Copyright National Geographic
This story originally published in the December 1997 issue of National Geographic magazine. See more digitized stories from our archives here. I first saw the tigress called Sita in 1986 in Bandhavgarh National Park in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. She lay asleep on a hillside when the elephant I was sharing with the Indian naturalist Hashim Tyabji found her, full bellied after eating from the spotted deer that lay next to her. She was exhausted by the steady strain of having to feed and care for her first litter of three cubs, whose mewing I could just make out from still higher up the slope amid the expectant cawing of crows that teetered in the branches of the surrounding trees. We were just 30 feet or so from the tigress, close enough to hear her steady, sonorous breathing. Over the next half hour or so three more elephants bearing tourists came and went. Cameras clicked. One overeager photographer dropped a canister of film, and the mahout loudly ordered his mount to pick it up with its trunk and return it to its owner. The tigress slept on, oblivious. Nothing seemed to faze her-nothing, 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 terrifled bird with one enormous forepaw and roaring so loudly the sky seemed to split. It was the first 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? He smiled. "Tigers," he told me, "do not like to share." Last spring I was back at Bandhavgarh starting out again at dawn, riding the same elephant with 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 with 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. Limited-Edition Classic Collection Inspired by Earth’s highest peak and deepest point, get limited-edition holiday gifts and a National Geographic subscription. Still, less than ten days after the loss of her fifth set of cubs, Sita was seen mating again, with the big, testy resident male. He is nicknamed 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 us there were already morning sounds: Peacocks called from their nighttime roosts and were answered by the raucous crowing of jungle fowl, gaudy ancestors of the domestic chicken. Gray langur monkeys gave out with the low self-satisfied hooting with which they greet the day and warn one another to be on alert. Ahead of us we could just make out a broad 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. His heart may have been in the right place, but everything he said was suspect. In fact, tigers throttle most of their prey-in the field the distinctive throat wounds left by their big canines often provide the best evidence that they have been at work. And while they do conceal their kills as best they can in brush or leaves or tall grass, they do not bury them. Nor has anyone any real idea how many tigers survive in the wild-the dearth of reliable numbers is one of the most frustrating aspects of tiger conservation. There is no question that the species is in trouble throughout its remaining range, but there is no reason to suppose tigers will all be gone by the turn of the century—or anytime soon after that—provided governments intensify their efforts to protect them, good science is applied to their conservation, and well-meaning alarmists don't convince the public that their rescue is a lost cause. Tigers are generally believed to have evolved in southern China more than a million years ago and then to have prowled westward toward the Caspian Sea, north to the snow-filled ever green and oak forests of Siberia, and south, across Indochina and Indonesia, all the way to the lush tropical forests of Bali. Their modern history is admittedly dispiriting. Into the 1940s eight supposed subspecies persisted in the wild. Since then, however, the tigers of Bali, the Caspian region, and Java have vanished, and the South China tiger, hunted as vermin during the regime of Mao Zedong, seems poised to follow them into extinction; fewer than 30 individuals may now survive outside zoos, scattered among four disconnected patches of mountain forest, probably too few and far between to maintain a viable population ever again. Just four other subspecies remain, and well over half the tigers in the wild are believed to live in India and neighboring Nepal and Bangladesh. When I started writing about the tigers of India in the early 1980s, their future, at least, seemed assured. Shooting them had been banned since 1970, and there were stiff penalties for anyone caught trying. Project Tiger, undertaken at the instigation of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1973, had set aside 9 national parks for special protection (14 more have been added since). The core areas of these tiger reserves, off-limits to humans, were meant to be "breeding nuclei, from which surplus animals would emigrate to adjacent forests." Broad buffer zones, into which human incursions were limited, were to protect the breeding grounds. It was an extraordinary commitment for a relatively new nation beset by other, more pressing challenges; no Western country has ever mounted so serious an effort to save a magnificent but potentially deadly predator in such proximity to its citizens. And it seemed to be working. In 1984 forestry officials declared that the number of wild tigers in India had more than doubled, from 1,827 individuals to better than 4,000. Project Tiger seemed so successful, its reserves were said to be so full of tigers, that some conservationists worried