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# We Asked Our Guide What He Used to Poach
- URL: https://christingeorge.com/we-asked-our-guide-what-he-used-to-poach/
- Published: 2026-10-18T17:19:55.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-18T17:19:55.000Z
- Description: Two days on the Periyar Tiger Trail in Thekkady with an ex-poacher guide: leeches, hornbills, gaur herds, a forest camp and no tigers.
- Author: Christin Emmanuel George
- Tags: Life, Wander, Wildlife, Kerala, Periyar Tiger Reserve, Trek, The Road

Joseph does not take no for an answer. He takes it as a booking request. Preethi and I had been politely declining the Periyar Tiger Trail for weeks. The four of us already have the Philippines booked for March, and Joseph and Minnu are bringing their kids. Another trip before that felt like one too many, especially after the few weeks I'd had. So Joseph booked it and told us afterwards. That was the whole negotiation.

We have been friends since LKG, and after thirty-five years he knows which of my no's are real. Minnu joined the gang twelve years ago by marrying Joseph. Preethi and I [drove up from Cochin](https://christingeorge.com/i-bought-the-car-before-the-licence/), picked up Minnu and Joseph. We spent the night near the reserve, so the trek wouldn't start at the end of a three-hour drive.

It had rained hard the day before, hard enough that the forest department cancelled that day's treks. The Tiger Trail is booked out until April 2027\. Anyone who lost their slot to the rain now has six months to think about it. We made it. Whew.

We were at the Periyar forest office by 9:15\. Claude had told me to pack three extra pairs of socks. The rangers told us to take off the pair we were wearing. Leech socks go on bare feet and tie tight below the knee, which is a terrible moment to remember I hadn't trimmed my toenails. Ranger Sabu George went down the line tying us in, then rubbed a generous pinch of nasal snuff into each sock. Leeches hate snuff. The ground was crawling with them, every one already reaching for us.

Our guide for the two days was a poacher. A former one, which makes all the difference. Sabu used to hunt in this forest and now protects it, and the whole Tiger Trail is run by men like him. Each group has at most six people. Ours was the four of us and Aiden and Helen, a couple in their sixties from the UK who turned out to be smashing company. The support team had already gone ahead. They walk in front of every group to set up camp, carrying its lunch with them.

![The six trekkers in leech socks against a fallen log by the lake](https://christingeorge.com/content/images/2026/10/1000352712.jpg)

**Six pairs of leech socks, tied tight.*

Preethi once spotted a single ram on a mountainside in Yosemite, so it was no surprise that she got the first animal here too. It was a Malabar giant squirrel, and it put on quite a show, leaping from tree to tree.

A little further on, something huge took off right above us. It was a great hornbill, and the sound of its wings beating was ethereal. Before we had recovered, a second one took off after it. Helen said it felt like Jurassic Park, and she wasn't wrong. With the giant trees and the grassland opening up beyond them, it could have been the scene where the Brachiosaurus first walks into view of the jeep. A langur nearby was less impressed. He swung away through the trees, screaming what I am sure were colourful obscenities at the hornbills and at us. I don't blame him. We had walked right into his me time.

We passed the trenches dug to keep elephants away from the villages, and Sabu told us about a tiger cub the guards had found alone and too weak to survive. They raised her inside a netted enclosure, and we could see the cables running to its cameras. The nets were flimsy, Sabu said. She could have walked through them any time she liked, but she never knew her own strength, so she stayed. She never learned to hunt either, and this year the forest department decided she would go to a zoo.

For the rest of the morning we walked along the catchment of the lake rather than through the forest. Kerala sits in the tropics and doesn't get an autumn. The trees here flower in stages, though, and from a distance the hills look like fall anyway. The flats were full of butterflies and dragonflies, and after the downpour the night before, every step was a squelch. Sabu kept us going with stories about the land the whole way.

![Grassland between two banks of flowering trees in Periyar](https://christingeorge.com/content/images/2026/10/1000353379.jpg)

**Kerala has no autumn. The trees do it in stages anyway.*

Our first stop turned out to be the Thekkady boat landing, though none of us recognised it from that side. We crossed the water on a raft made to look like bamboo. Up close it was painted PVC pipe. Authenticity lost to durability, and nobody on board complained. On the other side the trail ran along the boat safari route for a while. A lone tusker stood in the distance, and his tusks were visible even from there. Anyone on the boats that day would have had a close encounter.

