Tiger is giving us dodge,' says wildlife guide Hem Bahuguna, calling a halt near some telltale paw prints and scrapings. As the engine cools, then stills, we hear only the birds, the soft breeze and the distant chattering of monkeys. From time to time another jeep driver materialises, stopping to exchange a few words. Otherwise, here in India, the most crowded of nations, there is perfect peace.
Corbett National Park is India's first, perhaps finest, tiger reserve and is buffered by surrounding tracts of country. You can spend days chasing tigers or cast a line to tempt the golden mahseer. The Ramganga reservoir provides year-round water for the animals and spawning grounds for the golden mahseer, which migrates upstream.
Gharial, the snouted crocodile, co-exist alongside the mugger crocodile and the otter. Sambar, chital or spotted deer and the solitary muntjac or barking deer are all easily spotted, especially in the grasslands. The less visible wild boar, sloth bear and tiger all record their passing with spoor - paw prints and droppings.
Panthers, although endangered, are sighted in the hill country - but, Bahuguna admits gloomily, Indian authorities have recently confiscated quantities of contraband skins.
Macaques or rhesus monkeys, and the larger langurs, enliven otherwise still forests where at least 500 of India's 1,300 known bird species also reside.
Bahuguna has set up a pre-dawn rendezvous at Amdanda Gate, outside the town of Ramnagar. By noon we have jolted across innumerable gravel riverbeds, wound up into the dappled shade of sal forest and back down again, and climbed a watchtower on the edge of a broad river valley. We have examined the bark torn and chewed by elephants, noting the bushes trampled by these huge and demanding creatures. Tiger paw prints and droppings beside the track indicate the age and health of the animal.