That the leopard was still in the close vicinity was without question; over the past ten days he had three times broken into houses, killing a goat, a sheep and, on the last try, nearly a man whose interior door was just too strong for the cat. To Corbett’s dismay, a party of 150 pilgrims had arrived at the nearby shelter that day. Although he could do nothing about it, Corbett told the innkeeper to keep them from moving around and to make them stay quiet, as there was no way such a big group could fit into the shelter.
As he took up his position in the mango tree in the late afternoon, Corbett noticed that a packman with a flock of sheep and goats and two noisy dogs had penned the animals in a heavy thorn enclosure some one hundred yards from his machan. Ibbotson had left for the bungalow nearby, and Corbett was alone with the bait goat when evening fell. Several days past full, the moon would not rise for some hours, and it would be much longer before the deep recesses of the mountainous terrain would be reached by its beams. Corbett was in his practiced ready position, enabling him to flip on his small flashlight and shoot with a minimum of movement and disturbance, when, around nine o’clock, he noticed a light carried by somebody leave the pilgrim shelter and go across a road, a foolhardy errand, whatever its purpose. In a minute, it was carried back to the shelter and blown out. Once again, complete gloom settled over Golabrai.
A few seconds after the light was extinguished, the two big dogs at the packman’s thorn enclosure began to bark insanely. Corbett flinched. It had to be the leopard they had seen, and from the direction of their barking, the man-eater was coming down the dark road. The cat had likely seen the lantern and was on its way to the shelter to make a kill. Then, as he listened through the night, the dogs shifted the direction of their attention toward Corbett. Had the leopard seen the goat? He must have, and was using the mango tree as cover to get closer. But would he kill the bait or just slip past and attack the pilgrim shelter? By the dogs having stopped their clamor, Corbett knew the cat had lain down to look the area over carefully, his widely dilated eyes seeing clearly, while the man’s were useless. Shutting his eyes to concentrate better on his hearing, Corbett listened as the slow minutes dragged by without a giveaway sound.
Just when he was almost sure that the leopard had skirted around him and gone for a human kill, the goat’s bell tinkled abruptly. As a reflex action, Corbett flipped on the small flashlight taped to his barrel and saw with disbelief that the sights were perfectly aligned on the shoulder of a huge leopard only twenty feet away. A twitch of Corbett’s finger touched off the shot just as the light flickered out. The battery, on its last legs, had died. With no idea of the result of his shot, Corbett was left sitting alone in the dark, with several hours to wait for the moon. Across the road, a crack of light showed as the innkeeper opened his door and called out, asking if Corbett needed a hand. Listening too hard for the leopard to answer the man, Corbett kept quiet, and the Indian hurriedly slammed the door.
When, at 3 A.M., five hours after his shot, the moon was bright enough to give some visibility, Corbett climbed to the top of the tree but was disappointed that he could not make out anything in the direction of the hill, where he had had the impression the leopard had leapt at the shot. By five in the morning, dawn was close enough for him to descend finally, greeted by a cheerful bleat from the uninjured goat. With thumping heart and sweating palms, he approached the road, thrilled by a thick smear of blood, now dried, on a rock at the side. Following the blood trail for fifty yards down the hillside, Corbett was startled to see the leopard’s head projecting from a hole in the rocks, staring straight ahead. He was as dead as a load of hamburger.
Strangely, there was no elation for Corbett, merely a draining sense of relief. Here, the enemy that had stalked his tracks so many dark nights, the devil-leopard that had slaughtered so many men, women and children, a shaitan that was now just a very big, whiskerless, straw-colored old cat, stiff and dead, looking rather shabby, considering his reputation. Nobody else seemed to feel this way.
