Burning Bright | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> Travel >> Burning Bright

Today's Question
What do you suggest for a cheap winter trip to Baja, Mexico? answer

Where in the United States can I stay overnight in a tree? answer

Can you suggest a great African safari? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine October 2002

Page:

Burning Bright
Dreams of Bengal tigers and visions of imminent extinction led Peter Matthiessen to a predator's last stronghold in the jungles of India. It was a place, the author discovered, where not seeing is believing.

By Peter Matthiessen


	Panthera tigris tigris on the move (Birgit Freybe Bateman)

THE HEART OF THE WILD TIGER COUNTRY in India is the Central Highlands state of Madhya Pradesh, on the Kanha plateau. A remote region of forest and savanna in the Maikala Range, the plateau was set aside in 1955 as Kanha National Park, where, in March 2001, from atop an elephant, among the wistful cadences of forest birds, I observed a male tiger on a gaur kill. The tableau was stirring, since the dark wild ox known as the gaur is the largest of all bovine animals, and the Indian tiger, Panthera tigris tigris, is rivaled only by another subspecies, the Siberian or Amur tiger (P. t. amurensis) as the greatest terrestrial predator on earth.

Unwilling to abandon its unfinished meal to the looming mass of the intruder, the tiger stretched its jaws wide in uneasy yawning, and with those incisors so close, the elephant was restless, too. Checking our beast's skittishness with heel kicks and harsh grunts, the barefoot mahout who piloted the elephant let it shift in place every few moments to distract the tiger from any impulse toward departure. Eventually the fire-colored cat, affecting vast feline indifference, eased away into the trees, losing itself in the leaf shadow and dappled light of the dry woodland.

In the warming sunlight, as the elephant returned to the road, I fairly glowed with exhilaration, feeling fortunate indeed to have seen a tiger at all. As the new millennium begins, this magnificent species, which once prospered all across Asia, from the Caspian Sea to the East Indies, in boreal forest and hot tropical jungle, from saline mangrove estuary on the Bay of Bengal to alpine tundra in the Bhutanese Himalayas—in every habitat, in fact, except dry desert and rock mountain—has been reduced to remnant populations scattered across the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and southeastern Siberia (where the single sparse population survives in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains).

Of the last tigers left in the wild—estimated numbers range from 4,600 to 7,700—it is commonly supposed that about half may inhabit India and several of its neighbors, including Nepal and Bhutan. The highest estimates are probably optimistic, and in India, where roughly 40,000 tigers could be found at the end of the 19th century, there are probably fewer than 3,000. Even in its last redoubts, unceasing habitat fragmentation and degradation, made worse by relentless poaching of both the tiger and its prey, are hastening the end of one of the most beautiful creatures ever known on earth.

The Indian cheetah is already extinct, and the Asian lion is confined to a single small reserve in the Gir Forest, near the coast of Gujarat. Because there is still hope for the tiger, and because tigers are critical to the earth's biodiversity, I was eager to work with conservation biologists and others who were studying their habits and ecological requirements in order to help save them. Beginning in Siberia in 1992, I made four journeys into tiger country.

In the winter of 1992, I spent three days at the small, exquisite park at Ranthambhore, south of New Delhi, by common repute the most dependable place in India to observe tigers, which commonly arrange themselves in the romantic ruins of old vine-grown stone pavilions at the edges of the lily lakes, and might even oblige the visiting photographer by leaping into the water to do battle with a crocodile over a luckless deer. But that winter, the Ranthambhore tigers were scarce and very wary; the wildlife safari group I was co-leading was warned by the former warden Fateh Singh that even a glimpse was quite unlikely, and in fact, we never saw one. Six months later, it was discovered that well-organized and well-armed local poachers, in collusion with park guards, had killed at least 18 tigers in the previous three years, almost half of the Ranthambhore population. (The immensely profitable trade in tiger parts, feeding the medicine trade in China, was already extinguishing the last tigers in eastern Siberia, Southeast Asia, and Sumatra; it was now epidemic in India, as well. Between 1994 and mid-2002, the Wildlife Protection Society of India documented the death by poaching of 622 wild tigers, and the WPSI believes that this figure represents only a fraction of the total loss.)

In January of 1996, I would see my first wild tiger in the coast range of the Russian Far East—a fire-striped creature bounding across deep sunlit snow in bursts of powder—but a month later, on an eight-day visit to the tiger reserve at Kanha, in India, I saw not one. Not until 2001 did the Indian tigers show themselves, and that big male on the gaur kill was an exciting sight. Yet even before I dismounted from the elephant, I became aware of something missing, something lost—in effect, some elusive aspect of the very different visit I had made to these forests six years earlier. For it was on that earlier trip, when I saw no tigers at all, that I came closest to an affinity with this great striped beast.

Page: