COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

First published in the United States by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers in 2019 as No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History

Copyright © Dane Huckelbridge 2019

Dane Huckelbridge asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover image © Getty Images

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008331726

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008331740

Version: 2020-02-05

Praise for No Beast So Fierce

“A great tale and study of man versus beast, or rather, beast versus man. The seminal battle between Jim Corbett and the Champawat Tiger stands as an epic encounter of the ages. Dane Huckelbridge’s No Beast So Fierce will make you rethink your position in God’s universe—and on the food chain.”

JIM DEFELICE, #1 bestselling co-author of American Sniper

“I had a feeling this book would hook me from the get-go. I was right. No Beast So Fierce is much more than a cautionary tale of the Man-Eater of Champawat, a Royal Bengal tiger responsible for hundreds of deaths in Nepal and India, or, of Edward James Corbett, the legendary hunter who shot and killed the big cat in 1907. Dane Huckelbridge’s remarkable narrative also reveals the circumstances that cause tigers to stalk human prey as well as Corbett’s transformation into a conservationist and ardent champion for protecting the animals he once hunted.”

MICHAEL WALLIS, author of The Best Land Under Heaven

“A gripping page-turner that also conveys broader lessons about humanity’s relationship with nature.” Publisher’s Weekly

Praise for Bourbon by Dane Huckelbridge

“Complex and entertaining” | Wall Street Journal
“Engrossing” | Washington Post
“Definitive” | Sacramento Bee

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

— William Shakespeare, Richard III

Do not blame God for having created the tiger, but thank Him for not having given it wings.

— Indian proverb

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE FOR NO BEAST SO FIERCE

EPIGRAPH

MAP

PROLOGUE

INTRODUCTION: UNLIKELY HUNTERS

PART I: NEPAL

1 THE FULL MEASURE OF A TIGER

2 THE MAKING OF A MAN-EATER

3 A MONARCH IN EXILE

PART II: INDIA

4 THE FINEST OF HER FAUNA

5 THE HUNT BEGINS

6 DARKNESS FALLS

7 TOGETHER, IN THE OLD WAY

8 ON HOSTILE GROUND

9 AN AMBUSH IN THE MAKING

10 A LITERAL VALLEY OF DEATH

11 CONFRONTING THE BEAST

12 A MOMENT OF SILENCE

13 AN UNLIKELY SAVIOR

EPILOGUE

PLATE SECTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ALSO BY DANE HUCKELBRIDGE

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PROLOGUE

We do not know the year. Nor does history record the poacher’s name. But around the turn of the twentieth century, somewhere in the terai near the Kanchanpur District of western Nepal, a man made a terrible mistake.

He attempted to kill a Bengal tiger.

We can imagine him to be a young man—that seems all but certain. For the local Tharu people are well acquainted with tigers, and only a youthful and inexperienced hunter would be so careless. After all, a tiger hunt among the Tharu is a solemn affair, to be initiated with a puja sacrifice of roosters and goats, as a show of respect to the forest deity Ban Dhevi. It is an act of profound spiritual and earthly significance, one that risks angering gods and kings alike. If such a decision is to be even considered, it must be blessed by a gurau with a sacred glass of rakshi, and sanctified by the wearing of holy red ribbons.

But change is coming, even to this remote province. Like others of his generation, this brash young man likely may have tasted the British gin and cigarettes that come smuggled across the border from India, and seen the Western suits and cravats one can purchase beyond the Sharda River, and he has no time for rice liquor or garlands made of ribbons. He does not see the tiger as a divine spirit, a lord of the forest, a custodian of the natural world, maintaining the balance of all things. To him, a tiger is a sack of gold and nothing more: money for clearing land, funds to buy a water buffalo and start a farm of his own. The young man bristles at the thought of eking out a living from the forest like his parents, of dwelling in a mud-walled house thatched with elephant grass. No, that is simply not for him.

So, we may imagine, he sets out from his village, a decrepit old muzzle-loader slung over his shoulder, an oblivious goat hobbling along in tow. He follows a path of packed earth, skirting the edge of the mustard and lentil fields, tracing the dry bed of a meandering nullah, until he at last reaches the sal trees where the true jungle begins. He has built a small machan—a tiger-hunting stand—near a clearing where he has seen fresh tiger tracks in the mud, and after tying the goat to a peg in the earth, he mounts his machan and does his best to get comfortable.

The heat of the afternoon mounts, and the goat flicks its ears lazily, and the odd croak of a mating florican is the only sound to be heard. The young man wipes the sweat from his brow and scratches a mosquito bite, his initial excitement turning slowly to boredom, and then at last to irritation.

The shadows lengthen, dusk approaches, and still the scrawny goat stands tethered and unmolested. The young man begins to doubt that the tiger will come at all. Perhaps the old men in the village were right, perhaps it was foolish to even consider coming into the forest without—

And then it happens. It arrives with a grace and a force unlike any the young man has ever seen. An attack appalling in its power and mesmerizing in its beauty, as if the dappled patterns of the forest floor themselves have come alive and engulfed the poor creature. A liquid blur of tawny stripes, then a mound of working muscle. The goat has time to neither move nor bleat—one moment it is alive, and the next, it is not. Its neck is snapped in an increment of time too small to measure.

The young man’s purpose is suddenly called into question. The notion of shooting the tiger before him feels impossibly bold, as if he were not killing a mere animal, but assassinating a king. Its body appears enormous, even from the safety of his machan. Its eyes are closer to those of a man than a pig or a deer, or any other creature he has encountered. And as if to further sour his conviction, two cubs appear, bounding almost playfully from the trees behind it. This is not just a tiger—she is a mother.

But for all his fear, the idea of returning home with nothing but the frayed goat tether unsettles him even more. No, he has made his decision. It must be done. And with the mother down, it will be easy to finish off the cubs as well. That’s two more tigers than he had bargained for. He takes the old muzzle-loader in his trembling hands, raises its battered stock to his shoulder, gets the tiger in his sights, and takes one final breath before pulling the trigger.

