We weren’t climbing to the hunting tower to hunt. Sunrise over the waking village was the lure: wisps of smoke drifting up along with strains of Hindi pop, the Raas Devigarh palace glowing on the hill opposite like a big, squat croquembouche. Local lords used to snipe at passing wildlife from this crenellated tower, my guide, Himmat, tells me.
For us, however, it’s purely picturesque, a rook from some long-lost chess game. Yes, we’re in classic leopard country, but Himmat hasn’t seen one in the 100 or so trips he’s made, he assures me – then stops dead. When I look behind me, he’s staring, perfectly still.
“Over there,” he whispers, and I see a large male leopard slouching away from the tower he’s made his lair. Raising my iPhone – a reaction as instinctive as it is comic – I begin clicking randomly; catching a single shot of a flank, tawny as the light, before he merges with the rocks and disappears. What follows is just as instinctive.
We stand for a moment, then silently turn back. Though neither of us says it, we’re shaken: that cat was huge, almost tiger-sized; the top of a hill is the shortest bit to circumnavigate and – hunted turned hunter – he was moving. Himmat has now seen his leopard.
For me, too, a couple of lingering questions are beginning to be answered. First, wild leopards still roam India, something I’d wondered about while tramping on past trips through the eerily quiet forests of the Kumaon, carpeted in pine needles, anim.