about what would happen to all the surplus animals. Then came the bad news. The assassination of Mrs. Gandhi in 1984 swept from the scene Indian wildlife's most powerful defender. Afterward, as effective political power slowly shifted from the central government at New Delhi to local politicians in the individual states, enthusiasm for defending India's jungles slackened under pressure from ever growing numbers of poor voters who saw them primarily as easy sources of fuel and fodder. The authenticity of the gains Project Tiger had claimed came into question as well. No one doubts that the number of tigers really had risen. But in reaching their ever more impressive tallies, forest officials had relied on identifying individual pugmarks, or paw prints—a system since shown to be inexact—and then, concerned for their jobs if the number of animals under their care didn't steadily climb, some had inflated their findings well beyond the numbers the resident prey base could conceivably have sustained. Meanwhile, the human population rose. Promised corridors were turned into farmers' fields, inundated by dams, and honeycombed with coal mines. Many of the "adjacent forests" to which the corridors were meant to lead simply vanished. There were fewer and fewer places to which young tigers could disperse and more and more conflicts between tigers and human beings. Then, beginning about 1986, something else began to happen, something mysterious and deadly. Tigers began to disappear. It was eventually discovered that they were being poisoned and shot and snared so that their bones and other body parts could be smuggled out of India to supply the manufacturers of Chinese traditional medicines. After the virtual disappearance of the South China tiger in the late 1980s, stockpiles of tiger bones were depleted, and resupplying them became a big business. No one knows how many tigers in India fell victim to this illicit trade, but the figures compiled by Ashok Kumar and Belinda Wright, whose tiny Wildlife Protection Society of India has spearheaded the fight against poaching on the subcontinent, represent only a small part of a very grim picture—94 tigers killed in 1994, 116 in 1995. Most poaching goes undetected, so the real number of butchered tigers must have been much higher. Ranthambore National Park in eastern Rajasthan—with its blue lakes, sprawling hilltop fortress, and ancient ruins scattered through the forest—was the pride of Project Tiger when I first visited it, famous both for the number of its predators and the astonishing ease with which they could be seen and photographed. On one especially memorable day at Ranthambhore in 1986, I was privileged to watch nine different tigers hunting, courting, caring for their young. My guide was the park's longtime field director, Fateh Singh Rathore. It had taken him 18 years of unremitting work to turn a small and largely lifeless former hunting preserve into perhaps the most celebrated national park in India, and he had almost lost his life in the process: Angry herdsmen beat him into insensibility, determined to graze their buffalo in grasslands he was no less determined to hold in reserve for the deer and wild boar on which his tigers fed. He has not been in charge of the park for a decade now, but he still lives on its western edge, and it was he who first noticed that the tigers he had observed for years were vanishing. By 1993, he believes, perhaps as many as 20 had been killed—nearly half of those then thought to be living in the park—so catastrophic a loss that even the tiger's extraordinary ability to rebuild its population may never be able to compensate for it. A sign near the railroad station at Sawai Madhopur proudly welcomed me last spring to the "City of Tigers," and the road that leads out of town toward Ranthambhore was lined with hotels that provide accommodations for thousands of eager wildlife viewers who still come here each year from all over the world. Ranthambhore has always been an embattled island. It is small—just 150 square miles—and surrounded by ever growing numbers of desperately poor people with little time or sympathy for tigers. The area once meant to be a buffer zone had been stripped bare by for aging livestock. And without strong backing from the state government of Rajasthan, forest officials no longer seemed willing to risk their lives resisting encroachment by human beings or their ravenous herds. Nongovernment organizations, most notably the Ranthambhore Foundation, have labored hard to persuade local people to plant trees in the ravaged countryside around the park. They have improved health in some villages, demonstrated alternative ways to feed cattle and fuel village fires, done all they could to spread the gospel of conservation. But the odds they face are formidable. A first-time visitor could easily be deceived. Shimmering peacocks still danced in and out of the scattered ruins, trying to impress perpetually inattentive peahens. Monkeys still perched in the tallest trees, on the lookout for predators. And in the evenings the three lakes around which I once watched tigers prowl in broad daylight still seemed packed with protein-scores of shaggy sambar, hundreds of spotted deer, and big sounders of wild boar. I counted 80 snuffling piglets around one of the lakes, rushing back and forth in furious imitation of their elders. "Lovely sight," said Fateh. "But bad sign. These are easy meals for tigers. Too many piglets are