Shaken, Corbett momentarily forgot the actual danger he was in. Disturbing the kill of a tiger is a perilous proposition, for if they have recently been feeding, they are seldom far away. But Corbett was, in his own words, “new to this game of man-eater hunting,” and as of yet unprepared for all the hazards it entailed.
As he lowered his rifle and knelt to inspect the severed leg, a sudden sensation of being in extreme danger consumed him; a millisecond registration that something was out of place. Perhaps the faintest of rustling, or a soft puff of displaced air. But that was enough. Once again, Corbett acted on pure instinct. Never leaving his crouch, Corbett spun on his heels, ground the butt of his rifle against the earth, and put two fingers on the triggers.
Ears ringing from the blast of the double barrels, nostrils stinging with the acrid smell of cordite, Corbett blinked through the haze only to see that, rather than an enraged tiger, just a few clods of earth and loose sand had come tumbling down from the edge of a fifteen-foot bank directly above him. There was a soft stirring of ringal, the hollow bamboo stalks chiming ever so faintly, and the tiger was gone. Having not had time to properly aim, Corbett was confident he had not hit it. But that sudden and massive burst of gunfire at close range had been enough to discourage the ambush. The tiger had been on the cusp of a strike when his barrels roared.
Now it was the Champawat’s turn to roar. Setting down what remained of the girl’s body, the tiger let loose a thunderous cry. Corbett had just one bullet remaining, but that didn’t deter him. Upon scrambling up the bank, he saw from a patch of bent Strobilanthes stalks where the Champawat had passed with its kill just seconds before. The terrain became increasingly difficult to cross, a welter of jagged rocks and deep crevasses. Despite the obstacles, however, Corbett was not far behind, following a trail marked clearly in blood. Leapfrogging over boulders, hopscotching across river stones as the tiger’s growls echoed through the rocky abyss, Edward James Corbett was in a situation that must have felt strangely surreal—like the very worst of dreams. A slow-motion chase through a literal valley of death, after a striped creature that had in its maw its 436th human kill. It took many years for Corbett to fully collect his thoughts:
I cannot expect you who read this at your fireside to appreciate my feelings at the time. The sound of the growling and the expectation of an attack terrified me at the same time as it gave me hope. If the tigress lost her temper sufficiently to launch an attack, it would not only give me an opportunity of accomplishing the object for which I had come, but it would enable me to get even with her for all the pain and suffering she had caused.
Bouncing from rock to rock along the bottom of the ravine, an awkward primate pursuing the single most lethal apex predator in the world, watching as, according to the article in The Pioneer, “portions of the body and its clothing were left behind,” Corbett would have been unable to ignore the unpleasant truth that if the tiger were to decide to abandon its kill and turn around—and if his aim were to prove less than perfect—it would be his dismembered limbs scattered about the canyon floor. But after four grueling hours of pursuit, of seeing the thick clumps of rhododendron leaves stir just ahead, of hearing periodic growls rumble through the rocky passages, Corbett gave up. Night was closing in, and the bottom of a black ravine with a gleaming-eyed man-eater was the last place he wanted to be. As a tide of shadow began to seep into the valley, Corbett turned back and crawled his way out, pausing only to bury the severed leg of the poor young girl so her family could later retrieve it for cremation. Upon escaping the ravine, he found the patwari still there waiting for him at the top of the stone spire, much to the man’s expressed relief—with the sound of the growls ringing through the valley, he had been certain Corbett had succumbed to the tiger. With their grim work done for the day, the two of them began the hike back to the village.
