The Beast Tamer

by Ruskin Bond

  Moreover, a tiger is unable to pursue and catch smaller game, such as gooral, which take refuge on steep slopes where a tiger due to its weight cannot safely follow. In 1878, however, a tigress suddenly appeared beyond Chakrata, at about 9,000 feet; she is believed to have come up from Dehra Dun, having followed the Gujars’ buffaloes on their spring migration up to the hills.

  These Gujars are a nomadic race of graziers, and own herds of magnificent buffaloes, which they maintain largely in the Government forests, feeding them mainly on loppings from trees. During the winter months, they keep to the forests in the plains, but in April they start driving their cattle up to the hills where they remain throughout the summer and rains, at altitudes between 7,000 and 11,000 feet; and in October, before the advent of snow, they take them down again.

  But, to return to the tigress in question. Having followed the Gujar’s cattle up to the hills, killing and feeding on stragglers from the herds during their 60–80 miles slow-moving trek, she their settled down to an easy and comfortable existence in the vicinity of the Gujar’s camps, without any food problems whatever! But when October came, and the Gujars started driving their cattle down to the plains again, she seems to have either accidentally missed their departure, or, more likely, to have been more or less compelled to remain behind because she had meanwhile produced three babies which were still entirely dependent on her, and far too young to travel.

  She thus, all at once, found herself and her cubs stranded, up at some 8,000 to 9,000 feet, with snow in the offing, and normal food supplies virtually non-existent. She and her farnil soon became desperately hungry and, one day while she was out hunting, she suddenly came across a man at close quarters, and, in her extremity, she killed him. She found that he was both ridiculously easy to kill, and also excellent to eat.

  This led to her rapidly becoming a confirmed, notorious and cunning man-eater, taking toll from villages scattered over some 200 square miles of mountainous country. The villagers were terror-stricken and would not go out except in large parties. Even so, her killings continued, either by day or by night, and more often than not, it was a woman she selected.

  She brought up her three cubs on human flesh and they too became man-eaters. They, however, lacked the cunning of their mother and were killed long before she was accounted for: one was killed by a spring-gun set by Mr Lowrie at Lokhar; another was shot near Chakrata by Mr Smythies, who obtained the assistance of British soldiers to surround the valley in which the young tiger had been located; the third cub was found dead under a tree which appeared to have been struck by lightning. The tigress, however, had continued in her evil ways, until in 1879 a reward of ₹500 was placed on her head. This had resulted in many visits from experienced shikaris, but none had ever succeeded in getting in touch with her, and the reward remained unclaimed for ten long years.

  That was the picture when I arrived at Mundali on 11 May 1889. I had been in India less than 5 months and had never seen a tiger outside a zoo. The day I reached Mundali, I heard that the tigress had killed a buffalo calf about half a mile from our camp. The latter included Forest Students from Dehra Dun, in the charge of Mr Fernandez, Deputy Director of the Forest School. I determined to tie up a machan in a tree near the kill, from which I hoped to get a shot at the tigress when she returned. But the same idea had also occurred to several of the students, and I foresaw little chance, therefore, of anyone at all getting a shot that way. However, a young fellow called Hansard, one of the students, approached me with a suggestion that we should explore the steep ravine below the kill at midday, when, we thought, the tigress would be enjoying a siesta. I readily agreed and we set out, I being armed with a double-barrelled 12-bore rifle by Riley, firing a conical shell propelled by 6 drains of black powder, which was kindly lent by Mr Fernandez. Hansard had only a small bore rifle, which I later realized was quite inadequate for the purpose.

  The kill was situated at the head of a precipitous ravine which had extremely steel-wooded sides, and a small spring stream at the bottom, bubbling down through a wild confusion of countless large and small boulders. It was under the lee of one of these large rocks that we were hoping perhaps to find the tigress asleep; and with that end in view, we cautiously started off down the ravine—I on one side fairly close to the stream, while Hansard was some 20 yards higher up on the other side.

