Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Of leopards and men - 2

The wild elepahnt was dead too.I mean the first one I saw.
I was driving along the road when I saw a group of people in the adjacent field crowding around what looked like a huge steel grey mound from a distance. I stoped the car and went over. I saw a huge tusker lying on its side, very much dead. The forest officials examinning the animal told me the elephant had been eletrocuted. A herd crossed this field the previous night and this one must have raised its trunk and touched the HT lines that passed above. A silent,instant and tragic death for such a magnificent animal.
This was way back in 1974 during my first and short stint in the Dooars. When I returned to the Dooars in 1989, I stayed there for a much longer period and travelled extensively by road. This was when the Dooars with its neverending tea gardens and forest reserves,its abundant green cover and natural beauty charmed me. I came across wild elephants - single, in twos or in a small herd - on the road on number of occassions.I first met a leopard too this way, very much alive and bright in the headlight of the car I was in. It slunk away noiselessly into the roadside bushes.

Many of the leopards of the Dooars reside in the tea gardens, I was told once by a forest official. The gardens provide enough bush cover and nooks and corners for their shelter and possibly rabbits,goats and dogs provide them enough food. I have not heard of any special liking they have for men or women, but attacks occassionally do take place when any of them feel treatened or cornered by fortuitous circumstances.

I had spotted the leopard very near the campus we lived in. I saw it in fact on more than one occassion when a colleague told me that a leopard had been sighted inside the campus and some stray dogs were missing. I am no lover of dogs, more so stray dogs which disappear overnight and would not have been much concerned at such a development but my colleague had a dog of his own and two small children. He had reasons to be worried and felt we could not allow a leopard to have a free run inside our living area. However much we may like a wild animal, it should better be left in the wild and there only .

Good point. So we contacted the Forest department. It was quite prompt in arranging a large cage to be placed in a bamboo grove, actually a mini forest , on one side of our large campus. The cage had a partition of iron bars in it with two entrances on opposite sides. A goat was to be caged in one partiton as a bait while the other was left open for the leopard to enter, should it ever be so tempted.
A goat was accordingly arranged, kept in one of the partitions and provided enough grass and fodder to munch and sustain itself.
Days passed without any sign of the leopard. The goat continued to grow fatter and possibly become more juicy. After about ten days when we had almost given up, the leopard struck one night (or rather we struck gold ) at around 8 o'clock. We rushed to the spot with torches and found a young leopard growling and plunging again and again on the cage bars, its nose bruised and bleeding with the skin on its nose lacerated in its futile attempts to escape. The trap door on its side of the partition was shut unmercifully. On the other side, a short distance away stood the goat, like a statue, totally transfixed in mortal fear. A strange sight indeed, of the predator and the prey - almost within touching distances
It was difficult to pull the goat out, it had to be dragged out literally through the other door. Life came back to it when it was out of the cage and it fled with lightening speed without even stopping to say thank you.
We felt pretty bad for the leopard and contacted the forest people . They advised us to cover the cage with tarpaulin to make the inside totally dark .We were told that this would calm the animal down.That was how we left the leopard, inside the cage, to contemplate its fate which turned out fine eventually as the forest department took it away the next day and released it in the jungles where it belonged.

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