There is an interesting epilogue to the death of the Champawat Man-eater. After the skin was taken, the body was given to the people, who whacked it up into small pieces to carry in lockets as charms to protect the bearer from becoming tiger food. Shortly thereafter, Corbett received a curious little package from the tahsildar of Champawat. In it was a bottle of alcohol containing the fingers of the girl who had been the last victim of the tigress. They had been eaten whole. Corbett sank this pathetic package in a holy lake near a Hindu temple. The girl’s head, which had been found severed when the beaters came down the hill, was burned on the exact spot where the tigress had fallen. Somebody, presumably, remembered to dig up the leg.
Leaving Champawat with the skin of the tigress tied over the back of his saddle, Corbett and his men happened to pass the small house just outside Pali village where the woman lived who had been struck dumb by her experience with the man-eater the year before. Thinking she would like to know that her sister’s killer was dead, Corbett went up to the house and spread out the fresh skin on the ground. The dumb woman, hearing her children chattering excitedly, came to the door. The minute she saw the tiger skin, her impediment vanished, and she ran back and forth, shouting at the top of her lungs for the village people and her husband to come and see what the sahib had brought.
The Champawat tigress was the first of an amazing number of man-eaters Corbett would kill over his thirty-two-year career in Kumaon. Yet if he was lucky beyond the powers of reason not to have become her four hundred thirty-seventh victim, he would push that luck to the breaking point in his future hunting life, certainly with tigers but especially with the other great man-eater of India, the leopard.
In relatively modern times, there have been two individual man-eating leopards in India that, during the some eleven years of their combined activities, caused as much human misery and loss of life as any two man-killing animals in history. They operated in different areas as solitary creatures some years apart, and although one, the Panar Leopard, had more than three times the number of victims as the challenger—the Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag—on a numerical basis (officially 400 to 125 respectively), the latter was far and away the more notorious. The reason for this was the difference in their range of operations. The Panar Leopard’s hunting grounds were well off the major trade routes, deep in the Himalayas in what is now Uttar Pradesh province. Thus, its depredations were limited to extremely rural areas where it did not achieve the psychological impact upon the population that the less successful but far more terrifying Rudraprayag Leopard did, which stalked the 500 square miles of mountainous terrain surrounding the 25,645-feet-high Nanda Devi peak, keeping more than 60,000 pilgrims and local villagers in a state of terror for more than eight years.
In the entire history of the confrontation betwen man and the animals that eat him, there has probably never been a feline of any kind that displayed the intelligence and pure, sinister talent of the Rudraprayag Leopard. For more than eight years, killing people all the while, he survived every imaginable device employed against him, including hunters, set-guns, steel traps, baited bombs, ingestions of double and triple lethal doses of cyanide, strychnine and arsenic. He was even walled up in a cave for five days without food or water, breaking through a crowd of 500 armed men to make good his escape. At one time, more than 4,300 men armed with licensed guns (not counting probably four times that number of illegal arms), as well as hundreds of off-duty soldiers, spent most of their time trying to collect the 10,000-rupee cash reward and the income of two villages, which would be the bounty of collecting this leopard’s hide. The combined results of this massive campaign amounted to one bullet crease on the left hind paw, the loss of a small piece of skin and a claw from one toe and the observation of the deputy commissioner of Garhwal, the province in which the man-eater operated, that the Rudraprayag man-eater actually thrived on the deadly poison he ingested from the bodies of his victims that had been laced with the stuff.
The first official recognition of the Rudraprayag Leopard—who was known by other names, as well—was after a kill on June 9, 1918, at a remote place called Banji. His last kill was April 14, 1926; his formal tally laid at 125 victims. In fact, the Rudraprayag man-eater killed substantially more than this figure, which, consistent with the records of most bureaucracies, were misfiled or simply unrecorded. Corbett states that several people consumed by this man-eater while he was actually hunting it do not appear on the roster of the dead, although what the precise figure might be will never be known. Corbett says that had the leopard been killed during an early attempt, “several hundred” people it ate would have lived.
