Read Online The Sun in the Morning by M. M. Kaye - Free Book Online

I saw it many years later — faded by time to a pale beigy-grey and denuded of most of its hair by reason of being walked on for so long. It still retained a claw or two, and Cull gave me one as a memento of his friend and my father’s first tiger. That is the one I still have. Tacklow was not a keen
shikari
. Only one more tiger and, much later on, a single tigress, fell victim to his rifle. And I fancy those, like that first one, were lucky flukes, because he was the first to admit that as a marksman he was firmly on the wrong side of ‘average’.
    To any animal-lover-cum-conservationist who reads this and immediately suffers a rise of blood-pressure, I would like to point out that back in the last century — and right up to the day that the Raj ended — the tiger population of India was very large. Too large, according to the villagers who suffered most from their depredations. It was only after the British left and every peasant who could afford it bought a gun and a woodman’s axe — using the former to kill any wild animal that preyed on his crops and his cattle, and the latter to hack down trees and decimate the jungle in order to increase his holding — that the number of tigers, together with their one-time habitat, began to shrink like a water-hole in a year of drought; almost to vanishing-point. And if anyone does not believe this, I would suggest that they write to the headquarters of the World Wildlife Association and ask for the actual figures: which will (I hope) shock them more than somewhat.
    Among my favourite
shikar
stories were those that Tacklow told me about his pad-elephant, Pramekali, who when he was on shooting-leave in the Terai used to present herself daily at
chota-hazri
* time before the verandah of whatever forest bungalow he happened to be staying in. Fruit is always served with
chota-hazri
and if there was one food that Pramekali really fancied above all others it was fresh fruit. When Tacklow gave her apples, oranges or bananas, or any ordinary-sized fruit, she would take it elegantly with the tip of her trunk and pop it into her mouth. But when he gave her something like a melon or a papaya (pawpaw, to you!) she would place it carefully on theground, and then lift up a foot like a trip hammer and bring it down so gently that instead of smashing the fruit to pulp she merely broke it into suitably-sized pieces.
    He told me, too, of a day when the entire line of elephants, plodding in single file through the thick jungle, was brought to a halt by a single king cobra who reared up in the middle of the narrow, marshy track and weaved its spectacled hood and its small, wicked head from side to side in a menacing manner, daring the leading elephant to move one step further. The dare was not accepted and word passed back down the line to send up Pramekali who, being a lady of strong common-sense, took in the situation at a glance and dealt with it competently. She merely plucked a trunkful of the tall grass that formed a high, impenetrable wall on either side of the path, and brandished it in the cobra’s face, simultaneously bombarding the creature with fids of wet mud kicked up with her forefeet. The cobra lowered its hood and departed at speed and Pramekali tossed away the grass and led the procession forward. Tacklow always swore he heard her sniff in a contemptuous manner.
    Yet another of his Terai stories was about a tiger-shoot in which a half-circle of pad-elephants, each carrying a rough-and-ready
howdah
containing one or two Sahibs in addition to its
mahout
, were listening to the shouts and yells of the approaching beaters and waiting for the tiger to emerge into the clearing ahead, when a porcupine scuttled wildly out of the jungle scrub. Faced with a line of elephants it made straight for the nearest one who, being young and nervous, lost his nerve and attempted to kneel on it.
    The porcupine fought back gamely, shooting off quills in a manner that