The three men left whatever protection the tight ring of stone houses offered, walking slowly past the terraced fields and entering tentatively into the first line of trees. They must have been conscious of the distinct disadvantage they were placing themselves at as they were enveloped by the forest.
Normal, wild tigers will generally surrender a kill site when confronted by humans. With a snarl, perhaps, even flattened ears and a display of teeth—but they seldom persist beyond that. Man-eaters like this one, however, had no such compunctions. Like the ultra-aggressive cats that would appear in Chitwan National Park a century later, this tiger had virtually no fear of humans and would yield nothing; a procession of hunters was little more than a cavalcade of meat. And if it chose to strike, there would be only fractions of a second to react to the blinding assault. A single shot, if Corbett were lucky, and while his aim was exceptional, it often took more than one bullet to stop an enraged tiger. This was why most tiger hunting in India involved shooting from the safety of a howdah atop an elephant, or from a machan stand high up in a tree—staying beyond the reach of their claws and teeth was crucial. When conducted on foot, tiger hunting was a very different occupation, with a margin of error so slim as to be virtually nonexistent. At the very least, a dog trained for tiger hunts could afford some protection, both by detecting tigers early by their smell, and by serving as a convenient distraction should a tiger attack. But as a newcomer to the vocation of tracking man-eaters, Jim Corbett had none of these advantages. There was no hattisar near to lend him an elephant, no time to build a machan and set out bait, and no hunting dogs in the vicinity to sniff out the trail. To walk right into this tiger’s feeding site was to court death in its most disturbing form.
Still, the trio of men possessed their own advantages. For starters, it was early May, which meant that the summer monsoon, although just around the corner, had not yet arrived to choke up the valleys with impenetrable foliage. It was because of the monsoon that tiger hunting in northern India was generally a winter occurrence—in the warm, wet months, the grasses and thickets became so dense as to render all tigers virtually invisible, and impossible to find, let alone shoot. In colder, dryer weather, the forests lost much of their vines and creepers, creating a window in which hunting was feasible. Second, Jim Corbett had an extensive body of knowledge in regards to tigers, and while this particular tiger broke with many conventions, there were some that he was certain it would still abide by. Corbett knew the feeding habits of tigers, and he understood that once a large animal was killed, the tiger would spend several days in a row intermittently feeding and resting, seldom venturing far from the carcass, at least during the daylight hours, until all the edible portions were gone. Granted, almost a full week had passed, and it was increasingly unlikely that the tiger would still be nearby—but if it had not yet left on another hunt, it would almost certainly be close to the original feeding site, either quietly finishing its meal or drowsing away the afternoon in a shady spot just beside it. This knowledge may have provided Corbett with some comfort, but probably not much. Unlike his companions from Pali, who had never seen a modern rifle fired before that day, he knew there was nothing magic in the bullets he carried; if the tiger became aware of them before they saw it, there was a very good chance he wouldn’t have time to get off a shot. Just a flash of stripes before the claws did their work. One more addition—or perhaps even three—to the tiger’s unconscionable tally.
All of this would have cycled through Corbett’s mind as he ventured closer to where the tiger had fed. Before visiting the site, however, the hunter asked to be shown where the woman had been attacked, hoping to reconstruct in his mind exactly what had occurred. He needed to learn as much as he could about this particular tiger—how it hunted, how it killed. His companions led him to the oak tree in question, where he saw at last the first tangible evidence of an attack.
A patch of dried blood marked where the tiger had sunk in its teeth and dragged the woman from her perch—with such violence and force, evidently, that shreds of skin still clung to the bark from the palms of her hands, a sight that seems to have shaken Corbett greatly. Struggling to keep his composure, he retraced the tiger’s approach from a nearby ravine, and found, at last, a pristine set of pugmarks in the fine earth that had settled between two rocks. Finally, he knew something about the tiger—not much, but a clue nonetheless. It was a female, good-sized, and seemingly in good health, although a little past its prime. Given that wild tigers can live up to fifteen years, and in some cases even longer, this seemed to corroborate what Corbett had suspected about its history as a man-eater. If the tiger had been killing humans for roughly eight or nine years in both Nepal and India, and if it had been a young adult when first wounded in the lowland terai, then its age would have likely been in the vicinity of ten to twelve years—making it an older tiger, although still more than capable as a hunter. And the fact that it was a female could also help to explain its initial transition to man-eating; the pressures of feeding cubs early in life, especially if natural prey was inaccessible, could have easily led a mother tiger to consider slow-footed and weak-limbed Homo sapiens as food.
