The Wildest Sport of All

by Prakash Singh

  I felt a sharp twinge of conscience at risking the lives of the helpless boys in that grass from which our elephants had run in terror of the wounded tiger. I was about to protest, when the leader of the youths spoke up, asking if we would really give them meat. Durbar Sahib reassured them and they got ready to go down into the watercourse and beat the dense area which he now pointed out to them. While they formed a line at the edge of the jungle, we stationed our elephants along the higher level of the bank and looked to our guns. I could still not accept the risk those boys were unwittingly running and it seemed bitterly unfair.

  As if in answer to my silent misgivings, Durbar Sahib said, ‘I smelt a rotting carcass close to where we last saw the tiger. Three days have passed since it was wounded and lost and I am sure that by now it is well and truly dead.’

  ‘We’ll soon know,’ my brother replied grimly.

  How could Durbar Sahib be so sure? I marvelled at his confidence in sending in those boys. The faint sounds of their shouts and handclaps and the noise they made as they laid about with their sticks beating the grass now came towards us. My heart skipped a beat as the distinct sounds suddenly fell in volume and then abruptly stopped. The eerie silence seemed to scream accusingly at us. I looked at Durbar Sahib but he assiduously stared ahead. He can’t face me, I thought. Then pandemonium broke loose in the grass.

  The youthful leader came running out of the jungle, his clothes ragged from the bushes he had run pell-mell through before reaching us. Hot on his heels came the rest of his motley troop. ‘Sahib! Sahib!’ he gasped at us through bloodless lips. By then the other boys had scrambled up the bank, and in various stages of disarray, they collapsed about their shivering, stuttering leader, as they sought to regain their breaths.

  ‘Yellow and black!’ their leader sobbed, incoherent with terror. I leaned over the howdah rails in order to hear him better. ‘There in the grass over there, yellow and black, there in the grass,’ he finally cried, pointing and looking back, eyes wide with fear, towards the tall elephant grass, out of which they had so hurriedly scampered.

  ‘What happened? What is the matter?’ Durbar Sahib firmly asked.

  ‘Yellow and black and it will kill me, Sahib, it is a great yellow and black cat and it will kill me,’ the frightened lad cried and his breath whistled involuntarily as he glanced back in alarm at the dense grass.

  Durbar Sahib broke out laughing and said, ‘Just as I thought. He came across the tiger lying dead in the grass but terror has made him senseless.’ A feeling of great relief washed over me.

  When the boys had regained their composure, Durbar Sahib again addressed their leader. He explained the matter frankly to them and said, ‘It is quite safe to go in now. The wounded tiger is dead, and has been so for the past two days. I smelt it as soon as we reached here and now you have seen for yourselves that it is lying there quite dead.’

  The boy looked at him in shocked disbelief. ‘It was lying in one place when you went near, wasn’t it?’ Durbar Sahib asked him. The boy broke out again into a babble of phrases.

  ‘You better believe me when I say that it is dead,’ Durbar Sahib said, ‘otherwise the tiger would have charged out and killed you before your eyes had even fallen on it. Now go into the grass again and instead of running away like a group of girls rope the dead tiger and bring it out to us.’

  The leader sank down on the ground, fearfully shaking his head, entirely unable to meet the challenge. The unexpected sight of the tiger from such close quarters had completely unnerved him. But his companions, who had rushed out blindly behind him, were now eager to go into the grass and bring out the dead tiger.

  As we watched, they went in and soon a great shout of relief rose up from the grass. They called out exultantly that the tiger was really dead. When brought out, I saw that it measured over nine feet in length and, like all grassland tigers, was massively built. The Paradox bullet, as surmised by Durbar Sahib, had drilled through its upper mid-section having missed the shoulder and so the heart, but had irreparably damaged the liver and other vital organs in the region. Death had been postponed by a few hours. Yet it had gloriously fought off all our attempts to locate it as long as breathe flowed through its body. This tiger had shown much courage and pluck, but so had the man who hunted it down.

