I toy with the notion of not reading the book at all. On the one hand I love animals – yes – even ones that are fierce and aggressive – so long as I don’t have to deal with them face-to-face. On the other hand, my heart goes out to the terrorized villagers and how traumatized they must have been when these tigers prowled the area looking for easy targets. And to lose a loved one so violently – how do you ever come to terms with that?! And then the poor hapless buffaloes that are tethered to be used as bait – aah – I know not who to weep for! According to the book, the numerous man-eaters that Jim sends on to their “happy hunting grounds” were responsible for the deaths of over 1200 people. I note with horror, that even in the last couple of years, the region that Corbett made his own in the book – still loses lives to man-eating leopards and tigers. Of equal note is that the tiger population has dwindled from about 100,000 to a paltry and dismal 3000.
I do not want to read any accounts with gory details and after a few pages it becomes (thankfully) clear that Jim spares his readers that. His stories show his empathy *and* sympathy – both for the tigers he hunts as well as the villagers whose lives (and livelihoods) he undertakes to protect. Given the harshness of the subject, Jim handles it with great delicacy, tact and compassion. He even injects considerable humour into the narrative when he talks about his hunts – “I lacked the courage to return to the village and admit I was too frightened to carry out my self-imposed task, and with teeth chattering, as much from fear as from cold, I sat out the long night.” Once when he is skirting some bushes while stalking a tiger, a “covey of pheasants fluttered screaming out of them”, making Jim think that his “heart had stopped beating for good.”
Jim Corbett – or “Carpet sahib” as I learn later through Google that he was called – is a master sleuth and his knowledge of the jungle and its’ wild inhabitants are as extraordinary as they are fascinating. He is a real-life Tarzan with similar powers and abilities. He hears a Kakar (deer) bark and understands that there is “a snake in the scrub”; he knows that man-eating tigers lose their fear of human beings and will hunt in the daytime when humans are more likely to be afoot – leopards on the other hand are afraid of humans and engineer sneak-attacks under cover of dark, thus making it infinitely more difficult to kill a leopard than a tiger; he stalks his targets “step by step, and as silently as a shadow.” When 2 Himalayan magpies fly off the ground, their bird-call informs him that the “buffalo is dead, partly eaten – and the tiger is not in close vicinity”. Pug marks are a veritable map for this jungle detective and they reveal all kinds of secrets – important data to help catch the perpetrator – age and gender of the tiger, direction and speed with which the animal is traveling, approximate distance to its headquarters, elapsed time since passed; nature of kills; recently had human flesh or not; whether all 4 limbs are sound – if not, which are defective. WOW!!!
I am enthralled by his description of the villagers’ communication methods – “standing on a commanding point the message is shouted across in a high-pitched voice – from village to village the message is tossed & broadcast throughout large areas in an incredibly short space of time.” And completely captivated by his ability to mimic animal sounds – once when he is within a few feet away from a tiger that still hasn’t spotted him, he feels a cough coming on that he quickly changes to a call of the Langur because it was “a case of cough or burst”. Another time he returns a tiger’s mating call and actually manages to lure the animal to within a few feet of where he is sitting in wait.
His instincts are sharply honed from years of having the jungle as his backyard and they stand him in good stead numerous times. “I felt I was in danger and the danger that threatened me was on the rock in front of me. The fact that I had seen no movement did not reassure me – the man-eater was on the rock, of that I was sure;” He seems to be a tireless walker – and can comfortably sleep on trees – “long practice in selecting a suitable tree, and the ability to dispose myself comfortably in it, has made sleeping up aloft a simple matter.” He appears to be as much at home on a make-shift machan as he is in a brick-and-mortar building. He owes the fact that he lives to tell all his tales partly to luck but mostly to this unique ability to be at one with his wild and untamed surroundings.
Saying modestly (and quite untruthfully) that he does “not have the ability to paint word pictures”, Corbett does just that – “The full blast of her deep-throated call struck me in the face and would’ve carried the hat off my head had I been wearing one.” Another time he sees a wounded tiger savagely attacking a tree and tearing “it to bits, emitting as he did so roar upon roar with a dreadful blood-curdling sound as if he was savaging his worst enemy.” I find myself shivering in sympathy when I read that the ropes he was sitting on cuts into him & “a cold wind continued throughout the night chilling me to the bone”. In fact, all his “word-pictures” are so vivid and evocative that by the end of the book I am left with a sense of having watched an animated movie rather than nose deeply buried and engrossed to the point of captivated stillness for the duration of the reading.
My post-book internet-scouring does not reveal too much information about Corbett – a man I am by now completely smitten with. Sadly, he did not marry and moved to Kenya with his sister. Yet in the book he says – “years of exposure and strain and long absences from home – were beginning to tell as much on my constitution as on the nerves of those at home”. So, who was at home exactly? Some articles on the Net suggest that his mother and sister were vastly possessive of him and never gave him free rein. If true, it would explain why he prefers answering the call of the wild – it must’ve been soothing by contrast. But what a shame that he did not have a child (or two or three) to pass on his formidable legacy to.
P.s: There is so much I have learned from this book. Not just the accounts of how to read a jungle-map, but also so many new words. Hamadryads are King Cobras, chevrons are v-shaped stripes (and not a gas-station); there is supposedly a superstition about “passing the wine” that I still don’t know about in spite of extensive Googling. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must also confess that thus far, the word “pug” only conjured up either the specific dog-breed or the shape of its’ nose – I had no idea that the tiger’s paw-prints are called pug marks. My dad, who spent much of his life telling me with relentless frequency all the words that the Brits had borrowed from India and made their own, forgot to mention this – pug from the Hindi word for foot. Once I learn this fact, my head annoys me no end and distracts me – every time I come across this in the book, I immediately recall an old Hindi song – “pug ghungroo bandh Meera nache re” (Meera wears bells on her feet and dances)! How vastly inappropriate!!! Bah!!!