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Burning Bright (Cont.)

A TIGER HAD BEEN SEEN on the day before near a fork in the road above the Nakti Ghati, a stream or nala that descends from the springs and escarpments of the Bija Dadar, about nine miles southeast of Kipling Camp. That one might meet a tiger on the road in so much forest seemed astonishing, since cats must hear the drum of tires on the hard dirt track from a mile away. But as in eastern Siberia, where Amur tigers take advantage of the lumber roads in the deep-snow country, Indian tigers have adapted to the tracks, which are well suited to soft and silent travel. They are also useful in the hunt, since the hoofed prey graze and browse the open edges where sunlight pierces the forest canopy, encouraging new growth. Near the road today we saw all five of the main prey species—chital, sambar, gaur, wild pig, and barasingha.

The magnificent barasingha is the southern race of the swamp deer of the Nepal borderlands in the Terai, that thousand-mile strip of savanna, swamp, and jungle south of the Himalayan foothills. In Madhya Pradesh, the barasingha's habitat has been progressively usurped by village livestock, and its numbers in the Kanha region had fallen to less than a hundred by the time the park's current boundaries were established in the early 1970s. While it has substantially recovered, it is now confined to the area in and around Kanha National Park, having nowhere to wander in the agricultural landscape beyond the buffer zone.

On a slow return to Kipling Camp through darkening forest late that afternoon, the Land Rover surprised a herd of ten or more wild hogs. The big, scrofulous boar had a black shoulder mane on its bristly black-brown hide; snorting, it rushed its careening sows and shoats across the track and downhill through the understory.

Farther on, a chital doe slowly raised and lowered the warning flag of her white tail. She stamped and yelped that musical alarm as a nearby buck pointed his antlers this way and that with a frantic flicking of his ears. The spots fairly flew off his trembling flanks as if he might explode at any moment.

Once again there fell that imminence of the great tiger. For long minutes, we searched the woodland with binoculars, scanning beneath bushes and past leaf-hidden rocks as the chital shapes withdrew into the darkness.

THE NEXT MORNING we headed off again for our assignation with the Goddess, yet with so much fresh sign and evidence of tigers near the Nakti Ghati, we made a detour along that road on the way to the Kanha meadows. Instead of the yelping chital and hurtling wild boar of last evening's encounter, we were met by calm langurs plucking coral blossoms from the tree called flame-of-the-forest, but beyond the Y-fork near the Nakti Ghati, on the steep winding road that leads eventually to Bisanpura, were two fresh sets of tiger pugmarks headed in opposite directions and crisscrossing each other for more than a mile. There was also a fresh tiger scat, still shining.

Though no one dared say so, we were certain that we were about to overtake the tiger, which had left these big bowl disks preceded by four round marks in a crescent made by its sheathed claws. Instead we met a car filled to the brim with a large Indian family—the windows were all eyes—which had shrouded our road of crisscrossed tracks in a fine, light film of dust.

Atop the Goddess, we headed up and over forest ridges, through deep underbrush and tall bamboo, then down the drying Sulkum Nala, with its clear pools and softly sculpted rocks. The Goddess forged across dense canebrakes much frequented by tigers, to judge from the antlers and white shards of bone in the copper-colored swales where the cats had lain. The elephant, upon command, plucked up an antler, and Kuarlal lodged it in a tree fork; he would later retrieve it for use in native medicines. "Rocks, bamboo, deer, and water," Rashid sighed, leaning back in resignation, hands behind his head. "Fine tiger habitat!" In his gentle and ironic way, Rashid seemed more frustrated than I was.

In the dry sand beds down the nala, leopard pugmarks crisscrossed those of tiger, but here, too, the prints were old. The Goddess twisted off mouthfuls of bamboo and other forage as she barged along. "All you care about is stuffing your mouth!" Kuarlal cried. To us he said, "I don't know why people would pay to ride around an empty forest. Used to see ten tigers in a day—now they've all gone away into the mountains!"

In the Land Rover that afternoon, we returned almost obsessively to the road of the crisscrossed tiger tracks. From the trees on the slope above, an excited langur was venting its harsh, tearing cough, and for one heart-piercing instant, I saw the recumbent fire-colored shape of my first Indian tiger, curled at the base of a pale kudu tree up the brushy ravine. Our driver and the forest guide were too polite to disabuse me; but when I laughed, they laughed, too. To want to see something so badly that one conjures it up out of one's own head—what could be said of such a fool?

By now, the jungle fowl had started up their vespers and the rose-ringed parakeets were screeching over the treetops on their way to roost, and the forest guide hinted with a gentle shrug that we must turn toward home.

On my last day at Kanha, we forsook the Nakti Ghati road in favor of the Goddess, heading out across the dreaming maidans and the stately sal groves of this vast, mythic deer park. Swaying along atop our redolent warm beast to the creak of the hemp ropes lashing down the howdah and the mahout's grunts and loving oaths and patter of quick feet, heeding the outcry of alarmed animals and exotic birds, aswim in the fecund fragrance of a flora evolved on this fragment of primordial Gondwana that appeared long ago out of the southern oceans to collide with Asia and remain affixed as its subcontinent, forcing the Himalayas high into the sky—in this moment-by-moment moment spun free of space and time, one did not need to be a Hindu or a Buddhist to rest in the myriad sounds and smells of the morning forest, in the all-encompassing great silence of the One.

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