying there asleep. Now it was past ten o’clock and I decided the critical time for tigers was past. I switched on the searchlight attached to my rifle to see who was prowling and who was breathing so heavily. But the jungle was too dense;

18 Tiger in Sight

everything turned silent and there was no animal to be seen. I swept the beam of light from side to side. Then I switched it off. After a while I turned on the searchlight again and looked down at the cows. A cat - a lynx - a LEOPARD was lying there licking blood from the mouth of the farther cow. I fired quickly. The leopard flung itself to the side - but it was hit. I had had time to see the hole made by the heavy cartridge. The shot had taken a little too far back but it was definitely lethal. The leopard growled and rolled around and was now lying five or six yards from the cow. I could not see it; there was too much low scrub and grass. I took the searchlight off the rifle so as to be able to move it more easily and fire a shot with the revolver if necessary. My companions had evidently heard the shot; I could hear the jeep approaching a long way off. At the edge of the rice field they stopped and shouted to me. I shouted back at them for all I was worth not to come, that the leopard might still be alive, that I wanted to stay on the machan till morning. But as soon as they heard that the shot had hit and where the leopard lay, they came on all the same through the darkness with their searching flashlights and guns at the ready. I pointed with my swiveling beam to where the leopard had fallen. There in the tall, dry grass lay my first leopard, reassuringly dead. I climbed down to have a careful look at it. It was a young male with close spots. The shot had spoilt the skin but the back was fine. 1 decided to make a stuffed toy of it for my little boy at home! If I had only been left alone on the machan until morning, as I had wished! The next day a man came over from a nearby village and told us that a tiger had dragged away the farther cow, the white one, during the night.

Rain Storm

We received a report that the people of the village of Salibat, about six miles away, had seen fresh tiger tracks beside their drinking and bath water just outside the village. There had been regular killings of cattle around Salibat by both tigers and leopards. Now the village people asked us to come. After a quick jeep trip along a broad, freshly-swept road, we went down into the dried-out river bed. By the water hole we could see a few impresses of big tiger paws. Most of them had already been obliterated in the course of the day by the naked feet of people fetching water, and the trampling of dogs and goats and thirsty cattle. The first thing was to find a good tree for a machan. Tall jungle trees grew right down to the river bank, and on the edge stood one with a long, thick branch that stretched out across the sandy bed. We decided that halfway along the branch was the best place for a small machan. The outlook from there was clear and the distance to the water hole about fifty yards. The machan would be unnecessarily high, about thirty feet, but there was nowhere else as suitable. Gira, a young Hindu and budding forester, and a few helpers, were left behind with me to build the machan while the rest of my companions went on to investigate another place. A well-trodden path led from the village, which lay a couple of hundred yards above the river, down to the water hole. It was actually two holes, one slightly excavated, in which the water was cleaner, and a large pool in which buffaloes were tramping.

20 Tiger in Sight

Gira started work at once. Some ofkthe men felled tall, thin trees with their narrow axes and made the longest ladder I have ever seen. Others, meantime, were cutting wood for the platform. As soon as the ladder was finished, Gira and another man climbed up and tied the machan fast, camouflaging it with leafy boughs and fixing a cross support for the rifle barrel. Eight women in white saris down to their feet - it was a half-Hindu village - came single file down the path from the village. The first of them carried a large round brass bowl in which lay a coconut. They came up to me and I took the coconut which they offered me. Then the first woman fell on her knees, laid the palms of her hands together and lowered her forehead to the ground. She got up; the next woman did the same; all eight of them knelt before me one after the other. And there I stood with the coconut in my hands, feeling extremely small. We did not know each other’s language, but we managed. Several of the women had babies under their saris. I was allowed to hold the smallest of them, an incredibly pretty little baby girl two or three months old. Soon we were all great friends, laughing hilariously. By sign language, I asked a man with an axe to open my coconut. He slit it in half and carefully removed the succulent flesh from the shell. Now the machan was ready. Gira had taken up my guns and other equipment and I climbed up the long wobbly ladder. The man removed the ladder and carried it a little distance away, so that it should not be visible. A large herd of cows and other animals with dogs came out of the jungle and crossed the river. All the cows stopped at the water hole and drank before going up to the village. A couple of women came to fetch water, a few men came and washed. Dusk fell quickly and the sky looked much darker than usual, a dense brownish black. Was the great mountain wind coming, the “hill storm,” of which so far I had only heard? All of a sudden the storm came. As it whined and tore at the jungle, my own tree started to swing and sway, and in a single second the rain began pouring down. . . . I managed to get my arms into my rain jacket - down below Gira and

The Rain Storm 21

another man came running up with a ladder. No, no, I shouted, and signed to them that I wanted to stay where I was. I had no intention of giving up as quickly as that: the storm would soon pass. They rushed back through the deluge to the huts in the village. The storm grew fiercer from one moment to the next; a tall tree snapped like a match stick only a few yards away from me and crashed onto another tree; it groaned and two or three large branches shuddered to the ground in the half-darkness. I flung myself down on the machan and clung to the branch - I was afraid. In just a few seconds I had been completely soaked through except where my rain jacket covered me. The storm was sweeping everything away. My topee, or pith helmet, disappeared; I had no idea whether or not my revolver had blown down; the only thing I could think about was to hang on tight and lie on top of the rifle, so that it too wouldn’t disappear. My sou’wester, which I had managed to put on, was torn from my head. The storm whined; lightning flashed; thunder crashed overhead; the rain poured down. So long as the branch the machan was on held firm! I glanced down; at least twenty-five feet to the ground - and more than fifty miles to the cottage hospital at Dhamtari. . . . Some big branches crashed to the ground immediately behind my tree I was terrified. My sleeping bag which lay under me on the machan was dripping wet; everything was soaked. But as I fumbled about, I found my revolver, and that at least was a comfort. The storm eased off a little, but the rain, the lightning flashes and the rumble of thunder kept up. Soon I ventured to sit again. Water squelched in my sneakers, but it was warm water and not particularly unpleasant. I found a few bits of coconut which I had laid out on my sleeping bag. They tasted watery but it was food in any case. Constant flashes of lightning lit up the whole countryside. There was the water hole. It was actually an extremely beautiful spot on the edge of the winding river bed, though without the help of the lightning I would scarcely have realized it. At the end of perhaps an hour the rain slackened a little and it began to

22 Tiger in Sight

grow lighter. I thought I could hear p. leopard on the other side of the river. Panthers - the more romantic name for leopards - often mutter to themselves when they are on their way to a village in the night - people say they do it to give themselves courage. That was the sound—like someone sawing a plank - which I seemed to hear through the rain in the darkness. Yes, I was quite sure it was a panther! Then suddenly 1 heard quite a different sound, very strange and melancholy - singing and the music of some stringed instrument. It came from the same part of the jungle as the herd of cattle earlier in the evening A man was walking along, singing a sad, monotonous tune to the accompaniment of some stringed instrument. 1 could just see him as a shadowy figure when he emerged onto the river bed. Å solitary sadhu, where from and whither? The leopard/ Would a voice shouting “The Speckled One!" high up in a tree in the darkness frighten a sadhu more than a roaring tiger? The danger in that case was that he would turn back to the jungle again to pray to the gods for help against an evil spirit. Soon the man was on the far side of me, heading for the village. The panther would hardly attack now. I remained silent, listening to that mournful singing, and I saw him for a moment in a brilliant flash of lightning, walking along with a dark, mudstained blanket over his shoulders. Now, now I could hear the panther again! It was moving along the river bed forty or fifty yards behind me. Another one! Right at the edge of the wood from which the sadhu had just come out, another panther was “sawing." I listened to them both for a long time and tried to make them out in every flash of lightning, but the flashes were too quick. The sadhu never stopped at the village. I could hear his monotonous wail moving steadily on through the rain, past the village and on toward the east. . . . Perhaps the Indians are right when they say that helplessly intoxicated men and sadhus are never attacked by tigers and leopards. Now it was growing darker again. More storm, I thought. All around, in every direction, the sky grew blacker. Another minute or so and the rain poured down as violently as before. The storm had broken loose again.

The Rain Storm 23

I half-lay across the rifle and the revolver. There was nothing to do but wait until the storm had passed and that was anything but hopeful. The sky was so close, such an impenetrable black. It was sure to rain for a very long time. But I had no intention of getting down from the tree without the ladder. Or going down to the leopards without even being intoxicated! If only the storm would stop and the wind not blow so hard, it was welcome to pour down as much water as it liked. Rain I was not afraid of. Time passed; the rain never ceased, lightning glimmered and thunder rumbled almost simultaneously. When I looked up and saw how the crowns of the trees swayed and rocked against the black sky, I got dizzy. Never look up! After almost two hours I saw headlights playing in the air behind the village. It must be the jeep. I couldn't hear the sound of the engine through the storm. The headlights swept along the bank of the river. I switched on my searchlight to show where I was. My companions were on their way and soon we were able to shout to each other. The ladder was brought along and it was wonderful to get down onto firm ground again. With the help of flashlights we managed to find my topee, my mackintosh trousers and the water container. My sou'wester and the insect repellant we never found. The men had grown uneasy. As they had come along in their jeep, they found the road blocked by great trees, but thanks to the four-wheel drive they had managed to turn off into the jungle and make their way around. Several times heavy branches had crashed down very close to the jeep, making them wonder how I was getting on up there in my tree.

"It is no little leopard, this one,” said Salim the forester, laying his outstretched hand over a large leopard print in the sand beside the dead ox. "It must be a powerful old male.” This was the first to be struck down of the five oxen we had tied at various places as tiger bait. Even if there had been no tracks we would have known that the killer must be a leopard, for it had started eating at the groin, and the stomach and entrails had been torn out. A tiger never eats like that. To make sure the killer would not drag his prey into the jungle, we had tied the ox with very strong rope a suitable distance from a good tree for a machan. We tied it by one foreleg. Tigers and leopards never like to attack an ox or buffalo that has a thick rope round its neck. When the roaring tiger hurls himself over an ox, he fixes his jaws into the back and holds on, at the same time flinging the whole of his weight, perhaps as much as five hundred pounds, over to one side. The ox's neck is broken in an instant. But now, it seemed, we were dealing with a leopard. "Panther is definite to come,” said Salim. That was his pet expression whenever he saw a track beside a water hole or a dead animal. I, too, felt in my bones that "panther is definite to come.” Tonight I was to use a repeating rifle with telescopic sight. But we had no suitable holder for the searchlight on that rifle, so we decided to have two of us on the machan, Salim and I. Salim was to hold the searchlight. As soon as we heard the leopard devouring the ox, he was to switch it on.

■: x‘: :'

Previous page: I do not think it would be possible to find any happier youngsters than those in the Muria tribe, who spend their teen-age years in the ghotul, or house of youth. They are frank, happy and harmonious. Rice field in the Bastar district.

The Muria men are good bowmen. They buy the iron arrowheads for their bamboo arrows at the markets that are held every Sunday in the larger villages. The feathers they cut themselves from the wing feathers of jungle fowl or peacocks, tying them on the arrows with silk from silkworm cocoons.

A Smell of Leopard 25

I prefer to be alone on a machan. Two people cause more disturbance than one. And particularly if one is after a tiger, almost everything depends upon how absolutely still and motionless one can sit hour after hour, if one is to get the tiger. A fully-grown, wary tiger seldom goes straight to its slaughtered prey. When it comes noiselessly through the jungle, perhaps only a bird’s warning note will betray its presence. Thirty or forty yards from its kill it will generally stop, sit still and wait, perhaps for half an hour, just listening and watching. If it sees some strange movement up in a tree just beside the kill, or hears some unfamiliar sound, it will simply get up, turn and go quietly back into the jungle as silently as it came. And it will never go back to that kill again. But we were agreed that there should be two of us for this particular leopard. For I wanted to use the telescopic sight which I had found effective on other occasions. This was a typical leopard and tiger “walk.” The ox lay in a curve made by a broad, gently winding river. The machan was being built just a little behind it, at a suitable firing distance and not too high. A small water hole full of pure, clean water glimmered among dark boulders almost in the middle of the yellow sand bed. It was still morning, too early to begin our vigil on the machan. We left a few men behind as guards to prevent vultures or dogs from devouring the dead ox during the day. They settled themselves on the opposite bank. When we came wandering back along the river bed about five that afternoon, we could see from a long way off'that our guards had received reinforcements. Right across the whole of the river bed sat an even row of long-tailed langur monkeys. They might have been set out in military formation. But their behavior was anything but military. One was scratching himself, another was sitting cross-legged like a listless old man, and a third was picking lice out of his tail, which he held at eye level with one hand. When we laughed, they all rushed off into the jungle, deeply offended. The machan was excellent, large and firm. I settled myself at once with my rifle resting against my updrawn knee and aimed at the remains of the ox which lay just at the edge of the jungle. Salim sat half turned away so

26 Tiger in Sight

that he could see in the direction of tlje jungle without having to move. We had arranged that he should poke me in the back as soon as he saw or heard the leopard, which ought, of course, to come from the direction of the jungle. The monkeys scrambled and jumped about in the trees close to us that was fine. They usually give good warning when a tiger or a panther is coming. As always when one is on a machan we could hear just before dusk the mournful iooo-iooo of peacocks in the jungle. It must be difficult for them with their long trains to find suitable resting places for the night. Down by the water hole frogs kept up a continuous croaking. A little black-winged wader on delicate, flame-red legs came out from a hole among the stones. A number of nightjars fluttered around over the surface of the water catching insects, now and then giving a long-drawn, eerie laugh. On the opposite bank, just behind the spot where the men had been sitting, an outcrop of black rock rose like a ghostly castle against the lighter jungle behind. When it was almost dark we heard the monkeys withdraw; the watch was over for the night. They vanished without any fuss; all we heard were the thuds in the trees and the rustle of the branches they had just left. Salim poked me in the back. The panther was coming toward us. We sat absolutely still, scarcely breathing. I could not hear it but I knew that Salim would be watching it all the time. Now it must be quite close to our tree. ... I heard it rustling about for an eternity. . . . Then it turned and entered the dry leaves at the edge of the jungle. Salim whispered: “It sat a long time under our tree!" Now we could hear it making a little detour, to approach its prey from the other side. It had reached the ox. . . . Salim switched on the searchlight - too soon, I thought - and the panther leaped away, back into the jungle. We switched the light off at once and waited, absolutely still. Only ten minutes later we heard the panther creeping back again, and this time it tried to drag its kill away. But the rope was strong. Salim quickly put on the light. I could not see the panther in the telescopic sight;

A Smell of Leopard 27

some peculiar reflection made everything look milky. Confound the mist. ... I took my eye away from the sight, and saw an enormous panther standing sideways to us on the far side of the ox! Back quickly to the sight - there was still a sort of veil over the image but I managed to get the hairline cross where I wanted it and fired. . . . The panther sank to the ground. I reloaded so as to be able to fire again, but Salim shouted joyfully: "It's dead!” With a bloodcurdling growl the panther leapt up and hurled itself, roaring furiously, straight toward our tree. “The revolver," yelled Salim. I handed it to him. I could not see in the darkness where the panther had gone - but it was not up our tree. We heard him dash out, roaring, onto the open river bed, right across the water hole among the stones, and up to the black rocks on the opposite bank. Then at last silence fell. We put on the light to try to see him - but the distance was too great. We neither saw nor heard anything more. Salim fired the revolver into the air. All was silent. For about an hour we sat on the machan listening. Not a sound came from the rocks. We signaled to the village men to come. They approached cautiously with their flickering paraffin lamps, keeping close together on the river bed. We told them what had happened, and together we found tracks beside the water hole. It would have been too dangerous to go any farther in the darkness. There was nothing to be done but wait for the dawn. We sent two men to the nearest village to warn them that no one should go into the jungle next morning on the panther’s side of the river. Then we went dejectedly home to sleep for a few hours. I took consolation from that night’s important lesson: a light must be held well in front of a telescopic sight so that it will fall only on the target. Absolutely no light at all must get into the sight. What was going to happen the next day? Would the leopard be lying dead in some hole in the rocks or would we meet him in a furious, fighting mood? Morning came and by about five o’clock we were down at the river

28 Tiger in Sight

again. We went with loaded weapons*up to the clump of black rocks and looked for tracks. I carried the heavy Smith & Wesson revolver, the “foolproof” one. Salim had my double-barreled rifle. Every now and then the natives, who are fantastic trackers, found an almost invisible drop of blood on grass stalks or dry leaves, but there was no proper track to follow. We separated up and went around the pile of rocks. Suddenly 1 caught a whiff, very faint but unmistakable, of the rank smell of leopard. “There’s a smell of leopard - he must be in one of these holes!” I exclaimed. A moment or two later some of the men shouted out that the leopard was lying in a cave under a large rock and he was alive! I peeped into the halfdarkness where all I could see was a foaming leopard’s jaw and two burning eyes. I shuddered and turned away. The natives had already climbed up into trees around the cave. Salim was on the opposite side. ... As fast as I could, I climbed the nearest tree, pulled up quickly by a helping hand from above. Now we were going to get the leopard out of the cave the natives’ way! All at once the men started shouting as loud as they could. I aimed at the entrance to the cave. Now it came roaring - an enormous leopard, large as a young tiger - not in my direction but almost straight at Salim. He fired. The leopard, already badly wounded, was hit, rolled over, got up, rushed forward into some long grass, but was hit again from the second barrel. Now he was down for good - the leopard was dead. No leopard is really dead until you have skinned him, Salim used to say. Before going up we threw a stone at him to make sure. We laughed with relief. We were happy. There had been some exciting moments but now there he lay, quite still. The natives looked at his teeth. He was an old male, as we had suspected. His neck was broad enough to carry an axis deer, strong enough to drag an ox, and his jaw muscles were hard as iron. The natives call these tough old leopards “spotted tigers.” Later on I heard that the men in the next village believed that it was

A Smell of Leopard 29

this same great leopard that had killed and dragged away a nine-year-old girl two months before. The leopard was skinned at home in the bungalow. The langur monkeys which were always hanging around there were absolutely beside themselves. They jabbered and protested up and down the scale hour after hour, as long as they could see that spotted skin.

