Tyger tyger, burning out

A descendant of Charles Darwin travels through reserves and forests for an insight into the predicament of the wild tiger.

If great journeys must begin with a single step, for scholar and poet Ruth Padel that step was the end of a long relationship a few years ago. The breakup was a painful one; suddenly adrift and desolate, she turned to a dormant interest in wildlife to help keep her mind occupied.

The result: a two-year journey through the tiger reserves and jungles of India, China, Russia and many other countries.

One of the many remarkable things about the book, Tigers in Red Weather, that emerged from these travels is how it moves from a personal story into a magnificent study of an animal being hounded into extinction.

Padel's journey may have begun as therapy for a broken heart "" "I was being pulled towards the great animal solitary...Tigers are about surviving, alone" "" but it soon turned into an obsession in its own right.

Writing the book as part-memoir, part-travelogue, part-wildlife primer was a literary risk but she pulls it off beautifully. " I wanted to root the reader in my own life to help provide a personal perspective," she says.

If you're a layperson, you'll be drawn into the book for this very reason. More knowledgeable tomes on the animal have been written by men like Valmik Thapar and Ullas Karanth but they are so close to the subject that their work can be daunting for the casual reader.

But Tigers in Red Weather is an exploration "" from the careful articulation of things that experts would take for granted to the lovingly detailed index.

Throughout the book, we accompany Padel on her quest, learn with her, feel the wonder and dismay that she does. It's comforting (even if much of what we learn isn't).

Every country Padel travelled to has a unique set of problems. Beginning the India leg of her travels in Madhya Pradesh's Panna reserve, Padel soon learnt about corrupt middlemen and poacher-official collusion.

"There is no centralised body for wildlife," she says, "Some of the best scientific minds in the world are right here but they are persecuted when they try to make a difference."

Like Ullas Karanth, whose move to radio-collar tigers "" a reliable, modern method of monitoring wild animals "" led to accusations that he was spreading cancer.

In Russia the issue is one of political instability. In China the tiger has traditionally been revered as a symbol of power but has simultaneously been betrayed like nowhere else.

This is where the greatest demand comes from: for tiger meat, tiger bones for dubious medicinal purposes, tiger skins for the nouveau riche, even tiger-whisker toothpicks!

This is where grinning tourists get their adrenaline rushes by sitting atop bound and drugged beasts and posing for photos. This is also where denial has been turned into an art form. "If China is the economic model for the world, wilderness is doomed."

And everywhere, around the world, there is the problem of apathy "" human beings looking out for their own short-term interests without caring that tiger and forest protection can only benefit them in the long term.

"Forests are protectors of the great rivers," says Padel. "The fall of civilisations through the ages "" from Babylon down "" can be traced to the destruction of forested land. Saving the tiger means saving everything in the ecosystem."

"The problem is, how does one expect a poor villager, who has children and grandchildren he has to feed now, to understand or care about the larger picture?"

Padel's own ability to see that larger picture can be traced, at least in part, to her genealogy: she is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, who helped us understand how the various parts of an ecosystem "" humans and tigers included "" sustain each other.

But even this vision is easily misinterpreted. In China, Padel was perplexed by a Shanghai novelist's statement that Darwin represents human progress. "Darwin had made us see ourselves as connected to other animals," she writes, "If you take him to stand for human progress, that connection is lost."

Later, she was dispirited by a visit to the Jade Garden: "This was nature squeezed and planned, not the natural balance of animal and plant..."

Isn't it idealistic though to see the world today in terms of that grand vision? Hasn't human selfishness already tipped us too far over the edge? "But we have to try and save what there is left," Padel insists.

"In India, for instance, less than 4 per cent of land is forested. Surely it isn't much to ask that in just that territory the interests of the tiger should be allowed to override short-term human benefit?" Even this would be a sad compromise.

A century and a half after Darwin dreamt of a vibrant, interdependent ecosystem, Padel herself will continue to see the tiger dreams she describes so vividly in her book, knowing that the wild tiger might soon exist in only those jungles of the imagination.