Barely a furlong away from their chowki, was a bear—fussing around a tree. She was clearly agitated. She would look up, run around the tree, back and round again. The bear was trying to climb the tree, grasping the trunk and heaving herself up, but time and again she would slide, then flop down—rather comically—in a heap.
The situation, though, was anything but funny.
Perched, rather precariously, on the top of the tree were two tiny cubs, just a bit bigger than the cuddly teddy Priya’s daughter liked to sleep with. The guards thought they seemed around four months old. The cubs were petrified. They tried to scamper down and in their fright, they slipped (and Priya’s heart slipped, too!), latching onto an oh-so-flimsy branch just in time.
But how had the cubs got stuck in the tree, wondered Priya. Like all curious (and naughty) children, they may have wandered while Mama Bear was occupied looking for food—ants and termites which were a favourite (yes, really!) or luscious honey or berries and flowers. The cubs must have scampered up a tree, just like her little monkey back home…
AWWWWUUUU—yelled something from above, bringing her back to earth.
This was not the time to let her mind wander. The cubs wailed. Mama Bear snorted and roared and howled in distress.
Priya and the three other guards watched, almost as frantic. Should they help? As forest guards, they were trained not to intervene to help animals, as this disrupts their natural function. Yet, how could they just stand by and do nothing?
It was unthinkable.
The bears needed help. But what could they do? Normally, a trained rescue team would deal with a situation like this. They would have come, had there been time. Here the need was immediate. And it was long after midnight, and they were in the middle of a remote forest, many miles from help. Time was slipping away, and the cubs were in danger of slipping down the tree and injuring themselves…or worse.
The team decided to go by their gut instinct. It probably wasn’t a wise idea to approach the tree to help the cubs, with a protective and frustrated mother bear around. Like most mothers, Mama Bears can be ferocious in the defence of their cubs, when they feel their little ones are in danger.
Yet, that is exactly what they did.
Excerpted with permission from When I Met the Mama Bear: A Forest Guard’s Story by Prerna Singh Bindra, with illustrations by Maya Ramaswamy. Published by Talking Cub (the children’s imprint of Speaking Tiger Books), 2022.
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