The heat grew more and more oppressive. The climate was dreadful down here in the lowland jungle. Any day now the monsoon might break in earnest, and meanwhile the air felt explosively thick, heavily pregnant, waiting in torment for torrents of water to pour down over the tinder-dry earth and all the dead leaves. It was a breathless waiting for new life. At midday the thermometer stood somewhere between a hundred and five and a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade. On this hot day, our last but one in the Kalari jungle, two natives came with the following news: When they had approached the last of our four tethered oxen, they saw that it lay dead and that a panther was in the act of devouring and tearing at it. The panther had been frightened away by the men, but as soon as they left the place, they could see from a distance that it had returned to its prey. As I listened to their story, I stood gazing in wonder at a marvelously beautiful bird that had just been shot and was going to be skinned, a paradise fly catcher. It had a little white body, a dark, blue-shimmering head with a crest, and long white tail feathers three times as long as its body. The fourth ox lay at a well-selected spot. There was only one tree suitable for a machan, so that the men were able to go back and start constructing it themselves. We drove over in the afternoon. There was almost six miles of very bad road to cover; after that we walked for another mile and a quarter to the wide, dried-out river bed on one side of which the leopard's victim lay.

Leopard in the Moonlight 31

Salim was anxious to do the shooting on this occasion, and I promised to hold the searchlight. We did not take the rifle with the telescopic sight. Salim preferred to use the ordinary rifle, the trusty old 8.57, which had been responsible for my first elk. We could see a number of panther footmarks in the sand. The machan was small and camouflaged with leaves. It was pretty high, but we climbed up easily on the well-made ladder. The men took away the ladder and left us. The dead, stinking ox lay just beneath an enormous tree that spread out over the river bed. The stomach had been ripped out, in the customary leopard manner. A silver-gray mother monkey sat on the bank playing with her little black baby. Here and there in the jungle around the river wild cocks were cackling as they searched for a perch for the night. Cocka-doodle-doo, they cried just as though they had been on a manure heap at home in Sweden. The great difference between jungle cocks and tame cocks is the four-inch-long, knife-sharp spurs on the wild ones, with which they fight and often spear their rivals to death. A young, redheaded lizard darted about on the machan, and two black drongos with their lyre-shaped tail feathers fluttered by. It was cramped for the two of us on that small machan. Our legs fell asleep and we had to stretch them now and then and change position. Dusk fell quickly, and almost before I noticed we were in full moonlight. The great leaning tree with all its branches threw a dark shadow pattern over the light sand. I could not help thinking of another moonlight evening. We had been sitting with some young boys around an open fire, talking and sharing a calabash of palm wine. The full moon shone down through the leaves of the banyan tree and was reflected in happy, flashing smiles in the dark faces. There beside the fire we learned how tigers hunt monkeys in the moonlight. If a tiger discovers a pack of monkeys in a tree on a moonlit night, he goes calmly up to the shadow pattern on the ground. He does not waste a single glance on the terrified monkeys up in the tree but simply lays his huge front paw on the shadow of a monkey, which immediately drops dead from fright in front of the tiger's nose.

32

Tiger in Sight

We waited, listening to all the bird cries round us. Suddenly I realized that part of the shadow on the edge of the tree pattern was moving slowly toward us. A long, darker shadow. “The leopard is here/’ I whispered to Salim. We watched the leopard-shadow creep slowly along the branches of the tree pattern, stop, move gently forward a little way, stop again and then slowly follow the broad shadow of the tree trunk toward its base close to the ox, stop again, until at last it was there. I switched on the searchlight, a magnificent leopard stood blinking up into the beam. The shot rang out - the leopard fell on his side, one front paw in the air, his white chest shining in the moonlight. Then the paw sank slowly down, and the leopard lay on its side like a big cat peacefully asleep. It was dead. Three revolver shots in the air was the signal for the men to come and fetch us. We passed through quite a number of villages on the way home and everyone wanted to see our leopard. They climbed happily up onto the jeep and looked and laughed and talked their heads off. It had been an easy hunt, very appropriate just now in the worst of the heat for our weary bodies and sun-baked brains.

A cattle camp deep in the jungle: Five adults, a few children and some forty buffaloes. One of the little boys was killed by a tiger. Next page: Inside the palisade around the ghotul, the house of youth, there is security and happiness.

,

The Sunday markets are a wonderful meeting-place and a festive break in everyday life. Here you can buy almost anything: Salt and matches, flower wine and water buffaloes, arrowheads and brilliantly coloured glass beads for necklaces.

The Man-Eater of Narainpur We had to stop a few days at Raipur, the second largest outpost, about halfway between Bombay and the jungle village of Narainpur in the Bastar district, where we were to have our headquarters from now on. There we met Blackburn, one of the very few Englishmen in Central India. He owned a timber firm and had just been driving through Kondagaon and Narainpur to keep an eye on the timber cutting. “There are several man-eating tigers playing havoc in Bastar just now,” he told us, “and the worst of them is around Narainpur itself. It has already killed about forty people, and there is a reward of a hundred rupees being offered for him.” Blackburn had also heard reports of a man-eating leopard. Its latest victim was a little boy who had been playing at the edge of a village in broad daylight. It had been seen in “Makri block,” about a hundred miles south of Narainpur. Early one February morning we drove up to the plateau of Bastar along a road that wound around in hairpin turns. It was wonderful to leave the plainlands. The Bastar district is an area a little bigger than Rhode Island. It lies at a height of about two thousand, five hundred feet above sea level. It is extremely beautiful, with high, jungle-clad mountains in which one often hears the roar of tigers at dusk, and broad rice fields with solitary palms or silk-trees or perhaps “the flames of the forest,” trees which, when in blossom, make the countryside look as though it were on fire for miles on end. There are sparse jungles of banyan trees adorned with violet

34

Tiger in Sight

tree-orchids, and dense pale-green bamboo thickets with winding yellow f

rivers. There are high black rock formations, the favorite resort of leopards, bears and wild pigs. Bastar is above all the land of the Murias and the Marias - and of tigers and leopards. The Murias are a friendly, and so far a happy, hunting and agricultural people. They are perhaps best known for their “ghotul system.” Each village has a ghotul, a youth hut with a dancing floor outside and a palisade around it. Here the boys and girls gather in the evenings or on certain evenings a week (the customs vary slightly between the different villages) to dance and sing and get acquainted with one another, not without discipline but in a spirit of warm friendliness. They sleep together, and in order that the demon of jealousy shall have no opportunity to raise its head, they have to change partners every night. To the astonishment of all anthropologists it is extremely rare for any of the ghotul to become pregnant. But if this happens the girl marries the boy she “believes” to be the father. And since the parents have already decided on the husband for their daughter, the young “father” has to pay a certain sum, about the value of a water buffalo, to the boy who was the intended. After that all is well, but the girl and her new husband are never again allowed inside the palisade of the ghotul. Only unmarried persons may enter there. The Murias are often described as delightful people, poetic and perhaps a little weak. They have a gentle friendliness and tenderness, much joy in life, a natural dignity and a strong sense of honor. Some of our finest friends in India were Murias. On one occasion much later we were sitting on a river bank out in the jungle, waiting for the sun to come out so that we could go on filming, and chatting about anything and everything with our Muria actors, Ginjo, Tangru, Doma and little Chendru. Chendru had just found a large white orchid, and was sitting gazing at it lost in wonder. Then he gently broke off the huge flowers and stuck them into his red turban. When he looked up, he was smiling. We asked which the Murias liked best, a beautiful flower or a beautiful girl? Ginjo laughed and said at once:

The Man-Eater of Narainpur 35

“A beautiful flower by day and a beautiful girl by night/' The Marias are a considerably more primitive people. They live far up in the mountains and they, too, do a little farming and hunting. It is easy to recognize the Marias, partly because the women, like the men, go about with the upper part of their bodies naked and very often have heavily tattooed faces, and partly by the color of their ornaments. They wear row upon row of necklaces of small brick-red beads. The favorite colors of the Murias for bead necklaces and earrings are blue, white and red. The climate in Bastar is better than on the plain. The nights are cold in the winter and the rest of the year is cooler than on the lowland. Yet all state officials and their servants who are stationed in Bastar receive extra pay, partly because the place is so remote, but chiefly because the climate is not healthy. A doctor in Bastar told me that an overwhelming majority of the population had enlarged livers caused by malaria. Yaws - also called frambesia - a sort of leg sore having many analogies with syphilis, is also very prevalent here in Bastar. Special yaws patrols go around by jeep from village to village giving penicillin injections, which are extremely effective. A single injection of four cubic centimeters is enough in ninety per cent of the cases. We were interested, of course, in the man-eating tiger we had heard about. On our first day in Narainpur, which is a largish village of very mixed population consisting of Hindus, Mohammedans, caste Hindus, and a few Murias, we drove out to a number of smaller jungle villages to enquire after the man-eater. In Gahr Bengal, three and a half miles away, we discussed the tiger for a long time with the Muria men. The Murias call the tiger “the dog of the jungle gods" and believe that he follows his master's orders when he kills. And, they said, all the forty-two people the tiger had killed so far had been Murias - neither Marias nor Kumars, Baigas nor Halbas, Hindus nor Mohammedans. This tiger was therefore an inescapable scourge for the Murias. They were convinced of this, and they feared the brindled beast which only two weeks before had taken a woman from Gahr Bengal. In the fourth village we came to, a little collection of huts just at the foot of a high hill dotted with outcrops of rock and caves, two men told

36 Tiger in Sight

us that a buffalo had just been killed and that the headman of the village and his three sons had gone to the spot only an hour before. But while they were still a little way off, they had heard a dull growling. The killer was busy eating and did not wish to be disturbed. The owner of the buffalo came with us a little farther in the jeep, and then, armed, we made our way through unpleasantly dense jungle up the hillside. Suspense hung over us. Would we soon stand face to face with a tiger? But everything was deserted around the buffalo's carcass. Empty and silent. It looked as though a leopard had done the killing. There were no tracks, but once again the killer had begun by eating the entrails. Besides, we gathered that there are always leopards on this hill. Presumably this one had just been at his kill but had beaten a retreat when it heard people coming. For the trees all around the buffalo were full of vultures - if a tiger or leopard had not been feeding there shortly before, the whole flock of vultures would have been on the ground tearing and devouring with fury. Or at least we should have heard them flying up into the trees with a great deal of noise and commotion. But as it was they were up there already, a silent testimony to the fact that the killer had just been with his victim. We drove on and stopped at a suitable open space in the jungle to test our weapons. A necessary measure, in particular for any rifle with a telescopic sight. If the sight receives the slightest jolt, the hairline cross may be displaced, and a hundredth of an inch there may mean perhaps an error of eighteen inches on a tiger at a hundred yards' distance. It is dangerous not to take the greatest possible care of a gun of this sort. For example, one must never lay it down in a jeep when driving, someone always has to hold it. They are sensitive, but extraordinary to shoot with. After that we took the road to Sonpur, the “gold village," where the natives used to wash gold some sixty years ago. We ran into some Mountain Marias and asked whether there were reports of tigers up in the mountains. For the past fortnight there had been no attacks, but every evening they heard a number of tigers roaring. “Coop dual manta” - There are many tigers, they said. There are quantities of peacocks along the Sonpur road, particularly

The Man-Eater of Narainpur 37

where the road crosses a broad river. An old cock scuttled off into the bamboo thicket, sweeping the ground with his shimmering blue-green train, while two young birds fluttered up and disappeared behind a large banyan tree. There was a pattern of peacock tracks in the moist sand beside the watercourse. The water looked glorious, and we could not resist stopping to bathe in the shallow, running river. On the way home from Sonpur dusk fell quickly. A large sambar deer with enormous antlers came dashing across the road at full gallop just before a bend. We stopped to see if any pursuer would appear, but the deer must simply have been scared by the jeep. One night, some time before, we had heard a tiger hunting a sambar around and around in the jungle. In the end the exhausted deer was struck down. We could hear the dull roaring of the tiger and the heart-rending death cries of the sambar. That night I could hardly sleep at all, I remember. Farther along the road we saw two great gleaming eyes ahead of us and were certain it must be a leopard. But unfortunately it turned out to be a large hyena, hideous with its broad striped head and its long forelegs and short hind ones. It ran in front of the jeep in the glare of the headlights for the best part of a mile, before turning suddenly off into the jungle. When we got back to the hut at Narainpur we found that the senior police commissioner for Bastar was there on his. way through. We drank tea together, and he told us that he himself had tried to shoot the maneating tiger that was ravaging thereabouts but had not succeeded. “At one stage the tiger seemed to have gone demented, killing people every day,” he said. He himself had sat up and waited over a half-devoured woman’s body, but that particular tiger never returned to any of its victims. “A very cunning tiger,” said the police commissioner, “and a big one, presumably an old, experienced male.” The next day was a Sunday, market day in all the larger villages. All day long people of every kind, caste and race came streaming in from all the villages up in the mountains and out in the jungle. Marias came from the mountains with freshly-woven bamboo baskets, fruit and sweet

38 Tiger in Sight

potatoes, Kumars with freshly-baked red clay pots, Baigas with freshlywoven white saris with wine-red borders, dyed with vegetable dyes. Hindu traders came from far-off places with glass beads of every color, matches, salt and ugly ready-made blouses. Everything is bought or sold here: Rice and goats, bananas, sweet potatoes, cowrie shells, tobacco leaves and buffaloes, silkworm cocoons and arrowheads, flower wine and glass bracelets - everything that an Indian in Bastar could wish to sell or to have. The market place is also a fine meeting ground. Here the finely-dressed, flower-adorned Muria girls meet their bead-adorned boy friends from the neighboring villages. Here sisters living at a distance from one another mourn some dead relative, perhaps killed by a tiger. Here the old Muria men drink too freely of the flower wine, mahua, while their little parched-skinned old women run around looking at everything and haggling for fine “gold” glass beads for a small grandchild. We asked the head forester of Narainpur, who was completely overcome by mahua wine, for permission to borrow one of his foresters. The man he assigned to us, in a turban and blue shirt and hardly anything else, stood up in the middle of the market place and beat on a drum and proclaimed that people with rifles had come to the villages and wanted to help kill the man-eating tiger. As soon as the tiger killed anyone again, word should be sent at once to the hostel at Narainpur. Whoever brought the report would receive a reward of ten rupees. On that very afternoon we were on our way to find the victim of a tiger. A buffalo had been killed in a very small village five or six miles away from Narainpur. We waded across a broad river which was barely knee-deep. The jungle was beautiful, with undulating, tree-covered hills around the river, and the air was sweet and fresh after the sun had gone down. We stopped on one of the hills and saw in a glade beneath us two low huts with grass roofs. The scene was timeless. It might have been a thousand years ago: A glade in a jungle - a couple of huts - a few almost naked people. . . . The forester, whom we had with us, shouted to the people. A grayhaired old man and two strong boys came up with long-handled axes over their shoulders.

The Man-Eater of Narainpur 39

The buffalo - oh, yes, the man had cut away for his own use all the meat that was left on the buffalo after the tiger had finished his meal the day before. Since a woman had been killed here a month ago, we suspected that it might be the man-eater that had also killed the buffalo. It was a pity there was nothing left to watch over. We saw the scene of the killing some fifty yards farther on. Only the skeleton and the horns remained. A flock of replete vultures and crows sat in the trees round about, having finished their job of picking the skeleton. Next day the police commissioner passed by again. He had been out in a number of Maria villages high up in the mountains and had invited the Maria men to become police constables without any training whatever. They were to have a hundred rupees a month and free uniforms. He had been very astonished that they had all refused and wanted to stay where they were up in the mountains. “All they possess in the world isn’t worth five rupees,” he said, “yet they don’t want to be police constables at a hundred rupees a month!” As usual the commissioner had fresh reports from various quarters about tigers and leopards. He told us about “the cunning devil” in Makri block. This was a leopard that had recently climbed up onto the damaged roof of a hut in one of the villages, jumped down through the hole, snatched a man, rushed straight out through the door with him and disappeared. There was also a man-eating tiger that usually stayed near Orissa but for a period every year came over the frontier into Makri. A woman and her nine-year-old daughter were sitting quarreling not thirty feet apart on the outskirts of a village. Suddenly the tiger appeared, clapped his jaws around the girl and ran off with her. At first the mother simply sat and gaped, but then she grasped what had happened and ran shrieking after the tiger for about a hundred yards. It dropped the dead girl, and the following night the police commissioner sat in a tree above the body. The tiger never came back. . . . We tried to form a picture of our own man-eater by fitting together little bits and pieces of information from various quarters. It was certainly a powerful he-tiger; a couple of Murias had seen it crossing a road beyond

40

Tiger in Sight

Gahr Bengal. It had probably come from some wild, high, jungle-covered mountain, where it spent most of its time, in order to seek out the nearest water hole, a spring in the river behind Bengal. We had actually seen the tracks of a big he-tiger down on the river bed. He killed people but probably sometimes cattle, too. He was obviously crafty and cunning: He never went back to any kill that had been discovered by humans. He was fairly stationary and had taken most of his victims from villages quite close to each other, now in one, now in another, then back to the first, and so on. And he generally took his victims in the afternoon, before sunset. The villagers dwelt in fear. The women refused to go out alone into the jungle to gather fruit and roots, and no one, not even the men, would walk alone now on the road to Narainpur.

