This week’s travel dream: Inside an Indian tiger park

The state-protected forests of India are the places to see free-roaming tigers, said Mike Snow in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Only a few thousand of these large, fierce cats exist in the wild today, with roughly half of them in the 39 preserves set up by the Indian government to prevent their extinction. Recently, I visited northwest India’s Ranthambore National Park, which offers a “perfect backdrop” for panthers, caracals, jackals, sambar deer, and 200 types of birds. Of course, I hadn’t traveled to this “matrix of lakes and sharp gorges” just to count moorhens.

My guide assured me that we’d be safe inside our jeep: The tiger that had killed two villagers a week earlier apparently didn’t have to confront a loud, four-wheeled beast. As ours entered the park, lemurs and peacocks greeted us, then deer, a herd of sambar, and a crocodile. “But where were the tigers?” Finally, a passing driver alerted us to a sighting and we rocketed off to where the subject had been spotted napping. With my telephoto lens, “I clumsily zeroed in on an orange, furry head that occasionally bobbed up, as if stoked by a bad dream.” Later, my guide found Machli, a tiger that has gained a following on YouTube owing to clips that show her fighting rivals and killing crocodiles to protect her cubs. She exhibited none of that ferociousness, though. Like the earlier tiger, she appeared to be napping.

There’d be a lot of nap-watching. Later, we gazed at a cub rolling in the grass near Zalim, a male Bengal famous for nurturing two cubs—a “rare if not unheard of” act of paternal devotion. But then came another alert and another mad dash in our jeep. This time, the call of a deer in distress caused us to screech to a halt, and a tiger darted across the road ahead of us. Just then, I saw another cat in the woods and followed him until he “perched royally on his haunches near the crest of the hill.” Through my telephoto lens, I managed to catch “the unmistakable glint in his eyes” before he shifted his weight, “then disappeared into the sunset.”

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For park and hotel information, visit ranthamborenationalpark.com.