My elephant has stumbled across a tiger. It sounds like the least used line in a Hindi phrasebook, but it’s the truth. And instead of being safely down around the elephant’s feet, the tiger is at eyelevel, on a ledge just 8ft away. He watches our panic with disdain, his thick fur spilling in golden folds over his rocky perch, his whiskers catching little rainbows in the dappled sunlight, as the mahout, or elephant jockey, frantically tries to back up.

At least 100lb heavier than Africa’s biggest lion, the tiger is the true king of the jungle. His head is as big as my chest; his fangs are long enough to skewer me from sternum to scapula; and his paws look big enough to scrape a shallow grave for me, the mahout and the elephant, if need be. His eyes look straight into mine, reflecting something between the nonchalant and the psychotic, making it perfectly clear that if he wanted me, he could have me, and there’s nothing I could do about it.

In the shadows behind his stare lies his sister, sprawled over a rock like a mafia moll in furs. This is their manor and I’m at their mercy, but, for the moment, these natural-born killers seem content for me to admire their fearful symmetry.

IT’S NOT easy to come face to face with a tiger in its natural habitat. Worst accounts reckon on as few as 2,500 remaining in the wild, spread out in rapidly shrinking populations from Siberia to Bangladesh. Shamefully,

the nation with the world’s highest concentration of panthera tigris is the United States, with an estimated 10,000 of the beasts banged up on ranches, or caged in the fashionable homes of American millionaires.

God knows how many more are languishing in compensation for the flaccid egos of Russian businessmen and central Asian gangsters — 6,000 by some accounts — and then there’s the abhorrent fact that a vast part of the world still believes that the only good tiger is a dead one.

The current value of a tiger corpse is about £20,000, which is more than a poor Indian farmer will earn in a lifetime. Tiger bone fetches up to £350 a kilo in South Korea, and in Taiwan a pair of tiger eyes — used to treat epilepsy — costs £65. In the Chinese city of Lanzhou, a phial of ground tiger tail — supposedly effective against skin cancer — will set you back £170; and in Japan, virility tablets containing tiger penis have been found on sale at £13,000 a bottle.

And despite the efforts of all the soft-hearted celebrities and well-meaning charities, the killing goes on — by poachers, by big-game hunters and by local populations who can’t think of another way to stop tigers taking their stock.

These days, your only chance of seeing a tiger, outside a pharmacy or a cage, is in a national park. India’s Ranthambore National Park is by far the most popular, but the best place to spot this critically endangered predator is in Bandhavgarh, in the little-visited central state of Madhya Pradesh. Cradled between the Vindhyan highlands and the eastern flanks of the Satpura Range, this remote reserve is currently home to 58 Royal Bengal tigers and there’s still room for a dozen more.

“Visit in the summertime and the park is a choking place of heat and dust, but in the springtime it is sublime,” says Deepak Kashani, a local writer. “The birdsong is at its sweetest: the most divine call is that of the Indian cuckoo, a plaintive, mournful whistle. The flame trees have burst into blossom and, at night, the flowers of the mahua tree fall. The travelling people — the Gond and the Baiga — collect the flowers at sunrise to make wine, sometimes meeting sloth bears who also like to get drunk on the nectar.”

He paints a pretty picture but glosses over the troubling reality of poverty-stricken locals, who quite rightly feel that the preservation of a vast swathe of firewood and grazing land for the benefit of rich western tourists does them no favours at all. To them, the tiger is at best an irrelevance and at worst a lurking, cattle-rustling, murdering menace.

Raj Sharma, who runs the Nature Heritage Lodge outside the park gates in Tala, nearly had his throat ripped out by a tigress in 2003. The attack left him with a shredded shoulder and a badly damaged arm, but failed to kill his passion for the beasts.

“Only tourism can save tigers,” he says, “but only if that tourism directly benefits the people living around the national park.” He sips his marsala chai and fixes me with an evangelist’s eye.

“Down that road lives a 10-year-old girl called Nisha.” He points down a potholed track bordered by lushly forested, fenced parkland on one side and dusty, denuded pasture on the other. “Her father is unemployed, her mother is bedridden with tuberculosis and the family can’t afford treatment. Each day she hikes five miles to a school with no toilets and no electricity, with no hope whatsoever of improving her life. Every morning she is passed by 4WDs full of rich tourists on their way to see the tigers, and every evening they pass her on their way back to dinner at their distant hotels, but they’re irrelevant to this little girl.

