Hugh Allen’s shikar stories make the
reader side with the hunted, perhaps because the author himself belonged to
that side.
David Davidar “devoured Jim Corbett” as a boy. Yet, in his
foreword to The Lonely Tiger re-published after 54 years, Davidar
claims that Hugh Allen’s is “quite simply the best book” on tigers and shikar
in India. He is right.
Discharged from the British army after WWII, Allen settled
down with his widowed sister Babs on an estate by the river Denwa in the
Satpura-Panchmari tiger country around the same time when Corbett sold the
Gurney House and left for Kenya with his sister Maggie. Allen hunted the
crop-raiders and also went for the odd maneater and cattle-lifter in the
vicinity. He picked up his pen late and, “of all the forms of self-torture”
found writing to be “the most exquisite”.
Allen’s prose has the rare ability of creating drama without
being dramatic. He builds up the atmosphere effortlessly and a ready dash of
humour is a potent antidote to any impression of heroism. His absorbing tales
also offer a casual insight into the ways of animals and forest communities and
the excesses of hunting in the first decade of Independent India.
Not surprisingly, long before wildlife biology became science,
Allen had grasped the distribution dynamics of carnivores. “When he (a leopard)
came to us he was not really unexpected… they usually respect another bad man’s
territory and seldom poach until the rightful owner has either moved away or
been destroyed… We had a ‘vacancy’ (in the estate) for I had just shot a
leopard which had been playing hell for some time.”
At a time when harping on India’s traditional tolerance for
wildlife has become fashionable, Allen’s observations are refreshingly
objective. “The jungle man is pretty much of a fatalist whenever a tiger starts
killing his cattle and he seldom makes an effort to stop it… (but) when a tiger
starts killing them (people)… In no time at all, and over a wide area, parties
of men armed with spears and axes were going out with the cattle.”
Allen believed in practical trade-offs too. “The monkeys…
always do some damage” but “they might even save your life for they will often
tell where a tiger or a leopard is hiding after a badly placed bullet”. The
last bit about injury is important. “The idea that a tiger is… liable to attack
on sight is shared by nearly everyone unfamiliar with the jungles. The tiger is
seldom dangerous until provoked and in its normal state… wants so little to do
with man that it will always stay out of sight if it possibly can”.
But, cautioned Allen, “the odd chance does occasionally turn
up and you meet a tiger bent on mischief”. In almost all cases, such
exceptional behavior was the result of “criminally careless shooting” by
poachers leaving the animals wounded. Allen could not have imagined that in
decades to come a reckless management policy of trapping and packing off
so-called straying wildlife to distant forests would trigger similar aggression
in traumatized animals.
The wounded, however, allowed Allen to give his hunting urge
a full rein. “There are no qualms about pulling a trigger then: a wounded
animal, be it dangerous or not, is one of the most pathetic sights I know and I
would rather see it dead.” For the record, Allen did pull the trigger at least
once “without meaning to” and regretted killing a healthy tigress who never
gave him trouble.
More often than not, Allen’s shikar stories make the reader
side with the hunted; perhaps because the author himself belonged to that side.
From his wooden armchair built permanently into the fork of a giant tree thirty
feet above a pool in the nullah that ran through his estate, Allen often spent
entire nights watching animals coming to drink. “For no shot is ever fired from
the chair; the pool is a sanctuary and I like to believe that the animals know
it.”
It was from this lonely perch that Allen first spotted the
tiger cub that would soon lose his mother, and subsequently his sister, to
poachers. When Allen worried about the orphan, the young male showed up one
afternoon. “…He was staring intently at a leaf blowing over the surface and
drifting towards him. When it came within reach he started to dab at it with
his right front paw, but with a touch so gentle that his pad was the merest caress
on the tiny tip of its curled up sail. From that moment, I always called him
the Lonely Tiger.”
No, you have not read any other shikar book quite like this.
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