The Patience of the Tiger

I arrived in Rajasthan in the monsoon's last gasp, when the landscape was still green and the air thick enough to drink. Ranthambore was my first encounter with a landscape shaped as much by human history as by ecology — a national park carved from the ruins of a medieval fortress, where tigers walk the same paths as tenth-century kings.

For three weeks, I sat in open-top jeeps and walked forest trails with trackers who could read a pugmark the way I read a journal article. They taught me patience — not as a virtue, but as a methodology. In ecology, the data comes to you on its own schedule.

I saw my first wild tiger on day sixteen. She emerged from a stand of dhok trees at dusk, moving with an economy of motion that made everything else in the forest look frantic by comparison. In that moment I understood something about fieldwork that no classroom had taught me: the animal does not exist for your study. You exist in its world, and the privilege of observation is earned through stillness.

That lesson — patience as methodology — has shaped every field season since.