No Beast So Fierce

by Dane Huckelbridge

  Perhaps—but if Corbett hesitated for a moment, the Tahsildar did not. From his flank post beneath the pine tree farther up the slope, he let loose both barrels of his shotgun in the tiger’s direction, sending a duet of slugs screaming toward its hide. The shots missed, which isn’t surprising given the distance to the target and the poor condition of his shotgun. But the sound of the report and the explosion of earth at its feet were enough to bring the advancing tiger to a grass-shredding halt.

  Corbett now had a chance at a shot, albeit a long one. As the tiger reared and turned tail, he was able to get off a single “despairing” shot from his rifle. But this bullet missed as well, sending up another geyser of ruptured sod, and Corbett could only watch as the tiger vanished back into the thick undergrowth of the ravine. And he must have both praised and cursed his luck at once—he was still alive, but then again, so was the Champawat. His guess was that now, it would attempt to flee the gorge in the other direction, eventually racing up the steep side and into direct confrontation with the line of beaters—and who knew what carnage that might mean—or, it would simply hole up at the bottom and wait until darkness, in which case they would likely lose it for good.

  Luck, however, is a funny thing. Even that which appears to have soured can take a turn quickly for the better. While Corbett stared into the hopeless ravine, dejectedly changing his spent cartridge and anticipating the screams of wounded men, something unexpected occurred. The army of beaters, having heard the gunshots, assumed that the Champawat had at last been killed. A sweeping roar of approval moved across the lip of the chasm, and all of the remaining ammunition was fired into the air in celebration. The collective tumult of that misguided hurrah was enough to jar the tiger loose from the ravine a second time, back toward Corbett.

  It reappeared, showing its stripes once again, conjured on command as if by a Tharu gurau. The tiger traveled directly across the open bottom of the valley, crossing the stream at its base in a single, jaw-dropping leap, then headed straight for the cover of the next wooded ravine.

  This time, Corbett was ready.

  * * *

  The .500 modified cordite rifle came up in a single fluid movement. Corbett was aware that the gun, sighted at sea level, tended to shoot high at altitude, but he adjusted accordingly, getting a steady bead on the tiger then squeezing the first trigger.

  This time, the shot struck home. A little farther back than he would have liked, but the Champawat had been hit. Snarling, its head bowed in pain, the cat spun around in the direction of the report, although Corbett was still hidden from sight by the patch of tall grass. The tiger’s reflexive contortion gave him the cleanest shot yet, from not more than thirty yards away—a distance an attacking tiger could cover in less than two seconds.

  With a steady hand, he took the slack out of the second trigger, the blotted orange of the tiger hovering at the cusp of his sight.

  A second blast resounded through the valley. The bullet tore through the Champawat’s shoulder, into its chest. Fully enraged, it bared its teeth and lowered its ears, prepared for a charge, searching wildly for the source of its agony. With Corbett still out of sight, it attacked the closest object it could find—a bush, standing across the stream, fastened at the joint to a protruding shelf of rock. Still dazed by the unexpected wounds, it bounded back across the stream and mounted the boulder, where it commenced in its fury to tear the bush to shreds.

  Jim Corbett realized he had a serious problem. With a sinking sensation, like the nadir of a nightmare, his rifle became useless in his hands. His old habit from boyhood had finally caught up with him; he had spent all three of his precious cartridges. The Champawat was only feet away, in an absolute frenzy, and he was helpless to do anything about it. It was distracted for the time being, but Corbett knew that a seriously wounded tiger was the most dangerous kind of all.

  The Tahsildar . . . Corbett shouted in his direction, toward his post higher up beside the blasted pine. His words were lost, however, in the mayhem of growls and the distant yelling of the beaters. The Tahsildar shouted something back, but his words were a jumble as well. And then, Corbett knew his only chance was to run to the Tahsildar and get his shotgun. Which would mean breaking cover from his hiding place in the tall grass and making a dead sprint across more than a hundred yards of exposed valley—hopefully before the Champawat had time to take note.

