Bardiya is the largest lowland reserve in Nepal, sal forest and elephant grass along the Karnali river in the far west. It is one of the very few places left where you go after a tiger on foot. There are tigers here to look for. The count went from about eighteen in 2009 to 125 in the 2022 census, the highest density in the country. They are not found by scanning for stripes. The guide stops at fresh pugmarks in the sand, then waits on the alarm barks of chital deer, the surest sign something is moving nearby. A dawn walk goes out in the cool with a licensed guide and nothing at all between you and the grass. Every rustle in the sal sharpens as you work toward a waterhole where a tiger, a rhino or an elephant may be drinking. A jeep covers far more ground in a morning, out along the forest roads to the open phantas, the grasslands.
An elephant goes where neither can. It walks into grass that stands taller than a person, and from its back you look down onto the grassland instead of into a wall of it. That is how the greater one-horned rhino usually turns up, reintroduced here and breeding again, content to graze shoulder-deep or sink into a wallow while you watch. For decades the animal everyone came for was Raja Gaj, a wild bull elephant so big and so strangely domed in the skull that scientists asked whether he was a survivor from the Ice Age. DNA settled it: an exceptionally large but ordinary Asian elephant. He disappeared around 2007, at perhaps seventy. On the Karnali a raft or a dugout drifts past gharials on the sandbars, everyone watching the current for the roll of a Gangetic dolphin, with India on the far bank. Every late winter the rangers and the Tharu villages cut and burn the grasslands. It is renewal, not clearance: the fire brings a flush of tender shoots, the shoots bring the deer, and the deer bring the tiger you came to find.