  The going was very difficult and slow, and we had not managed to get very far, when I suddenly heard a fierce snarling noise from moderately high up on the further side of the ravine. I momentarily imagined that it was Hansard trying to pull my leg; but, upon raising my head to tell him to shut up and keep quiet, I saw to my horror, the tigress on top of him, biting at his neck.

  It is extraordinary with what lightning speed thoughts can flash through one’s brain in an emergency of that nature; and, in a matter of perhaps half a second, I knew that I must shoot—whatever the danger, of hitting Hansard, instead of or as well as the tigress—and in the next half second I had fired. The tigress immediately let go of Hansard and came charging down at me. I fired the second barrel as she came bounding down (but without effect), and then dropped the empty rifle and fled for my life down the precipitous ravine, leaping wildly from boulder to boulder in my head-long flight, and expecting every moment to get the tigress on top of me. But after I had covered some distance without either breaking my neck or being seized by the tigress, I realized that I was not being pursued after all; and I decided to cut straight back through the forest to the camp, in order to get another rifle, and help for Hansard.

  Several of the students and their servants accompanied me back to the spot, bringing with them a camp-bed for use as a stretcher. Upon arrival there, we found Hansard lying unconscious by the stream, and the tigress lying dead a few yards away. It was my first shot that had actually killed her, the second one having merely grazed one of her fore-paws.

  We afterwards ascertained from Hansard that he never knew that she was stalking him until she was on him, and he certainly never had a chance to fire his rifle. He was wearing a thick woollen muffler rolled up round his neck which doubtless did much to save him. In spite of this, however, the tigress had mauled him terribly, one hole penetrating from below his ear into his throat. Bits of the red muffler were adhering to the claws of the tigress when we found her in the water. She was old, though exactly how old it was impossible to say; but her canine teeth were worn right down almost to the gums and one, at least, was badly decayed. Otherwise she appeared to be in good health, and had a very good coat. Her length was 8 feet 6 inches.

  Hansard and the tigress were at once carried to the camp where the former’s wounds were attended to by the Assistant Surgeon attached to the school-camp, and two days later he was carried miles across the hills to Mussoorie on a stretcher. There he remained in the Station Hospital for some months and, when he was eventually discharged, in reasonably good shape, he married his hospital nurse, and they went to Ceylon, where he had another forest appointment.

  Some years later I met his son, who said that his father had eventually died from the after effects of that terrible encounter. The day after the tigress was brought into camp, the villagers flocked in from near and far to see the body of the dreaded beast which had carried off so many of their friends and relations during the past ten years.

  Many of them cut off little bits of the tigress’ flesh and hung them as charms round the necks of their children. The killing of the tigress was reported to the government and the reward of ₹500 was duly paid to me; this was shared with Hansard, who certainly deserved it at least as much as I did.

  [More than a hundred years later, a notice-hoard at Mundali still marks the spot where Osmaston shot the man-eater—Ed.]

  Beckwith’s Case

  Maurice Hewlett

  The facts were as follows. Mr Stephen Mortimer Beckwith was a young man living at Wilsford in the Amesbury district of Wiltshire. He was a clerk in the Wilts and Dorset Bank at Salisbury, was married and had one
child. His age at the time of the experience here related was twenty-eight. His health was excellent.

  On 30 November 1887, at about ten o’clock at night, he was returning home from Amesbury, where he had been spending the evening at a friend’s house. The weather was mild, with a rain-bearing wind blowing in squalls from the south-west. It was three-quarter moon that night, and although the sky was frequently overcast, it was at no time dark. Mr Beckwith, who was riding a bicycle and accompanied by his Fox-terrier, Strap, states that he had no difficulty in seeing and avoiding the stones cast down at intervals by the road-menders; that flocks of sheep in the hollows were very visible, and that passing Wilsford House he saw a barn owl quite plainly and remarked its heavy, uneven flight.