But that is enough. The rustle of his movements, however faint, are not missed by the tiger’s spotted ears. It drops the goat and raises its head in alarm, as a thunderclap bursts from the trees—a red sting of pain lashes at its jaw. The tiger rears back, as if to attack the air, only to find that its bite feels loose and unhinged. The taste of its own blood filling its throat, the tiger turns and streaks back into the forest, into the thick underbrush from whence it came, its two toy-sized cubs hesitating for a moment before bouncing along obediently behind.

The young man reloads his gun and springs down from his stand, racing to see if his bullet struck home. He notices the trampled earth beside the pathetic carcass of the goat, and next to it, a spattering of blood and two broken teeth—tiger teeth. The young man realizes his shot was poor and the tiger merely wounded, a fact that is confirmed moments later by a roar that seems to rend the very fabric of the air. He has heard tigers before, their low moaning from a distance, but this is different. He has never experienced anything like this. He feels the roar as much as hears it, in the pit of his stomach and the hollows of his chest. It is the purest distillation of rage he has ever known.

Darkness is coming. The idea of going blind into the bush to confront the enraged tiger is beyond comprehension to the young man, a nightmare he can’t even begin to consider. No, it would be suicide—courting death in its most primordial form. And so, still sick with adrenaline, he slings his antique gun over his shoulder and turns back to the village on weakened knees, first walking, then running, casting harried glances over his shoulder the whole way, covering his ears to stifle the roars. And while there is no way for this young man to know the full implications of what he has done, the terror he has unleashed, the lives he will have indirectly ruined, he must surely have an inkling, with those roars reverberating through the still air and damp leaves of the sal trees, that in the pulling of that trigger, he has created a monster.

INTRODUCTION

UNLIKELY HUNTERS

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the most prolific serial killer of human life the world has ever seen stalked the foothills of the Himalayas. A serial killer that was not merely content to kidnap victims at night and dismember their bodies, but also insisted on eating their flesh. A serial killer that, for the better part of ten years, eluded police, bounty hunters, assassins, and even an entire regiment of Nepalese Gurkhas.

A serial killer that happened to be a Royal Bengal tiger.

Specifically, a tiger known as the Man-Eater of Champawat. Far more than an apex predator that occasionally included humans in its diet, it was an animal that—for reasons that wouldn’t become apparent until its killing spree was over—explicitly regarded our species as a primary source of food. And to that end, this brazen Panthera tigris tigris hunted Homo sapiens on a regular basis across the rugged borderlands of Nepal and India in the early 1900s with shocking impunity and an almost supernatural efficacy. In the end, its reported tally added up to 436 human souls—more, some believe, than any other individual killer, man or animal, before or since.

Despite its unusual appetites and hunting prowess, however, surprisingly little has been written about the Champawat. And when the odd mention of the tiger does crop up, it is more often than not as a curious footnote to a broader article on human–tiger conflict, or as a gory bit of trivia from The Guinness Book of World Records. The fact that a single tiger was able to take such an immense human toll over such a long period of time is rarely presented as a subject worthy of historical scrutiny or academic study. It seems like a good story, and nothing more.

And admittedly, it is a fine story, and it is tempting to present it simply as such. It is universal in its appeal and almost literary in its Beowulfian dimensions: a man-eating creature that terrorizes the countryside, repeatedly evading capture, until a hero appears who is brave enough to track it straight to its lair. It is a timeless campfire tale, simple and hair-raising in the way all such yarns must be. Who wouldn’t want to hear a story like that? One that speaks to the most primal and deeply ingrained of all human fears?

But there is another story to be told here as well, and while certainly hair-raising, it is anything but simple. The events that transpired in the forests and valleys of the Himalayan foothills in the first decade of the twentieth century were not a series of bizarre aberrations. They were in fact the inevitable result of the tremendous cultural and ecological conflicts that were shaking the region—indeed, the world—at that time, affecting man and animal alike in unlikely ways, and throwing age-old systems chaotically out of whack. Far from some pulp fiction tale of man versus nature or good versus evil, the story of the Champawat is richer and much more complex, with protagonists at odds with even themselves.

Beginning, of course, with the actual tiger. Bengal tigers do not under normal circumstances kill or eat humans. They are by nature semi-nocturnal, deep-forest predators with a seemingly ingrained fear of all things bipedal; they are animals that will generally change direction at the first sign of a human rather than seek an aggressive confrontation. Yet at the turn of the twentieth century, a change so profound and upsetting to the natural order was occurring in Nepal and India as to cause one such tiger to not only lose its inborn fear of humans altogether, but to begin hunting them in their homes on an all but weekly basis—a tragedy for the more than four hundred individuals who would eventually fall victim to its teeth and claws. This tiger ceased to behave like a tiger at all, in important respects, and transformed into a new kind of creature all but unknown in the hills of northern India’s Kumaon district, prowling around villages and stalking men and women in broad daylight.

Then there is Jim Corbett, the now-legendary hunter who was finally commissioned by the British government to end the Champawat Tiger’s reign. To many, even in present-day India, he is nothing short of a secular saint, a brave and selfless figure who risked life and limb to defend poor villagers when no one else would. To others, particularly academics engaged with post-colonial ecologies, he is just another perpetrator of the Eurocentric paternalism that defined the colonial experience. Each is a fair judgment. The whole truth, however, is far more nuanced, as one would expect when it comes to a deeply conflicted man whose life spanned eras, generations, and eventually even empires. Jim Corbett was a prolific sportsman who, upon achieving fame, hobnobbed with aristocrats and used tiger hunts to curry their favor. But he was also a tireless advocate for wild tigers and devoted the latter part of his life to their conservation—as evidenced by the sprawling and magnificent national park in India that bears his name to this day. Yes, he did come to enjoy the trappings and privileges of the English sahib, servants and sport shooting and social clubs included. But as the domiciled son of an Irish postmaster, foreign-born and considered socially inferior, he was also keenly aware of what it meant to be colonized—by the very people he enabled and admired. And he did love India, above all its people, even while playing an unwitting part in the nation’s subjugation.

