Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  Uh-oh, Jerry whistled.

  The driver asked if he should turn around.

  I don’t know, she said. Will we see him again? Will we see him tomorrow?

  The driver shrugged.

  Did you give him something, Brian, she said. How much—I wonder if we ought to turn back.

  I had given him five hundred rupees as he got out of the jeep. She looked back, but the village was no longer visible in the haze of dust behind us.

  All right, she said. I suppose that will be—unless we do see him tomorrow—we can say that is all right.

  When we got back to the eco-lodge waiters in collarless shirts and black trousers brought out tightly wrapped cool washcloths for our faces and glasses of cucumber water for us to drink. We sat in the shade of the long portico outside the dining room and drank cold sweet water and cleaned the dust from our faces and hands. Through the glass wall of the dining room, we could see waiters setting out white napkins beside each china plate. The napkins were folded like fantails. The desk manager peeked out at us from his small office room. Vish, Verbena called, Vish, did you have any luck with the train? Vish had not had any luck with the train. Oh too bad, Vish, Verbena said, that really is too bad, but it’s all right, Vish, thank you for trying.

  We’ll get stuck with some loudmouth, then, Jerry said, not unhappily.

  Verbena was looking at BBC News headlines on her phone, and somehow this led, with the sense of a boundary being approached, to their asking what I thought of the new American president.

  I said I thought America had lost its mind.

  I don’t like him, Jerry said carefully, but I do understand the people who voted for him. I do understand that grievance. The way working people have been left behind. He’s a poor messenger, in my opinion, but his supporters, they have a point.

  He seems, himself, quite unstable, Verbena said. But if you could imagine a better person with the same message, a smarter person, there is something really quite appealing about that. I don’t like Trump, I find him frightening. But there is a feeling that the same ways of doing things will no longer work. It isn’t only in America. I was surprised when Brexit passed in the U.K. But I do have to admit I was also pleased, because I do, she said, her voice growing colder now, yes I do believe Europe has failed.

  3

  I liked watching the forest guide go about his work of tracking tigers. He was small and wore a neat mustache and a dark green uniform and he coiled a loose bright houndstooth scarf around his neck and went barefoot. When the jeep was moving fast, he covered his mouth with the scarf to keep out dust. When the jeep stopped to listen for alarm calls, he pulled himself up out of the passenger seat and sat on the side railing with one knee tucked up and a bare foot resting on the door. Occasionally he murmured in Hindi to the driver. The forest was loud with the alien-sonar sounds of jungle birdcalls. The guide listened intently but without urgency. For the tourists packed into the jeeps—the Europeans and Americans in their new safari clothes, the Delhiites in soccer jerseys and Spider-Man T-shirts—seeing a tiger now, this afternoon, might be the difference between a successful vacation and the waste of a small fortune. For the guide, though, the jungle was a crossword he attempted to solve every day. When he spoke in English about tigers, it was always in the singular: the tiger, this tiger, he. He knew that he would find this tiger sometimes, and that much of the time, even if he did everything right, this tiger would not appear.

  Now he raised his arm and waved the driver forward with two fingers. We came to a place where a few thin men in long button-down shirts were burning dead leaves on the side of the road. Villagers, the guide said. Forest department have them to do this. The leaves burned in long low piles. The warm air smelled of smoke. The guide slouched on the side rail of the jeep with his chin buried in his scarf and quizzed the villagers about tigers. The villagers held out their arms and chopped the air to indicate direction. The tiger was not here. They had heard alarm calls. The tiger was there.

  We saw the jeeps before we saw the tiger. Tourists were standing on their seats craning forward with their phones aimed at something in the trees. Photographers crouched over cameras whose huge lenses, wrapped in camouflage or dusty green covers, were propped on the vehicles’ crossbars. The jeeps’ drivers kept switching on their engines to jockey for position and when this happened there was a great deal of gesturing and shouting among the guides. Clouds of dust came up when the jeeps moved. Finally I saw the tiger. It was a male, a small one, resting in a pile of fallen leaves under a tree.

  The tiger got up and walked toward the dirt road. He came very close to the jeeps. The tourists were excited and began to take pictures faster.

  I looked at the guides. None of them seemed alarmed. Tigers in the parks did sometimes kill people, I knew, forest policy and habitat destruction having created a scenario in which conservation itself might inadvertently produce man-eaters. The jungle corridors linking the reserves had been destroyed; many parks had become islands where highly concentrated tiger populations competed for limited territory and prey. When tigers did attack humans, however, it was not tourists in jeeps who were at risk but the villagers whose lives overlapped the boundaries of the reserves. Only a few weeks earlier, in the north, a tiger designated T-28 had dragged a village woman into the forest near Jim Corbett National Park, devoured her, and then killed her father-in-law when he tried to come to her aid. In early 2014, I had read, a tiger at the same park, Corbett, had killed and eaten nine or ten people over several weeks (nine certainly; the tenth might have been killed by a different tiger). The killings created such a panic that a group of villagers stormed a national forestry office. Man-eater attacks often served as flash points for conflict between forest dwellers, conservationists, and government officials. Villagers thought conservationists prioritized tigers over human lives. Conservationists opposed killing problem tigers except as a last resort, and their donors, most of whom lived in cities and overseas, often opposed killing tigers under any circumstances. So did tourists. Twitter campaigns had been waged to save man-eaters.

