No Beast So Fierce

by Dane Huckelbridge

  Long before an emboldened Champawat Tiger was terrorizing villages and snatching farmers from their fields, it was a wounded animal convalescing deep in the lowland jungles of western Nepal, agitated, aggressive, and wracked with hunger. And it is a safe bet that its first attack occurred there, in the rich flora of the terai floodplain, the preferred habitat of the northern Bengal tiger. The terai once was—and still is, I discovered, in some isolated areas—a place of enormous biodiversity and commanding beauty. Dense groves of sal are interspersed with silk cotton and peepal, imposing trees that look as old as time. Islands of timber are encircled by lakes of rippling grasses, their stalks twice as high as the height of any man. Chital deer gather at dusk along the rivers, wild pigs root and trundle through the leaves, and even the odd gaur buffalo can make an appearance, guiding its young come twilight toward the marshes to feed. But there are people who make their home here as well: the Tharu, the indigenous inhabitants of the region who lived in the terai then as some still do today, in close proximity and harmony with the forest. Residing in small villages composed of mud-walled, grass-thatched structures, and combining low-impact agriculture with hunting and gathering, the Tharu are experts not just at surviving but thriving in a wilderness where few others can. The spirits of the animals they live beside are worshipped, and the largest of their trees are as sacred as temples. In short, they are a people with tremendous respect for and knowledge of the natural world. And the Champawat Tiger’s first victim was almost certainly one of them.

  A woodcutter, possibly, or someone harvesting grass for livestock. A worker whose stooped posture resembled an animal more than a human. Perhaps he was a hattisare—a Tharu working in the royal elephant stables, on his way into the land’s bosky depths to harvest the long grasses upon which the elephants fed. It is a scene still repeated in the forest reserves of Nepal to this day, and instantly retrievable. We can imagine it: the air spiced by the curried lentil dal bhat simmering on the fire, and rich with the tang of fresh elephant dung. Our hattisare rides through these aromas atop a lumbering tusker, ducking his turbaned head to clear the low-hanging branches of trees, guiding his tremendous mount with gentle prods of his feet away from the stables toward the dense jungle and grasslands beyond.

  The forest is still a wild place here, despite the farmland and pastures being cleared on its fringes, despite the outsiders from the hills who are beginning to buy up the land. But he has committed his puja for the week, making offerings to both the appropriate Hindu gods and Tharu spirits, and besides, he has lived and worked here all of his life—he is a phanet, a senior elephant handler with decades of experience. The terai has been good to him, he has nothing to fear. He loves the creatures here, and he respects their power, always granting them the wide berth that is their due. Respect, yes, but fear? No, that has never been necessary.

  His elephant rumbles beneath him, still content from the dana of rice and molasses that composed its last meal. He scratches it behind the ear affectionately, and directs it with a grunted command across a shallow river, toward the plains of high elephant grass beyond. Normally, the harvesting of grass is done with his mahout, but today he let the boy sleep in. He likes being alone with his elephant on mornings such as this, riding up front just behind its head, plodding through the blankets of steam that rise from the marshes and cling to the banyan trees. There is something relaxing, almost hypnotic in the slow, seismic gait of the elephant. From his perch atop its neck, he takes great pleasure in watching the swamp deer graze at the water’s edge, or catching a passing glimpse of a rhino calf—or, on rarer occasions still, a fleeing tiger. They, like him, call the forest home, and in that he finds no small sense of kinship.

  When they arrive at the spot, he gives the elephant the signal to stop and gathers his sickle. He dismounts, with a little help from the animal’s forelimb, and steps gingerly over the swampy ground. At the choicest stalks, he stoops over and begins cutting the tough grass with short, hasping strokes, humming as he works. When he has harvested enough for his first batch, he takes a thin rope from his dhoti cloth and begins to tie up the shock, squatting as he knots the twine.

