Uh oh.
Leeches.
About a million leeches. The second I stopped hiking, they took one look over their slimy shoulders, and deviously chuckling, writhed in my direction. They smell me, and now they’re rushing towards me to get a taste, the mossy forest floor alive with movement.
I straighten up, removing my hands from my knees, my breathing slowing down from a pant. We’re up in the Western Ghats on a fine, misty morning. There’s a chill in the air, and I can hear the braying call of a pair of Grey Hornbills coming from a huge, twisting fig tree nearby. We’ve been hiking for only about an hour, but I’m out of breath from carrying my binoculars and camera with long lens.
Ravi, the Irula tribal who was our guide for the morning, points out a hill mynah, perched on a lichen-crusted tree against the misty background of the rainforest. I take a picture, glad I’d lugged my camera all the way up there.
We decide to carry on.
We continue following Ravi up the side of the hill, my dad pointing out an old gaur skull leaning against the rocky cliff face to our right. I want to get closer to it, to see if there’s any evidence of what killed it.
‘’Tiger’’ my dad says with certainty.
I enjoy these hikes with him. We spend a lot of the time doing detective work, looking for clues and signs of wildlife. Sometimes, the thrill of knowing what animals had walked where I was walking exceeded the thrill of actually seeing them.
Ravi had gleaned that we were the sort of people who loved looking at feathers, tracks, scratch marks. He’d taken us up the track to a large anthill and stopped beside it.
A huge hole gaped in the side of the anthill, crumbling bits of clay surrounding it.
I hazarded a guess, ‘’Wild boar?’’
Wild boar were known to relish the odd insect from time to time. Ravi shook his head.
‘’Porcupine?’’ I tried again.
Porcupines often excavated anthills and created their burrows inside, the clay keeping them cool during the hot summers.
Ravi shook his head again, nope.
He knelt down near the entrance of the hole, and he pointed at the long, deep claw marks along the sides.
‘’Karadi’’ he said: bear.
My eyes grew to the size of dinner plates.
A sloth bear!
Sloth bears have long, white claws, perfect for excavating anthills. They are omnivorous, and will consume nearly anything small enough to eat. Ants are a protein-rich delicacy, and the pleasure of digging them out to enjoy the feast within the anthill was an important part of their lives.
At the rescue centre, most of the sloth bears still had their claws, despite missing their teeth. The Kalandar tribe of people, the ‘bear charmers’, who once kept the dancing bears, used to pull all their teeth out to make them more ‘amicable’ and safe for children to be near.
I’d been shadowing the vets at the rescue centre for about a week at that point, and as a treat, Sandy, the volunteer coordinator, assigned me some enrichment work.
Without enrichment activities to encourage natural behaviours, animals in captivity tend to develop ‘stereotyped behaviours’ or repetitive, anxious behaviours that manifest as pacing, head bobbing, and swaying. In the sloth bears, boredom often lead to them anxiously returning to ‘dancing’ or swaying their heads side to side, shifting from foot to foot.
The enrichment activities for the day were to encourage climbing, digging, and some amount of problem solving; all behaviours they would perform in the wild.
I was introduced to Rohan, another kid a couple of years older than me, who was also shadowing the vets for the same reasons as me. He’d been assigned the same job for that morning, and we headed over to speak to Muthu and find out how we could help.
Rohan spoke with a heavy American accent, having been born and raised in the States to his South Indian immigrant parents. He’d never been to India before, and asked me all sorts of particularly naïve and ignorant questions about life in the Ooru1.
‘’Do you speak English in school?’’
‘’People have swimming pools here?’’
‘’Have you ever had pizza?’’
He was about to ask me yet another idiotic question, when Muthu spotted us and shouted,
‘Watermelon!’
And as we approached, he tossed a nice, fat watermelon at Rohan.
‘Today we are giving the bears watermelon’ he clarified, waving the watermelon around and doing some sort of jig.
‘First, you have to make the hole,’ he demonstrated, driving a wooden stake through a watermelon.
‘Then you tie the rope’, he threaded a jute rope through the melon, pulling it out the other side and securing it with a large knot.
‘And then,’ he said, eyes sparkling, ‘you’ll see,’
He left us to our devices.
I stabbed at the watermelon with disdain, each time making a small, shallow dent in its hard rind. Mohan adopted the strategy of placing the melon on the ground, and stabbing it, Van Helsing-style, red juice dramatically splashing from the large wound.
I excelled at the more dexterity-demanding rope threading, and we emerged about an hour later, sticky and fly-studded, with about twenty watermelons hanging from strings.
