The Shark and the Albatross Read online

  Bandhavgarh is a patchwork of meadows between rocky hills and a forest dominated by spectacular trees called sal. Every other plant seems withered by the heat but they are superbly indifferent, putting out new leaves of the most brilliant green. The view between their straight, grey trunks could almost be of beech trees in southern England, but with the colours turned up. This is Rudyard Kipling’s jungle, where Mowgli played with Baloo. It is home to Bagheera the panther, or leopard, and their overlord, Shere Kahn, the tiger: a fearsome presence but scarcely seen. I cannot imagine a better place for him to hide than here, among the trees’ long shadows, where light slashes fall on the red-brown forest floor. Filming how tigers hide and hunt in these dappled places strains every sense to detect them. I have never seen a wild tiger and I hope that Digpal and Ramjas can teach me to find them.

  Without a sound an elephant walks up behind us. It rumbles and blows a whoosh of air from its trunk. I jump round to find it just a few feet away. We are eye to eye, even though I am standing in the back of the open jeep. It’s as shocking as if a whale had surfaced alongside. If I can’t tell that a four-ton elephant is coming, what are my chances of spotting a hunting tiger?

  ‘He is Inderjeet, John. It means “indigo”, like the colour in a rainbow.’

  All the elephants in Bandhavgarh have names: one is called the King of the Forest, another male is Beautiful Elephant. There are females too: one called Storm sometimes badly shakes the people riding on her back. Digpal says another is named after ‘the beautiful thing you see first when you wake’, a Hindu concept that makes people put pictures of gods beside their beds. One of them is the elephant god, Ganesh, who brings good luck and is always the first to be invited to weddings.

  Inderjeet’s eyes are downcast, their irises bright hazel under his long lashes. I gently touch his skin, which is soft and warm. It is grey, except on his forehead and at the edges of his ears, where it thins gradually into sparse dots, like a blown-up picture in a newspaper, revealing the pink underneath. He shifts his weight and his rope harness and its massive knots creak like leather. He is thirty years old: creased, pleated and comfortably baggy. He flaps his ears with the sound of a hand being clapped over an open jar. They are the classic ‘map of India’ shape of all Asian elephants’ ears, even seeming to include the Ganges delta, much of which is now in Bangladesh. Inderjeet’s ears may not have kept pace with geography but he is our best hope of finding tigers.

  High on his back sits the mahout. He paddles the elephant’s neck with his bare feet. The instructions seem at odds with the result, as if the driver is frantically trying to backpedal, while Inderjeet makes a series of sideways steps and turns. As he does so he snaps a branch from a sal tree with his trunk, strips off the leaves, which he eats, and tucks the stick carefully between his trunk and one tusk, as I might store a pencil behind my ear. He will use it later to swat flies or scratch an itch. The mahout waves his radio and says he will let us know what he finds, then paddles again on the elephant’s neck and Inderjeet pads quietly away, leaving footprints larger than dinner plates, criss-crossed by pucker-lines in the dust. These marks are as specific to each elephant as fingerprints are to people.

  Digpal has been watching him too: ‘Once there was an elephant with four visitors and the mahout on his back. They were looking at a tiger when a spotted deer jumped out in front of them. The deer ran between the elephant’s legs and the tiger chased it right through as well. The elephant panicked and turned around so quickly that all the people fell off. He ran five kilometres, all the way back to the camp.’ Digpal’s shoulders shake with laughter.

  Jeeps and elephants are the only ways visitors are allowed to travel around Bandhavgarh. In this tangled forest it would be too dangerous to be on foot. Elephants have the great advantages that they can leave the road and they can find the tigers by smell, but filming from their backs with a long lens is nigh on impossible. Sometimes cameramen use monstrously tall tripods, climbing onto them from an elephant’s back. I ask Digpal about this and he says that choosing the right elephant is vital: Inderjeet would not be ideal because he is too tall and, while younger ones are keen and fast, they fidget too much to be safe. An Indian cameraman called Alfonse Roy once toppled over when his tripod was nudged by a young elephant. He fell straight onto a tigresses’ kill, then picked himself up and filmed her as he backed away, in case she charged.

