No Beast So Fierce

by Dane Huckelbridge

  The attack may have involved an outside researcher, but the vast majority of human–tiger conflict occurs among local populations, in the tight-knit rural communities that tend to border tiger territory. And when they do occur, there is a considerable and understandable amount of confusion, heartache, sadness, and anger. A regrettable human tragedy, no matter how you look at it. Hemanta Mishra, a Nepalese biologist with a focus on tiger conservation, was responsible for capturing a number of man-killers in Chitwan National Park, and encountered the sites of recent attacks on multiple occasions. One incident, which occurred in 1979 in the Nepalese village of Madanpur, involved a beloved local schoolteacher who was killed by a predatory bite to the neck. A crowd of villagers was able to scare the tiger away, however, and the schoolteacher’s body was saved from being carried off and eaten. After finally assuring a furious mob that he would deal with the problem—after all, the protected tigers were technically still considered government property in Nepal, just as they had been a century before—Hemanta Mishra describes the following scene:

  The disfigured body of the schoolteacher was lying flat on the ground, facing upward. His mutilated face was covered with dried blood. A group of the dead man’s relatives squatted around his body, mourning the unprecedented tragedy. They were surrounded by a large crowd of villagers, silently lamenting the tragic loss of their only schoolteacher. The scene was somber, sorrowful, and silent. The aura of death hovered in the air. From a nearby hut, the wailing of the schoolteacher’s wife weeping in pain with her two children periodically broke the silence. A white blanket of cotton and a freshly cut green bamboo bier were laid next to the body. The dead man was a Hindu. His death ritual demanded that he be wrapped in the shroud of white cotton, fastened to the bamboo bier, and transported to the cremation site on the banks of a river. The scene [was] both heart wrenching and gruesome—reminiscent of a nightmarish movie.

  Though shaken by what he had witnessed, and uncertain of his ability to actually capture the man-eater, Hemanta Mishra did keep his promise to the people of Madanpur—he eventually shot the responsible tiger with a tranquilizer dart and carried it via elephant to a waiting transport cage, and later, an enclosure at the Kathmandu zoo, where it lived out the rest of its days eating goat legs and chickens instead of human beings.

  As disturbing as such attacks can be, the above are not the worst cases. The results can be far more gruesome when a man-eater is not scared away or interrupted before it has begun to feed. The tiger’s preferred method of feeding is to drag its fresh kill into a secluded part of the forest, feast on the meat until it can stomach no more, rest for a spell nearby, drink water, and then return to the carcass to continue feeding. It is this behavior that enables trackers to find tigers with bait—once the cat has made the kill, it will generally linger around its prey for several days—but it also means that once a body has been taken into the forest by a man-eater, it is very seldom recovered anywhere near intact. Take, for example, another of Hemanta Mishra’s accounts of surveying a kill site following a man-eater attack in Nepal in 1980, involving a cat dubbed “Tiger 118”:

  Except for the skull and part of the victim’s lower leg, the tigress had eaten almost all of the man. An iron sickle glowed in the bright sun next to the victim’s toes. A Nepali topi—a kind of cap—and some bloody rags of clothing were scattered all over the kill site. With a wrenching heart, I watched the two villagers collect the remains of their relative and put them in a jute sac.

  Far from being an extreme and unusually disturbing outcome, this scene is fairly typical of a full-scale man-eating event. In a scenario that bears an unsettling resemblance to the aftermath of a suicide-vest bombing, it is often only the human head and extremities that remain, scattered about a welter of blood and shredded clothing where the tiger has been feeding. And in some cases, not even that much is left. In one Amur tiger attack that occurred in the Russian Far East in 1997, virtually all that remained after a young hunter was killed in the forest was a pile of bloody clothing, a pair of empty boots, a watch, and a crucifix. The actual physical remains—a few splinters of bone and bits of flesh—could have fit in a coat pocket. One can only imagine what it is like for friends and family having to contend with the fact that their loved one is not only dead, but actually ingested by an oversized predator still at loose in the forest. And as already mentioned, in western Nepal and northern India, where both Hindu and Tharu funerary rites were closely observed, the lack of an intact body served as a spiritual sort of insult to injury, making the catastrophe that much more traumatic.

