Death in the Silent Places

by Peter Hathaway Capstick

  Corbett and Ibbotson continued their maddening game of hide-and-seek with the man-eater every night, somehow always missing what should have been “an easy shot.” And the leopard, on several occasions, followed the hunters, waiting patiently for that one lapse of alertness that would bring a flashing attack. Recovering the body of a man named Gawiya, the hunters heavily dosed the corpse with cyanide which was unquestionably eaten by the leopard, who was then tracked to a hill cave. It was sealed off for ten days but proved to be empty of the cat, dead or alive. Apparently, he had been able to withstand the poison and also escape the cave through some unseen opening which led out to another part of the hill.

  That he was still alive changed from conjecture to fact when he killed and ate a seventy-year-old woman, leaving enough of the body to provide a focal point for the continued efforts of the two frustrated hunters. It’s difficult to say conclusively that any one episode in the incredible saga of the Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag was more exceptional than another, but the events surrounding the ambush set up over the old woman’s body were so weird that even Corbett swears that he would not have told them had he not had witnesses.

  After chasing the leopard around the rock slopes for a day with the usual results, it was concluded that, as the body was not in a proper location for the erection of a machan, or tree platform, a combination of set-guns, poison and the gin trap would be used. As both men were getting pretty tired of continually missing chance after chance, they really pulled the plug in this instance.

  The body was lying at the edge of a ravine, on a small piece of flat ground against a high bank. After the vile business of cutting incisions in the corpse for the insertion of cyanide capsules, a .256 rifle of Ibbotson’s and Corbett’s extra .450 rifle were most carefully arranged, sighted and set with trip lines cut from Corbett’s fishing reel. In addition to giving the leopard the chance to touch the trip lines as he came or went to or from the kill, the ends of the lines were also attached to the corpse’s waist, so that the slightest tug would cause both guns to fire. As the .256 had a hair-set trigger, a distant sneeze would be enough to jar it off. Particular care was taken with the setting of the gin trap. Even though the leopard theoretically could come from any direction, there was one place which offered a natural approach to the kill, across a strip of flat ground some fifteen feet long. Here the earth was removed bit by bit, until a recess had been made which perfectly fitted the height and outline of the big trap. When the dirt had been carried away to an unsuspicious distance and scattered, every dead leaf, twig or other bit of natural debris was painstakingly replaced over a cover of green leaves and a layer of thin dirt. So perfect was the camouflage that even Corbett couldn’t pick out the trap from the surrounding ground. As a final touch, a series of wild, thorny bushes was transplanted from the hillside to form a subtle funnel into the trap jaws. When the men left to take up their wait in a machan some distance away, they were absolutely convinced that nothing “bigger than a rat” could conceivably get to the body without meeting death in one of three forms.

  The late afternoon began to chill off as the sun eased lower, and the hunters relaxed on the comfortable machan. Although they were more than two hundred yards from the dead woman’s body, there was always a chance the leopard would show on his way from the thick mountain jungle where Corbett had been trying to get a shot that morning, and both men watched carefully without any hint of the cat until darkness. As the blackness settled in the hollows, leaving the ridge tops capped with golden light, the hunters put down their rifles. Too dark for a shot, but they were not depressed. Three chances remained for this to be the last night of the man-eater’s life: the trap, the rifles and the poison.

  When the sun was completely gone, something happened that neither Corbett nor Ibbotson had thought of: It began to rain. A sense of despair drained Corbett as he whispered his fears to his companion. The mere weight of the rain on the earth over the trip pan of the trap might set it off, so lightly was it cocked. And what of the hair-trigger .256? Would the rain cause the silk fishing line to shrink? The smallest increase in tension would fire the rifle, ruining the whole ambush. Worried, the two lay on the machan, staring into the blackness, the continuous rain soaking them through with an icy, night chill. Ibbotson had just asked Corbett for the time. “A quarter to eight,” had been the whispered answer, the low words no sooner out of his mouth when the blackness was shattered with a terrible series of snarls and roars, coming directly from the kill. Could it be? Yes! The Man-eater of Rudraprayag was finally caught. Nothing could escape the grip of that savage trap. Risking their necks, Corbett and Ibbotson leaped blindly off the edge of the machan to the ground, Corbett at least breaking his fall by grasping a branch on his way down. Frantically, they scrambled to get to the petromax lamp hidden nearby, and, while Ibbotson was trying to light it, the commotion of the leopard suddenly stopped. Corbett made some negative remark—which, after his continuing experience with the man-eater, might be forgiven—and Ibbotson read him the Riot Act about being a confirmed pessimist. Ibbotson soon had the lamp working, and the pair made for the trap as fast as they could go, circling around to approach from the top of the bank, above the body. Working their way up to the edge, both were thrilled to see that the place where the trap had been hidden was now just an empty hole. But the higher their hopes rose, the deeper they plummeted when the bright sweep of the lamp showed the dull, steel outline of the sprung trap ten yards farther down the slope. It was mournfully empty.