an indicator that predation is nearing zero." There were other bad signs too. No patrols were seen anywhere. Along upland roads closed to ordinary tourists because of "repairs" nowhere in evidence, the once rich meadows through which I had watched tigers stalk their prey were stubble, chewed over by hundreds of domestic cattle whose droppings lay everywhere. Defiant herdsmen from a nearby village had commandeered a guard post on the western edge of the park originally built to keep them out and had scrawled their names on its walls in Devanagari script nearly a foot high—Bharat Ram, Chandra Mina, Dhan Raj, B.L. Mina, Chota Singh—just to taunt the forest department. The Ranthambhore tigers' drive to reproduce remained strong—three tigresses had borne litters in the past 18 months or so—but the big male that is presumed to have sired them all died suddenly last May, after an injury to one of his shoulders turned septic. The forest department now admits there may be as few as nine adult tigers within the park—fewer than are said to have been living there when Fateh arrived some 30 years ago. Since my visit, there has been one hopeful sign. During the monsoon, when even the sere Rajasthan jungle turns lush and green and graziers traditionally drive their herds into the park to feed, a reinvigorated forest staff, armed only with bamboo staves, managed to fend off the graziers for the first time in years. But the line between survival and extinction remains precariously thin. Even if the annual invasion of livestock can be permanently curtailed, if the poaching threat really has eased, and if other vigorous males remain, two or three more fatal accidents could still spell the end for the tigers of Ranthambhore. I asked Fateh what he thought would happen to the City of Tigers if the tiger vanished from the park altogether. "Maybe," he sighed, "they could call it the City of Peacocks." The conservation community was initially stunned by the poaching emergency in India. And there was soon evidence of poaching for the bone trade from Indochina and the Russian Far East as well. Suddenly every gain seemed in danger of being wiped out. Articles began to appear in the press declaring the tiger doomed. "Rather than a cozy feeling from tigerland," remembers John Seidensticker, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., "we realized the tiger was once again in crisis." A big, plain spoken man, Seidensticker witnessed the passing of the Javan tiger as a young field researcher and has never gotten over it. "It was like mourning a death in the family," he says. "My first reaction was to lash out in anger. Since then I've learned that anger alone is a waste of time. We need to learn from these tragedies so they won't be repeated." Those lessons took time to learn. The crisis initially produced denials, recriminations, quarrels over funds among conservation organizations, bickering between advocates of captive breeding and those determined, against all odds, to save the species in the wild. And any number of rescue schemes were put forward, including a suggestion from an overzealous Briton, who sought funds with which to tranquilize and radio-collar every single tiger in the Project Tiger reserves so that a satellite could keep track of them all from space. But real progress was made too. Representatives of most of the 14 tiger-range countries met at New Delhi in 1994 and promised for the first time to cooperate in combating the tiger trade. The next year the Exxon Corporation pledged more than a million dollars annually for a five-year worldwide "Save the Tiger Fund" campaign to be administered by the U.S.-based National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Pressure from foreign governments, including the U.S., helped persuade China and Taiwan to enforce their bans on the trade in tiger bones, and, perhaps in part as a result, the incidence of tiger poaching in both India and Russia appears to have fallen off since 1995. Belinda Wright and Ashok Kumar are not reassured, pointing out that the market for medicines that at least claim to contain tiger derivatives has not shrunk. They suggest that Indian traders have simply become more crafty in concealing their bloody work; certainly the illegal slaughter of some tigers as well as leopards and other wildlife in India continues. And so does the official lack of commitment that allows it to go on. Perhaps the most hopeful sign for the tiger is that serious science is at last being enlisted in its conservation across much of its range. It was early morning in Nagarahole National Park in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Two massive gaur bulls occupied a roadside clearing. Gaur are the largest wild cattle on earth. The elder hadn't yet risen from his night's sleep, but he weighed about a ton and looked, just lying there, like a dark brown mountain. In what seemed to me an unwise effort to intimidate him, his young rival began a slow-motion strut across the clearing on his white stockinged hoofs, carefully keeping in profile so he'd seem still bigger than he already was. He came to a halt beside a sizable bush and slowly roiled its leaves with his horns. The older bull seemed unimpressed. But he lumbered to his feet and, moving at a yet more stately pace, approached a termite mound, lowered his horns, and, as slowly and deliberately as possible, nudged it over. The younger bull waited until the dust cleared, then started gliding toward