A party of rescuers arrived at the machan at dawn and, seeing the blood trail and Corbett nowhere in sight, concluded that the leopard had killed and probably by now had eaten the sahib. When they discovered him and the perforated pussy, they went completely off their collective nut with joy, as did the gathering crowd of pilgrims. The relief of seeing their great enemy dead after eight years of terror released a fast-traveling mass paroxysm of euphoria. Even Ibbotson was beside himself with happiness as he sent cables and messages to the government and the press by the dozens. Corbett? He wanted a cup of tea, a hot bath and a rest, in that order. He could skin the leopard later. It wasn’t going anywhere … .
From the physical standpoint of being an outstanding people processor, the Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag was very well qualified for his work. Twelve hours after he died, he was measured at seven feet six inches between pegs driven into the ground at nose and tail tip, seven feet ten inches over natural body curves. Considering that a leopard of just seven feet will place a sportsman’s name forever in the record book of Mr. Rowland Ward of London, who keeps track of such matters, the man-eater was truly gigantic. He was very old, his hair pale and short with a tendency to be brittle. Interestingly, he had no whiskers at all. One very strange aspect of the leopard was that he had a completely black mouth and tongue, a condition I have never heard of before. Corbett speculated that it might have been the result of so many doses of various poisons, but this has never been confirmed.
The man-eater’s teeth, consistent with his age, were quite worn, and one canine was broken. This, however, is not evidence of a reason for starting his man-eating eight years before, as he clearly demonstrated over his career that he had no trouble killing animals as big as cows and, if anything, was much more powerful and fit than a normal leopard.
That he was, indeed, the Rudraprayag Man-eater was testified to by his wounds. In addition to the killing shot by Corbett through the right shoulder, there was the clear mark of a bullet fired at him on the bridge by the young officer back in 1921, the scar on the left rear pad and the missing claw shot away by the same bullet. His recent territorial battle while Corbett was waiting for him at Bhainswara village must have been a real donnybrook, as he was covered with cuts on his head, tail and two legs. Corbett also found a single pellet of buckshot embedded just under the skin of the chest which, years later, was claimed to have been shot there by a Christian Indian the first year the man-eater opened for business.
After word of the man-eater’s death was spread throughout Garhwal and beyond, great crowds gathered at Rudraprayag to see the “devil.” Corbett was truly touched by the gratitude of the thousands, which was shown traditionally by the gift of a flower dropped at the feet. As he stood, listening to the tearful thanks and terrible stories of death in the night from survivors who had lost children, husbands, wives and parents, E. James Corbett’s last recollection of the Man-eater of Rudraprayag was standing in a growing pile of tear-dewed flowers.
When India received her independence from Great Britain, Jim Corbett left his beloved hills and moved to the then crown colony of Kenya, in East Africa. With the army rank of colonel, he had played a recruiting role in both world wars and taught jungle warfare in the second. The ten man-eating tigers and leopards he personally destroyed under the most difficult of conditions without doubt saved thousands of lives, despite the more than fifteen hundred already lost to these cats.
Corbett, one of the only two men ever given “Freedom of the Forests” by the Indian government, died in Kenya on April 21, 1955, a bit short of his eighty-first birthday, an incredibly long life for a man who risked it so often and so willingly. Anyone who knew him, or followed his life through his books, cannot other than agree with the comment of Joseph Wood Krutch, quoted by the publishers of a posthumous omnibus of Corbett’s work. He will always be remembered as a “fine writer and an admirable man—simple, kindly and courageous.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Corbett, Jim (E. James
). Man-Eaters of Kumaon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.
————. The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948.
————. Jungle Lore. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
————. The Temple Tiger and More Man-eaters of Kumaon. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1954.
————. Man-Eaters of India (A Corbett Omnibus). New York: Oxford University Press, 1957.
Perry, Richard. The World of the Tiger. New York: Atheneum, 1966.
And Furthermore …
IF YOU HAVE EVER HAD an extended lapse of sanity during which, between imitating birdcalls and drooling, you have written a book, I don’t have to tell you that chapters are large, hopelessly blank stacks of square paper intended to be covered with characters and deeds which are invariably round. So much for any pending theories of literary geometry. I prefer to write about people who are safely dead and who, therefore, tend to come along quietly. But there are some whose ghosts and adventures are downright uncooperative and don’t fit those fifty-odd typewritten pages, no matter how nasty you get with them. Worse, these people and events happen to be favorites of mine, the exclusion of which would leave this book something less than I mean it to be—whatever that is. Getting down to it, I suppose I’m saying that I’m writing this chapter as much to humor myself as you.
