ROBIN
I NEVER saw either of his parents. The Knight of the
Broom I purchased him from said he was a spaniel, that his name was Pincha, and
that his father was a 'keen gun dog. This is all I can tell you about his
pedigree.
I did not want a pup, and it was quite by accident
that I happened to be with a friend when the litter of seven was decanted from
a very filthy basket for her inspection. Pincha was the smallest and the
thinnest of the litter, and it was quite evident he had reached the last ditch
in his fight for survival. Leaving his little less miserable brothers and
sisters, he walked once round me, and then curled himself up between my big
feet. When I picked him up and put him inside my coat it was a bitterly cold
morning he tried to show his gratitude by licking my face, and I tried to show
him I was not aware of his appalling stench.
He was rising three months then, and I bought him for
fifteen rupees. He is rising thirteen years now, and all the gold in India
would not buy him.
When
I got him home and he had made his first acquaintance with a square meal, warm
water and soap, we scrapped his kennel name of Pincha and rechristened him
Robin, in memory of a faithful old collie that had saved my young brother, aged
four, and myself, aged six, from the attack of an infuriated she-bear.
Robin responded to regular meals as parched land does
to rain, and after he had been with us for a few weeks, acting on the principle
that a boy's and a pup's training cannot be started too early, I took him out
one morning, intending to get a little away from him and fire a shot or two to
get him used to the sound of gunfire.
At the lower end of our estate there are some dense
thorn bushes, and while I was skirting round them a peafowl got up, and
forgetting all about Robin, who was following at heel, I brought the bird
fluttering down. It landed in the thorn bushes and Robin dashed in after it.
The bushes were too thick and thorny for me to enter them, so I ran round to
the far side where beyond the bushes was open ground, and beyond that again
heavy tree and grass jungle which I knew the wounded bird would make for. The
open ground was flooded with morning sunlight, and if I had been armed with a
movie camera I should have had an opportunity of securing a unique picture. The
peafowl, an old hen, with neck feathers stuck out at right angles, and one wing
broken, was making for the tree jungle, while Robin, with stern to the ground,
was hanging on to her tail and being dragged along. Running forward I very
foolishly caught the bird by the neck and lifted it clear of the ground,
whereon it promptly lashed out with both legs, and sent Robin heels-over-head.
In a second he was up and on his feet again, and when I laid the dead bird
down, he danced round it making little dabs alternately at its head and tail.
The lesson was over for that morning, and as we returned home it would have
been difficult to say which of us was the more proud Robin, at bringing home
his first bird, or I, at having picked a winner out of a filthy basket. The
shooting season was now drawing to a close, and for the next few days Robin was
not given anything larger than quail, doves and an occasional partridge to
retrieve.
We spent the summer on the hills, and on our annual
migration to the foothills in November, at the end of a long fifteen-mile march
as we turned a sharp corner, one of a big troop of langurs jumped off the
hillside and crossed the road a few inches in front of Robin's nose.
Disregarding my whistle, Robin dashed down the khudside after the langur, which
promptly sought safety in a tree. The ground was open with a few trees here and
there, and after going steeply down for thirty or forty yards flattened out for
a few yards, before going sharply down into the valley below. On the right-hand
side of this flat ground there were a few bushes, with a deep channel scoured
out by rain-water running through them. Robin had hardly entered these bushes
when he was out again, and with ears laid back and tail tucked in was running
for dear life, with an enormous leopard bounding after him and gaining on him
at every bound. I was unarmed and all the assistance I could render was to 'Ho'
and 'Har' at the full extent of my lungs. The men carrying M.'s dandy joined in
lustily, the pandemonium reaching its climax when the hundred or more langurs
added their alarm-calls in varying keys. For twenty-five or thirty yards the
desperate and unequal race continued, and just as the leopard was within reach
of Robin, it unaccountably swerved and disappeared into the valley, while Robin
circled round a shoulder of the hill and rejoined us on the road. Two very
useful lessons Robin learned from his hairbreadth escape, which he never in
after-life forgot. First, that it was dangerous to chase langurs, and second
that the alarm-call of a langur denoted the presence of a leopard.
Robin resumed his training where it had been
interrupted in spring, but it soon became apparent that his early neglect and
starvation had affected his heart, for he fainted now after the least exertion.
There is nothing more disappointing, for a gun dog
than to be test at home when his master goes out, and as bird-shooting was now
taboo for Robin, I started taking him with me when I went out after big game.
He took to this new form of sport as readily as a duck takes to water, and from
then on has accompanied me whenever I have been out with a rifle.
The .method we employ is to go out early in the
morning, pick up the tracks of a leopard or tiger, and follow them. When the
pug marks can be seen, I do the tracking, and when the animal we are after
takes to the jungle, Robin does the tracking. In this way we have on occasions
followed an animal for miles before coming up with it.
When shooting on foot, it is very much easier to kill
an animal outright than when shooting down on it from a machan, or from the
back of an elephant. For one thing, when wounded animals have to be followed up
on foot, chance shots are not indulged in, and for another, the vital parts are
more accessible when shooting on the same level as the animal than when shooting
down on it. However, even after exercising the greatest care over the shot, I
have sometimes only wounded leopards and tigers, which have rampaged round
before being quieted by a second or third shot, and only once during all the
years that we have shot together has Robin left me in a tight corner. When he
rejoined me after his brief absence that day, we decided that the incident was
closed and would never be referred to again, but we are older now and possibly
less sensitive, anyway Robin who has exceeded the canine equivalent of
three-score-years-and-ten, and who, lies at my feet as I write, on a bed he
will never again leave has with a smile from his wise brown eyes and a wag of
his small stump of a tail given me permission to go ahead and tell you the
story.
We did not see the leopard until it stepped clear of
the thick undergrowth and, coming to a stand, looked back'. its left shoulder.
He was an outsized male with a beautiful dark glossy
coat, the rosettes on his skin standing out like clear-cut designs on a rich
velvet ground. I had an unhurried shot with an accurate rifle at his right
shoulder, at the short range of fifteen yards. By how little I missed his heart
makes no matter, and while the bullet was kicking up the dust fifty yards away
he was high in the air, and, turning a somersault, landed in the thick
undergrowth he had a minute before left. For twenty, forty, fifty yards we
heard him crashing through the cover, and then the sound ceased as abruptly as
it had begun. This sudden cessation of sound could be accounted for in two
ways: either the leopard had collapsed and died in his tracks, or fifty yards
away he had reached open ground.
We had walked 'far that day; the sun was near setting
and! We were still four miles from home. This part of the jungle was not
frequented by man, and there was not one chance in a million of anyone passing
that way by night, and last, and the best reason of all for leaving the
leopard, M. was unarmed and could neither be left alone nor taken along to
follow up the wounded animal so we turned to the north and made for home. There
was no need for me to mark the spot, for I had walked through these jungles by
day and often by night for near on half a century, and could have found my way
blind-* fold to any part of them.
Night had only just given place today the following
morning when Robin who had not been with us the previous evening and I arrived
at the spot I had fired, from. Very warily Robin, who was leading, examined the
ground where the leopard had stood, and then raising his head and snuffing the
air he advanced to the edge of the undergrowth, where the leopard in falling
had left great splashes of blood. There was no need for me to examine the blood
to determine the position of the wound, for at the short range I had fired at I
had seen the bullet strike, and the spurt of dust on the far side was proof
that the bullet had gone right through the leopard's body.
It might be necessary later on to follow up the blood
trail but just at present a little rest after our four-mile walk in the dark
would do no harm, and might on the other hand prove of great value to us. The
sun was near rising, and at that early hour of the morning all the jungle folk
were on the move, and it would be advisable to hear what they had to say on the
subject of the wounded animal before going further.
Under a nearby tree I found a day spot to which the
saturating dew had not penetrated, and with Robin stretched out at my feet had
finished my cigarette when a chital hind, and then a second and a third,
started calling some sixty yards to our left front. Robin sat up and slowly
turning his head looked at me, and, on catching my eye, as slowly turned back
in the direction of the calling deer. He had travelled far along the road of
experience since that day he had first heard the alarm-call of a langur, and he
knew now as did every bird and animal within hearing that the chital were
warning the jungle folk of the presence of a leopard.
From the manner in which the chital were calling it
was evident that the leopard was in full view of them. A little more patience
and they would tell us if he was alive. They had been calling for about five
minutes when suddenly, and all together, they called once and again, and then
settled down to their regular call; the leopard was alive and had moved, and
was now quiet again. All that we needed to know now was the position of the leopard,
and this information we could get by stalking the chital.
Moving down-wind for fifty yards we entered the thick
undergrowth, and started to stalk the deer not a difficult task, for Robin can
move through any jungle as silently as a cat, and long practice has taught me
where to place -my feet.
The
chital were not visible until we were within a few feet of them. They were
standing in the open and looking towards the north in the exact direction, as
far as I was able to judge, in which the crashing sound of the evening before
had ceased.
Up to this point the chital had been of great help to
us; they had told us the leopard was lying out in the open and that it was
alive, and they had now given us the direction. It had taken us the best part
of an hour to acquire this information, and if the chital now caught sight of
us and warned the jungle folk of our presence, they would in one second undo
the good they had so far done. I was debating whether it would be better to
retrace our steps and work down below the calling deer and try to get a shot
from behind them, or move them from our vicinity by giving the call of a
leopard, when one of the hinds turned her head and looked straight into my
face. Next second, with a cry of 'Ware man', they dashed away at top speed. I
had only about five yards to cover to reach the open ground, but quick as I was
the leopard was quicker, and I was only in time to see his hind quarters and
tail disappearing behind some bushes. The chital had very effectively spoilt my
chance of a shot, and the leopard would now have to be located and marked down
all over again this time by Robin.
I stood on the open ground for some minutes, to give
the leopard time to settle down and the scent he had left in his passage to
blow past us, and then took Robin due west across the track of the wind, which
was blowing from the north. We had gone about sixty or seventy yards when
Robin, who was leading, stopped and turned to face into the wind. Robin is mute
in the jungles, and has a wonderful control over his nerves. There is one
nerve, however, running down the back of his hind legs, which he cannot control
when he is looking at a leopard, or when the scent of a leopard is warm and
strong.
This nerve was now twitching, and agitating the long
hair on the upper part of his hind legs.
A very violent cyclonic storm had struck this part of
the forest the previous summer, uprooting a number of trees; it was towards one
of these fallen trees, forty yards from where we were standing, that Robin was
now looking. The branches were towards us, and on either side of the trunk
there were light bushes and a few scattered tufts of short grass.
At any other time Robin and I would have made straight
for our quarry; but on this occasion a little extra caution was advisable. Not
only were we dealing with an animal who when wounded knows no fear, but in
addition we were dealing with a leopard who had had fifteen hours in which to
nurse his grievance against man, and who could in consequence be counted on to
have all his fighting instincts thoroughly aroused.
When leaving home that morning I had picked up the 275
rifle I had used the previous evening. A good rifle to carry when miles have to
be covered, but not the weapon one would select to deal with a wounded leopard;
so instead of a direct approach, I picked a line that would take us fifteen
yards from, and parallel to, the fallen tree. Step by step, Robin leading, we
moved along this line, and had passed the branches and were opposite the trunk
when Robin stopped. Taking the direction from him, I presently saw what had
attracted his attention the tip of the leopard's tail slowly raised, and as
slowly lowered the warning a leopard invariably gives before charging. Pivoting
to the right on my heels, I had just got the rifle to my shoulder when the
leopard burst through the intervening bushes and sprang at us. My bullet, fired
more with the object of deflecting him than with any hope of killing or even
hitting him, passed under his belly and went through the fleshy part of his
left thigh. The crack of the rifle, more than the wound, had the effect of
deflecting the leopard sufficiently to make him pass my right shoulder without
touching me, and before I could get in another shot, he disappeared into the
bushes beyond.
Robin had not moved from my feet, and together we now
examined the ground the leopard had passed over. Blood we found in plenty, but
whether it had come from the old wounds torn open by the leopard's violent
exertions, or from my recent shot, it was impossible to say. Anyway it made no
difference to Robin, who without a moment's hesitation took up the trail. After
going through some very heavy cover we came on knee- high undergrowth, and had
proceeded about a couple of hundred yards when I saw the leopard get up in
front of us, and before I could get the rifle to bear on him, he disappeared
under a lantana bush. This bush with its branches resting on the ground was as
big as a cottage tent, and in addition to affording the leopard ideal cover
gave him all the advantages for launching his next attack.
Robin and I had come very well out of our morning's
adventure and it would have been foolish now, armed as I was, to pursue the
leopard further, so without more ado we turned about and made for home.
Next morning we were back on the ground. From a very
early hour Robin had been agitating to make a start, and, ignoring all the
interesting smells the jungle holds in the morning, would have made me do the
four miles at a run had that been possible.
I had armed myself with a 450/400, and was in
consequence feeling much happier than I had done the previous day. When we were
several hundred yards from the lantana bush, I made Robin slow down and advance
cautiously, for it is never safe to assume that a wounded animal will be found
where it has been left hours previously, as the following regrettable incident
shows.
A sportsman of my acquaintance wounded a tiger one
afternoon, and followed the blood trail for several miles along a valley. Next
morning, accompanied by a number of men, one of who was carrying his empty
rifle and leading the way, he set out intending to take up the tracking where
he had left off. His way led over the previous day's blood trail, and while
still a mile from the spot where the tiger had been left, the leading man, who
incidentally was the local shikari, walked on to the wounded tiger and was
killed. The rest of the party escaped, some by climbing trees and others by
showing a clean pair of heels.
I had marked the exact position of the lantana bush,
and now took Robin along a line that would pass a few yards on the lee side of
it. Robin knew all that was worth knowing about this method of locating the
position of an animal by cutting across the wind, and we had only gone a short distance,
and were still a hundred yards from the bush, when he stopped, turned and faced
into the wind, and communicated to me that he could smell the leopard. As on
the previous day, he was facing a fallen tree which was lying along the edge
of, and parallel to, the thick undergrowth through which we had followed the
leopard to the lantana bush after he had charged us. On our side of the tree
the ground was open, but on the far side there was a dense growth of waist-high
basonta bushes. Having signaled to Robin to carry on along our original line,
we went past the lantana bush, in which he showed no interest, to a channel
washed out by rain-water. Here, removing my coat, I filled it with as many
stones as the stitches would hold, and with this improvised sack slung over my
shoulder returned to the open ground near the tree.
Resuming my coat, and holding the rifle ready for
instant use, I took up a position fifteen yards from the tree and started
throwing the stones, first on to the tree and then into the bushes on the far
side of it with the object of making the leopard assuming he was still alive
charge on to the open ground where I could deal with him. When all my
ammunition was exhausted
I coughed, clapped my hands, and shouted, and neither
during the bombardment nor after it did the leopard move or make any sound to
indicate that he was alive.
I should now have been justified in walking straight
up to the tree and looking on the far side of it, but remembering an old jungle
saying, ' It is never safe to assume that a leopard is dead until it has been
skinned ', I set out to circle round the tree, intending to reduce the size of
the circle until I could see right under the branches and along the whole
length of the trunk. I made the radius of the first circle about twenty-five
yards, and had gone two-thirds of the way round when Robin stopped. As I looked
down to see what had attracted his attention, there was a succession of
deep-throated, angry grunts, and the leopard made straight for us. All I could
see was the undergrowth being violently agitated 'in a direct line towards us,
and I only just had time to swing half right and bring the rifle up, when the
head and shoulders of the leopard appeared out of the bushes a few feet away.
The leopard's spring and my shot were simultaneous,
and side-stepping to the left and leaning back as far as I could I fired the
second barrel from my hip into his side as he passed me.
When a wounded animal, be he leopard or tiger, makes a
headlong charge and fails to contact he invariably carries on and does not
return to the attack until he is again disturbed.
I had side-stepped to the left to avoid crushing
Robin, and when I looked down for him now, he was nowhere to be seen. For the
first time in all the years we had hunted together we had parted company in a
tight corner, and he was now probably trying to find his way home, with very
little chance of being able to avoid the many dangers that lay before him in
the intervening four miles of jungle. Added to the natural dangers he would
have to face in a jungle with which, owing to its remoteness from home, he was
not familiar, was the weak condition of his heart. And it was therefore with
very great misgivings that I turned about to go in search of him; as I did so,
I caught sight of his head projecting from behind a tree trunk at the edge of a
small clearing only a hundred yards away. When I raised my hand and beckoned,
he disappeared into the undergrowth, but a little later, with drooped eyes and
drooping ears, he crept silently to my feet. Laying down the rifle I picked him
up in my arms and, for the second time in his life, he licked my face telling
me as he did so, with little throaty sounds, how glad he was to find me unhurt,
and how terribly ashamed he was of himself for having parted company from me.
Our reactions to the sudden and quite unexpected
danger that had confronted us were typical of how a canine and a human being
act in an emergency, when the danger that threatens is heard, and not seen. In
Robin's case it had impelled him to seek safety in silent and rapid retreat;
whereas in my case it had the effect of gluing my feet to the ground and making
retreat rapid or otherwise impossible.
When I had satisfied Robin that he was not to blame
for our temporary separation, and his small body had stopped trembling, I put
him down and together we walked up to where the leopard, which had put up such
a game fight, and had so nearly won the last round, was lying dead.
I have told you the story, and while I have been
telling it Robin the biggest-hearted and the most faithful friend man ever had
has gone to the Happy Hunting Grounds, where I know I shall find him waiting
for me.
THE
CHOWGARH TIGERS
THE map of Eastern Kumaon that hangs on the wall
before me is marked with a number of crosses, and below each cross is a date.
These crosses indicate the locality, and the date, of the officially recorded
human victims of the man-eating tiger of Chowgarh. There are sixty-four crosses
on the map. I do not claim this as being a correct tally, for the map was
posted up by me for two years and during this period all kills were not
reported to me; further, victims who were only mauled, and who died subsequently,
have not been awarded a cross and a date.
The first cross is dated 15 December 1925, and the
last, 21 March 1930. The distance between the extreme crosses, north to south,
is fifty miles, and east to west, thirty miles, an area of 1,500 square miles
of mountain and vale where the snow lies deep during winter, and the valleys
are scorching hot in summer. Over this area the Chowgarh tiger had established
a reign of terror. Villages of varying size, some with a population of a
hundred or more, and others with only a small family or two, are scattered
throughout the area. Footpaths, beaten hard by bare feet, connect the villages.
Some of these paths pass through thick forests, and when a man-eater renders
their passage dangerous inter-village communication is carried on by shouting.
Standing on a commanding point, maybe a big rock or the roof of a house, a man
cooees to attract the attention of the people in a neighboring village, and
when the cooee is answered, the message is shouted across in a high-pitched voice.
From village to village the message is tossed, and is broadcast throughout
large areas in an incredibly short space of time.
It was at a District Conference in February 1929 that
I found myself committed to have a try for this tiger. There were at that time
three man-eaters in the Kumaon Division, and as the
HUMAN
BEINGS KILLED
BY
THE CHOWGARH MAN-EATER
Village
Number
THALI -1, DEBGURA -1, BARHON -2 CHAMOLI ...... -6,
KAHOR 1, AM 2, DALKANIA 7, LOHAR ...... 8, AGHAURA 2, PAHARPANI 1, PADAMPURI 2,
TANDA ......1, NESORIYA 1, JHANGAON ......1, KABRAGAON 1, KALA AGAR ......8,
RIKHAKOT 1, MATELA 3, KUNDAL ......3, BABYAR ......1, KHANSIUN 1, GARGARI 1,
HAIRAKHAN ..... 2, UKHALDHUNGA 1, PAKHARI ...... 1, DUNGARI -2, GALNI -3
TOTAL
- 64
ANNUAL
TOTALS
1926
15 KILLED
1927
9 KILLED
1928
14 KILLED
1929
17 KILLED
1930
9 KILLED
TOTAL
64
Chowgarh tiger had done most damage I promised to go
in pursuit of it first.
The map with the crosses and dates, furnished to me by
Government, showed that the man-eater was most active in the villages on the
north and east face of the Kala Agar ridge. This ridge, some forty miles in
length, rises to a height of 8,500 feet and is thickly wooded along the crest.
A forest road runs along the north face of the ridge, in some places passing
for miles through dense forests of oak and rhododendron, and in others forming
a boundary between the forest and cultivated land. In one place the road forms
a loop, and in this loop is situated the Kala Agar Forest Bungalow. This
bungalow was my objective, and after a four days' march, culminating in a stiff
climb of 4,000 feet, I arrived at it one evening in April 1929. The last human
victim in this area was a young man of twenty- two, who had been killed while out
grazing cattle, and while I was having breakfast, the morning after my arrival,
the grandmother of the young man came to see me.
She informed me that the man-eater had, without any
provocation, killed the only relative she had in the world. After giving me her
grandson's history from the day he was born, and extolling his virtues, she
pressed me to accept her three milch buffaloes to use as bait for the tiger,
saying that if I killed the tiger with the help of her buffaloes she would have
the satisfaction of feeling that she had assisted in avenging her grandson.
These full-grown animals were of no use to me, but knowing that refusal to
accept them would give offence, I thanked the old lady and assured her I would
draw on her for bait as soon as I had used up the four young male buffaloes I
had brought with me from Naini Tal. The Headmen of nearby villages had now
assembled, and from them I learned that the tiger had last been seen ten days
previously in a village twenty miles away, on the eastern slope of the ridge,
where it had killed and eaten a man and his wife.
A trail ten days old was not worth following up, and
after a long discussion with the Headmen I decided to make for Dalkania village
on the eastern side of the ridge. Dalkania is ten miles from Kala Agar, and
about the same distance from the village where the man and his wife had been
killed.
From the number of crosses Dalkania and the villages
adjoining it had earned, it appeared that the tiger had its headquarters in the
vicinity of these villages.
After breakfast next morning I left Kala Agar and
followed the forest road, which I was informed would take me to the end of the
ridge, where I should have to leave the road and take a path two miles downhill
to Dalkania. This road, running right to the end of the ridge through dense
forest was very little used, and, examining it for tracks as I went along, I
arrived at the point where the path took off at about 2 p.m. Here I met a
number of men from Dalkania. They had heard via the cooee method of
communication of my intention of camping at their village and had come up to
the ridge to inform me that the tiger had that morning attacked a party of
women, while they had been cutting their crops in a village ten miles to the
north of Dalkania.
The men carrying my camp equipment had done eight
miles and were quite willing to carry on, but on learning from the villagers
that the path to this village, ten miles away, was very rough and ran through
dense forest I decided to send my men with the villagers to Dalkania, and visit
the scene of the tiger's attack alone. My servant immediately set about
preparing a substantial meal for me, and at 3 p.m., having fortified myself, I
set out on my ten-mile walk. Ten miles under favorable conditions is comfortable
two-and-a-half hours I walk, but here the conditions were anything but favorable.
The track running along the east face of the hill wound in and out through deep
ravines and was bordered alternately by rocks, dense undergrowth, and trees;
and when every obstruction capable of concealing sudden death, in the form of a
hungry man-eater, had to be approached with caution, progress was of necessity
slow. I was still several miles from my objective when the declining day warned
me it was time to call a halt.
In any other area, sleeping under the stars on a bed
of dry leaves would have ensured a restful night, but here, to sleep on the
ground would have been to court death in a very unpleasant form. Long practice
in selecting a suitable tree, and the ability to dispose myself comfortably in
it, has made sleeping up aloft a simple matter. On this occasion I selected an
oak tree, and, with the rifle tied securely to a branch, had been asleep for
some hours when I was awakened by the rustling of several animals under the
tree. The sound moved on, and presently I heard the scraping of claws on bark
and realized that a family of bears was climbing safe carpal 1 tree I had
noticed growing a little way down the hillside. Bears are very quarrelsome when
feeding, and sleep was impossible until they had eaten their fill and moved on.
The sun had been up a couple of hours when I arrived
at the village, which consisted of two huts and a cattle-shed, in a clearing of
five acres surrounded by forest. The small community was in a state of terror
and was overjoyed to see me. The wheat field, a few yards from the huts, where
the tiger, with belly to ground, had been detected only just in time, stalking
the three women cutting the crop, was eagerly pointed out to me. The man who
had seen the tiger, and given the alarm, told me the tiger had retreated into
the jungle, where it had been joined by a second tiger, and that the two
animals had gone down the hillside into the valley below. The occupants of the
two huts had had no sleep, for the tigers; baulked of their 1 Karphal is found
on our hills at an elevation of 6,000 feet. The tree grows to a height of about
forty feet and produces a small red and very sweet berry, which is greatly
fancied by both human beings and bears.
Prey, had called at short intervals throughout the
night, and had only ceased calling a little before my arrival. This statement,
that there were two tigers, confirmed the reports I had already received that
the man-eater was accompanied by a full-grown cub.
Our hill folk are very hospitable, and when the
villagers learned that I had spent the night in the jungle, and that my camp
was at Dalkania, they offered to prepare a meal for me. This I knew would
strain the resources of the small community, so I asked for a dish of tea, but
as there was no tea in the village I was given a drink of fresh milk sweetened
to excess with jaggery, a very satisfying and not unpleasant drink when one
gets used to it. At the request of my hosts I mounted guard while the remaining
portion of the wheat crop was cut; and at midday, taking the good wishes of the
people with me, I went down into the valley in the direction in which the
tigers had been heard calling.
The valley, starting from the watershed of the three
rivers Ladhya, Nandhour and Eastern Goula, runs south-west for twenty miles and
is densely wooded. Tracking was impossible, and my only hope of seeing the
tigers was to attract them to myself, or helped by the jungle folk to stalk
them.
