The Lone Ranger

 Coorg
Feb 15th

A walk-and-jog on a lightly-misty morning in coffee land.  There’s hardly anyone on the road at this hour and, as I pass a labour line, the enticing fragrance of a firewood stove blends with the aroma of mist.  I stop to breathe it in, chat with the devil of a dog hanging around that has strong views on strangers walking by – more so, those that have the temerity to chat with it – and look at the canopy; there are Malabar hornbills, racket-tailed drongos and golden backed woodpeckers that always sound like a fleet of ambulances with their urgent, pitched chatter.  

There are mud roads, leading off the main one, into each plantation and I always stop at their entrance for the depth of view they offer and the possibility of seeing something – or someone – out of the ordinary.
Forty-five minutes later, I stop at one such mud road and stare.  The road leads down to a clearing about a hundred metres away, and I see a dog right there; it is standing sideways and seems to be looking away, but I can’t make much more out (my binocs have been helpfully left behind in the room).  The light mist shrouds the dog’s silhouette in that morning light and lends it a glow, a radiance that makes the ordinary seem gifted.

Or am I wrong? Is this a dog or is it something else?
As I stand there, as still as I possibly can be, it turns its head and sees me.  My pulse rate quickens, for there is now doubt mingled with excitement, anticipation that seeks vindication.  We watch each other for a few moments and then it turns and, with the characteristic trot of the Golden Jackal, vanishes into the coffee bushes.  
Could a morning ever be better?

If there is one animal that deserves a better script for its story, it is the jackal.  From bedtime tales to myth and legend, from farmer’s stories to the powders sold by quacks, jackals were – and are - described as cunning, thieves, dangerous, surreal….and – if some parts of theirs were eaten – medicinal.  These stories were fiction, yet their consequences have been real: an animal on the mud road to certain extinction.  

In Coorg and elsewhere in the southern Western Ghats, the slide to the bottom has had another rapid brutal cause: pesticide usage – a particularly nasty one being Thimet, used in ginger cultivation to kill crabs, which are then consumed by jackals.  

Over the years of travel there, the two questions to those I have met have been: when did you last hear a jackal howl?  ….as a child how often did you hear it?  And in a hundred out of hundred answers, I have sensed loss and foreboding, a sense of the inevitable.

  
I stand there for a moment staring at the now-clear path, hoping that it would return for a final glimpse.  But the jackal knows better.

Yet, we – you and I – can write a new script and tell the tale of a superbly adapted, courageous, gifted, graceful, animal, one that is as crucial for our survival as the tiger or the elephant, for it is a seed-dispenser and keeps the populations of other species (think field mice and wild piglets) in check.  It is a tale for the heart and in the narration of the real story is the redemption from complicity.  
ps: the picture isn’t mine, it’s a Wiki one from Keoladeo, but about sums it u