A Boy is Killed Our first report of a human victim reached us about midday on February tenth. Two ten-year-old boys had been herding buffaloes on the outskirts of the village of Surtelai. The tiger had rushed out, struck down one of the boys and dashed away with him between his jaws. No one in the village had dared to follow the blood trail which led up the side of a high mountain. The tragedy had happened at about four o’clock the previous afternoon. We immediately sent one of our Indian assistants, Arvind Shah, in the jeep back to the village with the reporters to try to collect beaters as quickly as possible, so that we could try to drive the tiger out. At about two o’clock we ourselves, three of us with our rifles, drove to Surtelai. Only some twenty beaters had been assembled as yet - it was to be expected. We decided while we were waiting to follow the blood trail in the hope of perhaps being able to shoot the tiger beside its victim. Accompanied by the dead boy’s father, an enormous, serious young Muria man, we picked up the trail which led straight up the mountainside, where the jungle was very dense. Soon we came on the boy’s bloody turban and a little farther on his little loincloth, red with blood. To cross a mountain stream the tiger had carried the boy’s body along a fallen tree trunk; we could tell by the streak of blood. The jungle grew denser and denser — it would have been extremely dangerous to follow the trail any farther in search of the boy’s remains. The tiger might be crouching anywhere. We had to turn back. Unfortunately it proved impossible to collect enough beaters so late in the day for the very difficult drive across the mountain. We decided

42 Tiger in Sight

instead to tether two buffaloes in the tiger’s path - one up beside the blood trail and the other down beside the water hole close to the path the tiger normally took. If either of the buffaloes were killed by the man-eater, this particular tiger might not return to its kill, but on the other hand we should have some indication as to which side of the road we could expect to find it after its first meal, and arrange a big drive. On the evening of February eleventh a man came to us with a young boy who was very much shaken up, and told us that only two hours ago the boy had seen a tiger kill a buffalo only eighty yards away from him. It had happened at four o’clock, the very same hour at which the boy had been killed. The tiger might be the man-eater. This took place at a little village not two miles beyond Surtelai. We went there by difficult, winding paths, but when we got there it was almost dark - too late for a machan. We arranged in the village to have a beat at eight o’clock next morning. When we went over to the village early on February twelfth for the beat, only a very few men had assembled. In addition, we were told that a man had taken home the whole of the buffalo for the sake of the meat. At that we were really angry. “Do you want to get rid of your tiger or not? The next victim will certainly not be one of your buffaloes but one of yourselves, you ungrateful meat-collectors. . . . Keep your killer if you can’t even be bothered to help us get rid of it for you!” The villagers were ashamed and promised to do everything they could to help us help them. We examined the place where the tiger had struck, saw the big footmarks and decided to tether an ox there. The eighty or more beaters who had finally collected we sent home. Things had already gone too far for a drive. We had barely got back to Narainpur before another tiger report reached us. This time the tiger had struck an ox up on the mountain side beyond Gahr Bengal, not very far from our own tethered beast beside the boy’s blood trail. It would probably not return, but even so, I wanted to take what little chance there was and spend the night there. There was no particularly suitable tree close to the ox and so the machan

A Boy is Killed 43

could be only a bare twelve feet high. Arvind Shah came with me in the afternoon and helped me up onto the machan. “Mind you shoot a tiger tonight/’ he admonished me, laughing as he walked away. As soon as it was dark, I began to hear something rustling around me. I switched on the light but saw nothing and switched it off again. Time crept by. At half past nine I heard a large animal rustling around. Flap, flap, snap, crush whispered the dry leaves. Was it the tiger? I could hear the animal make a loop round the carcass, then go backward and forward as though it was searching for the ox. Then another loop, and after that it must have been just beside the prey. I switched on - saw nothing at all and switched off quickly. Strange. Then the rustling began again close to my tree - I could hear the animal breathing up at me, and my heart started thumping. Wasn’t that, in the faint starlight, a broad, striped tiger’s head turned straight up toward me? I dared not put on the torch one little leap and he would have been in my lap! I felt ashamed of myself and waited. The animal rustled off toward the ox again. Now I could hear its great jaws crushing the ox’s bones. I braced myself: Now you shall die! I switched on the light and was just about to fire when a horrible striped hyena leaped aside into the darkness. About four o’clock it turned cold and I started shivering. Far off a man was frightening an animal away from his hut. I could hear him shouting and hitting with his ax. A child cried loudly. How close the stars were! The cocks in the villages and the wild cocks in the jungle started crowing in concert. At about seven I was fetched away, sore, cold and stiff after fourteen hours on the machan. February thirteenth. I slept a few hours and dreamed about tigers disguised as hyenas, climbing trees and searching for machans and little human hunters. I woke up disheveled and cold, just in time to hear from my sleeping bag through the open door a report of yet another victim of a beast of prey. “Tigers everywhere!’’ I thought and jumped up. A tethered ox close to a large Hindu village out on the plain four miles away had been killed, probably by an enormous leopard which had already

44 Tiger in Sight

taken a number of buffaloes and co^s and also several humans. Four women, two men and a little boy had been killed around that village in the past two years. The machan was already built; all that was needed was someone to sit on it. “You're welcome to," said my companions. “We have work to do at home." By about five o’clock I was sitting in the tree and the ladder had been taken away. It was all perfect, a good, firm machan, a good cross bough to support the rifle on, a good distance, about fifty yards away from a white ox which was in an open glade surrounded by dense jungle. I sat absolutely still waiting for the sun to go down behind me, after which I should no longer have four or five small reflected suns in my sight and the light behind my hair. I had been told that a leopard, once it has acquired a taste for human flesh, is often a worse scourge in the villages, on account of its boldness and its knowledge of the locality, than even a man-eating tiger. I myself consider the tiger, with its enormous strength and weight, its powerful jaws and lightning-quick forepaws, the most dangerous beast in India. But for all that he is the most respected beast of prey. He always kills for food, never for the sake of killing. And his method of killing is quick and efficient. Often the animal - or man - is dazed by the terrible roaring, one second after that his neck is usually broken. There are always reasons why a tiger becomes a man-eater. He may be injured in some way; perhaps he has a pig’s bristle lodged in one paw or for some reason has lost his big canines. Or he may have been hurt by some unlucky or unskillful hunter. Then, of course, it is easier to kill people than the swift beasts of the jungle. Another frequent reason is that the natives themselves with their bows and arrows have killed most of the tiger’s natural food - deer and antelopes. When there are not enough deer, it is natural for the tiger to move in closer to the villages and start killing cattle and - perhaps just by accident - one day a herdsman. A surprisingly easily-killed and tender morsel! And so the taste is aroused for that sort of diet. One can sympathize with tigers. I believe that most Indians admire

A Boy is Killed 45

tigers, even though they may sometime have taken a relative or friend. It was just the will of the gods, one often hears them say with typical Indian fatalism, as soon as the worst of the sorrow for a tiger’s victim has passed. The tiger is an honored enemy. The one that, on the contrary, is hated and despised is the leopard! He often hangs about, cunning and crafty, close to the villages. He learns the ways of humans and operates accordingly. At night, after the village people have grown silent and their fires have fallen low, he creeps brazenly around the village streets and in and out of sheds and huts, snatching some dog or goat on the way. It has even happened that a mother has awoken in the morning to find that the child who was sleeping by her side has vanished. The leopard’s tracks tell how. It is hardly surprising that the leopard has come to be the symbol of evil to the village people. A leopard can terrorize a whole district and, thanks to his craftiness and cunning, keep it in subjection for a long time. One wily old he-leopard in Rudraprayag in northern India killed one hundred and twenty-eight people before a hunter’s bullet got him at last. I remember the typical story of a cunning leopard which I heard from the Indian forester, Dinoo Kulkarni. It is about a leopard that knew all the nooks and corners of “his” village better than the villagers themselves. One day a few years ago Kulkarni went out into the jungle just outside a village in broad daylight to try to shoot a little musk deer he had seen about. Suddenly, quick as lightning, a great leopard rushed out in front of him. Instinctively and in self-defense he fired with his shotgun but missed the leopard, which in a flash climbed up a tall tree standing by itself. Kulkarni had only two heavy cartridges with him; he loaded the gun and fired. The leopard fell down - but was not dead! Instead of rushing at Kulkarni or off into the jungle, it made straight for the village, where it galloped roaring along the village street and up onto the roofs of the huts, jumping from one to the other. Women and children ran shrieking into the huts. A few of the men found time to seize their bows while trying at the same time to watch which way the leopard was going. Suddenly it was as though the ground had swallowed it up.

46 Tiger in Sight

Kulkarni came running into the village and was met by the desperate shouts of the men. The leopard must be inside one of the huts! Hut after hut was searched while some of the men kept a lookout in the village. No leopard was to be seen. In the end a child in one of the huts heard something panting above it. The hut was surrounded and now it was discovered that this particular hut had a double roof. The present owner had no idea of this, but the leopard knew. He lay there pressed between the roofs. The only way to get him out was to set fire to the grass roofs. Then he shot out like a projectile from among the flames with a furious roar, to be met by a number of arrows and for the last time by a shot, Kulkarni’s second round! A cheerful roll of drums from over in the village interrupted my train of thought. The sun had gone down at last, and light clouds floated like little purple islands on a lavender sky. A breath of cold air swept past my face and caused me to look down quickly. A chill ran along my spine. An enormous leopard was moving noiselessly among the bushes a little way from the ox! Cautiously I released the back cock of the quick-firer. There stood the leopard, a huge warrior with two great dark scars on his neck, fully exposed in perfect broadside. I slowly released the first cock with the hairline cross over the leopard’s heart. Click! went my gun. Another shot. . . . , I thought. The leopard looked straight up at me with a calm, icy stare. I had not fired more than a few trial shots with my new Husqvarna rifle and I had forgotten how the safety catch went. In my nervousness I was on the point of locking it, but suddenly I remembered to move the catch forward. The leopard had taken a few steps toward the ox but was still looking straight up at me - quickly I fired, the hairline cross to the heart. The leopard sank straight down beside the dead ox. A shudder ran along under the spotted skin; he dug his teeth desperately into the ox’s body twice before his head sank gently down over the white, swelled-up stomach of the ox. The huge leopard was dead. I laughed and danced about on the machan with joy. It was several hours before anyone was to come and fetch me. Doesn’t

A Boy is Killed 47

iderd mean "Come here” in Hindi? I wondered. I shouted “Iderd, iderdV* as loud as I could toward the village, and at last I could hear an answering "Hao, hao. ...” Twenty minutes later I heard a lot of men coming, all chattering away as fast as they could go. Before long I could see them between the trees, a long line of ten or twelve men. They advanced cautiously, and when they came out into the glade and caught sight of the leopard, they all started clapping their hands. Their faces shone with happiness and they laughed up at me. Out came the ladder and I climbed down to my fine quarry. Baravalla, baravalla, said the men delightedly. A really, really big one. They pointed at the scars and I was able to distinguish the word sher - I realized they were saying that the leopard had been wounded in a fight with a tiger. It had been only a quarter to six when the leopard came. The men signed to me to climb up onto the machan again, while they carried the leopard off to the village. "A tiger will come later,” they said. That I hardly believed, but I decided that in any case I would prefer to be on the machan rather than sitting in the village looking at my dead leopard! They carried it away on a long pole in the lovely evening light. The personification of craftiness and evil, a murderer, hanging by four paws bound together, swinging to the steady tramp of happy men? or simply a rather old, very experienced and pretty battered wild animal, which for some reason or other had now and then eaten a human being for a change. At about nine o’clock my happy band of working companions came and fetched me. "Now there is one murderer the less in Bastar,” they said.

The Big Drive On the fifteenth of February there was excitement in the air. Today the District Commissioner accompanied by other high officials was passing through Narainpur on his way to Sonpur to a vast meeting. Thousands of Murias and mountain Marias would be assembled there, and the District Commissioner would distribute salt and clothes and give a “good will talk” to the natives - telling them how much nicer it would be if the women covered their breasts, how absolutely childish bead ornaments were, how the greatest happiness for children was to go to school, and that they ought to stop eating larvae and red ants. This sort of thing is known as social uplift, or the benevolent advance of civilization. I had made up my mind to drive to Sonpur and photograph the spectacle. But my plans were completely overthrown. The District Commissioner was very late. Thanks to this I was still there to receive the important news that “our man-eater” had killed the buffalo we had tethered beside the water hole in the river beyond Bengal. The tiger had dragged the buffalo away, which was just what we wanted it to do - we had tethered it with rather weak rope. Now we had to act quickly; the drive must be held today. We drove to Gahr Bengal, where two of the men went down to look for tracks while the rest of us drove around to all the villages in the neighborhood to announce that the great tiger drive was about to be held, and that all the men were to come as quickly as possible with axes and bows and arrows and drums and hunting horns. Quickly, quickly! The tracking showed that the tiger had dragged the buffalo a good

The Big Drive 49

three hundred yards, across the river bed close to the water hole and on into dense jungle. After that it had gone back to drink and now, presumably it was lying in the densest part of the jungle, perhaps no more than five hundred yards away. Meantime, about a hundred and forty men had assembled. The area in which the tiger appeared to be was very suitable for a drive. To the south and west it bordered on open rice fields; to the north the jungle thinned out somewhat and gave way to little open glades. There were three of us marksmen. The first was to take his place on the machan just at the edge of the river bed, where the tiger’s tracks were often to be seen in the sand. To the east lay the high mountains where the tiger had carried the dead boy. But between the mountains and the area of the drive ran the main road in a strait stretch almost five hundred yards long. Here two machans were swiftly erected at intervals of about a hundred yards. The next thing was to place the beaters quickly and silently in a semicircle starting from the west. The drive was to work straight toward the road and the mountains, drawing together more and more, working the tiger as it were out of a sack, the opening of which gave onto our three machans. Almost the most important part of a drive is the “stoppers.” Fifteen men were to be placed up in the trees along each side of the mouth of the sack, close together so that if the tiger tried to slip out to the sides they would be there to turn it inward and forward again by a light cough or, if necessary, by clapping their hands. It is often thanks to the correct placing of stoppers that tigers have been shot in drives and not simply “run out” to the sides. The forester of Narainpur himself positioned all thirty stoppers and also gave strict orders to the beaters to maintain the proper distances from each other, so as to leave no open gaps behind. We were all agreed that it was a cunning, vicious tiger, but we were almost sure we had it in the “sack.” Would the sack hold? I was on the middle machan. I could just see the next marksman farther down, and on the road at the corner of the “trap” where the southern rice field began, stood our green jeep, in which sat Arvind Shah.

50 Tiger in Sight

Now the beaters were beginning to shriek and hoot. They struck their axes against the trees and blew their horns; two fiery trumpeters led the way at the outer edges. But how close they seemed! Were they on the wrong side of the tiger? Was the tiger really inside this area? Strange - not a single wild cock or peacock, not even any monkeys came out onto the road. The trap seemed dead. No, come to think of it, that was probably good - I remembered now the police commissioner’s account of a tiger drive: no deer, no birds had come out. Any more or less enclosed area in which a tiger is at large is normally empty of deer and other wild animals. This was actually a good sign. Only one solitary green parrot came flying past me. A terrible roaring - I almost flew off the machan. In a flash I released the back cock of the quick-firer and held the gun to my cheek. “Keep calm, Astrid, keep calm,” I said to myself. The roaring came from somewhere in front of me and to the right, where the first marksman waited. I could follow the exact movements of the tiger from the howls of the beaters which, after that first roar, had risen to a surging crescendo, a continuous howl without beginning or end. Now he was straight in front of me but deep in the jungle; now he roared again, an eerie, blood-chilling sound like rumbling thunder, which was answered by howling men. Now he was down at the jeep end - would he break out over the road in spite of everything? No, in the end he must have turned. Back to the center again. Now his roar came deadened - he must be down in the dense bamboo thicket beside the water hole. I could hear distinctly how the chain of beaters grew closer around the tiger. A man shrieked in terror. Had the tiger wounded someone? A wary, vicious man-eater in a sack with walls of men. Would the walls hold? Would the tiger break straight out through the chain? Without my being aware of it the barrel of my gun had followed the tiger’s every movement. Now he was rushing in the direction of my shooting companion to the left. I squinted in that direction - he had his double-barreled rifle to his shoulder. Oh, if he would only fire! But no, the tiger turned and now, now he was coming in my direction. ... I could see

The Big Drive 51

him for the first time - he was working along behind some bushes in an oblique line for the road, barely a hundred yards away. He stood still in a blind position - almost completely covered - listening to the cautious clapping of the stoppers to the right. . . . I expected him to move on toward the road. But he did not. He turned and trotted obliquely back to break out across the road on the left-hand side instead. Now his shoulder was free - broadside! I pulled the trigger. The tiger crumpled up - fell on his side. He did not stir. I knew that the tiger lying there, seventy or eighty yards away, would never rise again. Quickly, too quickly, I tried to reload so as to be ready with a second shot in case. But the cartridge jammed. Even so, I felt sure enough to give a whoop of triumph, which was repeated by the nearest marksman, followed by: “Fire another shot!” “Can’t,” I yelled back. Keeping one eye on the tiger, I managed in the end to get another cartridge in, took aim and fired another shot into my first tiger, lying there on the ground. I shouted out that the tiger was dead. All the beaters and stoppers came running up rejoicing from every direction. I climbed down from the tree with my rifle, and we all stopped a little way from the tiger. Before going up, we threw some stones at it. But there was not a trace of life: The maneater was dead! He had a fine skin with unusually strong black stripes. He was no record in length - the forester measured him at nine feet, two inches - but he was big and broad. The father of the tiger’s forty-third and last victim, the little boy, was just bending over him looking at his nasty jaws. But not even his solemn face could dampen everyone’s joy; it broke out everywhere. Many were the heroes of the hunt. “I turned the tiger back twice,” shouted Arvind Shah proudly. “He tried to break out beside the jeep, but I hooted as hard as I could, and he turned back!” As for old Tangru Shikari of Koseranda, one of the stoppers, the tiger

52 Tiger in Sight

had rushed straight at him, roaring, trying to break out. But Tangru had roared back, he had, and the confused tiger had actually turned. Tangru, with delight, showed us time after time how he had roared as hard as he could. For several minutes the tiger had lain crouched down in a deep, narrow ravine. The men had tried to “shriek” him out but in vain. Then they all started throwing stones and clods of earth down into the hollow, and with a roar the tiger rushed out. The fact that none of the beaters was injured in this dangerous and exciting drive seemed to me a miracle. The forester had almost had a fit when he saw the tiger suddenly hurl itself at one of the beaters, who climbed up the nearest tree, quick as a monkey. The tiger had leaped after him, and the two great forepaws closed together only a few inches beneath him. Yes, each link in the chain had equal glory in the man-eater’s death. It had been a perfect, dramatic piece of teamwork. All the men who were able to get near enough helped drag the heavy tiger’s carcass out to the jeep and hoist it up onto the roof rack. Then we drove home in triumph, followed through Narainpur by crowds of happy people running after the jeep. All that evening, until long after dark, people came in a steady stream to look at the dead man-eater. There must have been six or seven hundred of them. I was given a garland of fiery-red hibiscus flowers, and a frail old woman brought me a coconut. I was tired and hungry. Tea and something to eat were all that I wanted. Before I crawled under the mosquito net to sleep I sent a telegram home to my father. It read: FIRST MAN-EATING TIGER SHOT GREETINGS ASTRID.