To those of you who may be inclined to indulge in the
sport of man-eater hunting on foot, it will be of interest to know that the
birds and animals of the jungle, and the four winds of heaven, play a very
important part in this form of sport. This is not the place to give the names
of the jungle folk on whose alarm-calls the sportsman depends, to a great
extent, for his safety and knowledge of his quarry's movements; for in a
country in which a walk up or down hill of three or four miles might mean a
difference in altitude of as many thousand feet the variation in fauna, in a
well-stocked area, is considerable. The wind, however, at all altitudes,
remains a constant factor, and a few words relevant to its importance in connection
with man-eater hunting on foot will not be out of place.
Tigers do not know that human beings have no sense of
smell, and when a tiger becomes a man-eater it treats human beings exactly as
it treats wild animals, that is, it approaches its intended victims up-wind, or
lies up in wait for them down-wind.
The significance of this will be apparent when it is
realized that, while the sportsman is trying to get a sight of the tiger, the
tiger in all probability is trying to stalk the sportsman, or is lying up in
wait for him. The contest, owing to the tiger's height, colouring, and ability
to move without making a sound, would be very unequal was it not for the
wind-factor operating in favor of the sportsman.
In all cases where killing is done by stalking or
stealth, the victim is approached from behind. This being so, it would be
suicidal for the sportsman to enter dense jungle, in which he had every reason
to believe a man-eater was lurking, unless he was capable of making full use of
the currents of air. For example, assuming that the sportsman has to proceed, owing
to the nature of the ground, in the direction from which the wind is blowing,
the danger would lie behind him, where he would be least able to deal with it,
but by frequently tacking across the wind he could keep the danger alternately
to right and left of him. In print this scheme may not appear very attractive,
but in practice it works; and, short of walking backwards, I do not know of a
better or safer method of going up-wind through dense cover in which a hungry
man-eater is lurking.
By evening I had reached the upper end of the valley,
without having seen the tigers and without having received any indication from
bird or animal of their presence in the jungle. The only habitation then in
sight was a cattle-shed, high up on the north side of the valley.
I was careful in the selection of a tree on this
second night, and was rewarded by an undisturbed night's rest. Not long after
dark the tigers called, and a few minutes’ later two shots from a muzzle-loader
came echoing down the valley, followed by a lot of shouting from the graziers
at the cattle station. Thereafter the night was silent.
By the afternoon of the following day I had exploded
every bit of the valley, and I was making my way up a grassy slope intent on
rejoining my men at Dalkania when I heard a long-drawn-out cooee from the
direction of the cattle-shed. The cooee was repeated once and again, and on my
sending back an answering call I saw a man climb on a projecting rock, and from
this vantage point he shouted across the valley to ask if I was the sahib who
had come from Naini Tal to shoot the man-eater. On my telling him I was that
sahib, he informed me that his cattle had stampeded out of a ravine on my side
of the valley at about midday, and that when he counted them on arrival at the
cattle station he found that one a white cow was missing.
He suspected that the cow had been killed by the
tigers he had heard calling the previous night, half a mile to the west of
where I was standing. Thanking him for his information, I set off to investigate
the ravine. I had gone but a short distance along the edge of the ravine when I
came on the tracks of the stampeding cattle, and following these tracks back I
had no difficulty in finding the spot where the cow had been killed. After
killing the cow the tigers had taken it down the steep hillside into the
ravine. An approach along the drag was not advisable, so going down into the
valley I made a wide detour, and approached the spot where I expected the kill
to be from the other side of the ravine. This side of the ravine was less steep
than the side down which the kill had been taken, and was deep in young bracken
ideal ground for stalking over. Step by step, shadow, I made my way through the
Bracken, which reached above my waist, and when I was some thirty yards from
the bed of the ravine a movement in front of me caught my eye. A white leg was
suddenly thrust up into the air and violently agitated, and next moment there
was a deep-throated growl the tigers were on the kill and free having a
difference of opinion over some mouthful morsel.
For several minutes I stood perfectly still; the leg
continued to be agitated, but the growl was not repeated. A nearer approach was
not advisable, for even if I succeeded in covering the thirty yards without
being seen, and managed to kill one of the tigers, the other, as likely as not,
would blunder into me, and the ground I was on would give me no chance of
defending myself. Twenty yards to my left front, and about the same distance
from the tigers, there was an outcrop of rock, some ten to fifteen feet high.
If I could reach this rock without being seen, I should in all probability get
an easy shot at the tigers. Dropping on hands and knees, and pushing the rifle
before me, I crawled through the bracken to the shelter of the rocks, paused a
minute to regain my breath and make quite sure the rifle was loaded, and then
climbed the rock. When my eyes were level with the top, I looked over, and saw
the two tigers.
One was eating at the hind quarters of the cow, while
the other was lying near by licking its paws. Both tigers appeared to be about
the same size, but the one that was licking its paws was several shades lighter
than the other; and concluding that her light colouring was due to age and that
she was the old man-eater, I aligned the sights very carefully on her, and
fired. At my shot she reared up and fell backwards, while the other bounded
down the ravine and was out of sight before I could press the second trigger.
The tiger I had shot did not move again, and after pelting it with stones to
make sure it was dead, I approached and met with a great disappointment; for a
glance at close quarters showed me I had made a mistake and shot the cub a
mistake that during the ensuing twelve months cost the district fifteen lives
and incidentally nearly cost me my own life.
Disappointment was to a certain extent mitigated by
the thought that this young tigress, even if she had not actually killed any
human beings herself, had probably assisted her old mother to kill (this
assumption I later found to be correct), and in any case, having been nurtured
on human flesh, she could to salve my feelings be classed as a potential man-
eater.
Skinning a tiger with assistance on open ground and
with the requisite appliances is an easy job, but here the job was anything but
easy, for I was alone, surrounded by thick cover, and my only appliance was a
penknife; and though there was no actual danger to be apprehended from the
man-eater, for tigers never kill in excess of their requirements, there was the
uneasy feeling in the back of my mind that the tigress had returned and was
watching my every movement.
The sun was near setting before the arduous task was
completed, and as I should have to spend yet another night in the jungles I
decided to remain where I was. The tigress was a very old animal, as I could
see from her pug marks, and having lived all her life in a district in which
there are nearly as many fire-arms as men to use them, had nothing to learn about
men and their ways. Even so, there was just a chance that she might return to
the kill some time during the night, and remain in the vicinity until light
came in the morning.
My selection of a tree was of necessity limited, and
the one I spent that night in proved, by morning, to be the most uncomfortable
tree I have ever spent twelve hours in. The tigress called at intervals
throughout the night, and as morning drew near the calling became fainter and
fainter, and eventually died away on the ridge above me.
Cramped, and stiff, and hungry I had been without food
for sixty-four hours and with my clothes clinging to me it had rained for an
hour during the night I descended from the tree when objects were clearly
visible, and, after tying the tiger's skin up in a coat, set off for Dalkania.
I have never weighed a tiger's skin when green, and if
the skin, plus the head and paws, which I carried for fifteen miles that day
weighed 40 pounds at the start, I would have taken my oath it weighed 200
pounds before I reached my destination.
In a courtyard, flagged with great slabs of blue
slate, and common to a dozen houses, I found my men in conference with a
hundred or more villagers. My approach, along a yard- wide lane between two
houses, had not been observed, and the welcome I received when, bedraggled and
covered with blood, I staggered into the circle of squatting men will live in
my memory as long as memory lasts.
My 40-lb. tent had been pitched in a field of stubble
a hundred yards from the village, and I had hardly reached it before tea was
laid out for me on a table improvised out of a couple of suitcases and planks
borrowed from the village. I was told later by the villagers that my men, who
had been with me for years and had accompanied me on several similar
expeditions, refusing to believe that the man-eater had claimed me as a victim,
had kept a kettle on the boil night and day in anticipation of my return, and,
further, had stoutly opposed the Headmen of Dalkania and the adjoining villages
sending a report to Almora and Naini Tal that I was missing.
A hot bath, taken of necessity in the open and in full
view of the village I was too dirty and too tired to care who saw me was
followed by an ample dinner, and I was thinking of turning in for the night
when a flash of lightning succeeded by a loud peal of thunder heralded the
approach of a storm. Tent-pegs are of little use in a field, so long stakes
were hurriedly procured and securely driven into the ground, and to these
stakes the tent-ropes were tied. For further safety all the available ropes in
camp were criss-crossed over the tent and lashed to the stakes. The storm of
wind and rain lasted an hour and was one of the worst the little tent had ever
weathered. Several of the guy-ropes were torn from the canvas, but the stakes
and criss-cross ropes held. Most of my things were soaked through, and a little
stream several inches deep was running from end to end of the tent; my bed,
however, was comparatively dry, and by 10 o'clock my men were safely lodged
behind locked doors in the house the villagers had placed at their disposal,
while I, with a loaded rifle for company, settled down to a sleep which lasted
for twelve hours.
The following day was occupied in drying my kit and in
cleaning and pegging out the tiger's skin. While these operations were in
progress the villagers, who had taken a holiday from their field work, crowded
round to hear my experiences and to tell me theirs. Every man present had lost
one or more relatives, and several bore tooth and claw marks, inflicted by the
man-eater, which they will carry to their graves. My regret at having lost an
opportunity of killing the man-eater was not endorsed by the assembled men.
True, there had originally been only one man-eater; but, of recent months,
rescue parties who had gone out to recover the remains of human victims had
found two tigers on the kills, and only a fortnight previously a man and his
wife had been killed simultaneously, which was proof sufficient for them that
both tigers were established man- eaters.
My tent was on a spur of the hill, and commanded an
extensive view. Immediately below me was the valley of the Nandhour river, with
a hill, devoid of any cultivation, rising to a height of 9,000 feet on the far
side. As I sat on the edge of the terraced fields that evening with a pair of
good binoculars in my hand and the Government map spread out beside me, the
villagers pointed out the exact positions where twenty human beings had been
killed during the past three years. These kills were more or less evenly
distributed over an area of forty square miles.
The forests in this area were open to grazing, and on
the cattle-paths leading to them I decided to tie up my four young buffaloes.
During the following ten days no news was received of
the tigress, and I spent the time in visiting the buffaloes in the morning,
searching the forests in the day, and tying out the buffaloes in the evening.
On the eleventh day my hopes were raised by the report that a cow had been
killed on a ravine on the hill above my tent. A visit to the kill, however,
satisfied me the cow had been killed by an old leopard, whose pug marks I had
repeatedly seen. The villagers complained that the leopard had for several
years been taking heavy toll of their cattle and goats, so I decided to sit up
for him. A shallow cave close to the dead cow gave me the cover I needed. I had
not been long in the cave when I caught sight of the leopard coming down the
opposite side of the ravine, and I was raising my rifle for a shot when I heard
a very agitated voice from the direction of the village calling to me.
There could be but one reason for this urgent call,
and grabbing up my hat I dashed out of the cave, much to the consternation of
the leopard, who first flattened himself out on the ground, and then with an
angry woof went bounding back the way he had come, while I scrambled up my side
of the ravine; and, arriving at the top, shouted to the man that I was coming,
and set off at top speed to join him.
The man had run all the way uphill from the village,
and when he regained his breath he informed me that a woman had just been
killed by the man-eater, about half a mile on the far side of the village. As
we ran down the hillside I saw a crowd of people collected in the courtyard
already alluded to. Once again my approach through the narrow lane was not observed,
and looking over the heads of the assembled men, I saw a girl sitting on the
ground.
The upper part of her clothing had been torn off her
young body, and with head thrown back and hands resting on the ground behind to
support her, she sat without sound or movement, other than the heaving up and
down of her breast, in the hollow of which the blood, that was flowing down her
face and neck, was collecting in a sticky congealed mass.
My presence was soon detected and a way made for me to
approach the girl. While I was examining her wounds, a score of people, all
talking at the same time, informed me that the attack on the girl had been made
on comparatively open ground in full view of a number of people including the
girl's husband; that alarmed at their combined shouts the tiger had left the
girl and gone off in the direction of the forest; that leaving the girl for
dead where she had fallen her companions had run back to the village to inform
me; that subsequently the girl had regained consciousness and returned to the
village; that she would without doubt die of her injuries in a few minutes; and
that they would then carry her back to the scene of the attack, and I could sit
up over the corpse and shoot the tiger.
While this information was being imparted to me the
girl's eyes never left my face and followed my every movement with the liquid
pleading gaze of a wounded and frightened animal. Room to move unhampered,
quiet to collect my wits, and clean air for the girl to breathe were necessary,
and I am afraid the methods I employed to gain them were not as gentle as they
might have been. When the last of the men had left in a hurry, I set the women,
who up to now had remained in the background, to winning water and to tearing
my shirt, which was comparatively clean and dry, into bandages, while one girl,
who appeared to be on the point of getting hysterics, was bundled off to scour
the village for a pair of scissors. The water and bandages were ready before
the girl I had sent for the scissors returned with the only pair, she said, the
village could produce. They had been found in the house of a tailor, long since
dead, and had been used by the widow for digging up potatoes. The rusty blades,
some eight inches long, could not be made to meet at any point, and after a
vain attempt I decided to leave the thick coils of blood-caked hair alone.