Which brings us, inevitably, to colonialism itself—a topic far too broad and multifaceted for any single book, let alone one that’s concerned primarily with man-eating tigers. Yet it is colonialism, undeniably, and the onslaught of environmental destruction that it almost universally heralds, that served as the primary catalyst in the creation of our man-eater. It may have been a poacher’s bullet in Nepal that first turned the Champawat Tiger upon our kind, but it was a full century of disastrous ecological mismanagement in the Indian subcontinent that drove it out of the wild forests and grasslands it should have called home, and allowed it to become the prodigious killer that it was. What becomes clear upon closer historical examination is that the Champawat was not an incident of nature gone awry—it was in fact a man-made disaster. From Valmik Thapar to Jim Corbett himself, any tiger wallah could tell you the various factors that can turn a normal tiger into a man-eater: a disabling wound or infirmity, a loss of prey species, or a degradation of natural habitat. In the case of the Champawat, however, we find not just one but all three of these factors to be irrefutably present. Essentially, by the late nineteenth century, the British in the United Provinces of northern India and their Rana dynasty counterparts in western Nepal had created, through a combination of irresponsible forestry tactics, agricultural policies, and hunting practices, the ideal conditions for an ecological catastrophe. And it was the sort of catastrophe we can still find whiffs of today, be it in the recent spate of shark attacks in Réunion Island, the rise of human–wolf conflict on the outskirts of Yellowstone, or even the man-eating tigers that continue to appear in places like the Sundarbans forest of India or Nepal’s Chitwan National Park. In the modern day, we have at last, thankfully, come to realize the importance of apex predators in maintaining the health of our ecosystems—but we’re still negotiating, somewhat painfully, how best to live alongside them. And that’s to say nothing of the far more sweeping problems posed by global warming and mass extinction, exigencies that have arisen from very much the same amalgamation of economic mismanagement and environmental destruction. Apex predators are generally considered bellwethers of the overall health of the environment, and at present, with carbon emissions on the rise and natural habitats diminishing, the outlook for both feels disarmingly uncertain.

Which is why this particular story of environmental conflict is not only relevant, but urgent and necessary. At its core, Jim Corbett’s quest to rid the valleys of Kumaon of the Champawat Tiger is dramatic and straightforward, but the tensions that underscore it contain the resonance of much larger and more grievous issues. Yes, it is a timeless tale of cunning and courage, but also a lesson, still very much pertinent today, about how deforestation, industrialization, and colonization can upset the fragile balance of cultures and ecosystems alike, creating unseen pressures that, at a certain point, must find their release.

Sometimes even in the form of a man-eating tiger.

PART I

NEPAL

CHAPTER 1

THE FULL MEASURE OF A TIGER

Where does one begin? With a story whose true telling demands centuries, if not millennia, and whose roots and tendrils snake into such far-flung realms as colonial British policies, Indian cosmologies, and the rise and fall of Nepalese dynasties, where is the starting point? Yes, one could commence with the royal decrees that compelled Vasco da Gama to sail for the East Indies, or the palace intrigues that put Jung Bahadur in the highest echelons of Himalayan power. But the matter at hand is something much more primal—elemental, even. Something that’s shaped our psyches and permeated our mythologies since time immemorial, and that speaks directly to the most profound of our fears. To be eaten by a monster. To be hunted, to be consumed, by a creature whose innate predatory gifts are infinitely superior to our own. To be ripped apart and summarily devoured. And with this truth in mind, the answer becomes even simpler. In fact, its golden eyes are staring us right in the face: the tiger. That is where the story begins.

“The normal tiger,” writes Charles McDougal, a naturalist and tiger expert who spent much of his life studying the big cats in Nepal, “exhibits a deep-rooted aversion to man, with whom he avoids contact.” This is a fact corroborated time and time again by biologists, park rangers, and hunters alike, all of whom can attest firsthand to just how shy and elusive wild tigers actually are. One can spend a lifetime in tiger country without ever laying eyes upon an actual tiger, with the occasional pugmark or ungulate skull the only hint at their phantomlike presence. Even for modern-day Tharu who live alongside reserves with dense predator populations, it’s fairly uncommon to see a tiger. Sanjaya, who served as my host and guide in Chitwan while I was conducting research for this book, grew up fishing and foraging in local forests, and in all those years, he had spied a tiger just once. No, the normal tiger has little interest in our kind, and even less in challenging us to a fight. With hunting, mating, and fending off territorial rivals taking up most of its time, the normal tiger has more important things to worry about; we barely rate a passing glance. We are a nuisance to be avoided, and nothing more.

However, for the abnormal tiger—that is to say, the tiger that has shed for whatever reason its deep-seated aversion to all upright apes—there are essentially two ways it will kill a member of our species.

The first category of attack is a defense mechanism, a means of protection, and it is employed only when a tiger sees a human as a threat to its safety or that of its cubs. When a mother tiger is surprised in a forest, or when a wounded tiger is cornered by a hunter, its instincts for self-preservation kick in and the claws come out. This tiger will often roar, come bounding in a series of terrifyingly fast leaps, and commence beating its human target head-on with its front paws, with enough power in most cases to smash the skull after the first strike or two. And from there, it only gets worse—according to Russian tiger specialist Nikolai Baikov, once the offending human is on the forest floor, “the tiger digs its claws as deeply as possible into the head or body, trying to rip off the clothing. It can open up the spine or the chest with a single whack.” This is strictly a combative behavior, the inverse of predation (although defensive attacks do sometimes result in consumption as well). It manifests itself when the tiger senses imminent danger, and for that reason, calls upon its considerable resources to save its own skin—figuratively, and, given the price a tiger pelt can fetch on most black markets, literally as well.

And the results of this behavior, as the rare individual who is both unfortunate enough to encounter it yet still fortunate enough to survive it can tell you, are understandably horrific. There exists a video—and a quick Internet search will readily reveal it—of one such attack that occurred in Kaziranga National Park in northeastern India in 2004. Filmed from atop an elephant, it shows a group of park rangers tracking a problem tiger that had roamed beyond the boundaries of the reserve and begun killing cattle—almost certainly as a result of diminished habitat and limited natural prey. Armed with tranquilizer guns, their intent was not to harm the tiger, but rather to capture it before angry farmers did, and return it safely to its home in the park. But alas, the four-hundred-pound cat was not privy to this plan. Although grainy, and shot with an unsteady hand, the film makes the terrific competence with which a tiger can protect itself abundantly clear. With astounding speed and athleticism, the roaring tiger materializes from the high grass as if out of nowhere, leaps over the elephant’s head with claws at the ready, and with merely a single glancing blow, manages to shred the poor elephant driver’s left hand to bloody ribbons before making its getaway. And this happened to a group of heavily armed men mounted on towering pachyderms—one can imagine what such a tiger could have done to a single individual alone in the forest. They would have been dead before they had time to squeeze off a shot, a fact supported by one lethal Amur tiger attack recorded in 1994 in the Russian Far East—the local hunter’s gun was found still cocked and unfired, right beside his mittens, while his ravaged remains were discovered in a stand of spruce trees one hundred feet away.