The Third Telegram When I trudged down to the post and telegraph hut at Narainpur the evening of the man-eater’s death, I really had no idea that only four days later I should be going the same way on precisely the same errand. The only difference in the telegram home to my father was that the word “first” had been changed to “second!” I shot the second tiger without any particular dramatic complications in the vicinity of Sonpur. Everything went so surprisingly quickly that there is nothing special to say about it. The most interesting thing about this tiger was his impressive size. He measured 11 feet, a record tiger according to the officials in Narainpur. But the third telegram I sent to my father twenty days later was quite a different matter. There are always tigers in the jungle around the large Hindu village of Benor, twelve miles to the south. Whenever anyone starts talking about the Benor tigers, “the most beautiful in Bastar,” I drop everything I am doing and simply listen and long to be allowed to see one of them. The natives from thereabouts report now and then that they have seen one, or several together, of “the golden ones.” They are more beautiful than the sun, they say proudly of their neighbors in the jungle. And their black stripes are not straight and even but shaped like the round leaves of the “rope tree” or the “eyes” on the long tail feathers of a peacock! And they have never killed any of the men in the villages, even though they see them and hear them so often. “If only they wouldn’t take our cattle,” said the village chief on one

54 Tiger in Sight

occasion, when he had just lost a buffalo. “But of course that doesn’t happen very often,” he added exoneratingly. It was as though these special tigers constituted an integral part of the life of the village people, a patch of precious gold in their otherwise drab and monotonous lives. They did not want to lose a single one of them. But then, tigers increase quite quickly, and if they seek fresh territories it will be close at hand, for these strikingly marked tigers were never seen anywhere else but around Benor. One can have too much, even of what is beautiful. On February 20th a man came over whose name, unusually enough, was Christian, and who was at the moment in charge of some men building a bridge on the road close to Benor. He explained that he wanted help against three tigers which were constantly being seen around his workmen’s leaf huts. Every day they saw fresh tracks across the road close to the huts, and that morning he himself had seen the tigers, two adults and one half-grown, crossing at a distance of only about sixty or seventy yards away. The night before, tracks around an ox that had been killed a mile or so from the road had shown just what the two large tigers and one smaller one had been up to. A man from Naitanar, a little way beyond Benor, had lost half his worldly possessions with the loss of that ox. He had one ox left. “It’s bad plowing a rice field with half a plow,” he had said to Christian the bridge builder. And the bridge builder had decided to cycle the twelve miles to Narainpur to ask for help. We discussed various possible ways of coming to grips with the cattle killers. We had the blessing of the chief of Benor village, too, said the bridge builder; he had just bought two fine oxen which he was very concerned about. “Would it be possible to get together enough beaters for a big drive?” we asked. “Surely counting my own twenty men I ought to be able to get together a hundred,” he replied. We arranged for a lift for Christian in a timber truck that was just going along the road past Benor, so that he could get back quickly and start collecting beaters.

The Third Telegram 55

When we drove to Benor a few hours later, only forty men had assembled. We went out to see the dead ox and found that it had been almost entirely devoured. There was no particular reason to suppose that the tigers would remain in the vicinity in order to go back again; there was nothing much to go back for. Of course all three of them would be somewhere up in the mountains round about, or down in some ravine cut by a mountain stream. But the jungle here was hard to penetrate; there were too many dense thickets. With only forty men a beat was impossible. After a little consideration we decided to build a machan close to the nearest water hole instead. The tigers would be bound to go there. The Benor men who accompanied us said they saw tiger tracks there regularly. In a large glade a mile or so inside the jungle was a patch of shining water and smooth mud where fresh tiger tracks mingled with those of deer and jackals. A few bushes and one solitary tall tree stood at the edge of the water hole. While a machan was being built in the tree, a couple of men went back to the village to fetch a white ox, a poor scraggy old beast, which they tethered to a root a few yards from the water. “You stay here, Astrid; we’ll come and fetch you about eight tomorrow morning,” said my companions. I climbed up, pleased as always at the prospect of being on a machan. Since we knew it was going to be a full moon that night, the machan was extra well camouflaged with leafy branches. The tigers would be sure to wait a good while at the edge of the forest before going out across an open glade bathed in moonlight. It was important not to be seen. “The moon, Seile,” the fine old Tangru Shikari of Koseranda said to me once, as we sat talking one night of the full moon after a Muria wedding in Bengal, “the moon is a land where there is nothing but hares, lovely big hares, which live on nothing but dew.” Afterwards I remember that both Tangru and I sat silent a long while, gazing up at the land of hares and dreaming. How rich this Benor jungle was in bird life! A number of black drongos with their long, lyre-shaped tail feathers fluttered around catching insects.

56 Tiger in Sight

“Did-he-do-it? Did-he-do-it?” shouted the “titiri”, a long-legged lapwing (Lobivanellus indicus), well known from the days of the British raj for his excellent English accent. “Did-he-do-it?” he went on. “Pity-to-do-it! Didhe-do-it?” “Kokila-kokila” sang a tree magpie on the edge of the jungle. A little lavender-blue flycatcher gave a sharp, warning klick-klick, klick-klick from a branch above the machan. And far up in the mountain a hoarse jungle cock started crowing in the twilight. The white ox, tethered by one foreleg, stood eating a bundle of hay which his owner had left him. A solitary peacock came cautiously out from the jungle. He stopped every now and then but finally made up his mind and went determinedly, in spite of the white ox, up to the water hole where he dipped his beak, drew in water and stretched his long, snake-like neck upward as he swallowed. After repeating this a number of times he turned abruptly and trotted back among the trees. I could hear his quick, rustling steps fade away into the jungle. The ox was munching peacefully, but now he stumbled and slid a little way down a slight slope. He fell over, kicked and tried to get up. He evidently couldn't. Difficult with his tethered foreleg, I thought. And I can’t climb down and do anything for him either; I’m as much of a prisoner as he is, high up in a tree top. The long ladder was hidden a good way off. . . . hidden from tigers. The ox lay kicking and moaning piteously; he was breathing very heavily. Time passed. And without being able to do anything, wondering what could have happened, I became witness to a beast’s death throes. His breathing grew weaker, his movements the same. A final nerve spasm, a rattling - and the ox lay dead and white in the moonlight. Surely an ox can’t die of stumbling over? Had he been sick from the start? Should I have given him a shot in the forehead? But I couldn’t possibly have known he would die like this under my very eyes. I felt ill at ease up there on the machan. “Did-he-do-it? Did-he-do-it? Pity-to-do-it called the lapwing again. Suddenly a white-spotted miniature owl was sitting on a branch of my tree, ”

The Third Telegram 57

watching me silently in the moonlight. I cast a glance down at the water hole and over the surrounding plain. When I looked back again, the branch was empty. The little ghostly owl had vanished as suddenly as it had come. I found it hard to keep awake. I tried to think and concentrate on various things. My thoughts turned quickly back onto already beaten paths and churned automatically on, while I myself slipped off into a halfsleep, started up again and struggled for all I was worth to keep my eyes open and to keep awake. It would have been so easy to fall asleep. But think of waking up again to find the water hole full of fresh tiger tracks and the ox half-eaten by tigers! After that one would never be allowed on a tiger machan again. No, I must keep awake. I fought against sleep and looked at my watch too often; it moved so miserably slowly. From the time the men left me it was fifteen hours until they would fetch me again in the morning. Now it’s eleven hours, I thought; then it will be ten, then nine. It was cold, too, and I tried to stop myself thinking about a warm bed and the dinner that I would eat tomorrow morning instead. But suppose the tiger comes in the moonlight - suppose all three tigers come. What a sight! Such a dream was powerful enough to keep one sitting all night on a machan, regardless of hunger and cold, doing everything in one’s power to keep awake. . . . I remember some happy Muria boys who seemed to think it would be a dream come true to be killed by a tiger. But of course the tiger death was to occur in quite particular circumstances. Only a few months past a village chief in the mountains beyond Sonpur had been killed by a tiger. When we asked how the tragedy happened we received no reply, only a delighted whispering and laughing. Can death be so pleasant? we wondered in bewilderment. Apparently it could. In the end they explained that the village chief and his wife had been down in Narainpur one market day, and had bought, among other things, some mahua wine. The way home was long and they felt thirsty every now and then. When it grew dark they still had a few

58 Tiger in Sight

miles to go to their village up in the mpuntains. They stopped, built a fire and lay down side by side next to it. A tiger came creeping out of the jungle, saw the fire and the man and woman, rushed forth and seized the man in his jaws just as he was making love to his wife! “Could a man possibly die a happier death?” the Muria boys asked, laughing. Some dark animal was running across the plain far away. With its short hind legs, it must be a hyena. Night birds whistled warningly in the jungle in that direction. A few hours later I again saw a dark shadow moving across the glade. The animal seemed smaller, could it be a wild pig? The hours passed slowly. By about two o’clock the moon had almost gone, but I could still see the white ox gleaming in the half-darkness. So strangely dead. Red ants were biting my leg. Let them bite; I had to keep absolutely still. At about four in the morning, which the Murias call the hour of the jungle cocks, a lot of wild cocks, or morgis, started crowing all around in the jungle. A couple of peacocks also screeched hoarsely from a mountain slope. Dawn was coming. About six o’clock, when it was growing light, I turned and finally caught sight of the striped hind parts of a tiger, just disappearing into the edge of the jungle! If I had only seen it sooner. ... I wondered where it had come from. Perhaps it had only just come out from the jungle onto the plain and in spite of everything had seen me and turned straight back? At half-past six I heard a tiger roaring angrily at the place where the previous ox had been killed. It had evidently gone back there, even though there was nothing left. Perhaps that was why he roared, quickly and angrily, four or five times. Toward eight I heard the jeep, and soon I was down on the ground again. We investigated the dead ox - one of his forelegs was very swollen - and on a flat stone by the water’s edge we found a coiling, slimy track. Even a cobra gets thirsty sometimes and makes its way to a water hole! But the cobra was not the cattle killer I had expected.

The Third Telegram 59

“Did-he-do-it? Did-he-do-it?” I seemed to hear the lapwing calling again. “ Pity-to-do-it.” The natives considered the ox’s flesh to be poisoned. They dragged the body away and promised to tether out another ox a little farther away from the water hole. A few days after the night of the "cobra murder” we heard from a couple of Halbas, caste Hindus, in Sonpur that two large tigers, a male and a female, were frequenting the dry river course beyond the village every day. One or two men had actually seen the tigers mating. That same day Christian the bridge builder appeared again. There were no tiger killings to report from his area, but he had something more extraordinary to tell us. He and some other Benor men had gone into the glade where the water hole was, in the middle of the day, and had seen two fully grown tigers there. They stood lapping water for several minutes. After that the two golden tigers had gone down into the water hole and bathed there a long time. I would have given a great deal to have seen that fantastic sight. “A memory for life,” said Christian the bridge builder, who was not at all accustomed to jungles and tigers - he was a town dweller originally, born in Nagpur. It was not long before we again had word of the golden tigers. A man from Benor came and told us that a cow with her calf had been killed by tigers. The previous evening, he said, some of the bridge workers had seen two golden tigers going together through the jungle toward Naitanar, where the men fetched timber. The tigers had roared repeatedly and soon afterwards had killed their victims. They had not eaten much and would probably come back that evening to go on feeding. Within the hour I was on the spot. While the machan was being built above the stinking bodies, I went with a native to a little water hole in a narrow ravine five hundred yards away. There, in the moist sand, I saw fresh tracks from the night before, both of peacocks and medium-sized tigers. Soon I was sitting alone on the machan with my Husqvarna rifle across

6*0 Tiger in Sight

my knees. Just before nine a tiger roamed from the direction of the water hole. It roared again a couple of times - then all was silent. The water hole lay in front of me to the left. I sat there, tense. About nine o'clock I suddenly heard and saw two tigers ambling along from the right straight toward my machan. They sounded thirsty - they were panting aloud - and I could actually see their tongues lolling out of their jaws. I sat without breathing, my gun at my shoulder. One of the tigers went right under the machan; the other panted past a few yards behind me. I had thought they would make a wide swing and go back to their prey, but they merely passed by. My machan had been roofed over partly because it was very low and partly because of the moonlight. I had no possibility of firing in any other direction than that of the two dead animals. All I could do was sit and listen to the tigers padding away and hope that they would come back later. At about twelve a hyena came rustling - now I could tell that rustling from a long way off. The tiger's step is soft even when it is walking on dry leaves; it always has its claws drawn in when it walks. But a hyena - to think that at Bengal I mistook a hyena for a man-eating tiger - cannot draw in its claws and they rustle and tear against dry leaves and twigs. Besides, hyenas move jerkily and irregularly; suddenly they will stand still and listen, and then go on. I switched on the searchlight. The hyena was not in the least upset, rather the reverse: it went on biting and tearing at the dead cow harder than ever, and seemed to find a little light on the subject quite helpful. How can any animal be so hideously ugly as a hyena? Such awkward proportions, the broad blunt head and the long coarse hair from its ears right down to its tail? I switched off the light again so as not to have to sit and look at the monster. For two hours it went on eating. Then it lumbered off, but two more hyenas appeared and took over the eating, one after the other. It was good to be up on a machan, anyhow. It can't be very pleasant to meet a large tiger on the ground. The former thasildar - or village bailiff of Narainpur was once driving with five other men in an ox cart along the Raugat road close to the high “Bison Mountain," when suddenly a tiger

The Third Telegram 61

rushed up and jumped onto the shafts between the oxen and the men. There he sat, apparently making up his mind which he should eat first. Then he jumped down onto the ground, padded around the cart and sat down to consider again. He kept this up for at least half an hour. All of them were out of their minds with terror; they had no weapon with them at all. The thasildar set light to a little hay they were carrying as food for the oxen, but this did not trouble the tiger at all. All of them were wondering which of them was going to be eaten. There was a paraffin lamp in the cart and in desperation the thasildar lit this. The lamp spluttered and flashed. Then at last the tiger trotted off. But one doesn’t always have a paraffin lamp with one in unexpected situations. No tigers appeared. When it was six o’clock and already light, the last of the hyenas was still gnawing away at the calf. In the end it took a joint in its jaws and lumbered away in the morning light, just before the men came to fetch me. One day at the beginning of March, when I had just finished feeding my baby leopard, Lill-Cheeta, with milk from a baby bottle, two Muria men appeared. They stood for a long time silently watching me as I saw to my little pet. I thought they wanted a penicillin injection or some medicine against scabies, which is common here, but they did not ask for anything. “Which village are you from?” I asked. “Naitanar,” they replied. Naitanar, in the golden tigers’ jungle, I thought at once. And then at last they came out with their message: A tiger had killed a cow there, and they wanted me to come. At one o’clock Arvind Shah, who had fallen into the kind habit of acting as my interpreter and hunting assistant, set out with me and the men who had brought the report. At Benor we turned off onto a narrow path which led us across two rice fields, through a village and on into the jungle. “Bass idher,” said one of the men, and I pulled up. “It’s not far from here to the tiger’s prey,” whispered the men. We

62 Tiger in Sight

went cautiously in among the trees. Ax flock of vultures rose noisily from the ground only some fifty yards ahead of us. There, among leaves and rice, lay a single, well-gnawed hind leg from the cow. One of the Muria men pointed at the trail leading into the jungle and whispered: “The tiger has been back again while we went to fetch you. Now he has dragged the cow farther into the jungle - he must have thought it was lying too close to the path.” “We’ll follow the trail,” I whispered back. I loaded the heavy Smith & Wesson revolver, the one we called The Last Chance, with six shots and stuck it into the open holster, which I put on. Then I put five rounds in the rifle, one in the breach and made sure the safety catch was off. Silently we followed the scarcely visible trail where the beast had been dragged. One of the Murias went first as tracker, then I with the guns, behind me Arvind Shah, and after him followed a number of natives whom we had brought from the last village to help in building the machan. We moved very slowly; the tiger might be anywhere. Probably he was lying eating his prey which he had just dragged off in broad daylight. We looked carefully around. After some thirty yards the jungle thinned out there were no tall trees close to the path to climb up into. Arvind Shah behind me was evidently thinking the same as I. He whispered in his jerky English: “Astrid, this is very dangerous.” “Very dangerous,” I whispered back over my shoulder. After that we said no more as we went along. I knew very well that one ought not to follow a tiger with such a light rifle as a 30.06. I ought to have had a heavy double-barreled rifle. I was also relying on the revolver if the tiger should fly at us. But neither the rifle nor the heavy revolver has any great stopping power; it is there the danger lies. We crept slowly on. The jungle with its thick trunks was far behind us. Now we were going through a patch of scattered bushes and on toward a stony hillside. The tracker stopped and pointed at something dark a little way ahead

The Third Telegram 63

of us - there lay the cow! Only the forequarters were left and they had been covered over with dry leaves. It was a sure sign that the tiger meant to come back; he had hidden his prey from the searching eyes of vultures. There were a few large trees growing here close to the slope of the hill. Only one was at a suitable distance: it had a very tall, smooth trunk, with no branches for the first twenty-five or thirty feet. So it would have to be a very high machan. We all got to work cautiously and silently. One man climbed up the tree, carrying ropes to haul up brushwood; some of the others started binding a long ladder together. I pointed out which of the bushes had to be cut away to give a free view. Lastly the remains of the cow were tied fast to a root to make the tiger feed on the spot. Everything was carefully camouflaged with earth and leaves. The ropes must not show; every little stem that had been cut off had to be darkened with earth. The man who had climbed the tree came down to me looking very worried: The tree was swarming with red ants - what should we do? ''Carry on; red ants are not so dangerous as tigers,” I replied. He was up again in no time, hauling up branches and leafy sprays with the rope. It was already four in the afternoon. The ladder was ready and was set up against the tree. I climbed up, but when I got to the top of the ladder there was still ten feet of smooth tree trunk up to the machan. I could not and dared not go on. I came quickly down again, the ladder was laid on the ground, a few thin stems were cautiously cut and a short little ladder was bound together as an extension to the other. Now I got to the top. Someone brought me my rifle, rain clothes and water bottle. The man pointed toward the stony rise: The tigers usually lie in a cave over there, so they will probably come from that direction. He smiled at me kindly and clambered down, the ladder was borne away and the men went off in a long procession. It was now a quarter to five. I wondered whether the tiger had already started out for his supper; the "golden tigers” kept early hours, so the natives told me. I sat comfortably on my rolled-up rain clothes. I screwed the searchlight

