III. Pugmarks
October 1998. I arrived in Thummalabailu, a small tribal village in what was then the state of Andhra Pradesh. The monsoons lingered that year, and my second-hand LML Vespa had taken a beating on the trip from Hyderabad. Having unloaded my gear at the guard quarters that would be my home for the next year, I met Naganna, my sole contact in the village. Word quickly spread, and in the short-lived excitement of that novelty, he took me to a small clearing of grass and mud Northwest of the village. There, hand-sized rocks had been arranged in a circle, and the opening was covered by large leaves held in place by a second layer of stones. As men squatted and stood nearby, one gently unroofed this temporary shelter to reveal an unmistakeable imprint in the mud – a shifted triangle and four ovals like clouds passing over a mountain - the foot and toe pads of a tiger footprint or pugmark.
Over the next year, I spent a lot of time looking down. We walked along the forest trails looking for hints of the unseen around us - a broken quill scraping the dirt next to porcupine tracks, hoofmarks around a salt lick, and if we were lucky, tiger pugmarks. Each time the jolt of seeing a pugmark raised questions: when was the animal here? where are the tracks coming from and where are they going? or rather, since tracks record an animal's passing, where has the tiger already vanished to? Like memories, the footprints were imperfect. A 400 pound animal leaves no trace on exposed rock and only the faintest imprint on dry sand, a smudge which can be swept away by the winds in hours. A pugmark in wet mud can be over an inch deep and may be preserved for months after being baked by the summer sun.
What may not be obvious: at least in NSTR, the easiest places to find pugmarks were on paths used by people and livestock. These trails connect villages to each other and to the main road. The trails also connect water sources where herders graze buffaloes, goats, and cattle; and where tigers and their prey must go for water. Thus the story of the forest paths is being re-written daily - one impermanent record writing over another - tigers at night, people during the day.
But how long can this story continue? Even twenty years ago, the record was very one-sided. I learned from my Chenchu guides to spot the fragments of pugmarks among the scores of prints left by buffaloes, bare feet, and chappals. The imagery was not subtle: how can tigers survive in a world that, with every passing year, becomes less wild and increasingly human? And yet improbably the tiger survives, amid people, an enormous unseen force, a ghost. The pugmark represents the duality of the tiger: mass, realness, the tangible present, but also impermanence, fragility, the past, the invisible, and the great mystery of what cannot be known. A pugmark is a wild tiger as a perishable impression, a being not yet entirely of our imagination.