  In the mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans, I had read, around the large tiger reserve on the border between India and Bangladesh, tigers killed forest dwellers at a rate of one per week or more. The attacks had been going on for decades. Probably thousands had died. The jungle in the Sundarbans is waterlogged. Men from the villages paddle small boats into the swamps to gather honey and wood. Women and children collect prawn seeds along the banks. Tigers glide through the water like crocodiles and burst out of it when they attack. For years, villagers in the Sundarbans wore clay masks on the backs of their heads, because it was thought Bengal tigers would strike only from behind. The mask trick worked for some time. Then the tigers figured it out, and the attacks began again.

  This tiger crossed the road without looking at us.

  On the way back to the checkpoint we met another group of village men. They were stooped under a tree gathering fallen yellow flowers. They piled the flowers into the middle of a blanket. Some of the men bent double at the waist and some of the men squatted. When they saw us, they scooped up handfuls of yellow flowers and brought them to me in the jeep, holding them cupped in both hands. They want for you to be eating this flowers, the guide said. For you, boss, one of the villagers said. I took a few of the flowers. They were fibrous yellow spheres, slightly elongated at the tip. The guide told me their name, mahua, and said that the villagers used them to make wine. He showed me how to rinse them with water from my bottle. He poured a little pool of water into his upturned palm and swirled a flower around in it. He popped the flower into his mouth. I did the same and began chewing. The flower was spongy. It had a musty taste. The villagers smiled and nodded as I chewed. From my raised seat in the jeep, absurdly, mouthing a flower, I smiled down at them.

  Yes, boss, the man said, as if humoring my ignorance of the world and all things in it. Yes, boss.

  4

  Our rooms were in cottages elevated fi
fteen or twenty feet above the ground on stilts. Sometimes rhesus macaques, small pink-faced monkeys with shaggy gray fur, would be sitting on the terrace outside the door, and when you came up the stairs they would leap over the railing into the nearest tree. Inside the cottages were large and light. The rooms had been designed to evoke the British Raj. The walls were white and the faded chairs had wicker arms. From the window, if I pulled back the curtain, I could see out across the forest to the hills.

  When I came back from safari I showered, then lay on my back on the bed and watched the lizards that clung to the wall in the places near the ceiling. Sometimes one of the lizards would start to run and its feet made a dry scuttle against the wall as it moved a little and stopped, moved a little and stopped. The ceiling fan turned in slow circles. It was useless to think about “nature.” Nature was inconceivable, any vision of it self-negating; how could you have thoughts about the system that enclosed all possible thought? A tiger had no concept of nature. A tiger saw what was. That was why tiger tracks lined the dirt roads all over the forest. The roads made it easier to get from one place to another, and what difference did it make to a tiger who put them there? It was a mistake to think you could imagine nature as something distinct from the part of nature that was human activity, for the same reason it would be bizarre to invent a separate category for all of existence minus squid or silkworms. Yet I realized that in coming here to look at tigers, what I had wanted was to see the wilderness, to be close to the thing itself, and instead I had a strange sense that I was still at home streaming nature videos on YouTube. Except on YouTube the wilderness might have felt more like itself, might have been more recognizably a wilderness, than here in the physical jungle, where you could not help but see everything—the breakfast sandwiches, the access roads, the villages, the confusion—a nature video would have artificially kept out.

  It had to do with language, perhaps. If nature could only be grasped through approximations, through terms we could use to frame an experience that was otherwise terrifyingly subjective (what we see is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning), then here in the eco-lodge our terminology was that of London and Delhi and Los Angeles; we were closer in every important respect to Paris than to the village a few hundred yards away. In Paris, Hermès had dedicated part of the previous year’s collection to the big-cat organization Panthera, founded by the billionaire investor Thomas S. Kaplan, whose foundation’s website credits him with a “strong passion for wildlife conservation.” This was the language we spoke. We, too, felt a strong passion for wildlife conservation. We, too, wished to preserve nature for the next generation. We saw this as a matter of initiatives and campaigns, fund-raisers launched at Sotheby’s, outcomes measured in pure numbers and broadcast through mailers declaring “a rare success story.” We believed in cautious optimism but much work left to do. This way of thinking, it seemed to me, quickly ran the risk of making the object of reference so abstract as to be unobservable even in its presence.

  One day I had been shown a newly built wall. It separated, I was told, the reserve from one of the villages. If a tiger killed a cow or an ox outside the reserve, the villagers were entitled to compensation from the government. If it killed one inside the reserve, they were not. Villagers whose cattle were killed in the reserve had been caught dragging the carcass into their own yards in order to claim the payment, and so the government had built the wall, not to stop tigers from attacking the villagers or their cattle, but to stop the villagers from claiming payments they were not owed. Until 2006, it had been illegal for forest dwellers even to own the land they lived on; the law had been changed over furious objections from conservationists. I was beginning to perceive that not everyone living in this scenario might feel a strong passion for wildlife conservation. I was beginning to think that preserving nature for the next generation might seem a less academic notion in New York than on the threshold of the actual jungle—how under certain circumstances it might sound like a mystifying collection of words, and how it might in fact sound more mystifying the closer to “nature” one came.