64

Tiger in Sight

fast to the gun barrel at once. When du$k comes there is no chance to mess about with that sort of thing - one has to keep still as a statue. Birds sang and called. The ants bit my legs, but it was not so very bad. I sat enjoying the jungle around me and the fact that I was waiting for a tiger. I wondered, but in vain, why the tigers are so particularly beautiful, so rich in coloring, just in this particular jungle. After a while I heard peacocks over on the ‘‘tiger hill” give warning cries. A beast of prey is coming, the Indians always say, when they hear peacocks sound warnings in the evening. A few minutes later, other birds started warning as hard as they could, in the same direction, obliquely behind my back. Was the tiger coming? It was not yet half past five, still quite light. Next I heard a rustling in the jungle on my right - distinct footsteps, slow, heavy. . . . My heart began to pound. The tiger was coming. No! As I listened, I could tell that it was not one tiger, but two tigers! I was absolutely certain. And then, suddenly, only thirty or forty yards away, I saw the brilliant, golden, black-striped coat of the first tiger. It was coming slowly forward, incredibly cautious, its eyes fixed on its prey. Now it stood still, out in the open and to one side, perhaps twenty-five yards away. I could not fire in that direction because of branches and leaves and if I moved everything was lost. The least little sound now would frighten the tiger; it would be gone in a flash and never come back to that prey. There was nothing to do but sit absolutely still, hardly breathing. What a tiger, how incredibly beautiful! “More beautiful than the sun” isn't that what the Muria people say of their tigers? Would the tiger see me after all? The rifle barrel with the searchlight stuck out a bit; he could even see my face between the leaves. If he went up to the cow, I would be able to shoot very well, but I dared not be sure he would. I was right. The tiger stood still for a little while inspecting his prey, looked around and even turned his head up in my direction but soon looked away again. It was lucky the machan was so high. After that he glanced back at the cow again. Then he turned and went calmly away. I felt certain the tiger had seen the changes. We had had to cut down a

The Third Telegram 65

few bushes to give a clear view. Now he was suspicious and I wondered whether he would come back again. Fifteen minutes later he roared discontentedly several times over, some hundred yards away. It grew dark. Too slowly, I thought, for this evening I wanted the dark to come quickly. A lizard peeped up at me from a branch but darted quickly away. The ants ran nervously backward and forward, biting me whenever they saw a chance and rushing on. A number of peacocks screeched from various directions. By a quarter past six it was dark; I was just aware of a little faint starlight. Yes - now again I could hear two tigers coming! One of them stopped just behind my machan tree; the other was moving toward the dead body, very, very slowly in the darkness. All of a sudden it made a rush but stopped short, and then went on again almost soundlessly and extremely slowly. The prey lay slightly to the left ahead of me. Now I could hear the tiger straight underneath me. I had to act quickly. I switched on the light I fired. ... It all happened so quickly. I must have centered the telescopic sight completely automatically, seen the hairline cross on the shoulder and pulled the trigger! The tiger rushed about thirty feet in full career, and fell Great paws waved in the air; on the other side of a bush two green eyes shone at me in the light of my searchlight. Then slowly they fell back - the eyes, the paws. The tiger was dead! Could it be that magnificent great tiger I had seen three-quarters of an hour ago or was it another one? I thought it looked smaller seen from above when I fired. The second tiger had of course vanished at the shot, but half an hour later I heard the loud roar of a tiger no great distance away. That it could be coming back again was hardly credible. I rested, ate a few broken biscuits I found in the pocket of my raincoat, drank a little water, not because I was thirsty but simply to give myself something to do. I did not intend to go down to have a closer look at my tiger! As an Englishman once did. The mahua-happy forester of Narainpur, sitting in the village of Kolur

66 Tiger in Sight

waiting for the beaters to assemble, told us the story of an English couple a few years ago who had sat on a machan together during a drive close to Kolur. “The drive was down there in the valley,” said the forester, pointing over at a wide belt of jungle just beneath a steep mountain chain. “They were after a cattle killer that had been taking buffaloes and cows in the area for a long time, driving the Kolur villagers desperate.” Along came the tiger, walking calmly and majestically - like a king, said the forester, getting up to show just how majestically the tiger had come. Then he sat down again and whispered to a villager to send for a calabash of mahua wine. He went on: “Well, the Englishman was a crack shot and he caught the tiger perfectly, so that it fell on the spot. “Then he proudly helped his wife down from the machan and both of them went up to the dead tiger, an enormously powerful male. “ ‘That’s the broadest tiger’s head I ever saw in my life’ said the Englishman, bending down to look at his trophy more closely. “Crunch, went the tiger’s jaws around the man’s head. His wife, who had a gun in her hands, quick as lightning fired a shot into the tiger’s body, but what use was that. . . . The man died instantaneously, and the tiger, which was already mortally wounded but had mobilized his last spark of life for this explosively sudden outburst of strength, was dead just as quickly. “How she wept, the Englishwoman; her tears were streaming down when she came to tell me about the accident,” said the forester. And with a flash of ice-cold dignity he added: “It was I who had to take care of her.” Time passed pretty slowly. As usual when the time seemed long, I counted the hours till dawn: Nine hours more, eight, seven, six. . . . Now I could hear a hyena coming a long way off, but it turned just behind my tree. It had probably caught the scent of the dead tiger. There were plenty of peacocks in this area; I could hear them in various directions. They were uneasy - tigers were on the move. A big nilgai antelope whinnied repeatedly a few hundred yards away, and a sambar

The Third Telegram 61

deer trumpeted warningly in another direction. The jungle was certainly ill at ease. At about five it was still dark and starlit, but towards half-past it began to lighten. By six it was full daylight. Then suddenly I heard the familiar tread of big soft paws, tiger’s paws. Two tigers - no, it was three! The nearest went around behind the machan tree and on behind the dense bushes on my left-hand side. There it stood still - I couldn’t see it. I sat with my rifle to my cheek and caught sight of two golden tigers creeping slowly, parallel to one another, at a distance of about twenty feet apart, toward the remains of the cow. They came from my right-hand side. They were both equally large, equally beautiful and their heads were turned toward their prey - and toward me. The nearer one stood beyond my angle of fire, too far to the right, on the same spot where the evening tiger had stopped and turned, while the farther one went forward offering me a fine broadside. I aimed and fired. The tiger collapsed on the spot, kicked for a few seconds and then grew still, lying on its side. Only the striped skin shone like gold among the dry, rust-brown leaves. I looked calmly down at the two lovely tigers. I was not sure whether I felt glad or sorry. I had arranged with Arvind Shah, who was waiting overnight at Naitanar, that I would fire a revolver shot when I wanted him to come and fetch me in the morning. When Arvind and the village men heard the second tiger’s death shot, they took this for the signal and before long I could hear Arvind calling from a long way off, asking whether they could come. I shouted as loud as I could: "Come!” When the men were within better hailing distance I couldn’t help shouting out: “Do sher margia - two tigers killed!” It was a minute or two before the men really grasped what I had said, but then I heard them give a whoop of joy and they all came rushing, laughing aloud without even slowing up when they saw the tigers. Never

68 Tiger in Sight

has a ladder been put up quicker and never have I come down from a tree faster. They were two normal-sized tigresses, perhaps three or four years old. “We must run on ahead to Naitanar and tell our people to come, so that they can see the tigers/’ said two of the men and disappeared. Tall, strong tree trunks were cut down, tigers’ paws were tied together and a crowd of happy men helped to carry the heavy burdens out through the jungle to the path and the lorry. Here we waited for the Naitanas people, who live about half a mile farther into the jungle. The sun rose and at last a happy band of Murias arrived. The eldest of the village, a thin, wrinkled old woman with yellowish-white hair and the kindest of eyes, came up and blessed me and hoped I should have twelve sons! After that, children, women and old men pressed around the tigers, looking and touching. When they had all seen enough, the tigresses were loaded up on the back of the lorry. I sat at the wheel and drove homeward, happy and hungry. Toward Benor we ran into Christian the bridge builder. “Look in the back!” we said. His face lit up. Not long ago he had seen two tigers bathing in a water hole, now he saw two dead tigers on the back of a lorry! “Sensation after sensation,” he said, laughing. He invited us into his leaf hut for hot tea with buffalo milk and a lot of sugar. A plump Hindu woman served the tea. Nothing in the world could have been more welcome after that night. But we had to hurry home. We thanked them and drove on. “I can’t sing,” I said. “Neither can I,” Arvind replied. And then we sang at the top of our lungs English songs we had learned at school. We laughed as I drove the heavily laden truck through the jungle. Then a telegram home to my father: TWO TIGERS CATTLE KILLERS SHOT SAME NIGHT GREETINGS ASTRID.

Death in the Monsoon Now the monsoon was in full swing; it was the beginning of July. For over a week we had seen neither sun nor blue sky. The only variety in the weather was that sometimes it deluged and sometimes it drizzled. Rain has its charms, no doubt, but when you are out in the field taking color film and are dependent on sunshine, it is not so funny to have water everywhere: In the air, on the ground, on the floor, in your bed, on the dining table, among your books. We had suddenly acquired a new luxury in the bungalow: Running water - it came through the ceiling into the hand basin. On the sandy river beds, where only a few weeks before we had been tracking axis deer and tigers, masses of water hurtled along and only the tops of trees stuck out, struggling to keep themselves anchored to the spot. Many villages were completely cut off, and more than one man-eater ravaged in the countryside around us without our being able to do anything about it; there was seldom any possibility of getting to the place where the victim had been taken in time. Snakes and scorpions came to life, or more correctly, we saw them more often. Looking inside my shoes for scorpions every morning was no longer just routine - I shook out my shoes with extra care. Kaile Ram killed a large black scorpion under my bed early one morning while I was still asleep. Hans, the expedition's trained collecting assistant, caught a good many, which he kept in a glass jar. He was collecting them for a genuine Swedish crayfish feast when August comes, he said in his endearing Hälsinge dialect.

70

Tiger in Sight

Hans was not particularly afraid of snakes either. A few days ago some < Muria boys came on a three-foot-long, yellow and black snake not far from the bungalow. It was dusk. He heard the boys shouting around the snake, went out cooly, grabbed the snake quickly by the very end of its tail, picked it up and cut off its head with his mora knife. He showed it to us later quite casually. It was a banded krait, the only Indian snake against which there is no serum. If you get bitten, you are said to have sixty seconds to live. The air during the rainy season is laden with moisture and everything mildews, especially shoes, camera cases and anything else made of leather. When you go to bed, the pillows smell of mildew. It is sometimes difficult to sleep at night on account of the choir of frogs from the pools of water around the bungalow. At the beginning of the monsoon I thought it was goats braying and went out into the dark with a pocket flashlight, but all I found was a seething, braying choir of mating frogs. Then sometimes there will come a brief clear interval with deep blue skies, black clouds and intense colors over the drenched rice fields, the jungle and the blue mountains. The sun bursts through and from the rice fields one hears the happy singing of girls, working in long rows, planting or thinning out. There are happy, smiling faces and friendly greetings as we pass. There can be no question of any proper film work for several months, among other things because the roads are cut off. A number of bridges have collapsed - but not Christian the bridge builder’s splendid new one. That has resisted all natural forces, so far. It will be a long time before we can send off any exposed film to London for development. One night I was wakened suddenly by the terrified, heart-rending cries of a woman in a hut nearby. I jumped up, grabbed a flashlight and ran toward the hut. The chokidar, the man who is in charge of the household, had flung himself out of his bed under a mango tree in the garden, and the two of us wrenched open the door. The woman, who had been lying asleep on the mud floor, had waked up in the dark and laid her hand right on a

Death in the Monsoon 71

snake. She ran past us shrieking out of the door. In the beam of light we could see an enormous cobra wriggling away toward a corner of the hut. The chokidar managed to kill it with a thick stick. It was almost five feet long. A miracle that the woman had not been bitten. One day a Maria man from far up in the mountains brought us two large young toucans. He was a well-built man with intelligent eyes, dressed in a loincloth, his ax and a mass of brick-red necklaces. The birds look quite engaging with their stubby noses and halfgrown wing-feathers. Some time ago we showed the man a picture of a toucan in a bird book, and told him we would like to have some young ones. He nodded at the picture in recognition and two months later he brought them. We have quite a lot of pets now which the natives have brought us among others some of the funny, playful langur monkeys, and a number of leopard cubs, sweet little balls of wool with big, pale blue eyes that drink milk out of a bottle. It is almost impossible to imagine these little fellows growing into dreaded man-eaters. We have a wild pig, a few deer calves, a little antelope, two civet cats, a python and any number of baby spotted owls. A report came in of a buffalo that had been killed by a tiger at Sonpur. Three bridges on the way there had been swept away by the floods and there was no possibility of getting to Sonpur by jeep. The Narainpur policeman appeared. He said that a tiger had taken a man that day in the mountains beyond the village of Bakulvaj. The tiger was lying beside the man, tearing at him, the policeman said, and it refused to go away although a number of men had tried to frighten it off. We had to get there at once, if we were to be of any help. We were soon on our way in the jeep over the miserable paths leading to Bakulvaj. Rain was streaming down on us, making the paths even worse and more slippery. We were not sure we could get through. The most difficult part was crossing a river of knee-high water. Everyone waded across except the driver, who plunged into the river at top speed on four-wheel drive. With the water splashing high above the roof he brought the jeep skillfully up on the farther bank.

72 Tiger in Sight

After that there was only a narrow path across rice fields with earthen embankments which now and then we had to drive over and knock down a few inches. At last we reached Bakulvaj. There we were joined by a man to act as guide. He told us that the man the tiger had mauled was dead and that the accident had happened yesterday, not today. We drove on another five or six miles up a long chain of mountains and came in the end to the last village. There we met the dead man’s mother, who was weeping uncontrollably. It was her only son. He had been high up on the mountain plateau cutting bamboo when the tiger attacked. A few of the village men came with us and we set off immediately up the mountain slope. Those of us who were armed went first with loaded rifles. For two miles we followed a path that led almost straight up the mountain. The jungle up here was lush and green. In a long, silent procession we followed a winding path across the high mountain until at length we came to a little band of solemn, silent men. “Twenty minutes ago,” whispered one of them, “the village chief and his son went into the jungle to track and try to find the body.” One of the Murias showed us where the tiger had taken the man - an ax was lying there and a short coil of rope. There was no trace of blood to be seen. But there were clear traces, on the other hand, of the way the tiger had come. It had been lying in a little ravine and rushed up at the man from below, strangely enough. We waited a bare half-hour in tense excitement. Everything was so silent in the jungle. How far could the village chief have gone? It was fearfully dense terrain. At last we heard him shouting, and before long he emerged from the vegetation in front of us with a hard, pale face. His son, who came close behind him, looked frightened and shaken. The tiger had eaten practically the whole of the body - only the feet and a little of the skeleton remained. There had probably been jackals there in the night, too, for everything had been well gnawed. The two men had followed the trail left by the dragging body and it had

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Previous page: The heat of the sun increases the alcoholic content of the palm wine and more than one Muria man has sat at the top of a palm tree, drunk too much and fallen down. Monsoon time— weeks of rain. The rivers overflow and one can fish on the ricefields.

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The leopard is the symbol of evil in the villages. He goes boldly between the huts at night. In the morning a footprint or the loss of a goat or dog shows who has been around.

Death in the Monsoon 73

shown quite clearly how the tragedy had happened. We had been told by the natives who rushed up to try to frighten the tiger away from the shrieking man, whom the tiger had got by the arm, that the tiger refused to be frightened away but only roared back angrily. To judge by the trail the man had lived quite a long time. While the tiger was dragging him by one arm he had kicked out with his feet and hands and tried to grab hold of branches and bushes. A small herd of tame buffaloes had evidently turned on the tiger, which was why it had dragged the man around into the high grass and the bushy terrain. The buffalo tracks showed how the cattle had attacked, but even so the tiger had not let go of its victim. We turned silently back across the mountain. On one of the slopes we found three-foot high yellow orchids. ... A sweeping view, which we had not noticed behind our backs as we were going up, spread out between tall, lush green trees. Down below wound a yellow river; in the midst of the jungle was a clearing with a few huts, and far beyond, blue mountain ridges. It was suddenly hard to believe that we were on our way back from the jungle where a man had been killed; the sunshine was too beautiful. But down in the village we met the old weeping mother again.