  Even more traumatic still, however, is the possibility that a man-eater might return—that such a tiger may have acquired a taste for its new prey and actually begin seeking humans out on a reoccurring basis. In these instances, attacks change from chance encounters in the forest to the deliberate stalking of villagers and even predation within their homes. Man-eating leopards are more famous in India and Nepal for dragging victims from their houses, but tigers have been known to do it as well. In addition to the previously mentioned tiger attacks, Hemanta Mishra also relates in his memoirs an attack that occurred in the Madi Valley of Nepal, by a man-eating tigress known as Jogi Pothi. Like the Champawat, this tigress had ceased being an elusive, nocturnal predator and began conducting raids on the edges of villages in broad daylight. And also like the Champawat, this tiger proved extremely difficult to find or catch, as it had a knack for concealing itself immediately after a kill in nearby ravines. The houses of the villagers tended to be simple mud, wood, and thatch structures, economical but not terribly sturdy, which meant that a tiger could break in and drag its victims from their homes. This was very nearly what occurred in the village of Bankatta in 1988. A local yogi—an ostensibly celibate holy man—happened to be furtively entertaining feminine company in the wee hours of the morning when he thought he heard a knock at the door. His “guest” made the mistake of answering said door, as described in the following account:

  Upon hearing the knocking sound, the jogi’s lady friend peeked through a hole in the wooden door. Shocked to see a huge tiger, she shrieked “Bagh! Bagh!” (“Tiger! Tiger!”) in terror at the top of her lungs. Her jogi consort jumped out of his bed and joined her, banging pots and pans in the hut and yelling for help. Their cries rang across the forest to the village. Equipped with axes and khukuris, Nepalese machetes, villagers rushed toward the jogi’s hut, causing the tiger to flee into a nearby ravine.

  The yogi’s reputation as a holy man may have been ruined, but both his own life and that of his guest were preserved, and the tiger was scared away before it could force its way into the house and complete the kill.

  If the thought of a man-eating tiger bursting through wooden doors or mud walls to drag away a sleeping victim isn’t sobering enough, there are stories of Bengal tigers braving water and currents to carry off people from their boats. In the aforementioned Sundarbans, a region famous for its unusually aggressive tigers, the cats have been known to swim out and snatch people from their vessels. Despite the mangroves being officially off-limits, locals still do enter into the protected forests to cut firewood and poach animals, activities that put them at risk from a dense population of environmentally isolated tigers with a limited food supply. Inevitably, human–tiger conflict follows. That was precisely what happened in 2014, when a sixty-two-year-old man from the village of Lahiripur set off in a boat with his two children to catch crabs on a small river in the forests of Kholakhali. In this instance, the stalking tiger leapt from the bank of the river, over the water, and into the boat, where it immediately attacked the father. The man’s son remembered the tragic attack vividly, as reported by The Times of India:

  Suddenly, my sister cried out: ‘Dada, bagh (tiger)’. I was stunned, and my body froze. All I saw [was] a flash of yellow. It took me a moment to register the gruesome sight before me. My father was completely buried under the beast. I could only see his legs thrashing about. I shook off my numbness and grabbed a stic
k. Molina, too, took out a long cutter we use to clear foliage in the jungle. Together, we poked and battered the tiger, but it refused to give up . . . It jumped off and landed on the bank in one giant leap. We saw it disappear into the jungle with my father still in its jaws.

  Indeed, tigers do not share the common house cat’s fear of water, and at times, they can even incorporate it into an attack strategy. The renowned filmmaker and tiger expert Valmik Thapar took note of how one tiger he observed in India’s Ranthambore tiger reserve had mastered the technique of chasing sambar deer into a lake, where, once they were hampered by the water, it would drag them under and kill them beneath the surface. Something similar may have occurred on a human target in the Sundarbans in 1997, when a man named Jamal Mohumad narrowly escaped a watery death. This is his version of the attack, which occurred while he was fishing:

  The tiger lunged at me with its paws. It dug its claws into my legs and dragged me under the water. I struggled under the water and dived down about 10 feet under the water. The tiger let go of me. I swam deep under water as fast as I could. After a while, when I reached the surface of the water, I couldn’t see the tiger. I swam down the river for a bit and saw a boat and cried out for help.

