No Beast So Fierce

by Dane Huckelbridge

  This attitude of British paternalism was most clearly depicted in the illustrations and hunting narratives of the era. As early as 1857, in a publication called Tiger-shooting in India, an Indian servant is depicted as cowering in terror before a charging, oversized tiger while a British hunter, on foot, no less, is shown gunning the animal down with calm determination. In a similar sepia print from a work published in 1871, titled Wild Men and Wild Beasts, Indian men are shown fleeing from an enraged tiger while a British hunter gets ready to slay the animal from an absurdly close range. Worth noting, of course, is that in both prints, the fleeing Indians are unarmed, while the British portrayed have guns at the ready—which is quite possibly the only part of the illustrations that’s historically accurate. While the rural Indian population had generally been forced to surrender whatever meager arms they possessed following the Rebellion of 1857, the firepower available to British officials increased significantly in the decades that followed it. Prior to the 1870s, most European hunters in India relied on smoothbore, muzzle-loading muskets, which even sportsmen of the era decried as “very light, inferior [and] inefficient” when compared to the high-velocity rifles that appeared shortly thereafter. By the early twentieth century, many big-game hunters in India had adopted large-caliber double-barrel rifles like the 0.475-caliber H.V. This powerful gun weighed twelve pounds and could fire a one-ounce round at extremely high speeds, resulting in exceptional “stopping power.” Other hunters preferred slightly smaller rifles, such as the 0.375-caliber Magnum, which fired a lighter bullet at a higher velocity—this was especially favored by trophy hunters, as it did less damage to animal hide. In either case, the accuracy, range, and power of the weapons available to colonial hunters improved dramatically. But even if Indians had been able to readily acquire the permits to own such weapons, they would have been well beyond the budget for all but the wealthiest members of Indian society. In 1909, a W. J. Jeffery 0.475-caliber high-velocity hunting rifle sold for around thirty-five pounds in London—this at a time when many indentured Indian servants were making the equivalent of around one pound per month. Even a significantly smaller sporting rifle, like a 0.256-caliber Mannlicher, would have cost the same indentured servant an entire year’s salary. Not surprisingly, the average Indian villager or subsistence farmer was much more concerned with the immediate task of putting food on the table than the far more abstract and unlikely notion of shooting a marauding tiger. Which left dealing with such things almost solely in the hands of the privileged class—more specifically, the white sahib—whose “duty” to defend the unarmed rural poor gave him license to kill tigers as he saw fit.

  Corbett surely would have been infected by these same ideas—as a member of colonial society he would not have been immune to the prevailing sentiments of the day, and even in his later writings about the Champawat Tiger, as we shall see, one can readily detect some of those same paternalistic undertones. But his sense of duty undoubtedly would have stemmed from genuine compassion for and fellowship with Indians as well. From his boyhood days in the forests of Kaladhungi, to his early years in the railway camps of Bihar, to his current posting at a ferry terminal on the Ganges, Corbett lived among the rural Indian population and considered them his friends and colleagues; he interacted with them and respected them in a way that was exceptionally rare among British colonists at that time. Indeed, as one of the few Europeans born in India, he considered himself as Indian, to whatever extent the ideologies of the day would allow, and as ambiguous as his own identity must have sometimes felt, he would not have hesitated to declare Kumaon to be his home. He had not, at least by that point, ever been to Ireland or England—India was all he knew. To Jim Corbett, the Champawat wasn’t preying upon the foreign people of a distant land. It was killing and eating his fellow Kumaonis. Perhaps he did feel compelled as an aspiring sahib to perform his paternalistic duty. But he would have been equally motivated, perhaps even more so, by the very real fact that people he cared about—people “among whom I have lived and whom I love,” by his own account—were being devoured in scores just a short distance from his hometown. After all, Corbett’s life had been anything but easy: He’d given up on his dreams of becoming an engineer and dropped out of school as a teenager to help provide for his family; he’d spent more than a decade on his own at isolated frontier outposts, where men dropped like flies from cholera and malaria, and where human intimacy was an abstract notion at best; he’d lived through ample poverty, heartache, and suffering. No, not to the same extent that some of his Indian friends and colleagues had, but certainly more than any Europeans among his cohorts. The decision to go into the forest after a man-eater may have instilled in him considerable fear, but when asked, he didn’t hesitate at the thought of sacrificing his own life for others. After all, it’s what he’d been doing for almost fifteen years.