The Goa- Thief in the Garden It had been pouring with rain all day. It is not easy to get to sleep in the moisture-laden, oppressive air of the monsoon evenings. I sat for a long time on the veranda writing letters. Suddenly I heard a strange gurgling sound from the "garage/’ an open shed thirty yards away from the bungalow, where our twelve goats were tethered. I flew up, grabbed a flashlight, ran out into the yard and shone the light on the shed. There stood a large leopard looking at the goats, ready to jump in! I dashed indoors, grabbed my rifle and four cartridges. Kaile Ram came with me, he carried the flashlight, and we went cautiously around the shed and shone the light everywhere but could see no leopard. Only a dense cluster of terrified goats’ eyes shone back at us out of the darkness. Better count the goats anyway. Eleven! Confounded goat thief! So in just those few seconds while I was fetching my gun and the cartridges, the leopard had managed to steal a goat. And now we could see where it had dragged it out through a wide gap between two planks in the far corner of the shed. There were bloodstains there and goat hair. It was disturbing to us that the leopard had taken the goat. Not so much for the loss of the goat as because of the danger that he might come back and kill our tame deer and antelopes. The leopard’s boldness, creeping around the bungalow at night, did not surprise us at all - we had often come across or heard of cases like that here in Bastar. Our friend Kulkarni, the forester, for example, had told me about a nasty leopard incident that had happened when his boy was a baby. He and his wife were living at the time in a forest bungalow deep in the jungle in

The Goat Thief in the Garden 75

the Chanda district. They were sitting on the veranda one evening with the baby in its cradle and their dog, a powerful bull terrier, who had settled himself under the cradle. The two of them left the veranda for a little while to talk to the cook in the cooking shed. A few minutes later they heard the dog growling, so they hurried back to see what was the matter. The dog was still lying under the cradle whining miserably. Kulkarni happened to shine his flashlight onto a corner of the veranda, and there sat a large leopard! He was evidently simply waiting for the dog to leave his place under the child. As soon as the dog saw the leopard in the beam of light, he jumped up and pursued it as it fled into the jungle. The dog didn’t come back. Kulkarni whistled and called and went out in his jeep to find it. In vain. Both he and his wife Sheila were deeply grieved at the loss of their beloved dog. Toward morning the dog came limping home, bloody and torn. Kulkarni stood the dog in a bath of tepid water, washed it clean and disinfected all the wounds. And it lived. But now we had to consider how to outwit the unwelcome thief in our garden. The evening of the following day we moved ten of our goats to a safer place. The eleventh, a white he-goat, we tethered with strong ropes to a hibiscus bush twenty yards from the bungalow. When night came it was raining hard, and we had little hope that the leopard would return. We put out the paraffin lamp and went to bed with the rifle loaded and ready. At midnight we were wakened by a frightful growling; it sounded like thunder rumbling just outside the house. We ran out and saw from the large fresh tracks that the leopard had first slunk by only a few yards away from Kaile Ram, whose bed stands on the veranda, and then had gone over to some of the cages in which we keep a number of leopard cubs and also a young he-leopard which the wild one had obviously quarreled with. Fortunately, each on his own side of the bars. We shone the light out to the hibiscus bush. The goat was dead! I decided to watch and see if the leopard would come back to his prey. In order to fetch the right searchlight for the rifle, I went inside for a

16 Tiger in Sight

moment. When I came out again, the goat had been moved! ! ! The leopard must have rushed in while my back was turned and tried to carry the goat away but failed - the ropes were strong. He came back no less than three times in the darkness to get his kill. But each time I switched on the flashlight, he leaped out of the beam of light like a flash, and there was no hope of having time to fire. A few hours later I heard some axis deer making warning sounds a little way inside the jungle. I assumed that the leopard had given up his attempts to get the goat and was going away. I went in and went to bed. But it was difficult to sleep. Would the leopard abandon the killed goat? I had visions of long faces around an empty end of rope beside the hibiscus bush in the morning. It was going to be an ill-spent night and a thoughtless and useless sacrifice of a goat. In the end I got up, shook out my boots - no scorpions inside - put them on, took my rifle and cautiously opened the door into the second room of the bungalow through which I had to pass in order to get out. By the time I was halfway into the room I could hear the sound of bones being crushed in the leopard’s jaws out in the garden. I had to move without a sound, not hit against anything in the darkness! At the open door I sat down with infinite care in the chair we had placed there, drew up one knee, rested the rifle on it and aimed into the darkness toward the sound, switched on the flashlight - saw a great spotted leopard on top of the goat - fired! The shot echoed all through the house; a roar came from the leopard, which rolled on its back with all its paws in the air. I reloaded quickly and waited but I saw all four legs sink slowly onto one side. My companions came running when they heard my whoop of triumph. For safety’s sake we threw a few stones at the leopard’s body before we went up to it. It was a fine male with extremely beautiful skin. He had had time to eat one of the hind legs of the goat. We celebrated the death of the goat thief with a strong cup of tea. It was growing light, the air was cool and a drizzle of rain was drifting slowly down through the leafy crowns of the mango trees.

The Old He-Tiger of the Peacock Jungle Among my very best friends in Bastar were the people of Mornar, a little Maria village high up in “The Blue Mountains/' To get there one has first to drive in a jeep about twelve miles and then go on foot into the jungle, wade across a wide river and then on across open, far-flung rice fields, climb three jungle-clad, stony hills, and there at last is my favorite village, just at the foot of the high mountains. “ Johdr, johdr, Seile,” the Mornar villagers always greeted me when we met. Seile, The Smiling One, is my “ghotul name," given me by the boys and girls of the Gahr Bengal ghotul. It was the only name I was known by in Bastar. Around Mornar there are always masses of wild peacocks. Each time we had been there wild jungle fowl and brilliantly colored peacocks had always come flapping about. That day in Narainpur, two Muria girls had come to me with infected wounds and I was just giving each of them a suji, a penicillin injection, when I heard the heart-warming Johdr, Seile\ I looked up. An old man, one of the ugliest I have ever seen, short and thickset with coarse features and a ragged loin-cloth was standing there one of my very dear friends from Mornar. He had with him a young boy,

78 Tiger in Sight

handsome as a god, slim and muscular with black hair hanging down to his shoulders. I guessed what they wanted to say and asked: “Dual” - their name for a tiger - “margiat” “Balsa” - buffalo, they replied, and with that the situation was clear. A tiger had killed a buffalo at Mornar! It was a big tiger that had been taking cattle from the Mornar people’s herd at regular intervals. When several hours later I got to the dead buffalo, it turned out that a man had been sitting beside it keeping watch the whole day; he had been weaving bamboo baskets to pass the time. It is not a good thing to keep watch on such occasions - tigers usually inspect their prey during the day, and when it lies close to a village as in this case, they generally come and drag it away to a safer place for their meal the coming night. It was not very likely that this tiger would return. We built a machan in any case, and I stayed there. At about five I caught sight of something blue in the tall grass. A splendid peacock was moving along, warily and watchfully. Presumably it was on its way to drink water in the stream that ran just behind my machan tree. A little later three young peacocks marched across the glade in front of me. Many more called warnings from up in the mountain that the tiger should be coming from. Behind me was tall grass. There were rustlings there now and then, but it was never a tiger. I was very tired and found it a little difficult to keep awake, having a long and hard day’s work behind me. A Thermos flask of coffee was my nose bag and I drank a little out of it which helped. While we were building the machan, I had had a strong feeling that the tiger was watching us from the mountain slope and I really had very little hope that it would come, particularly as it was believed to be an old tiger. There were plenty of mosquitoes from the marsh land behind me. They bit and bit, and I was annoyed that I had not brought my insect repellant. But after a while I forgot about the discomfort of the mosquitoes round me. I began thinking about Tiwari, a young Indian who was interested in botany, and was working on teak planting and plant improvement in Bastar. He sometimes came through Narainpur on his travels. Tiwari

The Old He-Tiger of the Peacock Jungle 79

always had such interesting things to tell about the jungle - not merely about plant improvement and annual growth rings on teak trees. One evening recently he told us a wonderful story of escape from a tiger. An Englishman, H. S. George, who was working for the Indian Forestry Commission - he was forester in the Chanda district east of Bastar - was out on one occasion with a Gond, tracking a man-eating tiger. The Gond went ahead. After a while he turned around - the Englishman had vanished. The Gond traced his way back and saw a tiger standing over the Englishman, who was badly mauled. Instead of running away, he started throwing stones at the tiger, which went off leaving the man on the ground. The Gond then put George over his shoulder and carried him three miles to the nearest village. The tiger was following the whole time, and the Gond had to stop every now and then to throw stones at it. In the village George was given first aid, and then he was flown to England. He came back to India later on, and was made chief forester. He arranged for a sum of money, ten rupees, to be paid to the Gond every month. Whenever H. S. George came back to the village, which after this event was renamed Georgepeth, he always looked up the Gond, and for the most part they sat happily together in silence. For neither of them understood the other’s language. Now George is retired and is believed to be living in England somewhere outside London. Nothing exciting happened to me on the machan. Toward five I fell asleep for an hour or so, until the villagers came, and they told me then that a cow was missing since the preceding evening. It had not come home with the rest of the cattle after being put out to graze on the mountain slope just outside the village. The cow’s calf, on the other hand, was home. So the tiger had taken a fresh victim - no wonder it had not come to me that night. The thickset man and the village chief with his sons decided to go and look for the tiger’s latest victim, while I and a couple of men went to the village. In an hour or so they returned. They had found the place where the cow had been killed and then followed the trail where it had

80 Tiger in Sight

been dragged, far up the mountain chain and then steeply down into a ravine between two mountains. The men had gone along one side of the deep ravine. Suddenly they saw a big tiger walking slowly along beneath them. It went up the side and disappeared into long grass. It was a big male tiger with a broad, powerful head and long whiskers, obviously a wily old beast, for he had dropped the whole cow into a water hole in the dry river bed, where the meat would be kept fresh and the vultures would not see it. He was clearly planning to have more of it that night. We took down the first machan and went to the new place, where we silently and cautiously built a new shooting platform, not very high, only eight or ten feet, but all the better camouflaged. I was sure that the tiger was not far off, and I thought I heard a dull roaring from the nearest mountain. As soon as we had finished we returned to the village, left some of our equipment there and then trudged the three miles in the heat back to the jeep and drove home for a little food. Once home I was so tired I could scarcely eat, and after that there was only a bare hour left to sleep in before it was time to go back to the machan. I assumed that the tiger would come early. We started at about two and Arvind Shah came along as interpreter. At last we reached Mornar. Three men came on with us to the ravine. Halfway there some big, dark animal dashed across the path only about fifty yards in front of us. We stopped and saw an enormous, black Indian bison, a gaur, turning slowly in a half-circle in front of us. “Shoot, Seile,” whispered the village chief's son, and I could certainly have shot the biggest gaur I shall probably ever see in my life, one of the finest Indian hunting trophies. I whispered back that if I shot, I should certainly not get their cattle killer that night. The shot would inevitably frighten the big tiger away. They understood. Next moment the gaur got wind of us and galloped off in full career up the mountain. A strange beast with its big, heavy black body, a hump on its back, long legs and fine, strong, rounded horns. We went on, and I climbed in silence onto the machan. As soon as I

The Old He-Tiger of the Peacock Jungle 81

was safely up, the village men sat down in a circle on the ground and mumbled a quick prayer to their gods that this cow should be the tiger's last victim, that Seile should kill the tiger that had so often reduced the village cattle herd and made one of the men so much poorer in a single night. . . . They got up, said johar, johai\ and went back to the village. The rifle - the 30.06- and the revolver were loaded as usual. I settled myself with the rifle resting on one updrawn knee and the butt to my shoulder. A peculiar shooting position perhaps, but for me it was perfect. I could fire without any other movement whatever than curling my forefinger around the trigger, if a tiger came into my field of vision. I had ceased to use a fixed support in the form of a crossbar on the machan; at certain angles it impeded firing. The machan was in a tree that grew a little way down the ravine, so that I was sitting perhaps ten feet above the surface of the water but actually on a level with the ground. It was really vital not to move. Tree magpies sounded a warning up the mountain side, but I could hear no rustling. Nevertheless, the tiger might be on its way. In the trees around me and by the water hole I recognized a number of attractive small birds. A spectacle bird, also called “white eye," rather like a leaf warbler but with a white ring round both eyes, came and sat on the machan and looked at me, hopped to another branch and looked again. A white-throated, long-tailed flycatcher came and settled on a branch of a tree just in front of me. Suddenly it started displaying, spread out its tail, flapped its wings and ruffled up and down all over its body. I thought at first it was a lovesick hen, but I realized it was a cock displaying when I discovered a hen sitting a little aside, admiring the display. Another flycatcher, gleaming dark blue above and rust-red and white beneath, went down to the water to drink. Then it sat on a stone and preened, going over every single little feather on its body. This must have gone on for at least three quarters of an hour, and it was delightful to watch. Then I thought about my Mornar friends, the village chief and his cheery sons, the thickset, ugly little man, the beautiful young wife with her newborn baby, the toothless old woman with the kind eyes and the 6

82 Tiger in Sight

magnificent boy with his shoulder-length black hair and glorious brown skin. How fond I was of them all! Once, quite a long time ago, I had stayed in Mornar after an “empty” night on the machan till the following night. The squat little man had prepared a large green leaf-bowl of boiled rice for me, which I had lived on during the twenty-four hours I had on my hands. Not that the unsalted rice had very much taste, but it tasted of thoughtfulness and friendliness, and one can live on that for a very long time. I remember only that I was terribly thirsty, for it was an unbreakable rule with me not to drink water out in the villages. For us foreigners unboiled water often spells immediate dysentery or at the worst cholera, and I stuck firmly to that rule all the time I was in India. It was almost seven now, and the sky had begun to grow dark. The birds around me had fallen silent and all was peaceful. Then suddenly I heard soft, heavy tiger steps in the dry leaves on the farther side of the ravine. I saw a flicker of striped fur through the wall of leaves just a few yards away from me to the side. My heart thumped so loud that I was afraid he would hear it. The tiger - how powerful he was! - went straight down the ravine to the water hole, put his front paws in the water, took a firm grip on the cow’s body with his teeth and with incredible strength pulled it straight up - we had tied it fast to the root of a tree under the water. I was watching the tiger from behind and every muscle in his body was tense with effort. Then he turned sideways, presumably to get a better grip and slip away quickly with his prey to some other place to eat it. Now was the time. The shot rang out in the narrow ravine and was followed by a terrible roaring, which for the moment took my breath away. But I felt that it had taken as it should. Suddenly there was a terrible commotion just below me in the ravine. I started - what could it be - not more tigers surely? No, it was only some large frogs on their way to the water hole! A few minutes later the tiger suddenly lifted up his big heavy head - it looked almost as though he were going to get to his feet. I gave him a second shot immediately, and after that there was no further question. The great he-tiger lay on his side with his legs outstretched - dead.

The Old He-Tiger of the Peacock Jungle 83

It was still faintly light. A moment later it would not have been possible to fire without putting on the torch. It grew dark fast. The colors in front of me were fascinating. First the tiger with his yellow-and-black striped back, beyond him the white cow and beyond that the water hole, the dark green surface of which had not yet ceased to ripple after the tiger had pulled up the cow. I shouted toward the village and received a reply from the men who were already on their way, since they had heard the shot. It gave me a great sense of satisfaction to have felled this particular old cattle thief at Mornar, altogether different from my mixed feelings when I shot the golden tigers at Benor. Not for a moment did I regret that I had let the gaur bull go. With much effort the heavy tiger was pulled up from the revine and carried in triumph to the village. One man went first blowing a brass horn, and every blast on the horn was accompanied by wild whoops from all the men carrying the tiger. Soon we heard answering shouts from the village, and we were met on a small rice field by joyful drummers and singing girls. At the village we rested, while the men who were to carry the tiger farther went to get something to eat. Half an hour later we set off in the darkness toward the road on the other side of the river, where we had left the jeep. Eight men carried the tiger, and I lighted the way with my torch. Dead tired, happy and hungry I sank into a chair at home a few hours later. Kaile Ram had saved half a curried chicken for me with a little rice and several glasses of cold powdered milk. It was just what I wanted.

Mostly about Bears “Do you know how the Murias hunt bears?” asked Mr. Plumly, a trim, slight little Englishman who had driven over with his two hundred and eighty pound wife from Jagdalpur in an open jeep red with dust. They were a pleasant old couple, who had lived and worked in Bastar for more than forty years. “Well,” he went on, “they use enormous bowl-shaped baskets, which they weave of bamboo. They put the baskets on their heads and run backward and forward and around the always easily irritated black bears. When a bear sees a man with a basket, he attacks at once. The man flings himself down on the ground with the basket over him. The bear hurls itself angrily over the basket to try to get at its enemy, who immediately pushes a short spear up through the basket with all his might straight into the bear’s heart or stomach! I have seen basket hunting of bears many times, but that was years ago. It has its dangers - one hunter had half his arm torn off by a powerful he-bear which he thought was dead. “Bears are nasty-tempered and always quick to attack,” said Mr. Plumly. “If you meet a bear in the jungle and have no heavy firearm with you, you are really in trouble. In most cases the bear will rush at you. And it’s no use climbing a tree - the bear will simply climb after you. “I myself have seen a number of natives with old bear wounds, for example the whole of one cheek bitten off, the face completely deformed. The reason for any facial injury here in Bastar is usually Balo.” “But I know of times when the black bears are not at all dangerous,” said Mrs. Plumly, laughing.

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“Yes,” her husband put in, “when they have been eating mahua flowers! The forester at Narainpur isn’t the only one who likes to get drunk on mahua. When the mahua trees have finished flowering and all the ground underneath is covered with fallen flowers, you can see the quarrelsome, bad-tempered bears going around eating flower after flower with huge enjoyment. And the more he eats, the friendlier and mellower he gets. In the end, when he has eaten all the flowers, he staggers off, tipsy and happy, to find a hair of the dog under another mahua tree. In large quantities, the flowers are intoxicating to a bear. “When we first came out to Bastar,” Mr. Plumly went on, “what an untouched, virgin land it was! Such quantities of wild animals! There were masses of axis deer everywhere and even of barasinga, the big, highantlered deer. But there were masses of tigers and leopards, too. If you drove in a jeep - though the roads were not good for getting about on then - to Koseranda for example, twelve miles or so, you might see ten or twelve leopards on the way, assuming it was the right time of day. “When John, our middle boy, was only fourteen, he shot a tiger up in the mountains on a trip to Orcha. It was sitting like a big china cat at the side of the road as we drove along. We let the boy have my rifle and shoot, and he did a good job of it. We took the tiger to the nearest village, where there was great joy. All the pretty little Muria girls came running up to John and wanted to kiss him, they were so delighted at his tiger. He was very shy and took it very hard.” “Yes, but remember the Tostboy tiger’ though,” said his buxom wife, whose ample form was almost bursting out of her blue-flowered dress. “The tiger that only ate postmen! Yes, I suppose all your mail from Kondagaon here to Narainpur is still sent by postboy? The postboys are natives who trot along with the mailbags on a pole over their shoulder. There are little bells on the pole so that one can hear a long way off when the post is coming. It’s done like a relay race, with fresh postboys to take over the pole with the sacks at regular intervals and run the next stretch. “Some time ago there was a man-eating tiger that specialized in postboys. They always came at the same time, and you could hear them a long

86 Tiger in Sight

way off. All this tiger had to do was tp sit and wait by the road side, if he was hungry about post time. "Police and hunters tried to ambush the tiger; they tethered out buffaloes and cows by the roadside, but the tiger refused to be taken in. He was sold on postboys, and one after another of them got killed. In the end an Englishman had a bright idea. He tied bells to his rifle, hung a few light sacks at each end of it, laid it across his shoulder and ran along the road just at the right time and in just the same sort of jog trot as the postboys. The tiger, after sitting at the edge of the jungle listening for the postbells, rushed out for the kill but got killed himself by the brave Englishman. "That same year there was a bad cholera epidemic among the natives and we gave them their first injections. Using all our powers of persuasion we at last managed to get most of them together in a little Maria village near Kokameta. We had to hold the first man down almost by force; he was trembling and staring at the needle in absolute terror. As soon as my husband stuck the needle in, he fainted, and all the rest of the men ran out into the jungle shrieking. It was about twenty-four hours before they came back. Things went better later, and in time the natives came of their own accord to ask for suji. Those were wonderful days/' concluded Mrs. Plumly with a gentle smile. I listened, gazing in admiration at the English couple, particularly at Mrs. Plumly, a woman who had lived out her best years here in the jungle and had borne three sons, one of whom was later killed in the war. What an intensely dramatic life she must have behind her. What difficulties she must have met, but also what happiness and warm companionship she must have experienced with the fine people of these Indian tribes. Her kind, humorous eyes had much to tell. Arvind Shah came up to me and whispered something in my ear. I got up, asked them to excuse me and said I had to go in to Benor for something. Five minutes later I was in the jeep together with Arvind and a couple of Murias from Naitanar, driving out to a meeting with a "golden" tiger. During the night one of the two Muria men had lost his best cow, which

Mostly about Bears 87

in addition was just about to calve. The dead cow was lying quite close to the village. The last few miles into Naitanar we were weaving back and forth between tree trunks and potholes, over roots and rice. It was really a dreadful road for driving. The men in the village had already chopped down brushwood for a machan and had twisted rope of soft bark. We hurried to the spot where the cow had been killed. It was only a couple of hundred yards from the huts. There was blood on the ground and on the bushes. The tiger had dragged its prey farther away, and we followed his tracks for about a hundred yards. There was no difficulty in that; the stench gave the direction. The cow was lying in a little dried-out stream bed. The tiger had eaten quite a lot and then scratched up dry leaves over it to hide it from vultures and jungle crows. The terrain was full of thickets with little open glades and tall trees here and there. The only suitable tree was a good fifty yards from the cow, but a machan was quickly bound together and camouflaged all around with leafy branches, leaving only an opening in the direction of the cow, big enough for the rifle barrel with searchlight attached. The cow had to be moved forward a foot or two to give a clear view, and as usual was tied fast with ropes which were covered with earth and dried leaves. It is always important to get the tiger to feed on the spot. All looked well. The men left me. It was only four o'clock. From the village came the sound of loud talking and laughter. The cow was so close to the huts that the tiger would presumably come very late, probably after dark and perhaps not until the villagers were quiet and asleep, and that was seldom before ten or eleven in the evening. On the other hand, Benor tigers are unusually bold - or is it simply that they have more beauty than sense? Last time the first tiger arrived at a quarter past six in full daylight. In any case I was prepared to wait - till a quarter past six, till eleven or till next morning.