There is, however, a second means of attack that the tiger employs when it regards something not as a threat, but as a potential food source—one that relies less on claws than it does upon teeth. Specifically, a set of three- to four-inch canine teeth, the largest of any living felid (yes, saber-toothed tigers are excluded), designed to sever spinal cords, lacerate tracheas, and bore holes in skulls that go straight to the brain. And it makes sense a tiger would have such sizable canines given their usual choice of prey: large-bodied ungulates like water buffalo, deer, and wild boar. Two of the Bengal tiger’s preferred prey species—the sambar deer and the gaur bison—can weigh as much as a thousand pounds and three thousand pounds, respectively, which gives some idea of why the tiger’s oversized set of fangs are so crucial to its survival. They are the most important tools at its disposal for bringing down some of the most powerful horned animals in the world. To crush the muscle-bound throat of a one-ton wild forest buffalo is no easy task, but it is one for which the tiger is purpose-made.

The tiger’s evolutionary history, however, begins not with a saber-toothed gargantuan eviscerating lumbering mastodons, but with a diminutive weasel-like creature scampering among the tree branches. With miacids, more specifically, primitive carnivores that inhabited the forests of Europe and Asia some 62 million years ago. Bushy-tailed and short-legged, these prehistoric scamps lived primarily on an uninspiring diet of insects. Their bug-feast would apparently continue for another 40 million years, until the fickle tenets of evolutionary biology put a fork in the road—some miacids evolved into canids, which today include dogs, wolves, foxes, and the like, while a second group, over the eons that followed, would turn into felids, or cats. Initially, there were three subgroups of felids: those that could be categorized as Pantherinae, Felinae, and Machairodontinae, with the third, although today extinct, including saber-toothed Smilodons that were indeed capable of ripping the guts out of woolly mammoths, thanks to their foot-long fangs and thousand-pound bodies.

Tigers, however, arose from the first group. Unlike leopards and lions, which both came to Asia via Africa (there are still leopards in India today, as well as lions, although only very small populations survive in the forests of Gir National Park), tigers are truly Asian in origin, first appearing some 2 million years ago in what is today Siberia and northern China. From this striped ancestor, nine subspecies would emerge, to spread and propagate across the continent, of which six still survive today, albeit precariously.

The Bali tiger, the Javan tiger, and the Caspian tiger all went extinct in the twentieth century, due to the usual culprits of habitat destruction and over-hunting. The first vanished from the face of the earth in the early nineteen hundreds, although the latter two subspecies seemed to have hung on at least until the 1970s. The extermination of the Caspian tiger is especially unsettling given the sheer size of its range—the large cats once roamed from the mountains of Iran and Turkey all the way east to Russia and China.

Of the tiger subspecies that still exist today, the Amur tiger—also known as the Siberian tiger—has stayed closest to its ancestral homeland in the Russian taiga, and continues to prowl the boreal forests of the region in search of prey. This usually means boar and deer, although at least one radio-collared tiger studied by the Wildlife Conservation Society, or WCS, was recorded as feasting primarily on bears. It seems the Amur not only has a preferred method of killing bears, involving a yank to the chin accompanied by a bite to the spine, but that it is also somewhat finicky, preferring to dine on the fatty parts of the bear’s hams and groin. With a thick coat, high fat reserves, and pale coloration, the Amur tiger is well suited to the wintry landscape of the Russian Far East. It is generally considered the largest of all the tiger subspecies, with historical records showing weights of up to seven hundred pounds, although a modern comparison of dimensions reveals that Bengal tigers in northern India and Nepal today are actually larger on average than their post-Soviet relatives farther east. Research hasn’t effectively concluded why Amur tigers are physically smaller today than in centuries past, although the removal from the gene pool of large “trophy” tigers could well be a factor. The Amur tiger’s current wild population numbers only in the hundreds, confined to a few pockets of eastern Russia and the borderlands of China.

While the northernmost realms of East Asia are prowled by what little remains of the Amur tiger population, the warmer climes to the south claim their own small subgroups of Panthera tigris, in the form of the Indochinese tiger, the Malayan tiger, the Sumatran tiger, and the South China tiger. All of their populations are atrociously small, with the South China tiger bearing the ignominious distinction of being categorized, at least recently, as one of the ten most endangered animals in the world, and quite possibly extinct in the wild. The future of all tigers is precarious at best, but in the case of these lithe jungle dwellers, considerably smaller on average than their brethren to the north, it is even more so.

Farther west, however, in the forests of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, there is another tiger yet, and although endangered, it has miraculously managed to maintain numbers that border on the thousands. It is the tiger of Mughal emperors and maharajas, of Rudyard Kipling and William Blake. The tiger that Durga, the Hindu mother goddess, rode into battle to vanquish demons, and that the rebellious Tipu Sultan—also known as the Tiger of Mysore—chose as his standard. It is the tiger that yanked British generals from their howdahs atop elephants, that turned entire villages in Bhiwapur into ghost towns, and that is responsible for the vast majority of the million people believed to have been killed by tigers over the last four centuries. It is the tiger of nursery rhymes, the tiger of nightmares, the tiger our imagination conjures when the word itself is spoken. It is identified by scientists, rather prosaically if not redundantly, as Panthera tigris tigris, but it is known to all as the Bengal tiger.

