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Burning Bright (Cont.)

IN FEBRUARY 1996, I flew inland from Bombay to the small city of Nagpur, in Maharashtra, from where a narrow, toilsome road led north-northwest toward Madhya Pradesh. In these leached and dusty landscapes, worn bare by swarming livestock and human beings, one could scarcely imagine that the Indian subcontinent, with 350 species of mammals and 1,200 species of birds, remained one of the richest faunal areas on earth outside Africa. The vast region of Madhya Pradesh, with its forests, savannas, ridges, and plateaus rising almost 3,000 feet above sea level, sustains the greater part of what is left of India's tropical dry forest, and perhaps half of the nation's surviving tigers.

In Madhya Pradesh, wooded hillsides appear, then small rivers and low mountains. At lower altitudes the forest is dominated by the sal tree, which, because its wood is hard and straight, was logged extensively in colonial days for railroad ties. As early as the 1860s, this region, where valuable teak and bija are also common, was set aside as a timber reserve, but since it was cut only infrequently, the forest remained sufficiently intact to support its abundant wildlife. In the early 20th century, it was used as a private hunting reserve for British viceroys, and in 1933 part of the region was set aside as the Banjar Valley Sanctuary. In 1962, seven years after the sanctuary was declared a national park, its area was expanded to encompass 172 square miles. By that time, according to American wildlife biologist George Schaller—who spent 18 months at Kanha in the mid-1960s doing research on predator-prey dynamics for his book The Deer and the Tiger—Kanha's tiger population had shrunk to about a dozen animals. In 1973 the park was designated a tiger reserve and expanded to 363 square miles.

Depending on the driver's willingness to blare his horn and bump through village crowds and milling animals, the journey overland from Nagpur to Kanha requires about five and a half hours. Toward the end of the trip, the ever-narrowing and deteriorating road crosses the Banjar River, a western boundary of the broad buffer zone around the park. Human activity is restricted within this zone, and one of the few settlements is a safari lodge called Kipling Camp, named for the British writer; the wonderful Jungle Book and Just-So Stories had their inspiration and location in this hill country. Read to me at bedtime as a child, Rudyard Kipling's peculiar dreamlike tales, illuminated by the awe he brought to the imminent and unexplained, lay close to the source of my own lifelong fascination with the wild. Here in the heart of tiger country, the name of the camp filled my heart and mind with nostalgia and anticipation.

"But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat," wrote Kipling in his story "The Cat That Walked by Himself." "And all places were alike to him."

What better description of the tiger, that solitary creature of tropical jungle and snow mountains and all habitats between, on its long age-old walkings over Asia.

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