It had been fifteen years since Jim Corbett had hunted down and destroyed the Panar Leopard and eighteen years from his—shall we say—memorable meeting with the Champawat Tigress before he set his sights on the great leopard of Rudraprayag. For roughly seven years, the heavily traveled pilgrim route of torture from the lowlands to the south through the freezing mountains, the trail splattered with the blood and skin of the barefooted devout, had been a path of the purest terror. The man-eating leopard who prowled and ghosted through the blackness of the night around the resting places and native inns had caused the strictest of curfews; yet this deterred him hardly at all. Although past his prime, he was apparently supernaturally strong and equally determined, breaking into rural huts with ease and keeping the 50,000 inhabitants living between the Mandakin and Alaknanda rivers in as great a state of horrified expectation as the 10,000 pilgrims who annually tried to visit the shrines at Kedarnath and Badrinath.
Like most of the big cats, leopards are not bashful about scavenging, and this trait is probably how the Rudraprayag cat took up man-eating. We discussed the peculiar characteristics of man-eating leopards and the factors that make them so hard to hunt down in Death in the Long Grass, so that it does not bear repeating here, except to say that they are casual hunters who go right on eating livestock and game, as well as men. Unlike the tiger, man-eating leopards rarely carry injuries that force them into a career of people purloining; thus, they are far less predictable than tigers or lions, who have developed a sweet tooth for thee and me. After the great influenza epidemic of 1918, which killed more than a million Indians, the dead were so profuse that the normal Hindu cremation ceremony of the Garhwal hills could not logistically be carried out, and a lip service literally was paid by the ritual placing of a live coal in each corpse’s mouth. Left to rot in the bush, these bodies almost surely taught the neophyte man-eater that he had been missing a good thing, and the transition between dead bodies and live ones could have been no great adjustment to an enterprising leopard like him.
By the time Jim Corbett began hunting the Man-eater of Rudraprayag in 1925, there was quite a store of historical data on the cat on which to draw. Already, the leopard had become one of the most highly publicized man-eaters in history (with the possible exception of the African Tsavo lions), having been featured in the newspapers of at least ten major countries. Reams of government reports existed on the cat’s activities, detailing not only the circumstances of attacks, but those attempts made at retribution.
The closest call the leopard had survived after three years of marauding was when he had been hunted by two young British officers in 1921. Somehow determining that the leopard at times used a suspension rope bridge across the Alaknanda River to hunt both banks, they set up an ambush at each end, hoping to catch the man-eater crossing at night. For two long months the men waited, shivering away the nights, one sitting on each suspension cable tower on the left and right banks. Then one night, the man in the left tower was astonished to see the leopard casually walk out onto the bridge and begin to cross. With admirable presence of mind, the hunter did not fire, waiting until the man-eater was well out on the bridge, so that if he missed the first shot he would have another if the cat ran back toward him. Taking careful aim in the murky darkness, he fired. Like a bolt of spotted lightning, the leopard flickered away, across the bridg
e straight toward the second officer. Whether this man did not have a rifle—which would be hard to believe—or was somehow caught off balance by his partner’s bullet with his rifle out of reach is not known. He did, however, pull his service revolver and cranked out six shots at the cat as it ran by.
The next morning, although the leopard was nowhere in sight, some blood was found on the bridge. Through whatever logic it was they chose to apply, it was concluded that the leopard had been hit both in the head and the body. Corbett, who later spoke with one of the native trackers who helped to search for the wounded cat, disagreed with Garhwali’s analysis of the blood spoor, convinced that it could have only been a foot wound. Of course, the leopard was not found, but Corbett was later proven to have been precisely correct; the first bullet had creased the left rear paw and clipped off a small piece of toe. The pistolero missed with all six shots. According to other government reports, a leopard whose description matched that of the man-eater to a tee was caught in a drop-door live trap. The Hindus, who were scared to death of the man-eater, wanted no part of killing the trapped animal, for fear that the spirits of his victims would come back to haunt them. What the logic of this was, I’m sure I couldn’t tell you, but finally it was agreed to send for a Christian Garhwali to come and do the caged critter in. As might be expected, the Garhwal region of the Himalayas is not overrun with Christians, the nearest living some thirty miles away from the trap site. By the time the executioner was sent for and arrived at the scene, the man-eater—if indeed it had been the Rudraprayag Leopard—had dug a hole under the bars and was long gone.