88 Tiger in Sight

Off came one of my green socks which I put over the searchlight on the rifle barrel instead; today I had the double-barreled rifle. I hunted out my dark green cap, which everyone teased me about, and pulled it down over my forehead so that only my nose and a little of my eyes could be seen, for fear my pale face would attract the tiger’s attention. And finally I took off my rings - they might scratch against the barrel when I held the rifle, which was now resting in firing position against my knee. No unnecessary movements when the tiger came! I dug a little snuff-colored book out of my pocket, Hindustani without a Master, and thought I would pass the time learning a little Hindi. '‘Trim my beard” - “Who is the murderer?” - “I won’t pay as much as that” “Bring my boots” - “London is bigger than Bombay!” I put the book back in my pocket again; I would rather listen to the birds, calling and whistling in the jungle. Far away I could hear a solitary peacock’s mournful cry. Now thunder began to rumble quite close at hand. But the black clouds were floating slowly across to the right of the sky. With luck the storm might pass by. I looked at the terrain and wondered which way the tiger would come. If he came. Probably from straight in front, across a small glade just on the other side of the stream. If it was dark I might not hear him until he got to his prey, digging his sharp teeth into the flesh, pulling and tearing, cracking and crushing bones. A black lizard with a dark red head ran onto a branch just in front of my face. He stiffened, looked me straight in the eyes and shot away like an arrow toward the crown of the tree. A brilliant white paradise flycatcher with navy blue head and long white tail feathers sweeping behind it came flying toward my tree, but it changed course and went billowing away out of my sight. Then I felt something looking at me sideways inside the machan. I slowly moved my gaze until it was met and held by two small black eyes staring icily out of a little red face. A long narrow tongue shot out, flickered, went in again, and the redheaded lizard vanished among the leaves. But I still seemed to see two wicked

Previous page : Muria boy with silver earrings. Five people under the same rain-hat! Three women and two small children. The cattle are driven home in streaming monsoon rain.

To be able to laugh again so soon. This little girl’s brother had been killed by a tiger the day before.

Right: The boys’ drums are made of burned clay. The skins are tuned with the aid of a lump of boiled rice. Below: When a wild animal has been shot, the whole animal is divided up equally between the hunters. The shares are laid out in green leaf-bowls.

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little black eyes there on the branch. No, it was merely specks in the bark. . . . The tiger! The tiger was there! He had come gliding between the bushes without a sound. I was almost blinded. The tiger shone like gold in the evening sun. I had released the safety catch on the 465 - I was waiting only for a clear view. Now - now for a single second - the shoulder was clear. The recoil knocked my shoulder back and the tiger rolled over on its back, roaring dully. The heavy body slipped down into the course of the stream behind a bush. I could only see the tail and the hind parts. I chanced another shot through the leaves. The body jerked a little. There was nothing to do but wait until I could be sure there was no more movement. Arvind Shah shouted from the village to ask whether they should come. “No, wait,” I shouted back. Now the storm came sweeping across the sky like a big black wave suddenly the deluge was over me and it turned almost dark in a moment. I flung on my raincoat and sou’wester; my trousers were soaked already. Then I put on my light and fired another shot where I thought the tiger’s shoulder was. I thought I heard a faint moan - then all was silent. The only sounds were the battering of the rain on the ground, raised voices from the village, a baby’s crying. After three quarters of an hour I shone the light on the tiger again. There was no question that it was dead. I shouted to Arvind Shah and a few minutes later he and a crowd of men were at my tree. I climbed down, Arvind shone the light, and with the rifle at my shoulder I went up to the tiger, while the villagers threw stones at it. The men dragged the soaked tiger out of the stream and carried it on tree trunks to the jeep. When everyone in the village had seen their fill of the cattle killer, we drove home. The already wretched path to the “big main road” was extremely dangerous after the rain. Arvind Shah was driving, and the jeep with its heavy load zigzagged between trees and potholes. In one place it nearly skidded into a deep hole where it would undoubtedly have overturned, but Arvind eased it past. It was a relief to get out onto the road at last. After going three or four miles we suddenly saw eyes glimmering far

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ahead of us in the beam of the headlights - but how many? Two, three four - no, five, six were moving simultaneously across the road like little rolling balls of fire! Was it axis deer? We accelerated as much as we could to get closer to the animals. They were not deer! But what was it? Now we were almost up to the eyes: It was a big black she-bear with two little ones on her back! She stopped perhaps sixty feet from the road and the hairy little black babies slid down. We watched them delightedly for a while, until all three of them padded off into the jungle. It was really one of the most enchanting sights I had seen in Bastar. When we got back to the bungalow a quarter of an hour later, the Plumlys were sitting drinking tea by the light of a paraffin lamp. We jumped out of the jeep and told them enthusiastically about our meeting with the bears. They all thought it was very amusing and interesting. They said it was only these particular black long-haired bears that can carry their young on their backs - the babies cling on to the long fur. “But how did you get on in Benor?” somebody asked. “Look in the jeep,” I answered, laughing.

The Tigress of Dota One evening, when we got home dusty and tired after a long day’s filming beside the Tendomilan River twelve miles inside the jungle from Narainpur, some men were standing in the dusk beside the bungalow waiting for us. A tiger had killed one of their cows. The machan was already built, they declared proudly. The tiger had killed this cow in broad daylight close to the village of Dota, which lies five miles away and a little way off the Sonpur road, and the cow was still lying out in an open field. Since it was full moon and so close to the village the tiger would probably come late, perhaps about midnight, thought the Dota men. It was seldom good for the machan to have been already built by men we did not know and with whom we had not previously worked, with insistence on all security precautions. It frequently happens that they talk loudly while they are building, or that they frighten away the tiger, which is probably not far from its prey, by cutting wood for the machan too close to the tree. Tigers are sensitive to changes in the terrain. The only thing that spoke in favor of our being successful this time, in spite of everything, was that the cow lay so close to the huts. The tiger had probably gone a good way off during the day, and would come back late. I did not know the habits of the Dota tigers at all - had merely heard that some men had been killed by tigers in these parts about a year ago. I decided to spend the night at Dota and Arvind Shah came with me. After searching a little we found the path leading off from the Sonpur

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road, left the jeep and went first abQut three quarters of a mile over dry, rustling leaves through sparse jungle, where the moon cast long shadows like black tiger’s stripes across the path. We reached the broad river bed. The whole landscape was so unreal in the moonlight, so frighteningly beautiful. The white sand, the naked men, the watercourse that glittered whenever a foot was lifted or set down, the jungle on either side of us. In any one of these dark shadows a tiger might be lying, following us with his eyes as we crossed the river. I felt a little uncomfortable. After a few hundred yards the jungle opened out into glades and small open spaces. We reached the “village,” a single hut and two open cattle sheds. There were supposed to be a few more huts scattered around. We went on across a rice field and reached the dead cow, which had been only too obviously tethered fast to a thick pole in the ground. What would the tiger say to that? The machan was dangerously low, nine feet off the ground perhaps, too open but altogether not too bad. There was nothing we could do to camouflage it now - the only thing was to sit motionless. I climbed up with my things and the men went back to the hut. It was nine o’clock. My tree stood at the tip of a spur of the forest. The nearest and best way for a tiger to get to its prey would be to go straight underneath me and out onto the open space. Behind my back the machan was completely open. If the tiger came he would go straight beneath me. I really had to keep still as a statue. I laid the revolver where I would be able to grab it quickly, if the tiger decided to jump a few feet up to me. Far away, from some village in the Sonpur direction, I could hear the beating of drums and singing from a ghotul. Each throb of the drums vibrated like a jubilant fanfare through the jungle with all its dark shadows, dead and living, this moonlit night. It was like a happy defiance of all lurking dangers, a single-voiced declaration for the forces of life by young boys and girls who know that security is only to be found if one is together, and why not then in joy and love. And the melodies and rhythms of the songs called and whispered to the jungle, the mountains, the rivers, that

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human life can indeed be full of joy, of the unrestrained, fresh joy of youth. . . . Rustle! To the left behind me. A large animal on its way! All was silent for a few minutes; then I heard hard claws rustle against dry leaves behind me. I sat absolutely still - without turning my head. Beneath me to the left came a large hyena - how could it suddenly go so quietly? It went straight out onto the open space and made a few turns around the dead cow. Then it went up cautiously and started eating the hind parts and stomach. It slabbered and crunched at the cow; it was eating frenziedly. Occasionally it looked up quickly in one direction or another but went on eating again at once. Now again a rustling behind me, and an animal came out onto the open space; one could hear it was not a tiger. The hyena pricked up its ears and then went straight toward the rustling, halfway toward the edge of the wood and me. This in itself showed that Animal Number Two could not be a tiger. The hyena went back quickly and went on eating and tearing at the cow. I peeped cautiously between the branches and saw a big black wild pig emerge twenty or twenty-five feet from my tree. Such a size it was - what a long body and enormous snout! And its hair! It was the first time I had seen an Indian wild pig at such close quarters. It went around for a bit on the open space in the moonlight and snorted through its long snout, which reached right down to the ground. The hyena merely glanced at it abstractedly now and then and went on eating as fast as it could. Hyenas are always in a hurry. It was making desperate efforts to tear off one of the cow’s hind legs. The wild pig moved off across the open space. It was not very long before something rustled behind me again, and from the edge of the wood appeared Wild Pig Number Two. It was just as big. For a moment it was right beneath me, I could have stretched down the arm that held the rifle and scratched it behind the ear. Number Two also went snorting like a great black shadow across the moonlit space and disappeared. The hyena went on eating. From behind the bushes to my left yet another beast emerged - I had not heard it come - it must have been

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standing there a long time watchingt A wild boar, half as tall again as the others, with long hair all along its back! The white tusk gleamed on one side in the moonlight. I had often longed to shoot just such a fellow as this but had never had the chance. The boar looked straight at the hyena, which also looked up but went on eating, though keeping its eyes on the boar. The boar went closer toward it and the hyena snarled with irritation. When the boar was only about fifteen yards from the dead cow he made a dash, a vicious attack at top speed on the hyena, which started but snarled fiercely and angrily back. The boar pulled up a few feet from the cow and swerved to the side, circled morosely around the cow at a rather wider range - and made off across the open space into the jungle on the other side. At the end of an hour the hyena seemed to have had enough. It stopped eating but had managed to bite free a lot of entrails, contained in a bag of membrane, and departed with head held high, bearing its stolen nose bag, which it might not have room for in its stomach just now but would a little later. He had helped himself to the tiger's killing in typical hyena fashion. It grew quiet and silent, and would have been just the moment for a tiger to come creeping into the moonlight shadows. I had heard several peacocks screeching deep in the jungle. It was miserably cold on the machan; the wind cut in from every direction. It was blowing hard across the open space, and I was so cold that my teeth chattered and I had to put my tongue between them to keep the sound from being audible. That would have been a ridiculous way to frighten tigers away! Later on in the night a solitary hyena went up to the cow, ate a little and went on. Another large wild pig, presumably the old boar, came and poked about at the remains, snuffled around a little and at length disappeared. Evidently no tiger was coming. The moon turned reddish yellow; it was nearing dawn. Just before six o'clock, before it was properly light, about thirty black vultures came suddenly sailing along like great eagles, as though at the wave of a magician's wand, all from the same direction up in the mountains.

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The dawn sky seemed to darken as all those black birds descended over my head, and settled in the tree tops around me with a thunderous commotion. Two thudded down in my own tree, eight in the tree beside, six in another - was there no end to them? And there they sat with “shoulders,” hunched glaring at the remains of the cow and croaking a little, while a few little jungle crows that had got carried along by the impetus flapped around from tree to tree. So far none of them had noticed me. It was only the stinking cow’s cadaver that interested the scavengers. Before long they were all hastily scared off — again there was commotion among the branches and heavy wings beat the air. Arvind Shah and the villagers were coming. Now I heard more about the tiger attack. When the cow was killed a woman was standing only sixty feet from the tiger and the cow. She shrieked as loud as she could and the tiger had run away. Several men came rushing up from a long way off. The tiger had returned to the dead cow, but the men had frightened it away, fetched rope and axes and started building the machan forthwith. While they were building it, they had caught sight of the tiger yet again. So the tiger had watched the machan being built! What a strange tiger it was, to be sure. After my night of ghotul singing, wild pigs, hyenas and vultures we packed up and left the little village on the plain with the “Blue Mountains” all around. Not one single night on a machan would I have missed! Eleven days later, just as I was taking the film out of my camera after the morning’s still photography, the two Dota men bobbed up again. Yesterday afternoon “their” tiger had killed a cow on the mountain side, eaten a little and dragged it away. “The tiger will probably come back again, yes, certainly,” said the men and asked me to go. I took Arvind with me again. It was unbearably hot walking along the path through the jungle up to Dota. It was April now. On the open rice fields the sun burned like a blowpipe on our heads and backs. Arvind suffered even more from the heat than I, a Northerner; his face was a greenish brown. This time the tiger had not struck close to the village. We had to go on

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nearly a mile into the jungle, through dangerously tall grass and tangled thickets, up toward a mountain slope covered with dense jungle. Suddenly one of the villagers grew uneasy and stopped. He looked terrified. “Here, just here, I saw my brother killed by a tiger last year, exactly here!” He didn't want to go on but he had no choice. He could neither stay there alone nor go back alone. We went on in silence. We soon found the place where the tiger had killed the cow and carefully followed the trail it had made by dragging it, which was hard to see. After sixty or seventy yards we found the cow. There was not much left of the hind parts and all the entrails and the whole of the stomach had been devoured. A choir of blowflies hummed round the remains and it stank properly. There was no very suitable machan tree; the only possibility was two thin tree trunks and a liana-like spray from a “string tree,” the tree from which the natives cut strips of bark to twist it into strong rope. Nevertheless the machan was built, twelve feet up, and solid. It was well camouflaged, particularly behind; the front was perhaps a little open. The angle of fire was fine and the cow lay a bare sixty feet away. At half past three the men left, promising to fetch me the next morning. It was good to be on the machan so early. I had a Thermos flask of coffee with me. I had had no time to have lunch at home, and I would get no dinner either, so I drank a cup of coffee as soon as I had loaded the rifle and revolver. I had a strong feeling inside me that the tiger would come and that he would come early - I hoped before dark, so that I should not need to use the flashlight. At about four a few birds started sounding warning notes perhaps two hundred yards below me. Was the tiger moving already? The birds came nearer but then moved away behind my back and grew gradually silent. The bird that whistles just like a human being started up; it was tempting to answer it. How it frightened me the first time I heard it whistling out in the jungle. I remember I turned cold as ice and I quite expected to see a whistling ghost materialize out of the darkness.

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Time passed. Peacocks screeched hoarsely and mournfully from various spots on the mountain side. Then suddenly I heard a tiger moving on soft paws some fifty yards ahead of me. It was coming calmly from one side behind a quantity of bushes and trees. Yellow, black and white it glimmered through the dense foliage. Then it turned off sharply toward its kill and me and stood still for a few moments. How thick the jungle seemed. I was determined to take the first opportunity of firing and not wait for a better one. If the tiger got close to the cow, it would probably see me on the all-too-low machan. I could see through a little hole in the foliage - now the tiger was standing directly opposite me, swinging its tail close to the ground. ... I had its head behind the hairline cross at an ideal distance, fifty yards round about. No, not a shot through the forehead; they are apt to ricochet. I waited - now the tiger turned its head sideways and its chest was exposed I placed the shot in its throat. The tiger jumped, rushed full speed past the machan, fell, kicked, gave a roar, was dead. . . . I felt glad. It was a difficult shot in that dense jungle. Now I had the whole night ahead of me before the men came. It was only half-past six. It grew dark quickly. I drank a little coffee again, felt happy about that particular tiger. An hour or so later another tiger roared far away on the mountain. It sounded impressive but also frighteningly eerie. I could hear a pack of langur monkeys giving warning over there, too. From the village side I could hear the men sitting on their field-watching platforms, shouting “Go away!” and beating empty tins and drums to frighten away wild pigs and deer from their rice fields. Now and then a peacock screeched hoarsely from the jungle. I lay on my back and gazed at the starry sky above me. There was Charles’s Wain upside down, the Southern Cross, Orion’s Belt. I felt calm and relaxed like a resting animal lying there listening to all the sounds from the jungle. A musk deer bayed - another answered farther away. 7

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A vampire came and fluttered just above my face, flew around a few X times excitedly and nervously and disappeared. Here I lay, and forty or fifty yards away lay the big tiger. The only difference between us was that it was tremendously dead and I was tremendously alive. I fell asleep but had terrible dreams - that I fell down from the machan just after firing a shot, down to the tiger, and that my father at home in Sweden opened a telegram and read aloud to my mother: “Last maneating tiger shot by Astrid”. Bathed in sweat, alone in the jungle I woke again after an hour or so, sat up terrified but found I was still alive and calmed down again. I sat still a long time there in the darkness listening to all the sounds and cries of the jungle and thinking to myself. It is true, I thought, that these tiger hunts are for me, to a certain extent, a flight from reality into a world of beauty, strength, excitement and even danger. But it is no flight from reality to come back from killing a man-eater and feel within one the relief and joy of the natives that a dreaded enemy is dead. That they will no longer have to go out and hunt for the remains of their nearest and dearest. That they will not have to go in fear every day for their dear ones. That feeling belongs to reality; it has to do with both the joy and the seriousness of life. Just imagine, there are people who don’t regard a man-eating tiger as an enemy at all but more as a means of increasing their income or as a useful scapegoat. Some Indian civil servants, for example, a policeman or a thasildar, a village bailiff, may guard their man-eaters quite jealously. I have seen frightening examples of this myself. There is a certain honor attached to killing a man-eating tiger, and if one is terribly anxious to be promoted or to have one’s salary raised, it is extremely useful for a thasildar to have a ravaging man-eating tiger up his sleeve to offer, when some superior official such as the District Commissioner comes to visit his village. On several occasions the police in Narainpur withheld from us official reports on humans who had been killed by tigers for reasons of this sort. Later we would hear from the natives of the villages that people had been killed regularly in some area without any help being sent at all.