As a one-man wave of gargoyle-festooned romanticism posing as a professional small boy, it’s been hard enough for me to leave out quite a few jolly chaps who have gotten the chop in one or another of the silent places, particularly since their stories could—and, in many cases, have—filled volumes. But there are still a couple of “hairies” that belong here, and thus this maverick chapter, a potpourri of peril, a trilogy of terror, maybe even a crate of—well, never mind. Enough. Rather than create a chapter by telling you why this one is different, let’s get on with the goodies. They are events of great wonder and delight to me—the last one very close to my heart, not to mention my tail.
One of the greatest and best known of the “Victorian lions” during the tumultuous period of British Nile exploration was Samuel White Baker. As a sportsman and traveler, he practically foamed at the mouth with enthusiasm for the most dangerous escapade, fame and knighthood coming as a result of his journeys of discovery to Lake Albert and Murchison Falls, both of which he named in company with his “woman,” later wife, Florence. Unparalleled as paragon of bravery, resilience and resourcefulness, Lady Baker had a most interesting and, by Victorian standards, shocking background: Sam had purchased her as a slave in the Balkans when she was still in her teens. No kidding. She was at his side virtually the rest of his life, even through the bloody battles later fought to suppresss the slave trade in East Africa, when Sam became Baker Pasha under the khedive of the Ottoman Empire.
Certainly, Baker’s African experiences were interesting, yet the early part of his life, from a hunting standpoint, was even more so. Well known in England for running down stags on foot and killing them with a cut-down sword while his hounds bayed them, Sam Baker spent much of his young manhood in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where, at one time, he probably had killed more Asian elephants than any man alive. Yet, for all his brushes with elephants, one of the closest calls he ever had occurred shortly after making the acquaintance of that terror of southern Asia, the water buffalo (Bubalius bubalis). The incident was immortalized in his book The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon as “The Charge of Sixpences.”
Not named by accident, the water buff is one of the most dangerous game animals not only by virtue of his tremendous strength and tendency to charge, but because of the wet, open terrain he loves, which prohibits stalking and the safety of trees when needed. With horns much larger and more swept back than his African Cape counterpart, he is every bit as resistant to bullet damage as a Mark IV Tiger tank. That’s a major consideration for reviewing one’s codicils before beginning a slogging hunt for water buff, even today with modern, heavy-caliber, smokeless-cartridge rifles. Imagine what the risks were back in the days when only muzzle-loading black-powder guns were available!
To appreciate the chances the early hunters took with dangerous game, let’s have a quick review of the problems inherent in using the front-end charcoal burners. The main snag was the lack of firepower because of the intricate reloading process, difficult under laboratory conditions, let alone in a misty, jungle swamp or aboard a racing horse. The first part of the operation was the measuring and pouring down the barrel of a charge of black powder. Since the stuff wasn’t as powerful as modern smokeless propellants, considerably larger ratios of powder quantity to caliber were the rule. When hunting really big game, the size and weight of the bullets or balls and the amount of black powder that powered them were enough to give a strong man sweaty palms in anticipation of the pummeling from the recoil of these shoulder-fired cannons. For them to be effective on animals the size of buffalo and elephant, such guns as found in Baker’s Ceylonese battery were typical: He used a 4-gauge single-barrel rifle weighing a handy twenty-one pounds, powered by a ferocious sixteen drams of powder behind a quarter-pound bullet; a sixteen-pound 8-gauge; and four matching double-barreled rifles of 10-gauge which handled a two-and-a-half-ounce conical bullet from a fifteen-pound frame. “Gauge,” incidentally, means the number of pure lead round balls required to total one pound; therefore, a 4-gauge fires a four-ounce ball, a 12-gauge a ball of one-twelfth of a pound and a 1-gauge, theoretically, would shoot a ball of one pound.