Shortly thereafter, after killing and eating most of a man, a leopard was seen by a search party sneaking out of a small patch of jungle where he had been lying up and feeding. When the party chased the cat, it ducked into a cave with a small mouth, which was promptly plugged with thick thorn branches and heavy boulders. Word spread around the countryside of the leopard trapped inside the cave while five days went by.
By this time, a crowd reported at about 500 men had gathered outside, amazed that the leopard had not been heard to make the smallest sound in all this time. Inevitably, there arrived a man of considerable local influence, who got it into his head that there was no way for a leopard to be in the cave so long without some sign of its presence. Scoffing at the credulity of the crowd, he marched up to the cave, rolled away the stones and pulled off the thorns. Instantly, the leopard rocketed from the darkness, dashed straight through the mass of people and disappeared.
If it had had three miraculous escapes in the first few years of man-eating, this was just a simple drill in elusiveness, compared to the weird quirks of fate that saved its life time and again from the bullets of Jim Corbett.
Corbett was called to hunt the Rudraprayag Leopard in 1925 by William Ibbotson, later Sir William, who had been posted to Garhwal province as deputy commissioner. A famed big-game hunter in his own right, Ibbotson had himself been trying to kill the leopard without success and begged Corbett, his good friend, to lend a hand. Corbett’s first attempt lasted ten weeks, beginning shortly after the leopard had dined on a sadhu, or holy man, who had overestimated the power of his faith by sleeping on an open platform with some other pilgrims outside a store along the road. Unfortunately, this kill had placed the leopard outside a well-organized beat going on at that time, set up by Ibbotson, who was combing the cat’s regular lying-up place with 2,000 men, while the man-eater was sleepily digesting the sadhu several miles away.
With his usual analytical approach, Corbett set himself to making a plan that would enable him to guess where the leopard might be at a given time in the rugged 500 square miles of mountains. Quickly, he realized the key to the area lay with the rivers, both tributaries of the Ganges. The leopard had never crossed the barrier of the Mandakin River to the west but regularly killed on both sides of the Alaknanda, which ran west, forming a right angle with the Mandakin at Rudraprayag—“Prayag” meaning a confluence of rivers. Obviously, if he could determine which side of the Alaknanda the leopard was on, the area for the search would be cut roughly in half. Since there were only two points at which the Alaknanda’s icy rushing current could be crossed—both suspension bridges—it should not be difficult to figure out which side of the river the leopard was on.
As the holy man had been taken a few miles from the easternmost bridge at Chatwapipal on the north side of the river, Corbett felt certain that, after abandoning the remains of the man, the leopard had crossed this bridge to make its next kill. After a death, the entire region closed up like a clam, making the securing of another victim in the same neighborhood difficult for a while, so the leopard would tend to move along. Despite the caution, though, over the eight years he was active, the Rudraprayag Leopard did take six people from one village, five each from two others, four from one more and three each from eight other villages.
A few days after arriving in the area, Corbett started to acquire an idea of the fascinating combination of boldness and elusiveness that marked the Rudraprayag Leopard as nearly unique among killer cats. Since it was well known that the leopard killed livestock along with men, a pair of goats were tied up as bait on either side of the Alaknanda, one on the pilgrim path and the other in a patch of very likely-looking scrub jungle. The next day, one had been killed by a male leopard, which, for some reason, had not eaten it. That afternoon and evening, Corbett sat in a tree over the carcass, but the lack of warning bird and animal calls indicated that the man-eater had abandoned the goat and was not in the vicinity.