  ‘He had unusual presence of mind,’ says Digpal. ‘Most people charged by a tiger lose control of their bladders. Some mahouts make a lot in extra tips when that happens by complaining that they will have to wash the covers on the houdah.’

  I stare into the forest on either side as we bounce along the tracks. The more closely I look at the trees, the stranger they become. Some seem to have been shot-blasted or beaten with a ball hammer. Others shed strips of bark like brown paper, revealing smooth green skins. One is a rare and beautiful Indian ghost gum, so pale that it glows by moonlight and soft enough to mark with a fingernail. Another has bark like crocodile skin. These trees show less reserve than the ones at home, fusing with each other, then parting their trunks only to merge again seamlessly further up. Some are draped with parasitic strangler figs, flowing down and around their hosts as if they were rivulets of molten wax. The figs’ limbs will tighten over decades. Any tigers in this patchwork jungle will appear behind a jumble of plants that could hide a thousand big cats. I am struggling because I don’t know what shapes to look for between the fast-moving trunks and branches. Perhaps I should be searching for a flicking ear or the twitch of a tail, maybe the shadow of a long back or just a strange stillness in the grass. On my first morning I’m unlikely to see anything at all, but the sounds of the jungle are a different matter. There are audible clues everywhere if you can understand what they mean.

  Sound matters to our filming in another way. Our director, Mike, is interested in how cinema uses sound to reveal what you cannot see. He has been inspired by the cowboy movie, Once Upon a Time in the West. The rhythmic squeak of a wind pump, the drip of water and a buzzing fly were used artfully to build tension towards the inevitable gunfight. Mike wants to use natural sounds to do the same thing in this film: he imagines a bird calling regularly, with the timing of a human pulse, speeding up as the tiger makes its move. The brainfever cuckoo would be ideal. We have an expert recordist with us, Andrew, who will collect the sounds. I need to film shots to complement this approach, hinting at what might happen, as well as showing what does: giving a tiger’s perspective of the chital for instance, seen through grass and leaves, and the ambiguous view the deer have, looking back. This is not everyday wildlife filming and I relish the challenge.

  We have come to the edge of a small meadow, a cool place of grass and pools between the trees, and when we round a bend there are three tigers lying in front of us, as if they have been carefully laid out on display. We see them so suddenly and so clearly that I’m taken completely by surprise. They are exquisite. The tigress stands and stretches. She has the contained energy and poise of all big cats. In isolation tigers seem almost absurdly patterned, overdone, but the boldness of her stripes and her orange fur fit this forest perfectly.

  I scramble to mount the camera on the tripod, desperate not to startle them, groping to plug in the cables, trying not to click metal on metal. I had imagined that my first wild tigers would seem small compared to those I’ve seen in zoos, reduced by this larger landscape, but the opposite is true. Another tiger is up and moving: it’s a cub as large as a Great Dane. It walks into the grass where twitching stems give away its progress until it emerges beside its mother. They bump heads and rub cheeks. She raises her muzzle and half closes her eyes as the cub brushes under her chin. She seems relaxed and unafraid. The cub rolls onto his back and lies with his wrists bent, his paws above his chest. His feet are enormous: a promise of the power into which he’ll grow. The tigress rises with an easy grace and I cannot take my eyes off her as she walks away through the trees, her shoulders rising and fa
lling smoothly under the pattern of her stripes, like a body moving beneath a dress. Her cubs follow, climbing over fallen tree trunks and pouncing on each other.

  ‘They are nine months old,’ says Digpal. ‘They will stay with her for another year. By then they’ll be as big as she is,’ and the thought of three huge tigers, strolling together through these woods, makes him smile.