The major wounds consisted of two claw cuts, one
starting between the eyes and extending right over the head and down to the
nape of the neck, leaving the scalp hanging in two halves, and the other,
starting near the first, running across the fore- head up to the right ear. In
addition to these ugly gaping wounds there were a number of deep scratches on
the right breast, right shoulder and neck, and one deep cut on the back of the
right hand, evidently inflicted when the girl had put up her hand in a vain
attempt to shield her head.
A doctor friend whom I had once taken out
tiger-shooting on foot had, on our return after an exciting morning, presented
me with a two-ounce bottle of yellow fluid which he advised me to carry
whenever I went out shooting. I had carried the bottle in the inner pocket of
my shooting jacket for over a year and a portion of the fluid had evaporated;
but the bottle was still three-parts full, and after I had washed the girl's
head and body I knocked the neck off the bottle and poured the contents, to the
last drop, into the wounds. This done I bandaged the head, to try to keep the
scalp in position, and then picked up the girl and carried her to her home a
single room combining living quarters, kitchen and nursery with the women
following behind.
Dependent from a rafter near the door was an open
basket, the occupant of which was now clamoring to be fed. This was a
complication with which I could not deal, so I left the solution of it to the
assembled women. Ten days later, when on the eve of my departure I visited the
girl for the last time, I found her sitting on the doorstep of her home with
the baby asleep in her lap.
Her wounds, except for a sore at the nape of her neck
where the tiger's claws had sunk deepest into the flesh, were all healed, and
when parting her great wealth of raven-black hair to show me where the scalp
had made a perfect join, she said, with a smile, that she was very glad her
young sister had quite by mistake borrowed the wrong pair of scissors from the
tailor's widow (for a shorn head here is the sign of widowhood). If these lines
should ever be read by my friend the doctor I should like him to know that the
little bottle of yellow fluid he so thoughtfully provided for me, saved the
life of a very brave young mother.
While I had been attending to the girl my men had
procured a goat. Following back the blood trail made by the girl I found the
spot where the attack had taken place, and tying the goat to a bush I climbed
into a stunted oak, the only tree in the vicinity, and prepared for an
all-night vigil. Sleep, even in snatches, was not possible, for my seat was
only a few feet from the ground, and the tigress was still without her dinner.
However, I neither saw nor heard anything throughout the night.
On examining the ground in the morning I had not had
time to do this the previous evening I found that the tigress, after attacking
the girl, had gone up the valley for half a mile to where a cattle track
crossed the Nandhour river. This track it had followed for two miles, to its
junction with the forest road on the ridge above Dalkania. Here on the hard
ground I lost the tracks.
For two days the people in all the surrounding
villages kept as close to their habitations as the want of sanitary
conveniences permitted, and then on the third day news was brought to me by
four runners that the man-eater had claimed a victim at Lohali, a village five
miles to the south of Dalkania. The runners stated that the distance by the
forest road was ten miles, but only five by a short cut by which they proposed
taking me back. My preparations were soon made, and a little after midday I set
off with my four guides.
A very stiff climb of two miles brought us to the
crest of the long ridge south of Dalkania and in view of the valley three miles
below, where the ' kill ' was reported to have taken place. My guides could
give me no particulars. They lived in a small village a mile on the near side of
Lohali, and at 10 a.m. a message had come to them in the manner already
described that a woman of Lohali had been killed by the man-eater, and they
were instructed to convey this information to me at Dalkania.
The top of the hill on which we were standing was bare
of trees, and, while I regained my breath and had a smoke, my companions
pointed out the landmarks. Close to where we were resting, and under the
shelter of a great rock, there was a small ruined hut, with a circular thorn
enclosure nearby. Questioned about this hut, the men told me the following
story. Four years previously a Bhutia (a mari from across the border), who had
all the winter been sending packages of gur, salt, and other commodities from
the bazaars at the foothills into the interior of the district, had built the
hut with the object of resting and fattening his flock of goats through the
summer and rains, and getting them fit for the next winter's work. After a few
weeks the goats wandered down the hill and damaged my informants' crops, and
when they came up to lodge a protest, they found the hut empty, and the fierce
sheepdog these men invariably keep with them, to guard their camps at night,
chained to an iron stake and dead. Foul play was suspected, and next day men
were collected from adjoining villages and a search organized. Pointing to an
oak tree scored by lightning and distant some four hundred yards, my informants
said that under it the remains of the man his skull and a few splinters of bone
and his clothes had been found. This was the Chowgarh man-eater's first human
victim.
There was no way of descending the precipitous hill
from where we were sitting, and the men informed me we should have to proceed
half a mile along the ridge to where we should find a very steep and rough
track which would take us straight down, past their village, to Lohali, which
we could see in the valley below. We had covered about half the distance we had
to go along the ridge, when all at once, and without being able to ascribe any
reason for it, I felt we were being followed. Arguing with me against this
feeling was of no avail; there was only one man-eater in all this area and she
had procured a kill three miles away which she was not likely to leave. However,
the uneasy feeling persisted, and as we were now at the widest part of the
grassy ridge I made the men sit down, instructing them not to move until I
returned, and myself set out on a tour of investigation. Retracing my steps to
where we had first come out on the ridge I entered the jungle, and carefully
worked round the open ground and back to where the men were sitting. No
alarm-call of animal or bird indicated that a tiger was anywhere in the
vicinity, but from there on I made the four men walk in front of me, while I
brought up the rear, with thumb on safety-catch and a constant lookout behind.
When we arrived at the little village my companions
had started from, they asked for permission to leave me. I was very glad of
this request, for I had a mile of dense scrub jungle to go through, and though
the feeling that I was being followed had long since left me, I felt safer and
more comfortable with only my own life to guard. A little below the outlying
terraced fields, and where the dense scrub started, there was a crystal-clear
spring of water, from which the village drew its water- supply. Here in the
soft wet ground I found the fresh pug marks of the man-eater.
These pug marks, coming from the direction of the
village I was making for, coupled with the uneasy feeling I had experienced on
the ridge above, convinced me that something had gone wrong with the ' kill '
and that my quest would be fruitless. As I emerged from the scrub jungle I came
in view of Lohali, which consisted of five or six small houses. Near the door
of one of these houses a group of people were collected.
My approach over the steep open ground and narrow
terraced fields was observed, and a few men detached themselves from the group
next the door and advanced to meet me. One of the number, an old man, bent down
to- touch my feet, and with tears streaming down his cheeks implored me to save
the life of his daughter. His story was as short as it was tragic. His
daughter, who was a widow and the only relative he had in the world, had gone
out at about ten o'clock to collect dry sticks with which to cook their midday
meal. A small stream flows through the valley, and on the far side of the
stream from the village the hill goes steeply up. On the lower slope of this
hill there are a few terraced fields. At the edge of the lowest field and
distant about 150 yards from the home, the woman had started to collect sticks.
A little later, some women who were washing their clothes in the stream heard a
scream, and on looking up saw the woman and a tiger disappearing together into
the dense thorn bushes, which extended from the edge of the field right down to
the stream. Dashing back to the village, the women raised an alarm. The
frightened villagers made no attempt at a rescue, and a message for help was
shouted to a village higher up the valley, from where it was tossed back to the
village from which the four men had set out to find me. Half an hour after the
message had been sent, the wounded woman crawled home. Her story was that she
had seen the tiger just as it was about to spring on her, and as there was no
time to run, she had jumped down the almost perpendicular hillside and while
she was in the air the tiger had caught her and they had gone down the hill
together. She remembered nothing further until she regained consciousness and
found her- self near the stream; and being unable to call for help, she had
crawled back to the village on her hands and knees.
We had reached the door of the house while this tale
was being told. Making the people stand back from the door the only opening in
the four walls of the room I drew the blood-stained sheet off the woman, whose
pitiful condition I am not going to attempt to describe. Had I been a qualified
doctor, armed with modern appliances, instead of just a mere man with a little
permanganate of potash in his pocket, I do not think it would have been
possible to have saved the woman's life; for the deep tooth and claw wounds in
her face, neck, and other parts of her body had, in that hot unventilated room,
already turned septic. Mercifully she was only semi-conscious. The old father
had followed me into the room and, more for his satisfaction than for any good
I thought it would do, I washed the caked blood from the woman's head and body,
and cleaned out the wounds as best I could with my handkerchief and a strong
solution of permanganate.
It was now too late to think of returning to my camp,
and a place would have to be found in which to pass the night. A little way up
the stream and not far from where the women had been washing their clothes,
there was a giant pipal tree, with a foot-high masonry platform round it used
by the villagers for religious ceremonies.
I undressed on the platform and bathed in the stream;
and when the wind had carried out the functions of a towel, dressed again, put
my back to the tree and, laying the loaded rifle by my side, prepared to see
the night out. Admittedly it was an unsuitable place in which to spend the
night, but any place was preferable to the village, and that dark room, with
its hot fetid atmosphere and swarm of buzzing flies, where a woman in torment
fought desperately for breath.
During the night the wailing of women announced that
the sufferer's troubles were over, and when I passed through the village at day
break preparations for the funeral were well advanced.
From the experience of this unfortunate woman, and
that of the girl at Dalkania, it was now evident that the old tigress had
depended, to a very great extent, on her cub to kill the human beings she
attacked. Usually only one out of every hundred people attacked by man-eating
tigers escapes, but in the case of this man-eater it was apparent that more
people would be mauled than killed outright, and as the nearest hospital was
fifty miles away, when I returned to Naini Tal I appealed to Government to send
a supply of disinfectants and dressings to all the Headmen of villages in the
area in which the man-eater was operating. On my subsequent visit I was glad to
learn that the request had been complied with, and that the disinfectants had
saved the lives of a number of people.
I stayed at Dalkania for another week and announced on
a Saturday that I would leave for home the following Monday. I had now been in
the man-eater's domain for close on a month, and the constant strain of
sleeping in- an open tent, and of walking endless miles during the day with the
prospect of every step being the last, was beginning to tell on my nerves. The
villagers received my announcement with consternation, and only desisted from
trying to make me change my decision when I promised them I would return at the
first opportunity.
After breakfast on Sunday morning the Headmen of
Dalkania paid me a visit and requested me to shoot them some game before I
left. The request was gladly acceded to, and half an hour later, accompanied by
four villagers and one of my own men, and armed with a .275 rifle and a clip of
cartridges, I set off for the hill on the far side of the Nandhour river, on
the upper slopes of which I had, from my camp, frequently seen ghooral feeding.
One of the villagers accompanying me was a tall gaunt
man with a terribly disfigured face. He had been a constant visitor to my camp,
and finding in me a good listener had told and retold his encounter with the
man-eater so often that I could, without effort, repeat the whole story in my
sleep. The encounter had taken place four years previously and is best told in
his own words.
'Do you see that pine tree, sahib, at the bottom of the
grassy slope on the shoulder of the hill? Yes, the pine tree with a big white
rock to the east of it. Well, it was at the upper edge of the grassy slope that
the man-eater attacked me. The grassy slope is as perpendicular as the wall of
a house, and none but a hill man could find foothold on it. My son, who was
eight years of age at the time, and I had cut grass on that slope on the day of
my misfortune, carrying the grass up in armfuls to the belt of trees where the
ground is level.
'I was stooping down at the very edge of the slope,
tying the grass into a big bundle, when the tiger sprang at me and buried its
teeth, one under my right eye, one in my chin and the other two here at the
back of my neck. The tiger's mouth struck me with a great blow and I fell over
on my back, while the tiger lay on top of me chest to chest, with its stomach
between my legs. When falling backwards I had flung out my arms and my right
hand had come in contact with an oak sapling. As my fingers grasped the
sapling, an idea came to me. My legs were free, and if I could draw them up and
insert my feet under and against the tiger's belly, I might be able to push the
tiger off, and run away. The pain, as the tiger crushed all the bones on the
right side of my face, was terrible; but I did not lose consciousness, for you
see, sahib, at that time I was a young man, and in all the hills there was no
one to compare with me in strength. Very slowly, so as not to anger the tiger I
drew my legs up on either side of it, and gently inserted my bare feet against
its belly. Then placing my left hand against its chest and pushing and kicking
upwards with all my might, I lifted the tiger right off the ground and, we
being on the very edge of the perpendicular hillside, the tiger went crashing down
and belike would have taken me with him, had my hold on the sapling not been a
good one.
'My son had been too frightened to run away, and when
the tiger had gone, I took his loincloth from him and wrapped it round my head,
and holding his hand I walked back to the village. Arrived at my home I told my
wife to call all my friends together, for I wished to see their faces before I
died. When my friends were assembled and saw my condition, they wanted to put
me on a charpoy and carry me fifty miles to the Almora hospital, but this I
would not consent to; for my suffering was great, and being assured that my
time had come, I wanted to die where I had been born, and where I had lived all
my life. Water was brought, for I was thirsty and my head was on fire, but when
it was poured into my mouth, it all flowed out through the holes in my neck.