A trail of dried blood led from the oak tree back down into the ravine, where the tiger had apparently taken its victim, and this Corbett and his two guides followed. Eyes wide, ears straining, they descended into the shadows, the occasional russet spattering of blood their only guideposts. If the safety catch on Corbett’s rifle was not released before, it certainly was by the time they reached the bottom. But the tiger did not stop here; it had taken the woman even farther, up the opposite bank, to a dense cluster of bushes where it had finally stopped to feed. The three men approached the final site in silence, with aching slowness, Corbett’s rifle surely raised, its barrel used cautiously to part the curtains of leaves and peer within . . .
Blood was everywhere. But no tigress. According to Corbett, the animal had eaten virtually all of the body; nothing remained after days of feeding but a few shards of bone and shredded clothing. With as much reverence as they could muster, the three of them assembled whatever meager remains they could find and wrapped them in the clean cloth that the victim’s family had given them to serve as a shroud. Then, confident but not yet certain that the tiger had moved on, they re-created their own somber version of a funeral march—the men cradling what was left of their beloved neighbor for cremation, Corbett holding his rifle just in case her killer should return—back to Pali, where they faced the heartbreaking task of presenting what could barely be called a body to her grieving family. But it was enough for cremation, for the sacred rite to be performed, and for the ashes of the tiger’s victim to reach “Mother Ganges.”
* * *
If Corbett’s first two days in Pali had been a crash course in man-eaters, the next three proved to be a study in frustration. Having yet to confront the tiger, he was still acting as something of a detective on the trail of a serial killer. Back in the lush terai forests near Kaladhungi, he could have relied on the testimony of the “jungle folk,” as he liked to call them, to help pinpoint a suspect tiger. The belling of sambar, the barking of kakar deer, and the hooting of langur monkeys were all clear indicators that a tiger was near; the calls of birds such as scimitar babblers and blue magpies could readily provide information on where a predator had passed. And if all else failed, there was always the congregations of blowflies and vultures that seemed to follow in a tiger’s bloody wake. But here at altitude in the Himalayan middle hills, the lessons he had picked up while tracking in the lowland jungles were of considerably less value—this was not ideal habitat for a Bengal tiger. There seemed to be little beyond tangled scrub and chill ravines, places where the only sound was of one’s own heartbeat, and of the unsettling winds that sighed through the pines.
Corbett did experience some hope of a lead, however, upon discovering a living witness residing just outside the village who had seen the tiger up close. A young girl and her older sister had bee
n attacked while cutting grass the year before, with the elder of the two being carried off into the forest. But the experience had so traumatized the surviving sister—she had actually chased the tiger with a sickle until it turned to roar back at her—that she was either unable or unwilling to talk about it. From the rest of the family Corbett was able to gather few details about the animal that he did not already know. A pattern, however, presented itself: women and children were making up a disproportionately large percentage of its victims—an unsettling realization for anyone, let alone a man who had essentially been raised by his widowed mother and older sisters. It did make a cruel sort of sense, though, given the division of labor common in the Kumaoni hills at that time. While men toiled in the fields and older women prepared meals and cared for animals, it was usually the responsibility of the young women and children to go into the surrounding forest—often in direct defiance of government forestry regulations—for the crucial tasks of gathering firewood and animal fodder. Which meant, inevitably, that they bore the brunt of the tiger’s attacks.
Corbett spent from sunrise to sunset for three straight days wandering the forests that encircled the village, senses on high alert, rifle at the ready, asking everyone he met if they had seen or heard the tiger. He was pointed to watering holes where the tiger was thought to have drank, and the shady bowers where it was believed to have rested, but each new lead proved to be a dead end. No fresh pugmarks, no scat, no tiger. It seemed as if the creature had vanished into the ether just as inexplicably and unsettlingly as it had materialized before.
