The hunter and the spirit

At a Glance

• Central figures: A young Santhal hunter, unnamed in most tellings, and a bonga - a forest spirit dwelling near a sal grove at the edge of cultivated land.
• Setting: The Santhal Parganas region of Jharkhand, in the forested hills between villages; a story preserved in oral tradition among Santhal elders and manjhi headmen.
• The turn: The hunter, having killed a white hare sacred to the bonga, is confronted by the spirit and offered a choice - return the hare’s body to the forest floor or keep the meat and lose his ability to find game.
• The outcome: The hunter refuses to return the hare, and from that night forward he cannot track, cannot aim, cannot find so much as a squirrel in the forest he has known since childhood.
• The legacy: The story survives as a cautionary account told in Santhal villages to explain why certain animals and certain groves are left alone - why a hunter who takes everything will, in the end, have nothing.

The sal trees stood close together where the hill dropped away, and in the green dark between them nothing moved. The hunter crouched at the edge of the grove with his bow across his knees. He had been out since before light. His wife was pregnant with their second child. The rice from the last baha season was almost gone, and what remained had weevils in it.

He had seen the hare twice already. Once at the stream crossing below the village, once on the path near the old termite mound. Both times it had been white - not pale, not grey-touched, but white from ears to feet, the kind of white that does not belong to the forest floor. He had not shot then. Now he waited where the hare’s tracks led, into the sal grove where his grandfather had told him not to hunt.

The White Hare

His grandfather had been specific. The sal grove on the hill’s east face belonged to a bonga. You could walk through it. You could gather fallen wood from its edges. You could not kill there. The bonga fed on the life of the grove - the insects in the bark, the fungus on the roots, the small animals that sheltered in the leaf cover. To take from the grove was to take from the bonga’s plate.

The hunter knew this. He also knew that his daughter had cried through the night because her stomach was empty, and his wife had not cried because she was too tired. He watched the grove. The white hare came out from between two sal trunks, moving in the unhurried way of an animal that does not expect to die.

He shot it. The arrow took it behind the shoulder and it fell without a sound. He stood and walked to where it lay. Its fur was as white as he had thought, cleaner than anything he had seen in the forest. No dirt on it. No ticks. Its eyes were open and they were black and wet and looked at nothing.

He picked it up by the hind legs and turned to go.

The Voice in the Grove

The sound came from inside the sal trees. Not from any particular tree. From all of them, or from the ground between them, or from the air itself - he could not tell.

You have taken from me.

The hunter stopped. He did not drop the hare. He held it tighter.

That was mine. It lived under my protection. Put it down on the ground and walk away, and I will not follow you.

The voice was not loud. It was the kind of voice that comes when you are almost asleep and someone speaks your name - quiet, close, impossible to ignore. He felt cold across his shoulders despite the heat.

He thought of his daughter crying. He thought of his wife’s face when he came home with nothing, which he had done three days running. The white hare was heavy in his hand. Good meat. Enough for two meals.

Put it down.

He did not put it down. He walked. Fast at first, then faster. Branches caught at his arms. He did not look behind him. By the time he reached the stream crossing he was running, and when he splashed through the water and climbed the far bank he stopped and listened. The grove was behind him. The voice was gone.

The Empty Forest

He brought the hare home. His wife skinned it and cooked it with wild garlic and a handful of the weeviled rice, and they ate well that night. The meat was good. His daughter stopped crying. His wife slept.

The next morning he went out with his bow and he could not find anything.

This was not the ordinary bad luck of a hunt. He knew the forest. He had hunted it since he was twelve years old, trailing his father, learning which paths the barking deer used in the morning and where the jungle fowl roosted in the afternoons. He knew the water holes. He knew where the monitor lizards lay in the heat of the day. He knew the sound a sambar makes when it steps on dry bamboo leaves.

None of it worked. The paths were empty. The water holes were still. He walked for hours and heard nothing but his own feet. He set snares in the evening and checked them at dawn and found them untouched, not sprung, not even approached. The forest had closed against him.

This went on. Three days. Five days. A week. He tried different routes, different times. He tried the fields on the other side of the village where rabbits sometimes came to eat the young grain. Nothing. His arrows flew wide of things they should have hit. His feet found dry sticks when they should have found soft earth. Animals he could see at a distance vanished when he got close, not running but simply gone, as though they had stepped behind something that was not there.

The Manjhi’s Words

He went to the manjhi - the village headman - and told him what had happened. He told the truth. He said he had killed the white hare in the sal grove where his grandfather had said not to kill.

The manjhi listened. He was an old man. He had heard this kind of story before, or stories close to it. He told the hunter that the bonga had taken his hunter’s eye and his hunter’s luck. These were not the same thing. The eye was the ability to see game. The luck was the willingness of the game to be seen. Without both, a man could walk through a forest full of deer and come home with nothing.

The manjhi said there was a way to ask for it back. Go to the sal grove. Bring an offering - not meat, never meat. Bring rice beer, good rice beer, brewed properly. Pour it on the ground at the grove’s edge. Sit. Wait. If the bonga speaks, listen. If it does not speak, come home and try again.

The Grove at Dusk

The hunter brewed the rice beer himself. His wife helped him strain it. He carried it up the hill in a clay pot and reached the grove as the light was leaving.

He poured the beer on the ground at the edge of the sal trees. It soaked into the earth and was gone. He sat. The grove was quiet. Insects moved in the canopy. A gecko called from somewhere in the bark.

He waited until the stars came. No voice spoke. He walked home.

He went back the next evening. And the next. Each time he poured the rice beer and sat and listened to nothing. His wife did not complain about the beer, though they had little grain to spare. She understood what he was trying to get back.

On the seventh evening, the bonga spoke. The same voice, the same sourceless closeness.

You are patient now. You were not patient then.

The hunter said nothing. He waited.

Go home. Hunt tomorrow. You will find what you need. Not more than you need.

He went home. He hunted. A barking deer stood in the path below the village, broadside, still. He shot it clean. That night his family ate. The next day he went out and found a jungle fowl, and then nothing else, and he came home with the fowl and did not go back out.

The forest gave him enough. It did not give him more than enough. He never entered the sal grove again.