Thereafter, for a period beyond measure, there was great confusion in my mind,
and much pain in my head and in my neck, and while I waited and longed for
death to end my sufferings my wounds healed of themselves, and I became well.
'And now, sahib, I am as you see me, old and thin, and
with white hair, and a face that no man can look on without repulsion. My enemy
lives and continues to claim victims but do not be deceived into thinking it is
a tiger, for it is no tiger but an evil spirit, who, when it craves for human
flesh and blood, takes on for a little while the semblance of a tiger. But they
say you are a sadhu, sahib, and the spirits that guard sadhus are more powerful
than this evil spirit, as is proved by the fact that you spent three days and
three nights alone in the jungle, and came out as your men said you would alive
and unhurt/ Looking at the great frame of the man, it was easy to picture him
as having been a veritable giant. And a giant in strength he must have been,
for no man, unless he had been endowed with strength far above the average,
could have lifted the tigress into the air, torn its hold from the side of his
head, carrying away, as it did, half his face with it, and hurled it down the
precipitous hill.
My gaunt friend constituted himself our guide, and
with a beautifully polish axe, with long tapering handle, over his shoulder,
led us by devious steep paths to the valley below. Fording the Nandhour River,
we crossed several wide terraced fields, now gone out of cultivation for fear
of the man-eater, and on reaching the foot of the hill started what proved to
be a very stiff climb, through forest, to the grass slopes above. Gaunt my
friend may have been, but he lacked nothing in wind, and tough as I was it was
only by calling frequent halts to admire the view that I was able to keep up
with him.
Emerging from the tree forest, we went diagonally
across the grassy slope, in the direction of a rock cliff that extended upwards
for a thousand feet or more. It was on this cliff, sprinkled over with tufts of
short grass, that I had seen ghooral feeding from my tent. We had covered a few
hundred yards when one of these small mountain-goats started up out of a
ravine, and at my shot 'crumpled up and slipped back out of sight. Alarmed by
the report of the rifle, another ghooral, that had evidently been lying asleep
at the foot of the cliff, sprang to his feet and went up the rock face, as only
he or his big brother the tarp could have done. As he climbed upwards, I lay
down and, putting the sight to 200 yards, waited for him to stop. This he
presently did, coming out on a projecting rock to look down on us. At my shot
he staggered, regained his footing, and very slowly continued his climb. At the
second shot he fell, hung for a second or two on a narrow ledge, and then fell
through space to the grassy slope from whence he had started. Striking the
ground he rolled over and over, passing within a hundred yards of us, and
eventually came to rest on a cattle track a hundred and fifty yards below.
I have only once, in all the years I have been
shooting, witnessed a similar sight to the one we saw during the next few
minutes, and on that occasion the marauder was a leopard.
The ghooral had hardly come to rest when a big
Himalayan bear came lumbering out of a ravine on the side of the grassy slope
and, with never a pause or back word, came at a fast trot along the cattle
track. On reaching the dead goat he sat down and took it into his lap, and as
he started nosing the goat, I fired. Maybe I hurried over my shot, or allowed
too much for refraction; anyway the bullet went low and struck the bear in the
stomach instead of in the chest. To the six of us who were intently watching,
it appeared that the bear took the smack of the bullet as an assault from the
ghooral, for, rearing up, he flung the animal from him and came galloping along
the track, emitting angry grunts. As he passed a hundred yards below us I fired
my fifth and last cartridge, the bullet, as I found later, going through the
fleshy part of his hind quarters.
While the men retrieved the two ghooral, I descended
to examine the blood trail. The blood on the track showed the bear to be hard
hit, but even so there was danger in following it up with an empty rifle, for
bears are bad-tempered at the best of times, and are very ugly customers to
deal with when wounded.
When the men rejoined me a short council of war was
held. Camp was three and a half miles away, and as it was now 2 p.m. it would
not be possible to fetch more ammunition, track down and kill the bear, and get
back home by dark; so it was unanimously decided that we should follow up the
wounded animal and try to finish it off with stones and the axe.
The hill was steep and fairly free of undergrowth, and
by keeping above the bear there was a sporting chance of our being able to
accomplish our task without serious mishap. We accordingly set off, I leading
the way, followed by three men, the rear being brought up by two men each with
a ghooral strapped to his back. Arrived at the spot where I had fired my last
shot, additional blood on the track greatly encouraged us. Two hundred yards
further on, the blood trail led down into a deep ravine. Here we divided up our
force, two men crossing to the far side, the owner of the axe and I remaining
on the near side, with the men carrying the ghooral following in our rear. On 6
the word being given we started to advance down the hill. In the bed of the ravine,
and fifty feet below us, was a dense patch of stunted bamboo, and when a stone
was thrown into this thicket, the bear got up with a scream of rage; and six
men, putting their best foot foremost, went straight up the hill. I was not
trained to this form of exercise, and on looking back to see if the bear was
gaining on us, I saw, much to my relief, that he was going as hard downhill as
we were going uphill. A shout to my companions, a rapid change of direction,
and we were off in full cry and rapidly gaining on our quarry. A few well-aimed
shots had been registered, followed by delighted shouts from the marksmen, and
angry grunts from the bear, when at a sharp bend in the ravine, which
necessitated a cautious advance, we lost touch with the bear. To have followed
the blood trail would have been easy, but here the ravine was full of big
rocks, behind any of which the bear might have been lurking, so while the
encumbered men sat down for a rest, a cast was made on either side of the
ravine. While my companion went forward to look down into the ravine, I went to
the right to prospect a rocky cliff that went sheer down for some two hundred
feet. Holding to a tree for support, I leaned over and saw the bear lying on a
narrow ledge forty feet immediately below me. I picked up a stone, about thirty
pounds in weight, and, again advancing to the edge and in imminent danger of
going over myself, I raised the stone above my head with both hands and hurled
it.
The stone struck the ledge a few inches from the
bear's head, and scrambling to his feet he disappeared from sight, to reappear
a minute later on the side of the hill. Once again the hunt was on. The ground
was here more open and less encumbered with rocks, and the four of us who were
running light had no difficulty in keeping up with him. For a mile or more we
ran him at top speed, until we eventually cleared the forest and emerged on to
the terraced fields. Rainwater had cut several deep and narrow channels across
the fields, and in one of these channels the bear took cover.
The
man with the distorted face was the only armed member of the party and he was
unanimously elected executioner. Nothing loth, he cautiously approached the
bear and, swinging his beautifully polished axe aloft, brought the square head
down on the bear's skull. The result was as alarming as it was unexpected. The
axe-head rebounded off the bear's skull as though it had been struck on a block
of rubber, and with a scream of rage the animal reared up on his hind legs.
Fortunately he did not follow up his advantage, for we were bunched together,
and in trying to run got in each other's way.
The
bear did not appear to like this open ground, and after going a short way down
the channel again took cover. It was now my turn for the axe. The bear,
however, having once been struck resented my approach, and it was only after a
great deal of maneuvering that I eventually got within striking distance. It
had been my ambition when a boy to be a lumberman in Canada, and I had attained
sufficient proficiency with an axe to split a match-stick. I had no fear,
therefore, as the owner had, of the axe glancing off and getting damaged on the
stones, and the moment I got within reach I buried the entire blade in the
bear's skull.
Himalayan
bearskins are very greatly prized by our hill folk, and the owner of the axe
was a very proud and envied man when I told him he could have the skin in
addition to a double share of the ghooral meat. Leaving the men, whose numbers
were being rapidly augmented by new arrivals from the village, to skin and
divide up the bag, I climbed up to the village and paid, as already related, a
last visit to the injured girl. The day had been a strenuous one, and if the
man-eater had paid me a visit that night she would have ' caught me napping '.
On
the road I had taken when coming to Dalkania there were several long stiff
climbs up treeless hills, and when I mentioned the discomforts of this road to
the villagers they had suggested that I should go back via Haira Khan. This
route would necessitate only one climb to the ridge above the village, from
where it was downhill all the way to Ranibagh, whence I could complete the
journey to Naini Tal by car.
I
had warned my men overnight to prepare for an early start, and a little before
sunrise, leaving them to pack up and follow me, I said good-bye to my friends
at Dalkania and started on the two-mile climb to the forest road on the ridge
above. The footpath I took was not the one by which my men, and later I, had
arrived at Dalkania, but was one the villagers used when going to, and
returning from, the bazaars in the foot-hills. The path wound in and out of
deep ravines, through thick oak and pine forests and dense undergrowth. There
had been no news of the tigress for a week. This absence of news made me all
the more careful, and an hour after leaving camp I arrived without mishap at an
open glade near the top of the hill, within a hundred yards of the forest road.
The
glade was pear-shaped, roughly a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide, with
a stagnant pool of rain-water in the center of it. Sambur and other game used
this pool as a drinking place and wallow and, curious to see the tracks round
it, I left the path, which skirted the left-hand side of the glade and passed
close under a cliff of rock which extended up to the road. As 'I approached the
pool I saw the pug marks of the tigress in the soft earth at the edge of the
water. She had approached the pool from the same direction as I had, and,
evidently disturbed by me, had crossed the water and gone into the dense tree
and scrub jungle on the right-hand side of the glade. A great chance lost, for
had I kept as careful a lookout in front as I had behind I should have seen her
before she saw me. However, though I had missed a chance, the advantages were
now all on my side and distinctly in my favor. The tigress had seen me, or she
would not have crossed the pool and hurried for shelter, as her tracks showed
she had done. Having seen me she had also seen that I was alone, and watching
me from cover as she undoubtedly was, she would assume I was going to the pool
to drink as she had done. My movements up to this had been quite natural, and
if I could continue to make her think I was unaware of her presence, she would
possibly give me a second chance. Stooping down and keeping a very sharp
lookout from under my hat, I coughed several times, splashed the water about,
and then, moving very slowly and gathering dry sticks on the way, I went to the
foot of the steep rock. Here I built a small fire, and putting my back to the
rock lit a cigarette. By the time the cigarette had been smoked the fire had
burnt out. I then lay down, and pillowing my head on my left arm placed the
rifle on the ground with my finger on the trigger.
The
rock above me was too steep for any animal to find foothold on. I had therefore
only my front to guard, and as the heavy cover nowhere approached to within
less than twenty yards of my position I was quite safe. I had all this time
neither seen nor heard anything; nevertheless, I was convinced that the tigress
was watching me. The rim of my hat, while effectually shading my eyes, did not
obstruct my vision and inch by inch I scanned every bit of the jungle within my
range of view. There was not a breath of wind blowing, and not a leaf or blade
of grass stirred. My men, whom I had instructed to keep close together and sing
from the time they left camp until they joined me on the forest road, were not
due for an hour and a half, and during this time it was more than likely that
the tigress would break cover and try to stalk, or rush, me.
There
are occasions when time drags, and others when it flies. My left arm, on which
my head was pillowed, had long since ceased to prick and had gone dead, but
even so the singing of the men in the valley below reached me all too soon. The
voices grew louder, and presently I caught sight of the men as they rounded a
sharp bend. It was possibly at this bend that the tigress had seen me as she turned
round to retrace her steps after having her drink. Another failure, and the
last chance on this trip gone.
After
my men had rested we climbed up to the road, and set off on what proved to be a
very long twenty-mile march to the forest Rest House at Haira Khan. After going
a couple of hundred yards over open ground, the road entered very thick forest,
and here I made the men walk in front while I brought up the rear. We had gone
about two miles in this order, when on turning a corner I saw a man sitting on
the road, herding buffaloes. It was now time to call a halt for breakfast, so I
asked the man where we could get water. He pointed down the hill straight in
front of him, and said there was a spring down there from which his village,
which was just round the shoulder of the hill, drew its water-supply. There
was, however, no necessity for us to go down the hill for water, for if we
continued a little further we should find a good spring on the road.
His
village was at the upper end of the valley in which the woman of Lohali had
been killed the previous week, and he told me that nothing had been heard of
the man-eater since, and added that the animal was possibly now at the other
end of the district. I disabused his mind on this point by telling him about
the fresh pug marks I had seen at the pool, and advised him very strongly to
collect his buffaloes and return to the village. His buffaloes, some ten in
number, were straggling up towards the road and he said he would leave as soon
as they had grazed up to where he was sitting. Handing him a cigarette, I left
him with a final warning. What occurred after
I
left was related to me by the men of the village, when I paid the district a
second visit some months later.
