Shikar Stories Read online

  The Rupa Book of

  By the same author:

  Angry River

  A Little Night Music

  A Long Walk for Bina

  Hanuman to the Rescue

  Ghost Stories from the Raj

  Strange Men, Strange Places

  The India I Love

  Tales and Legends from India

  The Blue Umbrella

  Ruskin Bond's Children's Omnibus

  The Ruskin Bond Omnibus-I

  The Ruskin Bond Omnibus-II

  The Ruskin Bond Omnibus-Ill

  Rupa Book of Great Animal Stories

  The Rupa Book of True Tales of Mystery and Adventure

  The Rupa Book of Ruskin Bond's Himalayan Tales

  The Rupa Book of Great Suspense Stolries

  The Rupa Laughter Omnibus

  The Rupa Book of Scary Stories

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  The Rupa Book of Travellers' Tales

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  The Rupa Book of Shikar Stories

  The Rupa Book of Love Stories

  The Rupa Book of Wicked Stories

  The Rupa Book of Heartwarming Stories

  The Rupa Book of Thrills and Spills

  The Rupa Book of

  Edited by

  Ruskin Bond

  Selection and Introduction Copyright © Ruskin Bond 2004

  First Published 2004

  This edition 2010

  Second Impression 2011

  Published by

  Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd.

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  Contents

  Introduction

  The Tiger and the Terrier

  By Brig.-General R.G. Burton

  A Letter from the Jungle

  By 'Nimrod'

  A Further Letter from the Jungle

  By 'Nimrod'

  The Panther and The Shepherd

  By C.H. Donald

  Indian Lions

  By C.A. Kincaid

  Some Panthers

  By C.A. Kincaid

  An Adventure with a Tigress

  By N.B. Mehta

  The Midnight Visitor

  By C.A. Renny

  Hunting With A Camera

  By F.W. Champion

  Drought in the Jungle

  By F.W. Champion

  Shooting in the Doon

  By John O'Lynn

  Hunters of Souls

  By Augustus Somerville

  Encounters With Big Game

  By 'Surfield'

  On the Banks of the Narbada

  By 'Nimrod'

  The Haunts of Isabeline

  By C.H. Donald

  Introduction

  ome hunted for sport, others for commercial reasons. Some hunted for self-protection, or to rid an area of a dreaded man-eater or cattle-lifter.

  Sixty and more years ago, the forests were extensive, wildlife abundant. Hunting was the sport of kings, officers and gentlemen. You were pretty low on the social scale if you had not bagged a couple of tigers. Big-game hunters, amateur shikaris, surveyors, administrators, all had their own thrilling experiences to relate, and many of these factual accounts appeared in the magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, a period when the popularity of "shikar" was at its peak. Some wrote under their own names. Others used pseudonyms, possibly to hide the fact that they had been spending a great deal of time away from their official duties! With one exception, none of these stories has appeared before between book covers. They have been selected from my collection of Indian State Railways magazines of that period.

  It was a period when the walls of almost every official or civilian residence were adorned with the mounted heads of tiger and panther, or the antlers of chital, sambhur or antelope. But not everyone who entered the jungle went in with guns blazing F.W. Champion of the Indian Forest Service, was a pioneering wildlife photographer who preferred to do his shooting with a camera. His books, With A Camera in Tigerland and The Jungle in Sunlight and Shadow, reveal a knowledge of the jungle, wildlife and natural history equal to that of Jim Corbett or Kenneth Anderson.

  Indeed, most of the writers represented in this collection— C.H. Donald, C.A. Kincaid, Augustus Somerville, C.H. Dawson— acquired an intimate knowledge of the jungle and its ways: Somerville, in his wanderings as a Surveyor; Kincaid as a curious and well-read Civil Servant who served in many parts of the country; Donald, who spent many years in the hills around Simla; 'Nimrod', who loved the Narmada....

  About five years ago, when I was taking an elephant ride through the forest of the Rajaji Sanctuary near Hardwar, the elderly mahout who was my guide told me that he had been Champion's mahout when he was just a boy. He showed me plenty of wild boar, cheetal and sambhur, but alas, there were no longer any tigers in the area; they had all gone, shot into extinction in the 1950s, when the Indian nouveau-riche plundered the forests of what little the British had left behind. It was really the coming of the jeep that helped. finish off the larger carnivores. No longer dependent on elephants or beaters, shikaris could drive along the narrow forest roads, and many used powerful headlights or searchlights to render these animals helpless targets.

  As a boy, I had the mortification of being on some of these expeditions, my stepfather being an inveterate poacher. But on one occasion the hunters were hunted. Their jeep backed into a nest of vicious red ants. In a twinkling the shikaris were covered with the brutes, all intent on finding the softest portions of the human anatomy, biting with vicious little nips. The expedition beat a hasty retreat.

