The four of us were spread out, searching for the Indian Thick-knee (also called Indian Stone-curlew) when we heard Lokesh call, “I have it! Come quickly.”
I turned and started striding in his direction . . . and then I was suddenly lying face down on the ground. For a moment, I didn’t know what had happened or how; all I knew was that my knees had hit the ground a split second before my face did. I had caught my foot under a root or vine and pitched forward with velocity.
I cried out for Vernon, and he and Andrew came running. As soon as Vernon saw me, he shouted, “Don’t get up! Don’t get up!”
“Why not?” I gritted out—a reasonable question, I thought—but the answer was really quite obvious. We were in a somewhat open but quite uneven area with thorn bushes here and there, as well as vines with inch-long thorns. We had seen grazing goats and, of course, cows wander freely everywhere in India; as a result, dung was liberally scattered everywhere on the ground. I wanted to get my face out of the dirt and, most likely, dung, but in fact, those long thorns were sticking into me. Vernon was concerned that if I started moving around, trying to stand up, the thorns would break off in my flesh.
Lokesh arrived on the run. He immediately grasped the situation and lifted me—in my prone position— straight up so that no thorns broke off and became embedded. We abandoned the hunt for the thick-knee, limped to the car, and went back to the hotel. We stopped at the office, and they donated some supplies; between those and our own first aid kit, we thought I could be fixed up without outside help.
Vernon is my doctor on these occasions—they occur more often than either of us would like— and he washed my right leg which was bloody from the knee down and disinfected my many scratches. I had a good-sized goose egg on my forehead as well, and some dirt was embedded in my face. After applying ointment, Vernon neatly wrapped my leg in gauze and taped it up. I had twisted my knee and my foot, but we didn’t think anything was broken. It took a few days for all the bruises to appear—they essentially reached from my thigh of the bottom of my foot. At the moment, though, I was all ready for the afternoon game drive (our second at Ranthambhore National Park). I merely had to limp to the safari vehicle and, with some assistance and not a little pain, crawl into my seat.