From his experiences of man-eating tigers, Corbett was careful leaving the tree and walking back to his government bungalow, even though there had been no sign of the leopard. It didn’t work both ways. The next morning, directly outside the rest house were the pug marks of the man-eater squarely in his shoe tracks. By following the spoor backward, Corbett learned with a chill that the big cat had shadowed him every foot of the way through the dark. There was no longer any question of on what side of the river the leopard was.
That night, in a small village on a hilly ridge 4,000 feet above the bungalow, a couple sat finishing their evening meal by the light of the hearth fire. In a very few days, the wife would give birth to the first son of the house. Great with child, she waddled to the doorstep to clean the few metal pots used in cooking. As the husband sat smoking, he heard the pans clatter to the ground and, curious, called out to the woman. Again, more sharply. No answer. What did that brave and devoted soul do? He ran across the room and slammed the door, bolting it from the inside. It was clearly not an Indian version of Love Story, especially as Corbett tells us as delicately as possible that the husband’s greatest grief came when, after examining the mother’s body, the exposed fetus in the dead woman’s torn-open belly was a male heir.
Down the narrow lane between the houses, the Man-eater of Rudraprayag dragged his pathetic victim, all doors shut tight at the husband’s first cries. Caught by the throat, she was still alive and probably conscious for the first fifty yards, until the spoor clearly indicated that the leopard had paused to kill her. The body in his jaws, the big leopard had carried her easily another one hundred yards into a little ravine along some fields and had eaten much of her at his leisure.
When Corbett arrived at the village after a long, hot climb the next day, he saw that the remains of the mother were still in the ravine where the leopard had left her, at the edge of a field which, forty yards from the corpse, had a hayrick or stack built into a stunted walnut tree. This would make an excellent blind. On the dirt of a tiny footpath running down to the body were the pug marks of the same leopard that had followed him two nights before, a huge male whose print showed the old bullet wound received on the suspension bridge four years earlier. Very likely, Corbett knew, the leopard would come back up this path if he returned at all. A most inhospitable reception would be waiting. With cut bamboo staves, he rigged gun traps using both his extra rifle and shotgun, slender lengths of fishing line acting as trip
wires across the path. Even if the leopard came from another direction, if Corbett missed him at the kill, the leopard would probably run down the ravine anyway and shoot himself on the way out. The body of the woman was naked and, in the shadows of the ravine, the leopard would be nearly invisible, so Corbett placed a white rock a foot from the near side of the remains as a relative aiming point that would show up through the blackness. Comfortably settled into the walnut tree, hidden by the hay, Corbett sat back to wait.
There are three terms used here that bear some explanation. First, the hayrick wasn’t a haystack as seen in the West, but rather a pile of hay formed around the branches of the walnut tree, leaving a space beneath the hay of some four vertical feet and rising to a height of ten feet from the ground. Also, the “fields” were actually terraces cut into the hillsides to take cultivation, some as narrow as two feet, as was the space under the tree. The last term, as Corbett points out, is the relativity of darkness to night. Complete blackness is rare, especially in tall mountains where snowfields glare a diffused light even in mere starshine. When the eyes of a hunter are accustomed to it, visibility is often surprisingly good. Not, however, always … In fact, my personal dictum has become, “It’s always darkest just before it’s totally black.”
Night had come down like a shroud. No sooner had the last feeble illumination of the sun faded in the west than a ripple of lightning flashed across the blackening sky, and fat, stinging drops of gale-born rain pelted the hunter, the downpour increasing to a wild deluge. The stars, suffocated by storm clouds, went out, and true blackness lapped up over the terraced ravine. At the height of the ferocious storm, Corbett heard a stone slide down the cut and, a few seconds later, the light rustle of straw, four feet directly below his feet. The man-eater had taken shelter from the rain under the hayrick and was lying dry, patient and unaware less than five feet below the hunter!
Death in the Silent Places Page 23