in daylight, even when it has not seen you, causes a disturbance in the bloodstream.”
Jim Corbett’s a sanguine fella, suspended in a sagging tree with a man-eater tigress prowling the outer dark below his feet. I’ve been around the book track many times but I can still find narratives that dazzle and drag me away from the Oxford floods and the grindings of a booze-free January. Corbett’s tales of hunting rogue leopards and tigers in the Himalayan foothills are weirdly fresh and detailed enough to take you right into the jungle scrub. But it’s a life that’s long gone, back when the population of India was only at 200 million. These days the tiger national parks are throbbing with tours and Pentax snappers, what’s left of the wild is mapped and fenced. But I’ve still got my dreamings, my dog-eared, tea-stained library edition of Corbett and my Chiltern wanderings. That’s glimpse of the wild enough.