  And if Corbett had indeed been waiting for the chance to prove himself, after his meeting with Berthoud, he wouldn’t have to wait much longer. Just one week later, the word came, brought into town during the blackest hours of night by an exhausted runner on the verge of collapse. Between gagging breaths and choking heaves, the messenger would have struggled to spit out the news: the tiger had struck again. A woman had just been killed in the village of Pali, some sixty miles away.*

  Corbett leapt into action. No minutes to ponder the decision he’d made, or second-guess the wisdom of going out to face such a creature. Man-eaters seldom stayed near a kill site for more than a few days, a week at most, and time was of the essence. He packed his things that same morning and set out for Pali, moving fast, traveling light, marching on foot through the sinuous mountain passes alongside six other Kumaoni men he’d recruited for the journey—not one of whom had any idea of the horrors that awaited them on the other side of those hills.

  Chapter 6

  Darkness Falls

  Jim Corbett and his men covered seventeen miles the first day alone, on their way to the village of Pali—up and down steep mountain trails, with packs laden with gear. Seventeen miles toward an animal that was believed to have devoured 435 souls. The march must have been tortuous, as they half jogged, half walked, drenched in the sweat of both anxiety and exertion. The hill folk they passed along the packed-dirt roads would have looked upon them with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity—suspicion as to why this gangly young railway worker with a mustache and short pants was marching into their mountains, curious as to the Martini-Henry rifle that protruded unavoidably from his pack. And these hill folk, these sari-clad women walking miles to find firewood, these topi-capped goatherds leading their famished flocks down from barren pastures, would have had their reasons. The year of 1907 was a tense one for Kumaonis, with their resentment over recent British forest regulations slowly simmering toward a boil. The Pahari hill tribes, much like the Tharu in the lowland terai, relied heavily on the forests for fodder, food, and fuel. The British, in attempting to preserve their crucial timber interests in Kumaon, had essentially declared most wooded areas as protected forests, and off-limits to all but British loggers and sportsmen. Organized forms of protest were beginning to take shape in the Kumaoni hills, including a massive demonstration in Almora that same year, to oppose the latest round of forest department regulations. Corbett does not mention such things in his account of the ordeal, but he must have been aware of the tension and the resentment around him. Tension and resentment that the untimely arrival of an almost supernaturally gifted man-eater would have only exacerbated. An angry forest goddess, perhaps, come to finally collect her due.

  Panting, aching, Corbett and his men would have arrived in the village of Dhari that evening, setting up camp in the twilight to catch a few hours of sleep. If there was a government bungalow available, they may have spent the night there, although it seems more likely they slept in the open, beneath the stars. They weren’t close enough to the tiger’s hunting grounds to worry for their lives just yet, but they knew that was coming. The tiger’s killing was still the
oretical to them; its acts of predation were dry phrases, simple stories, devoid of shredded muscle tissue, bare of blood and bone. The reality of what the animal had accomplished in the hills of eastern Kumaon was still tinged with the surreality of myth—but that too was about to change.

  After a quick breakfast at the nearby settlement of Mornaula, Corbett and his men set off again, resuming their furious pace through the mountains, covering almost thirty miles in a single day. Hillsides hatched with terraced fields, tawny green stands of serried pine, the white caps of the true Himalayas looming on the horizon—they would have seen all of this on the occasions when they looked up from the rutted path before them. The village of Dabidhura was approaching—the last stop before the killing site of Pali—and with its growing proximity surely came a mounting sense of foreboding. Although all present, including Corbett himself, were Kumaoni born and bred, one can easily imagine the disquieting feeling of marching into enemy territory, with every bush potentially concealing their foe, every wooded ravine the site of a possible ambush. In direct defiance of the latest British regulations, many hillsmen continued to burn out parts of the forest, both as a form of protest and as a means of regenerating wild grasses. In that dry month of May, it’s not difficult to envision the almost apocalyptic image of smoke rising in black columns all around Corbett and his team, narrow mountain passes walled on either side by flame. Marching into darkness, into the smell of burning.