There is no shortage of shades or strokes one can employ when it comes to painting a portrait of the Bengal tiger, but to begin: Bengal tigers are big. While females tend to max out close to 400 pounds, adult males regularly achieve body weights in excess of 500 pounds, and some exceptionally large individuals have been documented at weights of over 700 pounds. Royal Bengal tigers, the subset that lives in the sub-Himalayan jungle belt known as the terai, tend to be even bigger. One extraordinary specimen—reportedly also a man-eater, at least until David Hasinger shot it in 1967—weighed in at 857 pounds, measured over 11 feet long, and left paw prints “as large as dinner plates.” For its last supper, it managed to drag not only a live water buffalo into the forest, but also the eighty-pound rock to which it was tethered. The humongous tiger’s man-and-water-buffalo-eating days may have ended shortly thereafter, but it still prowls today—in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, in fact, where it is on permanent display in the Hall of Mammals.

Second: Bengal tigers are fast. In short sprints, they can achieve forty miles per hour, which is almost three times as fast as the average human being, and roughly equivalent to the top speed of a Thoroughbred racehorse. In other words, it is futile to try to outrun a dedicated tiger. And when it comes to their leaping prowess, there are plenty of examples of tigers clearing tremendous hurdles to get their claws on a target. In an incident recorded in Nepal in 1974, a startled tigress protecting her cubs had little trouble mauling a researcher hiding fifteen feet above her in a tree. The aforementioned tiger from Kaziranga National Park managed in 2004 to take three fingers off that unfortunate elephant driver’s hand—a hand that appears to be at least twelve feet off the ground—with barely a running start. And on Christmas Day, 2007, a tiger (Amur, not Bengal, although their abilities are comparable) escaped the ostensibly inescapable barriers of its open-air enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo, for the sole purpose of going after a trio of young men who had provoked its ire. Accounts vary as to what caused the attack—the zoo accused the victims, all of whom had alcohol and marijuana in their systems, of taunting and harassing the animal, something the two survivors vigorously denied. What is certain, however, is that the enraged tiger got across a thirty-three-foot dry moat, cleared a nearly thirteen-foot protective wall, and emerged snarling from the pit like the wrath of God. Police arrived in time to save two of the young men from almost certain death—the third, who received the brunt of the initial attack, was not so lucky—but stopping the crazed tiger proved anything but easy. One officer fired three .40-caliber-pistol rounds into the charging cat’s head and chest, and that only seemed to anger it further. It wasn’t until a second officer put a fourth bullet in the tiger’s skull at point-blank range that it finally ceased its attack and fell to the ground. A more nightmarish scenario is difficult to imagine, but it is at least worth mentioning—this was only a captive tiger. Experienced wild tigers, accustomed to bringing down big game and fighting off territorial rivals, are generally much more athletic and aggressive when their hunting or defensive instincts kick in. A tiger in its natural habitat—alert, attuned, muscles rippling beneath its tawny striped hide—is another creature entirely from the languid, yawning pets of Siegfried & Roy. As lethal as this urbanized West Coast zoo tiger proved to be, it was a flabby house cat compared to its country cousins, ripping apart wolves and chasing down bears in ancient forests across the sea.

Third: Bengal tigers are strong. A tiger’s jaw is capable of exerting around a thousand pounds of pressure per square inch—the strongest bite of any cat. That’s four times as powerful as the bite of the most menacing pit bull, and considerably stronger than that of a great white shark. Even Kodiak bears, which can weigh as much as 1,500 pounds, can’t keep up. The bite of a tiger can shred muscle and tendon like butter and crunch bones like we might a stale pretzel stick. And if their bite is terrifying, a swipe from their retractable claws is just as bad if not worse. A single blow from a Bengal tiger’s paw can crack the skull and break the neck of an Indian bison, and can decapitate a human. Aggressive tigers have been known to rip the bumpers off cars, tear outhouses to splinters, and burst through the walls of houses in search of food. They can drag a one-ton buffalo across a forest floor with ease, and are capable of carrying an adult chital deer by the neck as effortlessly as a mother cat does a kitten. It’s less apparent on an Amur tiger, with its heavy fur and fat reserves, but on a Bengal tiger, the musculature is unmistakable—this is the middle linebacker of the animal world, the perfect melding of power and speed.

And last: Bengal tigers are smart. Predation of almost any kind requires intelligence—a carnivore must discern what prey is ideal, where to find it, and how best to stalk it while evading detection. Tigers excel at all of the above, thanks to skills acquired during a lengthy tutelage with their mothers. Cubs typically stay with their mothers as long as two and a half years, during which, under her ceaseless care, they learn the many, complicated tricks of the trade. And tricks, at least according to some sources, they most definitely are. During the British Raj, hunters took note of tigers that could imitate the sound of the sambar deer—what naturalist and tiger observer George Schaller would later refer to as “a loud, clear ‘pok,’ ” although he admitted to having seldom heard them make the noise while actually hunting. In colder climes to the north and east, there exist tales of tigers imitating the calls of black bears, ostensibly so they could snap their spines and dine on their fat-rich meat. Tigers frequently adjust their attack strategies to fit their quarry, and whether it’s chasing larger animals into deep water where they are easier to kill, snapping the leg tendons of wild buffalo to bring them down to the ground, or flipping porcupines onto their bellies to avoid their sharp quills, tigers are quick studies in the arts of outsmarting their prey. This intelligence, coupled with their innate athleticism and sizable frame, makes for one exceptionally effective natural predator.

Indeed, when one considers the raw physics of a collision with a five-to-six-hundred-pound body moving at forty miles an hour, the equation starts to feel less like one belonging to the natural world, and more akin to that of the automotive. Only this Subaru is camouflaged, all-terrain, and has one hell of a Klaxon—not to mention a grill bristling with meat hooks and steak knives. And when it comes to putting a tiger in its tank, this high-performance vehicle runs almost purely on meat—sometimes as much as eighty-eight pounds of it in one sitting. It has its own favorite sort of prey, the hooved, meaty mammals that graze in its domain. But a hungry tiger will eat almost anything.