  It has become possible only quite recently to make films about tigers and to take photographs of them while you are on holiday. Before 1969, when tiger hunting was stopped in India, they were entirely nocturnal and terrified of lights. Most of India’s forests have vanished since then and there are far fewer tigers now, but the remaining ones have learned that they won’t always be shot at in daylight and they have become less reluctant to show themselves. It’s this change that has made tiger tourism a reality and produced a surge of television programmes like ours, which in turn have increased the number of visitors. Tourism and television can create a rosy impression that all is well in the land of the tiger, yet, in eight years, Digpal has seen at least twenty-four cubs born here while the population has stayed the same. All those young tigers must be going somewhere. Most of them, especially the males, are killed or driven away by adults and forced to leave the forest.

  Many Indians are astonishingly tolerant of living alongside such powerful predators. Tigers are protected by law, of course, and the poorest farmers’ opinions carry little weight, but it is hard to imagine most people in Britain or the United States accepting the same risk. Even so, it is a precarious existence outside. The nearest protected forest, with enough food to support a population of tigers, is about 200km (125 miles) away. They do occasionally walk that far across farmed land, but the chance of finding such a rare place is very slim, and most of the young tigers that leave Bandhavgarh are never seen again. Some are poached. Others are electrocuted by fences wired directly into power lines to protect crops from other animals, or poisoned if they kill livestock. Sometimes the authorities send a mahout and an elephant to keep an eye on the tigers that stray outside, and occasionally they take them into captivity, but with nowhere else to release them that is usually a one-way trip.

  In South-east Asia, tiger-penis soup costs more than £200 a bowl. It is believed, without any evidence, to boost virility. Tiger-bone wine can fetch £20,000 ($32,000) a case. It is said ‘to ward off chills’, among other things, but these astronomical prices have more to do with wealth than health. The best chance for India’s remaining tigers is to be worth more alive than they are dead, and they certainly earn their stripes: 100 tourist cars means 200 jobs for the drivers and guides, as well as for all the other people earning money from visitors outside the reserve. Even so, the rush to cash in on the tigers can be a problem in its own right.

  News of the obligingly visible family has spread quickly. The park’s regulations force drivers to take different routes in the morning, to avoid crowding, but this afternoon at least twenty-five cars have come straight here. Many of the guides and drivers greet Digpal respectfully as they pull alongside. He often helps them with money or to sort out problems. Ramjas has been struggling to see his family during the reserve’s nine-month open season, because he works every day, but Digpal is helping him to buy a motorbike so he can visit his village in the evenings.

  I am in no position to complain about the number of cars because two of them are ours, but I do mind how aggressively some are being driven, especially close to the tigers. Digpal does his best to explain to those drivers that, by being selfish, they are spoiling the experience for everyone. He says that some of them care more about earning good tips than about the tigers’ well-being. The others will get no tips at all if they don’t seem to be trying equally hard, so there’s a race to be the closest. He says he watched one woman throw her camera to the ground, shouting, ‘Why are we always last to arrive?’

  It’s easy for me to see it this way, of course, with the luxury of having time to wait for the tigers to come closer, but most visitors have only a day or two to get their pictures. It’s a classic environmental problem, with everyone scrambling to take a share while it’s still there to be had. This is how people are everywhere, not just in India. When something is rare, the prices rise: from the tips earned by the pushiest drivers, to the land sold for building new lodges around the reserve and the prices fetched by poachers selling tiger bones to the Far East. Even the images taken by people like me become more precious as the tigers dwindle.

  Digpal, typically, points out something positive, which I am ashamed I had not already noticed: most of the visitors are Indian and many are carrying binoculars and cameras with long lenses. This is something new, he says. These are Indians who really want to see their tigers.

  By midday the heat is oppressive, especially for someone more used to filming in colder places. The tigers have disappeared into the shade and even Digpal is feeling hot. He suggests we visit a statue of Lord Vishnu, reclining by a spring. It is the only place we can get out of the cars and stretch our legs. The statue was carved from the rock centuries ago, in such a way that the spring water wells up beneath its feet. This is Charan-ganga, a tributary of the River Ganges, which will eventually flow into the Bay of Bengal, many hundreds of miles away. Generations of tigers have brought their cubs here, to drink and rest in the shade. The year-round water supply flows into pools among the trees and grows lush grass for the deer. Like many of the world’s best nature reserves, this forest was first protected as an exclusive royal hunting ground, partly because of the water from this spring.