“Back home, there’s no firewood because the only source is inside the park, so she cooks the family dinner on a fire made of cow dung. Somewhere nearby a tiger roars, but she couldn’t care less. He too is irrelevant to her, until he kills a neighbour, steals her father’s cattle, or a poaching gang pays the family a few hundred rupees to keep quiet.”

But Raj had a solution. “I thought about what would happen if, instead of staying far away from the park, the tourists stayed here in Tala, and each one donated a few hundred rupees to the school. Now, the roof is repaired, there’s a brand-new toilet block and a computer room. There are new teachers, too, attracted by the facilities, and there’s a chance that Nisha will make something of her life. Things are looking up at home, too: her dad has got a job at one of these local lodges and, because he can now afford medicine, her mum is up and about. The firewood is still hard to find, but Nisha doesn’t blame the tigers. These days, she couldn’t imagine life without them.”

At sunrise the next morning, I’ve already been in the park for an hour, crawling through the mist in a 4WD they call a Gipsy and watching the stars fade. It’s cold enough to see your breath and monkeys sit shivering in trees, staring impatiently at the ridge over which the sun’s first rays will appear.

We’re following an aural trail, tracking the barks of sambar deer among the dripping trees and damp, sandstone crags. These alarm calls mean a tiger is on the prowl, but with just a few dozen of the beasts in a park the size of Bedfordshire, there’s no guarantee that the predator will be seen.

But you can improve your chances by choosing a good guide, and mine is among the best. It’s rumoured that Dipendra’s somewhat disturbing ability to predict and anticipate tiger movements was learnt in a former career as a poacher, but he just smiles bashfully when I ask him for the truth.

He parks the Gipsy near the junction of two tracks and settles down to play with his mobile phone. Other guides speed past, their passengers wrapped in blankets in the pre-dawn chill, but Dipendra says: “We’ll just wait here. She’s near.” Thirty minutes later, the alarm calls rise in a panicked crescendo, then cease. Even the birds stop calling for a few moments, until the awful stillness is broken by Dipendra’s solemn voice.

“She’s killed,” he murmurs. Blood trails at the scene show the victim has been dragged deep into the jungle. After an agonising wait for the elephants to arrive, we climb aboard and lumber into the woods. The smell of gore upsets the wrinkled behemoths but the mahouts urge them onwards, breaking branches and bashing down bushes.

Suddenly, my elephant stops, and in the shadows, six paces in front, the bloody faces of a tigress and her two cubs look up from the remains of a spotted deer, their expressions more of indignation than anger at our intrusion on their breakfast.

It’s a brutal, terrifying scene, and as I watch the still-warm body of the deer devoured, something stirs inside — a long-buried emotion swaddled by the sterile insulation of risk-free western life. It’s the primeval fear of predation, of being caught, killed and consumed by a creature faster, stronger and crueller than me.

And as bone cracks, flesh rips and those golden eyes stare back, unblinking, I see what Raj saw a decade ago. The tiger is an anachronism: a near-mythical beast too powerful, too dangerous and too beautiful to live freely in the modern world. Tourism alone can save the few that remain, but only if tour operators can persuade local populations — to whom a poacher’s money is as good as anyone’s — that this cattle-killing cat could become a cash cow.

It’s a long shot, though, and as the train pulls out of Katni for the 14-hour drag to New Delhi, I stand in the doorway watching the sun go down behind the plain. Broken clouds obscure the bloody orb, painting stripes across its face, and as I watch its decline, I can’t shake the fear that by the time my own daughter is Nisha’s age, the sun may have for ever set on the tiger.

–– Chris Haslam travelled as a guest of Exodus (0870 950 0029, www.exodus.co.uk), which supports the Tala school project and offers a 17-day Land of the Tiger itinerary from £1,655pp, visiting Kanha, Ranthambore and Bandhavgarh national parks. The price includes flights from Heathrow to Delhi, B&B accommodation and transfers. Other operators supporting local conservation projects include Explore (0870 333 4001, www.explore.co.uk), which has a 17-day tiger-spotting trip from £1,429pp, also with flights from Heathrow and accommodation; and Tribes Travel (01728 685971, www.tribes.co.uk), which has a seven-night full-board package in the exclusive Anant Van ecolodge for £2,185pp, again with flights from Heathrow

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