No Beast So Fierce

by Dane Huckelbridge

  But what other recourse would such a tiger have had? With its bullet-damaged canines, it would have been unable to hunt most of its natural prey. The smaller deer it might have killed with its paws would have been almost too scarce to hunt. The tall grasses and deep jungles where it should have lived a solitary, near-invisible existence were vanishing by the day. The forest-dwelling Tharu who revered tigers were being supplanted by a population of colonials and migrants who viewed big cats simply as a menace to themselves and their livestock. Ask any person with actual tiger experience, and they’ll tell you: although tigers are not by nature aggressive toward humans, when cornered or in peril, they will attack. And in the hills and valleys of Kumaon at the dawn of the twentieth century, the Champawat Tiger had nowhere left to run. It was both cornered and in peril.

  Nevertheless, it would be mistaken to imply that empathy and understanding of this fact was completely beyond the scope of the colonial mind. Granted, the majority of those in the government or civil service did view tigers as a valuable trophy at best, or at worst, a bloodthirsty pest. But not every British colonist living in India reduced them to the status of game or vermin, and Corbett’s was not the only voice that spoke highly in their favor. In a surprisingly prescient and sensitive editorial published in 1908 titled “A Wronged Animal: Justice for the Tiger,” The Times of India made the case—no doubt scandalous at the time—that the tiger was “not only a harmless but a useful member of Indian society,” and that the colonial government was “oblivious to the really valuable services the vast majority of tigers render to the Indian cultivator—services unsullied by wrong doing or even intimidation.” This is an obvious reference to the fact that tigers traditionally had kept wild deer and pig populations at levels that prevented them feeding on the crops of villagers. Also noted was that, despite the occasional cattle kill by a tiger, the average farmer, when “weighing the services rendered him in the uneven warfare he wages in defense of the crops which stand between him and starvation, he prefers the tiger alive to the tiger dead.” This sentiment, while revolutionary for a European colonist, is again very much an echo of what many Tharu and some Pahari peoples, who had lived alongside tigers since time immemorial, knew all along: the predators helped to maintain a sustainable balance for those whose lives depended upon the forest, and the loss of the occasional cow or goat was a small price to pay for a healthy harvest and an adequate food supply. And this balance persists in the modern day, in the pockets of Kumaon where traditional agriculture survives. Among the small farmers I spoke to, both Tharu and Pahari, all expressed an appreciation for predatory cats for protecting their fields from boar and deer. In places where tigers and leopards were scarce, farmers had to stay up all night guarding their fields in a cramped machan—a grueling task no one was keen on. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, this sort of small-scale, subsistence agriculture was already beginning to disappear across wide swathes of Kumaon, and the ingrained cultural appreciation for the tiger was vanishing right alongside it. Why would a colonial government bent on populating a sparsely inhabited region and pushing economic productivity through the roof care about the delicate balance among tigers, wild ungulates, and forest-dwelling locals, when all of the above could be wiped off the face of the earth and replaced with field after field of cultivable and taxable land?