a termite mound of his own. "This will go on all morning," Ullas Karanth whispered, reaching for the key to start our jeep. He has been coming to Nagarahole for more than 30 years, the last 11 as a field biologist working for the Wildlife Conservation Society headquartered at the Bronx Zoo. "We can come back. They're not going anywhere." But they were. Just as the motor started, a tiger roared deep inside the jungle. In an instant the bulls forgot their rivalry and vanished into the undergrowth; each of them represented a 2,000-pound breakfast to a tiger. Tigers are so beautiful, so powerful, so secretive, so shrouded in myth that the daily reality of their lives can seem prosaic. Tigers do not "roam" the forest as romantic writers like to have them do; instead they doggedly work carefully delineated territories, on the lookout for their next meal—and on the alert for any other predator that threatens access to it. They need meat, massive amounts of it, just to stay alive. An adult Bengal tigress on her own eats an average of 13 pounds every day, 4,700 pounds every year; a tigress with two cubs can demand more than 6,800. That's somewhere between 40 and 70 kills annually. It takes enormous energy to do all that killing observers at Ranthambhore estimated that the average tiger there made ten attempts before it managed to pull anything down—and it is therefore far more efficient for tigers to hunt big animals. The tigers of Nagarahole routinely feast on gaur, favoring them over the much smaller spotted deer that are staples of the tigers' diet in other forests. Karanth and his colleague Mel Sunquist of the University of Florida have shown that Nagarahole provides 32,385 pounds of meat for every square mile, such a staggering amount of prey in so many different sizes that three of India's large carnivores—tiger, leopard, and wild dog—are able to flourish here side by side. But in parts of Thailand, for example, where large ungulates have been hunted almost to extinction, tigers now struggle to survive on porcupines, monkeys, and 40 pound muntjacs. "Indochina, with its huge forests, ought to provide the greatest potential for tiger preservation," Karanth says. "But the prey is all buggered-up." Studies by Karanth, Sunquist, Seidensticker, and others suggest that density of suitable prey is the most reliable indicator of how a tiger population is likely to fare. And history bears them out. Tiger hunting and loss of habitat were once blamed for the loss of the Bali, Caspian, and Javan tigers—and both surely played a part in their decline. But the latest research suggests that it was the loss of their prey that finally made their lives literally insupportable. Karanth doesn't minimize the seriousness of poaching. "If it continued at the levels it reached in the early nineties, it could provide the coup de grâce for the species in India," he says, "and we should be ruthless in dealing with anyone involved in it:' But there will probably always be some hunting, he continues, and a healthy tiger population can tolerate a reasonable amount of it: "Suppose a forest holds 24 breeding females and each year 8 of them give birth to a litter of 3 cubs. That's 24 cubs. In the natural course of things, half the cubs will die before their first birthday. If properly protected and fed, each of the surviving 12 will either disperse or kill and replace an already existing tiger. So in a healthy community there's always a doomed surplus." As long as poachers don't remove more than that number, Karanth argues, the population should remain more or less stable. (If poachers do exceed that number—as they may have done at Ranthambhore—all bets are off.) But if the prey base collapses, if tigresses begin to have trouble feeding themselves let alone their cubs, populations plummet. "If the tiger is to survive in Indochina, governments will have to act fast," Rabinowitz says. "Local people will not save tigers on their own. Why should they? There's nothing wrong with long-term schemes aimed at involving local communities in conservation. But we haven't time to wait for them to work. We need first to find out where the remaining tigers are. Then we need a triage system like the one used in battlefield hospitals, to separate those populations large and strong enough to have some hope of survival from those probably too weak to make it. Finally, governments will have to designate protected areas for tigers, then commit the resources necessary to guard and manage them without compromise. Otherwise, we'll lose the Indochinese tiger." The news from Indonesia is more encouraging. It was once home to the Bali, Javan, and Sumatran subspecies. Now only the tigers of Sumatra remain, and until recently many authorities believed they were about to disappear as well. But findings by a mostly Indonesian team, headed by Ron Tilson, director of conservation at the Minnesota Zoo, suggest that reports of the Sumatran tiger's imminent demise may have been premature. The study area, Way Kambas National Park near the island's southern end, seems an unlikely source of hope. More than half a million people live along its border, and much of the forest has been logged in the recent past, some parts of it more than once. It was thought until 1995 that no more than 24 tigers survived within the whole park, and during the Tilson team's initial 15 months of studying one 62 square-mile section, its members glimpsed individual tigers just twice. But when they