It must have been a pressing and somewhat intimidating question—no doubt posed amid the snarling of stray dogs and the warning tolls of Baleshwar’s bells. But fortunately for Jim Corbett, he had someone to vouch for him. He arrived with a letter of introduction, almost certainly from the headman back in Pali, who’d had the foresight to recognize the dubious reception he might encounter in the far-eastern borderlands of Kumaon. The letter was intended for the Tahsildar of Champawat, a man whose proper name Corbett does not mention, although an article published later in the Indian journal The Pioneer would identify him as Pandit Sri Kishan Pant. One can assume he was a respected and educated individual of advanced years, likely hailing from a well-established, high-caste family. Rather than the common topi cap and coarse woolen cloak donned by most hillsmen, he probably wore an honorary turban, or pugaree, together with a long embroidered kurta robe to denote his special status. The title of Tahsildar in India dated back to the early days of the Mughal Empire, and it derived from both Arabic and Persian to essentially mean a collector of revenue. And while the role did indeed originally entail the collection of taxes for the king, it was also considered a position of leadership within the community—a more formal and officially recognized version of the village headman.
The Tahsildar was not present when Corbett first arrived in Champawat, and the hunter proceeded to do what almost any employee of the colonial government would have done, particularly one on his own in a historically hostile part of the country: he quickly repaired with his men to the dak bungalow. At the time, it was commonplace for any sizable Indian town to have a special structure set aside for visiting officials, a well-kept albeit somewhat Spartan guesthouse. The structures were a common feature of colonial life, although they had a darker, less obvious significance as well. During the Rebellion of 1857, many British colonials, fleeing from rebel-occupied towns and fortresses, had used these dak bungalows as emergency shelters, and more than a few had met a violent end within their walls—often by fire, which was why thatch of any sort was banned as a building material in such bungalows following the revolt. The bungalow’s ominous connotations permeated the colonial consciousness, even revealing itself in the stories of Rudyard Kipling, who would write: “a fair portion of the tragedy of our lives in India acted itself in dâk-bungalows . . . so many men have died mad in dâk-bungalows.” One can imagine that in Champawat, with its own volatile history, such structures were especially tainted by their overtly colonial implications.
The Tahsildar, upon hearing that a British tiger hunter had arrived in Champawat and repaired to the old dak bungalow, quickly scrambled up the dirt road to greet him, and to suggest that he might have better luck finding the tiger at another bungalow outside of town, near a village called Phungar. The tiger had recently attacked a number of people near Phungar, the Tahsildar insisted, although that may not have been the only reason for encouraging a relocation. Regardless, Jim Corbett, who appreciated the concern of the Tahsildar, agreed to move camp early the next morning to the bungalow outside of Champawat proper, and the Tahsildar, who appreciated Corbett’s cooperativeness, agreed to meet him there for breakfast and do his best to help. And even if the Tahsildar did have misgivings about this British hunter’s arrival, he surely recognized the importance of his mission. As a leader in the community, it was the Tahsildar’s duty—just as it was Corbett’s—to rid the town of the tiger by any means necessary. Collaborating with the British would have seemed a small price to pay for restoring normality to a region that had been terrorized for four years. And it is possible that the Tahsildar also sensed that this British hunter was somehow different; that in Corbett’s strange grasp of the regional language, his bizarre intimacy with the animal world, his peculiar habit of smoking alone and mumbling to himself in the moonlight, the Tahsildar finally saw someone who might actually have a chance.
Someone just as unusual, just as unpredictable, just as extraordinary as the tiger itself.
Chapter 9
An Ambush in the Making
But what about the tiger? That elusive three-hundred-plus-pound female specimen of Panthera tigris tigris that could be heard roaring in the night, that pulled women out of trees and farmers from their fields? Where was it while Corbett scrambled to make sense of its lethal rounds and its deadly routine?