  In light of such facts, there is an intriguing historical comparison that all but begs to be made. Essentially, the powers that be were seeking to do in India over the course of a few decades what had already been accomplished in Britain over several centuries: the transformation of a forested land rich in both prey and predators into a productive, pastoral agro-scape utterly devoid of both. The British mandate to “tame” the wilderness had been acted out on its own lands long before it was shipped abroad to any of its colonies. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain in the fifth century, they alighted upon an island abounding with lynx, bears, and wolves. The first two had been hunted to extinction by the early Middle Ages, and the latter, deemed a threat to sheep and humans alike, were totally eradicated by the seventeenth century. And the forests of Britain, which in ancient times covered roughly half of the island and were widely used as a sustainable resource by local Celtic and Anglo-Saxon tribes, had been trimmed down by the time of the Norman conquest to the point where they covered only around 15 percent of the island. Of that remnant, much was converted to royal reserves, where commoners were prevented from engaging in traditional hunting and woodcutting practices, while noble elites—as any fan of Robin Hood can tell you—essentially exploited the forests as they saw fit. The comparison between thirteenth-century Sherwood Forest and a nineteenth-century Kumaoni forest may seem a stretch, but there are surprising and undeniable similarities: a foreign colonial government imposing forestry restrictions on its native-born subjects, rising taxes that encourage agricultural and pastoral expansion, and mounting bounties put upon the apex predators that stood in their way. And in an almost eerie parallel, King Edward I, who reigned from 1272 until 1307, ordered the total extermination of all wolves in his kingdom, and employed a hunter named Peter Corbet to accomplish this where the wolves proved most dangerous. And dangerous, back then, they certainly were. Although wolf attacks would be virtually unknown later in North America—a continent with comparatively ample room and prey—the wolves in Britain, under very similar stresses as the latter-day tigers of northern India, would become just as cornered and just as deadly. In Scotland, the last outpost of wild wolves in Britain, the few specimens of Canis lupus that remained by the late sixteenth century were so aggressive toward humans, special shelters called spittals were erected along the highways to protect travelers from attack. In the Highland county of Sutherland, the wolves grew so desperate and bloodthirsty, they even took to digging up corpses from graves—a state of affairs that eventually forced the inhabitants of Eddrachillis to bury their dead on nearby Handa Island, where the wolves could not reach them. Memories of those dark days would persist well into the nineteenth century, as demonstrated in these selected verses from the ballad “The Wolf of Ederachillis,” published in 1860:

  On Ederachillis’ shore

  The grey wolf lies in wait,—

  Woe to the broken door,

  Woe to the loosened gate,

  And the groping wretch whom sleety fogs

  On the trackless moor belate.

  The lean and hungry wolf,

  With his fangs so sharp and white,

  His starveling body pinched

  By the frost of a northern night,

  And his pitiless eyes that scare the dark

  With their green and threatening light.

  He climeth the guarding dyke,

  He leapeth the hurdle bars,

  He steals the sheep from the pen,

  And the fish from the boat-house spars;

  And he digs the dead from out of the sod,

  And gnaws them under the stars.

  Thus every grave we dug

  The hungry wolf uptore,

  And every morn the sod

  Was strewn with bones and gore;

  Our mother earth had denied us rest

  On Ederachillis’ shore.

  A haunting reminder of what large predators are capable of when they have been pushed to the edge and have nowhere left to run, be it in the far north of Britain like the Wolf of Eddrachillis, or the far north of India like the Tiger of Champawat.

  But just like those wolves in the Scottish Highlands, it seemed the Champawat’s end was nigh as well. In early March 1907, news broke that a British soldier by the name of Edward Harold Wildblood, touring India while on leave from the Leinster Regiment in Mauritius, had shot the man-eater on shikar in the eastern hills of Kumaon. The report was ballyhooed in papers and social clubs across India, and Wildblood was even offered a reward of two hundred rupees for dispatching the most sought-after tiger in all of the empire. It was the sort of story colonial society relished—a dapper, square-jaw
ed British officer in His Majesty’s Army, vanquishing an unruly tiger while on holiday. Oh, what jolly good sport it must have been.

  Or so they thought, anyway.

  Chapter 5

  The Hunt Begins

  For four years, Jim Corbett neither heard nor thought about the tiger his friend Eddie Knowles had mentioned on their trip to Malani. He returned to his railway station job at the distant Bengalese river outpost of Mokameh Ghat, where he had risen into the management ranks—gone were the days when he lived in the malarial jungle camps of the Bengal and North Western Railway, helping armies of Indian laborers clear out timber for fuel. He had a desk job now, and authority, although the conditions were still rustic and the pay anything but enviable. Days were often eighteen hours long, and the headaches that came with trying to unload trains and get their goods across a monsoon-swollen Ganges were considerable. And it’s hard to imagine that the mingling of mudflats and coal smoke and colonial disarray didn’t create a Conrad-worthy nightmare at times, for Corbett in particular. The heat, the smells, the seemingly endless barrage of crates and people, all would have been oppressive to someone most at home in the quiet hills of Kumaon. Still, it was a decent job for a European of his station—opportunities for the native-born in the colony, particularly those of Irish descent, were few and far between—and despite the hurdles of distance and isolation, he was more or less content with his work. He saw it as a duty of sorts, one that he executed with as much cheer as he could muster, rendering a service that, while stressful, even backbreaking at times, he truly believed was good for the colony. His familiarity with both Indian and British customs made him a natural fit for the position, and while his employers kept him perennially busy, he was still able to sneak in the occasional visit back to the towns and forests of his beloved Kumaon, more than six hundred miles away. By scrimping and saving, he had also managed to cobble together enough funds to invest in a small hardware store in the hill town of Nainital, where he had spent his summers as a boy and where his mother and sisters still lived. His trips back home gave him a chance to check up on the business, as well as relax and reconnect with old friends.

