Hunting With The Wolves

AUGUST 17, 1 am. En route to Banvirpur village on the Pratapgarh-Jaunpur border in Uttar Pradesh. We bump into Inspector A.K. Singh, braving an incessant drizzle, on his way back from the village, where yet another child has been carried away by a wolf. Singh has the barrel of his .12 bore resting on the jeep's bonnet, in case a jackal or a wolf comes running into the lighted arc of his headlights. But this tactic also poses a threat to other vehicles and we cautiously avoid being caught in its sweep in the dark of the night, with visibility further hindered by the rain.

Standing precariously next to a pothole, a soaking wet Singh fills us in on the incident. With minor variations, the plot is essentially the same: a wolf preying on an unsupervised child. In Banvirpur four-year-old Nand Kumar Pandey met a tragic fate on August 16 when his mother went to relieve herself in a field. Nand Kumar's sister, six-year-old Sita, was witness to the kidnapping and will have to live with the horrifying sight of the wolf creeping up on her brother and carrying him away.

And the twist that has characterised the series of wolf attacks since March is also there. Initially identifying a wolf as the predator in their statements, both mother and daughter now blame a manhai (a human). "The girl began by saying that it came nuhera, nuhera (low and crouched), the way a wolf stalks, but later changed her story and said her brother was carried off by a two-legged human who cradled the boy on his shoulder." 

Hard-pressed to account for the mystery man, Singh grins as he presents his own theory: "People in this district are a little weak on intelligence." We can't help but grin back at the inspector, a response to both his narrative skills as well as the sense of humour he has managed to retain. In fact, we were acquainted with these humorous touches earlier when the district forest officer of Pratapgarh, R.N. Jha, cupped his mouth and went: "Yeow..ow..ow." Jha was imitating a wolf's howl as part of our wildlife education. But the effect was far from bloodcurdling, simply comic.

But the tragic hits us as soon as we enter Banvirpur, a day after the fresh attack. The police are organising combing parties to locate Nand Kumar's body. The youth of the village shirk from joining in the operation. An old man, with tears in his eyes, berates them: "It could have happened to your own brother." Shamefaced, about a quarter of the youngsters return to the search group. For her part, the mother, Urmila Devi, is unconsolable.

Over the past six months the wolves have claimed 32 victims in the districts of Pratapgarh, Sultanpur and Jaunpur. A physics graduate, Jha has his own theories on this spurt and talks of the threshold phenomenon. It seems that the threshold phenomenon has something to do with photoelectric cells. What Jha is trying to say in his Einsteinian way is that the wolf population has mushroomed, disturbing the eco-balance of the region so that there isn't enough natural prey for the predators. And so, holding forth on the "dynamics of the eco-phenomenon in Pratapgarh", he concludes: "We are concentrating on critically intensive areas." 

Technicalities apart, there's also a question of ethics. While it's just a minority of wolves that have turned maneater, the dilemma facing forest department officials is that there's no foolproof method to distinguish them from the innocent. The result is that the brief for the 14 forest department hunters from Dudhwa and Gonda is to go for the trigger on first sight. So far the official hunters have managed to kill four wolves, three in Pratapgarh and one in Jaunpur.

And it's been a tough chase for the past three months. Says Aftab Ali Khan, assistant wildlife warden of Dudhwa National Park and camp leader of the hunting group: "We have had blisters from the walking we have done at night." Khan lowers his socks to show you tell-tale signs. He is also aggrieved that a hunter of his calibre (Khan has hunted man-eating tigers at Dudhwa) has now beenreduced to hunting bhedias . Khan sighs: "I had to see these days, so I am seeing them." 

A group of nine traditional hunters, whom the district SP Chandrika Rai has called from Etawah, however, specialise in killing wolves. Rasik Lal Behari, their leader, tells you of the time when his community of Gyar adivasis shot hundreds of wolves in Allahabad district in 1962. You have no way of checking on this but the chief wildlife warden in eastern Uttar Pradesh, R.L. Singh, informs you that forest department records don't corroborate the claim.

BEHARI and his team have come prepared with primitive .36 bore guns that have to be loaded with gunpowder and metal balls. This itself is fraught with danger. If they fill the barrel with more than two inches of gunpowder, they'll wind up with a broken collar bone for their efforts. Rai has promised his team Rs 20,000 per wolf killed. They subsist on a daily food allowance of Rs 200. Sub-inspector G.S. Tripathi, whom the SP has deputed to keep an eye on the hunters, runs them breathless every night. Behari and his men claim they have shot one wolf but have nobody to prove it. But it doesn't stop them from claiming a little 'advance inam ' from the authorities.

All of them have been hunters since birth, learning the skill from their fathers. In fact, the guns they carry have all been earned as rewards from district magistrates way back in the '50s and '60s. Just one of them bought his own—for Rs 35 in 1955. All of them are expert trackers, skilled in pug mark reading; and since there aren't enough guns to go around, a few carry spears. Back home, all of them are into agriculture or protecting fields from wild animals on a contract basis. Camping at the village of Mehuli for the past 10 days, the hunters are a little wary of going far afield. The wolf trail has become a complex hive involving politics, comedy, rumourmongering, settling scores and oneupmanship.

