At 11 pm, when the forest is enveloped in deathly stillness, faint whispers are heard at the Arjuni Morgaon Range that falls in the Vidarbha region of Gondia district in eastern Maharashtra. A team of forest officers was called urgently for a meeting after one of the guards received information about a sighting of a large herd of elephants, a few hundred metres from Kawtha village. They are joined by the hulla team, a party of elephant chasers, who have been specially called in from West Bengal.

Maruti Sauskar and his 30-year-old son Yashwant, residents of Kawtha, first spotted the herd in their field. They were sitting on a machaan guarding their crops, when suddenly at around 8 pm, they saw the elephants amble in. “We nearly escaped death,” Yashwant tells this writer. “A few hours after arriving at our farm at 5 pm, I heard the loud sound of a tree branch breaking. A villager had already told us about a herd spotted nearby. Without wasting any time, we jumped out of the machaan and ran towards our village. Nearly three acres of our farmland was damaged by the elephants. They even destroyed the machaan we sat in.” Ever since, forest officials have been warning villagers against visiting their fields after dusk, but many have thrown caution to the wind.