  It was on one such visit, toward the end of April 1907, that Jim received a guest in the form of Nainital’s deputy commissioner, Charles Henry Berthoud. One can imagine the meeting as quite cordial. After all, the two young men were longtime acquaintances, and the commissioner was, in Corbett’s own words, a man “loved and respected by all who knew him.” London-born and Oxford-educated, Berthoud relied on Corbett’s local knowledge when it came to dealing with problems for which his own experience was limited. Even after a decade in India, he was still an outsider compared to his old friend Jim, and being roughly the same age—both men were now in their thirties—it would have been natural for Berthoud to approach Corbett when he was back in town, with any challenges that were beyond his ken.

  One of which, on this occasion, happened to involve a tiger. India was, even in 1907, a country teeming with tigers—perhaps as many as 100,000 of them were to be found in Asia at the turn of the century—although the numbers were dropping fast. “A tiger” could have been a reference to any one of the cats that were still hunted by officers for sport, and dragged in for bounties by shikaris on a daily basis. It quickly became clear, however, which tiger Berthoud was referring to. The tiger. The same man-eater that Knowles had mentioned four years prior. Not only had his brother-in-law B. A. Rebsch, the expert tiger hunter, failed to stop it then, but apparently Wildblood had botched his more recent attempt as well. The latter had, in fact, shot the wrong cat, a revelation that had been made public only a few days before, in an article from The Times of India published on April 15, 1907. The journal acknowledged that the man-eater was still on the loose, admitting that “the depredations have not ceased” and that a “plea for more drastic action in dealing with man-eating tigers” was needed—all of which was no doubt embarrassing for government officials like Berthoud, who had applauded its demise only weeks before. No, the tiger was still out there, and killing at its usual horrific rate. In the years it had free rein in Kumaon, it had raised its human tally to the unthinkable sum of 434 victims.

  To Corbett, the news came as a shock. Perhaps not the failure of Wildblood to bag the man-eater in question—after all, what would a soldier on holiday from Mauritius know about hunting tigers? But the idea that Knowles’s brother-in-law had also failed at the undertaking must have been unsettling. Corbett knew of Rebsch, by reputation alone. He was the same expert hunter that Inspector General of Forests Sir Sainthill Eardley-Wilmot would go on to claim “has shot as much game as any man in India.” Rebsch had even survived a surprise bear attack, suffering a severe mauling before defeating the beast single-handedly. How was it possible that the most fearless hunter in all of Kumaon had tried and failed to stop this tiger? And in pondering that question, the true question at hand presented itself.

  Berthoud was asking him to go after the tiger. Corbett was their last hope.

  * * *

  It’s impossible to know precisely how Jim Corbett felt upon receiving the request to kill the tiger. In his written accounts of the hunt, he doesn’t go into much detail about his feelings at that point, or his apprehensions. It seems he viewed the request, much like his work for the railroad, as his duty—an unpleasant task that was crucial for the colony. And perhaps—perhaps—he also had some inkling of how dispatching a notorious man-eater could help his career down the line. After all, if he was investing in businesses in Nainital, it seems at least plausible that he was already aspiring toward a more entrepreneurial life than the rails could give him.

