Twenty years ago the wife and I woke up one morning and decided to blow the house deposit on a year living out of backpacks in India. We didn’t know much about the place but it turns out India is pretty much another planet. Many of the boundaries we in our country have erected to tidy our lives do not exist, or if they do, they are much more porous and ill defined. In India, everything can happen in the same place, all at once; death, life, wealth and poverty, they all dwell in the same heartbeat.
Take Tigers, they must have been an almighty pest when they roamed the forest in their tens of thousands, a proper scourge, but now they live in the margins, in the national parks or on what wilderness remains. They are still there, but now you have to go find them, they no longer come find you (unless you are terribly unlucky). All the same, a trip to a forest in Britain is an affair much less fraught with existential threats than a visit to Ranthambore National Park, Rajasthan. We went there with some trepidation, tigers are elusive creatures and the park was an expensive proposition, but we decided we would never forgive ourselves if we did not at least try. After all, how often do you find yourselves at the gates of a preserve for actual wild tigers?
After waking up before dawn and jostling good naturedly with some local gentlemen who were after buying tickets into the park for their clients, we set off on the back of a truck that had been rigged up like an open topped bus. Well, thinks I, no self respecting creature of the wild is going to miss this diesel engined behemoth grinding its way up the forest tracks, and so it was, we saw a few glimpses of distant wildlife fleeing the approach of our truck-bus as it rumbled along, but for the most part the forests of Ranthambore were quite devoid of wildlife.
The truck/bus came with a guide, he was part of the show and would point out dubious looking markings on the ground that he assured us were tiger sign. My wife asked him to identify a brightly covered avian, he confidently replied that “that, madam, is a bird!” Our vehicle bounced on, plunging deeper into the forest, we like a giddy church outing in a Stephen King novel.
I have no great beef with the wealthy. I hope to be one of them one day, if only to show them how it’s done properly. All the same, I am quite pleased to say that what happened next happened in the absence of any of the jeeps we had occasionally seen that morning, jeeps transporting seriously monied individuals, people with cameras and lenses the size of anti-aircraft missiles that could have picked out Neil Armstrong’s first foot print on the moon. It is comforting to know that sometimes fate throws down on the poor seats, those poor seats being sat atop a Tata truck as it blundered its way through Ranthambore National Park.
In all good horror movies, you get a taste of what’s coming, before you get what’s coming. As we trundled along we started to see some deer, these deer must have been made of the right stuff because they didn’t seem to care about our truck-bus. Perhaps here in the heart of the park they had other things to worry about. One of them, a traumatised looking fellow with a thousand yard stare, had great scars up one flank, the sort of scars that might have been made by the claws of a very large cat, something like…a…tiger.
There was this English lady. I am guessing she had scrimped and saved for years to afford a two week visit to Ranthambore to fulfil her dream of seeing a live tiger in the wild. It was not to be. Today was her last day and this her last ride on the bucking Tata truck of broken dreams, for her the bubble had burst, the magic was gone. Her dream holiday was ending today and all she had seen was dust and deer. Consequently, she had done nothing but bitch and moan about what a total rip the whole ‘safari’ was, a con, driving around the woods on the back of a truck day after day and seeing, at most, the distant ass of some fleeing antelope. She had given up pretending and was openly mocking the guide as he tried to suggest, yet again, that the alarm calls of the monkeys meant a tiger might be in the close-by.
Imagine then, our guide’s relief, his glee, the comprehensive and total reassertion of his authority as, not only a Ranthambore Guide, but a citizen of India, when a very impressive looking Nilgai antelope burst out of a thicket immediately beside our stationary truck closely pursued by a gigantic tiger with its predator settings dialed all the way to eleven.
The collective and multi-faith exclamations of extreme surprise from us in the truck-bus must have been audible in Delhi.
We turned as a unit to see this bloody great tiger as it galloped by, hot on the heels of this amazing looking antelope that was going like a steam train in hot pursuit of life. A tiger weighs anywhere from 90-300kg, this one was the size of a tyranosaur and, in the eye of my memory, flashed fire from its eyes as they bored in on its prey. The English woman, who I had mentally murdered several times already that morning, squealed with awe and delight, and was instantly transformed from a bitter cynic into a enraptured child. The tiger was going like Hussein Bolt, and we could tell he fancied his chances. He was focused like a laser beam on the hind quarters of the Nilgai antelope. The antelope was doing its level best to get the hell out of Dodge. It, too, fancied its chances. Tigers are ambush predators, and are good for a sprint, but soon run out of puff. The duo, locked in their life or death struggle, crashed into the bushes on the other side of the road and were gone. All that remained were the cries of the monkeys.
Everyone in the truck was astonished. I don’t suppose the whole thing had lasted more than a few seconds, dinner and diner were moving at quite a clip. Now it was over a combination of adrenalin and shock was setting in. The realisation that we had just won the park lottery when it came to tiger encounters, seeing one of the great cats at work, hunting, we were one big smile. There was even that little frisson of fear when we considered that, for just a second, a live and hungry tiger had been only ten feet away from us and all that had been between him and us eight or ten enraptured tourists was warm dry air. Even the guide and the driver looked pleased as punch, such a close encounter was rare even for them, and they worked the park daily.
