But he didn’t go back. He couldn’t. His strategy may have been foolish, but it was all he had, and Corbett knew that running back to the village would have meant losing the faith of its inhabitants. He needed to prove to them, and possibly even to himself, that he could do this. Corbett did come from a military family, after all. Both his father and grandfather had served in a host of wars and campaigns, and as a boy, Jim had been raised on tales of sacrifice and valor. No, turning tail was out of the question. He had made his choice. As to the terror that followed his decision not to run, who better but Jim Corbett himself to describe it:
The length of road immediately in front of me was brilliantly lit by the moon, but to the right and left the overhanging trees cast dark shadow, and when the night wind agitated the branches and the shadow moved, I saw a dozen tigers advancing on me, and bitterly regretted the impulse that had induced me to place myself at the man-eater’s mercy. I was too frightened to carry out my self-imposed task, and with teeth chattering, as much from fear as from cold, I sat out the long night. As the grey dawn was lighting up the snowy range which I was facing, I rested my head on my drawn-up knees, and it was in this position my men an hour later found me—fast asleep; of the tiger I had neither heard nor seen anything.
When Corbett returned to the village for breakfast, bleary eyed, the night’s chill still clinging to him, the local men were surprised he had made it out alive—as was he, with the benefit of hindsight. It seems likely that the tiger, still very much in the area, would have been aware of his presence. Yet in explaining its reluctance to attack, one need only consider the motivations of a tiger. Even a man-eater will usually only kill if it feels threatened or is sufficiently hungry. In his crouched, motionless position against the tree, Corbett would have posed little obvious threat, and it seems—fortunately for Corbett—that the tiger was still adequately sated from its last victim to forgo hunting for the night. But the tiger was almost certainly near, and it very well may have been watching him from the edge of the forest, those golden eyes turned to silver in the moonlight, on the brink of a pounce, muscles coiled, crouching but then hesitating, suddenly uncertain—then finally turning away and melting back into the shadows.
* * *
Over the next day, as more and more villagers shared their stories with Corbett, the true gravity—and enormity—of the situation became apparent. The residents of Pali were still too afraid to tend to their fields or gather feed for their animals. They were too terrified even to walk the roadways to seek help from their neighbors. They had become veritable refugees in their own homes, stalked by a specter that seemed able to kill them at will. And far from being a local phenomenon, this experience was common to villages across eastern Kumaon. The entire countryside was paralyzed, as no one knew where or when the tiger might strike. In rural communities where simply relieving oneself involved a walk into the woods, the inhabitants couldn’t help but feel that they were constantly at the mercy of the tiger. And all of this in a mountainous region where tigers were hardly known at all. Leopards and bears, yes, they did prowl the rugged highland terrain, but tigers were creatures of the jungled lowlands. For the hill-dwelling Kumaonis, a man-eating tiger was a new kind of terror altogether.
This sense of foreignness has persisted, I learned, even into the modern day. While most of the lowland-dwelling Tharu I spoke with while researching this book had heard tigers before and could easily reproduce their roars and calls, the Pahari people I met in the hills of Kumaon were at a total loss when it came to tigers—they could imitate the grunts of leopards and growls of bears with expert precision, but the sounds of the tiger were completely unknown to them. It was then, as it is today, a creature alien to their world.
However, Corbett’s show of bravery that night, foolish as it was, did appear to have reaped some benefits. The headman of the village asked him if he might be willing to stand watch over the village wheat fields so the crops could be harvested and the animals grazed; it seemed the farmers, who had virtually no rifles or guns of their own, had been encouraged enough by Corbett’s display of bravado to make a tentative return to their work, providing he was there with his rifle in hand. That at the very least meant there would be something to eat, in a village that had gone days without food. Recognizing the seriousness of the situation, Corbett immediately agreed to the request. After executing a preemptive search around the village for any fresh pugmarks, which turned up a heart-stopping eruption of kalij pheasants from the bushes, but thankfully no tigers, he set up watch beneath a walnut tree as the people of Pali returned to their work. By evening, the crops from five large fields had been cut with sickles and bundled into sheaves.
Whatever confidence daylight had given them, however, was quickly rescinded with the coming of the dark. Following a quick cleanup of the courtyard, the people of Pali locked themselves in their homes and huddled around their cooking fires. The foul odors of waste had at the very least been replaced by the familiar smells of Pahari cuisine—there was wheat again for chapati, and milk to make ghee—but the fear remained: Corbett was still unable to convince anyone in the village to take him into the forest where the last victim had been killed. And it was a fear that had begun to infect him as well, although possibly for the better. He had survived one brazen night in the open by the skin of his teeth, and he made the wise decision not to press his luck. His second night in the village, he stayed indoors, to sleep beside a blazing hearth fire. The door of his hut was packed with thick thorn branches to keep the man-eater from entering, and a loaded rifle was at the ready in case it should try. Somewhere outside the tiger lurked, prowling, waiting, its hunger mounting, its next hunt coming closer by the hour.
