I will never forget the day I met Arjun. He was the most beautiful creature I had ever laid eyes on. Menacing but beautiful eyes, 500 pounds of pure, natural muscle, limbs that could tear through you. But at the same time so dignified and truly awesome. Deep in the reserves of Ranthambore, he was a three-year-old male tiger; one of the handful left in the one well-populated forest reserve. And I mean well-populated in terms of tiger population. If you look at human numbers, the reserve was flourishing, filled to the brim with tribals and collectors of fruits and whatnot from the forest. Collecting was their prime occupation.
It took us a while to get used to Arjun. My mentor had much more experience with tigers and was a natural tracker. I on the other hand nearly got killed when I ruined an almost-kill for Arjun. I stepped on a twig and scared off his prey. He was furious. With that I pretty much ruined any chances I had of him allowing me in his territory.
After several months, the fierce king of the forest was ensnared in a trap. Literally. I was setting up the tiger counting system when I heard strange, almost pitiful noises from about 50 feet away. Our hearing improves vastly in the silent parts of the forest where the animals tend to live, away from preying poachers and humans. I followed the noise and found Arjun.
It really was pitiful. His front left leg had got trapped and was mangled. He was patiently trying to stop the bleeding by licking it but I knew that would not help. He snarled at me and tried getting up, but he couldn’t, and fell back down with a cry. He would not let me help him, so I did something I promised myself I’d never do.
I sedated him with a dart. I stitched him up, managed to saw off the trap, gave him an antibiotic shot and prayed he would be ok. Then I noticed how skinny he had become and set off to find him some carcasses. I wandered for what felt like several hours and managed to get a deer’s carcass which had been ensnared in another trap. The poor thing had bled to death. I noticed it was a lactating female and could only hope that its little ones would be looked after by the herd.
When I took it back to Arjun, he was in the same place. He refused to eat it in front of me. He limped away, presumably to his hiding hole. I wanted to check on him desperately, over the next few days. But I held myself back.
My mentor told me finally, after about a week, that I should go look for him. I found him near his hole, lapping from a tiny, almost non-existent puddle of god-knows-what. And I started weeping, cursing humans furiously. He looked at me with his big eyes and did not make any move towards me. Nor did he snarl, though.
The trap had caused damage in his limb, which may never heal. As I followed him around the reserve, I noticed he found it much more difficult to find his own food, and began helping him. Slowly he grew to trust me.
By that time I had also got a tigress to soften towards me after I rescued two of her cubs from another male tiger, and once prevented her from eating a poisoned cow. In the former situation, she found the carcass of her first cub and wandered the forest with its body for almost two days before letting it go.
After a few years, when Arjun healed, he even managed to mate a few times and began to regain his stature in the ecosystem much to my joy.
Arjun died nine years after I first saw him, when I was away from the reserve. He was old by tiger standards, 12. His arthritic limbs did not allow him to hunt very well anymore and he was weak with no food and high summer temperatures in his environment. A combination of those two killed him quite fast, I judged when I saw his body.
By that time we were strong friends. I had developed a mechanism to call him and once he even managed to find me when he was in trouble, in his last years when his arthritis was bad and he was starving. I cried publicly and privately for the first tiger who ever let me in to his home, when I was just a novice in Ranthambore.
People say I’m crazy when I say my first real love was for a tiger. A dead tiger now. But other environmental conservationists will understand exactly what I mean.
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anyone can support tigers.
read more: http://www.truthabouttigers.org/home/?page_id=5
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