Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
jeep driver, and he planned to meet us at a crossroads to deliver a hot meal. Earlier, sev-
eral families of fishermen—ethnic Bote people—had given us some smoked fish in return
for scaring off the lurking tiger. Now we could look forward to our meal of fish and rice.
We reached the rendezvous, but no Kancha Lama. No worries; faithful Kancha would show.
The drivers removed the elephants' saddles and let them graze the nearby lemongrass. Soon
the air was filled with perfume as the elephants' trunks plucked aromatic bundles of grass,
whacked them against a foreleg to dislodge any dirt, and stuffed them into their mouths.
Thirty minutes, and then an hour, passed. Kancha Lama and our lunch still hadn't arrived.
Vishnu immediately switched roles from head tracker to executive chef. Under his direction,
the men dispersed and came back with the ingredients of a jungle tasting menu:
Grewia
ber-
ries, fresh wild ginger stems, the smoked fish, and his inspiration, peacock eggs Vishnu.
We sat down to our repast. The food may have lacked refinement, but it was infused with
the good spirit of those who gathered and prepared it.
Grewia
fruits taste like wild blueber-
ries and are a favorite of the sloth bear. This usually fierce, shaggy denizen of the floodplain
dines on termites and ants, much as would an anteater or giant armadillo in other parts of the
world. But when
Grewia
fruits are around, sloth bears feast on them as grizzlies do on wild
huckleberries. The wild ginger stems were a revelation. Fragrant and with a bite, they could
replace sorbet as a palate cleanser. Vishnu built a small fire, set the avocado-sized peacock
eggs at the edge to cook in their shells, and warmed the smoked fish, which he had wrapped
in lemongrass leaves. Lacking an egg timer, Vishnu waited for the first of the eggs to explode
and then quickly removed the rest from the heat. The golf ball-sized yolks were quite edible,
but the whites had assumed the texture of vulcanized rubber. I left my share for the jackals.
An hour later, Kancha Lama finally arrived, red-faced and to much teasing, including how he
missed out on the adventure.
The elephants had rested and were now bathing in the Narayani. With time on our hands,
we lit up hand-rolled cigarettes known as bidis. Smoking by the riverbank, we watched busy
cormorants hunt for their dinner. The bright green water shifted and swirled in eddies around
sand bars. A few kilometers from where we sat, the river bent south on its way to meet the
Ganges. In a month or so, the monsoon would arrive and the Narayani would flood, washing
away all signs of our meal. But this perfect day—charging rhinos, a flashing tiger, fishing
cormorants, the fragrance of elephants feeding on lemongrass, topped off by a turn as hunter-
gatherers—would never fade from my memory.
Our census of the greater one-horned rhinoceros and data gathered from the thirty-five or
so radio-collared rhinos we had been intensively monitoring led to a number of conclusions.
The first confirmed the observation that Chitwan rhinos shunned the dense mature forest in