  Another creature that is more than a match for humans is the big bee, common throughout the country. When disturbed it will attack both man and beast with the utmost fierceness.

  There are many stories about the big bee and its vindictive ways. Two shikaris were resting between beats one hot May morning in the jungle. One of them unwarily lit a pipe. Overhead spread the crown of a talk silk-cotton tree with a dozen great combs of the big bee attached to its branches. Resenting the intrusion and the pipe smoke, the bees lost no time in launching an offensive.

  It was an utter rout, and the elder of the two shikaris, a respected bald-headed Colonel of H.M.'s Regiments of Foot, led the retreat, which was lacking in both dignity and strategy. They fled towards the open country, and when the bees finally left them, the Colonel had to all appearances suddenly grown a stiff crop of bristles all over his pate. It took a lot of attention, profane language, and soothing ointments to get rid of all those beestings.

  The Animal Kingdom is made up largely of two great groups of animals, the predators and the preyed upon. This also holds good for the insect world. In the words of the old jingle—

  Greater bugs eat lesser bugs,

  And so on, ad infinitum.

  There was a time when tigers were prevalent throughout the country, and the depredations of man-eaters and cattle-lifters did justify
the hunting of these predators. But motives were often mixed, and hunting as a sport usually took precedence over hunting for the protection of villages and their livestock.

  What is clear from the writings of these shikari-sportsmen is that many of them grew to love the jungle—camp life, the great outdoors, the richness of flora and fauna. From being hunters, a few became naturalists. And, once the jungle wove its spell, these men would return to it again and again. Not for gain, as is the case today; but for the feeling of freedom that only the jungle could give them.

  "The pleasure of shikar is not all in successful results," wrote 'Nimrod'. "The joy of living the jungle life; the peace, and the being so close to nature, is the greater part of sport. And so, though without trophies, we are content and strike our camp, to proceed to other jungle resorts without any regrets in our minds."

  This represented the attitude and outlook of the finer type of sportsman.

  Ruskin Bond

  Landour, Mussoorie

  The Tiger and the Terrier

  By Brig.-General R.G. Burton

  here was a time when "griffins", as newcomers used to be called, expected to find tigers in their gardens and snakes in their boots when they went to India; but even thirty years ago such ideas were no longer prevalent, and were supposed to be found only in the tales of those eminent Anglo-Indians, Colonels Monsoon and Bowlong. But I was no novice when I arrived at a military cantonment in the Deccan in November 1898 and observed what a "jungly" appearance it presented. Indeed, my first walk induced me to remark to my companion on the tigerish look of a nullah which ran through the place and was at that time overgrown with the luxuriant foliage of the rainy season.

  But there were, so far as we knew, no tigers within a radius of fifty or sixty miles, and no jungles to hold them, although a tomb in the old cemetery recorded that an officer had been killed by one of these animals ten miles off about seventy years before this time. A tiger requires extensive jungles for its wanderings, and the country around us was now mostly under cultivation with some sparse bush and wasteland on the hills. Yet, even then, all unknown to us, a tiger was padding his way towards the cantonment, and he had been seen, as I learnt long afterwards, by an old friend, a Muhammadan Mullah who Was waiting in ambush for more harmless animals near a pool and whose heart "turned to water" as he expressed it, at the sight of a monster such as he had never seen before. Leopards he was familiar with, for they were plentiful in his district twenty miles away, but the greatest cat of all was strange to him.

  Adjoining the large compound in which my house stood was a garden some acres in extent containing a bungalow now empty, the dwelling place of a missionary who for many years did excellent and devoted work in the surrounding country. Here, in his absence a gardener was employed to keep the place in order. Only a day or two after my arrival from leave in England, the gardener came over to say that he had seen what he described as a leopard lying down in the verandah of the unoccupied bungalow. Such simple people are prone to exaggeration, and it was thought more probable that the animal was a wild or a large domestic cat. However, with a few followers and two sepoys we two turned out with our rifles, only to find the verandah empty. The gardener was, however, so sure that we decided to beat through an extensive patch of long grass in the compound, into which the animal must have retreated.

  The two guns took up a position on the farther side of this patch while the men walked in line towards them. Suddenly, there was a rush and a roar, and not a leopard but a well-grown tiger, whose voice was at once recognisable, broke from the cover and sprang over the hedge, disappearing in a moment without giving the guns time to fire a shot. The tiger had made off as soon as it was disturbed, but in passing found time to strike down one of the sepoys and inflict some severe wounds on his back

  and shoulder. He was taken to hospital and made a good recovery in the course of a few weeks, although not in time to accompany us on the annual tiger-hunting expedition. No doubt, he had enough of tigers to last him the remainder of this life!

