I got off two shots with the motor drive the rest were blurs of green as Captain demonstrated remarkable skill at driving backward down the rutted two-track.
Proceeding immediately into the jungle, we were directly charged by a bull elephant, ears flapping - the full catastrophe. That afternoon “Captain” drove me to the old Maharajah of Mysore’s hunting lodge by the Kabini River, now part of Nagarhole National Park, where I was to photograph wild elephants. Singh drove me to my hotel, where I was to meet a former captain in the Gurkhas who still went by that title. Under the front seat was a pile of rags, and whenever the opportunity arose, Singh dabbed at paint and chrome. (In India all Sikhs are named Singh, though not all Singhs are Sikhs.) He was a large, genial man with a neat car that reminded me of a Morris. I flew to Bangalore, took the train to Mysore, and met my driver, a Sikh named Singh. At the Amber Fort, above Jaipur, I had been chased by a horde of monkeys who screamed in unison and pulled at my pants with their little fingernails. In the spring of 1981 I was photographing parts of India for Mountain Travel, Inc., a California-based company that organized treks and expeditions to exotic destinations. Lawrence begins Seven Pillars of Wisdom with terse words of moral solace: “Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances.” I want to believe this it somewhat excuses my going amok over a mountain lion at the zoo in Mysore, India. Running through the chaparral with my Fox Sterlingworth that evening long ago, I fell in love.
I do not believe I would hate zoos if I had not seen that streak, the sand off the paws, the stretch, the long tail. We come to love before we come to hate, and their loyal metamorphoses and transformations of fear and refuge, rage and consolation, create hard boundaries for the self. I stopped going to zoos - and slowly began to hate them.Įmotion creates more emotion, and one need not be a Freudian to see that early loves have long, potent causal histories.
And, worse, my presence before them confirmed something I no longer wished to confirm. One particularly dark day, deeply depressed by city life, academia, and a failing marriage, I went to the zoo with my stew meat and discovered I no longer knew who felt more caged, the cats or me. Many more years later, in Chicago, I sometimes bought stew meat to surreptitiously feed the mountain lions, snow leopards, and tigers at the zoo. This was several decades before it became fashionable for men to weep over dead animals, and I was both angry and embarrassed. Years later I teared up over a stuffed female mountain lion at the Bryce Canyon National Park visitor center. I just wanted to see her again, and I often returned to that arroyo with more desire to see her than to hunt. I might say she was a totem, but I believe it is simpler than that: I was smitten. I have heard wolves howl and seen grizzlies wander high meadows and a tiger feed on a young water buffalo, but no wild animal has captured my imagination like that first lion. Not until I was driving home did I realize I’d felt no desire to shoot the lion, an unusual reaction since I shot almost everything then, believing firmly that the world was here for my amusement and that killing was fun. Stunned, then elated, I ran after her through the chaparral, but she - for I just knew it a she - was gone. I saw a tan streak, but I remember, too, the sand flying behind its paws, how low it was to the ground, stretched, and especially the long tail, so long that the tail was its essential feature. Approaching the arroyo, I lowered the gun, slipped the safety, crouched slightly, and walked to the edge. I decided to walk along the edge and shoot cottontails as they broke into the sandy flats below.
It was sandy and open, scattered with slabs of rock that had spalled off a nearby cliff and were now fringed with thick brush.
I was walking through rocky chaparral with a Fox Sterlingworth across my shoulders, my elbows hooked over the stock and barrel and my forearms hanging free - a tired boy not expecting anything special. I saw my first mountain lion when I was hunting rabbits at the southeast edge of the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base in Southern California. Tiger, Tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? - William Blake