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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M.Krishnan: Bear at high noon :The Sunday Statesman : 14 June 2015
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BEAR AT HIGH NOON

" AT half-past eleven I decided to call it a day. We were six miles from home, at least an hour and a half for a pad-elephant taking it slow on hilltop tracks under an oppressive sun. We had been following a herd of Gaur for over two hours, gaining nothing by our persistence. So now, accepting defeat, we turned home.

On the way there was a sandy nullah and beyond it the only large field of lush grass there in summer. Three days previously, I had seen the almost human footprints of a Sloth Bear in that nullah and I now suggested a slight detour so that to pass through that field of four-foot-high grass, still tender in patches. Bears are very fond of young grass and apparently they are not so shy of daylight in grassy cover - twice before I have seen bears in such places, around four in the afternoon.

The mahout, my only companion, didn't think much of my idea. Bears, he argued, were nocturnal; it was well known that they were nocturnal or, at best, crepuscular. No bear in its senses would be out at noon, under that blistering sun, though some men would.

Furthermore, he would ask me to consider the inevitable delay in getting home, once our mount got into a field of green grass.

We were still debating the point when I entered the field, and I saw the Bear. Actually, what I saw was not a Bear but something coal-back and round, well inside the grass. Before I could warn my companion, he shouted at our elephant for stopping to sample the herbage, and the bear heard him.

Surprised in such tangled cover, Bears usually stand up on their hind legs, better to see the intruder. This one did no such thing. He had his back to us, with his head low and only the humped back and rounded posterior visible through the grass stems, and he turned sharply to the right and galloped away, with that heavy, clownishly exaggerated action that bears have, which is no longer comic when they are comic towards one. After going some distance, he pulled up, rudely turned his back on us again, and was a black ball in the grass once more.

This manoeuvre was repeated, when we moved nearer.

There are times when a man, retailing an experience, should tactfully omit a detail, in the interests of verisimilitude. But what I noticed was so particular, so altogether droll and improbable, that I am willing to risk such reputation as I have for accuracy to record the detail. Twice I noticed that the Bear was watching us from between legs, getting an upside-down view of us by bending its head so low that his chin touched his chest. The first time I could see both eyes clearly, between the somewhat straddled legs; only one eye, in a somewhat lateral view, the second time.

Never I have seen any other animal watch an intruder in such a fashion, excepting a Langur on tree once - and even that Langur looked downwards and backwards at me from above; it did not bow so low that the eyes looked up and back from the inverted face at the object of suspicion.

We tried another slow casual seeming approach, but that canny Bear was watching us narrowly, and was not to be fooled. When we were still some 30 yards away, he dived to a patch of taller grass, and by the agitation that ridged the grass tops in a wave we could make out that he was bearing steadily towards right, out of the field and back to the nullah we had crossed so recently.

There was a sandy hollow where the field ended, with half-a-dozen tall trees in a clump, and we arrived at this clump only a second after the bear did. Seeing us, he reared against the trunk of a 'Terminalia' - a big Terminalia of the kind whose bark is so reminiscent of crocodile-skin. For a moment he stood in indecision, hugging the rough bark - and for a moment my photographer's heart leaped up with joy, for I was sure he would go right up, and I would get the first pictures ever taken of a Sloth Bear climbing a tree.

He glanced at us, and then looked longingly up the trunk, and then decided to keep to terra firma. I know it is all wrong to interpret or record animal behaviour with any hint of anthropomorphism, but it is equally wrong not to record what one saw. Had you been there with me, you could have seen the Bear thinking - one quick look at us, a longer look at the trunk, and he was away. We lost sight of him as he tore down the hollow, then we saw him again as he scrambled up the other side of the nullah. There was a narrow belt of shorter grass that he had to cross before he could reach the tree jungle, but he didn't cross it. He entered the grass, and then suddenly he was no longer there, vanishing from the sight mysteriously. He has gone down a bolt-hole I knew.

Bears are, I think, the most interesting of our forest-living beasts, so strangely human in some ways. It is no surprise that our folklore and Puranas are so rich in melursine characters, and that in our jungleside traditions Sloth Bears are the only animals that seek out and carry away village belles. It is not merely that the plantigrade feet of the bear leave behind such semi-human prints, or that the carcass of a skinned bear is so horribly like a man - even a live bear, standing up and with the head turned away, looks very like a man. I think the droll ways of these bears, their strong mutual attachments, and their love of fruit and other jungle dainties that men also like (including the toddy in the pot up a wild date palm), have all contributed to those traditions. Only, the traditions have outlasted this wholly Indian and fascinating creature, in many of its former homes."

-M. Krishnan


This was first published on 13 December 1959 in The Sunday Statesman

#The photograph of the Sloth Bear hugging a big trunk not reproduced here.