When
the man eventually got home that day he told the assembled villagers of our
meeting, and my warning, and said that after he had watched me go round a bend
in the road a hundred yards away he started to light the cigarette I had given
him. A wind was blowing, and to protect the flame of the match he bent forward,
and while in this position he was seized from behind by the right shoulder and
pulled backwards. His first thought was of the party who had just left him, but
un-fortunately, his cry for help was not heard by them. Help, however, was near
at hand, for as soon as the buffaloes heard his cry, mingled with the growl of
the tigress, they charged on to the road and drove the tigress off. His
shoulder and arm were broken, and with great difficulty he managed to climb on
the back of one of his brave rescuers, and, followed by the rest of the herd,
reached his home. The villagers tied up his wounds as best they could and
carried him thirty miles, non-stop, to the Haldwani hospital, where he died
shortly after admission.
When
a troops who snips the threads of life misses one thread she cuts another, and
we who do not know why one thread is missed and another cut, call it Fate,
Kismet, or what we will.
For
a month I had lived in an open tent, a hundred yards from the nearest human
being and from dawn to dusk had wandered through the jungles, and on several
occasions had disguised myself as a woman and cut grass in places where no
local inhabitant dared to go. During this place the man-eater had, quite
possibly, missed many opportunities of adding me to her bag and now, when
making a final effort, she had quite by chance encountered this unfortunate man
and claimed him as a victim.
II
The
following February I returned to Dalkania. A number of human being? had been
killed, and many more wounded, over a wide area since my departure from the
district the previous summer, and as the whereabouts of the tigress was not
known and the chances in one place were as good as in another, I decided to
return and camp on the ground with which I was now familiar.
On
my arrival at Dalkania I was told that a cow had been killed the previous
evening, on the hill on which the bear hunt had taken place. The men who had
been herding the cattle at the time were positive that the animal they had seen
killing the cow was a tiger. The kill was lying near some bushes at the edge of
a deserted field, and was clearly visible from the spot where my tent was being
put up. Vultures were circling over the kill, and looking through my
field-glasses I saw several of these birds perched on a tree, to the left of
the kill. From the fact that the kill was lying out in the open, and the
vultures had not descended on it, I concluded (a) that the cow had been killed
by a leopard, and (b) that the leopard was lying up close to the kill.
The
ground below the field on which the cow was lying was very steep and overgrown
with dense brushwood. The man-eater was still at large, and an approach over
this ground was therefore inadvisable.
To
the right was a grassy slope, but the ground here was too open to admit of my
approaching the kill without being seen. A deep heavily-wooded ravine, starting
from near the crest of the hill plan right down to the Nandhour river, passing
within a short distance of the kill. The tree on which the vultures were perched
was growing on the edge of this ravine. I decided on this ravine as my line of
approach. While I had been planning out the stalk with the assistance of the
villagers, who knew every foot of the ground, my men had prepared tea for me.
The day was now on the decline but by going hard I should just have time to
visit the kill and return to camp before nightfall.
Before
setting off I instructed my men to be on the look-out. If, after hearing a
shot, they saw me on the open ground near the kill, three or four of them were
immediately to leave camp, and, keeping to the open ground, to join me. On the
other hand if I did not fire, and failed to return by morning, a search party
was to be organized.
The
ravine was overgrown with raspberry bushes and strewn with great rocks, and as
the wind was blowing downhill, my progress was slow. After a stiff climb I
eventually reached the tree on which the vultures were perched, only to find
that the kill was not visible from this spot. The deserted field, which through
my field-glasses had appeared to be quite straight, I found to be
crescent-shaped, ten yards across at its widest part and tapering to a point at
both ends. The outer edge was bordered with dense undergrowth, and the hill
fell steeply away from the inner edge. Only two-thirds of the field was visible
from where I was standing, and in order to see the remaining one-third, on
which the kill was lying, it would be necessary either to make a wide detour
and approach from the far side or climb the tree on which the vultures were
perched.
I
decided on the latter course. The cow, as far as I could judge, was about
twenty yards from the tree, and it was quite possible that the animal that had
killed her was even less than that distance from me. To climb the tree without
disturbing the killer would have been an impossible feat, and would not have
been attempted had it not been for the vultures. There were by now some twenty
of these birds on the tree and their number was being added to by new arrivals,
and as the accommodation on the upper branches was limited there was much
flapping of wings and quarrelling. The tree was leaning out-wards away from the
hill, and about ten feet from the ground a great limb projected out over the
steep hillside. Hampered with the rifle I had great difficulty in reaching this
limb. Waiting until a fresh quarrel had broken out among the vultures, I
stepped out along the branch a difficult balancing feat where a slip or false
step would have resulted in a fall of a hundred or more feet on to the rocks
below reached a fork, and sat down.
The
kill, from which only a few pounds of flesh had been eaten, was now in full
view. I had been in position about ten minutes, and was finding my perch none
too comfortable, when two vultures, who had been circling round and were
uncertain of their reception on the tree, alighted on the field a short distance
from the cow. They had hardly come to rest when they were on the wing again,
and at the same moment the bushes on my side of the kill were gently agitated
and out into the open stepped a fine male leopard.
Those
who have never seen a leopard jmder favorable conditions. jn
Jusjiatural_surroundings can have no conception of the grace of movement, and
beauty of jpolouring, of this the most_.gracefuL and the most
beauJdfiU^oLalLaixiiiials in our JEndian jungles, Nor are his attractions
limited to outward appearances, forTlpound for pound, his strength is second to
none, and in courage he lacks nothing. To class such an animal as VERMIN, as is
done in some parts of India, is a crime which only those could perpetrate whose
knowledge of the leopard is limited to the miserable, underfed, and mangy
specimens seen in captivity.
But
beautiful as the specimen was that stood before me, his life was forfeit, for
he had taken to cattle killing, and I had promised tile people of Dalkania and
other villages on my last visit that I would rid them of this their minor
enemy, if opportunity offered. The opportunity had now come, and I do not think
the leopard heard the shot that killed him.
Of
the many incomprehensible things one meets with in life, the hardest to assign
any reason for is the way in which misfortune dogs an individual, or a family.
Take as an example the case of the owner of the cow over which I had shot the
leopard. He was a boy, eight years of age, and an only child. Two years
previously his mother, while out cutting grass for the cow, had been killed and
eaten by the man-eater, and twelve months later his father had suffered a like
fate. The few pots and pans the family possessed had been sold to pay off the
small debt left by the father, and the son started life as the owner of one
cow; and this particular cow the leopard had selected, out of a herd of two or
three hundred head of village cattle, and killed. (I am afraid my attempt to
repair heartbreak was not very successful in this case, for though the new cow,
a red one, was an animal of parts, it did not make up to the boy for the loss of
his lifelong white companion.
My
young buffaloes had been well cared for by the man in whose charge I had left
them, and the day after my arrival I started tying them out, though I had
little hope of the tigress accepting them as bait.
Five
miles down the Nandhour valley nestles a little village at the foot of a great
cliff of rock, some thousand or more feet high. The man-eater had, during the
past few months, killed four people on the outskirts of this village. Shortly
after I shot the leopard, a deputation came from this village to request me to
move my camp from Dalkania to a site that had been selected for me near their
village. I was told that the tiger had frequently been seen on the cliff above
the village and that it appeared to have its home in one of the many caves in
the cliff face. That very morning, I was informed, some women out cutting grass
had seen the tiger, and the villagers were now in a state of terror, and too
frightened to leave their homes. Promising the deputation I would do all I
could to help them; I made a very early start next morning, climbed the hill
opposite the village, and scanned me cliff for an hour or more through my
field-glasses. I then crossed the valley, and by way of a very deep ravine
climbed the cliff above the village. Here the going was very difficult and not
at all to my liking, for added to the danger of a fall, which would have
resulted in a broken neck, was the danger of an attack on ground on which it
would be impossible to defend oneself.
By
2 p.m. I had seen as much of the rock cliff as I shall ever want to see again,
and was making my way up the valley towards my camp and breakfast, when on
looking back before starting the stiff climb to Dalkania I saw two men running
towards me from the direction in which I had just come. On joining me the men
informed me that a tiger had just killed a bullock in the deep ravine up which
I had gone earlier in the day. Telling one of the men to go on up to my camp
and instruct my servant to send tea and some food, I turned round and,
accompanied by the other man, retraced my steps down the valley.
The
ravine where the bullock had been killed was about two hundred feet deep and
one hundred feet wide. As we approached it I saw a number of vultures rising,
and when we arrived at the kill I found the vultures had cleaned it out, leaving
only the skin and bones. The spot where the remains of the bullock were lying
was only a hundred yards from the village but there was no way up the steep
bank, so my guide took me a quarter of a mile down the ravine, to where a
cattle track crossed it. This track, after gaining the high ground, wound in
and out through dense scrub jungle before it finally fetched up at the village.
On arrival at the village I told the Headman that the vultures had ruined the
kill, and asked him to provide me with a young buffalo and a short length of
stout rope; while these were being procured, two of my men arrived from
Dalkania with the food I had sent for.
The
sun was near setting when I re-entered the ravine, followed by several men
leading a vigorous young male buffalo which the Headman had purchased for me
from an adjoining village. Fifty yards from where the bullock had been killed,
one end of a pine tree washed down from the hill above had been buried deep in
the bed of the ravine After tying the buffalo very securely to the exposed end
of the pine, the men returned to the village. There were no trees in the
vicinity, and the only possible place for a sit-up was a narrow ledge on the
village side of the ravine. With great difficulty I climbed to this ledge,
which was about two feet wide by five feet long, and twenty feet above the bed
of the ravine. From a little below the ledge the rock shelved inwards, forming
a deep recess that was not visible from the ledge. The ledge canted downwards
at an uncomfortable angle, and when I had taken my seat on it, I had my back
towards the direction from which I expected the tiger to come, while the
tethered buffalo was to my left front and distant about thirty yards from me.
The
sun had set when the buffalo, which had been lying down, scrambled to his feet
and faced up the ravine, and a moment later a stone came rolling down. It would
not have been possible for me to have fired in the direction from which the
sound had come, so to avoid detection I sat perfectly still. After some time
the buffalo gradually turned to the left until he was facing in my direction.
This showed that whatever he was frightened of and I could see he was
frightened was in the recess below me. Presently the head of a tiger appeared
directly under me. A head-shot at a tiger is only justified in an emergency,
and any movement on my part might have betrayed my presence. For a long minute
or two the head remained perfectly still, and then, with a quick dash forward,
and one great bound, the tiger was on the buffalo. The buffalo, as I have
stated, was facing the tiger, and to avoid a frontal attack with the
possibility of injury from the buffalo's horns, the tiger's dash carried him to
the left of the buffalo, and he made his attack at right angles. There was no
fumbling for tooth-hold, no struggle, and no sound beyond the impact of the two
heavy bodies, after which the buffalo lay quite still with the tiger lying
partly over it and holding it by the throat. It is generally believed that
tigers kill by delivering a smashing blow on the neck. This is incorrect.
Tigers kill with their teeth.
The
right side of the tiger was towards me and, taking careful aim with the .275 I
had armed myself with when leaving camp that morning, I fired. Relinquishing
its hold on the buffalo, the tiger, without making a sound, turned and bounded
off up the ravine and out of sight. Clearly a miss, for which I was unable to assign
any reason. If the tiger had not seen me or the flash of the rifle there was a
possibility that it would return; so recharging the rifle I sat on.
The
buffalo, after the tiger left him, lay without movement, and the conviction
grew on me that I had shot him instead of the tiger. Ten, fifteen minutes had
dragged by, when the tiger's head for a second time appeared from the recess
below me. Again there was a long pause, and then, very slowly, the tiger
emerged, walked up to the buffalo and stood looking down at it. With the whole
length of the back as a target I was going to make no mistake the second time.
Very carefully the sights were aligned, and the trigger slowly pressed; but
instead of the tiger falling dead as I expected it to, it sprang to the left
and went tearing up a little ravine, dislodging stones as it went up the steep
hillside.
Two
shots fired in comparatively good light at a range of thirty yards, and heard
by anxious villagers for miles round: and all I should have to show for them would
be, certainly one, and quite possibly two, bullet holes in a dead buffalo.
Clearly my eyesight was failing, or in climbing the rock I had knocked the
foresight out of alignment. But on focusing my eyes on small objects I found
there was nothing wrong with my eye-sight, and a glance along the barrel showed
that the sights were all right, so the only reason I could assign for having
missed the tiger twice was bad shooting.
There
was no chance of the tiger returning a third time; and even if it did return,
there was nothing to be gained by risking the possibility of only wounding it
in bad light when I had not been able to kill it while the light had been comparatively
good. Under these circumstances there was no object in my remaining any longer
on the ledge.
