Chasing tigers in the Sundarbans

edged towards the cowshed where two tigers were crouching. The tigress bolted into a nearby house and the sole ranger shot it tranquiliser gun - so one tiger was saved from being bludgeoned by the villagers. The male tiger disappeared into a paddy field, and although eventually shot by the same ranger, the drugs took too long to work and the 200kg beast leaped out of the long grass straight into one of his pursuers, Anil Krishna Mistry, breaking the young man's leg. A shotgun blast rang out. Anil was lying on the ground, writhing in pain. Next to him was a dead tiger.

That was in 2003, when tigers were often seen in Village No 9 on Bali Island, and when it usually ended badly for them. Anil, once a poacher of deer and wild boar from a nearby tiger reserve, had just started his career as a principal field officer for the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI).

A decade on, he's helping educate villagers to not fear tigers. He hosts visitors at the lush gardens, ponds and tourist-grade huts that make up Bali's Tiger Camp in the Sundarbans National Park. In this most remote part of West Bengal, he's hoping to show them a tiger in the wild and, just as importantly, how a traditional village has transformed from a hotbed of poaching to the frontline of tiger conservation.

The village is constantly at the mercy of its diverse and dangerous surroundings. Here, south of Kolkata on the delta of the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and Meghna Rivers, are both vast and narrow tidal channels whose ebb and flow dictate when, even if, the villagers on Bali Island can come and go. The adjacent Gumdi River, about one kilometre wide, is home to Gangetic dolphins, estuarine crocodiles and bull sharks. Cyclones and catastrophic flooding are a constant threat. The temperature regularly hits 42 degrees Celsius.

This is life on the fringes, with no roads or electricity, and only a spare network of community water pumps. A Bengal tiger was last seen treading the levee that borders the tiger camp not three months before my stay, having swum across the Gumdi from the tiger reserve. It takes them less than 20 minutes and they usually cross at night. The thought sends shivers through me; on top of the levee is a dirt track, occasionally a bricked path, that passes basic thatched huts whose dried mud walls do nothing to protect against wild animals.

It's Anil's job to convince fellow villagers to protect the tigers that are essential to Bali's future. The T-shirt worn by Anil and his colleagues at the camp reads, "Bagh Bachao, Jungle Bachao, Bharat Bachao", or save tiger, save jungle, save village. "We are protecting the tiger's food," says Anil.