  A mile beyond Wilsford House, Strap, the dog, broke through the quickset hedge upon his right-hand side and ran yelping up the down, which rises sharply just there. Mr Beckwith, who imagined that he was after a hare, whistled him in, presently calling him sharply, ‘Strap, Strap, come out of it.’ The dog took no notice, but ran directly to a clump of gorse and bramble halfway up the down, and stood there in the attitude of a pointer, with uplifted paw, watching the gorse intently, and whining. Mr Beckwith was by this time dismounted, observing the dog. He watched him for some minutes from the road. The moon was bright, the sky at the moment free from cloud.

  He himself could see nothing in the gorse, though the dog was undoubtedly in a high state of excitement. It made frequent rushes forward, but stopped short of the object that it saw and trembled. It did not bark outright, but rather whimpered—‘a curious, shuddering crying noise’, says Mr Beckwith. Interested by the animal’s persistent and singular behaviour, he now sought a gap in the hedge, went through on to the down and approached the clumped bushes. Strap was so much occupied that he barely noticed his master’s coming; it seemed as if he dared not take his eyes off for one second from what he saw in there.

  Beckwith, standing behind the dog, looked into the gorse. From the distance at which he stood, still he could see nothing at all. His belief then was that there was either a tramp in a drunken sleep, possibly two tramps, or a hare caught in a wire, or possibly even a fox. Having no stick with him, he did not care, at first, to go any nearer, and contented himself with urging on the Terrier. This was not very courageous of him, as he admits, and was quite unsuccessful. No verbal excitations could draw Strap nearer to the furze-bush. Finally the dog threw up his head, showed his master the white arcs of his eyes and fairly howled at the moon. At this dismal sound Mr Beckwith was himself alarmed. It was, as he describes it—though he is an Englishman—‘uncanny’. The time, he owns, the aspect of the night, loneliness of the spot (midway up the steep slope of a chalk down), the mysterious shroud of darkness upon shadowed and distant objects, and flood of white light upon the foreground—all these circumstances worked upon his imagination.

  He was indeed for retreat; but here Strap was of a different mind. Nothing would excite him to advance, but nothing, either, could induce him to retire. Whatever he saw in the furze-bush Strap must continue to observe. In the face of this, Beckwith summoned up his courage, took it in both hands and went much nearer to the furze-bushes, much nearer, that is, than Strap the Terrier could bring himself to go. Then, he tells us, he did see a pair of bright eyes far in the thicket, which seemed to be fixed upon his, and by degrees also a pale and troubled face. Here, then, was neither fox nor drunken tramp, but some human creature, man, woman, or child, fully aware of him and of the dog.

  Beckwith, who now had surer command of his feelings, spoke aloud, asking, ‘What are you doing there? What’s the matter?’ He had no reply. He went one pace nearer, being still on his guard, and spoke again. ‘I won’t hurt you,’ he said. ‘Tell me what the matter is.’ The eyes remained unwinkingly fixed upon his own. No movement of the features could be discerned. The face, as he could now make it out, was very small—‘about as big as a big wax dolls,’ he says, ‘of a longish oval, very pale.’ He adds, ‘I could see its neck now, no thicker than my wrist; and where its clothes began, I couldn’t see any arms, for a good reason. I found out afterwards that they had been bound behind its back. I should have said immediately, “That’s a girl in there”, if it had not been for one or two plain considerations. It had not the size of what we call a girl, nor the face of what we mean by a child. It was, in fact, neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. Strap had known that from the beginning, and now I was of Strap’s opinion myself.’

  Advancing with care, a step at a time, Beckwith presently found himself within touching distance of the creature. He was now standing with furze half-way up his calves, right above it, stooping to look closely at it; and as he stooped and moved now this way, now that, to get a clearer view, so the crouching thing’s eyes gazed up to meet his, and followed them about, as if safety lay only in that never-shifting, fixed regard. He had noticed, and states in his narrative, that Strap had seemed quite unable, in the same way, to take his eyes off the creature for a single second.