  When describing the scene almost forty years later in Man-Eaters of Kumaon, Jim Corbett recounts what transpired summarily and succinctly, in the calm and unhurried tones of a lifelong hunter. But it’s hard not to imagine, however, the feeling of raw, helpless exposure he must have experienced when he dropped his empty rifle and began running unarmed toward the pine, uncertain if the tiger was behind him or not. Every thudding footfall bringing him one step closer to the gnarled tree, that fixed goal bobbing on the bank of the hill. The Tahsildar stands, at first confused, then understanding at last what this puzzling Britisher from Nainital intends to do. He nods, a gesture pregnant with trust and meaning, and he tosses the running Corbett his only weapon. The old shotgun hangs poised for an instant in the trembling blue air—and Corbett grabs it, never breaking stride, grinding his heels into the earth and turning back down toward the stream.

  And now there is the tiger: slowly turning its head from the shredded bush, and seeing the true source of its pain, indeed, of its lifelong misery, coming full speed down the opposite slope toward it. For a moment their eyes meet, and there is an understanding. A negotiation between hunters as old as time.

  Corbett takes the stream in a running leap. His lungs are spent, he’s gagging on fear. As he approaches the rock ledge, the tiger comes out to meet him, covering the stone shelf in long, loping strides. It stops at the brink, and so does he.

  Corbett is face-to-face with the Champawat, clutching a slapdash shotgun not so different from his boyhood muzzle-loader held together with wire. For a split second, he must have been that young boy again, fatherless and lost and alone in the jungle, frozen before a pair of golden eyes staring out from a plum bush.

  The Champawat turns its fury upon him. Though severely wounded, perhaps even mortally so, it has enough fight left in it for one more kill. Gushing blood, hurling roars, it comes back to the rock ledge before him. It is only twenty feet away now, a single leap from having its jaws on his throat. It sees Corbett, clearly at last, and opens its maw to voice its rage, exposing its wounded mandible, its shattered teeth. And all at once Jim Corbett understands what’s been done to this poor creature, a story written in malice and pain. But the number 436 leaves no room for pity, and twenty feet affords him no chance at escape.

  The old shotgun comes up, cocked and ready, loaded with the last of the Tahsildar’s cylindrical-slug shells. This is how it has to be. Given the weapon’s poor condition, Corbett isn’t even certain it will fire. It will work or he will die—it is that simple. The tiger crouches and prepares for its attack.

  Corbett takes in a breath and hooks his finger around the trigger. Perhaps he hesitates, for the thinnest sliver of an instant. Once the trigger is pulled, two paths await him: extinction or transformation. Perhaps he already knows the future, as inevitable as the monsoon rains, as certain as the snows that cap the Himalayas. He closes his eyes to the gathering horror before him and he prays . . .

  There is a single clap of thunder.

  A pair of golden eyes goes dim.

  One life ends, and another begins.

  Chapter 12

  A Moment of Silence

  Between the final blast of the shotgun and the arrival of the beaters, there was contemplative silence. A calm minute filled with both satisfaction and regret. For while Corbett was content to have accomplished that which was deemed all but impossible, he was also deeply shaken—as he would be for the rest of his life—by the act of killing a tiger. He would later describe the peculiar sensation that followed the destruction of a man-eater as “a breathless feeling—due possibly as much to fear as to excit
ement—and a desire for a little rest.” The Tahsildar joined him, and the two men stood vigil together. Just above them, the Champawat’s head hung limp over the edge of the rock, releasing a slow drip of blood that dimpled the dust at their feet.

  Once Corbett’s nerves settled, he mounted the steep bank of the stream and approached the ledge to inspect the dead tiger. Just as he reached its limp body, however, the first of the beaters burst through from the forest, brandishing their assortment of guns and spears, whipped into a frenzy by the sight of the striped form sprawled out across the boulder. Few among them had not lost a loved one to its claws. The man whose entire family had been consumed by the cat was especially intent on tearing it to pieces, shrieking at the top of his lungs, “This is the shaitan that killed my wife and my two sons!”