  One night, before dinner, the lodge showed a movie about Jim Corbett. We were at Jim Corbett National Park; the park had been named for him. Corbett was a legendary hunter who became a conservationist and, in the 1930s, helped establish the park as India’s first tiger reserve. The screen was set up beside the pool. Waiters circulated with trays of beer and cocktails. Lights shining from the pool were waveringly blue things on the walls and the trunks of the trees. Jim Corbett was famous for hunting man-eaters. In the early twentieth century, in the villages of the Kumaon hills—not far from where we were now—there had been a shocking wave of tiger and leopard attacks, costing more than a thousand lives. Corbett had shot many of the man-eaters. Big cats that eluded all other hunters, that in some cases thwarted entire army units, he tracked and killed, often alone and on foot. In 1907 he shot the Champawat Tiger, one of the deadliest man-eaters on record, which had consumed more than four hundred people. In his old age, he wrote books about his exploits. The first, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, was a worldwide bestseller in the 1940s.

  The film showed a tall, thin man with a shy face and a diffident mustache, captured in grainy black-and-white photos wearing kneesocks, shorts, and a pith helmet. He had a little hunting dog, Robin, which he trained to ride in his coat pocket.

  Corbett’s ancestry was Irish, but he had been born in India in 1875. When he spoke, which he did softly and sparingly, his accent and diction sounded “chi-chi,” half-Indian and half-British. His background left him in a peculiar position, not quite one thing or the other. He had grown up among the Kumaoni villagers and felt close to them, but with them he was inescapably a white man, a sahib, separated by complex codes of privilege and obligation. Among native Britons, by contrast, he was looked down upon for not being British enough. He was “country bottled,” as the saying went. Colonial societies produce these baffling hierarchies. Were you born in London? Then you aren’t one of us. Nevertheless he was devoted to the British Empire. In his old age, after India became independent, he moved to Kenya; easier to leave his lifelong home than to live in a country that was no longer a British possession. By that point he was famous. He dined with Princess Elizabeth, at the Treetops Hotel near Nyeri, on the night her father died and she became Queen Elizabeth II. He wrote in the guest book,

  For the first time in the history of the world a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess, and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience she climbed down from the tree the next day a Queen.

  It had been Corbett’s devout loyalty to the empire that spurred him to go into the jungle after the man-eaters. It was his duty, he believed. Colonizers were supposed to improve the lives of the people they colonized; that was the justification for the whole imperial system. Of course it’s clear now that the justification was fraudulent, and it was clear to many people in the early twentieth century, but it wasn’t clear to Corbett. The irony in this case was that the empire had almost certainly been responsible for creating the man-eaters in the first place; deforestation at lower altitudes had driven tigers into the hills, where game was scarce enough that weaker animals turned to hunting humans to survive. Corbett’s heroism spiraled helplessly into the logic of the crisis it was trying to avert: To uphold the empire meant hunting man-eaters, but upholding the empire also meant there would be more man-eaters to hunt. Critics of twenty-first-century conservation movements have a term, “conservation colonialism,” to describe the way in which the overwhelmingly urban and international conservation paradigm, however well-meaning, unwittingly replicates the processes of colonial degradation. I had read Corbett’s books, and I found the parallels unnerving. If Corbett, whose bravery and sacrifice were genuine, had ultimately been a servant of the vicious system into which he was born, which of us could be sure of doing good?

  5

  Have I told you about the tiger who fell from the tree? Mr. Sharm
a asked. Ah, yes; well. It was a rather droll occurrence, which happened to be witnessed by a friend of mine, on a drive very much like this one. In fact, if you’ll look just to the side of the jeep—yes, indeed. It happened in that tree, that one there.

  Mr. Sharma indicated a wide, bushy tree of medium height, made up of many spindly branches. I don’t know, he said, if the tiger was hungry or merely bored, but he saw a monkey in this tree, and he decided to climb up and try to make a breakfast of it. People are fond of saying that tigers do not climb trees. To that rule, we here encounter a rather notable exception. In fact, I believe I may have a video—yes, here it is—of this interesting incident on my smartphone.

  He handed me his phone, whose screen held a miniature double of the tree I had just been looking at. In the branches of this second, smaller tree, a gray langur was staring with mild disbelief at a tiger that had somehow climbed to within a few feet of her. The tiger looked much more startled than the langur did. The langur had a baby around her neck, but she seemed in no hurry to escape. She seemed not so much afraid as offended. The tiger climbed above her and glared down at her. He had maneuvered himself into pouncing position only to discover that there was nothing to stop him from falling headfirst to the ground. Finally the langur took two easy swings out of the tiger’s striking range. The tiger flinched and lost his balance. He flipped over onto his back and tumbled down the tree. For one pitiful moment, he clung to a cluster of low branches, hind legs dangling. Then he dropped ten feet to the ground.