Back in the forest, the leeches joined us. The rain had turned the fallen leaves into mulch, and the guards said that is what makes their numbers explode. In the dry season they burrow a few centimetres into the soil and wait for the rains to bring them back up. The leech socks did their job, and nothing got through below the knee, so the leeches went over the top. A few climbed the leaves along the trail and tagged us from above. I got two bites on my wrists and Preethi got one on her neck. Four bites in all, against the number of leeches we walked through, and we're calling that a win.

Somewhere along here Sabu spotted a red mongoose far ahead. We only found it on a phone at 10x zoom, and only after he pointed. A poacher's eyes, even at sixty, are something else.

The views kept opening up after that. The sounds and the smells of a place that runs entirely on its own terms made me feel small, because this forest was here long before any of us. It also made me feel big, because I was walking through it with my wife and my best friends. Airplane mode, with both feet in the mulch, is the best disconnection I know.

We reached camp at about 15,000 steps, and boy, was it a surprise. We had braced ourselves for a hole in the ground with a lid. Instead there were two European-style toilets, both spotless. It is the middle of a forest, so the bugs come free, but for people expecting a porta potty at best, this was luxury. The support team had cooked a Kerala lunch of rice, cabbage thoran, sambar, raita and mezhukkupuratti made with long beans and with beetroot. It is not hunger saying this. The food was amazing. Afterwards some of us napped and some of us sat around talking while sambar deer grazed across the lake. A large wild boar wandered in to inspect the camp, snorted at us a great deal and left.

The second leg started at 3:30\. There was black coffee on demand, and I was in keep-it-coming mode. This stretch is harder and can be dangerous, so a police officer and an armed guard came with us. The last time I camped, at [Gandikota](https://christingeorge.com/where-we-camped-is-a-road-now/), I walked a tent straight past the police. This time they came along.

![A forest guard in camouflage with a shotgun slung over his shoulder](https://christingeorge.com/content/images/2026/10/1000352402.jpg)

**Armed. To scare, never to kill.*

Sloth bears had torn open fresh termite mounds along the way, though the bears themselves stayed out of sight. The trail climbed and dropped over the hills and went into grass taller than our heads. We moved through it slowly, with the grass slapping our faces and arms. More than once Sabu stopped the line, and we stood there without knowing why. It looked exactly like the grass in that famous Kaziranga video, where a tigress launches out at an elephant and goes for the mahout on its back. Nobody invited that memory. It came anyway.

A Travancore tortoise was sitting by the path, and it pulled its head in as we came close. A few minutes later the head came back out.

![Close-up of a Travancore tortoise with its head out of its shell](https://christingeorge.com/content/images/2026/10/1000352274.jpg)

**Head back out, a few minutes later*

A few hundred metres to our right, some enormous gaur were using the same route as us. I could feel each of their steps through the ground.

Silence is the rule on the trail. Only the lead ranger talks, and the rest of us split our attention between our feet and the forest, heads on a swivel. We were walking single file along the edge of the catchment, with dense forest to our right, when something in the trees let out a massive snort, like a small explosion of air. Nobody could see what it was. Half of us were sure it was a tiger, which was terrifying and also exactly what we had come for. The other half were sure it was an elephant.

It was a lone gaur. Gaur are no joke. They look like buffalo that have spent years in Arnold Schwarzenegger's gym, and they have the legs, back and chest to prove it.

Later we walked out of the grass into a clearing with a whole herd standing in it. They were as curious about us as we were about them. Both groups kept a polite distance and went their separate ways. Skulls and bits of bone lay around here and there, in case anyone forgot we weren't in Kansas anymore.

The guards have a strict rule about being back at camp by six. After that, Sabu said, the forest turns into a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and we would be Tom. He knows the forest and the clock well enough to bend the route to our pace and still get us in on time. We promised to walk fast, and we did, I think. I will never know how many trails he dropped for us. On the way back a barking deer showed us its disappearing backside. Sabu had warned us that we'd get a few seconds with most animals, and the barking deer didn't stay for even that.

Ranger Mahendran was in charge of the evening, and he welcomed us back with biscuits, cupcakes and more coffee. His father was killed by a tusker. Even so, he was the most cheerful and helpful of all the guards. They were all a delight, and their stories carried the trek as much as the animals did. They lit a fire to keep the flies and the bears away, and we sat around it.