The fact that it killed humans may have been exceedingly unusual, but the manner in which the man-eater hunted and fed was definitely not. As the naturalist George Schaller notes in his seminal work, The Deer and the Tiger, “After the prey has been killed, the tiger usually drags or carries it to a secluded place, preferably into a thicket near water . . . The cat usually grasps the prey by the neck and drags the carcass between its forelegs or along the side of its body.” According to Schaller, tigers are so powerful that animals as large as “a 400–500 pound buffalo, which three men find difficult to move, are readily pulled for several hundred feet by the cat.” This explains the horrifying ease with which the Champawat Tiger carried off its victims into the forest; virtually all would have been under two hundred pounds, many considerably less than that. Schaller even writes of one tiger that was observed to have “jumped 15 feet up the bank of a stream while carrying a 150 pound carcass.” This is precisely the sort of behavior the Champawat exhibited upon yanking its Pali victim from the oak tree and scrambling up the steep side of the ravine.
A clear image of a tiger’s eating habits can be formed from Schaller’s observations involving its far more usual prey. After witnessing tigers dispatch numerous chital and gaur, he took note of how “the tiger begins to feed, regardless of the time of day, as soon as it has moved the carcass to a suitable locality.” The tiger’s carnassial teeth make excellent cutting tools, and “with a combination of cutting, pulling, and tearing, the cat rapidly bolts down the meat, skin, and viscera.” The tiger generally begins with the rump and hindquarters, where the most flesh is to be found, and then slowly works its way up, feeding voraciously for up to an hour before stopping to rest. After a period of sleeping, grooming, and drinking—during which it sometimes hides or covers its prey—the tiger will return to continue its feeding, engaging in this cycle of resting and eating until the edible portions are entirely gone. The process can take several days, depending on the hunger of the tiger and the size of the prey. One tiger was observed to have consumed an entire 400-pound cow in just 4 days; a 250-pound barasingha took a different tiger 3 days to eat, while some tigers have been known to devour small-sized pigs or chital deer in just one sitting. With this in mind, a single tiger could readily consume an adult human in two to three days, which is precisely what the Champawat appears to have done in Pali.
It is likely that by the time Corbett found the tiger’s feeding site in Pali almost a week after the initial attack, it had probably been abandoned for several days. And given the general lack of fastidiousness on the part of a famished tiger, it also becomes clear why so little remained to be taken back to the village for cremation. According to Schaller, “The tiger usually eats up its prey so completely that almost nothing remains for the scavengers.” Skin, internal organs, and bones can all be ingested; some cats even eat hooves. With rough, papillae-covered tongues designed for shredding, and a row of sharp incisors made for snipping, fur, flesh, feathers—and in the case of humans, even clothing—can all be neatly stripped away and eaten or discarded as the cat sees fit. Tigers are nothing if not efficient, the product of millions of years of refinement. Efficient in how they hunt, efficient in how they kill, and efficient in how they feed. There is no malice or cruelty in what they do, any more than there is malice and cruelty in how a cow eats grass.
And it is in the interest of survival that tigers seldom stay long once the feeding is done. “When the last edible scraps of a kill have been devoured,” writes Schaller, “the tiger usually leaves the site and either begins to hunt again or rests in another locality.” As for the Champawat, it seems to have had little interest in the latter. It must have reste
d enough while Corbett was searching the pine groves around the village of Pali, desperately trying to find its tracks. A week had passed—roughly the time it takes for a well-fed tiger’s hunger to return.
What’s most interesting, however, is that the residents of Pali seemed to have had some notion of the tiger’s eventual return to Champawat. That was, after all, where they advised Corbett to go. How did they know? Again, the answer may also lie in observed tiger behavior. James Inglis, a nineteenth-century chronicler of life on the Nepalese frontier, remarked how “like policemen, tigers stick to certain beats.” In effect, many wild tigers have established routes they follow through their territory, doing their rounds while searching for food, with a centralized “home base” where they inevitably return and spend much of their time. The French tiger observer William Bazé supports this notion, claiming that the tiger “is very strongly attached to his permanent quarters and uses them as his base for his foraging expeditions.” This behavior is also backed up by Schaller, who writes, “A tiger appears to have a center of activity within its range where it spends much of its time.” And this “center of activity” can be long-standing: records exist of tigers staying in a particular locale for fourteen, fifteen, and even twenty years when food is plentiful. The phenomenon seems especially common in places where cattle-snatching is easiest—tigers with ready access to livestock are not especially inclined to move. But in the case of the Champawat, this tiger took up people-snatching instead.