To give some idea of what was waiting for anything on the receiving end of one of these maulers, Baker tells of having shot a big bull buffalo in a shallow lake at about 150 yards’ distance with a “light” load of only twelve drams of powder in his 4-bore. The ball slammed into the bull, passed through the near shoulder, on through the lungs, out the far shoulder and thick skin and skipped along the surface of the water for a full mile! That the buffalo, by the way, did not even flinch at the terrible wound and ran for more than 300 yards may give some idea of the vitality of the species.
Once the powder was measured and poured, the bullet or ball was “seated” just inside the muzzle of the gun on a leather or cloth patch meant to take the impression of the rifling of the bore. If the patch had not been lubricated and precut to size, it would have to be trimmed with a sharp knife before being driven down the barrel. On many guns which had tight-fitting bores or which were “fouled” by burned powder residue from previous shots, a “bullet starter” might have to be used, a short rod with a palm cushion to slam the bullet far enough down the barrel to get it to take the tight fit of the rifling. Then it was rammed full length down the barrel, tightly against the powder charge at the breech. The ramrod withdrawn and replaced, the gun now had to be primed.
In a flintlock action, a layer of fine powder was spread on a grooved pan connected by a flash hole to the main charge in the breech. A frizzen, or striking plate, was swung into position over the pan; when the trigger was pulled, the cocked hammer, gripping a piece of flint, would strike the frizzen in a shower of sparks that would ignite the layer in the pan and, thereby, touch off the main charge, firing the ball up the barrel. If only the powder in the pan ignited, it was called “a flash in the pan,” still a common expression. If this happened while the hunter was trying to stop something that was trying to eat him, it was called “big trouble.”
From the early 1800s, the improvement of a percussion-cap ignition system speeded up the operation somewhat, as well as giving better reliability. As in Baker’s guns, this style used a hollow steel nipple, over which was seated a tiny, cup-shaped percussion cap, usually of copper, which had a shock-sensitive mercuric fulminate in it, waterproofed by a layer of dried lacquer. When struck by the hammer face when the trigger was pulled, this transmitted the ignition spark directly to the powder charge … at least most of the time.
If you reckon this takes rather a long time to explain, give some thought to the sensation of performing this process with s
omething large and angry bearing down on your quaking carcass. Legion were the pioneer hunters whose last thought must have been, “Now, just a couple more minutes, buffalo, [substitute elephant, lion, tiger, rhino, etc., as necessary for geographic accuracy] and I’ll have this thing relo—”
One of the most beautiful places in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon was called Minneria Lake, a vast wetland of verdant grass and fingers of jungle projecting into the shallow water for the entire twenty-mile circumference of the lake. Sam Baker’s first view of it was breathtaking on a clear, late afternoon in 1846 (when he was still in his twenties), after having ridden the whole day through a dense tropical forest with natives cutting a path ahead. In company with his brother, whom Sam identifies only by the initial “B” but is probably James Baker—why “B,” when he had no brother whose name began with that initial?—both men noted the incredible concentrations of wildlife: herds of deer grazing peacefully on the plains along the shore; swarms of ducks and geese; snipe flushing at every step. And what were those black patches here and there in the grass? Buffalo! Hundreds of them.
Sam Baker looked at the sun, at four o’clock inexorably sinking from its position toward the horizon. Damn it all! Where were the bearers with the heavy rifles? Somewhere behind on the trail, there was no way to guess when they might come up with the baggage. After a progressively irritating twenty-minute wait for the column of coolies, Baker happened to feel around in his pockets to find a few solid lead balls that would fit the two shotguns he and his brother carried for potting birds along the trail. Why not? Loading the smoothbores, they left their horses and started walking toward the nearest herd of buffalo, about a hundred in the closest bunch, with several mountainous old bulls out to the sides.
Death in the Silent Places Page 26