A sportswoman's account of hunting Himalayan black bear; Isabel Savory's hunting exploits in Kashmir; snatches of narrative that reveal the hunter's zeal to protect his hunting grounds all feature excitingly in this book. The Nilgiri Game Association, founded in 1870, made strict quotas for hunting so that the "cloud goat" or Nilgiri Tahr could survive. These were some early efforts at conservation. There are also exciting descriptions of wild elephant captures around Mysore and training of cheetahs to hunt. And a whole section of Jim Corbett's writings on the man- eating leopard of Rudraprayag add to the mixed bag.
At the end there's a fascinating description about tigers in Bastar and the trailing of a maneater of that region. This is my favourite extracted from Tigers in Bastar R. P.account, Noronha. Amidst lovely descriptions ofby the Indravati river, two gentlemen are a maneating tiger. In between they to enjoy the beauty of the area and fishpausetracking for the giant Mahaseer. Suddenly a big fish is hooked. As the race to haul it in begins, the maneating tiger amidst the chaos, slowly walking to theappears river to quench his thirst. While one man grapples with the fish the other rushes and knocks a bullet into the tiger which collapses in a heap! But in the frenzy of fishing the two gentlemen forget the tiger and spend the next thirty minutes bringing in the fish! Bastar then was a wildlife paradise, today it's been torn apart by mines, dams and timber mafias.
Since this anthology's about hunting and shooting, the book should have ended bysome of the horrific records of the lastrevealing two centuries, so a reader could get a sense of the countless species that have been made extinct or endangered. Such hunting records also bring home the impor of protecting nature and create an understandingtance of the way the bullet tore apart India's wildlife.
Past accounts of the forests of India are also treasure- troves of information; they reveal the remarkable richness of the wild-life in those times. What also becomes clear from the anthology is that all these so- called sportsmen and hunters played a very crucial part in the destruction of this wildlife, spraying as they did, countless bullets on everything they saw. But can we learn something from these accounts of the past? Can we prevent future extinctions? Can we prevent natural habitats from vanishing?
Mahesh Rangarajan has expertly extracted accounts from over two centuries, but some of the places described do not even have a standing tree left today! There must be thousands of more accounts that lie in diaries and books across the world. Let's make sure that in the next century we don't write the epitaphs of a whole bunch of species and forests because if the natural world continues to vanish, as it has done in the last century, it will spell disaster for humankind, and all that we will have left in the future are books on a shelf.
