The two men continued on their way, walking uneasily along the nullah rather than taking the road, and sure enough, the tiger appeared once again, materializing from the dense foliage that abutted the creek’s sandy bank. Only this time, it was visibly agitated: its striped tail twitched in obvious displeasure, its flanks rumbled with the profound beginnings of a growl. Once again, the two men froze, and once again, the tiger glared at them in menace before vanishing back into the dark shadows of the leaves.
At which point it became clear to Kunwar that the natural balance of the forest was horribly askew. Between the fox, and their missed shots, and the sudden appearance of an irritated tiger, he knew they needed to get back on the road and out of the trees as soon as possible. The spirits were out of sorts. On that particular day, the two men did not belong there.
At that very moment, however, a flock of jungle fowl rose before them, with one alighting upon the branch of a haldu tree only a few feet away. It was an easy shot—free food for the taking—and after a day of such dismal luck, Har Singh simply could not resist. Kunwar tried to stop him when he saw the rifle come up, but his warning came a second too late. The sharp report of the rifle was answered directly by an unimaginable roar, and just as he had feared, the now furious tiger came crashing in toward them through the brushwood. Kunwar, with his ample jungle experience, knew exactly what to do. Unlike leopards, tigers are relatively poor at climbing trees, and they will seldom pursue a human who has surmounted the reach of their claws. At the first sight of its barreling stripes, Kunwar scrambled up the nearest runi tree, its forked trunk and rough bark leaving plenty of purchase for his bare and callused feet. Har Singh, on the other hand, was neither so well versed in the ways of the jungle, nor so lucky. The comparative city slicker was still scrambling for a branch to hold on to across from Kunwar when the tiger sprang at him. It was not a predatory attack—simply a defensive one, of the sort that involves roars and claws rather than spine-severing bites to the nape of the neck. But still, this was more than enough. Kunwar watched in horror as the tiger reared upon its hind legs, pinned his companion to the trunk of the runi tree just opposite his, and amid a mingled tumult of snarls and screams, proceeded to eviscerate the poor man with its claws.
Kunwar had his rifle with him up in the tree and did consider taking a shot at the tiger, but he quickly realized he risked shooting Har Singh. If he did nothing, on the other hand, he knew that his friend would soon be dead anyway. So Kunwar did what he thought best and fired his rifle into the air. Fortune, for once in the day, appeared to be on their side; this time, at the sudden sound of a gunshot, the tiger fled, and Har Singh collapsed in a bloody heap.
Kunwar waited a silent minute to be sure the tiger was gone before descending from his perch and approaching his friend, who was shuddering and moaning at the base of the runi tree. Upon turning him over, Kunwar discovered just how ferocious the attack had been. In addition to shredding most of the bark and outer wood from the trunk of the tree, one of the tiger’s claws had also entered Har Singh’s stomach, tearing the lining “from near his navel to within a few fingers’ breadth of the backbone.” In just a few short seconds, the tiger had gutted the man like a fish, and his intestines were spilling out onto the jungle’s leafy floor.
Remarkably, Har Singh was still conscious, and in fierce whispers the two men debated if the jumbled mass of innards should simply be cut away or pushed back inside. Har Singh felt strongly that his own guts should be put back where they belonged, and Kunwar, although certainly no doctor, was inclined to agree. Working in silence in case the tiger was near, Kunwar stuffed the mass of intestines back into his friend, including the “dry leaves and grass and bits of sticks that were sticking to it,” before wrapping his own turban securely around Har Singh’s middle to hold it all in.
The worst of it may have been over, but their ordeal was far from finished. Night had fallen, and the nearest hospital was still ten miles away, which meant an excruciating and terrifying hike was ahead. Despite his catastrophic wounds, Har Singh walked the entire distance back in the darkness with Kunwar leading the way, the latter shouldering both of their rifles in case the tiger returned to finish the job. The hospital was closed when they finally arrived, but luckily the doctor was still awake, and he attended as best he could to the injured man. With Kunwar holding the flaps of his friend’s stomach together, and a local tobacco seller steadying a lantern for whatever light it could give, the doctor stitched up the hole, twigs and all, with nothing more than a glass of liquor for Har Singh to help kill the pain.