* * *
Up until Corbett’s arrival in Pali, the notion of a man-eater had been abstract. The tigers he had known before that moment behaved by a certain set of rules; a sort of biological etiquette whose contours followed the general shape of the natural world. The tigers Corbett was familiar with would occasionally snarl or engage in a bluff charge to scare off a human who had stumbled upon a fresh kill, but they didn’t crush a person’s neck between their jaws and strip the flesh from their limbs. The tigers of his youth might skate the edge of a village to snatch a goat, but they didn’t march up into the mountains and lay siege to a town like an invading army. No, this thing he was chasing seemed a different animal entirely, one whose natural instincts had become so perverted and twisted as to render it in some ways unrecognizable as a tiger at all.
As to whether Corbett understood, as early as 1907, the central role human beings had played in its perversion is difficult to say—although he must have realized that something unprecedented was taking place. In fact, the arrival of a new class of man-eater in the region was even beginning to gain traction in major colonial newspapers of the time, well beyond the hills of Kumaon. In an editorial published that same year, The Times of India would lament how such predators had “infested the jungles all this time around Dhunaghat, Devidora, Lohaghat, and Champawat,” with the troubling addendum that “hitherto the authorities have entirely failed to do anything for the protection of the villagers.” And it is a claim backed up by the government records of animal attacks at that time. Of the forty-two human beings killed by tigers in the United Provinces in 1907—a year that was not even half over when Corbett’s ordeal began—thirty-nine occurred in the Kumaon division alone. Most of the other divisions recorded no fatal tiger attacks at all, and Meerut, Agra, and Fyzabad claimed just one victim each. Clearly, what was happening in Kumaon with its thirty-nine victims was a bloodbath in comparison. Essentially, it seems that a single tiger—the very tiger Corbett had been commissioned to destroy—was responsible for 93 percent of the fatal tiger attacks in an Indian territory larger than the state of Wyoming. And keep in mind, the actual number of its victims was almost certainly much higher, due to a lack of official reporting in remote villages, and to the fact that local British officials would not have been eager to showca
se just how inept their campaign against a recalcitrant Indian tiger had been.
Corbett understood that without the trust of the residents of Pali, people who “knew every foot of the ground for miles round,” his mission would fail. He urgently needed to see the tiger’s tracks—and the only place Corbett knew he would find them was in the forest, where the tiger had taken the woman. For an expert tracker like Corbett, a single set of pugmarks from a tiger could provide a wealth of information, a sort of natural résumé that detailed the critical facts needed to plan the hunt. From the shape of the toe pads, he would be able to determine if the cat was male or female—those of males tend to be larger and more circular compared to those of females, which are generally more delicate and elongated. He would also be able to determine the tiger’s age by how developed or worn the toe pads were, detect potential injuries by the tiger’s gait, see whether or not there were cubs present, and collect at least some basic information on its feeding habits. And there was far more information to be gleaned beyond the animal’s tracks; claw marks, urine patches on trees, and fresh droppings could all yield precisely the sort of intelligence that Corbett needed to formulate a strategy. One of Corbett’s unique talents, both by his own account and the testimony of others, was an uncanny ability to imitate the calls of wild animals. This made for a nice parlor trick in Nainital, but in the jungle, it was an indispensable tool for attracting game. By knowing more about the tiger, he could determine how best to find it, to stalk it, and potentially call it out into the open, simply by re-creating the mew of a lost cub, or the grunts of a female in heat, if appropriate.
All of which was contingent upon being led to the site where the tiger had taken its victim—something the residents of Pali still steadfastly refused to do. The true depths of their terror is perhaps best revealed by the fact that they were devout Hindus, and recovering whatever human remains they could find for ceremonial cremation was absolutely essential; that the woman’s friends and relatives were still too shaken to venture into the forest to perform a religious duty speaks volumes on the psychological damage the tiger had caused. The people of Pali were deeply traumatized, as one would expect of a population that had lived for days with the striped specter of death hovering constantly over them. They had seen someone they loved ripped from a tree and dragged screaming into the forest; they had spent sleepless nights listening helplessly to the murderer’s roars as it circled their village, knowing it had been feeding on their departed friend. They were shaken to their core, and without some form of reassurance, nothing would convince them to seek out a second confrontation. Corbett was at an impasse; crucial minutes were ticking by, and soon, the tiger would either kill again in Pali or simply move on to hunt somewhere else.
