Borrowed from the night

There is an hour in Tadoba, after dawn, which is borrowed from the night. Now all the animals of shade and darkness meet the dawn souls on their way to the day. Now still the chital shriek, telling the day that deep in the forest night's tiger still walks. Plum-headed parakeets dart from their roosts, dropping their bright calls to earth, and peacocks waft from the trees, sweeping the dust with their great night-starred tails.

Chital bucks, calm now the unseen tiger is gone, strut mechanical and bow their antler-heavy heads in show, moaning gruffly to their tear-eyed females. Nearby the sow-eared sambar skip on swift hooves across the rocky track.

This new day is full of noise: red-vented bulbuls burble happily and magpie-robins cut the cool air with their sharp, lovely talk. Grey junglecocks call shrilly all around and over dry percussive leaves a spurfowl scuttles.

The wild dogs dance in this dawn light too, four of them madly weaving in a glade, like shoaling ocean fish. And stately walks a leopard through the groves, its dapple and the bamboos' dapple and the dawn's dapple melting and melding into one.

All this we see and hear and feel and touch in this rare hour borrowed from the night, including, yes, the first Indian leopard of my year and of my Big Cat Quest.


Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii            3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus        2
lion Panthera leo nubica                          78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                   3
jungle cat Felis chaus                               1
tiger Panthera tigris tigris                          1

leopard Panthera pardus fusca                1

This morning I...

... watched northern plains grey langurs, chital and sambar to my heart's content...

... was so respectful of the tiger and its need for space that I failed to see one...

... helped my new friend Vihan, aged nine, to make a list of the birds we had seen together...

... and met a common trinket snake which had been rescued in a village last night and was released around the lodge tonight.

This afternoon...

... I caused our jeep's driver and allocated park guide to have breakdowns by insisting, with my guests, that we drive away from a tiger. Maya, the tigress we all saw yesterday, had been found late in the morning asleep right by the Navegaon road where most jeeps saw her. This afternoon she was still there, though now further from the road under a bush. There was a crush of jeeps on the road and it was hot so, my guests having seen her much better in the morning, we decided to leave her and look for other wildlife elsewhere. Our driver and park guide, relatively new to this game and used to guests who are interested in the tiger alone, were incredulous and refused to budge. How could we be so stupid as to want to move away from a tiger? We left her in the end and spent a lovely afternoon trundling through this beautiful park by ourselves, watching barking deer and ruddy mongoose, oriental honey buzzard and black ibis. By the time we left the park the tigress had still not left her bush.

Wagh

A tigress walked into my life at eighteen minutes past six this morning, a female known officially as P2 and affectionately as Maya, meaning illusion. She strolled, confident, along the road ahead of our jeeps for no less than an hour and forty-two minutes, stopping sometimes to sniff a tree, then to spray it with a swift lift of her tail, stopping once to drink from a chai-coloured puddle, disappearing once for a few minutes into dense bamboo. At thirty-eight minutes past seven she slumped into the road ahead of us and twenty minutes later - precisely - she stood and wandered on. Two minutes afterwards, on the dot of eight, she slipped between bamboo stands and was gone.

I am a guest naturalist at Svasara, a pretty, friendly lodge by the Kolara gate of Tadoba National Park. For the ten days before my own Naturetrek Tiger Direct group arrives, I have been taken under the generous wing of Ranjit and Nandita and their team of naturalists, and put to work guiding the lodge's guests. Yesterday in the afternoon my four Indian guests from Pune saw chital, sambar, wild boar and many birds. This morning they saw, for more than an hour and forty minutes, their first tiger, relaxed, about her own business along a jungle road.

At breakfast, by the Navegaon gate, from where a whole community has recently been moved, for the safety of the village and its livestock, and hence the safety of the tigers, I ask Svasara naturalist Jignesh about our tigress. From her face I had guessed her age at four years. Jignesh tells me she is five. 'When were you last here?' he asks. 'In 2012,' I reply. 'Did you see the female with four well-grown cubs at Pander Pouni?'

I did. I have seen this tigress three times before, as a youngster. And many times since in my mind.


Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii            3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus        2
lion Panthera leo nubica                          78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                   3
jungle cat Felis chaus                               1
tiger Panthera tigris tigris                          1

A worried tiger at the Navegaon gate

Said tiger's footprints

Genuine tiger's footprint, a male

Jungli billi

My driver's name is Gajanan. This alone is enough to know that he is Marathi, from Maharashtra where the elephant god's many names - Vighneshwar, Ganpati, Ganesh - are sacred. As we drive from Nagpur he tells me of his village, his cattle and his buffaloes. Soon though our conversation, in my stumbling Hindi and his, in his stumbling English, and sometimes rapidly in his mother Marathi, must die and we are happy to smile silently in one another's company.

