Wakeeta

Winter mornings in Bandhavgarh are cold and with no tiger sighting in early hours it feels even more colder.We had one such morning last year on 5th Jan. You don't see much Deer or Monkeys in morning hours till sun really comes up and warm up the air. With lots of money in the budget and wrong policies of the management that demands the patrolling has put too many labour on park roads. These labour are major disturbance to the wild life. This disturbance is so big and effective that most of the animals have changed their habits. Now in early morning hours you don't see deer in any of the meadows of the park. Chakradhara has a constant presence of labour on bicycle and so the Lakhumar, Rajbehra and Bathan.
We were first to leave Hardia so we could have a dust free ride in the park. We heard few alarm calls at behind Lakhumar meadow but that did not produced any results. It was probably the presence of village dogs that scared the deer. 
Rampur hill was as silent that day as ever before. There was hardly any sign of any movement of any tiger in the jungle today. 
When we almost lost all our hopes of Tiger sighting for today a faint alarm call of a deer raised our hopes. 
A tiger was walking away. She was Wakeeta. She set her clock well. She knew that this the time when there wont be anybody on road. She mean Bicycle not jeep. Tigers are more scared of a man on bicycle than people in jeep. 
We followed her few meters and then suddenly she started sniffing a scratch mark on the ground. It was more than a day old, but she could smell it well and shown the flehman behaviour. It was her partner Shashi who walked here yesterday and left his scent mark on the ground. 

   
She followed her route and sprayed every where. Later in the year we found out that at this time she was already pregnant and delivered her cubs in mid to late March.