  1 Dhakion is an outpost of our zamindari (land revenue) administration that ceased to exist with the abolition of the revenue collection system.

  Close upon the recent fact of increased trade in tiger parts to China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Philippines, Java, Sumatra and even Tibet brought to public notice by the newspapers, an incident occurred that echoed but for a day in that vociferous corridor of the country’s true power – the Lower House of Parliament. A pair of tiger cubs were discovered dead in a private retreat bordering one of the more famous terai game sanctuaries. Enquiries revealed some startling findings.

  These tiger cubs had wandered in from the sanctuary and had been discovered by the caretaking staff of the place. As they were badly malnourished and in need of urgent care, the chaps took them in and began to try and feed them. They did revive, but only for a

  few days.

  Soon they began to reject the cattle milk and other contrived foods being given to them and fell sick once again, succumbing to their ill-health in another couple of days. Not cared for by the foresters, they had reached this pass. If the staff in charge of the sanctuary had been efficient enough in the first place, the mother-tigress would have been there with her cubs and not, in all probability, killed and parcelled out by organized criminals. Despite being cared for by the staff of the retreat who might indeed have saved them if only they knew how, both cubs died. There really is no substitute for a mother.

  Her udders filled with milk, a tigress exhibits immense patience in feeding her cubs, who become unusually demanding and frolicsome, clinging to and clawing the tigress until she rises and walks away, swinging herself free.

  A pure feline grace, lethal and deadly, is yet another attribute of the tigress in milk. A country gentleman as old as my father once told me about seeing an unwary tigress whose cubs were scrambling around and intermittently suckling on her. He had come upon her deep in the Doon forests, in the Himalaya’s lower reaches. Motoring to a place where he had arranged to bag a tiger, he fondly recalled the twists and turns of the road up the line of mountain and forest and the flat, broken shelves of level jungle that straggled down the rock–strewn scree slopes to a different world – the realm of a mountain river.

  He remembered that it was in the clearing of the higher jungle further up the river that his car had occasion to stop. A little below, and ahead of them, a tigress heavy in milk, was settling down to feed her two cubs. She saw the car at once. A total physical and emotional change came over the tigress. Her body with its filled, swinging udders expanded in length as she rose up, lunging with her suddenly extended, slashing foreleg, noiseless and deadly – paralyzing the occupants of the car even in their comparative safety. Having escaped being mauled, or worse, they moved away quickly in their car, in true sporting spirit.

  My relative went on to complete his journey and successfully bag the tiger his men had arranged the shikar for, but that tigress with udders so full they touched the ground suddenly transformed into the very picture of death – this eye-catching sight, cubs and all, was what had stuck in his memory, defying senility.

  I don’t doubt the elderly gentleman’s story in the least, for men of his ilk and generation were not prone to exaggerate. Chaudhry Lal Navratan Singh of Doonga – Sacchu’s father and also of Kunwar Ravindra Singh’s, some of whose paintings appear in this book – was an outdoorsman of vast experience. Sadly he spent the last few years of his life with a very pronounced limp from a fractured leg from his younger days. An elephant had stepped on the limb when, during a duck shoot, he had climbed off its back to help extricate it from the bog it had got stuck fast in.

  But to get back to the milk of the tigress, my own experience of
it is very sketchy and perhaps a bit sad too.

  Sitting by the campfire one cold morning in our zamindari in the Himalayan Terai–Bhabhar so very long ago, my thoughts were suddenly interrupted. One of our shikar companions called Matin Khan, a friend from a neighbouring village in Moradabad, came briskly up to the fire, obviously in high spirits. He told me that he had gone out for a shoot before dawn and at first light had shot and killed a tigress. He had found her udders spurting with milk. Under the grip of the illusion bred by legends of the tigress’ milk, he had collected some of it in an empty cartridge case and drunk it. I somehow could not share his elation and feel sombre to this day about that incident.

