We were just 30 fet or so from the tigress,close enough to hear her steady, sonorous breathing.Over the next half hour or so three more elephant bearing tourist came and went.cameras clicked. One over-eager photographer dropped a canister of film, and the mahout loudly ordered his mount to pick it up whit its trunk and return it to its owner. The tigress slept on, oblivious. Nothing seemed to faze her-noting, until a rufous-and-white tree pie smaller than a north American magpie fluttered down onto her kill.She was up and fully awake in a millisecond,swatting at the terrified bird whit one enormous forepaw and roaring so loudly the sky seemed to split.
it was firt time I'd been so close to so much tiger anger.I was thrilled but frightened too,and looked to Hashim for an explanation.Why had she become so furious so fast?
Quality time:With her belly fully,Sita nuzzles one of her trio of six-month-old cubs.Their home in Bandhavgarh's 268 square miles was once the royal hunting grounds of the maharajas of rewa. The park now shelters nearly 50 tigers and their prey.He smiled."Tigers",he told me,"do not like to share".
Last spring i was back at bandhavgarh staring out again at dawn,riding the same elephant whit the same mahout,and looking for the same tigress.
Sita is nearly 16 now,unusually old for a tigress in the wild, and she has given birth to 18 tigers over the 11 intervening years.Just seven made it to adulthood.The rest died or disappeared: One young male was killed by an adult male seeking to displace the cub's father; and his sister drowned in a monsoon flood; a female cub struggled whit physical deformities, then seemed to waste away. And all three offspring from Sita's fifth litter-born in march 1996-died two months later. No one knows for sure what happened to them.
Still less than ten days after the loss of her fifth set of cubs, Sita was seen mating again, whit the big, testy resident male. He is nick named charger because of his enthusiasm for doing just that, once clawing his way up the back end of a tourist elephant when it got too close and in the process traumatizing the visitors on board
The forest was still dark as we set out, and our fleet of five elephants moved along in almost total silence . but around ou there were already morning sounds: Peacocks called from their nighttime roosts and were answered by the raucous crowing of jungle fowl,gaudy ancestor of the domestic chicken.Gray langur monkeys gave out whit the low self-satisfied hooting whit which they greet the day and warn one another to be on alert.
Ahead of us we could just make out a board stretch of swampy grassland, where i hoped to see Sita again and, if i was very lucky, catch a glimpse of the new litter of cubs said to be somewhere in the area as well.
