Tigerland.(Travel narrative)

The old man stepped onto our boat out of the utter blackness that falls between the abrupt fall of twilight, at five o'clock, and the rising of the full moon. His name was Phani Gayen, and he was employed at the Saznekhali Wildlife Sanctuary, in the mangrove forest on the northern border of India's Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, where we were moored. Formerly, he was a crab fisherman, taking his small, pole-punted boat down along the forest's brackish tidal creeks and narrow channels. On June 23, 1984, at half past noon, he had gone into the forest with companions to collect wood. He turned and found a tiger springing for him, roaring. "I was then forty-five years old and very, very strong," he said. "I did not allow the tiger's face to touch my face." He stroked his Adam's apple. "The tiger's throat is very hard, here." As the tiger gripped him with its paws, its head hung over his shoulder, drenching his shirt with saliva. "I knew I was going to die. So I embraced the tiger. He was soft. The tiger was soft. Like a sponge." Somehow, this surrender freed him--the tiger released him and turned on one of his companions. Taking the companion by the throat, the tiger headed back into the forest.

The claw wounds on Gayen's head and face kept him in the hospital for three months. The wounds healed, but his ear was damaged permanently. Over the years, he had told his story many times. "I no longer fear the tiger," he declared, his scarred face lit by the yellow bulb that our boat's generator powered. "It is the tiger's nature." But he avoids entering the forest.

The bulb's light did not extend to the shore, and Gayen vanished into darkness on the long, narrow gangplank. The camp where he worked was one of only a few small stations in the 4,263 square kilometres of protected forest. At the mouth of the Ganges Delta, the Sundarbans encompasses the largest single mangrove ecosystem in the world, of which roughly forty per cent lies in India and sixty per cent in Bangladesh. The 9,630 square kilometres of the Indian Sundarbans, designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, are in turn divided into two more or less equal regions. Of the hundred and eight islands lying in the web of tidal rivers, creeks, and channels, fifty-four are inhabited--or "reclaimed"--supporting a rural, poor population of more than four million people. To the southeast lies the tiger reserve, whose swamp forest and intricate waterways are the improbable domain of the uniquely aquatic Royal Bengal tiger.

Washed by powerful, twice-daily tides flowing from the Bay of Bengal, and regularly buffeted by cyclones, the Sundarbans has always been unstable, its low landmasses constantly being eroded, silted, and reconfigured. Upstream pollution, from Calcutta; increasing salinity, caused by naturally occurring displacement of freshwater sources; and depredation of the forest by villagers cutting wood are long-standing threats. Still, the Sundarbans remains "intact," thanks partly to stringent conservation measures and to its inaccessibility, and partly to the Sundarbans tiger, whose presence insures that the forest is too dangerous to enter casually. "Without the tiger, we would have no forest," I was told by villagers, fishermen, wood collectors, honey gatherers--by all who cautiously skirt the forest.

I had come to the Sundarbans in late November, after the rainy season, with members of a not-for-profit agency, the Anudip Foundation, which offers livelihood training, and whose members were interested in producing a film about the region. Kushal Mookherjee, a Calcutta-based naturalist and wildlife consultant, who had been coming to the Sundarbans regularly for field study for more than a decade, was also on board. Another companion, Dr. Pranabes Sanyal, an authority on mangrove ecosystems, was the former field director, from 1980 to 1986, of the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve. The forest reserve can be reached only by boat, and our plan was to travel the rivers and back ways haunted by one of the most viable tiger populations remaining in the wild.

We had joined our launch, the sixty-two-foot M.V. Tanaya, at a small port on a channel off the Matla River, one of the main arteries through the reserve. Little other traffic was going our way as we wended through the waters of the reclaimed Sundarbans. On either side, broad embankments of baked clay fortified the land against the tide, giving each village the appearance of a walled city. Fishing vessels listed in the mud below them; hours later, the same boats would be floating as much as fifteen feet higher, level with the walls. In recent years, the tides have become more menacing, as the sea levels have climbed inexorably. Toward the end of 2006, two islands from the western edge of the Sundarbans archipelago were reported to have vanished beneath the water.

"If the Sundarbans goes under, the tiger episode on earth is over," Kushal said, a belief shared by many authorities. The plight of tigers worldwide is critical, with the most optimistic estimates positing a population of between thirty-three hundred and forty-three hundred. Some four hundred tigers are cautiously estimated to inhabit the combined Sundarbans of India and Bangladesh.