  Bitterly dejected, the hunters went back to the machan and settled down to sleep away their frustration, unable to imagine how the leopard had escaped all three of their traps. At the first hint of dawn, they found out, spelled clearly in the tracks on the rain-softened earth. What they discovered was a vivid, if not especially rare, example of the extraordinary intelligence of an experienced man-eating cat.

  The man-eater had approached the place in exactly the manner Corbett thought he would, but that was the leopard’s last predictable action. Instead of crossing the little flat spot hiding the trap, he had circled below it and come for the body on the side protected by the thorn bushes planted there. With no hesitation, he had then ripped three of the bushes out by their roots to make a hole and, on the safe side of the trip lines, had figured out how they worked. Disengaging them, he had gently pulled the body in such a direction as to create slack, relieving the tension of the triggers. Having defused the setup, he began to feed, starting with the two parts of the body without poison embedded in them, the head and neck, which he ate completely. Finishing his meal, he had worked on down the corpse, neatly eating between the poison incisions, until they and the small islands of flesh around them were all that was left of the dead woman.

  Pleasantly satiated—and probably feeling deservedly smug—the leopard had then decided to leave and take shelter from the rain. By the craziest twist of luck, just as he was stepping over the hidden gin trap, the additional weight of the wet covering of dirt (possibly combined with the tiniest disturbance of his passing) caused the trigger pan of the trap to release the exact moment he was over it. With a snap like a gunshot, the vicious steel jaws had clashed over the knee joint of the man-eater’s left hind leg. By all rights in heaven or hell, he should have died there, but he didn’t. Impossible to believe under even the most liberal application of the laws of chance, it happened that, while the trap had been carried there from Rudraprayag, somebody had dropped it, the impact against a rock having broken off one of the three-inch intermeshing steel teeth. Just one lousy, goddamn tooth. But which one? The one located precisely, exactly, where the jaws had closed on the leopard’s leg. After his initial roars of fear and surprise, the cat had simply pulled his leg free through the gap caused by the missing tooth and walked away. Even a couple of inches on either side of the gap would have held the leopard so firmly he would have needed a locksmith to get free. But no. Get out your calculator, professor, and tell me the odds on that!

  Corb
ett continued to hunt the leopard, despite the growing sense of helplessness that gripped him. Several days after the trap incident, he tried enticing the man-eater into range by imitating the mating call. Everything went fine as Corbett sat in a high pine tree, the leopard steadily approaching to within sixty yards. What happened? Another leopard—a genuine female—started calling from the mountain past Corbett, and the man-eater chose her. As an ersatz Jezebel, Corbett was a complete failure.

  That Corbett was getting desperate is evidenced by the fact that one night he talked himself into the suicidally dangerous idea of waiting on the ground near a dead cow killed by a leopard. It looked like a good chance, a snug place in the hollow at the base of a big rock to shelter him, a bush directly in front for cover, where he was sure he could kill the leopard easily as it came back for the cow, which had been undisturbed.

  Slowly, the evening wore on without any sign of the cat. As the darkness thickened, Corbett took relief in the dense scattering of very dry leaves all over the area, which would clearly indicate the position of the man-eater for the shooting light taped to his rifle. As the hours dragged by, Corbett became more and more uneasy at the thought that the leopard had seen him settle in at the base of the rock and was waiting for a chance to attack. Moment by moment, he struggled to beat back the rising fear that threatened to burst into unreasoning terror. Blacker and blacker became the sky as clouds moved in and he was forced to rely entirely on the dry leaves to hear the approach of the cat. And then the last defense was gone. Heavy rain sluiced down, dampening the leaves and covering any small sound with wet noise. Badly frightened, Corbett knew that now would be the time the leopard would choose to come for him. He took off his coat and wrapped it tightly around his neck as protection from the terrible fangs, tying it securely with the sleeves. The rifle was useless now, and Corbett knew it. With grim determination, he shifted it to his left hand and drew his knife, a wicked-looking Afridi stabbing dagger he had bought as a curiosity from a deputy commissioner in the north. With three notches in the handle, it had been the killing weapon in a triple murder, an old evidence tag attached to the hilt at the time of the purchase.

  Corbett’s mind raced. Should he stay here, blind and deaf, for another six hours until light? What would his chances be to cover the five hundred yards to the nearest hut? In the end, he realized that, with his nerves already frayed from months of flirting with death, he might well be either dead or insane if he stayed. Shouldering the rifle, afraid to use the light for fear of drawing the man-eater, he stumbled his way through the rainy blackness, the knife tight in his white-knuckled fist. To his unspeakable relief, he made it. The next day, the kill proved to be untouched. Crisp, clear pug marks showed over his own footprints on the road. Corbett had survived the most terrifying night of his venturesome career with the most dangerous of animals, a night he would admittedly relive in cold, sweating nightmares the rest of his days.

  The last human victim of the Man-eater of Rudraprayag was killed on April 14, 1926, a final and classic example of the skill and daring of the animal that had survived for more than eight years of steady man-eating.

