The Rusty Ghost of Kanha

Sal forest, barasingha herds, and an unbelievable hour with one of the world's smallest wild cats.

Kanha is the forest that taught Kipling. Walk in at dawn and you understand, immediately, what he was trying to describe — the cathedral feel of a mature sal stand, the way the high canopy filters the morning into pale green pillars, the absolute hush of a forest that has not been bullied for two hundred years. The barasingha herds — Kanha is the last home of the hard-ground swamp deer — drift through the meadows like a slow, gentle weather system.

On the Crested Serpent Eagle

The first morning's gift was a Crested Serpent Eagle, perched on a low sal branch perhaps twenty feet from our jeep, perfectly indifferent to our existence. He stayed for ten minutes, doing the slow, dignified head-turn that raptors do, and then dropped off the branch on a single deep wingbeat and was gone.

The Rusty-spotted Cat

But this trip will be remembered for a different cat. On the second drive, late afternoon, our driver heard a langur call — a single, unusual note — and stopped. We sat in the jeep for forty minutes, and then, very low to the ground, a Rusty-spotted Cat — among the smallest wild cats on earth, smaller than most house cats, with the rusty-cinnamon coat that gives it its name — emerged from a dry stream bed and crossed the road in front of us, exactly once, taking perhaps twelve seconds.

It was almost too small a thing to be photographable. The driver said, quietly, that he had not seen one in eight years. We did not speak for a long time after.

Some species are so small and so secretive that to photograph them is a kind of accidental privilege.

What Kanha asks of you

Kanha is not a list-ticker's forest. The drives are long; the sightings are not always frequent; the meadows can fool you into thinking nothing is happening for long stretches. But it is, more than any other tiger reserve in India, a forest that rewards patience — and gives back, when you least expect it, the kind of encounter you will tell people about for the rest of your life.

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