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THE MAGAZINE SILLY POINT M5

India Abroad April 22, 2011

A hair-raising
jungle adventure When Stumpy stood ting us, froze and stared. My bowels
were about to mutiny, for an alarm
call from this lax little herbivore could
on the day of
between us and World Cup
spell our doom. At the end of a long
and tense thirty seconds the deer
the India-Sri Lanka bounded off into the forest.
The elephants seemed in no hurry to
final move. They weren’t feeding – there
was nothing fit to eat. They just stood
Illustration: there fiddling with the dust, silent,
watching with their tiny brown eyes.
Uttam Ghosh At one moment, all of them seemed to
hold the same frozen front-foot-in-
the-air posture. The matriarch, lead-
ing the herd, stood to our extreme

C
ellular signals don’t trou-
ble the Kulgi Nature
Camp in Anshi-Dandeli
Tiger Reserve. Not
unless your phone hap-
pens to point northeast at a partic-
ular angle that takes three hours to
determine accurately. There is,
however, a color television set in
the common room here and a quo-
rum of cricket enthusiasts among
the guests – where is that hard to
find? And so my friend Satish, who
had almost stayed back in
Bangalore to cheer for India’s clash
with Sri Lanka in the final of the
World Cup, found himself couch-
potatoed stolidly before that most
idiotic of boxes, a musty-smelling
towel spread territorially over the
back of his PVC deck chair. I doubt
if he even made time for the
demands of his bladder. The rest of
us – Arun, Andy, Sahastra and I –
set out for a little walk in the jungle
at 5 pm. We took the Bird Trail, one
of two short walks (the other is the
Timber Trail) that originate at the
camp.
At this time of the year, the dry
deciduous forests of Dandeli are
bare and brown. Not that we were
complaining. The thin foliage
allowed for penetrating views
though the duller birds reveled in
the camouflage it offered. We had
already twice seen a White-bellied
Woodpecker (one of the rarest
species in southern India) and were
looking forward to exhaust the
hornbills on our checklist.
We had walked too far down the
trail as the sun began to set behind
the trees. And yes, we had left the
camp when Mahela Jayawardene
and Kumar Sangakkara were hold-
ing the flag aloft for Sri Lanka and,
though I could have gone ahead
and birded some more, patriotic pressure was building
within my troops to return and watch the Indian innings
unfold. Sahastra led the retreat from the bird trail and we
shuffled noisily along the path, which was strewn with a
rustling carpet of dry leaves, carelessly crushing red bugs
underfoot.
Arun suddenly alerted us to another sound – the cracking
of bamboo stumps. Only one creature (aside from the Giant
Panda, perhaps?) was capable of making that noise. To our
luck, the leafless jungle aided visibility. In the crackling dry
undergrowth we discerned the hunched shapes of ele-
phants. A prime wildlife sighting no doubt, but rather
intimidating at a distance of 100 meters. We stood there on
wobbly knees and considered the odds – what if they
attacked? Run in zig-zag formation, went an old jungle say-
right, pawing at the ground with her
enormous foot. The dust must have
reached my nose (or was it my mind
playing tricks?) for I began to feel a
desperate urge to sneeze. It took all
my yogic resolve to fend it off.
It occurred to us then that the match
would have resumed. India would per-
haps be chasing down that mammoth
(wrong word to use under the circum-
stances) total set for it by Sri Lanka.
Wonder if our pachyderm friends
were aware that the mascot of the
tournament was an (infinitely more
cuddly) elephant called Stumpy?
Would that knowledge be reason
enough for them to let us get away
from here alive and unharmed?
The herd shuffled in slomo while we
stood as still as we could, and as qui-
etly as our nervous, cricket-besotted
minds would let us. Twenty-five min-
utes later, when the light had almost
faded, the elephants had moved on
out of earshot. As we passed the spot
where the herd had crossed, Arun
pointed out a scoop in the ground
where the matriarch had pawed it.
There was no trace of dung anywhere
(though two days later we would
chance upon fragrant evidence that
the herd had fed copiously and moved
towards a waterfall five kilometers
downhill in the Nagzhari Valley). We
got out of there as quickly as we could,
fighting the instinct to bolt down the
path. It was the fastest that we had
ever returned from a birding trip.
Back at the camp, Virender Sehwag
had fallen to Lasith Malinga in the
first over and Sachin Tendulkar and
Gautam Gambhir were holding fort
for India. Satish sat before the televi-
sion munching a double-omelet,
oblivious to our arrival. He had
plenty of company by now and
we had to be content with the
seats at the back of the hall. The
ing. Yes, yes... as if we had forest guards were thrilled to
an option in this tangled hear of our encounter but Satish
forest. Another fear couldn’t be distracted from his
creased my brow: Were watch over Team India’s for-
we upwind or downwind tunes. We had to wait until
from the beasts? The only Dhoni had tonked the most cele-
way to find out was to brated six in four years to tell
break wind. Finally, we exercised Option Three: Shut up him how Stumpy had almost cost us the World Cup! n
and wait it out.
There were six beasts – three cows including a matriarch, Bijoy Venugopal is part of The Green Ogre team, which
and three calves of which one young chap had sprouted includes three other nature enthusiasts and photographers/
tusks. If they chose to use force, this was going to be a for- diarists. Thegreenogre.blogspot.com has been ranked among
midable army. Another creature then joined the gazing the Top 300 birding blogs by birding blog index Fat Birder
party. Separated from its herd, a young deer pranced anx- and among the top blogs in the Environment category by the
iously through the thicket across our path and, upon spot- Indian blog network Blogjunta