It had been driven out by armed Nepalese. Astonishingly, they’d failed to shoot the beast. Having killed 200 people, it now imperiled citizens in the Kumaon Division of India’s northern United Provinces. The Commissioner of Naini Tal owed the villages there a response. When posting a reward, even sending troops into the jungle failed to bring the animal “to bag”, he called upon an unassuming ex-soldier and mid-level government official.
Edward James Corbett was born July 25, 1875, in the Kumaon hills, hard against the Himalayas. Four years old when his father died, “Jim” and his 12 siblings were raised by their mother on the family’s Naini Tal estate and at a cottage 15 miles distant. The youngster showed a keen interest in nature, tracking animals and collecting birds’ eggs. He learned to hunt “with an old muzzle-loading gun — the right barrel of which was split for 6 inches of its length, and the stock and barrels [lashed by] brass wire.”
But this tiger was no ordinary game, the Commissioner pointed out. It ate people. In fact, its tally of human victims had more than doubled in the four years since its arrival. While Corbett had never dealt with such a creature, he accepted the task, promising to investigate the next kill.
It came within a week. A girl had been taken near the village of Pali, west of Champawat. Corbett started the next day, six men bearing his light camp 17 miles. After another day and night, they arrived at Pali the third evening, “Five days after the woman had been killed.”
The few dozen people there had stayed indoors. For three nights the tigress had called on the road short yards away. As the huts and courtyard were heavy with filth, Corbett chose to pass the night outside, seated against a tree. He had spent many nights alone in the jungle, but this was the first in striking distance of a man-eater. A full moon cast long shadows under tree limbs. In a light breeze, both moved with feline grace. “I saw a dozen tigers advancing [but] lacked the courage to return to the village and admit [my terror].”
Led the next day to where the girl had died, Corbett learned she’d been in a party collecting oak leaves for cattle. With two other women, she’d climbed a tree near a ravine. The tigress had caught her by the heel on her descent, torn her from the tree, killed her and carried her into a thicket. The other women raced back to their huts. Men with cooking pots beat their way to the site. Growls from a clump of bushes prompted the only man with a muzzle-loader to fire it into the air before all scurried back to the village.
So informed, Corbett asked why he’d not sent the shot into the bushes where surely the beast was feeding. The man replied that if the ball had struck the animal, it would have come out and killed him. Such fatalism marked rural villages. The speed, power and silence of a tiger struck fear into even armed men. Their single-shot blackpowder guns were no salvation. A shot was as likely to cause injury that prevented the cat from killing wild prey — a common genesis of man-eaters.
Hunting the Hunter
Corbett’s trained eye found tiger spoor where the last victim had been eaten, but the sign was too faint to follow. Scouting, he came upon a hut near the village’s hem. The woman could not speak. A year earlier she’d been cutting grass with her sister. A tiger sprang on her sibling and carried her off. In a rage, the woman ran after the cat, screaming and brandishing her sickle. Then the power of speech had left her.
While Corbett told her he’d come to kill that tiger, his words rang hollow. He was inexperienced, as this was the first man-eater known in Kumaon. It had yet to kill twice in one place or return to a kill. It roamed hundreds of square miles. Despairing, he moved a day’s walk east, to Champawat. He was joined by two dozen villagers who had dared not walk alone. On the way, Corbett learned of another victim. Two months earlier, a group of men had trod the same road. Suddenly they heard screams, which grew louder. A tiger appeared, carrying a woman by the small of her back. The beast passed the shocked group as she wailed her last pleas to God for help.
“And you men did nothing?” Corbett asked.
“No, sahib. What can men do when they are afraid? Besides, the woman was dying. Angering the tiger would only have brought misfortunes on ourselves.”
Corbett walked miles over steep terrain to investigate reports from cowed villagers. Fear sparked rumor. A dead calf proved to be a leopard kill. Then another girl died. He hurried to the spot. Tiger tracks were clearly visible; splashes of blood, then a sari confirmed its prey. By a pool he came upon the girl’s leg. He would remember that sight as the most pitiful of his career. It took his eye from the track just as loose earth rolled down a slope 15 feet away. How stupid of me! But instead of killing Corbett, the tiger took its interrupted meal into “a wilderness of rocks … the cracks and chasms masked with ferns and blackberry vines.” He followed, all senses alert. By best estimate, the beast ahead had now killed 436 people. It was used to having hunters on its trail. But growls announced the tiger’s displeasure at his persistence.
Then it was silent, increasing Corbett’s peril and slowing his step. After four hours, to ensure his return in daylight, he left the track. The tiger would finish eating that night and probably not move unless pushed. The going was too rough and noisy there to continue tracking. At Champawat he asked for volunteers to beat the jungle. Few stepped forward. Then the Tahsildar promised to “turn a blind eye” to unlicensed firearms — and that he would provide ammunition. By midday, 298 pushers had shown up.
Leaving them to spread across the lower end of the drainage, Corbett hiked in an arc to sit in tall grass at the valley’s head. Gun shots, yells and a din from beaten pans and drums brought the tiger out; but when the nervous Tahsildar prematurely fired his shotgun, the cat reversed. Corbett’s “despairing bullet” took no effect.