‘Very good!’ Muthu exclaimed, clearly pleased with our work.
‘Very good!’ Rohan mimicked, mocking Muthu’s accent2.
We took the watermelons to the Panchavati enclosure.
The bears were all still in their feeding enclosures, following their lunch break. They grunted restlessly, excited at the smell of watermelon in the air.
We got to work. Muthu handed me some dates and a steel jar of honey, and I went around the enclosure trying to find discreet places to hide them. I smeared some honey on the underside of a heavy log, and along the branches of some trees. The dates, I buried in the ground, or stuffed into crevices in trees, under rocks, and anywhere else I could think of that felt date-appropriate.
Muthu also handed me a long piece of braided canvas, an enrichment tool invented by the staff in which to hide dates. Once the dates were tucked into all the small gaps between the braids, Muthu took the canvas from me, and headed towards a nice, tall, flame tree.
He slung the canvas over his shoulder, and slid his chappals (flip flops) off, flexing his calloused feet. Then, just like the most agile monkey, he climbed up the tree with great speed, gripping the tree trunk with his toes as he climbed. Within seconds, he had secured the canvas about nine feet up in the canopy, and climbed back down the tree with gymnastic expertise.
As he slid his slippers back on, I looked around, impressed with all the watermelons hanging high in the trees. It was an absurd sight; watermelons were never meant to see such heights.
‘Oi!’ I heard Muthu shout in alarm, waving his hands towards the feeding enclosure.
‘Basavana! Ey!’ he continued, trying to wave Rohan and me down.
As we approached, he hurriedly said, ‘come come, the bears are coming’
‘What?’ I asked, assuming I’d misheard.
‘Bears are coming!’ he said, gesticulating excitedly at the feeding enclosure, as the bears emerged.
We hurried towards the gate, and just about made it across as the bears rushed into the enclosure, drawn by the sweet smells of their favourite treats.
Basavana stood outside the gate, grinning sheepishly at us as Muthu closed the gate.
‘Dai!’ Muthu exclaimed at him, taking off his slipper and mock-slapping him with it, ‘Wait till we come out before releasing the bears!’.
While Muthu continued to admonish Basavana for his negligence, I watched the bears gallop across the enclosure. I saw Odum sniffing at the log I’d smeared honey under. He sniffed harder and harder, as if he could simply sniff the honey out from under the log. Then he started trying to nudge the heavy log. It rocked a little, and this encouraged him. He leaned against the log with all his weight, causing the log to roll away from him, revealing the honey beneath.
Excitedly, he dipped his nose down to reach the honey, just as the log rolled back towards him, squishing his nose. He leapt back in confusion. What sick game was this?
Meanwhile, the agile Suvarna had managed to get to the canvas braid full of dates. She reached out with her claws to try to hook it, but Muthu had tied it quite far along the branch. She gripped the tree trunk with her hind legs, and reached out with her claws, finally hooking the canvas. She tried to pull the canvas towards her, and in doing so, let go with her hind legs, now hanging in mid-air by her long claws, swinging back and forth with an expression of embarrassment on her fuzzy face.
She looked around desperately, trying to find a way out of her predicament, while we laughed at her silly manoeuvres.
The bears that still had their teeth went for the watermelons, breaking them easily with strong jaws. Those without, licked greedily at the honey, or slurped away at the watermelon innards if they managed to drop them from a height.
It was lovely to watch the bears being bears for an afternoon. Watching them behave so unnaturally, yet performing in some way, many of their natural behaviours.
Odum sniffed at the ground, at a spot I had buried some dates. He effortlessly excavated the dates, and an area around in large enough for him to sit in, and I noticed the sharp claw marks in the ground, just like the ones the wild bear had made in the anthill.
I’m opening this up for feedback and discussion! Let me know what you think. Part two of this story will be available soon.
Disclaimer: Names of people (and bears) have been slightly tweaked to protect people’s identities, should they not wish to be known.
‘Ooru’ in both Kannada and Tamil, roughly translates to ‘place’, but can mean anything from ‘neighbourhood’ to ‘state’ to ‘country’. In this case, it’s the latter.
This is a topic I could go on about for days. After moving to the UK, I’ve met many second-generation Indians who tend to mock the Indian accent that I normally speak with - is this problematic? Who’s to say? But I don’t love it.
I’ve just realised I didn’t even end that with a full stop! This one had to be scheduled for release today and I didn’t have time for final edits, whoops!