To make matters worse, the villagers have not taken kindly to the presence of strangers. There have been 10 lynchings by villagers in the past six months, provoking the police to arrest more than 100 people. Law and order problems have been compounded by chakka jams which villagers resort to after each killing. Says Rai: "It's a strange area. Fifty per cent of the villagers are not willing to recognise the fact that the killings are animal-oriented. They think humans are responsible." So much so that villagers refuse to keep a vigil for the wolves and don't even inform the hunters about wolf sightings.

LOCAL politicians are turning the man-predator myth to their advantage. Says an exasperated Rai: "Elections are nearing and getting crowds is easy if the netas too blame it on humans. Once this neta gene gets into something, it changes the whole complexion of the thing." Rai himself has had pamphlets distributed in villages appealing to residents to make sure that children below the age of 10 sleep indoors, to organise village patrols at night, and not to give credence to rumours or be violent towards strangers.

Seventy-year-old Surya Kant Mishra has this to say once he barges into our hotel room under the impression that we are a SWAT team sent from Delhi to kill the lakadbaggas . " Huzoor, it's about 10 feet tall and can jump 60 feet. It has got four light bulbs on its head and one each on its feet. The lights come on once it jumps and they are so bright that if you look into them, you are blinded for two days." Mishra insists his is an eyewitness account. He says one of his relatives saw the creature and was so overwhelmed that he had to be given a glucose drip for four days.

Mishra's apparition also sprinkles powder on victims rendering them unconscious. Munnu Lal of Mehuli village thinks the creature attacks from the heavens and the hunter should turn their searchlights heavenwards and catch it in descent. Others say the killer has bulbs on its waist, wears a helmet, has springs on its feet and can jump 50 ft. An educated villager informs you it could run faster than Ben Johnson and jump farther than Carl Lewis.

Faith in these theories is so strong that hunters are viewed with a fair measure of contempt. The general refrain: don't waste your time looking for something that doesn't exist. Wolves have never been seen in their villages and it's odd they should suddenly abound now.

Another contention is that the half-devoured corpses have knifelike cuts on their torsos. No animal, villagers insist, can do that. But says R.L. Singh: "The wolf makes clean cuts with its incisor. That's a known fact." S.H. Prater's The Book of Indian Animals confirms this: "The (wolf's) incisors are well adapted by their shape and forward position for stripping skin from flesh to make an entry into meat." The wolf, in short, doesn't bite flesh off the victim.

And the wolf hasn't taken to child lifting recently either. In 1981, Hazaribagh district in Bihar saw six wolves turn man-eaters. Fourteen children died and 16 were wounded and it took hunters 10 months to kill the pack of six. In 1871, 624 children were killed by wolves in the Allahabad, Lucknow and Pratapgarh regions along the river Gomti and Sai. About 2,500 wolves were decimated to put an end to the killings.

Says R.L. Singh: "There's no know-how available to counter the wolves except to kill them." The chief wildlife warden also has a litany of theories: "Either all the wolves are living as one community or there are man-eating pairs operating in different parts of the district." While the wolf population in the district is estimated at around 125, just 20 per cent of them, on an outer limit, are child lifters. What's made the job of the hunters difficult is the inherent intelligence of the wolves. Explains Singh: "They don't return to have a second helping of their victims. They haven't yet touched a village twice and they have a radius of operation that can stretch to 35 km in one night. That's 70 km in all. There's the saying that the legs feed the wolf. It's true. It really works for a living."

 Since no two attacks have taken place in different places on the same night, R.L. Singh veers to his big community theory. At the same time he also propounds the "many packs" theory because Mandatta tehsil, the area where forest department wardens shot dead three wolves, hasn't seen any further killings.

He goes on eerily: "I sense the wolves have a way of communicating their new-found skills to other members of their community. It's a territorial animal and maybe the only way child lifting wolves can infringe on the territory of innocents is by assuring them that they won't touch natural prey. Just limit themselves to children."

For their part, the hunters are going full steam ahead with the task at hand. Says Ram Raj Gautam, wildlife warden at Gonda: "We are following wolves now. Not wolf pug marks." Though tracking is dif-ficult in the rainy season when the wolf turns into a tramp taking advantage of dense foliage and the many corridors of movement, the hunters are undeterred. States Khan: "We want to finish them off and go back home. It's starting to get on our nerves now."

 With the arrival of Behari's team from Etawah, an element of competition between the two groups of hunters has also been introduced. The wildlife wardens feel the pressure more, and though Jha welcomes the presence of the team we can feel the tension in the air when the traditional hunters are mentioned. Says Jha: "The hunters can do pug mark reading; that's why we have no objections. But we are keeping a close watch on them." 

But Behari's team notched its first success on just its 10th day by nailing a female wolf at Mehuli. When they reported to Jha the next morning, the Pratapgarh DPO reportedly didn't seem too enthusiastic. Maybe because the night before he had missed one of them after taking a jeep shot from his .315 rifle. But such anecdotes provide no solace to the harried villagers. Caught in a web of theories and hunters' egos, they resort to the oldest of defences: prayer.