  Far nobler pens than mine have written about tiger hunting. I may have oversimplified my stories in parts for the obvious reason that it is better to tell a straight tale rather than a grandiose one. I do not know whether I have succeeded in conveying a measure of the thrill I felt in living through the shikar camps that this account has dealt with. I do hope, though, you agree with me, after having leafed through this book, that tiger hunting may very well be the wildest sport of all.

  All those who have written about shikar owe an irredeemable debt to Colonel Jim Corbett. I feel glad, even though somewhat awed, at the fact that the jungles from which he gained his insights into shooting and life are the same stately, often forlorn and agonizingly beautiful forests that I have presumed to tell you so casually about. Will you blame me then for having omitted matters of experience and detail that may already be known only too well to you? In many books on hunting, scenery and graphic details of events as they occurred have been liberally pirated from Corbett’s accounts. Often many of their writers have never really hunted in the terai of the Himalayas and the Kumaon, but have simply read about them and are inventive enough to juxtapose their own lucky though ordinary experiences with Corbett’s imagination. I have limited myself to narrating incidents to do with tigers only, further limiting myself to recounting the action, without any attempt at humour or false airs.

  Have you ever watched them, the tigresses and tigers? You must. In the foreword to these stories I mentioned the role the game wardens and the chief of wildlife play in this transitional period when game is being preserved and when it indeed must be. To overcome the shortages brought about by indiscriminate shooting and shikar, the game department (the wildlife and forest departments jointly fulfilled this role earlier) must indeed do so. Real and true justice applies as much to mute animals as it does to generations of human beings that are yet to appear on the face of the world. These generations of wild or civilized life to come do deserve to have their interests protected, even in absentia. Having had the enviable experience of witnessing wildlife in its natural habitat, I assure you that the protection of forests and their inhabitants is a noble cause, well embarked upon. Other than safeguarding our right, natural inheritance, it even lights a spark of hope in the empty lives of all erstwhile shikaris who have lost their ‘happy hunting grounds’ as they knew it once, only to regain the concept in a far headier manner. You have only to visit a modern-day game preserve, or a Project Tiger sanctuary, to realize what I mean.

  It was not a lust to kill for killing’s sake that motivated me, or my companions, to undertake such shikar expeditions, of which these stories are an outcome. Like the youthful and little known poet, J.G. Magee, has so aptly said somewhere, it was ‘…a lonely impulse of delight’ that led us to plan hunts and live the frugal camp life. If these stories have engrossed you for a few moments, then those indelible years of trial and terror, thrills, blood and glory have, to my mind, been vindicated.

  The genealogical ancestors of carnivores and herbivores were considerably different in size and shape from the common as also rare beasts of the reserved forests and strictly controlled shooting blocks of today. Their mammoth proportions are now legendary and even the agile, incredibly swift lion, or the immensely powerful tiger, cannot hold a candle to their predecessors. In the course of the world’s botanical, ecological, economic and social evolution, animals had more of a positive role to play than they are credited with today, surprisingly even by environmental experts. That privilege is simply attributed to god and creation by the lay person or to the various evolutionary theories by those with a more scientific bent of mind. The wildest sport of all that I had the good fortune to experience has given me a totally different sort of insight into this contention about our world’s evolution and its logical, socio-economic culmination.

  Admittedly, the world’s physical features as we see it today have come about through a slow, extremely chaotic, and often unpredictably violent process. But the flora and fauna that eventually followed this ageing of the nascent earth are what prepared the ground for the appearance of human beings and for the resulting historical process in which they took root into that guileless world. Immense, unbroken continents of happy hunting grounds bred gargantuan herbivores, and equally ferocious and capable carnivores. The first lions, especially the ones that spearheaded the migration of all lions from central Europe and the Caucasian mountains south-westwards to France, south to Africa and the Middle East and further eastwards through the Bolan pass into India, were even larger than the Serbian tiger and very different from the few remaining prides of lions in African and Indian forest sanctuaries.