  Jamal became something of a local legend in the Sundarbans, as he was perhaps the only person on earth who had survived three—yes, three—separate predatory attacks by tigers. Despite his harrowing encounters with the animals, he would continue to venture into the forest, driven by the same need for food, firewood, and animal fodder that would have compelled the Tharu people a century before. But in the case of the Champawat, this tiger was no longer content waiting for humans to come passing by. It had begun, by the first few years of the 1900s, to leave the protection of the forest and go out looking for them, undergoing as it did so the transformation from a killer of men, to an eater of men, to an active hunter of them. And in its quest for fresh kills, it would eventually travel away from the marshy grasslands and dense sal jungles of its birth, and begin wandering northward and ever upward, into the populated hills that lay beyond.

  Chapter 3

  A Monarch in Exile

  The Nepalese beginnings of the Champawat Tiger’s man-eating career may be short on documentary evidence, but it isn’t lacking altogether—particularly in a culture so firmly grounded in oral traditions. And ironically, it is in fact a former tiger hunter, not a historian or academic, who appears to have uncovered a convincing report of its early exploits. Peter Byrne (born in 1925) has long been something of a living legend—an admittedly colorful Irish ex-pat and former game manager for the Nepalese royal family, who witnessed firsthand the legendary tiger hunts of yore, before finally turning his energies toward tiger conservation. One of the few Europeans to have gained access to the royal traditions of the bagh shikar (the story goes that he won the favor of the Nepalese elite by taking their side in a bar brawl), he was given a rare membership in the postwar years to the confraternity of game wardens and shikaris that served at the pleasure of the Nepalese king. And it was thanks to this intimate familiarity with Nepalese tiger hunters that he first heard stories of “the Rupal Man-Eater,” a tiger that devoured scores of villagers in western Nepal at the very beginning of the twentieth century. He was even able to acquire a firsthand account, from the aging father of one of his Nepalese friends—an elderly gentleman named Nara Bahadur Bisht. The ninety-three-year-old man shared with Byrne boyhood recollections of how the tiger had terrified his village, and the massive hunt that was eventually organized in Rupal to stop it.

  A glance at the map reveals two eye-opening facts: first, that the Nepalese village of Rupal is just across the border from the Indian town of Champawat. And given the timing, as well as the added details of the armed local response—details that corroborate almost to a tee an account Jim Corbett would later provide—it seems all but undeniable: the Rupal Man-Eater and the Champawat Man-Eater were one in the same. Two names for the same tiger, a Nepalese sobriquet acquired first, and its Indian moniker applied thereafter.

  And second? That the village of Rupal is north—surprisingly north—of the prime tiger habitat of the deep terai. When one looks at the tiger reserves that exist in Nepal today—Chitwan, Bardia, Banke, Shuklaphanta—it is not a coincidence that they seem to cluster, like green beads on a string, along the tropical floodplain at the base of the Himalayas known locally as the terai. This is because prior to being deemed national parks, they were royal hunting reserves, kept by the kings for the hunting of tigers. They were chosen specifically as hunting grounds because they were prime tiger habitat, with dense populations of Royal Bengals. This was where the striped cats were to be found, and where they were naturally suited to live. Even in modern times, tigers still cling to the marshes and grasslands of the lowland terai rather than venturing into the colder and dryer hills. A 2014 study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund that measured the tiger population in Nepal found the highest tiger densities “were concentrated in areas of riverine flood plains, grasslands, riparian forests and around wetlands . . .” In Shuklaphanta, tigers much preferred the marshy banks of the Mahakali River. Meanwhile, the dry hardwood forests of the bordering hills supported very low numbers of tigers, primarily because they also offered comparatively low levels of prey. Grazing deer and the tigers that fed on them kept to the rich grasslands and humid jungles of the terai floodplain below. It was simply a warmer, greener, and more biodiverse habitat, and it is almost certainly where the Champawat’s life began.