Taking all of this behavior into consideration, a picture emerges of how the Champawat hunted. Our understanding is supported by the testimony of Nara Bahadur Bisht, the elderly friend of Peter Byrne, who remembered the tiger from his boyhood in Nepal. According to that account, the tiger was known to execute the majority of its kills around the town of Rupal—hence its Nepalese moniker, the Rupal Man-Eater. But as Bisht would recall, it also claimed victims in smaller villages scattered across the Nepalese district of Dadeldhura. When the tiger was finally driven out of Nepal and across the Sharda into India, it essentially adopted the same pattern of behavior, with Champawat as its new “home base.” And when one looks at the two foci of its hunting, it makes perfect sense. Rupal and Champawat were both comparatively large, densely populated towns. Humans would have always been in relative abundance. Given that tigers are peripatetic within their own territory—a natural result of the instincts for both finding mates and fending off rivals—the Champawat did a regular “beat” of its own turf, traveling well-established routes across the middle hills. And when it came upon an easy target—a group of villagers collecting fodder or a young man tending to his fields—it took advantage of the opportunity to launch an attack. But as was the case in Pali, the village would immediately hunker down like a fort under siege, with the inhabitants refusing to leave the protection of their homes. Perhaps the tiger would linger for a few days, but without readily available food, it would inevitably return back to its base, the center of its territory where prey was abundant.
As Corbett began to realize, thanks to the villagers’ accounts, although the tiger never did stop moving, its seemingly random array of attacks at far-flung locations were not quite as random as they had initially seemed. While the tiger’s territory was large and its hunting grounds widely dispersed, it did appear to have a routine of sorts. Abandoning the small village of Pali, it circled back and returned to Champawat, possibly walking along dry streambeds during the day to avoid detection, and switching to established roads when darkness fell. A tiger actively searching for prey can cover a hefty amount of ground, traveling as much as twenty to thirty miles in a single night. At such a rate, it’s quite possible that the tiger covered the distance between Pali and Champawat in one evening, although if it stopped to engage in the usual feline pursuits of marking its territory with urine and scent, drinking at streams, and resting during the sunnier hours of the afternoon, the journey may have taken several days. A normal tiger would have visited the places most likely to yield wild prey—watering holes where deer gathered, game trails where bushpigs foraged. This tiger, though, while similarly motivated, would have known through experience where its two-legged prey was certain to be found: on the outskirts of villages, on well-traveled roads, on the banks of clotted earth at the edge of tilled fields. Although a tiger’s sense of smell is keen, particularly when it comes to detecting other tigers, it seldom uses it for hunting. Instead, tigers rely heavily on sound and sight, and after years of hunting people, the Champawat would have known what to keep its eyes and ears alert for: the babble of human voices, the clang of tools and pots, our gangly, upright gaits. And while tigers generally search out and stalk their victims, they also have been observed to hunt by hiding and waiting at places they know that their prey will soon be: an ambush, you might say. So when Corbett arrived in Champawat on May 9, 1907, it’s possible—perhaps even likely—that the tiger was already there.
Hiding. And waiting.
Chapter 10
A Literal Valley of Death
Jim Corbett’s hunch seemed to have been correct. At breakfast with the Tahsildar early the next morning, having moved camp to the new bungalow outside of town, he watched as two men came scrambling frantically up the hill. Breathless, they announced that the tiger had just killed a cow in a village ten miles away.