Of course, there are the more pedestrian items on a famished tiger’s menu. Turtles, fish, badgers, squirrels, rabbits, mice, termites—the list is long and inglorious. But then there are the more impressive items that a tiger may take as quarry when the conditions are right. In addition to bears and wolves, tigers have been documented ripping 15-foot crocodiles to pieces, tearing the heads off 20-foot pythons, and dragging 300-pound harbor seals out of the ocean surf to bludgeon on the beach. Bengal tigers in northern India are known to have killed and eaten both rhinos and elephants, and while they tend to prefer juveniles for obvious reasons, full-grown specimens of both species have been victims of tiger predation. In 2013, a rash of tiger attacks upon adult rhinos occurred in the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve in northern India, with a 34-year-old female rhino—almost certainly over 3,000 pounds—being killed and eaten. In 2011, a 20-year-old elephant was killed and partially eaten by a tiger in Jim Corbett National Park, and in 2014, a 28-year-old elephant in Kaziranga National Park farther east was killed and feasted upon by several tigers at once. Keep in mind, a mature Indian elephant can weigh well over five tons; the Bengal tigers responsible essentially took down something the size of a U-Haul truck just so they could gnaw on it. Oh, and lest we forget—tigers eat leopards too, fearsome predators in their own right. Among the most muscular and ferocious of predatory cats, leopards are themselves capable of downing animals five times their size, and hoisting their huge carcasses high up into the trees. However, that doesn’t seem to discourage Bengal tigers from crushing their spotted throats and dining on their innards.

But of all the wide variety of flora and fauna the tiger habitually kills, all the Latin dictionary’s worth of taxonomy it is willing to regularly gulp down its gullet, there is one species that is notably and thankfully absent: Homo sapiens. Perhaps it’s our peculiar bipedalism, our evolutionary penchant for carrying sharp objects, or even our beguiling lack of hair and unusual smell. For whatever reasons, though, Panthera tigris does not normally consider us to be edible prey. As we know, they go out of their way to avoid interacting with our kind. But as many a tiger expert has noted, what tigers normally do, and what they’re capable of doing, are two very different things. And in the case of the Champawat Man-Eater, normality seems to have vanished the moment our species stole half its fangs—a transgression that the tiger would repay two hundred times over in Nepal alone.

CHAPTER 2

THE MAKING OF A MAN-EATER

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, by 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.

Tigers, however, have never been ones to pay much heed to statistics, and in order to lend some legitimate credibility to the Champawat’s tally, particularly the more obscure Nepalese portion of it, more tangible evidence than that is needed. Indeed, there are analogous and better-documented situations we can use to show that such prolific man-eating is not quite as implausible as it sounds. Plenty of prolific man-eaters are recorded throughout the recent history of South Asia, although to find the most relevant cases, one need not stray far from the Champawat’s original hunting grounds. As recently as 1997, a 250-pound female tiger terrorized villages in the Baitadi District of Nepal, just a short drive north of the Champawat’s home turf. By the end of January of that year, the cat had already killed some 35 people; by July, that number had climbed to 50. And by November, it had added another 50 on top of that. In total, in a mere 10 months, this lone tiger was able to kill over 100 people before the government finally dispatched it. Many of its victims, sadly, happened to be juveniles and adolescents, which most likely accounts for its accelerated hunting schedule of an average of 2.5 kills per week. (One can only imagine the all but impossible challenge of trying to promote tiger conservation in a place where two to three children are being devoured by a tiger on a weekly basis.) Were this Baitadi man-eater to have continued its spree uncontested for as long as the Champawat did, haunting the edges of villages and the fringes of the forest, snatching young goatherds and women gathering firewood for the better part of a decade, it is not implausible to think that its total count could have approached a thousand.

And just across the border in India, in 2014, a tiger escaped from Jim Corbett National Park and killed ten people during a six-week rampage. That’s an average of 1.67 victims a week, over an extended period of time, in roughly the same geographic region where the Champawat once did prowl. And if there’s anything more haunting than the sheer number of victims claimed in such a short span by this contemporary cat, it’s the disarming similarity between its attacks and those of the Champawat more than a hundred years before. The first victim, a farmer in Uttar Pradesh named Shiv Kumar Singh, was found mauled in a sugarcane field, the tiger having almost certainly mistaken him for more conventional prey while he was stooped over cutting cane. The next, a young woman taking a walk at dusk—her name is not mentioned in the records—was grabbed by the neck and carried off into the trees. Not long after that, a laborer named Ram Charan went to the edge of the woods to relieve himself, only to be snatched by the tiger and dragged away, screaming for his life. His friends heard his shouts for help and discovered him lying on the ground with the flesh stripped from his thighs—he died not long after. And following the first three or four kills, which seemed to be cases of mistaken identity as the bodies were not actually eaten, the tiger finally figured out that our clawless, weak-limbed species was a fine source of protein, readily available. From then on, the tiger began eating its new prey, culminating with its final victim, an older man who was out collecting firewood in the forest when he was attacked. The tiger managed to consume part of his legs and most of his abdomen before a band of appalled shovel-wielding villagers scared it away. And in an almost eerie instance of déjà vu, this tiger too was female, it too was injured, and its appetite for human flesh also provoked a veritable whirlwind of hired hunters, elephant parties, and distraught locals—which only seemed to provoke it further.

And in both of these modern examples—the man-eater of Baitadi and the man-eater of Corbett National Park—the tigers began preying on humans for essentially the same reasons: loss of habitat, loss of prey, and injuries to their teeth or paws. Strong evidence, clearly, that a compromised tiger with a relatively dense population of vulnerable humans within its territory can and occasionally will feed on them for as long as it is able, and at a terrifying rate.

