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How life in the jungle taught me two lessons We zigzagged through the
south of India until one day we found ourselves in the wildlife reserve of
Bandipur in the vicinity of Mysore. Looking up this part of India in a travel
book today, the book says Bandipur is inhabited by bison, tigers, leopards,
more than a thousand elephants and by birds ranging from blue-bearded
bee-eaters, scarlet minarets and ospreys to herons and ducks. I am reading
that we should also have come across crocodiles and snakes and lizards. I
don’t remember any of them, which could mean that I have forgotten all about
them, which seems unlikely, or didn’t pay enough attention and walked past
without noticing them. Maybe we were just plain lucky that we were still
alive when we left the reserve three days later. I remember
the bison, elephants and birds and whilst the birds were beautiful and noisy,
the bison and the elephants taught me a bit about myself. Like Paul Hogan
years later in the first Crocodile Dundee movie I confronted one of the bison
(I mistook the beast for an oversized cow) and tried to hypnotize him with my
western personality by walking slowly towards him. At a distance of about two
metres the huge beast shook his gigantic head, which made his horns look like
rotating aeroplane propellers, and made me switch into reverse and slowly
move out of the vicinity of the whirling blades. It was not until I moved
backwards that I realized what was going on: that I was trying to show off in
front of Maria and that it was plain stupid, dangerous and served no good
purpose at all. It could have got me killed. This event
took place in a swamp area on slippery ground beside a little lake (possibly
with crocodiles closely watching me). As I moved backwards (watched by Maria)
I decided that from now on there would be no more a need for me to show off
in front of the girl I loved and who loved me, irrespective of whether or not
I confronted an oversized cow. We stayed in
the wildlife reserve for three days. By ’we’ I mean Maria and myself, Amar,
who was about my age and from Bombay, and a guide by the name of Balachandra
who also served as our cook and was allocated to us by the Forest Officer in
Mysore. After a four
hour walk we found ourselves in the centre of the reserve in a little hut and
Balachandra cooked rice and curry. After we had eaten I wanted to help clean
up the dishes but Amar told me that I shouldn’t because it was Balachandra’s
job and if I helped, Balachandra would no longer respect me as much as he
respected me now. Instead of helping him do his work, Amar suggested that it
would be more appropriate if we gave him money. He said: “Balachandra has a
big family.” He then put two rupees on the table and when I also put two rupees
on the table, Amar looked to Maria and I put another two rupees on the table.
Amar nodded and gave the six rupees to Balachandra, who took them and thanked
us and a few minutes later served hot tea which we enjoyed in front of the
hut. We all slept
on bamboo mats on the floor that night in one room. Maria and I were very
tired. When Amar woke us in the morning it was already nine o’clock and
breakfast was ready. Balachandra said that he had heard elephants during the
night and there were also tigers in the reserve and we would definitely see
elephants but to see a tiger would need a lot of luck and could also be
dangerous. After
breakfast we walked through the reserve and came across elephant droppings.
Several times we walked through grass areas where the grass was so high that
we could not see over it and Balachandra asked us to stay close together so
that we wouldn’t lose each other. He stopped frequently and asked us to be
very quiet so that he could hear what was going on around us and it became obvious
that he was afraid of tigers in the high grass. Maria was
afraid. I was afraid too and I think Amar was also afraid, but instead of
admitting it, Amar and I behaved as if it was the most natural thing for us
to walk through grass that was so high that we couldn’t see whether two
metres ahead of us we would walk into a waiting tiger or a leopard. After
several hours of walking we arrived at a large clearing. The clearing was at
least three hundred metres long and two hundred metres wide and surrounded by
forest. The grass was low and here and there we could see a few bushes and
there was noise coming from the forest. “Elephants”,
Balachandra said. We walked
along the edge of the clearing towards the noise and Balachandra told us to walk
quietly and stay close to the forest so that we could quickly hide between
the tress should this be required. As we walked the noise seemed to move away
from us and we walked faster thinking that the elephants were moving away.
When we talked about it later we concluded that the elephants probably hadn’t
changed their position at all and that only the wind had shifted and provided
us with the impression that the elephants had moved. We reached
an area where the edge of the forest became irregular and where parts of the
forest stretched toward the inside of the clearing like peninsulas and
between these peninsulas of trees there were ten to twenty metre wide areas
that were empty and stretched from the clearing into the forest like channels
made of grass. We crossed several of these grass channels and walked fast. We
felt like hunters except that we had neither the experience nor the instincts
of real hunters. We didn’t realize this until we nearly ran into a herd of
elephants in one of the channels. The humans
and the animals saw each other at the same time and while for a few moments
the humans stopped and didn’t move and didn’t say a word, the elephants
didn’t waste any time and got up at once and moved and trumpeted like the
angels of Jericho, except the tune might not have been the same. We, the
humans, found ourselves already half way into the channel and the elephants
were on the other side of it. Not straight ahead of us but about forty or
fifty metres to our right. For a moment the most sensible thing would have
been for us to retreat to the forest area from where we had emerged. Later,
none of us could explain why the elephants did not either attack us or
retreat into the forest area behind them. They decided in favour of a third
option and crossed the channel to our right and headed into the forest area
from where we had emerged a minute or two earlier. All of us
saw where the elephants were heading except Maria who was at the very back of
our group. She was aware of the elephants, the trumpeting and noise and from
her perspective the most sensible thing to do was to turn around and run back
for cover in the forest area behind her. Amar, Balachandra and I ran forward
for cover in the forest area in front of us and Maria turned backward in
almost the same direction that the elephants had chosen for their escape.
Considering the short distances and the considerable speed of both Maria and
the elephants it would have been only a matter of a minute or less for Maria
and the elephants to meet. |