Sentinels Of The Wild, Wild East

Meet the brave and compassionate wildlife lovers who risk their lives to protect the beautiful and endangered animals of Kaziranga

- Abdul Gani

In the floodplains of the Brahmaputra, where the grass grows tall to hide predator and prey, every sound in the landscape has a tale to tell; the crack of a dry twig, the cac­ophony of hillock gibbons, the whoosh of a black­backed forktail taking off. Here, life and death is often decided in split seconds for both—wildlife that have made Kaziranga their home and humans who risk their life and limb to protect the magnificent animals. The forest is an unforgiving place and wildlife follows its own unwritten rules. And nobody knows the rules of engagement better than the forest guards of this magnificent landscape, shaped by flood and drought over millennia.

Khargeswar Gour has been twice lucky. On July 17 this year, as floods pummelled the Unesco World Heritage site, Gour was among a group of forest guards assigned to escort a rhino back to safety after it had strayed out of its habitat. By late afternoon, they were almost done with their task when Gour was charged by wild buffaloes, among the most unpredictable of all animals in the wild. Despite 10 years of experience as a forest guard, Gour had no chance to escape—one buffalo slammed into him, throwing him in the air before he hit the ground with a thud. His fellow-guards managed to scare away the buffalo, leaving Gour with a dislocated hip.

“It was painful but I’m lucky to have survived,” Gour tells Outlook. In 2012, Gour had escaped a similar attack by a rhino, which was being tracked by poachers. Gour was assigned to keep an eye on it. “These things keep on happening but you need to be alert…Even the day when I was attacked, if we had delayed our response, the rhino could have been killed,” he says. However, Gautam Baruah, another forest guard, was not so lucky. He was trampled to death by a rhino in 2017, He was just 34.