Well, that was that. The truck did a one-eighty and we began our trundle home. The English lady’s sense of disappointment had been completely routed by the few seconds of close encounter, and we were a truck load of happiness. One of those jeeps bristling with cameras and vacationing thoracic surgeons came towards us, too late for the show. Disappointed, it made a quick turn and shot off, with our truck following at an amble. We were all chattering like a flock of sparrows when the truck lurched to a halt. The jeep full of cameras was blocking the road. Lenses the width of dinner plates searched the forest around us.
The monkeys, high in the trees, were hooting their alarm calls.
Lightning doesn’t strike twice? Imagine out surprise, then, when out from a knot of woodland shot the Nilgai antelope, serenaded by the hoots and howls of a monkey’s choir, and with a tiger noticeably closer to its rump than the last time we had seen the two together. Again the antelope ran across the forest track, aiming to disappear once more into the thick woodland beyond, but the tiger had other ideas and just as the pair crossed the road he had gained enough to venture a lunge. The tiger surged forward, a glowing meteor of fang and fury, hurling his awesome mass at the ass-end of the antelope, his forelimbs spread around its rear-quarters where the great span of his fearsome claws dug deep into the antelope’s rump.
The bus-truck was agape, not a single jaw clenched. Not a single camera snapped. The tiger, desperately tired after a long pursuit hauled on the antelope’s rear. The Nilgai antelope is a statuesque creature, the size of a horse, but the hundreds of kilograms of knackered tiger hanging off its backside was acting like an anchor on all its hopes of life. The tiger hung on as the Nilgai staggered forward, the big cat pulling its weight up on to its prey’s rear until the Nilgai’s hind quarters sagged. The tiger clawed its way up the torso of the antelope, the panic in the Nilgai’s eyes giving way to resignation as the weight of the nearly spent cat finally brought the antelope to it’s knees. The tiger manoeuvred forward some more, keeping his weight on the Nilgai until he was in a position to clasp his jaws around the animal’s throat. The Nilgai kicked and thrashed in protest, but his end was upon him and, in moments, the Nilgai was still. The tiger released his grip on the antelope’s windpipe and lay panting beside his day’s work, exhausted.
More jeeps arrived, each festooned with enough cameras to equip a Nikon store, and enough holidaying MDs to staff a hospital. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of camera bodies and lenses began to cluster on our grid reference. The monkeys had quietened somewhat, and of the humans those who spoke did so in a whisper. The loudest sound in the jungle was the click of camera shutters. Ordinarily, the tiger would have dragged the now defunct Nilgai off into the woods for some quality time in a more discrete environment. Luckily for us, this tiger had been comprehensively worn out by the rigours of the chase. Our guide, who had been as engulfed in the spectacle as the rest of us, reminded us all to be as quite as possible. A tiger with a fresh kill is an animal sure to respond with heroic levels of violence to anything it perceives as a threat to its lunch. The driver was all a quiver, ready to fling the vehicle into reverse if the tiger hurled itself at us. Later, in Jim Corbet National Park, we spoke with some local lads who were still coming down from a hair raising tiger experience. Part of a scientific expedition, they had been out monitoring and filming tigers when one took exception to them and hurled itself onto the hood of their vehicle, it had tried to get through the windscreen by smashing its paws upon it. The two lads had, at their own admission, screamed their heads off, though the one with the camera had managed to hit the record button. They showed us the footage, about forty seconds of film of the back of the camera’s lens cap. Disappointing, though the audio was impressive.
The silence in the forest was so complete I imagined I could hear the hot breath of the tiger from the across the thirty or so feet of jungle floor that separated us. Abby, my wife, took a photo using the pathetic little compact camera we had. It turned out to be the last exposure on the 36 frame reel and the camera dutifully began to rewind the spool of film. Whoever programmed that camera did so from an office chair in a building somewhere amidst the vast sprawl of Metropolitan Tokyo. I dare say they thought about it quite a bit, but I guarantee one thing they never considered was what would happen if the camera began to automatically rewind a 36 shot spool of Fuji film within ten yards of a victorious tiger next to his kill.
In the silence of the forest clearing, the sound of that little camera rewinding its spool of Fuji film was like a cheese grater on a chalk board. Every head on every vehicle turned towards my wife who held out her camera in horror as it whirled away. Our guide thrashed his hands about in panic, motioning for her to smash the camera to bits with a mallet, or some such thing, anything to make it quiet. Abby stuck it in her armpit which had no discernible impact on the surprisingly large amount of noise the camera was emitting. I’m pretty sure the English lady said ‘oh my god, shut the hell up,’ which was ironic, as that was the very phrase I had been beaming at her for most of the trip. Thirty feet away the hundreds of kilograms of feline hostility, now somewhat recovered from its hunt, turned its mighty befanged head towards Abby, whose armpit was still whirring away, licked its chops with a tongue the size of a beach towel, and bared his maw in what I now like to think of as a smile, though only from the comfort of my sofa, thousands of miles from the nearest wild tiger. Whatever it was, it involved a lot of teeth. We all tensed, the driver’s foot hovered over the throttle, the tiger shifted slightly. Alas, the tiger didn’t hurl itself at us, we never made the headlines, were never known as ‘those tourists, you know the ones the tiger got.’ The tiger seemed accustomed to the sound of camera motors, at least he didn’t attempt to erase us via tooth and claw. Probably, the tiger was just too tired.
Eventually we left the tiger. The huge beast was still panting besides the kill and we had overstayed in the park, so it was time to go, we left the tiger with a great deal of reluctance, though I’m not sure the tiger will ever leave us.
