Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [2]
The tiger is patient. The tiger knows how to wait. Nature does not make mistakes when she is handing out camouflage.
It had been a fine, lazy morning, replete with sightings of creatures as common as the crow and as rare as the jungle cat. Foraging chitals and sambars roam the hills and plains of Kanha. Wild boars snuffle unseen in its capillary network of narrow gullies. Blue-bellied rollers and green barbets flash between trees like strips of metallic foil riding the wind. Gaurs, a kind of wild cattle, loll near small streams or in mud wallows. The distinctive call of the muntjac, or barking deer, crackles through the forest.
Most impressively, Kanha is where the barasinghas have made their last stand. From a single surviving group of sixty-six, the Kanha herd of these striking swamp deer now numbers in the hundreds—a rare success story in a world of declining species and shrinking habitat.
Lulled into a semi-somnamublistic state by the heat and the steady, monotonous plodding of our patient elephant, I didn’t see the tiger until our excited mahout quietly pointed it out, and then I had to look twice. The powerful, muscular two-year-old male was relaxing on his belly to the left of a tree, as inconspicuous and hard to pick out as one of its roots. He was not trying to hide. He didn’t have to try. Nature took care of that for him. Had it not been for the sharp and experienced eyes of the mahout, we would have ambled right past without detecting him.
Now that I knew where to look, however, I could see it clearly. How could I possibly have missed it before? The cat was huge, between 300 and 400 pounds of pure predatory power at rest. Stripes blending into coat. Coat seeping into trees and bush and rocks. I immediately found myself mesmerized by two particular components of this magnificent representative of the order Felidae. It was not so much that I wanted to focus on them. They compelled me to do so. I found myself inexorably drawn to them.
They were the eyes and the teeth.
At the moment, the eyes were inclined upward. Tracking the arc of a bird, perhaps, or checking some suggestive rustling in the branches overhead. The deceptively soft mouth was open as the tiger, panting, sought relief from the midday heat. The exposed canines—they were longer than my middle finger—bright and gleaming and perfectly white, as if their owner had just had them cleaned by a local dentist. Reposing in the cooling shade as if fully aware of his own inescapable majesty, thick tongue flopping, massive body heaving slightly, he was just as I might have imagined him: all barely contained brawn and quiet magnificence. Then, almost absently, he lowered his eyes and looked straight at me. We locked. This is what his eyes said, accentuated with mild interest and palpable speculation.
I can kill you if I want.
In that instant, my tiger looked something other than magnificent. A connection had been made as piercingly and effectively as if I had stuck a finger into a wall socket. It was not the first time a glance from a carnivore had made me feel like meat, but it was the first time I had sensed genuine contemplation behind the look: calculation in addition to evaluation.
I can kill you if I want.
That stare shrank the distance between us as effectively as a fold in space-time. Though I had been told that the tiger would consider me as part of the elephant atop which I fortunately was riding, I no longer felt completely at ease. My belly was calm and relaxed, but mentally the relationship between the cat and I had undergone a radical change. I knew what that gaze meant. Knew instinctively. Remembered it from thousands of years of my forebears having been torn apart and consumed by long-dead relatives of what had instantly morphed into something far more immediate and visceral than a singular tourist attraction.
Having silently and effortlessly made his point, the tiger casually returned his attention to whatever had drawn his gaze into the tree’s upper branches.