used modern methods of counting, including camera traps tripped by passing animals, they discovered that their study area alone—just over one-eighth of the park—was home to 6 tigers and regularly visited by 12 more. They now believe Way Kambas may contain as many as 36 tigers and are training "rapid assessment teams" to survey Sumatra's other parks and unprotected forests to see if tigers are underreported there as well. Indonesian authorities estimate that there could be as many as 500 tigers scattered in reserves all across the island plus another 100 in unprotected areas, and Tilson and his researchers have helped the government draw up a comprehensive management plan to save as many of them as possible. "There's an old Malay saying that attests to the persistence of the tiger's spirit," Ron Tilson says. "'The tiger dies, but his stripes remain.' In Sumatra our job is to provide the information and the means to help the people of Indonesia ensure that both the stripes and the tiger survive." The Siberian tiger once occupied Manchuria and Korea as well as the Russian Far East. Except for perhaps 20 scattered individuals thought to survive in northeastern China and North Korea, it is now confined to a single 625 mile-long strip of mountainous terrain along Russia's easternmost fringe. When the Hornocker Wildlife Institute launched its Siberian Tiger Project fieldwork in and around the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve in 1992, the tiger's prospects looked very nearly hopeless. A series of hard winters in the mid-1980s followed by still harder economic times that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union drove local people, hunting for food, to take an ominous toll on the elk and deer and wild boar upon which the remaining tigers depended. Unregulated logging and mining threatened to shrink the tiger's home. Tiger poaching was rampant. Between 1992 and 1994, 40 to 60 tigers were trapped or shot each year and their bones and skins sold in China. (Siberian tigers are being hunted at night for their body parts.) But in the past three years the situation seems to have improved dramatically. In 1995 Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin called for a national conservation strategy. Patrolling was intensified, the Chinese border was better regulated, and poaching was reduced. During the winter of 1995-96 some 650 men, led by Evgeny Matyushkin of Moscow University, coordinated by American researcher Dale Miquelle, and funded largely by the United States Agency for International Development, undertook a systematic census of the entire region. Nothing so precise had ever been attempted. Tiger tracks were followed, measured, and cataloged over 60,000 square miles of snowy mountain forest. The results surprised nearly everyone—there were signs of somewhere between 430 and 470 adult tigers and cubs, nearly twice as many animals as some had estimated just a few years earlier. The Siberian tiger seems to be slowly edging its way back from oblivion. To continue this hopeful trend, the Hornocker Institute, working closely with Russian scientists, has drawn up a master habitat protection plan aimed at saving what remains of the tiger's beleaguered home. It calls for an inviolate core, a network of protected areas linked by corridors to allow safe dispersal of young tigers, along with careful management of the surrounding unprotected forests to ensure that logging and mining and road building do the least possible damage to tigers and their prey. "In the Russian Far East we remain optimistic," says Dale Miquelle. "Yes, there's still poaching. Yes, there's a lot of logging. Yes, there's too much hunting of ungulates. But there's still a big stretch of more or less intact forest. Human pressure is low—and not likely to rise. If the Russians extract timber at a sustainable rate, if hunters can be persuaded to remove prey at a rate that allows tigers as well as themselves to eat, if the need or desire to poach tigers can be eliminated, tigers will survive in Russia for the foreseeable future." Setting forests aside for tigers is one thing, ensuring that they remain protected is something else again. No one disagrees with John Seidensticker's view: "Tigers won't ultimately be safe until they're worth more alive than dead." But that is a tall order in countries where space is at a premium and millions of people are in need of the food and fuel forests have always provided. To meet that challenge in India, the Global Environment Facility and the World Bank are supporting a 67-million-dollar ecodevelopment scheme aimed at relieving the human pressure on five tiger reserves. And last summer, Tiger Link, a new, all-India network of individuals and organizations, persuaded 320 members of parliament representing more than 250 million people to sign an appeal to the prime minister demanding that the central government reorganize and strengthen tiger protection. More modest projects are also under way. Villagers were encouraged to reclaim and replant more than six square miles of degraded forest on the edge of Royal Chitwan National Park in Nepal and then allowed to keep half the proceeds from tourists eager to view wildlife. In the first year alone they earned $308,000 from entrance fees. Best of all from the wildlife point of view, one resident male tiger, a female tiger with cubs, and two transient males now use the area, and 12 rhinos have given birth within its precincts. Eric