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Burning Bright (Cont.)

IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, I completed Tigers in the Snow, in which the main subject was the Siberian tiger. But I hadn't forgotten India, or those days in the forest on the Goddess, and in March 2001 I returned to Kanha as a field leader for a wildlife tour that traveled around northern India on the reconstituted royal train, visiting historic sites and tiger parks along the way.

At Kanha I learned that Rashid Ali was no longer at Kipling Camp (he is married now to Jan Malony, and living in Bombay), and

As tiger biologist Ullas Karanth has said, "When you see a tiger, it is always like a dream." Alas, this can never be true of the Tiger Show.

that some of the Baiga people had been relocated. In Kanha, as in other parks, the controversial Tiger Show had been restored, and on the first morning the mahouts, armed with walkie-talkies, spread the news of a big male tiger on a gaur kill; phalanxes of elephants headed toward the scene, where we arrived not long thereafter in a Land Rover.

That male tiger on the gaur was the first tiger I'd ever seen at Kanha; I would see a second and a third that afternoon. Not far from the meadows, on a road I knew from the grand old days aboard the Goddess of the Forest, an elephant drew up beside our open Land Rover. Using the canopy frame, we managed to clamber up onto the howdah, after which the elephant proceeded to the lair of another adult male, not out in the open on a kill, but so uncannily hidden in thick, high tussock that even when the mahout pointed at it with his stick from ten yards away, one could scarcely make him out; the eye glint in the tawny grasses was the first I saw of him. Then the striped form jumped into focus, though the tiger in the shadows never stirred.

Not far away, on a grassy bank within growling distance of the male, a sleeping tigress sprawled, indelicate white belly to the sun: Seemingly as tame as a zoo animal, she paid her visitors no heed whatsoever. The mahout, who knew this slattern well, said she had three small cubs hidden nearby. Not liking the prospect of looming over terrified wild cubs, I was greatly relieved that we made no attempt to find them.

In one day we had seen three tigers at Kanha; we could just as easily have seen six. At two smaller parks in Madhya Pradesh, we saw six more, in addition to another three in Rajasthan, at Ranthambhore. That I saw so many tigers where in other years I had seen none was partly attributable to the hot, dry season between rains, when prey animals and their predators collect near the scarce water. (On the previous journeys I had come in winter.) Another reason, I would like to think, was that India's poaching, though not yet under control, had at least been slowed by greater vigilance. But the chief reason, sad to say, was the restoration of the Tiger Show in three of the four reserves we chose to visit.

Having written that, I wonder why I'm so sad to say it, though I know when and where those doubts began. That morning at Kanha during this visit, returning toward the track after seeing the big tiger on the gaur, we met another elephant on its way in toward the kill with a fresh howdahful of craning, camera-clicking human beings. Against my will—or perhaps against my romantic sensibilities—I found myself confronted with the People Show, and it was me. This was what the last wild tigers are compelled to look at. And try as I would to maintain my exhilaration at the exotic spectacle I had just witnessed, I felt instead a kind of baffled yearning and regret that was not offset by comparing such "success" to those long days of failure in this forest six years earlier.

Without some semblance of the hunt, the joy is no longer in the finding, but in the acquiring: Did you get your tiger? As in picking a beautiful wildflower, one destroys the moment's fragile evanescence, and with it the fleeting mystery of creation and the lost paradise that lies behind what we imagine that we seek. As tiger biologist Ullas Karanth has said, "When you see a tiger, it is always like a dream." Alas, this can never be true of a preordained and highly organized observation.

HAVING HAD THE GOOD FORTUNE to observe and study wilderness and wildlife all around the world for more than a half-century, and to take delight in this lifelong avocation, I must also accept the sadness of recording the precipitous decline of land and life in that half-century brought about by the rampaging activities of my own species. The Siberian tigress I saw in 1996, and another we were snow-tracking that winter, would be slaughtered by poachers in 1998.

As George Schaller has written, "Future generations would be truly saddened that mankind has so little foresight, so little compassion, such lack of generosity of spirit for the future that it would eliminate one of the most dramatic and beautiful animals this world has ever seen." In the end, whether or not I "got" my tiger or my leopard is of small importance; what's important is to know that they are there.

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