For modern examples of the actual quotidian challenges that a serial man-eater like the Champawat must have posed to nearby villages, one need not look further than Chitwan National Park—currently Nepal’s largest tiger reserve, as well as the home of rare one-horned rhinoceroses, slightly less rare leopards, and a trumpeting bevy of wild Asian elephants. Chitwan, like the vast majority of national parks and tiger reserves in Nepal and India, was once a royal hunting ground, used by the Shah and Rana dynasties over the centuries for its natural supply of tigers and elephants—both of which were considered, to varying degrees, royal property. It received national park status in 1973, when the rulers of Nepal first began diverting their efforts away from killing the once-plentiful tigers toward saving the few that still remained. Its status as hunting reserve aside, however, not a whole lot has changed over the last hundred years or so—at least not within the park itself. True, the local elephant stable, or hattisar, shuttles far more foreign tourists atop elephants these days than royal hunting parties, and tigers tend to be shot with telephoto lenses rather than Martini-Henry rifles. But beyond that, much is the same. Tharu settlements still dot the edges of the forest, villagers still graze their cattle in the trees and go into the brush seeking fodder and firewood (although not always legally), and the elephant handlers still perform puja offerings to the forest goddess before venturing into her domain. And, as one would expect in a patch of tiger forest hemmed in on all sides by people and livestock, man-eaters do occasionally appear. The methods of dealing with such tigers are nearly identical to those implemented by the Nepalese authorities of yore, complete with beaters, armed shikaris on elephant back, and even a nineteenth-century method for corralling the cats using long bolts of fabric known as the vhit-cloth technique, pioneered by the first Rana rulers—the only major difference being that tranquilizer guns are preferred to actual firearms whenever possible. If a tiger can be captured alive, the Nepalese authorities try to do so, condemning the guilty man-eater to a life sentence at the Kathmandu zoo rather than an execution. But in some cases, bullets do become a necessity, with mandates for termination coming—at least until recently—from the royal family itself.

From a statistical perspective, the research of Nepalese tiger expert Bhim Bahadur Gurung provides what is perhaps the most complete picture of how and why the Champawat began to kill humans more than a century ago. By carefully documenting and researching tiger attacks in Chitwan National Park over the course of several decades, he has essentially created an FBI-worthy profile of how wild, elusive tigers can transform under the right circumstances into serial killers. Between 1979 and 2006, 36 tigers attacked a total of 88 people. The average age of the victims was 36, although the range was wide, from a 70-year-old man killed while collecting wild grasses near the forest, to a 4-year-old girl who was attacked in her own home. Among these victims, more than half were cutting animal fodder of some kind—an activity that involved venturing into forested areas and initiating a stooped posture—and 66 percent were killed while within one kilometer of the forest’s edge, indicating that tigers were venturing out of the deep forest and hunting on the marginal zones around human settlements. Attacks increased dramatically from an average of 1.2 persons killed per year between 1979 and 1998, to 7.2 killed per year between 1998 and 2006. This rise was due largely to dramatic growth in the human population in Chitwan, from virtually zero in 1973 when the park was established (the families who had lived there were forced to resettle elsewhere), to the nearly 223,260 people living within the park’s new, expanded buffer zone by 1999.† The problem was only exacerbated by grazing restrictions that limited use of communal land, and resulted in more frequent human incursions—often illegal—into forested zones for the collection of grass and leaves to feed livestock. This is all strong evidence of the correlation between the collection of forest resources and tiger attacks, with the majority occurring in the transitional zone where human and tiger habitation overlap, inflicted upon a growing human population actively seeking feed for animals or firewood for their homes.

Even more interesting, however, is what we learn about the tigers. Sixty-one percent of the documented man-eaters occupied severely degraded habitats with low prey densities. Of the 18 problem tigers that researchers were able to examine, 10 had physical impairments like missing teeth or injured paws, with 90 percent of these impaired man-eaters also living in degraded habitats. And of the man-eating tigers that left the forest’s edge and ventured into villages—the sort of desperate behavior the Champawat too would eventually exhibit—virtually all came from degraded habitats, and all were physically impaired. Unusually aggressive non-hunting behavior was also recorded in some of these tigers, meaning they were unwilling to leave a kill even when confronted by humans atop elephants, conduct almost unheard of among normal, wild tigers in healthy habitats. Gurung attributes this aggressiveness to increased competition between tigers for limited territory, and to previous negative encounters with humans, who most likely attempted to chase tigers away from livestock kills so they could salvage the fresh meat for themselves. One of these ultra-aggressive tigers killed five people within a few minutes, and then sat beneath a tree for several hours where a sixth person was hiding, roaring and waiting for them to come down—not the sort of performance one would expect from a famously shy and elusive predator.

But this was the kind of behavior exhibited by the Champawat—an animal that was impaired, coping with a changing environment, and that had very fair reasons for being aggressive toward humans. Its pattern of killing almost certainly followed those of Chitwan’s most aggressive tigers today, as it became accustomed to hunting humans, first on its own territory in the grassy marshes and sal forests, and then later on ours, among grass-thatched huts and mud-walled houses. It would have progressed over time from chance encounters in the deep forest with woodcutters and foragers, to semi-deliberate confrontations on the forest’s edge with grass-cutters and herders, to intentioned kills on the outskirts of villages as farmers worked in their fields or walked into the brush to relieve themselves. As the research shows, the most problematic tigers—those with degraded habitats, physical impairments, and aggressive dispositions—seem to lose their fear of people altogether, and this is precisely what happened in the case of the Champawat. The human settlements that dotted the lowland terai ceased to be places of uncertainty and danger, as they were for most tigers, and instead became a veritable smorgasbord. And once that happened, a slaughter of unprecedented proportions commenced.

While statistical analysis of tiger attacks may provide a solid understanding of the underlying causes, data alone does a poor job of communicating their attendant horrors. Attacks by man-eating tigers, though rare, are exceedingly traumatic, in almost every sense of the word. The death of a loved one is always challenging for families and communities, but it becomes far more so when that cherished individual has been mauled or even completely devoured by a striped, fanged, quarter-ton cat. And again, there are contemporary examples of tiger attacks in India and Nepal that provide some idea—albeit a very unpleasant one—of what the aftermath of a wild tiger attack entails.

In the case of lethal maulings—attacks where the tiger succeeds in killing the victim, but either changes its mind or is chased away before it can feed—there is a small but extant body of medical literature on what those wounds involve. When tigers attack a human not out of self-defense, but as potential food, they generally approach the victim much as they would their usual prey of four-legged ungulates. A hunting tiger is stealthy—it approaches its target crouched low to the ground on silent, padded feet, and it waits with twitching tail until the right moment to strike. When that instant arrives, the ambush is lightning fast, and usually conducted from the side or the rear. There is sometimes an accompanying roar coincident with the initial strike—and at 114 decibels, roughly twenty-five times louder than a gas-powered lawn mower, what a roar it is. The tiger will generally use its ample claws to latch on to the prey around the flanks or shoulders, and then seek to kill it with a bite to the neck. On smaller prey, the tiger is more than capable of severing or damaging the spinal cord—its teeth are well designed to wedge between vertebrae and inflict catastrophic damage on the tender nerve tissue beneath, which it usually accomplishes quickly, and from the nape. On larger prey, tigers will knock over the animal first, then strangulate it with a choking bite to the trachea, possibly severing a jugular vein in the process. Humans generally fall into the first category, and when a tiger hunts our kind, it goes straight for the spine, although it will sometimes knock over the victim with a blow from its paws or the momentum of its body.