Around the fire, Aiden and Helen told us how they met. They were nineteen and both working at the same local McDonald's. We asked if they celebrate their anniversary there, and promised to think of them every time we walk into one. Joseph and I mentioned that we've been friends for 35 years, and it dawned on the rest of us that Aiden and Helen had been together about as long as we had been alive. The talk turned to world politics. An hour later everyone was so depressed that we went back to McDonald's.

Dinner was chapati and green peas, both cooked beautifully. Preethi ate the green peas. In all the years I have known her, peas on her plate have either been thrown out or eaten by me. This time she went back for seconds.

When the guards saw our torches, they asked why we weren't pointing them into the forest. So we did. Deer and boar were moving around the camp, and further out there was nothing but floating eyes reflecting the light back. After a while the fog rolled in. Once in the night a large deer tore past the tents screaming, but otherwise the forest was peaceful. We were not. I'd done about 30,000 steps that day and still couldn't sleep. Neither Preethi nor I ever sleep before midnight, and the tent was hot. We slept, woke up and slept again until the morning finally came.

After a black coffee we crossed the water by the camp to look for the lone tusker from the day before. He didn't show. We found more deer and boar, an owl in a tree and a Brahminy kite. What we found instead of the tusker was a herd of gaur, and this time we saw them before they saw us. A small hill stood between us and them, so we crept up it. From the top, the herd was split in two, maybe 50 to 75 metres away. We were all watching the half on the left when the half on the right broke into a full gallop across the plain. Their hooves sounded like rolling thunder.

![A herd of gaur running across a grassy plain](https://christingeorge.com/content/images/2026/10/1000352392.jpg)

**The right half, leaving. \[The video will be up on @chrristin on IG\]*

Back at camp, breakfast was poori and chana masala with sweet pineapple. The story repeats itself here. The food was frickin delicious.

The tribal fishermen who work the lake sell their catch to a society that pays them something like a monthly salary. They camp along the banks, and when elephants come they run for their bamboo rafts and paddle out to the middle of the water. The man fishing near our tent had caught nothing the day before. This morning the catch was good, and the guards bought it from them. The camp's leftover vegetables went back with the fishermen. It was a conversation between equals, and a pleasure to listen to.

Halfway through, the fishermen started roasting Sabu. They said he would have stripped the forest bare if the government hadn't stopped him and given him a job. So we asked him what he used to poach. The man who had talked for two days straight went completely shy. "Ummmm, everything," he said. "Anything." He didn't add another word. For the first time on the trip, he had no comeback.

On the walk out we passed a spot that had been empty the day before. Overnight, a leopard had killed a porcupine right on the trail. Quills were scattered across one patch, and the insides lay on the ground untouched. Nothing but the leopard had been near it, not even a scavenger. The guards told us that porcupine quills, mullu in Malayalam, are feathers without the feather. They are actually modified hair, which is somehow stranger. Further on, the water was full of tadpoles, thousands of them. The guards said they shouldn't be here for another few months, but the water is warmer now and they are hatching early.

The trek ended back at the boat landing, just like that. I was ready for another 7,000 steps, but the last leg was a bus to the forest office. Aiden and Helen stayed on the bus. We made a quick stop at a sandalwood tree, and the guards said goodbye.

![The trekking group with the forest guards by Periyar lake](https://christingeorge.com/content/images/2026/10/1000353263.jpg)

**The pack, with the people who kept us alive and entertained.*

We never saw a tiger, and never got close to an elephant. The rain turns the lowland grass to mulch, so the elephants had taken themselves up into the hills, where the grass and water are clean. Selfish of them. We had paid good money to see them. How dare they be picky when the rest of us eat microplastics every day. A tiger was always a long shot. Eight months ago, Sabu said, a tiger killed an elephant here and stayed with the carcass for a week. Sightings that week were almost guaranteed. Some people get so close that they forget to take a photo. We got the gaur instead. Maybe the tigers watched us from somewhere and enjoyed the show. [Our cat](https://christingeorge.com/who-cares-shes-a-cat/) would probably know. The odds of seeing a cat on the Tiger Trail were slim. On my laps of the villa complex, they are better than a hundred percent.

Next time Joseph won't need to ambush us. We'll message Sabu, ask him when to come and get him to book us three days and three nights. It will probably be a hotter, stinkier summer trip. With this lot, it will be a hoot.

Thirty or forty gaur made that thunder, and now I want to hear the wildebeest migration. The signpost outside the souvenir shop had already worked out the route. Serengeti, 4,875 kilometres, that way.

![](https://christingeorge.com/content/images/2026/10/1000353405.jpg)

Directions, for next time.