I have been giving some thought to my recent encounter with the leopard. First of all I should tell you that I totally blew the whole thing from a safety issue! Apparently the trick to encountering a leopard or any wild animal in the jungle is to make yourself look bigger and more threatening than you are, whereas I did the complete opposite and put myself in danger actually.
Crouching down as I did (in some mad unconscious effort to get to the same level as the cat in the same way I would squat at some gypsy fire in the desert) was totally inappropriate given the circumstances. I was quite simply inviting the cat to pounce on me as any cat would, said my friend when I told her.
She is right of course but then there is this.
Beauty (the cat) and beast (me) gazed at each other for those precious few seconds and there was no threat of a bridge of blood between us. If there had been any threat then the cat would have snarled instantly and turned my blood to ice and my feet to wings.
In the cats gaze I sensed not fear but caution, it was the kind of assessing look you get if you go into a rough bar.
It’s not the kind of gaze you hold for long unless you are looking for trouble.
I have seen something of the same look in rabid dogs or monkeys and always respond instinctively, snarling, swearing and barking them off.
But then it was the absolute last thing in my mind to react to this beauty with aggression or anything but awe and a sense that I had intruded on him.
Given my then inappropriate action, I could have made a tasty meal for the cat but the leopard merely drew back so as to allow me to go on my way and he on his.
There was no thought or feeling of danger in that encounter which only tells me how accustomed these cats are to seeing humans and so therefore how actually endangered they are.
And then there are the people for whom a leopard encounter is a daily threat and not a treat as they move through the jungle gathering fuel, moving stock, carrying water.
It’s a precarious balance, seeming to rely only on the benevolent attitude towards them of the villagers. Each understands the habits of the other; there is an unspoken avoidance of each other that is more about good manners than anything else. If a leopard breeches the boundaries and heads into the village he will be met with firecrackers and the shouted yells of the people until he slinks back into the dusk.
But the increasingly limited space for these cats to roam and feed and the lack of their natural food is shown in their taste for domestic dogs.
Down in Corbett Park, the problem with beauty and beast encounters includes the threat of tiger attacks for women who roam the buffer areas in search of fuel and fodder.
The Women and Tiger Project, under the auspices of the Mahseer Conservancy is encouraging women to achieve economic independence.
The idea is that then they can afford to buy cooking gas rather than cook on fires, thus reducing the potential risk to human life as well as having a positive effect on the environment.
So it’s a bit of a bugger that this week the Government announced price rises across the board for petrol, gas and kerosene.
Life! It’s a thin blue line between beauty and the beast.
Photo of Rangoli woman F. Crevette