The patwari stopped at the place where he had hidden his boots, and while he struggled with the straps to put them back on, Corbett sat and had a smoke. With the distant peaks of the Himalayas catching the last of the day’s light, reflecting it back across the foothills in a lambent gold, he studied the lay of the land and considered his next move. He knew going back down into the ravine alone was hopeless—the tiger clearly had the advantage in that rough and densely wooded terrain. One near-death encounter and four hours of hopeless chase had proved that. However, in the rippling landscape that spread out before him, Corbett saw an opportunity; a “great amphitheatre of hills,” as he would call it, with a stream forming a narrow gorge that cut west to east, and with one especially precipitous hill directly opposite. The tiger would almost certainly stay with its kill to continue feeding—which meant that it wouldn’t stray far for another day or two, at least. This tiger obviously preferred the low ground, retreating to the bottom of steep ravines that men could not easily reach, which was in part how it had evaded hunters for so long. It occurred to Corbett that if he could get enough helpers to man the length of the ridge from the stream to the hill, and then somehow manage to drive the tiger out from its quarters below, its natural line of retreat would send it out of its ravine and right into the narrow gorge that bisected the amphitheater. Where, if Jim Corbett’s incipient plan worked, he would be waiting with both rifle barrels cocked. Unlike the tiger’s present hideout deep in the ravine, this long, winding second gorge was relatively clear, free of foliage and rocks, and seemed to offer the only possibility of an unobstructed shot.
So that was it. There would have to be a beat. A line of men almost a mile long, all working together, marching into the brush to flush the tiger out into the open, while the hunter waited to spring the trap. It was roughly the same technique that had been tried in Nepal some four years before, and while it had succeeded in driving the tiger out of the country, it had also failed to capture or kill it. How much of this Corbett was aware of is difficult to say, although he did know such a beat would not be easy to replicate, particularly without trained elephants or experienced shikaris. It was to be, by his own admission, “a very difficult beat, for the steep hillside facing north, on which I had left the tigress, was densely wooded and roughly three-quarters of a mile long and half-a-mile wide.” Difficult, yes, but not impossible. He knew that if he could get everything organized correctly and have the beaters follow his directions, there was at least a “reasonable chance” of him getting a shot.
All he had to do then was convince several hundred men, none of whom had ever engaged in a large-scale tiger hunt before, and all of whom hailed from a region famous for its distrust of colonial authority, to put their faith in an outsider and walk unarmed and helpless into a monster’s lair.
He was going to need help.
* * *
Corbett’s first stop before returning to his bungalow was the little cluster of slate-shingled farmhouses that formed the village outside Champawat where the latest victim had been killed—and where, as it just so happened, the Tahsildar was already waiting. With the peach glow of sunset fading to the plum tones of twilight, the sore and limping Corbett must have been at once both nervous and relieved to see the Tahsildar—the closest thing in Champawat he had to a friend—cloaked and turbaned in dusky silhouette. Upon greeting him, perhaps Corbett related the horrendous events of the day, or maybe the exhaustion in his frame told the story for him. Smoking quietly together in the last snatches of daylight, Corbett must have finally worked up the courage to tell the Tahsildar of his plan. One can imagine the hesitancy in his voice, the uncertainty, because for once a representative of the colonial government was not giving an order so much as begging a favor—and not in English, as was customary, but in the native Kumaoni. Between puffs, perhaps, or even following a long draw, with the glowing butt held waist-high between his fingers, Corbett would have revealed the trap he had in mind, as well as his desperate need to get the people of Champawat on his side—something he feared might be impossible.
And although Corbett may not have seen it in the last of the gloaming, the Tahs
ildar, a man who no doubt remembered the tales of the old days, before the rebellion, before “The Mutiny,” as the English called it, surely smiled. A sly, knowing smile, one that lit up his eyes and creased his hill-born face. A flick of the butt, a cartwheeling ember, vanishing into the shadows of the fallow field beside them, and then the Tahsildar was gone, rustling away through the grass on his way back to Champawat, racing the darkness, one step ahead of the night.
Chapter 11
Confronting the Beast
Early the next morning, Corbett emerged from the bungalow into a lingering darkness. The deep indigo of twilight still clung to the hillsides, although the first peaks of the Himalayas were beginning to blush. He had slept well, without incident. He left the threshold feeling refreshed and anxious to start the day.