  Another night of camping in Dabidhura, curried lentils cooked over an open fire, silent drags from hand-rolled cigarettes, and then they’re off again, rising at dawn to cover the ten miles that remain between their campsite and Pali—the last stretch. Corbett says almost nothing in his writings about this final approach—perhaps there wasn’t much to say. One can imagine the uncomfortable silence shared among the seven men, the pensive anxiety that consumed them as they climbed. Corbett, for the first time, may even have considered taking his rifle out of his pack.

  And then they arrived. On the afternoon of May 3, 1907, with the sunlight showing the first signs of fading, they entered the village of Pali. Only, they felt as though they had entered a ghost town. No one greeted them. The slate-roofed stone huts were all silent; the central courtyard bare. Local custom would normally dictate a welcome from the headman, and the ceremonial offering of sweets and hot tea, but no such reception materialized. And just the arrival of a European—an oddity many deep in the hills had never seen—was usually novel enough to summon at least a band of curious children. But no, they didn’t appear either. In fact, nobody appeared, and it became evident, almost immediately, that something terrible had happened here; that this was a haunted place. They looked around uneasily, muscles tensed, unsure of what was happening. And there came a smell as well—a gag-inducing stench, not of rotting flesh, but of excrement—the cause of which became clear as soon as Corbett and his men dropped their packs and built a fire.

  What occurred next would stay with Corbett for years, and indelibly shape his understanding of man-eaters. It was to be his first encounter with actual victims, and his first clear picture of the psychological trauma that their communities incurred. One by one, the villagers emerged from their darkened stone houses, “in the state of abject terror,” as he would later write, ghost-eyed and visibly shaken. Although reluctant at first, the gathered residents of Pali, shivering in their soiled clothing, slowly began telling the new arrivals what had happened to their village. This is what Jim Corbett would remember, when writing down his recollection of events some years later:

  I was informed that for five days no one had gone beyond their own doorsteps—the insanitary condition of the courtyard testified to the truth of this statement—that food was running short, and that the people would starve if the tiger was not killed or driven away. That the tiger was still in the vicinity was apparent. For three nights it had been heard calling on the road, distant a hundred yards from the houses, and that very day it had been seen on the cultivated land at the lower end of the village.

  The arrival of Corbett’s hunting party seemed to have reassured the fifty-odd residents of Pali, at least enough for them to come out from behind locked doors—something they had been too afraid to do for almost a week. However, when Corbett asked to be taken to the site of the last kill, they were understandably reluctant. The tiger was still out there, and the woman it had taken was hardly its first victim in the area. The villagers were all too aware of what this creature was capable of, and that Corbett was not the first shikari sent in to stop it. With the sun setting and darkness closing in, taking this strange Kumaoni-speaking Englishman out to see the tiger’s latest feeding grounds was out of the question. They did, however, eventually give Corbett a detailed account of how the most recent victim had been killed, and it was a story all too familiar in the realm of man-eating tigers.

  A group of women, some twenty in number, had been out at the edge of the forest, collecting oak leaves to feed to the village cattle. One of the women had decided to climb a tree to harvest extra leaves, and she was in the process of climbing back down when the tiger attacked, rearing up on its hind legs and ripping her out of the tree, with a violence that left the other women stunned. Before they had time to even react, the tiger had switched its grip to her throat and gone barreling away, back up the steep side of a ravine and into the undergrowth. The terror-stricken women sprinted back to the village to get help, and a group of men did band together to go after the tiger, perhaps even attempt to save the victim, although the hopelessness of that task became quickly apparent. The tiger had already begun feeding in a dense cluster of laurel, and upon their approach, the creature charged, unleashing an eardrum-shattering roar that scattered the unarmed party and sent them fleeing back to their homes. A century before, a village like Pali might have possessed the weapons and the martial know-how to stop such an animal—spears, nets, poisoned arrows—but by 1907, a full fifty years after the armed uprisings of 1857, such weapons had long since been taken from them by the colonial government. The lone resident of Pali who had even some semblance of a gun had fired the old blunderbuss in the air when the tiger appeared, more confident in its abilities as a noisemaker than a lethal weapon. Needless to say, the strategy had not worked well. The tiger had not abandoned its kill, and the search party had not been able to stop it from feeding.

