Between the tiger hunter and his prey lies India itself….
Every Indian family has their tiger story. Collectively, it becomes an encyclopedia of tiger mythology. His strength is legendary, a fact acceptable to the ear but frightening if you are waiting for a tiger in the branches of a tree. A tiger can pick up a five hundred pound buffalo and drag it a mile to cover. One tiger is said to have jumped a vertical fifteen foot bank with a one hundred and fifty pound carcass in his teeth. Strength and size combine to make the tiger unpredictable. The timid villager, hearing the softest sound in the black night, may never know whether it is a two hundred pound tigress stalking a chicken or a seven hundred pound male who could knock a house down with one blow in his search for a cow, or an Indian.
The apocryphal mixes with the factual. The European reaches forward, picks up his gin and tonic, and sees the tray and its bearer whisked out through a window by a lithe, striped body. A man and his wife leave their hut in Mysore to visit some friends a few steps away in the village. In a second, the man is widowed and never sees his wife again. Of course, most of the stories of tiger savagery are exaggerated, but in the India of old it was difficult to find room for both people and tiger. And it is true that the tiger ate his fair share of humans. The record for one tiger is more than four hundred victims.
Facts on the tiger may be deceptive and unreliable, but the tiger’s adaptability is demonstrable. He is, of all cats, the most nearly omnivorous. He eats any deer or antelope; he attacks massive guar, the ferocious wild pig, which sometimes kills him, bison, and the porcupine which can cripple or kill him with spines in face and feet. He stalks birds and grub around in ponds and streams for frogs and crabs and fish. He eats snakes and bears, locusts and turtles, termites and nuts, berries and other fresh fruit. ( to be continued)…