Ironically, it was not Har Singh who would meet a premature death. Despite his grievous injury and slapdash medical treatment, the man made a full recovery, living to a ripe old age and passing away many years later of natural causes. It was Kunwar Singh—Corbett’s old friend and mentor—who expired far sooner than he should have. The expert shikari and once-proud Thakur, the headman of his village, fell victim to the same cycle of substance abuse and addiction that plagued so many indigenous communities displaced and dispossessed by the forces of colonialism. With his privileges gone, his ancestral hunting grounds off-limits, his stature diminished, the shikari sought comfort in the cheap opium that flowed in from China and Tibet. The last time Corbett had seen his old friend, he was emaciated and strung out, lying at death’s door on the filthy mud floor of a servant’s shack. Corbett tried to nurse his “Uncle” Kunwar back to health, and even had him swear an oath, upon a sacred thread and a leaf of the holy peepal tree, to give up the powerful narcotic for good. And Kunwar apparently kept his oath—he did not die that day. But he would never hunt again as he once did, and his damaged body finally gave out a few years later. The community lost a village elder, one of the last true shikaris with a native knowledge of tigers, and Jim Corbett lost a father for a second time.
It must have occurred to Corbett, as he raced down the narrow dirt paths through the hills toward Champawat, that if his friend were still with him, they could smoke tobacco once again around a campfire and plan the hunt together. Kunwar could offer him wisdom and advice: Think like the tiger, decipher its language and its intentions, the way a true shikari of Kumaon must. But Jim Corbett was on his own. And even if his old hunting companion had been present to offer him guidance, Corbett surely suspected what his counsel would have been: Turn around. Go home. This forest and this tiger are not yours to hunt. Respecting nature and not tempting fate were the core lessons of the story Kunwar had told him as a boy, and it was the sort of wisdom that allowed a wise shikari to live another day.
But Corbett also knew that another day meant another victim. Another woman out cutting grass, another man tending to his fields, another child gathering wood for a fire. Another blood trail that led to a shadowy ravine full of scattered gore and splinters of bone.
Darkness was closing in, and the many scars on the pine trunks where the Kumaonis had tapped them for torch resin would have testified to just how profound that darkness could be. Jagged black hills, lightless ravines, the empty roar of rushing water—night was falling, just as it had for Kunwar when he met his tiger back in the nullah. Only rather than fleeing from it as any smart shikari would, Edward James Corbett was hurtling toward it.
* * *
Much about the man-eater may have been unknown to Jim Corbett, as he marched with his small party into the tiger’s favored hunting grounds, but details of its existence—hints, perhaps, at even how it might be found—were beginning to reveal themselves. He may not have had the expert advice of his friend and mentor Kunwar Singh, but he possessed the cumulative experience of an entire lifetime spent in the forests of Kumaon, and an almost preternatural insight into the habits of the animals of the region, a sort of “sixth sense,” by his own account, that enabled him to see the natural world through their eyes and predict their movements. It would have occurred to Corbett, after just the few days he had spent on the tiger’s home turf, what made this animal such a proficient killer of men. It wasn’t
that this tiger was exceptionally bloodthirsty or murderous, or even vastly divergent in terms of feeding habits from its more conventional tiger kin. No, it was that this tiger had developed a hunting strategy that, when coupled with the region’s geography, made it almost impossible to pinpoint. True, when it came to prey, the tiger had totally lost its fear of humans; but at the same time, it had learned to avoid them in the immediate aftermath of a kill. And in terms of its territory, now free from the rivalry of its fellow tigers, it had accomplished the rare feat of drastically expanding its holdings. Its evolved hunting methods seemed to resemble more closely those of an Amur tiger of the Russian Far East than a Royal Bengal—it patrolled a very large area, covering a huge swathe of eastern Kumaon, and it never seemed to stop moving for very long. Amur tigers employed this strategy due to a scarcity of prey—finding food in cold northern forests demanded an all but nomadic existence. In the case of the Champawat Tiger, however, a shortage of prey was not a concern. Rather, it seemed the Champawat adopted this strategy specifically to avoid the hunters who sought it. Perhaps it was a lesson learned from that first wound to its jaw, or possibly wisdom acquired after its close call across the border in Rupal. But either way, it had absorbed the lesson well. Essentially, the Champawat had become a hit-and-run artist, a tiger that snatched villagers from the edge of the forest, devoured them quickly, and then moved on. Kill sites could easily be twenty miles apart, and there appeared to be no way to predict exactly where it would strike next—beyond the fact, of course, that the tiger seemed inexplicably compelled to return periodically to the environs of Champawat.
