When I joined the forest department, I had a certain image of myself. Striding through misty forests, binoculars around my neck, quietly protecting the wildlife. Nobody told me there would be days I’d be carrying a rubber boat on my head through a thorny forest.
It started as a clean, professional mission. My team and I, along with our field biologist, were going to raft through the multiple channels of the Beki river inside Manas Tiger Reserve, lay some camera traps along the sandbars, and hopefully catch some wildlife activity on film.
The Beki is a beautiful, braided river passing through the heart of the national park. But just like most wild things, it also resists the urge to be predictable, splitting itself into a dozen channels, weaving through the grasslands and forests . That morning, my team and I had trusted ourselves to its current, rafting through its braided arms, carrying camera traps to lay along its sandbars. The river held us gently. The forest watched us quietly. The issue with braided rivers is that some of these channels have the audacity to simply run out of water.Which is exactly what happened to us.The channel had dried up completely. The next water channel was visible through the trees but close enough to be mocking us, far enough to be a genuine problem.
I looked at my team. My team looked at me. We all looked at the raft.
“Sir?” one of them said, already knowing.
“We carry it,” I said, in my most authoritative voice.
Now, if you have never carried a fully loaded raft through a dense forest undergrowth, let me paint you a picture. It is not graceful. The raft is wide, the trees are not interested in accommodating it, and the grass had clearly formed an alliance with every thorn-bearing plant to stop us.We heaved. We pushed. We pulled. But the thorny branches reached across our path like reluctant gatekeepers. However there is something that happens in shared effort inside a forest. The frustration quietens and you stop thinking about the difficulty and begin simply moving.After what I will call as “considerable effort” and what my team will privately tell was “absolute madness”, we got the raft to the next channel. It hit the water. We collapsed alongside it, catching our breath.
With a careful intuition,we laid the camera trap on a sandbar without ceremony.Then we floated back. Quieter than we had come.
Weeks later, the image arrived; a tiger. It was walking along the sandbar unhurried, sovereign, moving through a world it has always known as its own.
There are days when the forest demands everything;your comfort, your dignity, your carefully made plans. It rearranges you. It asks questions your training never prepared you for. And just when you think you have given all you have, it shows you something like this ; something so quietly alive, so effortlessly itself and you understand that the giving was never a sacrifice. It was always just the price for witnessing it.