I definitely believe to remember, what local people in Kodai told us about these almost extinct WILD-SHEEP in the Palni-Hills. But I personaly never got to see one for sure. Only once:
maybe, when Steve Pearl and I, someday in our SOPHMORE-year, made a hike up on the ridge beyond the"CATHOLIC BELGIUM CONVENT", I think it was called. And from way up there
we young careless happy go lucky guys rolled some big rocks down the slope toward the huge valley on this side of Perumal . And suddenly, as our rock crashed into a small shola, a strange animal like a goat or a sheep or wildboar - or maybe it was a TAHR !?!? dashed out of those bushes and fled down the gorge. Steve and I couldn`t decide, but, maybe, this was MY ONE AND ONLY "KODAI TAHR".!!! And the effect was from then on, that we talked about these almost extinct creatures on all our hikes, and so I`m sure it became something like a mythical respresentaive of wildlife in our beloved Kodai-hills, next to the huge BISON we also saw on our hikes: in MANDSCHAMPATTY- and POOMBARY-VALLEY!!
In my Junior-year some of us went hunting with Indian friends (all the names I will for the present keep to myself to embarrace or endanger nobody, but truely I WOULD like to write about this part of my biography in Palni-Life ever so much - "to whom it may concern" as you Americans
would say!) and they led us to sholas beneath Poombaari or Marian Shola, where they exitingly should us fresh tracks suosedly of these KODAI TAHR. We were waited for them, guns loaded and ready - but..till today I`m so sorry, we never saw one ---- and, truely, those "tracks" came from goats and sheeps, of local shepherds???---but we were so excited and convinced of their existense that I think we talked and dreamed so much of them, that they can very likely have been
one suggestion in that name-finding phase for that KODAI-SCHOOL-NEWSPAPER which we discussed quite intensively in STUDENTCOUNCIL and so on. Maybe Mr .Steve Root as an excited hunter in Palni-Hills and as Principal also took part in giving this Name to that Schoolpaper started in those days and still going as it seems till today.
My dreams anyway of hiking and hunting all over Palni Hills are still appearing so often as very positive "flashbacks" from those days in my memory |