The Last Hunter
The following is a work of fiction that revolves around a fact.
The blades of the grass swayed from side to side by the prevailing upwind. The cirrus clouds floated swiftly in the azure sky. The shadows they cast moved even swifter and the entire grassland looked like a giant tiger’s glossy coat being brushed by the wind.
The silver radiator-grille of the 1919 model open top Cockshoot Tourer glimmered under the sun as the car chugged up the road and we reached the highest ground. The Maharaja impatiently gripped the front seat and stood up, looking around in anticipation. He signaled the driver to stop when he’d sighted a gazelle at some distance.
There, he pointed his finger in that direction. The grass in these parts of the world grows to a staggering height of one and half metres making this a perfect hunting ground for any predator. But the same provides a perfect cover for the prey too.
Amidst the ashen coloured grass, I saw a fully grown horned beast with an alternating brown and white coat and the distinctive black streak across its back that could be accounted for its visibility from a quarter mile.
It raised its head and looked around cautiously. The whirring of the engine was too low to scare it away. The gazelles have a very keen auditory perception, to warn them of their predators. Even the slightest deviance from the norm could make our hunt flee the place.
Unaware of the hunter, the gazelle again stooped low to eat the grass.
The Maharaja pulled a rifle from the front. His rifle was one of a kind, specifically designed for long distance shots. With the stock against his shoulder and one eye closed, the other eye keenly lining up the sight, his finger was about to pull the trigger when the gazelle suddenly leaped to one side and broke into a sprint.
It was definitely not because of us. Something else should’ve scared it away. Till that minute, I thought that there was only one hunter. But I was wrong. Something else was stalking the gazelle.
I slowly stood up adjusting my trilby with one hand and with the other a binocular. The Maharaja too leaned forward in excitement. It’s one of those rare occasions when you go for the hunt and your hunt is actually hunted by another hunter.
From behind the grasses the gazelle ran to its left and then leaped to its right; it was running in a serpentine course, towards us. Gazelles are good sprinters. They can run for long distances too without getting tired. From behind the gazelle emerged a spotted animal.
Its head was small, like that of a cat. No tiger or lion has that small a skull. It wasn’t a leopard either. Leopards are not so lean and don’t run so fast. It was long. Definitely longer than a tiger. There was a black streak from its eyes that stretched beyond its cheek. And there were black spots all over its golden coat. It was just mesmerizing.
The gazelle which was running in our direction suddenly maneuvered to its left and continued running, sparing us by a few hundred meters. It has very thin and pointed legs that allow it to run in any direction without lowering its momentum.
The spotted animal too quickly followed the trail without lowering its speed. The long tail perhaps was acting like a rudder steering the animal. The animal was almost a straight line when fully stretched in the galloping state, and its backbone was a perfect ‘U’ with its hind and forelimbs crisscrossed in the contractile state. I’d never seen a vertebrate with such an elastic spine. In two quick successive jumps the animal had crossed over twenty meters, in probably a quarter of a second.
And with one giant leap, it sprang into the air and reached for the flank of the gazelle. A swift blow with its paw was sufficient enough to bring down the gazelle. The gazelle shuddered to a halt. With another blow on its throat the gazelle that was writhing in pain then lay lifeless.
The cheetah impatiently walked around its prey and lay down for a while. It then reached for the throat, tearing it apart with its canines and then feasting on the flesh. It devoured a substantial portion of the gazelle in a very short time and then sauntered away. The grass cover was too good a camouflage that we lost him in no time.
“What is that animal?” the Maharaja was spellbound, and so was I.
“It’s called the cita, Sir!”
“Cita means a spotted body in Hindi,” the driver said.
I’d read about the cheetahs in books. I’d heard that the mogul emperor Akbar had hundreds of them domesticated and used them for hunting. But this was the first time I saw a cheetah, that too while it was hunting its prey.
The agility was unmatched. The precision was pin-pointed. There was no room for error. I’d seen tigers hunting deer, lions hunting antelopes but this was different. No lion hunts alone. No tiger can run so fast. No leopard hunts in the scorching sun. The cheetah is undoubtedly nature’s greatest hunter.
“I need him,” the Maharaja said looking at me.
“He would come again. I shall’ve him then,” the Maharaja said with a gleeful smile.
For over a week, we’d waited for the cheetah to return to the same place, without any success though. Cheetahs don’t move out of their comfort zone. But we have never seen the cheetah again.
The Maharaja had already killed a thousand royal Bengal tigers, a couple of Asiatic lions, mountain leopards and other big cats in the name of ‘shikar’, his favourite sport, but he could never lay his hands on the cheetah’s skin.
“Can I ever have the head and skin of the indomitable hunter?” the Maharaja felt that the trophies of the animals he had collected over years were of no value infront of the cheetah.
But his dream was soon to be fulfilled.
Almost a year later, on a fateful night, the Maharaja and I were driving through the countryside. The engine sound should have frightened the animals in the vicinity. The maharaja chanced upon three cheetahs a few metres away. The headlights of the Daimler we were travelling in, blinded them instantly and the Maharaja reached for his rifle. His aimed at the cheetahs, with a mind that was never weighed down by a humane conscience.
Thrice he pulled the trigger, the bullets swirled through the cold air and the innocuous beasts had fallen in quick succession.
Then we were not aware that the last surviving cheetahs in India were killed, and that we’d wiped the variegated beast off the Indian grasslands. The indomitable hunter will never look beyond those high rise grasses again.
The Indian cheetah was officially declared extinct in 1952, with the last of the cheetahs being killed by the Maharaja of Surguja in 1947.