  Walking from the small spring at Bhainswara village that April evening were a widow, her twelve-year-old son, her daughter of eight and a neighbor’s boy the same age. Carrying water back to the common-walled two-storied home, the widow was preceded by the neighbor’s son and her daughter, and followed by her own son, who brought up the rear. In single file, a few feet apart, they proceeded up a long, flagstoned courtyard to one of a set of short steps used in common by these two families. It was broad daylight still, and when the neighbor boy happened to look into one of the ground-floor storage rooms of one of the houses, he was not surprised to see what he thought was a large dog lying there. Paying no attention, he said nothing.

  The woman was halfway up the steps when she heard the clang of a brass water vessel dropping behind her. Putting down her own pot, she turned around to see what had happened. At the bottom of the stairs was her son’s water jug, overturned, but no sight of the child himself. Going back down the steps the woman picked the jug up, looking around for her son. When he did not appear, she thought he had run off to escape punishment for his clumsiness, and she started to call after him. The rest of the neighbors had heard the crash and came out to see what was going on. As it was now starting to get dark, one old man lit a lantern and began to look around the many storage rooms on the first floors, presuming that was where the boy had gone to hide. In the dull glow of his lamp, he noticed something shiny on the flagstones and bent down next to the widowed mother. His fingers came up red and slick. At the old man’s yell of horror, the rest of the village piled into the courtyard, one of them an experienced hunter. Borrowing the lantern, he followed the blood trail out the courtyard, over a low wall and into the edge of a yam field. Here in the soft dirt were the big tracks of the man-eater. Panic swept the village, although clearly the boy was dead, and nobody among the armed men attempted a rescue.

  That a huge leopard could and did enter a village of more than one hundred persons, in full daylight, cross a completely open courtyard without being seen or scented by any of the village dogs, make a kill so quickly and silently in the open that a woman mere feet away did not detect the slightest struggle, carry off the body of the boy, again without the smallest sound, and escape cleanly merely serves to illustrate the unbelievable and uncanny skill of a practiced man-eater.

  It seems almost an axiomatic observation that fate would again intervene to prevent Corbett from being able to kill the leopard over the body of the boy. While the hunter was waiting for the Rudraprayag Man-eater to return to his kill—which he was in the actual act of doing—another male leopard crossed the man-eater’s path and attacked him, in defense of the local cat’s territory. As Corbett sat waiting in the dark, he listened to a fantastic battle between the two big males, hoping that somehow the strange leopard would be able to kill the man-eater. No such luck. Although the fight lasted through various stages for quite a long time, the man-eater was driven off and never returned to the body of the boy.

  Time was growing short for Corbett, now back with Ibbotson. In addition to the sensation-frenzied press which demanded the death of the man-eater and the removal of Corbett in favor of some other hunter, he was scheduled to be sent on temporary assignment by the railway to Africa in a short time. After the months of unrelenting frustration, Jim Corbett had decided that the Man-eater of Rudraprayag was either too smart, too lucky, or both, to be killed in ambush over one of his victims and that some other method of hunting, less vulnerable to the quirks of outrageous chance, would have to be adopted.

  One thing had caught his attention during his long stay in Garhwal—the formation of a pattern. Since established patterns are more or less predictable by definition, it was exactly what he had been looking for. In this case, it was the fact that the man-eater had the habit of walking down the pilgrim road between Rudraprayag and the village of Golabrai, just south of Rudraprayag, the location of a pilgrim shelter where three persons had been killed over the years and the proprietor himself badly mauled in the summer of 1921. He was the only other person beside the woman with the clawed arm who had been caught by the leopard and survived. On the average of once every five days, the pug marks of the cat could be seen on this road. So, reasoned Corbett, spending ten nights in ambush along the path might very well provide a shot.

  Ibbotson, who had noticed how shaky Corbett’s nerves were, was against it, but Corbett was adamant. If, at the end of ten consecutive nights the leopard had not been killed, he would pack it in and give up, going home for good.

  Those ten long, dark nights seemed like ten centuries to Jim Corbett, perched in a machan built in a roadside mango tree, a small goat tied below his only companion. The first night, despite constant vigilance, the only sound he heard was the warning bark of a kakar, a barking deer. The next nine nights he heard or saw nothing at all. It looked like the end of the campaign; the
man-eater was clearly the winner. Meeting with Ibbotson on the eleventh day, Corbett was reluctant to abandon the hunt, leaving an untold number of Indians to certain death. But facts had to be faced. In his government position, Ibbotson simply had to get back to important duties elsewhere. As for Corbett, he was already three months late for his African assignment and could not delay further. Still, no other hunter in India wanted any part of a leopard who had already eaten more than 125 people, so there was no replacement forthcoming. As a last resort, Corbett considered canceling his passage to Africa, and Ibbotson gave thought to taking a leave of absence to continue the hunt. Yet there were important matters affecting the entire business careers of both. It was left that they would take that night to think about the matter and make their decisions in the morning. As for Corbett, he would at least go down swinging, spending his last night back in the mango tree along the Golabrai Road.