What happened to your finger?
He stares at his right hand with its four and a half fingers, smirks, and he tells me a cobra had bitten him 'but, I got the fellow', he chuckles, 'I bit him too'.

An odd character, a man of the wild, raw, primal and brutal. Built all sinews and muscles, his lean muscular frame was always exposed as he never wore a shirt: once or twice when he called on me at Mangalore, he would sit on the carpet in front of the TV, watching with childish delight the wildlife programs on national geographic channel, with no sound. Why have you turned the volume off? Hahaha, who wants to hear what they are saying? I like to listen to the elephants. They tell their life stories far more effectively and evocatively.

A total misfit, he preferred to reside all by himself atop a tall craggy slope, up the northern face of a high shola mund, lost amidst the clouds and mist of the Nilgiri ranges, near a small tea estate off Sholur. He earned his keep by hewing and logging teak and timber, or guarding the estate holdings which abutted the Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary: Raiding elephants? He shooed them away and heavens help vermin like wild boars. He bare-handedly ripped them if they dared encroach ‘his’ turf. His adventurous encounters with panthers, tigers, bears or hyenas, I have heard many a night sitting in front of a roaring fire that crackled in my living room on my estate bungalow near Ooty. He showed me claw marks and bite scars too as evidence of his ‘close encounters’.

Posses from Kandal Police Station regularly came by in jeeps, looking for him. Obviously he was one of the 'higher ups' in their 'wanted' rosters. He sent shivers down everyone’s spine: the villagers at Kannerimukh feared him; rather, were in awe of his physique, power and prowess. Rumors on his liaisons with the dreaded dacoit and poacher / sandalwood smuggler Veerappan and his henchmen flew thick and fast: in fact he disappeared quite often for weeks, only to resurface as if he had just gone for a 'walk in the park'.

'He traps and trades in skins, pelts, claws and ivory ayya', one or two estate laborers whispered, furtively looking around – they were terrified of him, all right. His wife and two children were with his mother in some interior corner of Karnataka. He lived in thatched roof mud lean-to, cooking and eating jungle produce – wild-fowls were aplenty in these shaded dense evergreen forests and he knew how to lure them in with mimicry and decoy calls. He sold honey collected from hives of lethal wild rock bees, brushing off their attempts to intimidate him, with a shrug and snigger; ‘Poochi, ayya, poochi!! puliya?’ (They