Guardians of the Ecological Cycle

The sun was slipping down the horizon when a pair of big ears, winglike, appeared on the crest of the hill.

- Neha Sinha

A little monsoonal drizzle fell and the sky moved with scraps of clouds, making the disc of the sun a blur. And so the light on the pair of ears—which belonged to a Striped hyena—was something of a moving prism. In that magical light, the hyena ventured closer, its head down, its powerful shoulders moving with deliberation.

Soon, the animal would slip away in the night, covering several kilometres, towards a carcass dump. We watched it make its way downhill, and then melt away into the darkness. The monsoon had rendered the usually-brown slope with lush vegetation. In the day, this gave the hyena pack some cover, a place to rest as the day wore on.

For one reason or the other—perhaps the fact that they are nocturnal, perhaps the fact that they have been the villains in Disney movies, perhaps because look like untidy, bedraggled versions of dogs to others, hyenas have mostly been reviled.