Tiger Bridge: Nine Days on a Bend of the Nauranala

Although in this essay Horton, a conservationist, attempts to approach nature as a spiritual experience, she effectively undercuts her goal by focusing on herself and diminishing her appreciation of nature for its own sake. In 1977, Horton spent nine days on the bank of the Nauranala River in India's Dudwa National Park: she hoped to see a tiger (and did). While she offers observations about the setting and the native animals--especially a python and a tiger, which she irritatingly tries to elevate to totems--she is equally self-interested: ``At my best I simply ingested stillness, experienced serenity as a quality of wilderness.'' She sentimentalizes solitude, saying the river taught her she could live a ``quiet existence without experiencing a single moment of loneliness''--but only eight pages earlier, she notes that at the guest house where she spent her nights, she was served by ``the staff of ten or so.'' Ultimately, Horton is the center of the book, and it's tough to care about her escape from hectic, two-telephone American life (just describing it leaves her ``almost too wearied'') and her idealization of rural India. (Mar.)