Such was the case of an attack that occurred in the Nagpur Division of India, and was subsequently described in Forensic Science International in 2013; an event that bears a striking resemblance to those attributed to the Champawat. The victim, a thirty-five-year-old woman, was foraging for tendu leaves in the forest with her husband and a few companions. The woman was left briefly alone while her husband scaled a tree to pluck leaves right off the branches, when shouts of “tiger, tiger” rang out through the brush. Her husband reached her just a few seconds later, and he was able to scare away the tiger by shouting and hurling stones, but it was too late—she was already dead. When her blood-soaked sari was later removed, and an autopsy performed, the examination revealed “four deep puncture wounds” on the nape of the neck resulting in a “complete laceration of the right jugulocarotid vessel” as well as “compound fractures of the C3 and C6 vertebral bodies due to through and through penetration by the canines of the tiger as a result of enormous bite force used in the killing bite at the canines.” The spinal cord at these points was “completely lacerated with multiple foci of hemorrhages.” In addition to the severed jugular and broken spine, the victim also suffered multiple deep puncture wounds from the tiger’s claws on the arms, shoulders, and torso—some almost two inches wide—as well as a fractured right clavicle and a fracture dislocation of the left sternoclavicular joint from the sheer force of the initial blow. In this case, the death was classified as “accidental,” which although true in a legal sense, doesn’t capture the purposeful nature of a tiger attack. When one sees the heart-wrenching autopsy photo of the four perfectly spaced, quarter-sized holes on the back of the victim’s broken neck, one can’t help but feel tremendous pity for the family of the unfortunate woman, and shudder at the expertise with which a tiger does its deadly work. Not malevolently, as man so often does, but naturally, with the grace and ease that 2 million years of predator evolution have bestowed upon it.

As to how the tiger can kill so effectively and quickly, we need only remind ourselves of the considerable toolkit with which the tiger is equipped. As we already know, tigers have four canine teeth that can reach close to four inches, and they have a total of ten claws on their forepaws of comparable length. This means that in the first milliseconds of a full-speed tiger attack, a human body must not only cope with a bone-fracturing impact comparable to that of a charging Spanish fighting bull, but also absorb fourteen simultaneous stiletto-deep stab wounds—four of which are usually inflicted on the back of the head or the nape of the neck. And that’s just the initial attack. If there’s any fight left in the grievously injured victim, it can usually be obliterated almost instantly with a fierce, spine-snapping shake of the head, or further flaying with all those bladed claws. Not surprisingly, survivors of actual tiger attacks are few and far between.

But they do exist. Oftentimes, victims of tiger attacks survive either because the tiger is scared away before it can finish the job, or because it is acting in a defensive manner and not a predatory one—in which case the attack is geared more toward deterrence than nutrition (although tigers have been known to eat victims even when the attack was defensive in nature). Both were likely mitigating factors in the 1974 mauling, though luckily not death, of one tiger researcher in Chitwan, Dr. Kirti Man Tamang. At the time, he was perched some fifteen to eighteen feet up in a tree—a distance considered to be safe from tiger attack—to monitor signals from a radio-collared mother tiger dubbed “Number One” by the team. What he didn’t reckon on, however, was just how protective a mother tiger can be. Fellow researchers Fiona and Mel Sunquist, who were working in Chitwan at the time of the attack, describe it in the following passage from Tiger Moon, as witnessed from atop a nearby elephant:

Kirti was moving around in the tree, pointing with the long aluminum antenna. He began to speak; then everyone heard the miaow of a young cub . . . Number One exploded out of the grass with a shattering roar. She made one leap up the tree and in a split second was on top of Kirti. He saw her coming and tried to ward her off with the antenna, but she flung it aside without noticing. She sank her claws into his thighs and buttocks and bit deeply into his leg. The force of her acceleration ripped Kirti off the branch and they both tumbled to the ground fifteen feet below . . . No one could believe what was happening. Kirti’s wife Pat repeated “Oh, my God,” over and over again, her voice rising in hysteria, but everyone else was dumb with shock. Before anyone could move the tigress charged again, her roars blasting through the silence. The elephants spun on their heels and bolted in blind panic ahead of the enraged tigress. Nothing could stop them. Equipment flew everywhere in a wild confusion of screaming and trumpeting. People clung to ropes or whatever they could find, trying not to be swept off the elephants in the headlong dash through the bushes.

The research team’s elephants may have bolted, but a battle-scarred old tusker was on hand that had participated in royal tiger hunts years ago, before they were banned. It had been trained to be fearless around tigers and had few hesitations about going back into the jungle to recover the fallen researcher before it was too late. Dr. Tamang was found to be in shock but still alive, with a “grapefruit-sized” chunk taken out of his thigh and deep claw marks raking his legs and buttocks. By tiger standards, this was a relatively mild attack—a defensive swat by a mother to deter an over-curious researcher—and yet it still cost the poor man an emergency medical flight to Kathmandu, multiple skin grafts, a nasty bacterial infection, and five full months of painful recovery.

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 stick. 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.

* For those interested in a more detailed examination of documentary evidence, there is an epilogue at the end of the book which lists the various colonial records, newspaper articles, and physical artifacts that specifically mention the Champawat and provide insight into its attacks.

† While generally lauded as a landmark event in tiger conservation, the creation of Chitwan National Park involved the forced displacement of dozens of indigenous Tharu families who had called the central forest home—a traumatic event that continues to haunt the Tharu communities that live today on the edge of Chitwan’s buffer zone. There has been some progress in terms of giving the Tharu access to the central forest for the traditional gathering of food, fodder, and building materials, although it is highly restricted, and continues to be a source of friction between the Tharu community and park officials.

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