In his account of the hunt, Corbett divulges little about the backgrounds of his companions. But he must have trusted them—he did choose them for a quest to kill a man-eater, after all—and it stands to reason that he would have valued their opinion. They may not have been rural hillsmen like the residents of Pali, but as Indians, they had experience and insights that a European like Corbett, despite his grasp of the Kumaoni language and culture, simply did not. Nainital, where they came from, was essentially a segregated town, and they were no strangers to the ways colonialism could engender fear and misgiving. It was likely their own appreciation for the villagers’ doubts regarding colonial authority—coupled, perhaps, with the grumbling in their own bellies—that gave birth to a plan. Something that might put some confidence in the people of Pali, and some victuals in the pot, with little more than a few well-placed shots. A show of marksmanship, as it were. Proof that this foolhardy Britisher, sent by a government they had no faith in, actually had the skills to protect them. Corbett approached the headman of the village shortly after, rifle in hand, and asked where best to find ghooral—the spry little mountain goats that Kumaonis across the board considered something of a delicacy. The headman apparently approved of the idea, and upon announcing the plan to find fresh game, three brave locals volunteered to take him there. The ghooral could be found on the steep grassy slopes just outside the village, and the men were understandably excited, after a week without food, to finally have something substantial for their families to eat.
As the people of Pali watched from behind half-closed doors, Corbett and his three new guides marched boldly together to the outskirts of the village. They crossed the main road and made their way down a steep ridge, until they reached a point some half a mile away where a series of ravines converged. Surrounded by gulches that could have easily concealed a tiger, their attention was drawn to the sudden appearance, high up on a distant hill, of a gamboling ghooral, its head poking out from a patch of wild grass. It was a tremendously difficult shot—Corbett estimated the mountain goat to be close to two hundred yards away, with just its head showing, at an awkward sixty-degree angle. But he knew it would be the only chance he got.
Although it was a boast he would never admit to in writing, Corbett was an exceptional marksman. He had honed his aim early on, while pursuing game in the jungles of Kaladhungi. When his family fell on hard times following the death of his father, bush meat became an important part of their diet, and head shots were crucial, as not to spoil an animal’s flesh. His marksmanship had also earned him praise and respect as a young student—he joined Nainital’s Voluntary Rifles regiment as a cadet at the age of ten, and after impressing a visiting sergeant major with his rifle skills, was allowed to borrow a .450 Martini carbine for his own expeditions into the forest. The breach-loading Martini-Henry rifle was a weapon he would quickly master, and it was the same weapon, among others, that he would bring with him on his mission some twenty years later. And although somewhat heavy and prone to recoil, Corbett would admit that it “atoned for its vicious kick by being dead accurate—up to any range.”
As for ghooral, however, that remained to be seen. Lying down flat against the ground and balancing the barrel on a pine root, Corbett took the shot. The hilltops resounded with the clamor of gunpowder, and for a moment, there wasn’t anything to see but smoke. The three men from the village strained their eyes to catch any sign of a wounded animal, but there was nothing—they murmured among themselves in disappointment, certain that Corbett had missed.
But he had not. As Corbett reloaded, the limp form of the ghooral came sliding from the tall grass, then began to tumble down the steep bank of the hill. In its fall, however, it came to disturb two other ghooral goats from a second patch of scrub, and as they sprang into view, Corbett found himself aiming once again, getting a bead and squeezing the trigger, praying that he could accomplish “the seemingly impossible,” as he deemed the feat he was hoping to perform. Two more bursts of black powder, and somehow, two more limp and tumbling ghoorals, one shot through the back, the other through the shoulder. The bodies of the three ghoorals somersaulted down the full length of the hill before coming to rest at the bottom of the ravine, directly in front of Corbett and the villagers. For an instant, man-eating tigers were forgotten and they cheered at the meat that had landed before them. They quickly gathered up their trio of ghoorals and made their way back to the village, where the people of Pali had assembled in the main courtyard, eager to greet them.
As the ghoorals were skinned and dressed, Corbett overheard his guides telling the other villagers wildly exaggerating versions of what had occurred: tales of magic bullets that could kill an animal from a mile away, and summon it to land before a hunter’s feet. Normally, Corbett would have dispelled such talk with a wave of his hand, but on this occasion, he wisely chose to let these “shikar yarns,” as he deemed them, percolate throughout the village—to fortify their courage, and perhaps even his own. They all were going to need it.
Following a communal midday lunch of curried ghooral, Corbett asked once again to be taken to the tiger’s feeding site, and this time the people of Pali, emboldened by Corbett’s sharpshooting and no doubt grateful for the first substantial meal they’d had in som
e time, obliged. The headman helped assemble a group of volunteers, and from them, Corbett selected two of the men who had accompanied him on the ghooral hunt as guides—a charge they now enthusiastically accepted. As they made their way through the village, toward the waiting forest beyond, the family of the woman who had been taken approached, asking them to bring back any remains they might find so that they could be cremated in accordance with Hindu custom. It was a request that Jim Corbett humbly agreed to, and he promised he would do his best.
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