  It’s the elephant that senses it first—even though the man cannot see his old friend through the tall grass, he hears his uneasy snort and sudden grumble, deep, resonant, and ominous. He knows that sound well, and all too well what it implies. Perhaps it is best to hurry with his task. The last thing he would want is to stumble upon a fresh kill at the wrong moment, although he does not recall any warning calls of chital deer or flocks of waiting vultures.

  But then there is another sound. One with which he is also well acquainted, although he has never heard it so close before. A roar, nearer than he ever thought possible. Close enough to make the grass stalks tremble. Heart seizing, his thoughts clarified by fear, he drops the shock, stands upright—and mounts a lightning-quick debate between the competing instincts of fight and flight. But in the end, there is time to do neither, as the realization comes to him with a stark limpidity that he is the fresh kill. He has essentially stumbled upon his own death. With a snarl and a snap and a bold rash of stripes, the tiger is upon him. It has attacked, just as it would a boar or a deer. To the wounded predator, the unknown creature it has caught is so slow and so soft, it barely has to try. It is a revelation of sorts, in whatever shape it is that such things are revealed to the mind of a tiger. A quick bite to the throat, and it’s all over. There is no struggle. The nearby elephant trumpets hysterically, but there’s nothing to be done—the famished tiger is vanishing back into the tall and rattling grasses, to gorge on its feast, its senses galvanized into a frenzy by this entirely new and imminently available class of prey . . .

  * * *

  The Champawat’s first taste of human flesh almost certainly began with some such scenario, probably around the year 1899 or 1900, although the details of its initial kills, before it arrived in India, are likely to stay murky. Jim Corbett, one of the few primary sources for the early exploits of the tiger, gives nothing in his account beyond the number of its Nepalese victims. And even in the present day, documenting tiger attacks in the remote frontier of western Nepal is difficult at best—many attacks go unreported, and problem tigers only gain recognition in the press when they’ve claimed unusually large numbers of victims. Not surprisingly, finding tangible evidence of specific tiger attacks more than a century old in the region is next to impossible. Unlike the United Provinces, just across the border in India, there was no colonial government to publish eyewitness accounts or squirrel away records in faraway archives.

  As for the Tharu, who constituted the bulk of the population in the lowland terai at that time, they possessed a culture that, although abundant in tradition and nuance, was primarily oral—literacy, except among a privileged few, was all but unknown. Traditionally, tigers were considered royal property, and only relevant to the government when it came to sport hunting. A man-eater, unlike a sport tiger, was greeted with relative indifference, and official “documentation” would have consisted simply of a tiger skin gifted to the village shikari who killed it. In the Panjiar Collection—one of the few historical archives available of communications between the Nepalese government and Tharu communities—problem tigers are only mentioned twice over the course of fifty royal documents. And in both cases, the responsibility to “protect the lives of villagers from the threat of tigers” was delegated to the local authorities, with the warning that “if you cannot settle and protect this area from these disturbances, you cannot take its produce.” Essentially, to the Nepalese government, man-eating tigers were the Tharu’s problem—not theirs. Rather than send in hunters, they preferred to let the locals handle it.