  With the help of the Tahsildar and some desperate pleading, Corbett was at last able to subdue the crowd, and the men’s rage slowly shifted to a morbid sort of curiosity. One by one, they climbed to the protruding slab of rock and gazed at the Champawat up close, suddenly so much smaller and less imposing than it had been when alive. Glazed eyes, blood-matted fur, lolling tongue—it was almost pitiable, as if the shaitan that possessed it finally had been exorcised, leaving behind only the limp remains of its discarded vehicle. The men lowered the tiger to the ground so Corbett could inspect it more closely, and confirm what he had suspected at first roar: both the upper and lower canine teeth on the right side of the tiger’s mouth had been damaged long ago, cut cleanly by a misguided bullet. The upper tooth was shorn in half, and the lower tooth, broken off all the way down to the bone.

  The skinning of the tiger was delayed, though—the men asked to wait until nightfall, so that they could carry it through the surrounding villages and prove to their families that the beast was actually dead. The population needed to know that they could tend their fields without fear and walk on the roads without dread; that the night was theirs again. Corbett watched as the men lashed the Champawat to a pair of stripped saplings with their unwound dhoti cloths and turbans, formed a human chain up the face of the mountain, and passed the burden of its body up along to its crest, singing an ancient hill song in unison as they did so. This procession had not been seen in half a century: Kumaoni men celebrating the defeat of an enemy that they themselves had banded together to vanquish. In the tiger’s demise, something seemingly irretrievable had been redeemed; something once lost had again been found. And now the Tahsildar joined them, as the men carried him up the mountain atop their broad shoulders, a symbol of respect, a gesture of triumph.

  Corbett climbed the slope by himself, watching with a pang in his heart a celebration he knew he could not participate in. Still, it was moving to behold, and at the top of the valley, the Tahsildar rejoined him, unwilling perhaps to leave him totally alone. As the tiger was marched eastward by the assorted villagers along the ridge of the amphitheater where the killing had taken place, the two men took the road back to Champawat together. As they marched, they noticed a single ribbon of white smoke unspooling its way toward the heavens from the valley below. It was a funeral pyre. The family of the tiger’s last victim had at last been able to recover her remains from the ravine, and now, at last, they were sending her home.

  * * *

  The festivities went long into the night. From a courtyard in Champawat, Corbett and the Tahsildar watched a procession of pine torches wind through the valley, as the jubilant songs of the people rang out through the still air. Gradually, the procession made its way down from the surrounding hills and arrived at the Tahsildar’s door, where the body of the Champawat was laid at Corbett’s feet to be skinned at last. It was customary for the shikari who had fired the lethal shot to keep the head and skin as a trophy, and Corbett obliged. He was happy to donate the body to the local villagers and townsfolk, who believed that lockets containing pieces of the tiger could serve as powerful talismans, and protect their children from future attacks. As Corbett crouched beside the tiger’s body, running his knife along its hide, he noticed that the final shot, the coup de grâce he had delivered with the Tahsildar’s battered shotgun, had actually struck the Champawat in its foot—not its roaring maw. But that had been enough to bring the creature down.

  By the time Corbett had removed the tiger’s skin, the town elders had planned the feast that was to be held the next day, to celebrate the end of their four-year ordeal. But it was a celebration Corbett either would not—or could not—attend. His railway job back on the Ganges was beckoning, Nainital was still seventy-five miles away, and perhaps he knew that while his presence at the celebration would certainly be tolerated, even welcomed, it was again a victory that was not his to celebrate.

  As the last of the stragglers left the courtyard, elated at being able to travel the roads at night without fear once again, Corbett had one final smoke with the Tahsildar. Between thoughtful drags on their cigarettes, enjoyed beneath the Kumaoni stars, Corbett told his friend that he could not stay for the celebration—that the Tahsildar would have to take his place at the head of the table instead, and that he deserved it. The Tahsildar, who seems to have understood far more than Corbett lets on in his writing, may have smiled, and told him that he would be honored.