  Either way, Corbett accepted the charge, albeit with two stipulations: first, that all existing bounties on the tiger be withdrawn, and second, that all the hunters and soldiers who were already in pursuit of the tiger be called in. Corbett would later attribute these conditions to an aversion to “being classed as a reward hunter,” and to the risk of “being accidentally shot.” Both are fair points, and Corbett was known throughout his life to have a fixation with being wounded by other hunters—a relic perhaps of his younger days, when crude rifles were unreliable and it was easy to be mistaken for game by local poachers. But the preconditions are also telling in what they reveal about the ambiguities of his own identity. It would have been widely known in Kumaon at the time that tiger hunting was the bailiwick of two very different factions of colonial society. For the high-born British official, it was a form of aristocratic sport. For the Indian shikari, it was a somewhat desperate means of collecting a bounty. Jim Corbett’s two conditions were in a way a declaration of his own identity separate from the two. As a native-born colonist of Irish descent, who had grown up thoroughly intertwined with the local Indian population, he occupied an interstitial space that separated the two worlds—he was proud of that identity, ambiguous as it was, and he wished to ensure he was not mistaken for either a pompous aristocrat bagging tigers for fun, or as a desperate poacher looking to make a few rupees. Jim Corbett wanted to make his purpose clear: he would hunt the tiger on his own terms, and strictly—or at least primarily—out of a sense of duty.

  Yet even the notion of “duty” would have been somewhat fraught for someone like Corbett, a colonist whose sympathies and allegiances were sometimes at odds with each other. Colonial attitudes had shifted since the early days of the Raj, and this evolution of the British colonial mentality had transformed the relationship between the colonial state and its subjects. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 had been a tragic and bloody affair for all involved, particularly in Kumaon. Jim Corbett’s own uncle, Thomas Bartholomew, had been tied to a tree and burned alive during the course of the uprising. Violent as it was, however, the insurrection was crushed—it was the last major armed challenge to their authority that the British would face. In its aftermath, control was transferred from the East India Company directly to the British Crown, and the provinces of India were ruled as an integrated part of the British Empire. The
Indian population was generally prohibited from keeping weapons on hand or gathering without permission, and gradually, in the new “pacified” India, the rebellion faded into the past. And without a direct military foe to face and rally against, the very purpose of colonialism was called into question. A justification was needed to explain why a diminutive island half a world away was controlling a totally foreign subcontinent, and that justification, as profoundly flawed and racist as it was, began to take the form of what Rudyard Kipling would refer to as “The White Man’s Burden.” The true purpose of colonialism never wavered—to exploit a foreign land’s resources in the interest of the metropole. Yet in explaining it, British sentiment by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was changing its tone, from that of pure conquest to one of protective custody—they envisioned themselves as harbingers of “enlightenment” and “civilization” to peoples that were, in Kipling’s own words, “Half-devil and half-child.” Almost as if the Europeans were doing their colonies a favor by subjugating them and putting them in their care.

  This shift in colonial attitudes carried over to the realm of tiger hunting as well. Whereas the act of killing a tiger had once been almost synonymous with the military conquest of India, it became viewed in increasingly protective, paternalistic tones. For the white sahib by the turn of the century, killing tigers was considered a way of shielding the local Indian population from predation. It was, in effect, considered a benevolent act, a means of keeping rural villagers, who were generally depicted as “poor” and “helpless,” safe from savage man-eaters. The “White Father,” in all his supposed power and wisdom, was expected to defend local towns and villages from harm, to symbolically save India from itself, as it were. The presumption was preposterous—after all, rural Indian populations had been negotiating their existence alongside tigers long before the arrival of any Europeans. However, there may have been a kernel of practical truth, if for only the aforementioned reason: In the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, most segments of Indian society were prohibited from having guns or weapons of any kind, without a difficult-to-obtain permit. Colonial officers of the early 1800s may have observed Indian villages banding together to drive away the occasional man-eater with spears, nets, and poisoned arrows, but such a thing would have been impossible by the advent of the twentieth century. Weapons had long since been outlawed, and much of the shared cultural knowledge of how to defeat man-eaters had been lost as well. If rural Indian populations had become helpless in the face of apex predators, it was largely because colonial policy had rendered them as such.