And that, ultimately, was what accounted for its tremendous human tally. It did not kill faster or more effectively than other tigers, nor wantonly, for that matter—its weekly hunts were more or less on par with what any wild tiger would accomplish. But rather, this tiger was almost impossible to find, let alone stop, and it had continued killing, unhindered, for a long stretch of time. The remoteness of the region, coupled with the fact that most locals were prevented from owning firearms, certainly didn’t help. Even an immediate response following an attack on a human meant sending a runner to the nearest large town with a colonial government presence, an endeavor that could easily take several days. Then, an experienced hunter needed to be found and dispatched, which could take several more days beyond that. And by the time that hunter arrived—often a week later or more—the tiger would have already finished feeding and moved on, ready to attack anywhere in a vast territory of steep ravines and rocky hills. In the past, when villages had the weapons and knowledge to stop a tiger themselves, and when regional maharajas still had the authority and means to assist, it would have been a problem solved at the local level. Given the centralized nature of the colonial government, however, hunting such a tiger in such an inaccessible region had become an exceptionally difficult affair.
This behavior on the part of the tiger not only meant that a would-be hunter was always one step behind—which accounts for the failures of the various paid shikaris, forestry officials, and soldiers sent in previously to stop it—it also compelled the local population to live in a constant state of terror. Tigers certainly don’t have the capacity to commit acts of psychological warfare, but that was precisely the effect that the tiger had upon the people of Kumaon. And as Jim Corbett neared Champawat, this fact was demonstrated in a new and unsettling way.
As Corbett passed the village of Dhunaghat on his way to Champawat, he began encountering large groups of people traveling on the road. At first, he may have assumed they were pilgrims on their way to a shrine, or possibly relatives journeying together for a festival. But the tone was off, and there were no shrines in the vicinity, nor was it the season of festivals. When his curiosity could bear it no longer, he approached one such group of men, some twenty strong, and asked them why they were traveling together in such large packs. The answer should not have come as a surprise, but it did—the tiger. The roads in the area were considered so dangerous, locals only felt safe traveling them by daylight, and only in groups of a dozen or more. Simply visiting neighbors, or going to a bazaar in a nearby village, had become a communal, almost martial affair. People marched in roving platoons, always wary, their eyes alert for striped fur through the trees, their ears attuned for distant roars.
As Corbett soon learned, just two months earlier, some of the men in this very party had witnessed firsthand what the tiger could do. While on their way to a market in Champawat, they’d heard an agonized cry from a valley below. The screams continued to mount and grow closer, until the tiger emerged from the tree line with a woman, still alive and pleading for help, held in its jaws, its teeth locked around the small of her back. From a mere fifty yards away, they watched as it crossed the road before vanishing once again into the forest.
Confounded, Corbett asked if they had attempted to stop the tiger. Indeed, they had—the men from the group sprinted to the nearest village to gather reinforcements, including several poachers who had unlicensed guns. The assembled rescue party, now fifty or sixty in number, followed the blood trail along the length of the valley, banging drums and firing muzzle-loaders in the air as they did so, hoping to scare the tiger away from its victim—which they actually were able to accomplish. But for the young woman, who had been gathering firewood when the tiger attacked her, it was too late. She was gone—she had been stripped of her bloody clothes by the tiger, and robbed of her life. Ashamed and humbled, averting their eyes from her body, the men used their own unwound dhoti cloths to preserve whatever remained of her dignity, and carried her back to her relatives in the village.
