Machilie Diswang

In the winter of 1993, hunters in the Angami village of Khonoma, in the hills of Nagaland, held a Christmas hunting competition. By the end of one week, roughly 300 Blyth’s tragopans, a crimson-throated pheasant found nowhere outside this stretch of the eastern Himalaya and the northern Myanmar borderlands lay dead. For a culture in which hunting prowess had long been a measure of a man’s standing, it should have been a triumph. Instead, it became a reckoning.

Machilie Diswang is with the College of Agricultural Engineering and Post Harvest Technology, CAU Imphal

On the ridge above Khonoma village, the morning mist sits so thick you could mistake it for the edge of the world. Below, arranged in near-geometric tiers that drop sharply into the valley, are the terraced fields that have fed this community for longer than any written record holds. A woman moves through the rows, her fingers parting leaves with the unhurried certainty of someone who has done this 10,000 times before.