Dinerstein of the World Wildlife Fund, who helped guide the project, is delighted. "It helps ensure the survival of the park," he says, "plus it adds to the area under protection. If we don't add more forest whenever we can, we'll end up like curators in a small museum, endlessly cataloging our old collections rather than building new ones." Benefits like these, derived directly from wildlife, seem to offer real hope for the future, though each park and each range country will require its own distinctive solution. Meanwhile, at Chitwan and everywhere else where tigers survive, protection requires strict policing. "It always will," says Ullas Karanth. "There is a criminal element even in the most sophisticated cities. We must deal with it in just the same way." Nowhere is policing more strict than at Kaziranga National Park in the eastern Indian state of Assam. "Only God can keep people from killing tigers in other parks," said Bhupen Talukdar, one of three range officers in charge of its antipoaching effort. He is a fierce, bearded man with bright silver rings on all his fingers. "Here we do it." They do, indeed, though tigers are only the unwitting beneficiaries of the officers' primary concern: protecting the Indian one-horned rhinoceros. A long, spongy floodplain of the Brahmaputra River, Kaziranga shelters more than 1,200 of these massive, myopic beasts more than half of all the wild Indian rhinos left on earth. Like tiger bone, rhino horn is used in traditional Chinese medicine, and a single horn can bring more than $8,000 on the black market—many times the average annual income of the people who live around the park. Between 1989 and 1993, 266 rhinos in India were butchered for their horns. Kaziranga lost 49 animals in 1992 alone. Nevertheless, Talukdar said, "The rhino is in the Assamese psyche. Lord Krishna is supposed to have brought it to Assam to fight an evil king, using it just like a tank. We are determined to protect it." In 1994 he and his two equally tough-minded colleagues—Pankaj Sharma and Dharanidhar Boro—were given the job of waging the day-to-day struggle required if India is to save the species in the wild. Kaziranga has many of the same problems that beset other sanctuaries all over Asia, plus a few distinctly its own. It is small. There is no buffer zone: Villages and paddy fields march right up to its boundaries. Just across the Brahmaputra are crowded camps of poor Bangladeshi refugees, some willing for a fee to ferry poachers to and from the park at night. The state's finances are often in arrears; when I visited the park, neither the rangers nor the army of some 400 guards who work for them had been paid for weeks. The battered rifles the guards carry are no match for the automatic weapons wielded by intruders. Finally, the great river overflows its banks every monsoon, drowning hundreds of animals and driving hundreds more—tigers and rhinos and elephants included—into the nearby hills, where they are easy prey for anyone with a gun. Yet, against all these odds, Kaziranga officials continue to hold the line: Poaching within the park has been sharply curtailed. "We are on a war footing,"' says Dharanidhar Boro, "and we are fighting wholeheartedly." He does not exaggerate. Guards as well as poachers have been killed in the struggle to save this extraordinary place. There are some 120 permanent outposts within its borders. Within ten minutes of the sound of a shot, armed units can be on the scene. An expert rhino poacher might be able to saw off the precious horn and race out of the park again in that amount of time—though at least 20 intruders have lost their lives trying to do just that in the past four years. But tiger poaching in Kaziranga is virtually impossible. "No one can skin a tiger in so short a time'" Tazukdar explains. "And they can't bury it either. The smell lasts for a month. It can't be hidden." The next evening a cow rhino concerned for her calf and agitated by the sound of the jeep in which Pankaj Sharma and I were riding suddenly whirled, kicking up dust, and charged straight for us. Sharma is a big man with a big voice, but when he clapped his hands and shouted to warn her off, she kept coming, amazingly fast, her broad body seeming to float above the ground, head high, ears straining to make out the source of the annoying sound—Mrs. Magoo at full tilt. We pulled away. She lost track of us, slowed, sniffed the air, and went back to grazing. As we headed back to headquarters at dusk each evening, we passed antipoaching squads on the move along the winding forest tracks. These are the authentic heroes of conservation, little bands of two and three men wearing tattered overcoats and armed with rifles, moving through the mist. Without them this magical world would long ago have vanished. That it has not already done so despite the odds is dramatic proof that with help from scientists and support and understanding from the rest of the world Asians can save their own forests; the tiger and its world still have a future. Back on the track of Sita in Bandhavgarh the sun was up, and somewhere high above our heads a hive of bees, awakened by its warming rays, began to hum. The elephant continued to squelch his massive way through the swamp, leaving behind footprints as big around as wastebaskets. There were signs of tigers everywhere. Pugmarks crisscrossed the inky mud. Deep within the grass lay a clutch of whitened bones, all that remained of a chital kill.