One name, however, kept cropping up. In the whispering of the villagers who beckoned to him from their windowsills, in the stories of the farmers who peeked out from behind closed doors, one location was mentioned repeatedly—a place where the tiger seemed to call home, and where, according to their tales, it had committed its most brazen acts of killing. Here was where the creature always returned—a place so dangerous, simply walking alone in the open was considered an act of madness.
Champawat. A larger town some fifteen miles away, the nexus around which all of the tiger’s hunts seemed to hang in dark orbit. It was the closest Corbett had to a viable lead, and the one trail that he knew he could actually follow. After three fruitless days of searching, he had no other choice. It was clear the tiger was no longer near Pali. There were no more tracks that pocked the dust of the road, no more roars from the forest that ripped out the seams of the night. The tiger was gone, simple as that.
Corbett gathered together his men from Nainital and made the announcement—they would pack up their things and leave for Champawat at dawn.
Chapter 7
Together, in the Old Way
The jungles of northern India were hardly a place for the inexperienced or the uninitiated. Poisonous snakes, fractious sloth bears, lurking crocodiles, aggressive elephants—not to mention protective mother tigers—all could and occasionally did prove fatal to humans. And as a boy growing up in Kumaon, Jim Corbett had mentors who taught him the art of survival in the forest. His cousin, Stephen Dease, an amateur naturalist, gave Jim his first gun, a derelict muzzle-loader, in exchange for helping him collect specimens of local birds. There was Dansay, the disinherited son of a general and fellow Hibernian who entertained the young Corbett around the campfire with tales of Irish banshees and Kumaoni churails, forever mingling in his mind the superstitions and folklore of his two homelands. And of course there was Jim’s older brother Tom, whom he worshipped like a hero and did his best to imitate on their earliest hunts together for peafowl.
Of all Jim Corbett’s teachers, however, none would equal the lasting and profound influence of Kunwar Singh. In addition to serving as the headman of the village of Chandni Chauk, just a short hike from the Corbett family’s winter lodgings near the terai, Kunwar was also, in Jim Corbett’s own words, “the most successful poacher in Kaladhungi.” As to what he meant by the term “poacher” isn’t clear—game restrictions were still few and far between at the time—although it seems Kunwar didn’t have much regard for the Indian Forest Act of 1878, and even less compunction about hunting in the protected timber reserves that the colonial government had deemed off-limits. His defiance of such policies could have been simple economic necessity, but there is also a revealing bit of information to which Corbett makes only a passing reference. Kunwar Singh was of Thakur descent—essentially the Kumaoni equivalent of minor nobility—and it’s very likely that prior to the arrival of the British, those same “protected” forests he was trespassing upon had served as his family’s hunting grounds for generations. To such a man, hunting for food and sport among the same sal and haldu trees as his ancestors would not have been “poaching” at all, but rather the exercise of an ancient birthright—one he refused to yield to the foreign rulers of an alien government. A Kumaoni Robin Hood, you might even say.
With all this in mind, a friendship between a Thakur elder and an eight-year-old colonial boy must have seemed highly unlikely. Yet Kunwar not only took a young Jim Corbett under his wing, he actually became a father figure after the boy’s true father passed away. Such a relationship would have been next to impossible in the provincial capital of Nainital, where a state of social segregation between Europeans and Indians was actively enforced. However, in the scattered villages around Kaladhungi, where the Corbetts spent the non-malarial winter months, such strictures held little sway, and the family mingled freely with their Tharu and Pahari neighbors, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian alike. It was “Uncle” Kunwar who came to check in on a young Jim Corbett after the boy narrowly escaped a run-in with a leopard, and who subsequently began taking his inexperienced friend along with him on hunts, to impart as much of his knowledge of the natural world as he could. And upon the reception of Jim’s first gun—an important rite of passage in the local culture—it was Kunwar who would tell him: “You are no longer a boy, but a man; and with this good gun, you can go anywhere you like in our jungles and never be afraid.”
