Country notebook:m.krishnan

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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" CALLING UP

The comparison with Col Corbett's thrillers is inescapable. It must be said in Anderson's favour that he attempts no one-handed shooting or other fancy manoeuvres, but he is not Col Corbett's equal as a naturalist and nowhere in that class as a raconteur. His narrative style is workmanlike and lacks that sure feeling for suspense and drama, that uncanny communication of atmosphere and circumstantial detail, that are Col Corbett's own. However, Mr. Anderson has been equally lucky in his escapes, and his book raises several interesting issues which may be briefly considered here, for they are features of recent Indian Shikar literature.

For instance, there is the question of calling up man-eaters. I believe that Col Corbett's 'Man-eaters of Kumaon' was the first book to describe the method. This method usually provokes skeptical banter in Shikar circles, outside them as well. I have even read of the predicament of the bandicoot-hunter who finally decides, when sittings up and traps and poisoned baits have all failed, to call up the Night-Raider of the Nether Regions, only to find he can not because, in his ignorance of the N-R's sex, he does not know whether to use the coarse, rasping grunt of the male bandicoot or the softer grumble of the female. But though I wrote this passage myself, I have never been able to understand why people should doubt the feasibility of calling up tigers and panthers.

ANCIENT EXAMPLES

Actually, the calling up of other animals has long been practiced in India and outside. The birch-bark trumpet used by North American hunters to lure the bull moose within range, and the use of leaves pressed to the lips by primitive tribes in India to produce sounds like the distress-calls of fawns to attract hinds (this will also attract wild dogs) are ancient examples of calling up. The greater cats, which "mate as fiercely as they kill", are highly excitable and aggressive during that period. However, their hearing is exquisite (that of the tiger has justly termed "microscopic") and it is doubted whether anyone can imitate them well enough to deceive them. I do not think this is always necessary, particularly in calling up man-eaters.

If you can bring yourself to bark like a dog, working up a good, staccato fervour into the barking, you will find (as I have found) that you can provoke a violent response in canines both at home and abroad. It is not that the dogs mistake you for one of their kind, for they can see you. But something in the infective urgency and strangeness of your behaviour moves them powerfully. Could it not be that a tiger in a state of fretful excitement is sometimes moved to seek out a human imitator out of sheer irritation? It is significant, in this connection, that slightly wounded tigers are said to respond to calling up as readily as those seeking mates.

There is another possible explanation, even if one will not concede the possibility of a tiger mistaking a human voice for a mate's. Mr Anderson's book illustrates this second explanation admirably. In his account of the Yemmaydoddi man-eater, he tells how he attracted the tiger to himself by tapping a branch in simulation of a woodcutter - and in telling of the "Man-eater of Jowlagiri", he says the tigress was kept till dawn (when there will be light enough to shoot by) in the vicinity of a shrine which housed the author and his companions by his giving her the answering call of a tiger and also by the prospect of dinner, since she knew there were men inside the shrine. Granted that his calling up after dawn failed to deceive the tigress, it could be that she came up to him attracted, as was the tier of Yemmaydoddi, by himself."

-M.Krishnan


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This was first published on 14 November 1954 in The Sunday Statesman


Note:
(1)The Article was re-published in two parts in The Sunday Statesman on 11.08.2013 and 18.08.2013 and I have reproduced only a portion of it.
(2)Sketches of 'A tiger actually killing a bull (taken from a machan)'
and 'The killer of Jalahalli' not reproduced here.