Aside from his six companions from Nainital, and perhaps a few of the twenty men he had met on the road to Champawat, Corbett couldn’t count on much in terms of assistance. Taking part in a beat was a hazardous affair—volunteers were rare, as no one was safe in the event of a mishap. The hazards of the bagh shikar are well documented in the colonial accounts of the era, with cornered tigers frequently charging the beaters, in some cases even dragging hunters down off of their elephants. Not surprisingly, many of these accounts, which are almost unanimously British in provenance and rich in hubris, frequently portray the Indian beaters—who were generally unarmed and coerced, sometimes forcibly, into taking part—as cowardly and ineffectual. Upon finding a tiger, the beaters are usually depicted fleeing from the forest “like so many rabbits from a warren when the weasel or ferret has entered their burrow,” as the nineteenth-century tiger hunter James Inglis would claim. Some hunters, like Inglis, even found such incidents amusing, as demonstrated in this passage, tinged with sadism, from his 1892 memoir, Tent Life in Tigerland:
The beaters came pouring out of the jungle by twos and threes, like the frightened inhabitants of some hive or ant-heap. Some in their hurry came tumbling out headlong, others with their faces turned backwards to see if anything was in pursuit of them, got entangled in the reeds, and fell prone on their hands and knees . . . I, who had witnessed the episode, could not help . . . a resounding peal of laughter.
Amusing, perhaps, to a well-armed, well-fed, well-heeled English sportsman watching at a distance from the relative safety of an elephant back. Needless to say, an impoverished farmer being forced to walk into a forbidden forest, totally unarmed, to confront an enraged tiger, probably would not have found much to laugh at. Quite the opposite. Unlike the Shah kings of Nepal, who had carefully cultivated their hunting partnership with the Tharu, rewarding loyal beaters and elephant handlers with monetary gifts and lal mohar land grants, the British in India—and to an extent the subsequent Rana dynasty in Nepal—relied heavily on “volunteer” beaters who were in actuality anything but. Participating in a beat was a civic duty, akin to being drafted for military service, and it was often greeted with similar levels of disdain and resentment. At best, it meant a long, hard day of hacking through the densest of jungles; at worst, being fatally mauled by a five-hundred-pound beast.
Jim Corbett surely knew this. The locals were not foolhardy or cavalier, and they certainly did not owe him anything. As Corbett paced and smoked at the base of the tree where they had agreed to meet come morning—the same tree beneath which he had found the girl’s bloody necklace the day before—he must have known that his chances were slim of organizing an effective beat, with or without the Tahsildar’s help. In Corbett’s own words, “That he would have a hard time in collecting the men I had no doubt, for the fear of the man-eater had sunk deep into the countryside and more than a mild persuasion would be needed to make the men leave the shelter of their homes.”
And it seemed Corbett was right. At ten o’clock, the Tahsildar, true to his word, did appear, but with only one man at his side. Corbett surely greeted him warmly, in appreciation of the brave gesture, and he would have done his best to hide his disappointment. Perhaps he accepted, with the dark humor of a soldier on a hopeless mission, the inevitability of their impending failure: a small pack of men against an animal that had already killed so many more.
But within minutes, another pair of men showed up. Then another after that. And then, even more men still, slowly trickling down from the hills in twos and threes. One can easily imagine Corbett’s pleasant surprise as their numbers reached, by his own count, 299 strong by the middle of the day.
It soon became clear how the Tahsildar had accomplished the seemingly impossible. In his wisdom and understanding, he had promised the inhabitants of Champawat that in this one instance, all forms of weapons would be allowed—that the “powers that be” would conveniently look the other way. Essentially, he repealed, at least in one town, for one day, the Indian Arms Act. And for the first time since the Rebellion of 1857, the population was openly brandishing an arsenal of weapons that, according to Corbett, “would have stocked a museum.” Granted, most of their weaponry was severely outdated, and in bad condition after spending decades buried or hidden away. It was intimidating nevertheless.
Corbett stared in awe at the previously inconceivable sight of Kumaoni men carrying “guns, axes, rusty swords, and spears”—weapons that hadn’t tasted blood in half a century, and that under normal circumstances would have landed any of their owners in a colonial jail cell. Fifty years after the downfall of Kalu Mahara, the people of Champawat had once again risen up and formed an army, only this time, their enemy wasn’t the occupying British government, but rather the beast its indiscretions had unleashed upon them. Many had lost loved ones to the creature. At least one, as Corbett was soon to learn, had lost both of his sons and his wife—essentially, his entire family, wiped out by a single man-eating tiger. This was to be the day in which scores were settled; the men were armed and hungry for blood. And while Corbett assessed the scene, the Tahsildar simply loaded his own double-barrel shotgun with contraband shells and distributed ammunition to all who needed it.
