An Encounter in the Elephant Hills

“Polama?”

“Polam, sir. Let’s quickly finish fruit counting on this transect and go home. God knows why I am so hungry today!”

“Why don’t you just eat some Myristica fruits like the hornbills on the other transect? By the way, did you notice the Knema fruits to the right of the previous bend?”

“Aama, sir. I did.”

“When do you think they will ripen so that we can do a tree watch on that to observe which birds come and feed on Knema?”

“Those fruits are still unripe, sir. It will take another month or even more.”

“Appadiya! I see!”

Those were the last pieces of conversation between me and my field assistant, Sathiyaraj, before we were chased by a makhna, a tuskless male elephant in the Anamalai Tiger Reserve. Of course, it was a mock charge. Had it not, I might not have been alive to tell this story − for it was a close encounter, a damn close one!

It was late in the morning on a bright sunny day in early February. The winter, although not very prominent in the Ghats, had left, but the summer had not yet arrived. That time of the year is usually quite pleasant, and was even more so in the dense evergreen forests of the southern Western Ghats, where I had been conducting my field research on avian frugivores (fruit-eating birds) over the past few months.  That morning, I had finished walking a couple of transects to collect data on which frugivores were present in that area, and how many. On one of the transects that morning, I had some brilliant sightings. There were six Great Hornbills (the largest avian frugivores in Indian forests) and at least eleven Malabar Grey Hornbills (an endemic species of hornbills found in the forests of the Western Ghats) on a trail just 500 meters long. It was not just a sighting, but rather, a delightful treat to both the eyes and ears, for they were duetting, feeding on the large aril-coated Myristica (nutmeg) fruits, flying, playfully fighting with each other, and again feeding, and fighting for nearly an hour, leaving us in complete awe. Looking back, I feel that it might have been this amazement that made us a little complacent that morning. Also, neither of us had expected the elephant to be there, so close to the road, in a relatively open stretch of the forest.

Nevertheless, what happened that morning was that Sathiyaraj and I walked a couple of bird transects, finished counting fruits on one of them, and were on our way to count fruits on the remaining transect. We left the forest road on the right and started climbing the rocky segment of an animal trail that would lead us to the transect we were planning to go to. A few Kusum trees nearby had started shedding their leaves, creating a challenge for us to walk as we did not know if we were stepping on solid ground. However, we managed to walk past and reach a relatively flat surface. Sathiyaraj was walking ahead, and I was trailing by a few meters. We were chit-chatting, as I mentioned earlier, mostly about the fruiting trees and the hornbill sightings that morning. At the same time, both of us were scanning the canopy with our binoculars to check for ripe fruits. Suddenly, there was an immediate pause in the conversation, as I heard heavy footsteps approaching me. I looked ahead only to discover Sathiyaraj sprinting towards me at the top of his speed. My whole body froze. But that was only for a moment. The next moment I was sprinting too, following him blindly. I knew exactly why we both were running, even though I saw nothing more than a big, blurred dark-grey object hurtling towards us. We ran hard; we ran for our lives. We ran past the flat ground, the Kusum trees, and the rocky slope. We were back on the road in no time and crossed it in a flash to enter the forest on the other side. The elephant stopped after a point, but we did not − not before we were convinced that we had created enough distance between us and that mighty fellow.

When we finally stopped, we were completely drenched in sweat. I was gasping like a furnace and my legs were shaking as if they were following someone else’s command. I couldn’t stand up anymore. So, I sat down under a Ficus tree as Sathiyaraj took his shirt off and went ahead cautiously to check the whereabouts of the makhna, with a katti (machete) and his pair of binoculars. After a couple of minutes, he came back hurriedly and informed me that we must move because the elephant was not very far away and was trying to sense our presence by putting his head down and sniffing the ground. So we started moving deeper into the forest.

We took a long detour and reached our base camp without further trouble. That was when Sathiyaraj realised he had twisted his right ankle while running away from the elephant. It had already started swelling and he was soon limping. I took no time to take him to one of the estate hospitals, where an X-ray of his right foot was done, and to our relief, the doctor informed us that there was no major injury. We drank chai at the tea shop near the forest check post and returned to our base inside the Tiger Reserve in our field vehicle Tharvati (a Mahindra Thar named by one of my former colleagues). Not to mention that Sathiyaraj had to be in complete bed rest for the next few days before he could walk in the forests of the Elephant Hills again.

A few days later, with Krishnakumar, another field assistant of mine, I happened to go to the spot where the elephant was standing, only to discover that we had gone too close to the fellow the other day. There, I saw piles of elephant dung and broken branches in addition to my camera’s lens cap which had fallen off during the chaos. Later that day, I returned to our base camp where Sathiyaraj was resting and asked him, “Do you know how close we went to the elephant the other day?”

“How close?”, he asked with an almost emotionless voice.

“Not more than fifteen meters”, I replied.

He took a moment, probably to recall the incident before he spoke to himself with a sigh, “Appadiya! I see!”