  * * *

  Jim Corbett left Champawat at sunrise the next day on a borrowed horse, leaving early, riding alone, the rolled skin of the Champawat strapped to the saddle. He told his men from Nainital that he would meet up with them again at Devidhura, where he intended to spend more time cleaning the hide. On the way, however, it occurred to him that there was someone in Pali—the village where all of this had begun—who might be interested in seeing the Champawat for herself. Corbett found the stone farmhouse beside the village, dismounted from his horse, and laid out the skin of the Champawat in front of the family of the girl that the tiger had killed the year before. The surviving sister of the victim, who had been too traumatized to even speak of the incident before that day, called excitedly for all the village to come and see what the sahib had brought. Corbett drank tea with the people of Pali and recounted the details of the hunt, telling them of the bravery of the men who had helped kill the tiger, not in English, but in Kumaoni.

  And it was a sentiment that he seemed to have echoed in his official report to the colonial government, upon his return to British society. Several months after the Champawat was killed, Sir John Hewett, the lieutenant governor of the United Provinces, hosted a special durbar reception in Nainital to commemorate the event—a ceremony at which both the Tahsildar and the patwari were presented with an engraved rifle and knife, respectively, as tokens of the government’s gratitude. Of course, Jim Corbett doesn’t mention the following in his account—to do so would have struck him as boastful and crass—but the lieutenant governor made sure to present him with an engraved rifle as well, a sleek and modern bolt-action .275 Rigby. It was a vast improvement over his old double-barrel black-powder rifle, and a prescient gift. Because as the people of Kumaon were soon to discover, the death of the Champawat had not marked the end of anything when it came to man-eaters.

  Far from it.

  Chapter 13

  An Unlikely Savior

  This book began with the premise that the Champawat Tiger was not a freak of nature, but rather a man-made disaster. That its arrival at the very cusp of the twentieth century was not an isolated aberrance on the part of the animal kingdom, but the direct result of decades of environmental mismanagement on behalf of the governments of Nepal and India; a catastrophe at least half a century in the making, arguably considerably longer. And if this premise holds true—if the ecosystems of the region had degraded to the point where apex predators could no longer subsist on their natural diet in a wild habitat—it only stands to reason that the death of the Champawat should have marked the beginning of an era of unprecedented man-eaters, certainly not the end.

  A harbinger, you might even say.

  And this was precisely what occurred. Prior to the Champawat, as even Jim
Corbett himself admitted, man-eaters in the divisions of Kumaon and Garhwal were all but unknown—tiger fatalities were perennially in the low single-digits, if that. The British authorities barely even bothered to keep statistics, and the few attacks that did warrant mention were usually the result of startled tigers acting defensively, protecting either their territory or their young. In the Champawat’s wake, however, a veritable cavalcade of serial man-eaters suddenly appeared in Kumaon, seemingly compelled by the same combination of diminished habitat, reduced ungulate populations, and human-inflicted injuries. And it was upon this plague of man-eating tigers and leopards that the legend of Jim Corbett was built.

  In killing the Champawat, Corbett had made a name for himself with the colonial authorities. And as an ever-increasing number of aggressive cats emerged from their ruined forests to seek human prey on the edges of villages and towns, Corbett was inevitably summoned, like some mythological hero, to dispatch them one after the other. Among the most famous of the man-eaters he hunted, there was the Leopard of Panar, a cat that was reported to have claimed almost as many victims as the Champawat, and which he finally terminated in 1910. Later came the aforementioned Leopard of Rudraprayag, killer of 125 humans, which he stalked and killed in 1926. Then, the Chowgarh Tigers, a trio of cats that Corbett was called upon to hunt in 1929. Next, the Mohan Man-Eater, another tiger, which Corbett shot in 1931. There was the Kanda Man-Eater, killed in 1933; the Chuka Man-Eater of 1937; and finally, the Thak Man-Eater, which he finished off in 1938, at the age of sixty-three.