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how many have a basis in fact, but they are so numerous that at the very least
they show there were repeated encounters between the wolves and the vil-
lage people of India over a long period of time.
What was the world like in which these encounters took place? Alas, not
much is left of it, even of the remains of wild India that Kipling knew. But I
glimpsed a little of that lost world recently in Ranthambhore National Park
in the state of Rajasthan. It was dusk, and I saw a jackal in a clearing, illumi-
nated by a shaft of golden light. Other jackals moved in the shadows nearby.
Then, suddenly, the forest was fi lled with chital deer fl eeing from the jackals.
Their dappled bodies fl ashed past only three meters from me. As quickly as
they had appeared, they were gone. The jackals, frustrated in their attempt to
stalk the deer, melted away to regroup and try again.
For that brief moment I had been taken back to a time when much of India
was covered in forests. The woods of that time were alive with the calls of
wild peacocks and the roars of hunting tigers. Packs of wolves and wild dogs
roamed freely for miles. Leopards, cheetahs and jackals were able to hunt the
chital deer without depleting them, while tigers and lions stalked the larger
and meatier sambar deer and nilgai antelope. Black sloth bears with striking
white markings on their chests prowled in the forests' depths. Pythons and
cobras slithered through the undergrowth, and families of magnifi cent black
bucks browsed in the clearings.
This was the magical world that Kipling wrote about. But even during
Kipling's time that world was vanishing. Now, especially after the wide-
spread deforestation that followed India's independence, Ranthambhore
and the other national parks represent less than one percent of India's orig-
inal forested ecosystems. And even this remaining one percent is threat-
ened.
Later, in Bandhavgarh Park in central India's Madhya Pradesh State, I
was lucky to spot an Indian wolf, one of possibly 2,000 that remain on
the entire vast subcontinent. This descendant of Kipling's Raksha, Akela,
and Father Wolf was hidden in a dense thicket. She was the fi rst wolf to
be seen in the park for over a month. Slim and rangy, she had a keen face
and a greyer and much lighter coat than her Tibetan and Asiatic wolf rela-
tives far to the north. Like the Mongolian wolf cub that I was to encounter
 
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