  Huddled around the fire with the assembled villagers, Corbett listened closely to their stories and faced the uncomfortable decision of what to do next. As a lifelong hunter, dangerous predators were hardly new to him; he’d had hair-raising run-ins with bears, leopards, and tigers before he was in his teens. Not being a trophy hunter, however, he generally did what any sensible Kumaoni would and avoided them altogether. But now, for the first time in his life, he found himself in a role to which he was totally unaccustomed. He was seeking to actually confront not only a feeding tiger, but a man-eater at that. This was a novel endeavor, and there was certainly no instruction manual or guidebook upon which he could rely. By his own admission, “there was no one I could ask for advice, for this was the first man-eater that had ever been known in Kumaon; and yet something would have to be done.” Corbett wasn’t exactly right on this count—the rare man-eater does crop up in the historical records of the region. But there certainly had never been a serial man-eater quite like this one. Corbett was no stranger to your average tiger—he had, in fact, access to a body of firsthand, indigenous knowledge that would take Western naturalists decades to catch up with—but now he faced an extraordinary creature. He would have to learn the delicate art of hunting a man-eater on the fly, and it was a subject with a steep and unforgiving learning curve. Mistakes were all but inevitable; he could only hope they would not prove lethal in the end.

  This lack of experience, coupled with the natural folly of youth, might explain why Jim Corbett chose, that same night, to commit what was quite possibly the most foolhardy act in his entire hunting career. Once he was assured that his six companions were safely
indoors for the evening, he decided to spend the night outdoors, on the ground, on the chance that he might get a shot at his target. Wild tigers have a peculiar penchant for man-made roadways, and Corbett’s suspicion that this tiger might as well was confirmed by the people of Pali, who told him that the man-eater had been seen stalking the road outside the village at night. Given that it was a full moon, and visibility would be good, Corbett eschewed the relative safety of a stone shelter for a single tree by the side of the dirt thoroughfare. Rifle in hand, back to its bark, he hunkered down for the night and waited—wondering if he would even have time to get off a shot should the tiger decide to make him its next meal. It had been at least five days since its last kill, and Corbett was well aware of the tiger’s need for a weekly feeding. The time to hunt again was dangerously close.

  As the moon rose and the chill gathered, it became increasingly clear to Corbett just what a mistake this strategy had been. Although aggressive man-eaters have no qualms killing by day, tigers are by nature nocturnal hunters. With retinas made up primarily of light-sensitive rod receptors, and a reflective tapetum lucidum layer right behind them, the tiger has night vision some six times more acute than that of a human. And coupled with those powerful eyes is an equally impressive pair of ears. Built on a swivel, they can readily hone in on a source like radar dishes, and have an impressive range of between .2 kHz and 65 kHz—considerably broader than the range for humans, whose extends only up to 20 kHz—geared toward picking up noises as faint as the swallowing of saliva and the whistling of breath through nostrils. In addition to vision and hearing worthy of a superhero, tigers also have five different types of whiskers covering their body, all of which are constantly absorbing sensory information and empowering them to navigate through the darkest and densest of underbrush. When one considers that this surveillance package comes mounted atop an animal that is virtually silent thanks to padded feet, and camouflaged to blend in perfectly with the banded and stippled shadows of night, one can’t help but realize—just as Corbett did soon after taking his post—that trying to outmaneuver a tiger once the sun has set is as suicidal as it is naïve. In his blithe determination to set up a trap, it had not occurred to him that he was not the deadly snare so much as the helpless bait.