  Rupal, however, where our tiger would first make a name for itself as a man-eater, is not in the lowland terai at all. It’s farther north, beyond the first Siwalik hills, in the beginning of the actual Mahabharat Lekh, or the Lesser Himalayas. It is a harsh realm of jagged cliffs and bristling pines; a place where the winters are frigid and large animals are scarce. If we assume—and it does seem like a relatively safe assumption—that the Champawat’s origins lie in the prime Bengal tiger habitat farther south, in the lush lowland sal jungles of what is today the Shuklaphanta reserve, the obvious question arises: What drove it away from its birthplace, northward into the steep valleys and rugged foothills of the Himalayas, to kill humans on an unprecedented scale? After all, injured tigers with damaged teeth or paws were not unknown in Nepal, nor were man-eaters entirely unheard of. But in the case of the Champawat/Rupal tiger, something without antecedent appears to have occurred. Its presence at that altitude seems almost as unlikely as Hemingway’s leopard on the side of Mount Kilimanjaro. What, exactly, was it doing in such an unwelcoming environment?

  In answering the question of why a tiger would leave its natural habitat in the terai, it only makes sense to look at what was happening in the terai at that time. What becomes evident is that the long-standing dynamics between this ecosystem and the human beings who lived within it were undergoing seismic shifts in the late nineteenth century. The deforestation of the terai and the displacement of indigenous Tharu people is often attributed to the eradication of malaria in the 1950s via chemical spraying—and there certainly is considerable truth to that attribution. But what history, taken with a healthy dose of analysis, reveals is that while the delicate threads that bound the terai, the Tharu, and the tigers may have unraveled almost completely in the twentieth century, they were already frayed long before—as early as the mid-nineteenth century, when the policies of the new Rana dynasty began to take hold. And the early damage done to those intertwined and interdependent cords goes a long way in explaining the emergence of a tiger like the Champawat. When those strands came undone, they released a man-eater like none other upon the world.

  * * *

  Some 50 million years ago, when the miacid ancestors of all cats were still scurrying through the treetops and the Paleocene Epoch was still in full swing, a tremendous collision took place. The continental plate of India, which had been an isolated island since drifting away from Africa more than 100 million years before, slammed into the Eurasian Plate. “Slammed” in the geolo
gic sense, as it was a slow-motion impact by human standards, occurring at a speed of less than fifteen centimeters per year. But it was dramatic, nonetheless, in the mountain range it eventually produced: the Himalayas. The world’s tallest and youngest mountains, born of a buckling that only a head-on collision between continents can provide. This upward thrusting of the earth’s crust would eventually engender a bristling range of peaks, reaching well over twenty thousand feet in height, stretching some fifteen hundred miles across, and spanning what is today Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. From their snowcapped heights, these mountains would in turn beget three major rivers: the Indus, the Ganges, and the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra. The name Himalaya means “abode of snow” in Sanskrit—an ancient Indo-European language that serves as the sacred mother tongue of Hinduism, and that has existed in the subcontinent since at least the second millennium B.C., when its earliest speakers began pouring in from the west. They were hardly the first ones to call the mountains home, however. In what is today Nepal, in the Kathmandu Valley, archaeological evidence has been found that suggests human habitation in the region for at least eleven thousand years. The new Sanskrit-speaking Indo-Aryan arrivals lived right alongside preexisting populations, and in many cases mingled, creating a patchwork of ethnic groups interspersed throughout the range’s peaks and valleys.

  In some instances, the Indo-Aryan groups who arrived in the Himalaya region—relative newcomers in the grand scheme of things—clung to geographies they were familiar with, while avoiding those that were beyond their ken. They effectively left such domains to the indigenous inhabitants who predated them, while still technically incorporating them into their burgeoning kingdoms. In few places was this practice more pronounced than in Nepal. In the foothills and mountains of the Himalayan range, a series of Hindu kingdoms arose, beginning with the Thakuri dynasty, who ruled parts of Nepal up until the twelfth century; the Malla dynasty, which held dominion until the eighteenth century; and the Shah dynasty, which unified a number of the region’s warring kingdoms into a single Gorkha state in the late eighteenth century. These mountain dynasties spoke a host of Indo-Aryan languages, including Nepali, and embraced the tenants and traditions of the Hindu faith, caste systems included.