  He could now see that, of whatever nature it might be, it was in form and features, most exactly a young woman. The features, for instance, were regular and fine. He remarks in particular upon the chin. All about its face, narrowing the oval of it, fell dark, glossy curtains of hair, very straight and glistening with wet. Its garment was cut in a plain circle round the neck and shorn off at the shoulders, leaving the arms entirely bare. This garment, shift, smock or gown, as he indifferently calls it, appeared thin, and was found afterwards to be of a grey colour, soft and clinging to the shape. It was made loose, however, and gathered in at the waist. He could not see the creature’s legs as they were tucked under her. Her arms, it has been related, were behind her back. The only other things to be remarked upon were the strange stillness of one who was plainly suffering, and might well be alarmed, an appearance of expectancy, a dumb appeal; what he himself calls rather well ‘an ignorant sort of impatience, like that of a sick animal’.

  ‘Come,’ Beckwith now said, ‘let me help you up. You will get cold if you sit here. Give me your hand, will you?’ She neither spoke nor moved; simply continued to search his eyes. Strap, meantime, was still trembling and whining. But now, when he stooped yet lower to take her forcibly by the arms, she shrank back a little way and turned her head, and he saw to his horror that she had a great open wound in the side of her neck-from which, however, no blood was issuing. Yet it was clearly a fresh wound, recently made.

  He was greatly shocked. ‘Good God,’ he said, ‘there’s been foul play here,’ and whipped out his handkerchief. Kneeling, he wound it several times round her slender throat and knotted it as tightly as he could; then, without more ado, he took her up in his arms, under the knees and round the middle, and carried her down the slope to the road. He describes her as of no weight at all. He says it was ‘exactly like carrying an armful of feathers about’. ‘I took her down the hill and through the hedge at the bottom as if she had been a pillow.’

  Here it was that he discovered that her wrists were bound together behind her back with a kind of plait of things so intricate that he was quite unable to release them. He felt his pockets for his knife, but could not find it, and then recollected suddenly that he should have a new one with him, the third prize in a whist tournament in which he had taken part that evening. He found it wrapped in paper in his overcoat pocket, with it cut the thongs and set the little creature free. She immediately responded—the first sign of animation which she had displayed by throwing both her arms about his body and clinging to him in an ecstasy. Holding him so that, as he says, he felt the shuddering go all through her, she suddenly lowered her head and touched his wrist with her cheek. He says that instead of being cold to the touch, ‘like a fish’, as she had seemed to be when he first took her out of the gorse, she was now ‘as warm as toast, like a child’.

  So far he had put her down for ‘a foreigner’, convenient term for defining something which one does not quite understand. She had none of his language, evid
ently; she was undersized, some, three feet six inches, by the look of her, and yet perfectly proportioned. She was most curiously dressed in a frock cut to the knee, and actually in nothing else at all. It left her barelegged and bare-armed, and was made, as he puts it himself, of stuff like cobweb, ‘those dusty, drooping kind which you put on your finger to stop bleeding’. He could not recognize the web, but was sure that it was neither linen nor cotton. It seemed to stick to her body wherever it touched a prominent part. ‘You could see very well, to say nothing of feeling, that she was well-made and well-nourished.’ She ought, as he judged, to be a child of five years old, ‘and a feather-weight at that’; but he felt certain that she must be ‘much more like sixteen’. It was that, I gather, which made him suspect her of being something outside experience. So far, then, it was safe to call her a foreigner: but he was not yet at the end of his discoveries.

  Heavy footsteps, coming from the direction of Wilsford, in due time proved to be of Police Constable Gulliver, a neighbour of Beckwith’s and guardian of the peace in his own village. He lifted his lantern to flash it into the traveller’s eyes, and dropped it again with a pleasant ‘good evening’. He added that it was inclined to be showery, which was more than true, as it was, at the moment, raining hard. With that, it seems, he would have passed on.

  But Beckwith, whether smitten by self-consciousness of having been seen with a young woman in his arms at a suspicious hour of the night by the village policeman, or bursting perhaps with the importance of his affair, detained Gulliver. ‘Just look at this,’ he said boldly. ‘Here’s a pretty thing to have found on a lonely road. Foul play somewhere, I’m afraid;’ he then exhibited his burden to the lantern light.