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“Some minister will be coming in a month's time," the policeman might reply with an irritated smile. “But what about the people? Is the tiger to be left to take more lives?" “It’s a very important minister!" Sometimes the tiger is merely a scapegoat. Human sacrifices still go on, though naturally in the greatest secrecy, in Bastar. Formerly it was not unusual for a little child to be killed and the blood ceremonially sprinkled over a field to ensure a good crop. I came in contact with one such case during my time in Bastar. A forester told me the following story: There is a big dammed-up lake in the Paralkot direction. Every year as soon as the monsoon has got going in earnest, the dam always bursts at a certain point. A man has the task of repairing it every year. But no repairs hold against the masses of water. Now people had got it into their heads that a human sacrifice was necessary, if the dam was to hold. One morning two little children were playing down by a river, an eight-year-old girl and her younger brother. They were bathing and splashing about. A strange man came out of the jungle onto the river bank and called to the girl, who came up out of the water in surprise. The man seized her and disappeared into the jungle. The terrified little boy ran crying home to the village. His parents were not in the hut but out on a rice field. It was not until they came home in the afternoon that they heard from the boy what had happened to their daughter. I happened to meet a couple of policemen who were on their way to investigate the case. The dam had held for a whole month since the girl disappeared. The police, who had already received a report on her disappearance, had heard a number of rumors about a sacrifice and were now going to investigate; they suspected that the girl’s body had been built into the repaired dam. A week or so later I met one of the policemen. He seemed completely

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uninterested in the case and merely said that it was a tiger that had taken the girl. Later on I asked the forester whether he thought it was possible that a tiger had dressed itself up like a man and called to the girl and snatched her away. He got angry, of course, and said: “The boy was only five years old - he didn't see properly - there are no witnesses - it was a tiger that took his sister." Of course it is simpler and more natural to put in a report to a higher authority that a tiger was the cause of death than to get oneself involved in forbidden things like human sacrifice. Many human quarrels and murder dramas out in the jungle are given the same smooth and natural solution in the police reports: It was the tiger that killed. Only a month after we had left Bastar when the film work was over we had a letter telling us of a murder at Gahr Bengal. Two men whom we knew had had a violent quarrel, one of them had killed the other and, unusually enough with the Murias, had hidden his body out in the jungle. On the day following the murder all the village men, including the murderer, went out to search for the “tiger's victim," and actually found the body which had not been hidden sufficiently well. There was not a trace of a tiger anywhere and so the facts came to light. And here in the jungle the beautiful gold-gleaming tiger goes on its way, free and strong, strikes its prey, eats its fill, slakes its thirst at some water hole, lies down in a river and lets the cool water gently ripple round its body, enjoying life. Quite unaware of all the crimes that the restless, bustling, chattering, tree-cutting, earth-delving human beings load over onto its shoulders from their own sick consciences. My thoughts and meditations up there on the machan drove away all sense of time through the long hours of the night. Only when a little thin sickle of moon, lying on its back, rose up above me, did I think of the time. It was four o'clock already. At half past five it was slowly beginning to lighten. Soon I heard the men calling from the village side. It was good to see them again.

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I had killed a big tigress with a beautifully marked head and large white patches over its eyes. One of the men recognized her. “Three people this tigress killed last year around Dota here,” he said. “And I saw her kill my only brother. She did it in broad daylight - while we were herding buffaloes up on the mountain!”

A Murderess’ Death Two excited natives came running up, breathless. Only about an hour ago (they had started off immediately) a tiger had killed a herdsboy at their cattle camp in the jungle outside the village of Kandari, four and a half miles away! This boy and another boy had been herding a large herd of buffaloes and cows, and had been walking alone, one on either side of the herd. When Soko, the surviving boy, had heard the tiger roaring and his companion’s death cries and had seen the striped beast disappear into the tall grass, he had run, terrified and desperate, back to the camp which consisted of two huts and a few cattle sheds in the midst of the jungle. The men had set off at once for Narainpur to inform the police and ask us for help. Two people had now been killed by tigers near Kandari, one only a few weeks ago, and the two families of the Raut caste (herding caste) which were there at the camp were terrified of the man-eater and scarcely dared sleep at night in their open huts. They had employed the boy who had been killed; he was of the Halba caste and his home was in Kandari. His twin sister was at the camp, too. We collected our things - weapons, strong rope, rain clothes, drinking water — and drove in the jeep along the wretched Sonpur road which now in October, in the aftermath of the monsoon, was being repaired by halfnaked, necklace-adorned Maria men and women. After walking through the jungle a little way and wading across a river we came to the cattle camp, which was on a patch of high ground with a wide valley between it and a steep mountain slope. The men showed us the

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place, about three hundred yards from the huts, where the boy had been taken. His ax lay there and his “shoes.” Two little flat pieces of wood with rope across. There was a little blood about. It was very dangerous terrain round about with man-high grass. We tried to track and we went with guns loaded. It was difficult - we did not really know which marks were the tiger’s. We followed various trails and in one place saw blood on some blades of grass - farther on there was a pool of blood on the ground. The tiger had obviously laid the boy down there. We went on with extreme caution. As we saw no more traces of blood, we divided up and tried various paths up the mountain side. Suddenly a lot of buffaloes snorted and came rushing toward us. They had caught the scent of the tiger from the place of the tragedy. We went on slowly, ready to raise our guns at any moment. Then Hans whistled about fifty yards to my right and I made my way across. He had come straight onto the victim. There lay the little dead boy - one leg was as good as devoured, the scalp was torn, and the neck had been bitten. How small and thin he was! His long arms were the same thickness all the way up. His eyes were closed and the broad mouth was half-open as though he were asleep. So utterly helpless they are against the tigers. So utterly abandoned. “Simply the will of the gods.” I could only hope that he had died instantaneously. His brown rug, which he had probably been wearing over his shoulders, lay torn a few yards away. It was necessary to tie him down. Tremblingly and unwillingly one of the Raut men knotted a rope round the slender waist. I was left as guard up in the machan tree while two men went back to the camp to fetch rope and other equipment. Meantime, one of the natives cut down tall trees and leafy branches on the village side of the site. The tiger was undoubtedly somewhere near. He might be lying watching us. In order to frighten him away, two brave men made a little tour up the mountain side. When they came back they said they had heard the tiger roaring up in the mountain about two hundred yards away.

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I was to sit on the machan, it was decided. It took a long time before everything was ready. The Raut men were nervous and not handy at building. We discussed weapons. The other marksmen thought I ought to use the heavy double-barreled gun, the Holland and Holland, and not the SO. 06. I was doubtful but gave way and changed guns. Finally at half past three I was sitting up there and the men were on their way back, talking loudly to each other about the tiger. My companions thought the tiger would come late. I, on the other hand, did not. I had heard of a man-eater at Bada Dongar which came back to its victim at four o’clock in broad daylight. I settled myself comfortably, arranged the camouflage branches in front of me, got into firing position with my Holland and Holland resting against one knee. I could hear them talking in the village. It was not more than about forty or forty-five feet to the little dead boy. Which way would the tiger come? Probably from straight up the slope. A hundred yards away to the right I could hear birds giving warning cries. . . . Suddenly there was a slight rustling from that direction - and through a gap in the leaves I glimpsed a striped tiger’s back only forty yards away. . . . My heart started beating violently - I was trembling a little but tried to hold the rifle still. I couldn’t manage it at once - I swore silently at myself - but then I grew calm. The tiger approached slowly, stood still in the tall grass only about forty-five feet from the boy and gazed at him. The grass was badly trampled after all our efforts. He obviously decided not to go up from that side, turned his nose slowly up toward the mountain and circled in that direction behind dense bushes, and was now coming straight at me. I sat breathless. The tiger looked at the boy a few yards ahead of him and then straight up into my eyes. Through the leaves I saw a gleaming yellow tiger’s eye - I gazed back without blinking. The tiger dropped his gaze and took a few steps calmly toward the boy. He was still facing me. It was tempting to shoot him in the forehead, but that I was determined not to do - the shot might ricochet. I had to wait for a broadside. Now he was only about three feet from the boy. . . .

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"You shall not set your teeth in that boy again - you shall kill no more humans - but I am going to kill YOU." At last the tiger turned his head sideways, his outer forepaw moved straight toward the boy; he looked enormously big and heavy. He took a last step toward the dead boy, opened his jaws in a fierce hungry grin - his shoulder was clear. I had it in the sight and — fired! There was a roar — a heavy fall - I saw a jumble of pads. The tiger had fallen a little to the left, i couldn't see the whole of his body but he was certainly down. The shot must have been a good one. To make doubly sure I decided to give him another shot and moved a little to the side so as to be able to see. The tiger gathered himself up and dashed quick as lightning straight into the bushes on the left. The machan was covered in at the sides. In an effort to see I got up, saw the tiger, badly wounded in the front part, tearing away behind bushes and grass, then stop, stumble, fall over. ... I fired a shot at it freehand but must have missed - it got up and went on into the tall grass. . . . A wounded man-eater! Is there anything more dangerous? I had made it even more dangerous than it was when it snatched the boy. But it must surely be lying dead there in the tall grass, perhaps by those trees over there? That was where I thought I saw it last. ... I looked at my watch - only four o’clock! The men shouted. Fortunately they had not got back to the jeep yet and gone home. I shouted to them that the tiger had rushed away and told them in which direction it went. At last two men with guns and a native came. The older one was furious and said I had muffed it. I myself was convinced that the shot must have lodged well in the shoulder, but I was obviously wrong, since the tiger had got away. We went with our guns ready a little way in the direction in which the tiger had disappeared, we stoned the grass and let the terrified native climb up a tree, but we neither saw nor heard anything. The grass was shoulder-high and terribly dangerous; the tiger might be lying only a few feet away from us and we would not see it. In addition it was growing dark. . . .

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We had no choice but to go home to Narainpur and go on searching for the tiger next morning at dawn. It was a gloomy evening. Many different theories were discussed but the morning would provide the answer, we hoped. About five next morning Kaile Ram woke us, as always, with tea and a Good morning. We collected a policeman who was to go with us from Narainpur, and drove off. It had been raining all night and the road was slippery and difficult. Was the tiger really still alive? If so, what was going to happen today? I was afraid. We went through the jungle, waded across the rover and soon came to the Raut camp, where a couple of children, Soko and the dead boy’s sister, were running around collecting with their bare hands the droppings of some sixty buffaloes and cows for fuel. What a Herculean task! The men in the village had promised not to let their cattle out to graze but to keep them all in until we came. To go on foot through the tall grass trying to find a wounded tiger would have been gambling with death. Riding elephants would have been excellent here, but they no longer exist in Bastar. So our plan was to drive the herd of cattle through the grassland, starting where the tiger had disappeared after my shot. A single buffalo can be paralyzed with terror when face to face with a tiger and become an easy prey, but where there are a lot of buffaloes the herd instinct is aroused and as soon as they get the scent of tiger in their nostrils they go straight to the attack together. So the buffaloes were to serve as tracking dogs - only they could show where the tiger lay, dead or alive. But they were also to constitute a security belt, a strong front between hunters and hunted. The hunters could feel a bit safer with a herd of cattle in front of them in the tall grass. To my great disappointment the men asked me to stay behind at the huts, as they thought it was too dangerous if the tiger was still alive. Even a herd of buffaloes can get pretty wild faced by a tiger, they said. I went to see the women and children in the open huts. In spite of what

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had happened they were delightfully happy and friendly and offered me tea with fresh buffalo milk. It was marvelous. “Seile, why did you not speak to us yesterday evening? We just saw you go, and you looked sad although we smiled at you.” “I was sad because I had not killed your tiger. I couldn’t sleep last night. First the tiger kills the boy who was helping you; then you ask me to come and kill the tiger, and I don’t do it. I did not fulfill your trust. That was why I was sad.” Soko was squatting at my side; the dead boy’s sister smiled up at me and laid her little warm hand on my arm. Then came the usual questions from Indian women: “Have you children, Seile? How many? Girls or boys? How old? What are their names?” They smiled and nodded appreciatively when they learned that I had a girl named Pia and a chote babo, a little boy, Jens. I also had to tell them, to their intense interest, all about my two sisters, my brother and my parents, including names and nephews and nieces and everything. I sat on a bast mat with an enchanting little Raut baby on my lap and it was wonderful to be a woman among women. The oldest of them showed me how the Raut women make butter in a clay jar with the aid of a long stick which is split at the lower end. It runs through two loops around one of the props that hold up the grass roof of the hut. The woman pulled a rope, which had a wooden handle at either end, backward and forward around the stick so that the split-end went around and around in the milk. Sitting there talking and laughing, it was hard to remember that yesterday a tiger had killed one of the little boys in the camp - and that his body was still lying out in the jungle. Was it a typically feminine quality, or a natural necessity if one was to be able to exist at all in these parts, that life should simply go on almost as though nothing had happened - that one should be able to laugh again so soon - that one should forget - or does one ever forget? Is it rather a storing away of a memory, like a black pearl of grim experience in the long chain of human life? I was brought abruptly back to reality by a loud, deep bellowing from

108 Tiger in Sight

the herd of buffaloes over on the mountain slope where I had shot the tiger. This was the terrible reality: my companions were out after a wounded man-eater, which I had wounded. I was back in the world of men. I went out of the hut quietly to listen, and sat down on a fallen tree trunk. Could the tiger still be alive? A terrible roaring thundered out over the jungle and gave me my answer. It was followed immediately by one - two - three shots. After that I heard nothing but excited voices. I waited in breathless anxiety. The men had promised to shout “The tiger is dead” if they found it dead or killed it. But no shout came. I waited and waited. Had someone been hurt? What had happened? I shouted to them as loudly as I could, but there was no reply. Minute after minute went by, eternity after eternity, and the anxiety grew more and more intolerable. I sat there resting my forehead against my gun and the tears trickled down the barrel. Why did they not shout? Now I could hear them chopping, and that could only mean two things. They were cutting poles to carry either a tiger or a man. After a nightmare half-an-hour they shouted at last: “The tiger is dead!” I ran through the tall grass as fast as I could. What a relief to meet them all, to see their happy faces and the dead tiger! The men had driven the buffaloes to the place where I had last seen the tiger but they saw no sign there. They went on about half a mile through the tall grass beneath the mountain slope, for no one thought the tiger had gone up the mountain. They drove through the whole of the grassland below. Once or twice the buffaloes showed an interest in the direction of the slope, but they wanted to search the grass properly first. Then the whole herd wheeled - a moment that is particularly dangerous for the men on the flanks - and started up the mountain side. All the buffaloes were soon converging bellowing on a certain point, all noses pointing in one direction. And the mortally wounded tiger got up roaring just a few yards in front of them and of two of the men on the flank. Three shots had been fired; one had hit and killed the tiger once and for all. It was a tigress, not so big as I had thought, actually quite thin. She

A Murderess’ Death 109

looked as though she had some sickness which was perhaps the reason for her diet of human beings. It was a satisfactory feeling to see her felled - to know that she would not kill any more people. The jungle god had lost one more of his dogs. For the Murias the tiger is and remains the dog of the jungle gods, and always obeys his master. I had in fact already caused trouble to the Muria priests in Gahr Bengal. Their gods had pronounced that the man-eater I shot in the drive outside Gahr Bengal should kill forty-nine Murias. When I shot it, it was six humans short; in other words a debt was owed to the gods. It was not long before I was told of the priests’ dilemma. “Have you consulted the gods?” I asked. “Oh yes, many times,” they replied, “and their latest reply is that if you, Seile, pay a fine for these six men in the form of a sum of money to be used for the adornment of our temple, the gods say they will be satisfied.” So now a silver ornament valued at about three pounds adorns their holy clay hut, a penalty cheerfully paid by me and a cheap price for six human lives. When we got back to the cattle camp we had breakfast with our happy hosts. “Tonight, Seile, we shall sleep well,” said the old woman who had just finished churning her butter. It was not yet midday when we got home to Narainpur. The tiger was skinned, and we also dissected the body to see how the cartridges had taken. My shot had entered sideways from the front into the left shoulder and crushed the whole shoulder blade to pulp. A few small splinters had pierced the lung and spleen and caused a great deal of bleeding around the crushed foreleg. The channel was three fingers wide. But no large splinter had entered the actual body. Strangely enough, the second shot had entered only two inches away from mine, but in a different direction. So the day passed. The weather was overcast; we did all sorts of little jobs around the camp. At dusk the fox bats came as usual by the hundreds from their sleeping trees somewhere far away to the east. And out on the

110 Tiger in Sight

steps, in the light of the paraffin lamp, sat two little Muria girls threading necklaces of blue and red and white beads. They were singing softly to themselves, and every time our eyes met, they smiled. Wonderful smiles that shone. Behind us the dark fell swiftly over the great jungle with all its hungry inhabitants, its hunting beasts of prey, their silent steps, their sharp jaws. . . . The night was theirs.

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