  Their sizes diminished, even if their ferocity did not, with the weak and deficient meat they ingested from the herbivores that thrived on the poorer soils of the regions that the lions had migrated to. This makes me suspect that the lions were at an incomplete stage, and if unhindered, those animals would have recovered some of their former size or might have become formidable in some other, completely new, way. We will never know. For man supplied the destructive process to their incomplete evolution by rooting out the areas of their habitat and their natural food from the face of the earth. Other than incalculably damaging the lion’s course of development, this man-made retrogressive process has also caused another kind of chaos that is so subtly linked, in my mind, to the damage done to the evolutionary process of animals.

  Commercial safaris, armchair shikaris, the fabulous prices of trophies and the false glory felt by those who possess them are all detrimental trends that the wildest sport of all brought about, only to make matters worse, despite government strictures and preservation projects – for big, very big, money is involved in all this. And the love of money, as is well known, is the root of all evil. Forest officials, in charge of re-establishing tiger sanctuaries, invariably turn a blind eye to the ‘sahib’ and his well-stocked camp or the minister’s son-in-law and nephew. Moreover tigers do not find their natural prey – the stag and the spotted deer, usually. Eucalyptus trees, liberally patronized by an unsympathetic forestation policy, quick and easy to grow as well as impressively wild to look at, render the forest floor largely infertile, where herbivores that survive poachers simply cannot graze, thus adversely affecting the tiger.

  Having successfully survived thrilling, spine-chilling moments while engaged in the wildest sport of all, I for one, have great hopes in the power of life to regenerate and flourish. The advent of human beings might have put the cart before the horse, but this terrible mistake I feel will be righted in time. For concealed in the patches of scrub and pine, amidst other trees still spared from indiscriminate felling, the king of the jungle lurks, waiting and watching for the Great Shepherd’s inexorable design to come true. As do the bull, buffalo, bison and its wild genetic strains that survive in the domesticated herds. The great elephants range over miles of entangled swamps, which no tractor can reach, regardless of human beings, who will eventually have to give way to them. The human kind’s efforts might ultimately tame rivers and their power, with the help of the topographical features surrounding their wilful, impetuous flow towards the vast oceans. Yet, no matter how much like sewage drains these playgrounds of fish, reptiles and birds become, animal life exists and does survive, however pained and discomfited it may be.

  The re
al enemy of wildlife is not the hunter but the deterioration of habitat. The natural forests around Kotdwar in Uttarakhand, since time immemorial, had had dense, starkly beautiful covers of sal, teeming with herbivorous and carnivorous wildlife. Today the forests have all but vanished. Hundreds of hectares of denuded sweeps of land have been replanted by the state forest department, not with sal, but by the tall hardy eucalyptus under which, as scientifically proved, not even the grass will grow and amongst whose branches, as local legends derisively have it, not even a bird sits! Sal trees, highly susceptible to the ‘die-back’ disease, suffer high mortality rates and consequently take as long as forty years to establish themselves. Hence the forest department’s neglect of their regeneration and the wholesale adoption of eucalyptus from whose valuable wood large revenues can be safely gleaned. This financial benefit sought by the forest department is going to prove terribly short-term and even crippling to the said department’s very existence and functions in the long run.

  In the context of the great varieties and forms of wildlife that the sal forests sustained, was it not obligatory for the forest department to devote all its time and energies in seeking to overcome the fatal disease the destroyed the tree? Should it not continue efforts to replant the empty spaces with sal, and only sal, not the ecologically unsuitable eucalyptus? In this context, it is pertinent to point out another lesser known fact: the presentation of smaller wild animals such as deer and the antelope needs to be highlighted. It is of great significance to replant sal. Seeds of the sal do not usually germinate on the forest floor as long as they have not been eaten by the spotted deer and passed out by their digestive systems!

  Conservationists and government agencies in charge of preserving wildlife would do well to keep this fact in mind, especially when formulating plans and taking important and relevant decisions. There are no short cuts or ulterior motives in the honest implementation of policies aimed at the betterment of the forests and wildlife. The overdevelopment and overexploitation of the rivers and the fouling of the air all have to be checked. It is only by giving nature its rightful place that the world, life in it may be ensured of continuity.