Under Kunwar’s tutelage, Jim learned to see the forest through the eyes of an indigenous shikari rather than those of a European hunter. The plants and animals had a language all their own, and Kunwar Singh instructed the young Corbett in its lexicon and grammar. Jim soon was hunting like a true Kumaoni: stalking barefoot through the Garuppu jungle, avoiding foxes, which could curse a hunt, reading the flights of birds to track recent kills, burning out nal grass to reveal hidden game, and staying in the forest’s good graces with blessings of the peepal tree. When it came to the ways of the jungle, Kunwar Singh was a teacher without equal, and Jim Corbett a more than eager student.
There was one lesson, though, one story, that stuck with the boy—that had instilled caution in him during his earliest hunts, and that surely did so again, years later, as he marched along that dark and uncertain road to Champawat. It was a warning of sorts, a tale from Kunwar’s own experience that he had imparted on Jim to forever remind him of just how quickly fortunes could turn in the forest. Before telling him the story, however, Kunwar had given the young man the same advice still heeded by many forest dwellers in tiger-prone areas of India and Nepal today: “When in the jungles, never speak of a tiger by its name, for if you do, the tiger is sure to appear.” With that warning, he began his story:
In the month of April of the previous year, Kunwar had gone into the jungle with his friend Har Singh, to hunt food for their respective tables. Kunwar was by far the more experienced of the two, having spent significantly greater time tracking game in the surrounding forests. But Kunwar was happy to have a companion, and the two men stalked quietly through the tall grasses and dense foliage of the Garuppu jungle, ever-mindful of the colonial forest guards who patrolled the region for poachers, and always on the lookout for the armed bandits, or dacoits, who were known to use the woodlands as a hideout from authorities. There were a host of potentially dangerous animals as well, although Kunwar had far less fear of them than he did of man—he knew their habits, and when to steer c
lear.
The first ominous sign arrived in the form of a jungle fox that crossed their path as they were leaving the village. Kunwar, with all the experience and wisdom of a Kumaoni shikari, immediately recognized the bad omen and suggested they turn back—it only signified trouble in the offing. His friend Har merely laughed at his old-time superstitions, saying it was “child’s talk” to think that a harmless little fox could ruin a hunt. To a town dweller like Har, such a thing was patently absurd. Against his better judgment, Kunwar gave in, and the two men continued their march deeper into the dense scrub and thorn bamboo of the jungle.
Kunwar missed his first shot at a chital stag feeding in the pale morning light, and Har Singh lost a wounded peafowl in the grass not long after. Both should have been easy shots, but something had gone unaccountably wrong—it seemed as if their bullets had been cursed from the onset. After an utterly fruitless day, the two men ultimately decided it best to head back; nothing else appeared in terms of game, and they were both concerned that the shots they had fired earlier may have alerted the forest guards of their presence. With the afternoon turning quickly to evening, they followed the course of a nullah, or dry creek bed, to avoid the trails that the forest guards usually patrolled—with their illegal, unlicensed rifles, denying that they were poaching would have been next to impossible.
They were right to be cautious—their gunshots had been noticed, although not by any human. No, in this case, they had summoned a tiger. Its massive form emerged from the leaves and stood staring at them, golden eyes aglow in the mossy twilight. The men froze; they dared not move. For a terror-filled minute they simply stood still, locked in its gaze. Then, as abruptly as it appeared, the tiger turned tail and vanished into the forest. Speechless and somewhat shaken, the men continued on their way, at a pace that was no doubt considerably accelerated—night was coming, darkness was on its way. And there had been something in the tiger’s posture that had left Kunwar deeply unsettled. He had run into tigers plenty of times before, but this one felt different. Its peculiar stare felt almost like a warning, a spine-tingling omen of a danger to come. Perhaps there was a fresh kill nearby, or maybe it had cubs—he didn’t know, and he didn’t want to find out. The message it was communicating, however, was undeniably clear. Turn around. Go home. Today, this is not your forest to hunt.
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