A local pastor took John, Jonathan, and I to a forest several hours south of our city for a couple days of adventure.  We slept in tents next to a sprawling forest home to all kinds of wildlife. It is a dangerous place.  Many villagers shared their stories of encounters with elephants or leopards.  But it is also a place of spectacular beauty.  Over three days we saw all kinds of exotic birds, peacocks, spotted deer, barking deer, mouse deer, sambar deer, lungar monkeys, wild pig, mongoose, cobra skin, black bears, elephants, and tigers.  I’ll never forget it.

Our friend knows a quirky man who is one of the few people to live deep in the forest, alone.  He has a beautiful back porch that overlooks a long strip of forest and a watering hole – great for spotting wildlife. When we arrived to spend an afternoon animal watching, this enormous tusker elephant was standing a few feet from his house.  We crept inside the front door and onto the porch and watched this incredible creature for at least a half hour. Elephants can be very aggressive and have claimed many villagers who happen upon them in the forest.  This rogue tusker has killed six people.  In South…

It’s illegal to venture into the forest alone.  It is far too dangerous.  Instead we were able to hire a jeep and professional tracker to look for tigers.  They are extremely hard to find, but amazingly we stumbled upon a mother and her four mid-sized cubs. There is really no way to describe being deep in the forest at dusk, thirty yards from a wild tiger, sitting in nothing but an open-air jeep.