I am waking as we drive, not just from my five o'clock start and my two hours' fog delay on the airstrip in Delhi, but waking to central India, remembering as we go: the fresh glossy leaves of neem, washed by a great rain two days ago; the purplish terracotta breast of a laughing dove puffed in song; the silk cottons heavy with today's new scarlet flower.

In a ripe field of cotton a cotton-clad woman stoops ghostly in white; by her are the ghost nests of last year's baya weavers. Beanpole boys pass with bundled burdens on their heads, as strong and slender as the tall teaks in whose little shade they tread. The scytheblade horns of sagging buffaloes sway past fields of fat, whiskered wheat and happy golden sunflowers.

For twenty minutes we pass a great train of Rajasthani gypsies. (I try to discern a more appropriate name for their culture but all Gajanan can muster is 'gypsy'.) The women blaze in red, magenta and gold; their hundreds of lop-eared cattle, all are dark tan and handsome.

By the road I hear and see the buoyant, dreaming flight of black-shouldered kites, the hunched shoulders of long-tailed shrikes, the chipper trill of purple sunbird males.

Gajanan stops the car. 'Wild cat,' he says, 'Rat is coming.' In the shade of an acacia on the bank of a rice-paddy ditch crouches a jungle cat, relaxed but purposeful. 'Very difficult to see,' he tells me in our stammering Hindi. 'Tiger you see, but not jungli billi.'

I beam. I am nervous, yes. The excitement of seeking tigers always makes me nervous. But I beam at the sight of my first jungle cat of the year, my second Indian cat in 2015. I beam to be here, happy to be embraced again by central India, her birds, her mammals, her flowers and her people.

Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii            3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus        2
lion Panthera leo nubica                          78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                   3
jungle cat Felis chaus                                1

I took my soul to the sky

I took my soul to the sky. In Ladakh, where I went, bold eagles hold the snow-clenched mountaintops and lammergeiers' daggered wings slice the day. In winter here the rivers freeze but, underneath, their waters drum a cold tattoo, flowing deep as they do to the Indus in its milder valley. Motion and motionlessness: this is winter in Ladakh.

Motion is in a flurry of horned larks over dusty fields and fields of snow. Motion is in the falling flakes and in the clouds which bring them. Motionlessness is in the mountains. Or almost, for as the triangle of India pushes north, orphaned these many million years from her mother Gondwana, these mountains inch their way to the sky. To which I take my soul.

I inch to the sky too, in the helter skelter of choughs on the morning wind. I inch to the sky in the scree-shifting feet of the blue sheep up the heady slopes above my tent. I inch to the sky in the trunks and twigs of winter naked poplars. They take my soul to the sky.

Here in the sky lives a cat. A nothing nowhere night-borne cat whose name is shan. It is here and I am here and the cold same air sears our lungs both. I met this sky cat two years ago here, since when it has gnawed at me with the same ferocious hunger with which it gnaws at sheep it kills.

It comes. It fills the valleys with its sky-big eyes. Slips, silent on the scree, through the dusk and the day's birth, above our temporary canvas world. It sits on a mountain crest, a thousand metres from us, yet in us. Its great tail strokes the sky as it bounds down the mountainside away.

All things else are nothing in the presence of this cat. The eagles its messengers, the ibex and the sheep its quaking people. We are its witness, blessed few who know this mountain winter cold, the stark wonder of these valleys.

While still it roams these mountains, silent over scree, the sky cat roams my soul and I must come to see. The cold and the hard ground, the bare air and my dry, nose-burning breath are nothing. For the sky cat calls. And I, its soul prey, answer.

I took my soul to the sky.

An iPhone in Hemis

Hemis National Park in winter is a place of rare beauty. During our stay there I took these photos of its landscapes, its harsh grandeur, its friendly people and their livestock.

Denzel the yak

On our first night a client heard a landslide.
It turned out to be the latrine collapsing.

Crossing a frozen river in the Rumbak gorge

Scanning for snow leopards

My tent in the snow

Denzel selfie

Sonam's snow leopard print

The younger Sonam

Chosphel

Konchok

Angchok and Norboo

Konchok searching Rumbak Sumdo

Angchok and a marsh tit

Petroglyphs in the Husing Valley

Latrine repairs in progress

Temporary tent latrine

Iced water. The coldest night this year reached
eleven degrees below zero. 

A camp dismantled

The older Sonam, an expert snow leopard spotter

How Naturetrekkers celebrate their return to Leh
after successful snow leopard watching

A video diary from Hemis National Park

Yesterday we reached Leh after six demanding, remarkable days and nights in Hemis National Park, camping in the snow and watching snow leopards, blue sheep, large-eared pikas and lammergeiers. Today, after a delay of three hours due to bad weather, we reached the warm, thick air of Delhi. Tomorrow I am busy all day here and the following morning I travel to Maharashtra to begin my search for tigers, Indian leopards and jungle cats. In the coming weeks I will share many words here on Hemis and the wonders it offers me each time I visit. For now here are the videos I made in the park in the past few days.