The Wildest Sport of All by Prakash Singh

Author:Prakash Singh
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2015-05-28T04:00:00+00:00

1 Doguddha is a township in the forested foothills of the Garhwal and the adjoining Kumaon Himalayas. It became well-known due to the depredations of the man-eating leopard at large in the area during the early 1980s.

The very first step we took on reaching the rugged mountainous forests of the Adhnala range and selecting a campsite was to send out our shikaris to tie out a live bait for tiger. The news of a large male tiger seen frequenting a heavily forested tributary stream of the Ramganga had reached us and we now acted promptly on it.

Fortune smiled upon our promptness, for the next morning our scouting shikaris brought word that during the night the tiger had killed the buffalo bait. They now reported that the tiger had eaten about half of the kill and could be expected to return to eat the rest by nightfall. At once Ram Singh, our faithful retainer, expert scout and shikari, was summoned from his tent and sent off to the site on one of the elephants. With him went all the odds and ends necessary to set up a machaan on the fairly high tree which, according to the shikaris, grew out of the bed of the dry gorge that the tiger had dragged the buffalo into. The place being but two miles away from our camp, we told Ram Singh to hurry up with the machaan as we would get there soon after lunch to sit up and await the tiger’s return.

It was well past midday when my eldest brother, Kunwar K.S.I. Singh, our brother-in-law, the Durbar Sahib of Amaliara1, an acquaintance who is also a keen shikari and I set out on the other elephant. Wending our way through dense thickets of sal and kikar trees, their golden-green foliage ablaze with the spring sun, and over the dappled carpet of the forest floor, our mount worked ponderously down a gentle, rock-strewn incline. Below us lay a fairly wide valley, wild with chest-high lantana and briar bushes. Out of this solid green fragrant wall of undergrowth stood out in stark contrast ranks of wild jamun trees that grew all along the valley. Their leathery, pale-green leaves were unmistakably distinct where the trees interspersed with the undergrowth. Reaching the level ground, our elephant stepped warily through the lantana and I found my hands seeking a firmer grip on my .470. The very air seemed to be palpitating with an incredible menace and an overpowering sense of danger filled us, for these were the hunting grounds of the king of the jungle – our quarry, the tiger.

We angled across the level forest of lantana and jamun and when we reached a dry nullah that ran down the middle of that wild valley, our mahout began to goad the elephant along one bank of this watercourse in keeping with the directions our shikaris had given us earlier. We now proceeded upstream of the nullah where somewhere ahead lay the tiger’s kill. Believe me, forging through that lantana on our way to where Ram Singh awaited us jaded my nerves completely.

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