My
clothes were still damp from my exertions earlier in the day, a cold wind was
blowing and promised to get colder, my shorts were of thin khaki and the rock
was hard and cold, and a hot cup of tea awaited me in the village. Good as
these reasons were, there was a better and a more convincing reason for my
remaining where I was the man-eater. It was now quite dark. A quarter-of-a-mile
walk, along a boulder-strewn ravine and a winding path through dense
undergrowth, lay between me and the village. Beyond the suspicions of the
villagers that the tiger they had seen the previous day and that I had quite
evidently just fired at was the man-eater, I had no definite knowledge of the
man-eater's whereabouts; and though at that moment she might have been fifty
miles away, she might also have been watching me from a distance of fifty
yards, so, uncomfortable as my perch was, prudence dictated that I should
remain where I was. As the long hours dragged by, the conviction grew on me
that man-eater shooting, by night, was not a pastime that appealed to me, and
that if this animal could not be shot during daylight hours she would have to
be left to die of old age. This conviction was strengthened, when, cold and
stiff, I started to climb down as soon as there was sufficient light to shoot
by, and slipping on the dew-drenched rock completed the descent with my feet in
the air. Fortunately I landed on a bed of sand, without doing myself or the
rifle any injury.
Early
as it was I found the village astir, and I was quickly in the middle of a small
crowd. In reply to the eager questions from all sides, I was only able to say
that I had been firing at an imaginary tiger with blank ammunition.
A
pot of tea drunk while sitting near a roaring fire did much to restore warmth
to my inner and outer man, and then, accompanied by most of the men and all the
boys of the village, I went to where a rock jutted out over the ravine and
directly above my overnight exploit. To the assembled throng I explained how
the tiger had appeared from the recess under me and had bounded on to the
buffalo, and how after I had fired it had dashed off in that direction; and as
I pointed up the ravine there was an excited shout of ' Look, sahib, there's
the tiger lying dead! 'My eyes were strained with an all-night vigil, but even
after looking away and back again there was no denying the fact that the tiger
was lying there, dead. To the very natural question of why I had fired a second
shot after a period of twenty or thirty minutes, I said that the tiger had
appeared a second time from exactly the same place, and that I had fired at it
while it was standing near the buffalo and that it had gone up that side ravine
and there were renewed shouts, in which the women and girls who had now come up
joined, of ' Look, sahib, there is another tiger lying dead! 'Both tigers
appeared to be about the same size and both were lying sixty yards from where I
had fired.
Questioned
on the subject of this second tiger, the villagers said that when the four
human beings had been killed, and also on the previous day when the bullock had
been killed, only one tiger had been seen. The mating season for tigers is an
elastic one extending from November to April, and the man-eater if either of
the two tigers lying within view was the man-eater had evidently provided
herself with a mate.
A
way into the ravine, down the steep rock face, was found some two hundred yards
below where I had sat up, and, followed by the entire population of the
village, I went past the dead buffalo to where the first tiger was lying. As I
approached it hopes rose high, for she was an old tigress. Handing the rifle to
the nearest man I got down on my knees to examine her feet. On that day when
the tigress had tried to stalk the women cutting wheat she had left some
beautiful pug marks on the edge of the field. They were the first pug marks I
had seen of the man-eater, and I had examined them very carefully. They showed
the tigress to be a very old animal, whose feet had splayed out with age. The pads
of the forefeet were heavily rutted, one deep rut running right across the pad
of the right forefoot, and the toes were elongated to a length I had never
before seen in a tiger. With these distinctive feet it would have been easy to
pick the man-eater out of a hundred dead tigers. The animal before me was, I
found to my great regret, not the man-eater. When I conveyed this information
to the assembled throng of people there was a murmur of strong dissent from all
sides. It was asserted that I myself, on my previous visit, had declared the
man-eater to be an old tigress, and such an animal I had now shot a few yards
from where, only a short time previously, four of their number had been killed.
Against this convincing evidence, of what value was the evidence of the feet,
for the feet of all tigers were alike!
The
second tiger could, under the circumstances, only be a male, and while I made
preparations to skin the tigress I sent a party of men to fetch him. The side
ravine was steep and narrow, and after a great deal of shouting and laughter
the second tiger a fine male was laid down alongside the tigress.
The
skinning of those two tigers that had been dead fourteen hours, with the sun
beating down on my back and an ever growing crowd pressing round, was one of
the most unpleasant tasks I have ever undertaken. By early afternoon the job
was completed, and with the skins neatly tied up for my men to carry I was
ready to start on my five-mile walk back to camp.
During
the morning Headmen and others had come in from adjoining villages, and before
leaving I assured them that the Chowgarh man-eater was not dead and warned them
that the slackening of precautions would give the tigress the opportunity she
was waiting for. Had my warning been heeded, the man-eater would not have
claimed as many victims as she did during the succeeding months.
There
was no further news of the man-eater, and after a stay of a few weeks at
Dalkania, I left to keep an appointment with the district officials in the
terai.
In
March 1930, Vivian, our District Commissioner, was touring through the
man-eater's domain, and on the 22nd of the month I received an urgent request
from him to go to Kala Agar, where he said he would await my arrival. It is
roughly fifty miles from Naini Tal to Kala Agar, and two days after receipt of
Vivian's letter I arrived in time for breakfast at the Kala Agar Forest
Bungalow, where he and Mrs Vivian were staying.
Over
breakfast the Vivians told me they had arrived at the bungalow on the afternoon
of the 2ist, and while they were having tea on the verandah, one of six women
who were cutting grass in the compound of the bungalow had been killed and
carried off by the man-eater. Rifles were hurriedly seized and, accompanied by
some of his staff, Vivian followed up the ' drag' and found the dead woman
tucked away under a bush at the foot of an oak tree. On examining the ground
later, I found that on the approach of Vivian's party the tigress had gone off
down the hill, and throughout the subsequent proceedings had remained in a
thicket of raspberry bushes, fifty yards from the kill. A machan was put up in
the oak tree for Vivian, and two others in trees near the forest road which
passed thirty yards above the kill, for members of his staff. The machans were
occupied as soon as they were ready and the party sat up the whole night,
without, however, seeing anything of the tigress.
Next
morning the body of the woman was removed for cremation, and a young buffalo
was tied up on the forest road about half a mile from the bungalow, and killed
by the tigress the same night. The following evening the Vivians sat up over
the buffalo. There was no moon, and just as daylight was fading out and nearby
objects becoming indistinct, they first heard, and then saw an animal coming up
to the kill, which in the uncertain light they mistook for a bear; but for this
unfortunate mistake their very sporting effort would have resulted in their
bagging the man-eater, for both the Vivians are good rifle shots.
On
the 25th the Vivians left Kala Agar, and during the course of the day my four
buffaloes arrived from Dalkania. As the tigress now appeared to be inclined to
accept this form of bait I tied them up at intervals of a few hundred yards
along the forest road. For three nights in succession the tigress passed within
a few feet of the buffaloes without touching them, but on the fourth night the
buffalo nearest the bungalow was killed. On examining the kill in the morning I
was disappointed to find that the buffalo had been killed by a pair of leopards
I had heard calling the previous night above the bungalow. I did not like the
idea of firing in this locality, for fear of driving away the tigress, but it
was quite evident that if I did not shoot the leopards they would kill my three
remaining buffaloes, so I stalked them while they were sunning themselves on
some big rocks above the kill, and shot both of them.
The
forest road from the Kala Agar bungalow runs for several miles due west through
very beautiful forests of pine, oak and rhododendron, and in these forests
there is, compared with the rest of Kumaon, quite a lot of game in the way of
sambur, kakar and pig, in addition to a great wealth of bird life. On two
occasions I suspected the tigress of having killed sambur in this forest, and
though on both occasions I found the blood- stained spot where the animal had
been killed, I failed to find either of the kills.
For
the next fourteen days I spent all the daylight hours either on the forest
road, on which no one but myself ever set foot, or in the jungle, and only
twice during that period did I get near the tigress. On the first occasion I
had been down to visit an isolated village, on the south face of Kala Agar
ridge, that had been abandoned the previous year owing to the depredations of
1^e man-eater, and on the way back had taken a cattle track that went over the
ridge and down the far side to the forest road, when, approaching a pile of
rocks, I suddenly felt there was danger ahead. The distance from the ridge to
the forest road was roughly three hundred yards. Thte track, after leaving the
ridge, went steeply down for a few yards and then turned to the right and ran
diagonally across the hill for a hundred yards; the pile of rocks was about
midway on the right-hand .side of this length of the track. Beyond the rocks a
hairpin bend carried the track to the left, and a hundred yards further on,
another sharp bend took it down to its junction with the forest road.
I
had been along this track many times, and this was the first occasion on which
I hesitated to pass the rocks. To avoid them I should either have had to go
several hundred yards through dense undergrowth, or make a wide detour round
and above them; the former would have subjected me to very great danger, and there
was no time for the latter, for the sun was near setting and I had still two
miles to go. So, whether I liked it or not, there was nothing for it but to
face the rocks. The wind was blowing up the hill so I was able to ignore the
thick cover on the left of the track, and concentrate all my attention on the
rocks to my right. A hundred feet would see me clear of the danger zone, and
this distance I covered foot by foot, walking sideways with my face to the
rocks and the rifle to my shoulder; a strange mode of progression, had there
been any to see it.
Thirty
yards beyond the rocks was an open glade, starting from the right-hand side of
the track and extending up the hill for fifty or sixty yards, and screened from
the rocks by a fringe of bushes. In this glade a kakar was grazing. I saw her
before she saw me, and watched her out of the corner of my eye. On catching
sight of me she threw up her head, and as I was not looking in her direction
and was moving slowly on she stood stock still, as these animals have a habit
of doing when they are under the impression that they have not been seen. On
arrival at the hairpin bend I looked over my shoulder and saw that the kakar
had lowered her head, and was once more cropping the grass.
I
had walked a short distance along the track after passing the bend when the
kakar went dashing up the hill, barking hysterically. In a few quick strides I
was back at the bend, and was just in time to see a movement in the bushes on
the lower side of the track. That the kakar had seen the tigress was quite
evident, and the only place where she could have seen her was on the track. The
movement I had seen might have been caused by the passage of a bird, on the
other hand it might have been caused by the tigress; anyway, a little investigation
was necessary before proceeding further on my way.
A
trickle of water seeping out from under the rocks had damped the red clay of
which the track was composed, making an ideal surface for the impression of
tracks. In this damp clay I had left footprints, and over these footprints I
now found the splayed-out pug marks of the tigress where she had jumped down
from the rocks and followed me, until the kakar had seen her and given its
alarm-call, whereon the tigress had left the track and entered the bushes where
I had seen the movement. The tigress was undoubtedly familiar with every foot
of the ground, and not having had an opportunity of killing me at the rocks and
her chance of bagging me at the first hairpin bend having been spoilt by the
kakar she was probably now making her way through the dense undergrowth to try
to intercept me at the second bend.
Further
progress along the track was now not advisable, so I followed the kakar up the
glade, and turning to the left worked my way down, over open ground, to the
forest road below. Had there been sufficient daylight I believe I could, that
evening, have turned the tables on the tigress, for the conditions, after she
left the shelter of the rocks, were all in my favor. I knew the ground as well
as she did, and while she had no reason to suspect my intention towards her, I
had the advantage of knowing, very clearly, her intentions towards me. However,
though the conditions were in my favor, I was unable to take advantage of them
owing to the lateness of the evening.
I
have made mention elsewhere of the sense that warns us of impending danger, and
will not labour the subject further beyond stating that this sense is a very
real one and that I do not know, and therefore cannot explain, what brings it into
operation. On this occasion I had neither heard nor seen the tigress, nor had I
received any indication from bird or beast of her presence, and yet I knew,
without any shadow of doubt, that she was lying up for me among the rocks. I
had been out for many hours that day and had covered many miles of jungle with
unflagging caution, but without one moment's unease, and then, on cresting the
ridge, and coming in sight of the rocks, I knew they held danger for me, and
this knowledge was confirmed a few minutes later by the kakar's warning call to
the jungle folk, and by my finding the man-eater's pug marks superimposed on my
footprints.
IV
To
those of my readers who have had the patience to accompany me so far in my
narrative, I should like to give a clear and a 1 detailed account of my first
and last meeting with the tigress.
The
meeting took place in the early afternoon of the 9th of April 1930, nineteen
days after my arrival at Kala Agar.
I
had gone out that day at 2 p.m. with the intention of tying up my three
buffaloes at selected places along the forest road, when at a point a mile from
the bungalow, where the road crosses a ridge and goes from the north to the
west face of the Kala Agar range, I came on a large party of men who had been
out collecting firewood. In the party was an old man who, pointing down the
hill to a thicket of young oak trees some five hundred yards from where we were
standing, said it was in that thicket where the man-eater, a month previously,
had killed his only son, a lad eighteen years of age. I had not heard the
father's version of the killing of his son, so, while we sat on the edge of the
road smoking, he told his story, pointing out the spot where the lad had been
killed, and where all that was left of him had been found the following day.
The old man blamed the twenty-five men who had been out collecting firewood on
that day for the death of his son, saying, very bitterly, that they had run
away and left him to be killed by the tiger. Some of the men sitting near me
had been in that party of twenty-five and they hotly repudiated responsibility
for the lad's death, accusing him of having been responsible for the stampede
by screaming out that he had heard the tiger growling and telling everyone to
run for their lives. This did not satisfy the old man. He shook his head and
said, * you are grown men and he was only a boy, and you ran away and left him
to be killed/ I was sorry for having asked the questions that had led to this
heated discussion, and more to placate the old man than for any good it would
do, I said I would tie up one of my buffaloes near the spot where he said his
son had been killed. So, handing two of the buffaloes over to the party to take
back to the bungalow, I set off followed by two of my men leading the remaining
buffalo.
