Ranthambore, Day 3

Keerthana had dreamt about peacocks the whole night. Vijay said he woke up with “Jungle mein more nachha kisine na dekha…” buzzing through his head. Back to the Canters: we were told that the authorities might become unhealthily curious if we insisted on cornering the Gypsies every day, so we were breaking and re-forming our groups daily. Today’s Canter has Jogi for our guide. Away we went, straight into Zone 3, stopping at the bottom of the hill for our check in. Those peacock dreams were coming true – by the steps leading to the temple on the hill was a peacock, spreading out his tail, alternating between showing us the ‘eyes’ and then turning around. In the excitement of watching the dance, we missed trying to get record shots of the Slaty-headed Parakeets we had seen at this spot on the first day.

Again we went to Padam Tal, hoping that yesterday’s luck would hold. The rangers told us that T28 was seen near the border of Zones 2 and 3 and if we get across quickly, we might sight him before he disappears into the forest. Our setting off was held up for a few minutes because one more peacock went into its dancing frenzy. We drove up and down the track; the Hanuman langur’s booming calls warning us of the tiger’s presence a little distance away, prompting us to swerve to the right, while our companion vehicle goes the other way, trying to triangulate the tiger’s position. The sunlight dappled with shadows on a sambhar’s hide leads us to mistake it for the tiger; another sambhar belling swings us around on to a higher road, the tree-tops on our left level with us as the ground fell away. And it was while we were distracted in trying to identify a raptor that Jogi spotted him; T28 was lying at the foot of a small nullah, about 80 feet below the road we were on, near a patch of water. “I knew the water here never dries up, that’s why I was looking for him here”, said Jogi. The narrow, rising path, cliff-face on one side and a drop on the other, vehicles ahead and behind jockeying for position, was not the best position for watching the tiger. Yet, it took a while before Sekar figured out what that reddish patch, just ahead of the tiger’s paw, was. A sambhar fawn’s neck had been gashed and the tiger was unhurriedly relishing his kill, letting the waters lap at it while he fed. Then we saw her, waiting in the bushes near the water; T17 was hoping to get a share of the sambhar and was waiting to see if she would be lucky. T28, however, did not seem to be in a mood to share; picking up the sambhar by its back, it gave us a glimpse of how the great cat ‘drags’ its kill – in reality, carrying the dead animal rather effortlessly. Not that T28 carried it far away, just across the water, as if to let T17 know that it was futile to wait. Fortunate to have had seen one more of the tiger’s behaviours, we did not want to hang around for much longer, and came back, hungry for our own breakfast.

We had so far stuck to the straight and narrow for our own food. Toast, cutlets, omelettes, paranthas and juice made up the standard breakfast. After a 4-hour drive, we really needed the full spread to get us back to action – especially today, when a few of us were headed back to the buffer zone of the National Park. The public is allowed entry to the top of the hill, where a dargah shares space with a Jain temple and a temple to Ganesha. Descriptions of the hill started off with a 300-step climb; last evening it was resting at 175-steps, but those who actually went up today estimated it as being less than 100-steps. Having become acclimatized to the heat over the past couple of days, it was possible to enjoy the wonderful view from the hilltop – ranging from the east to west, the whole of the core forest and the buffer zone is visible from the top, as are the chattris on the nearby cliffs. In its time as the hunting grounds of the Rajas of Jaipur and Sawai Madhopur, servants scanning the forest for the tigers’ movement, would have manned the chattris so that the Rajas could arrive at the right place at the right time. They appear rather forlorn now, embarrassing reminders of the tiger’s decimation over the years.

After lunch – again, standard but lip-smacking fare of rotis, dal, vegetables, rice and curd – we saw more of the Rajas’ hunting infrastructure. At the Raj Bagh is the hunting palace, at the edge of a large lake. Seated under the canopies of that palace, the Rajas could watch everything happening around the lake; the sambhar, chital and nilgai coming to drink, the langurs in the trees warning of the tiger stalking them through the tall grass, the muggers floating around until they spot their prey and the multitude of birds – we saw lapwings, godwits, stints, ducks, terns, gulls, storks, spoonbills, ibises, drongoes, mynas, sandpipers, plovers and stilts – incessantly milling around, all of them ready to rush away at the first hint of danger. Kanhaiya, our guide and Munir, our driver for the afternoon safari kept their ears open for the calls and we moved from one side of the lake to the other, but the tiger was feeling the heat and wasn’t moving out from wherever it was lying hidden. There was another animal working for its food, however. In a small offshoot from the main lake, a mugger was trying to drag a sambhar carcass across to where it could make a meal of it. That was part consolation for not seeing a tiger, but more comfort was had from our spotting teals and a flock of Pallas’ Gulls riding the water at the edge of the lake. Not giving up on the birds, we were rewarded, first with Ezhumalai sighting a Changeable Hawk-Eagle and then, as we headed out, with a grand sighting of four nests of the Long-Billed Vulture, one of them with a white-headed chick waiting for its parents to return.
Dinner was adventurous. We traded our normal ‘north-Indian’ food for Rajasthani cuisine – dal-bhatti-churma was the dish of choice for dinner, a specialty chef being brought in to make it for us. The bhatti, broken up and soaked in dal (or kadi, if you like), loaded with ghee, with some of the sweet churma mixed in, was traditionally Rajput soldier food – easy to transport, keep-fresh bhattis and churma, with only the dal to be prepared on the battlefield – providing nourishment and energy without much fanfare. The bhattis disappeared quite quickly, though they didn’t seem to have made much of an impact with the kids – or maybe it was just that they were preoccupied with Chennai Super Kings’ abject batting performance in the semi-final.