  There is another reason tiger attacks may have gone unpublicized, though, and that was the cultural stigmas that often attended them. Predation upon man, conducted by a tiger, was almost cosmically aberrant to the Tharu people, whose syncretic belief system represented a melding of both Hindu and older animistic
beliefs. Such attacks represented the unintended overlap of two separate spiritual spheres, in the unholiest of fashions. Tigers were regarded as the physical manifestation of the power and grace of the natural world—more specifically, of the forest, upon which the Tharu depended above all else. Under normal conditions, the tigers of the forest were seen as benevolent guardians, even protectors. But if their forest decided to send in a tiger to attack a village, then something in the spiritual health of the community was gravely out of order. A problem with its puja offering, a broken spiritual promise, or some other affront to the gods of the natural world grave enough to summon a distinctly striped form of punishment. Accordingly, it was common belief that the spirit of a tiger victim was doomed, at least in some unfortunate cases, to haunt the earthly realm as a bhut—a malevolent poltergeist of sorts capable of causing bad luck, illness, and even death. And since tiger victims were often totally devoured, the essential and extremely complex Tharu funeral rites of cremation and riverine release became difficult to perform, ensuring further spiritual calamity enacted by the bhut. These destructive spirits could take two forms, that of a churaini for women, or a martuki for men, and only the help of a shaman, or gurau, could keep them at bay. So feared were these specters, it was not uncommon for Tharu widows to pass a torch over the mouth of their departed husbands, to invoke their spirit not to return as a bhut, but instead continue on its path toward becoming a protective pitri, or ancestor spirit. And another complex ritual, involving head shaving, ceremonial rings of kus grass, and branches of the peepal tree, would be enacted thirteen days later to ensure that the proper progression had taken place. These funeral rites needed to be performed to create sacred balance in the village, and in the case of many tiger attacks where victims were partially or completely devoured, this was not always possible—resulting in a spiritual hurdle that put the entire community at risk. With this in mind, one can easily imagine a general reluctance among the families of tiger victims to call attention to the attacks, and risk being blamed for any communal misfortune down the line.

  These kinds of stigmas have declined somewhat in the terai of Nepal and northern India in recent years, as the presence of bhut has slowly transformed from practiced religion to old-fashioned superstition, and man-eating tigers have faded—although not vanished entirely, as we shall see—from cultural memory. When talking to Tharu guraus in present-day Chitwan, I found that the perception of tiger attacks as a form of divine punishment does still exist, although they don’t attach any bad luck or ill will to the families of the victims, and they would never deny a funeral service if asked. In fact, they believe that the offended god or spirit will often deposit tiger whiskers on the ground around the village as a form of warning, to give the community the chance to come together and mend its ways before another attack occurs. In the Sundarbans of West Bengal, however, where village men still go into the forest to fish and collect honey, and where tiger predation is still a daily threat, the stigma against tiger victims is very much alive and relevant. Many locals refuse to even speak of tigers or utter their name, as they believe words alone are enough to summon snarls and stripes from the mangrove forests. And when tigers actually materialize and do attack, relatives of the victims are often similarly avoided. “Tiger-widows,” as they’re unceremoniously known, can be considered unholy or tainted, and at times face abuse from in-laws as well as general ostracism in the community. They are frequently treated as a source of bad luck and forced to live in isolation, where they can wear only white saris and must eschew all forms of decoration, including jewelry or bangles. They are barred from most ceremonies and festivals, and allowed to travel roads only under certain hours. Such shunning may sound cruel—particularly when imposed on a person who has already had a loved one killed by a tiger—but it stems from the very real fears of people who are totally reliant on the forest for their livelihood, and who cannot afford to associate with anyone who may have incurred the forest’s clawed wrath. The people of the Sundarbans pray and make offerings to essentially the same forest goddess as the Tharu do in Nepal and northern India—although they call her Bonbibi instead of Ban Dhevi—and they rely on her favor for protection from tigers. When that protection fails, they, just like the Tharu, know that something grievous must have happened to have lost her favor. And this is not something one would want to broadcast in any way.

  But problem tigers have not vanished from the Nepalese terai. They still exist today. And to re-create what the first, harrowing manhunts of the Champawat must have been like, one need not journey far into the past at all.

  * * *

  When untangling the skein of information regarding the Champawat, the unavoidable point of entry is the sheer number of its victims.* The tiger is alleged to have claimed 200 victims in Nepal, and then later another 236 victims once it crossed into India. That’s 436 human lives taken by a single animal. To put that grisly number into contemporary perspective, the entire roster of the National Basketball Association evens out at around 450 players. So essentially—according to most published accounts—the Champawat very nearly consumed the entire NBA. While comparing its statistics with modern-day professional sports teams’ numbers may border on the whimsical, the horror and trauma it would go on to cause for the inhabitants of western Nepal and the Kumaon division of northern India at the turn of the twentieth century was viscerally and painfully real.

