Chasing elephants from their home

But for the long tusks, the elephant is successfully camouflaged. Its huge black body merged into the darkness of the woods, the wild elephant would have escaped our eyes if Ramakrishnan had not whispered: Aana, aana…. The tracker was already chasing the evasive elephant when the forester goaded us to a solitary watchtower protected by a ditch. A lone tusker is dangerous. A maimed one could be fatal.

The tusker had its tail cut, probably in a duel with another bull without tusks. We follow Ramakrishnan on toes for another glimpse of the beast. But we are comically lost, a group of civilized men on open ground chasing a seasoned animal in the woods. The Short-Tailed One won’t take any chance. It retreats. Later, when we have exhausted our patience, he would cross the road to the other part of the forest.

The 344-square kilometre Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary has the highest density of wild elephants in India, around 1.5 per square kilometre. We have been walking the forest for over four hours and the Short-Tailed One was our only catch. It’s just luck, forester K T Rajan and guard Ismail console us. They show us the Narimunda Lake, where elephants submerge themselves in summer.

Rajan is new to Muthanga forest range. He has had to pick up 17 human bodies trampled by wild elephants during his stint in the nearby Tholpetty range. The rising man-animal conflict is a cause of concern in Muthanga, an important junction that connects the Wayanad Sanctuary to Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu and Bannerghatta and Nagerhole National Parks in Karnataka.

C Sunil Kumar, the photojournalist who named his daughter Prakriti (Nature), had no hesitation in siding with the animals in this conflict when he called me up a couple of days ago to confirm my participation at the annual nature camp organised by Kerala Union of Working Journalists. “We have no existence without the forests. So there can’t be any compromises in the little battles to save the forests,” he said.

Predictably, Padmanabha Venugopal and I were late for the camp. When chief conservator of forests W S Suiting welcomed us at Muthanga, Sunil and the other journalists were getting ready for breakfast after an early morning trek. Suiting and his subordinates gave us a picture of the forest. The dominant theme is the battle of the species. Men settled along elephant corridors, elephants encircled by human colonies.

“The government has plans to relocate settlements situated on the elephant corridors. We have already relocated a hamlet in Thirunelli,” Suiting said. The herd of elephants encircled by farmers’ settlements is prone to inbreeding, which may result in genetic mutations. They often raid the farms. To make matters worse, a lone tusker which ventures out of the forest is blocked by the excited farmers from going back.

In the evening, Ismail took us on a brief walk through the sanctuary. We went up to the memorial of Chemmad Jogi, a tribesmen shot by the police on February 20, 2002. Jogi and Vinod, a cop held hostage by the tribesmen, were killed in a violent police repression on tribesmen agitating for land. Ismail joined the service four months later and was not a witness to the bow-and-arrow vs. .303-rifle battle.

In the night, a galaxy of stars descends to the ground. Wild eyes caught in a powerful beam of light. Deer no longer fear men in this area of the sanctuary open to tourism. They graze close to our dorm. In a few months cottages will come up in this part. The forest department has marked certain areas for tourism in Muthanga and Tholpetty ranges. Enthusiasts can trek or go on a safari in the daytime.

At the start of our trek in the morning, we are given strict instructions. We are supposed to walk in silence. Elephants have bigger and better ears. They would sense human movement from a distance and remain still. The moment the unsuspecting men breach its personal distance, it would charge. Elephants have a feline knack of movement. Last night, a native was telling us how someone saw an elephant walking on a narrow culvert meant to protect tribal farms from wild animals.

Dineshan too starts his day. The captive elephant is said to have the longest tusks in the state. He and two other kumki elephants help the forest officials in their sojourns in the wilderness, chasing their wild cousins when they stray to the countryside or help healing them when they are injured. The department no longer traps wild elephants for its use. Dineshan goes to his grazing field and we to the wonders that don’t wait.

A peacock flees to the bamboo forest as we go round a teak plantation. Planted by the British in 1917, Muthanga has one of the oldest teak plantations in India. More than half the sanctuary is consisted of teak and eucalyptus plantations. A Supreme Court order has banned any intervention in protected sanctuaries. Nothing can be taken from or given to the forest. Even a tribeswoman collecting firewood from the sanctuary is an offender, thought officials are not so strict.

Ismail spots a pugmark. Male tiger, he proclaims after measuring it. Masculine foot can be drawn in a perfect square while feminine is out of proportion. Rajan takes a break to tell us about Panthera tigris, the king of this jungle. It grows up to 250 kilograms and feeds on deer, gaur and macaques. The lithe animal can even pin down a gaur, which weighs four times his own body weight. Sense and speed makes tiger the ultimate killer.

Tiger strikes only when it is hungry. And he eats to the last fibre of his prey. If tiger is the king who controls the animal population, elephant is the lord of the jungle who ensures rarefied vegetation. He fells the trees that hamper the other’s growth. In what may seem to us a rampage, the big beast is working out a breathing space for the wild vegetation. Natural laws govern the seemingly strange patterns in the wilderness.

Nothing goes waste here, Rajan says. It is said that if an animal falls by his left side, it is fit to eat. If it’s on its right side, no carnivore would touch it. The carcass will rot away. The left side of death is an unproved theory. The spotted deer found dead near our dorm this morning was on its left side - fit to eat. But I am not sure if the guards would remember the rule when they abandon the carcass inside the forest after postmortem.

We are in the moist deciduous forest. Every summer, this forest would stand naked with its trees shedding leaves. Officials have to work overtime to prevent wildfire. A fire would tilt the balance and trigger animal migration in search of food and water. The inter-state migration of herds is difficult to track. Every census has a large margin of error given the animal’s lack of linguistic loyalties.

Amid strange trees, karimaruthu (Terminalia elliptica) is stranger. Its bark resembles a crocodile but its hunches strike parallels with a camel. The tree stores water in its trunk. In the dry months, thirsty tribesmen split open the protruding water belly of the fire-resistant tree. Rajan shows us a fruit which is an antidote against leeches. Even in this dry season, there were a few bloodsuckers to greet us.

We reach an open space with no undergrowth. A line of common langurs goes in our opposite direction. They are on a trek too. We eat wild gooseberries and drink sweet water from a virgin spring. At 11 am, we reach a motorable road. If we return through this road, we would reach our camp at noon. We refuse to return. One of us asks Rajan if he can return alone. “You may. But its usually loners that the animals target,” he replies.

We resume our journey. Just before we turned from the road, Ismail spot another tiger pugmark. The predator had his foot over the mark of a tire. The jeep in question, carrying a group of picnicking girls, started almost the same time as us. We missed the tiger who was standing at this spot around an hour ago. Metres away, Ismail spot a leopard pugmark, smaller and sleeker. Our friend was in no mood to return alone.

We hear monkeys quarreling on the canopy of trees. In Tholpetty, Rajan was accompanying a group of tourists when they heard such a great commotion overhead. An agitated langur. The spotted deer below fled to safety. Hanuman langurs and spotted dear have an unwritten pact of signaling each other against predators. This time the mutualism didn’t help the whistleblower, who panicked and fell to the waiting tiger’s jaws.

As we were resting atop a fallen tree at another open ground before returning to the dorm raided by Hanuman langurs, Ramakrishnan whispered: Aana, aana…

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