Having already seen how efficiently the tiger had consumed its victim back in Pali, Corbett hurriedly gathered up his rifle, stuffing just three cartridges in his pocket. This was an old habit from his youth, when powder had been expensive and every bullet precious, but it was also a matter of practicality. Familiar with the speed and stealth of a tiger, Corbett knew that in the event of an encounter, a single shot was likely the best he could hope for. Either the tiger would flee or it would attack, with both scenarios offering little time for reloading. If death came for either of them, it was likely to be over in seconds. Corbett could only hope it would end in his favor. The Tahsildar wished him luck and promised that he would return in the evening to spend the night at the bungalow—assuming, of course, the hunter made it back alive. Corbett thanked him and set off with his guides, the three of them taking the packed-earth trail to the village at a blistering pace.* If it was indeed his tiger that had killed the cow, Corbett knew there was a fair chance that it was still close by, hovering near its prey.
If he was fast enough, he might still catch it.
The path was uneven and rutted but mostly downhill. The scattered stone abodes of the village materialized through the pines, as did the frantic farmer whose livestock had been killed. Corbett greeted him in Kumaoni and, rifle at the ready, asked to be taken to the carcass immediately. The farmer obliged, leading Corbett to a nearby cowshed, where the hunter would have easily detected, mingled with the usual scent of manure and hay, the unmistakable iron tang of freshly spilled blood.
Twisted and mangled in the corner was the body of a calf, already half eaten. And it had indeed been killed by a predatory cat. But no, as Corbett could tell right away, this was not the handiwork of a tiger. Even a cursory examination of the bite marks and tracks made it abundantly clear that this young cow had been killed by a leopard—an animal Corbett was on intimate terms with as well. He had killed his first leopard with a borrowed .450 Martini-Henry rifle while just a ten-year-old boy in Kaladhungi; the cat sprang at him in the forest while he was on a hunting expedition, and he acted instinctively, hitting its spotted hide in midair and showering himself in blood. The young Jim Corbett was still so small at the time, he actually had to get his older sister Maggie to help him retrieve the dead leopard and carry it back to Arundel, the little stone cottage where his family made their home.
Leopards were relatively common in both the lowland terai and the middle hills of Kumaon, and they could be just as dangerous as tigers when they took to man-eating. Although considerably smaller in size—even the largest males were seldom over 170 pounds—they were more than capable of dispatching an adult human. One of the most infamous of such c
ats, known as the Leopard of Rudraprayag, would go on to kill as many as 125 people in the 1920s, most of them pilgrims traveling between the Hindu shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath. In fact, man-eating leopards—though uncommon—were rumored to be even more fearless than man-eating tigers, and were known to break into homes at night and tear down walls to get their victims while they were sleeping.
This leopard, however, was evidently not a man-eater. Killing a cow, although financially onerous for a poor farmer, was not beyond the realm of normal leopard behavior. The year before, leopards had been responsible for the death of 2,744 head of cattle in Kumaon alone—almost twice the toll of 1,370 head attributed to tigers. Not surprisingly, leopards were generally classed as vermin by the colonial government. To Corbett, however, this particular leopard was a false lead and nothing more. He thanked the two men who had brought him there and gave them a few rupees for their trouble, but quickly set off back toward the bungalow.
Corbett arrived at the hut just before nightfall, disheartened to discover that the Tahsildar had not yet returned. The last of the sunlight was fading beyond the hills, and the surrounding valleys were beginning to pool with shadow; only a few minutes stood between him and the darkness. And once that darkness came, it would no longer be safe to venture outside beyond the bungalow’s door. With nothing to do, Corbett felt anxious and uneasy—he didn’t want to waste the last precious minutes of daylight. The chowkidar, or caretaker of the bungalow, must have noticed Corbett’s frustration, and mentioned a nearby watering hole where he believed he had seen a tiger drinking.
Reshouldering his rifle once again, his expectations raised a second time, Corbett let the man guide him to the spring. But while there were indeed a few scattered animal tracks, he found no trace of the tiger he sought. He had studied the pugmarks of the Champawat closely at the kill site back in Pali, with a highly trained shikari eye. No, the man-eater hadn’t been there—not recently.
No Beast So Fierce Page 18