Corbett garnered two crucial insights from encountering this group of travelers. First and foremost, that he needed reinforcements just for the journey; even the road was not safe from the man-eater. Upon revealing his purpose—to hunt and kill the tiger in question—the local men, still disturbed and enraged by what they had seen, agreed to accompany him to Champawat and help in whatever way they could. Second, from talking to his new companions, it became all the more evident that stopping this tiger was not going to be a solitary endeavor either. Whatever illusions Corbett had harbored about besting the creature single-handedly were precisely that. Hunting it effectively would mean shedding the old Anglo-Saxon mythos, the need to confront Grendel alone in its lair, and instead think—and hunt—like a Kumaoni. It meant working as a team and a community, to finally bring almost a full decade of killing to an end. It meant hunting together, in the old way.
And so this unlikely party, this mounting army, now nearly thirty members strong, began marching in loose formation through the chilly dusk. Twenty rugged Pahari hillsmen, six porters from Nainital, and one khaki-clad Englishman, all banded together in a common purpose.
No, it was not Jim Corbett’s tiger to hunt. It was their tiger to hunt. All of them, as Kumaonis.
Chapter 8
On Hostile Ground
On February 7, 1815—the same year that the East India Company took Kumaon from the Nepalese Gorkhas, who in turn had taken it from the Doti kingdom that preceded them—newlyweds Joseph and Harriet Corbett arrived in the British colony of India, following a grueling six-month voyage from their home in the British colony of Ireland. They hailed from Belfast, a city at the center of the political and religious violence that wracked the north of the troubled island. Although Joseph Corbett would list “gilder and carver” as his trade, it appears his true training was of a significantly higher order. According to at least one account, Joseph had previously been a monk—and Harriet, his wife, had formerly been a novice at a convent that was, evidently, temptingly close by. The couple left the monastic life, eloped, and in doing so, almost certainly put themselves in a situation that was scandalous at best, and flat-out dangerous at worst. In the north of Ireland at that time, disavowal of the Church would have been seen as a provocation, for Catholics and Protestants alike—a dangerous proposition in a place where colonial hatreds were ancestral, and rebellions and up
risings a grim fact of life. Just in his own lifetime, Joseph would have witnessed the Irish Rebellion of 1798, Michael Dwyer’s guerrilla campaign of 1799, the Irish Rebellion of 1803, and the Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804. In short, the Ireland he knew was an unforgiving place, one where the breaking of religious ties and sectarian allegiances could prove to be a perilous transgression. And in rebuking the Church, that seems to be precisely what the erstwhile monk Joseph and the nun-in-training Harriet had done. No longer welcome among the Irish, and not ever having been trusted by the presiding English, the young couple apparently decided their only chance was to seek their fortune several oceans away, on the other side of the globe.
If they felt any relief upon escaping their situation back in the Old Country, it was to be short-lived. In attempting to get out of their rock-and-a-hard-place jam in Ireland, they had, metaphorically speaking, jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Malaria, cholera, and dangerous animals aside, it quickly became clear to the pair that they had come upon a land that was just as cloven by sectarian divides as the one they had left, and equally unforgiving of those deemed on the wrong side. Indeed, Joseph’s only escape route out of Ireland had been to sign up for unlimited service as an infantry private. The British had a long history of recruiting their colonial subjects to serve in the far-flung outposts of their empire, and in what to Joseph must have felt like a particularly cruel form of irony, he quickly learned that he had fled the frequent insurrections and rebellions of one British colony, only to end up risking his life subduing them in another. With the war with Nepal still in full swing upon his arrival—the same conflict that would eventually win for the British control of Kumaon from the Shahs—young Joseph was thrust into almost immediate service in India’s volatile northwestern frontier. Regardless of his prior standing or stature, however, opportunities did exist in India that were simply unavailable to an uneducated Irishman back on the old sod. Joseph seems to have done relatively well for himself during his time in the military, being promoted to the rank of sergeant in the horse artillery, building a modest home in the outpost of Meerut, and fathering nine children with Harriet before meeting his own premature demise at the age of thirty-three, possibly from malaria acquired while out campaigning, although one can’t be sure.
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