AS I CONTINUE to cover the cricket out here in India, I am filled with a new ambition. I want to ride a kunkie; I want to take on the wild elephants, I want to get in there among the shoving and the trumpeting and to revel in what sounds like the most thrilling form of sport ever devised, and a sport that has at its ultimate prize the saving of the Asian elephant.

The kunkies are tame elephants: the bravest, the toughest, the best-trained, the mahouts (riders) ditto, and their joint job is to face down crop-raiding gangs of wild elephants and drive them back into the jungle. This is a classic people-wildlife clash, and the wild elephants not only damage crops but kill people. The kunkie squads have been developed by local communities in Assam and the Assam Forest Department with the backing of the WWF. After two years, the project has been a great success, in some places with crops 80 per cent up and human deaths greatly reduced.

I once rode an elephant in Nepal, sitting on her neck with my feet in the hollows behind her ears: and my horsemanly soul soared in delight and, for a moment, I thought I might throw my life away there and then, develop a new elephantmanly soul and learn to handle these much more powerful and much more dangerous beasts.

And the thought of riding out on a tame elephant among the wild ones, like Toomai, to save elephants, is intoxicating. In some cases, there are a dozen elephants against 500 wild ones. It is a thrilling and, for the mahouts, extremely dangerous job. But it is one with huge satisfactions: the thrill of interaction with wild and tame elephants, and the joy of a successful intervention. Last rice-growing season, not a single elephant was killed in retaliation for crop-raiding.

• BUT THAT is not the solution, nor, for that matter, the problem. At bottom, it is all about deforestation. You can’t drive elephants back into the forest if there is no forest. The Asian elephant, the one with ears the shape of India, is the poor relation of the publicity-hogging African elephant, the one with ears the shape of Africa. But the Asian elephant is the one in greater trouble: there are more people in Asia, and more pressure on the land.

  The trick is to stop deforestation, protect significant areas — especially the corridors between forest and forest — and then to talk about regeneration. The most important weapons here are the local people themselves: they are aware that the more deforestation takes place, the more the elephants will come crop-raiding. An elephant must eat, after all, and rather a lot at that.Local populations are beginning to put pressure on politicians to prevent deforestation. Significant advances are being made, and small victories, small areas gained, are beginning to add up. “Every success gives us more courage to go forward,” Tariq Aziz of the WWF said.

  He promised to consider me for a vacancy in the kunkie squad as soon as I can get to Assam.

• THIS HAS been a bit of a city trip, as is the way of the sporting life: England’s last Test match against India started here in Bombay this morning. But I managed to get out to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park for a quick fix of birding and forest and green, listening to the noise of koels rather than hooters (“Horn Please!” is the message on the back of every lorry, an invitation seldom, if ever, refused).

  And behind the musical squeal of the koel, the steady beat of the coppersmith: the bird that sounds exactly like a man in the middle of a gently rhythmic piece of metalwork. The coppersmith was the bird who announced the death of Nag and Nagina, the cobras, in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

  And absurdly, a peacock, a male, not a lawn ornament but a wild bird, picking its way through the leaf litter: a bird that looked both improbable and perfectly appropriate at the same time, treating the ridiculous burden — affectation, almost — of its tail as if birds that lacked such an ornament were the eccentric ones.

  I returned to my sporting labours more than somewhat refreshed. That is why human beings need green spaces and need them more with every passing year. Not to go birdwatching, but to refresh the spirit, to make urban life possible once again. Conservation is not just for the animals and plants, it is also an act of self-interest: nothing less than the conservation of the human spirit. Wildlife preservation is self-preservation.

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