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Burning Bright (Cont.)

KANHA VILLAGE, the stockaded compound in the center of the park, overlooking the broad maidans, is a settlement mostly inhabited by forest rangers and mahouts; it adjoins the park's last thatch settlement of traditional Baiga forest people, small,

In the grand days of the Raj, tiger killers rode with two natives—since even aboard an elephant, it would not do for important persons to be caught out-of-doors without a servant.

dark-skinned hunter-gatherers who also practice shifting cultivation. Even at dusk we would see lone Baiga and Gond men walking the forest roads armed with nothing more than the thin stick they carry behind the head, across the shoulders. As animists who worship all life in the forest, the Baiga and Gond perceive the tiger as a forest deity and do not seem to fear it.

Beneath two huge and ancient sal trees, Rashid and I mounted the stairs of what looked like a small reviewing stand. The platform facilitated embarkation upon an elephant dubbed Bund Devi, Goddess of the Forest, whose howdah, or riding platform, was fitted with low iron rails, placed on sacks of meal, and secured by a hemp girdle of four ropes bound around the Goddess's rumbling belly.

(This modest arrangement was not to be compared with the royal howdah on display at Kipling Camp, acquired some years earlier from a maharajah of his acquaintance by Mr. Bob Wright of "the Tolly"—in effect, a high-sided and capacious wicker basket resembling a balloon's gondola and designed to accommodate three tiger killers of ample dimensions in complete security and comfort. A much smaller rear platform, all but aslide off the elephant's hindquarters, carried sporting firearms and ammunition, alcoholic spirits, water flagons, and the plentiful comestibles lugged along on august outings in the grand days of the Raj, and also two natives—since even aboard an elephant, it would not do for important persons to be caught out-of-doors without a servant. However, no area had been allowed for such inconsequential beings, and how they managed was their own concern: Presumably the pinched space between plump hampers of sturdy British food was deemed sufficient for two humble rumps so much smaller and less rosy in hue than those installed up front.)

Awaiting us without evident pleasure was Kuarlal the mahout, a sinewy man of saturnine demeanor who urged his elephant with quick brown feet: The toes were applied behind the ears while the heels drummed tirelessly upon the elephant's nape. Harsh cries of Mal! Mal! (Go! Go!), enforced by hard cuts of his whistling stick upon her brow knobs and down between her eyes, advised the Goddess to get moving, which she did, but not before relieving herself of a large load of manure, which struck the hard ground like a Turkish ottoman.

As the Goddess swung across the maidans in the early morning mist, a leopard came running toward her in light, graceful bounds. Seeing the elephant and her towering cargo, the cat recoiled backward in a somersault and unrolled rapidly in the opposite direction. Apparently this animal, climbing a tree, had leapt the high fence that enclosed a large meadow to rest it from overgrazing. As we watched, the frantic leopard probed for an opening along the bottom of the fence on the far side, although it could have clambered up and over the unbarbed wire almost as easily as it entered in the first place. When, quite suddenly and mysteriously, it disappeared, we assumed it had found a gap beneath and wriggled out.

"What a wonderful start to the morning!" Rashid said, and I, too, was delighted, for this was the first leopard I had ever seen in Asia. In most regions, the tiger will drive out or kill the leopard, but in Kanha, where prey animals are so plentiful, these two species of the genus Panthera can exist together in fair numbers.

At last we had escaped the dusty track. Entering the cool forest, the Goddess passed between the dark trunks of the sal trees. Shifting comfortably along, she descended into shady streams and followed the stony beds awhile before heaving back up onto the bank and climbing a hillside through thick stands of bamboo. Kuarlal was still beating a tattoo on her sparsely haired gray hide, and occasionally she closed her nostrils, filled her trunk with air, and then, as if to clear away her understandable exasperation, expelled the compressed air in an odd, loud explosion, not unlike a blowout or backfire, but more like booting a bass drum. "It pleases her to do that," grumped her mahout, who knows there is no accounting for the ways of elephants.

Kuarlal said a tigress with three well-grown young hunted this territory. He located a bed in the long grass where the four tigers had lain sprawled out together, and a nearby tree trunk where they had scratched deep to scrape off old chitin and sharpen their long claws. But none of these signs was very fresh, and the sun was climbing, and even if the tigers had not left this territory, they would now be resting somewhere until dusk.

Kanha elephants are worked only in the morning, composing themselves as they see fit in the afternoon. On the return toward the Kanha meadows, Kuarlal spotted the leopard again, still trapped in the far corner of the fenced meadow. But as the elephant drew near, it miraculously disappeared in the short, sparse grass, and the frustrated mahout, with wild kicks to the ear, turned the Goddess back along the fence, anxious to find it. Just at that moment his eye picked up a small, tawny tuft that differed minutely from the surrounding stubble. The mahout shouted and his elephant stopped as a long, spotted tail rose slowly from the grass, wavering like a cobra. Then, with a deep, growling roar—the leopard, despite its modest size, is one of the four "roaring cats" (which include the jaguar and lion)—it writhed swiftly away across the open ground, so flat to the grass that it looked legless, like gold molten lava. Within an instant it was 50 yards away at a shallow gully, where it poured over the rim and disappeared.

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