  We then followed the tiger, which had disappeared in an adjoining compound. More "guns" had arrived and we walked across the open accompanied by Sal, the bull-terrier, who soon turned the tiger out of a shallow nullah that ran along the hedge on one side of the compound. The animal fled, followed closely by the gallant Sal and by several bullets, fired to the danger of spectators in the vicinity. It was already growing dusk. The tiger had taken refuge in a deep and dense hedge, from which we tried in vain to dislodge it and in which it could not be seen. Darkness came on with the usual rapidity and suddenness. With the aid of lanterns we attempted to make out the lurking animal, but although we went up close and peered into the hedge, nothing could be seen. It was a situation not without danger, especially as the beast had probably been wounded and was certainly angry.

  There was nothing to be done but to leave it until morning, when the tracks were taken up where they crossed the dusty road, one halting footmark showing that the tiger was going lame, as indicated also by a few drops of blood. It had evidently retreated soon after nightfall, and a mile farther on it had slaked its thirst at a pool in a nullah on the edge of the cantonment. It then made towards the low hills where the velvet-footed beast left no impression on the hard and stony ground. We beat through the surrounding country and day after day I rode many miles round in the direction taken by the tiger, but no trace of it was found until five days later when a man was seized in a field near a village six miles off; he was mortally wounded, his insides being almost torn out of his body. The unfortunate villager was able to speak, and before he died he related that he had been scaring birds in the Jowari (millet) when he heard a peculiar noise and on going towards the spot from which it came he was seized by the animal, which rushed out upon him.

  We went to the scene of the tragedy which was in a field where the jowari grew to a height of six or seven feet. There we found the poor man's staff and cotton cloth, a pool of blood, and the tracks and a strong smell of the wild beast. We followed through the field and beyond, where the tracks were again lost on hard ground in a wide and rocky nullah. Dog Sal, though so keen and brave in the face of the enemy, seemed to have no nose for tracking.

  We encamped upon the spot and next day beat through the nullahs in the neighbourhood without results. But the animal had to be killed. The whole country was in a panic, the people afraid to go out to work in the fields, and we feared to hear of more deaths, for the tiger, so far as we could ascertain, had taken no prey, and must be hungry and desperate; it is of such stuff that man-eaters are made. The district in which the animal had been lost sight of was hilly and broken, containing little water. It was obvious that it would have to find water to quench its thirst; even in normal conditions tigers are impatient of thirst, and doubly so when hunted and wounded. A mile or two across the hills we came to a nullah where there were fresh tracks, and we found a pool where the animal had watered; it was evidently lying up in the adjacent jungle.

  We took post while Sal and the men beat through the cover, and the tiger soon broke and galloped across an open strip of ground pursued closely by the bull-terrier barking close at his heels. The chase disappeared in a patch of dense bush and after a succession of roars, howls, and barks Sal emerged, torn and bleeding from extensive wounds in the chest. Still the brave dog wanted to go in again and seek out her enemy, and had to be restrained.

  Showers of stones and small shot failed to make the tiger move or give evidence of its situation. Night was coming on and we did not wish to leave it to another day which might involve a further prolonged chase and endanger more lives. Three of us, including a famous Indian officer who still resides near the scene of this encounter, crawled into the bush. After a long search we came suddenly upon the tiger which lay facing us, its eyes blazing in the gloom of the jungle, and appearing ready to charge, but a few shots put an end to its existence.

  Poor old Sal was fat, heavy, and not very active, or she might have escaped the crue
l claws; as it was she lived a fortnight, and eventually died of exhaustion when the wounds were already healing up. She was photographed with her bandages on the day before her death. The tiger was a male, probably between four and five years old and over eight feet in length. It had a wound which had splintered a bone above one of the hind feet, which showed signs of healing, but must have caused much pain and discomfort, no doubt sustained in the first encounter; there was a slight wound in the flank from a bullet fired when it was driven out on this last occasion, and the final shots were in the chest and the centre of the forehead, where the Subadar-Major's bullet had pierced the brain. The dead animal was carried back to the cantonment, where thousands assembled to view the bold beast which had given so much trouble, and which, they said, had come in search of one who had killed so many of its kind.

  Mention has been made of snakes, which were exceedingly abundant in this part of the country. A krait one night left its skin on a teapoy at the bedside; Russell's vipers were numerous, and one that lay in the doorway of a bedroom was nearly trodden upon, but was fortunately betrayed by its loud and persistent hissing. So, tigers in gardens and snakes in bungalows are not only to be found in the tales of our old Indian officers, Bowlong and Monsoon, at any rate they were met with thirty years ago.

  The cantonment where these episodes took place has been long since abandoned, and the echoes are for ever silent which once resounded with the tramp of horse and foot and the thunder of guns. In those days the line of rail was nearly hundred miles distant. But should any now wish to travel to the scene of these and many other adventures, or to visit the battlefield where the greatest of English generals gained a famous victory, they need not traverse the long and dusty road along which the pony-tongas used to labour in days gone by. For, they can alight from the train within a mile of the spot where the invading tiger lay up on that November day.