The silhouetted deer is so massive and still that it seems almost sculptural in the thinning dark. Even when our car draws level with the full-grown sambar, it does not flinch or flee. Its curiosity matches our awe, and I have time to observe that the flaring three-pointed antlers end in white tips. And to think: This is my ‘tiger moment’, the highlight of my trip to Tadoba.
It’s fair to say that most visitors to the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve consider time spent here without a glimpse of the beast as time wasted.
When the deer finally darts into the bamboo thicket, we continue driving in near silence to the core forest. The day feels too young, the air too bitterly cold, for conversation. Then we arrive at Pandharpauni, one of nine viewpoints in Tadoba. Its extensive meadow came up when a tribal village of the same name was relocated in 1972; the abandoned fields turned into grassland. Climbing an iron watchtower, we immediately begin to appreciate the diverse wildlife drawn to its various microhabitats. Spotted deer and peacocks feed in the sun-bleached grass, which turns tawny as the sun rises. Egrets speckle the tops of trees, and wild boar root in the swampy edges of the lake.
The gilded meadow and placid animals seem to defy the fact that Tadoba is a jungle that has been part of Project Tiger for a decade. I think to myself that a tiger or leopard appearance would merely be a bonus after this view. But a companion bemoans our lack of luck. "We should probably have brought some Tiger biscuits," he wisecracks, then mocks his own sense of humour. "Now you see how desperate I am."
It ought to be easy to see wild cats in Tadoba, a national park since 1955 that has approximately 40 tigers and 25 leopards. But it is winter, and the trees—mohua, ain, jamun—are at their verdant best. The undergrowth of bamboo is as riotous as it is green. The wild grass rises six to eight feet high. Waterfalls, rock pools and streams emerge everywhere, so that the waterholes that attract big cats in the summer lie forsaken.
After Pandharpauni, we visit the other ‘points’ of this reserve forest. They vary widely in topography and wildlife, but each has a waterhole of some sort, natural or man-made, where animals congregate in the dry season. Dhauna, where we spot a crested hawk eagle and crested serpent eagle, is no more than a dirt road flanked on either side by a steep vegetated cliff and the Bhanuskhindi river. The birds start to call out to each other to proclaim their territories, and their cries sound, oxymoronically, like melodious shrieks.
At Jamunbodi, an elevated grassland descending sharply to a pool ringed by trees, we see a wild bison almost totally obscured by soaring grass and a wild boar skulking among the trees. At Panchdhara, a small clearing, we spend two hours up in a rickety watchtower, watching black-faced langurs scale jamun trees and pond herons fish in a rivulet. A sambar appears but sees our guide and dashes back with a tinny cry of alarm.
As we drive from viewpoint to viewpoint, we see groups of men and women along the roadsides, hacking grasses and low branches with axe and sickle. They are local villagers, hired to make ‘firelines’ or open swathes of land that serve to stanch forest fires and to provide a front from which to launch fire-fighting operations. Tadoba’s tendu and mohua trees—used to make beedis and liquor respectively—are often the cause of forest fires. Locals are said to start the fires because it encourages new growth of tendu leaves, and because the mohua flowers are easier to see and pick from the ashes on the forest floor.
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