  Cicadas start up among the trees, with the shriek of saw blades cutting sheets of metal: it’s a perfect soundtrack for the white-hot sun. We leave Lord Vishnu and park in the shade beside a meadow and a small dam, where the deer and monkeys have gathered by the water. One chital dozes with two monkeys’ tails draped like bell-ropes across her face. The langurs sit with their hands folded in their laps, their heads nodding, struggling to keep their eyes open. They’re at their most vulnerable now but there is a third lookout in this coalition, a bird the locals say is so vain about its gorgeous tail that when it sees its ugly legs it can’t help but cry. It’s the peacock, of course, which shrieks whenever it sees a predator.

  A kingfisher splashes into the pool. In the trees around us the baby langurs barely stir. They have their heads tucked into their mothers’ chests, their tails hanging straight down. Whole families are fast asleep on a branch. The chitals’ sentries are sleeping on the job. I film a breeze stirring the leaves. It is not enough to wake the monkeys but perhaps it will waft the scent of chital towards a tiger’s nose. We listen hard but there are no alarm calls. Nothing stirs.

  Digpal takes us to the Shiva temple near the reserve entrance. He has brought some coconuts as an offering, in the hope that our filming will be lucky. I have the camera ready to film close-ups of the langurs because the sound of the bell and the coconuts being broken on the stones brings the monkeys running. They are used to people and they settle close by, then one chatters an alarm and all the others spring into the trees. On the other side of the meadow, a tiger is passing through the forest. I film the monkeys giving their alarm calls and the look on Digpal’s face says, ‘I told you.’

  In the afternoon we have a choice: the water behind the dam may bring a tiger down to drink but it’s a long shot. On the other hand, the mother and the cubs we have filmed before are more likely to appear, despite the scrum of cars. Andrew needs a quiet place to record, so we leave him by the dam. I admire the way he has involved the guys in his car, giving them their own headphones so they can hear the beautiful calls for themselves, as well as the extraordinary level of quietness he needs to make good recordings. They have become adept at staying very still.

  At the tiger family’s clearing there is no sign of the mother. Her cubs mostly stay out of sight in the tall grass, so by the time we meet Andrew again, at dusk, we have not filmed much. He says to his guide, ‘Will you tell them or shall I?’
r />   After we had left a tall samba deer came down to drink, followed by a tigress, which stalked and chased it into the water. The deer swam across the pool and escaped into the jungle, past Andrew’s car. The tigress was joined by her three small cubs, which spent twenty minutes leaping from the bank onto her back and playing together in the water. No one else was there and Andrew made a wonderful sound recording of their games. We have no pictures to go with it.

  During each shoot there is usually just one chance at the thing you really hope will happen and this time it looks like it has fallen to Andrew.

  A few days later, word comes from Inderjeet Mobile (the mahout’s call sign is his elephant’s name, rather than his own) that the tigress with the two large cubs is visible again. As we bump on our way, the car scatters masses of butterflies. Their wings flash as purple as the after-image of a welding arc. We are travelling on a track made of smashed bricks and flattened houses. All the meadows here once encircled villages, seven of them, but their people were resettled elsewhere during the 1970s, to make Bandhavgarh the reserve it is today. Ramjas is sitting in the front seat, quietly teasing Digpal. I wonder if he thinks about this every time he passes. His village is in a block of forest adjoining the park and several years ago authority was granted to remove everyone from it, and from ten other villages, then to raze the houses to make more space for tigers. Only regional politics have postponed this happening so far: the delay was a vote-winning exercise. As a guide he is paid six or seven times more than a labourer (plus tips). Even so, for his Rs450 (£4.40) a day, he might soon find himself guiding visitors across the ruins of his family’s home. For people like Ramjas, the price of giving India’s tigers a place to live has been very high indeed, but if it had not been for the extraordinary efforts made to set up these reserves in the 1970s, there might now be no tigers in India at all.