That guttural sound, could it be a leopard? That distant yipping… did the wild dogs make a kill?”

We sat silently in the vehicle for almost 10 minutes. In the near distance we could hear a rustling as a soft, yet biting wind fanned our faces. It was cold. Above us a full moon lit the night sky and ahead of us I imagined I saw something move. Someone shifted and it seemed the creaking of metal plates would be heard in distant Nagpur. That was when I saw them in the frame of my night vision binoculars. There were four tigers walking towards us in single file. Cats see well in the dark and they must have heard us ages ago, but they were unafraid. They seemed as curious about us as we were about them! Within seconds they settled all around us like so many household cats, safe in the knowledge that we meant them no harm.


There can be no better place to escape to than the exquisite Himalayan havens to be found in Kashmir, Ladakh, Garhwal, Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh. One of my abiding sorrows is the fact that for long years it was not safe to trek through Kashmir. I have often walked up 2,000 metres through the famous oak forests of the Dachigam Sanctuary near Srinagar. Home of the last surviving herds of hangul deer, it seems difficult to imagine that so much blood has been shed in the beautiful Kashmir valley. I remember my trip to the Great Himalayan National Park in Himachal Pradesh. A bird had made several sorties from its fragile perch on the thin creeper to the trickle of water oozing from a green grotto that had been carved by nature out of hard rock....Continue

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