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Burning Bright (Cont.)

AT SIX THE NEXT MORNING, in the highland cold, we returned into the park, as we would do each daybreak and midafternoon for the next six days. In the woodlands, a fresh set of tiger pugmarks brought the track to life, and the alarm yelp of the chital was accompanied by the deep wowk of excited langurs—slender, long-tailed gray monkeys that raged through the coarse leaves of the sal trees, bouncing the branches. When a tiger shows itself and the suspense is past, the chital stops yelping, after which it may follow its enemy some little distance, presumably to keep an eye on it and reassure the herd that the predator's whereabouts are being monitored.

Not far away, a sambar deer stood motionless among the dark columns of the trees. Unlike the chital, whose explosive yelps compete with langur hoots and peacock squawks and the raillery of jungle fowl and the eerie sonorities of doves and the green barbet among the prevailing sounds of the Indian forests, the cryptic and dark-colored sambar remains silent, unwilling to betray its own location, half hidden by the leaves and dependent on the camouflage of branch and shadow. It cries out only when it sights a tiger, by which time it, too, has been sighted, and bolts away with a loud, weird pong, which Rashid calls "the most dependable sign of a nearby tiger in the forest."

Like the tiger, the sambar, largest of all Asian deer, may attain a weight of up to 700 pounds, and the two are similarly well matched in their keen hearing. But the sambar has poor eyesight, while the tiger, listening and peering, misses nothing.

On a woodland ridge, attended by a group of juveniles and does, a chital buck, big antlers still in velvet, stared fixedly downhill into a wooded ravine, and his great tension fairly trembled the flanks of his herd. Though one young animal snatched fitfully at weeds, it scarcely chewed; all eyes followed the buck's riveted stare. His antlers seemed to shiver as his pinkish ears switched this way and that, getting a range on the smallest sound that might pierce the racket of the langurs and fix the position of the tiger.

It was near midmorning. The big cats would lay up now until near dusk. Sensing this, the nervous chital lost concentration and resumed feeding. Rashid Ali and the forest guide were sure that a resting tiger lay just downhill from the track, in this ravine, but since the vehicle was not allowed to leave the track and barge into the bushes, there was no way to urge the animal into the open.

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