To a Mountain in Tibet(6)
Gently it starts to rain. At first we ignore this, but underfoot the path grows treacherous, sometimes winding 300 feet vertically above the river–and for the first time Iswor stops not for me, but to rest his burdened back against the rock. Then we change into waterproofs, and go on. Now water surrounds us. It churns through the ravine below, gushes out of every rock face, sheets down from the sky. I raise my face to it, hoping that it augurs the monsoons at last. Two and three hundred feet above us waterfalls loose themselves from the cliffs and spill down past giant ferns and bamboos almost to our feet. Here, where the Karnali squeezes between sheer walls, a narrow path has been hacked from the cliff side. We peer dizzyingly down to glimpse the river boiling through a canyon hung with vertical crevices, black and yellow. Beyond, the land grows ever more savage and precipitous. Our stone-littered track goes switch-backing emptily for miles. Intermittently, when the rain clears, we see the 23,000-foot snows of Saipal Himal to our south. The only person we pass is a cheery Bhotia woman smoking through a clay tube and cradling a potful of cannabis.
An hour later, in weak sunlight, we stop by a rocky overhang. Evening is coming on. We munch on cheese and biscuits, and Iswor dozes. Idly I spread a map on the ground, trying to locate our position on a grander scale: Dehra Dun…Lucknow…Ladakh in the north…Lhasa…Delhi…Then, with a shock, just beyond the border in India, I glimpse the name. Naini Tal! It strikes me with a strange, sad excitement. I’d sometimes wondered where it was. Eighty years ago my father had served in India as a soldier, and Naini Tal sounded through my childhood with a boundless romance. Incredulously I measure the distance again. On the map it is only a hand’s breadth away from where I sit (or 140 miles, as the crow flies). Naini Tal, Bhim Tal, Chanda: they were engraved on shields beneath the mounted heads of leopards and deer in my parents’ dining room. Naini Tal was the hill station from which my father had hunted big game.
I lie on the rocks, dreaming into another age. I found his hunting records preserved among early photograph albums after my mother’s death. The episodes these albums embalm are, I suppose, the expected ones of their place and time: the callow young officers in pith helmets and knee-length shorts, marching in the scrublands of the Central Provinces or jokingly astride their Enfield motorbikes; the army wives and daughters in perms and cloche hats; scenes of pig-sticking and the Madras Hunt.
But my father’s shikar records were different. In these he became solitary, perhaps himself. As early as 1925, at the age of twenty-one, he was departing alone into the jungle. The accounts of his hunting are as detailed and exact as if he were on campaign, penned in white ink on the black pages of photo albums. The hand-drawn maps–pinpointing areas of tiger, blackbuck or mouse deer–are meticulous, even beautiful, and his observations sometimes have the near-scientific exactitude of a Victorian explorer’s. The qualities that made him a wartime soldier, I realise, were first put into practice here.
Leafing through these records, I sense too the strangely intimate bond of hunter with prey, especially with the big cats–‘old man stripes’ he calls the tiger that eludes him, ‘old man spots’ the leopards he kills. Mixed with the sportsman’s chivalric code–the strictly selected victims, the shame and distress at wounding–I hear the fascinated voice of the naturalist he had youthfully wanted to be. He applied an almost loving attention to the animals he was slaying: their gait, their sounds. The sharp pook of the sambhu and the deep, eerie owoon of the tiger make a noise in these pages not only for their significance to the hunter but as phenomena in themselves.
My father grew up in another age. Game was fairly plentiful in India then, and its killing accepted. The deer and pig he shot were eaten round the campfire, and leopards threatened local livestock and even children. Yet sometimes I struggle to understand. I gaze at the young man, my father, posed unsmiling above his kill. A great black bear is sprawled like a soft toy before him, its legs stiff in death; he squats above a seven-foot leopard carcass, or sits on the haunch of a dead bison, his Winchester against his knees. But the photographs are no more than blown-up snapshots, taken by his tracker, and his face looks less resolved than I ever remember it, and I do not know him.
Was it easier, in those times, to kill? Once, while he was hunting leopard, he wrote, ‘A fine male bear came through the jungle from behind, and stood on a rock, all four feet together, sniffing the air very suspiciously. He appeared pretty silently without any previous warning, as is usually the case. Finally he came forward a little way, darted back, and then walked off at an angle from my tree. This necessitated a hurried shot in the kidneys, when the poor creature started whimpering like a human child. Two more hurried shots put him out of his misery.’
As a boy I liked to lie on this bear–it had been turned into a rug by then, complete with stuffed head–and to rest my face on its own.
For my father, the terrain around Naini Tal rose steeply eastward around minor Ganges tributaries before reaching the Karnali, where I now lie in the sun. He described it as ‘rolling tree jungle’, reaching to thick pine forest, and it was here that he shot the huge leopard that snarled for sixty years on my parents’ dining room wall. He was only sad, he wrote, that my mother did not witness the kill–he had been married three years by then. The month before, with my mother Evelyn crouched in the dark beside him, he had shot a leopard near Hyderabad. He wrote simply: ‘Took neck shot. Although many dead leaves, no sound. Eve very thrilled.’