May Day - 2017

 A pleasant and instructive morning, as Sir PG would have written.
  
Ananda, the repository of all forestry knowledge, and I set out early morning into the forest at Jawalagiri in search of the Adenanthera Pavonina (manjadi) tree, which we did not find.  What we did find were elephant tracks - the same male that had been at the farm and its surroundings last night and caused much local excitement. Anand suggested that we follow the elephant and find out where he was.  
Now he does this all the time, of course, so I concurred, but it isn't an exercise calculated to strengthen anyone's nervous system (I am happy to suggest other less taxing options, should you doubt). 

The footprints of the elephant (if you could call large craters, with lava creeping in at the bottom, footprints) were clearly headed into the forest, after a night of crop raiding and local duels with villagers.  At places, these footprints were indistinct on the caked ground, which often made the heart skip a beat (for Ananda would look around with a furtive air of one caught stealing fodder from under Mama's trunk).   We walked carefully past the small lake bed, on which there were signs of chital, gaur, wild boar, a lone leopard and jungle cats, and then reached a rock clearing that I had some years earlier christened Fragrant Rock, for, from the  soil here rise a number of Jalaari trees (Shorea Roxburghii).   
Then we stopped.

Ananda pointed to the valley below, "That's where he is," he asserted with authority; you can be assured, I was unlikely to be the Verification Manager.  
And, indeed, the faint smell - that distinct pachyderm odour - wafted upwards to where we were.  We waited for a while to hear him at work, for elephants are noisy fellows when they lounge around, but without luck.  

We wished him Good Day in absentia and headed back to a patch where a menagerie of bird life - blue bearded bee eaters, parakeets, babblers and mynas and bulbuls and robins, ioras and white-eyes and other birds in the higher canopy - were chirping, whistling, shrieking and calling, and took it all in with enthusiasm, for we were not in Jumbo's vicinity anymore.  In the early sky, the crested serpeant eagle sailed overhead and came to rest on a Terminalia Bellerica; an ominous figure of great size and fine beauty, the yellow on its cheek resplendent in the morning air. 

Our search for manjadi could wait.