Tiger Tiger Burning Bright
The day starts the usual way, dark before dawn. A cup of black tea, no sugar, and we’re off. As we travel through bustling Ramnagar in the early hours people are already milling about eeking out an existence. My senses are bombarded by the sights, smells and sounds of India waking up. Several people walking along the road with long sticks I’m told to fend off any tigers or leopards that wander into the village in search of food.
We get to the zone entrance and meet up with several guides and drivers who have become old friends. They are taking their clients into the zone to find the elusive tiger. Having gone through the formalities, filling out the records, several times, checking my passport to see that I am who I say I am the gates open precisely at 6.00am. I remember asking an Indian engineer I worked with ‘Why all the paperwork and permissions’? “Ah Mr Andy you British invented paperwork, we Indians perfected it’!
Everything is done in duplicate, triplicate and plenty of carbon paper, all hand written.
After that we just wanted to get on our way and head off into the zone with the other vehicles. It was a little like the Le Man 24 hour race start!
By now it’s daylight and we worked our way along the road and eventually onto the dirt tracks. The road is in poor condition and we wind our way around the potholes and missing bridges, a bit like it is at home these days.
Anil, my guide and Prakash my driver have become good friends over the years and we work well as a team. We look and listen to the jungle to give us a sign of where best to find tigers. My enjoyment is in the tracking, my reward is finding a tiger. The sandy soil of the tracks give us pugmarks, foot prints of the tiger. We can tell the direction and how fresh they are. When we spot pugmarks it gives us some optimism of seeing a tiger.
The next step is to listen for the alarm calls of the deer and monkeys. It’s not long before we hear the monkeys alarm call and head at speed to where the sound is coming from. Once there we go silent and listen… bark….bark…bark . There is a tiger nearby but the jungle won’t give it up easily. We sit and wait, something I am now use to and have the patience for.
Ten minutes goes by, seems like an hour, another gypsy vehicle joins us with a couple of people. Then suddenly, without warning a tigress appears, crosses the road and disappears into the jungle. Three or four seconds and it’s all over, hardly time to fire off a few shots but I did manage to. After a few years of this you learn to be ready and to react fast.
“Is that it all over.”I ask. A pause and then the tigress shows her head again and moves out of the jungle onto the road. Our patience was rewarded as she was followed by a cub, then, another, then another, and finally a fourth cub. We have found the mother and four cubs that I had hoped to see. She was directly behind my vehicle and walking towards me. Prakash drove slowly away and the tigress and her four cubs followed. One of the cubs didn’t want to tow the line and kept wandering off out of the photo. I did eventually get them all together but had to wait. They stayed with us for about 20 minutes. She was very bold and didn’t mind our presence, in fact it was almost as if she was posing for us with her beautiful cubs.
After that encounter we headed to a quiet area and Anil took out the breakfast he had prepared for us. We talked about the encounter drank black tea, no sugar and ate biscuits under the sun and the rising temperature, it was only 8.30am still time to see more tigers, which we did.
The next morning we came upon an adult tigress lying down bathing in the early morning light at the edge of the jungle. No one else was about, the best encounters are when you are at one with the tiger. She stayed with us for about twenty minues, yawned three times, stood up and disappeared into the dense jungle. Had that really happened? The pug marks were there to prove it.
“Seventeen tigers in eleven days”.
What a privilege to witness these magestic tigers.