A
footpath, taking off close to where we had been sitting, went down the hill to
the valley below and zigzagged up the opposite pine-clad slope to join the
forest road two miles further on. The path passed close to an open patch of
ground which bordered the oak thicket in which the lad had been killed. On this
patch of ground, which was about thirty yards square, there was a solitary pine
sapling. This I cut down. I tied the buffalo to the stump, set one man to
cutting a supply of grass for it, and sent the other man, Madho Singh, who
served in the Garhwalis during the Great War and is now serving in the United
Provinces Civil Pioneer Force, up an oak tree with instructions to strike a dry
branch with the head of his axe and call at the top of his voice as hill people
do when cutting leaves for their cattle. I then took up a position on a rock,
about four feet high, on the lower edge of the open ground. Beyond the rock the
hill fell steeply away to the valley below and was densely clothed with tree
and scrub jungle.
The
man on the ground had made several trips with the grass he had cut, and Madho
Singh on the tree was alternately shouting and singing lustily, while I stood
on the rock smoking, with the rifle in the hollow of my left arm, when, all at
once, I became aware that the man-eater had arrived. Beckoning urgently to the
man on the ground to come to me, I whistled to attract Madho Singh's attention
and signalled to him to remain quiet. The ground on three sides was
comparatively open. Madho Singh on the tree was to my left front, the man
cutting grass had been in front of me, while the buffalo now showing signs of
uneasiness was to my right front. In this area the tigress could not have
approached without my seeing her; and as she had approached, there was only one
place where she could now be, and that was behind and immediately below me.
When
taking up my position I had noticed that the further side of the rock was steep
and smooth, that it extended down the hill for eight or ten feet, and that the
lower portion of it was masked by thick undergrowth and young pine saplings. It
would have been a little difficult, but quite possible, for the tigress to have
climbed the rock, and I relied for my safety on hearing her in the undergrowth
should she make the attempt.
I
have no doubt that the tigress, attracted, as I had intended she should be, by
the noise Madho Singh was making, had come to the rock, and that it was while
she was looking up at me and planning her next move that I had become aware of
her presence. My change of front, coupled with the silence of the men, may have
made her suspicious; anyway, after a lapse of a few minutes, I heard a dry twig
snap a little way down the hill; thereafter the feeling of unease left me, and
the tension relaxed. An opportunity lost; but there was still a very good
chance of my getting a shot, for she would undoubtedly return before long, and
when she found us gone would probably content her with killing the buffalo.
There were still four or five hours of daylight, and by crossing the valley and
going up the opposite slope I should be able to overlook the whole of the
hillside on which the buffalo was tethered. The shot, if I did get one, would
be a long one of from two to three hundred yards, but the .275 rifle I was
carrying was accurate, and even if I only wounded the tigress I should have a
blood trail to follow, which would be better than feeling about for her in
hundreds of square miles of jungle, as I had been doing these many months.
The
men were a difficulty. To have sent them back to the bungalow alone would have
been nothing short of murder, so of necessity I kept them with me.
Tying
the buffalo to the stump in such a manner as to make it impossible for the
tigress to cany it away, I left the open ground and rejoined the path to carry
out the plan I have outlined, of trying to get a shot from the opposite hill.
About
a hundred yards along the path I came to a ravine. On the far side of this the
path entered very heavy under- growth, and as it was inadvisable to go into
thick cover with two men following me, I decided to take to the ravine, follow
it down to its junction with the valley, work up the valley and pick up the
path on the far side of the undergrowth.
The
ravine was about ten yards wide and four or five feet deep, and as I stepped
down into it a nightjar fluttered off a rock on which I had put my hand. On
looking at the spot from which the bird had risen, I saw two eggs. These eggs,
straw-coloured, with rich brown markings, were of a most un- usual shape, one
being long and very pointed, while the other was as round as a marble; and as
my collection lacked nightjar eggs I decided to add this odd clutch to it. I
had no receptacle of any kind in which to carry the eggs, so cupping my left
hand I placed the eggs in it and packed them round with a little moss. As I
went down the ravine the banks became higher, and sixty yards from where I had
entered it I came on a deep drop of some twelve to fourteen feet. The water
that rushes down all these hill ravines in the rains had worn the rock as
smooth as glass, and as it was too steep to offer a foothold I handed the rifle
to the men and, sitting on the edge, proceeded to slide down. My feet had
hardly touched the sandy bottom when the two men, with a flying leap, landed
one on either side of me, and thrusting the rifle into my hand asked in a very
agitated manner if I had heard the tiger. As a matter of fact I had heard
nothing, possibly due to the scraping of my clothes on the rocks, and when
questioned, the men said that what they had heard was a deep-throated growl
from somewhere close at hand, but exactly from which direction the sound had
come, they were unable to say. Tigers do not betray their presence by growing
when looking for their dinner and the only, and very unsatisfactory,
explanation I can offer is that the tigress followed us after we left the open
ground, and on seeing that we were going down the ravine had gone ahead and
taken up a position where the ravine narrowed to half its width; and that when
she was on the point of springing out on me, I had disappeared out of sight
down the slide and she had involuntarily given vent to her disappointment with
a low growl. Not a satisfactory reason, unless one assumes without any reason
that she had selected me for her dinner, and therefore had no interest in the
two men. Where the three of us now stood in a bunch we had the smooth steep
rock behind us, to our right a wall of rock slightly leaning over the ravine
and fifteen feet high, and to our left a tumbled bank of big rocks thirty or
forty feet high. The sandy bed of the ravine, on which we were standing, was
roughly forty feet long and ten feet wide. At the lower end of this sandy bed a
great pine tree had fallen across, damming the ravine, and the collection of
the sand was due to this dam. The wall of overhanging rock came to an end
twelve or fifteen feet from the fallen tree, and as I approached the end of the
rock, my feet making no sound on the sand, I very fortunately noticed that the
sandy bed continued round to the back of the rock.
This
rock about which I have said so much I can best describe as a giant school
slate, two feet thick at its lower end, and standing up not quite
perpendicularly on one of its long sides.
As
I stepped clear of the giant slate, I looked behind me over my right shoulder
and looked straight into the tigress's face.
I
would like you to have a clear picture of the situation.
The
sandy bed behind the rock was quite flat. To the right of it was the smooth
slate fifteen feet high and leaning slightly outwards, to the left of it was a
scoured-out steep bank also some fifteen feet high overhung by a dense tangle
of thorn buses, while at the far end was a slick similar to, but a little
higher than, the one I had glissaded down. The sandy bed, enclosed by these
three natural walls, was about twenty feet long and half as wide, and lying on
it, with her fore-paws stretched out and her hind legs well tucked under her,
was the tigress. Her head, which was raised a few inches off her paws, was
eight feet (measured later) from me, and on her face was a smile, similar to
that one sees on the face of a dog welcoming his master home after a long
absence.
Two
thoughts flashed through my mind, one, that it was up to me to make the first
move, and the other, that the move would have to be made in such a manner as
not to alarm the tigress or make her nervous.
The
rifle was in my right hand held diagonally across my chest, with the
safety-catch off, and in order to get it to bear on the tigress the muzzle would
have to be swung round three quarters of a circle.
The
movements of swinging round the rifle, with one hand, were begun very slowly,
and hardly perceptibly, and when a quarter of a circle had been made, the stock
came in contact with my right side. It was now necessary to extend my arm, and
as the stock cleared my side, the swing was very slowly continued. My arm was
now at full stretch and the weight of the rifle was beginning to tell. Only a
little further now for the muzzle to go, and the tigress who had not once taken
her eyes off mine was still looking up at me, with the pleased expression still
on her face.
How
long it took the rifle to make the three-quarter circle, I am not in a position
to say. To me, looking into the tigress's eyes and unable therefore to follow
the movement of the barrel, it appeared that my arm was paralyzed, and that the
swing would never be completed. However, the movement was completed at last,
and as soon as the rifle was pointing at the tigress's body, I pressed the
trigger.
I
heard the report, exaggerated in that restricted space, and felt the jar of the
recoil, and but for these tangible proofs that the rifle had gone off, I might,
for all the immediate result the shot produced, have been in the grip of one of
those awful nightmares in which triggers are vainly pulled of rifles that
refuse to be discharged at the critical moment.
For
a perceptible fraction of time the tigress remained perfectly still, and then,
very slowly, her head sank on to her outstretched paws, while at the same time
a jet of blood issued from the bullet-hole. The bullet had injured her spine
and shattered the upper portion of her heart.
The
two men who were following a few yards behind me, and who were separated from
the tigress by the thickness of the rock, came to a halt when they saw me stop
and turn my head. They knew instinctively that I had seen the tigress and
judged from my behavior that she was close at hand, and Madho Singh said
afterwards that he wanted to call out and tell me to drop the eggs and get both
hands on the rifle. When I had fired my shot and lowered the point of the rifle
on to my toes, Madho Singh, at a sign, came forward to relieve me of it, for
very suddenly my legs appeared to be unable to support me, so I made for the
fallen tree and sat down. Even before looking at the pads of her feet I knew it
was the Chowgarh tigress I had sent to the Happy Hunting Grounds, and that the
shears that had assisted her to cut the threads of sixty- four human lives the
people of the district put the number at twice that figure had, while the game
was in her hands, turned, and cut the thread of her own life.
Three
things, each of which would appear to you to have been to my disadvantage, were
actually in my favor. These were (a) the eggs in my left hand, (b) the light
rifle I was carrying, and (c) the tiger being a man-eater. If I had not had the
eggs in my hand I should have had both hands on the rifle, and when I looked
back and saw the tiger at such close quarters I should instinctively have tried
to swing round to face her, and the spring that was arrested by my lack of
movement would inevitably have been launched. Again, if the rifle had not been
a light one it would not have been possible for me to have moved it in the way
it was imperative I should move it, and then discharge it at the full extent of
my arm. And lastly, if the tiger had been just an ordinary tiger, and not a
man-eater, it would, on finding itself cornered, have made for the opening and
wiped me out of the way; and to be wiped out of the way by a tiger usually has
fatal results.
While
the men made a detour and went up the hill to free the buffalo and secure the
rope, which was needed for another and more pleasant purpose, I climbed over
the rocks and went up the ravine to restore the eggs to their rightful owner. I
plead guilty of being as superstitious as my brother sportsmen.
For
three long periods, extending over a whole year, I had tried and tried hard to
get a shot at the tigress, and had failed; and now within a few minutes of
having picked up the eggs my luck had changed.
The
eggs, which all this time had remained safely in the hollow of my left hand,
were still warm when I replaced them in the little depression in the rock that
did duty as a nest, and when I again passed that way half an hour later, they
had vanished under the brooding mother whose colouring so exactly matched the
mottled rock that it was difficult for me, who knew the exact spot where the
nest was situated, to distinguish her from her surroundings.
The
buffalo, who after months of care was now so tame that it followed like a dog,
came scrambling down the hill in the wake of the men, nosed the tigress and lay
down on the sand to chew the cud of contentment, while we lashed the tigress to
the stout pole the men had cut.
I
had tried to get Madho Singh to return to the bungalow for help, but this he
would not hear of doing. With no one would he and his companion share the
honour of carrying in the man-eater, and if I would lend a hand the task, he
said, with frequent halts for rest, would not be too difficult. We were three
hefty men two accustomed from childhood to carrying heavy loads and all three
hardened by a life of exposure; but even so, the task we set ourselves was a
herculean one.
The
path down which we had come was too narrow and too winding for the long pole to
which the tigress was lashed, so, with frequent halts to regain breath and
readjust pads to prevent the pole biting too deep into shoulder muscles, we
went straight up the hill through a tangle of raspberry and briar bushes, on
the thorns of which we left a portion of our clothing and an amount of skin which
made bathing for many days a painful operation.
The
sun was still shining on the surrounding hills when three disheveled and very
happy men, followed by a buffalo, carried the tigress to the Kala Agar Forest
Bungalow, and from that evening to this day no human being has been killed or
wounded over the hundreds of square miles of mountain and vale over which the
Chowgarh tigress, for a period of five years, held sway.
I
have added one more cross and date to the map of Eastern Kumaon that hangs on
the wall before me the cross and the date the man-eater earned. The cross is
two miles west of Kala Agar and the date under it is 7 April 1930.
The
tigress's claws were broken, and bushed out, and one of her canine teeth was
broken, and her front teeth were worn down to the bone. It was these defects
that had made her a man-eater and were the causes of her not being able to kill
outright and by her own efforts a large proportion of the human beings she had
attacked since the day she had been deprived of the assistance of the cub I
had, on my first visit, shot by mistake.
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