Jim Corbett gathered the band of three hundred men around him, and with the help of the Tahsildar, explained how the beat would work: they would form a line along the edge of the ravine, directly above where the tiger was feeding. While they spread themselves out across the ridge, he would take his post beneath a pine tree directly across from it, which was easily identifiable, thanks to a lightning strike that had stripped its bark. When the signal was given—a wave of a handkerchief on the part of Corbett—those among the posse who possessed firearms were to fire them into the air, while the others beat drums, rattled gongs, rolled rocks—essentially anything that could disturb the invisible tiger down below. Shortly after which, Corbett intended to take a hidden position at the mouth of the gorge, waiting for the man-eater to come exploding from its rocky maw, enraged, confused, and ready to defend itself against anything that stood in its way. If it all worked, that final showdown in the clearing was where it would end. Either a man or a tiger would live to walk away.
The assembled men approved of the plan and quickly set off for the ridge, spacing themselves evenly to cover its full length. Corbett turned to circle back and take his post beneath the blasted pine, but as he did so, the Tahsildar stopped him. I should come with you, he said firmly. He had a hunch that this British shikari, regardless of his skill or experience, might require assistance.
The two of them went racing across the upper end of the valley, first clambering up the ridge of the opposite slope, then sidestepping halfway down its steep face to the twisted form of the dead pine. Here, the Tahsildar called a momentary halt. Unlike Corbett, who was wearing comfortable rubber-soled shoes—the sneakers of his day—the Tahsildar had a thin pair of leather brogans better suited for the dirt roads in town than the rocky faces of Kumaoni hills. They stopped only for a moment, for him to adjust his footwear, but that short delay was enough to disquiet the restless beaters spread out along the ridge. Assuming Corbett had forgotten to give the signal, the anxious townsfolk decided to st
art the beat on their own. All at once, the din ensued, the sound of some three hundred men firing rifles, pounding drums, and screaming as loud as their lungs would allow. Boulders were sent crashing down into the hidden depths of the ravine, and spears hurled blindly into the darkness below.
There wasn’t a second to spare. Corbett unslung his rifle and made a skittering descent to the clearing at the mouth of the gorge, 150 yards away. He had no time to find a perfect blind—he spotted a stand of tall grass with a clear view of the gorge’s black mouth, and he knew it would have to do. If the tiger attacked, he would be left exposed and vulnerable. Another ravine opened up behind him and to the left—he assumed that once the tiger broke free, it would cross the brief patch of open ground as quickly as possible and make for its shelter.
He would have only a few seconds to take his shot, at a moving target traveling at the speed of a Thoroughbred.
Corbett knew what to expect—he had been envisioning it for hours—but no amount of anticipation could have prepared him for the tiger’s actual arrival. And he knew tigers were fast—quick enough to catch chital stags, even swamp deer—but exactly how fast, he had not realized until it broke through the trees. Amid the cries of the beaters and the clatter of their guns, the creature finally appeared, exiting the gorge higher than he had anticipated, and flying in his direction at a downward angle. A striped apparition, too fleet to be real, erupting from the shadows and streaking across a clear slope some three hundred yards away.
For a moment, all else must have lost its significance; the roar of the beaters deadening to a muffled hum, the thunder of the rifles dampening to a pale crackle. And cutting through that still and perfect moment in a liquid throb of movement, the Champawat Man-Eater. The deadliest animal in all of India, probably the world, cutting a furious swathe through the tall grass toward him, ears flattened, teeth bared. The same animal he had heard spoken of in hushed tones in Nainital tea parlors, suddenly taking shape; the same creature that had kept him and his men huddled in terror around a campfire, suddenly given form. Perhaps, for a moment, his whole purpose was called into question. Perhaps, just like the unknown boy in Nepal who first took aim and fired from his rickety machan, the notion of shooting this thing before him felt absurd, impossibly bold and monumental in scope, as if he were not killing a mere animal, but assassinating a king or a deity.
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