Wild & Free

The Pench Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh is home to the wild—big and small, the hunter and the hunted, the dangerous, the beautiful—where there is silence that you only hear in the vast wilderness and the haunting sounds of the jungle.

- Gustasp And Jeroo Irani

The forest held its breath as howl after howl resonated in its deep secret depths. Slowly, the sun sank behind the soaring mahua and teak trees, even as the last howl of a pack of jackals faded into a bottomless void. The forest exhaled and so did we. In the vocabulary of the jungle, the howls of jackals rank low in the hierarchy of threatening calls and sounds.

But the howling chilled us to the bone; awakening something primeval deep down inside us even as it fractured the deceptive peace of the jungle. We were in Pench Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, where wild dogs, jackals and sloth bears share the stage with the elusive tiger and leopard and often usurp the cats’ primary status (there are around 67 leopards and 45 tigers in Pench).

The jackals’ howls were like cries of pain—a pack of them on one side of a waterhole were calling out to one of their ilk, stranded on the other side, fairly close to where our safari vehicle stood. The lone jackal had not joined his pack but had waited under a tree, gazing at a frightened baby langur hiding in the leafy branches, shying away from his would-be predator’s bright hungry eyes.

The atmosphere in the forest was as taut as a bow string as we waited for a kill or a face-off to happen between the hunter and the hunted. Suddenly, the baby dropped from the tree and scampered away even as a couple of adult langurs pranced around the jackal, defiantly posturing and threatening. The confrontation, almost ballet-like, continued for what seemed like eternity, till the jackal trotted away to join his brethren on the other side and the langurs leapt upwards into the tree in choreographed unison.

The howls stopped as suddenly as they had started, as though a divine conductor had waved the jungle symphony to stop, and the total absence of sound was startling and menacing just like the jackals’ calls.