Nepal, A Land Of Spots, Stripes And Big Feet

Wild, wild Chitwan National Park is the antidete to the mountain country’s glacial peaks. It’s a land of spots and stripes and big feet.

- Steve King

In Chitwan National Park, in the lowlands of southern Nepal, in slanting morning light, a tiger emerged from long grass and stepped onto the dry dust of a dirt track. A female of larger than average size, about 2ft to the shoulder and 5ft from the nose to the base of the tail. The gold of her coat a tongue of flame against the rising sun. Unhurried, at ease, she lay down. She savoured the satisfying flatness and smoothness of the road, twisting her hips slightly, the better to feel the coolness of the earth against her body. Through amber eyes she peered, in the indifferent manner of all felines, down the length of the road that stretched before her. Her tail swatted the ground idly, raising fine puffs of dust. After a while, she rose, lightly powdered on one side, walked a short distance along the road before stepping once more into the long grass and vanishing completely.

I arrived too late to see any of this. Possibly minutes, possibly only moments. In any case when I got there the tiger was gone. But nor was the scene entirely a figment of my imagination. It was pieced together from a certain amount of evidence—along with a good deal of assistance from my guide, Shambhu Mahato, for whom reading the subtle signs of a tiger’s movement through the Chitwan jungle is apparently no more complicated than reading a text message on his mobile phone.