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Burning Bright (Cont.)

AT KIPLING CAMP, I was welcomed by Rashid Ali, a naturalist in his mid-twenties, and his companion, Jan Malony, who together ran the camp with a local staff and some lively young English volunteers. The camp's owner is a lady named Anne Wright, of an old colonial family, whose hospitable husband Bob turned up during my eight-day visit; the Wrights are residents of Calcutta and, more particularly, said Mr. Wright, the "Tolly"—the colonial-era Tollygunge Club. A large, florid, expansive man, Bob Wright retains something of the imperial aura of Kipling's day, when Panthera tigris bengalensis (now P. t. tigris) was still known as the Royal Bengal tiger.

In 1972, when it was estimated that the tiger population in India had been reduced to less than 2,000, Anne Wright, one of the founders of World WildlifeÐIndia, helped convince Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to inaugurate an inspired program known as Project Tiger. Kanha was one of nine tiger reserves established the next year under that program (there are now 27). In the early 1980s at Kanha and Ranthambhore, the Wrights' daughter, Belinda, and her then-husband, Stanley Breeden, filmed Land of the Tiger, arguably the best documentary on wild tigers ever made. In 1994 Belinda founded the Wildlife Protection Society of India, of which she is still executive director; it was she who arranged my stay at this simple, attractive, and unpretentious lodge, less than a mile from the park boundary.

After a late lunch in the terrace shade, I set off with Rashid Ali and two Kipling guests in a long-wheelbase Land Rover from which the top and sides had been removed for better viewing. At Kisli Gate we were assigned a forest guide who served as a spotter and also made sure that the vehicle never strayed off the track and that none of its occupants compounded its intrusion by disembarking or by hailing or otherwise accosting the other mammals in the park.

This rule has not required much enforcement since 1985, when British bird safari leader David Hunt, investigating an unknown birdcall, walked a short distance off the track at Corbett National Park, in Uttar Pradesh, and was fatally mauled by a tiger within earshot of his horrified clients. Such incidents, however, have become rare. Although India's tigers in their heyday killed hundreds of human beings every year, one of the few man-eaters still vaguely remembered in the Kanha region was an elderly specimen that killed a young boy some 15 years earlier. These days, aging or wounded tigers and newly dispersed juvenile males, driven from established territories in the interior out toward the boundaries, where the hard-hunted game is scarce and wary, are those most likely to prey on livestock and come into conflict with human beings.

Rashid, a small, handsome man with a black beard and faintly melancholy eyes and smile, is a kinsman of Dr. Salim Ali, who was India's foremost ornithologist and conservationist for many years and whose book on the birds of India, written in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution's Dillon Ripley, was long the standard volume in the field. Rashid himself is a dedicated naturalist, and that afternoon he pointed out how the brown jungle babblers, squalling through the underbrush stirring up insects, were often attended, higher in the branches, by the racket-tailed drongo, with its extraordinary black "flags," and higher still by the beautiful rufous tree pie, in what Rashid called "a vertical hunting party moving through the forest." Farther along, he showed me a place where a tiger standing on hind legs and sharpening its claws had made deep slashes in pale tree bark 12 feet from the ground, a clue to its size that might give pause to any rival daring to trespass on its territory.

Kanha is one of five parks in India that may shelter as many as a hundred tigers. The official number was "exactly" 104, Rashid pronounced wryly. In his opinion, 70 tigers, plus or minus 20, seemed more likely (a guess more or less confirmed by tiger biologist Ullas Karanth's 1995-1996 camera-trap survey in Kanha).

Crossing the western region of the park, the Land Rover purred quietly along hard sand-clay tracks of the sal forest and out across the Kanha valley maidans—old, overgrown cultivations of the Baiga and Gond aborigines or tribal peoples, grown up in warm, broad meadows. Through the open forest and over the maidans moved scattered herds of chital, a small red-brown deer named for the prominent chitti, or white spots, that camouflage its form in the sun-speckled wood edge. As the common deer of India, the chital is the main prey of the tiger, accounting for nearly 40 percent of its diet here at Kanha, and is also taken by the leopard and wild dog without noticeable depletion of a park population estimated at about 20,000.

Though no tiger was seen on that first afternoon, we had a fine sighting in good light of the small, dark barking deer, or muntjac, which sprang over the track and reentered the forest with its head carried low to the ground. The muntjac, with its peculiar tusklike canine teeth, is not so much uncommon as uncommonly encountered—perhaps once in every 14 or 15 trips into the park, Rashid supposes—and I was fortunate to see another a few days later.

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