  But if the number seems wholly beyond the realm of possibility, there are some other man-eaters bounding across the pages of history that clearly demonstrate that large-scale human predation is not beyond the capacity of many apex predators. In France, for example, between the years 1764 and 1767, a wolf—or possibly a wolf–dog hybrid—known as the Beast of Gévaudan reputedly killed some 113 people before Jean Chastel, a local hunter, finally shot it and ended its spree. It is a shocking number, but also one that is fairly well documented, thanks to ecclesiastic funerary records from the Gévaudan region. In 1898, a pair of lions known as the Tsavo Man-Eaters temporarily put a massive British railway project in Kenya on hold when they began pulling workers from their tents at night. Accounts vary as to the total number of victims, with some going as high as 135, although scientific tests conducted by the Chicago Field Museum, which has the taxidermied lions on display, has indicated that they probably didn’t actually consume more than thirty-five of their victims. And while its own total tally isn’t remarkable in size, the rapidity of the infamous shark that terrorized the Jersey Shore in 1916 has earned its status as the original “Jaws.” As to whether it was a great white or a bull shark is still debated—but either way, the deadly fish attacked 5 people and killed 4 in less than 2 weeks. And then of course there is “Gustave,” a Nile crocodile from Burundi with a reported length of more than twenty feet, a hide pocked with bullet scars, and an apparent taste for human flesh. In addition to the wildebeest and hippopotamus that comprise its diet, it is said by locals to have eaten as many as three hundred people. These may be some of the more publicized examples, but history abounds with similar predators that have taken humans as prey, in numbers that frequently extend into the dozens, and sometimes even the hundreds. Leopards, brown bears, alligators, even Komodo dragons—they all can and occasionally do attack and eat human beings. It’s not common, but it does happen.

  That tigers are capable of attacking human beings, under the right circumstances, is beyond dispute. We may not be their preferred, or even usual prey, but that hardly means humans never serve as a source of nutrition. We are made of meat, after all. But is the tally for the Champawat Tiger, a number recorded under less-than-optimal circumstances for fact-checking, and larger than that of any other man-eater on record, actually realistic?

  The number of two hundred victims in Nepal—as well as the overall tally of 436 victims—is generally cited in most scholarly works as a credible figure. Perhaps not exact, but reasonably close. This is the number cited later by Jim Corbett, the number evidently certified, tacitly or otherwise, b
y the colonial British government at that time, and this tally, or similar figures, are repeated by modern-day tiger researchers and tiger hunters alike. Nevertheless, there are some who initially greet the number with a fair and understandable dose of skepticism, the author of this book included. After all, few things beget exaggeration like fearsome beasts, and the Champawat Tiger’s alleged butcher bill does certainly test the limits of credulity. A few pundits have even cast doubt on whether an adult tiger could survive on a diet of humans over such an extended period of time, as the Champawat appears to have done. But even with the rough numbers at hand, the math at least does seem to check out. According to the eminent Indian tiger specialist K. Ullas Karanth, a fully grown tiger needs to kill at least one animal weighing 125 to 135 pounds every week to survive. For normal tigers, this would obviously mean a moderately sized ungulate, like a boar or a deer, every seven days at minimum. Given that the average weight of the humans the Champawat Tiger preyed upon was probably close to that range, then it is fair to say that a fully grown man-eating tiger, so long as it maintained its weekly kill schedule, could readily substitute its ungulate diet with a human one and hunt at the same rate. And if we accept that the Champawat Man-Eater was probably active for the 8 or 9 odd years Jim Corbett’s account would later suggest, then that would come out to roughly 52 kills a year over the period—resulting in a hypothetical total of between 416 and 468 human victims, a range that the purported total of 436 human victims falls easily into. It goes without saying that such figures are anything but precise—and it’s quite plausible that the Champawat still included livestock and smaller wild ungulates in its diet as well, even while feasting upon humans. But the figures do, at the very least, show that its total victim tally from Nepal and India is not at all beyond the realm of possibility for a tiger that has adopted a primarily human diet, at least from a purely statistical point of view.