Meanwhile, the beaters assumed the three reports signaled the tiger was dead. With a triumphant shout they fired all remaining loads. The tiger spun and raced up the gorge, breaking cover near Corbett. At his shot, it angled toward him, presenting an easy target at less than 30 yards. His second .500-grain bullet landed well, but the tiger did not fall. Ears flat, teeth bared, it faced its tormentor.
Corbett, however, had no more cartridges. “I never thought I would get more than two shots,” he would admit ruefully. “The third was [simply] for an emergency.”
Instead of coming for him, the tiger savaged the bushes round about. Corbett sprinted up the hill, wrenched the Tahsildar’s gun from his hands and dashed toward the wounded animal. At 20 feet he threw the smoothbore to cheek — only then noticing a big gap between barrels and breech. Taking that risk over the other, he fired at the cat’s open mouth. The ball instead punctured a paw — so shallowly he would later remove it with his fingers. By great good luck, Corbett’s rifle bullet took effect at this very moment. The Champawat man-eater died quietly under the last drifting wisps of blackpowder smoke.
On examining the tigress’ mouth, Corbett found her right-side canines broken, the upper in half, the lower to the bone. The result of a gun shot, this wound had prevented her from killing natural prey.
For eliminating this tigress, Corbett was given a rifle by London gunmaker John Rigby & Co. Its Mauser action was barreled to .275 Rigby (7x57). Trim and lightweight, it would, over the next decades, account for man-eating tigers at ranges as close as 10 feet.
The killing of a human by a wild animal anywhere now brings swift official response — even if the victim is a hunter and the beast is wounded or cornered and acting in self defense. So, kill tallies of India’s man-eating cats a century ago leave us aghast. How could a country or its sub-agencies permit dozens of citizens to be stalked and eaten before mounting a lethal campaign against the predator?
Natural hazards in wild places were once accepted without malice. Native peoples suffered more from the great cats of Africa and Asia than did European colonists. The infamous man-eating lion twins of Tsavo claimed 28 rail workers before both cats were killed. But had they not paused construction of the Uganda railway, they might well have eaten more before engineer J. H. Patterson made shooting the pair his personal priority. Notably, the toll these cats exacted in their nightly prowls doesn’t include uncounted natives they took from nearby villages.
Implicit here: some people were more highly valued than others. A European’s death mattered; that of a native or a low-caste member was often shrugged off by officials.Corbett was unable to find government records of man-eating tigers pre-dating 1905 in his part of India. This lack of data may well have reflected the scant historical effort to dispatch them. In 1907, when he hunted the Champawat man-eater, Corbett was urged by villagers in the nearby Amora District to save them from the Panar man-eater, a leopard as elusive as it was deadly. Between them, wrote Corbett, these two cats had killed 836 humans! But the government “had no machinery to put in action against them.”
Distances, roads and manpower limited the efforts of the most sympathetic governments. Corbett noted that the Chowgarh tigers roamed “an area of 1,500 square miles of mountains and vales, where the snow lies deep in winter and the valleys are scorching in summer, [where] paths beaten hard by bare feet connect the villages.” Reaching the site of a kill could take days of walking. The spoor would be faint or gone. Also, few government agents had the skills, courage or dedication to commit months to the trail of a man-eater. Private contractors and trophy hunters proved ineffective. At one district conference, Corbett was charged with killing three man-eating tigers in the Kumaon Division, and directed to prioritize them: 1st — Chowgarh, Naini Tal District; 2nd — Mohan, Almora District; 3rd — Kana, Garhwal District.
Corbett pushed himself physically and accepted great risk. To keep himself off the tigers’ menu, he usually closed solo, the better to focus while remaining aware of jungle sounds and silences. Survival often hinged on senses and options. He tried to choose a time and place. But when in 1938 a young girl was killed at Kot Kindri, the exceedingly long hike delayed his arrival. In that time, the tigress took a woman. Soon thereafter, another victim turned up near Thak. Remaining sign was again faint: a few tipped leaves. But “a goldenrod that had been pressed down had sprung erect.” He’d just missed her! Lest the month of hard days on spoor and cold nights over bait cost him his edge, Corbett walked 20 miles home to rest. As if on cue, the cat struck again. Corbett returned. His break came weeks later, when in a rocky thicket she gave voice, a mating call. From a narrow ledge, his .450-400 on a rock above, Corbett mouthed a reply.
Unexpectedly, she “came straight towards [me], working herself up into a perfect fury.” Suddenly, she was so near “I could hear the intake of her breath, [thus] as she again filled her lungs, I did the same with mine, and we called simultaneously. [Then] the blast of her deep-throated call struck me in the face.” Her huge head appeared in the failing light at mere feet, fortunately near the rifle’s muzzle. His first bullet entered under her right eye. The falling tigress “knocked me off the ledge … recoil from the left barrel, fired while I was in the air, [hammered] my jaw and sent me heels over head.”
The Thak man-eater was dead.
Corbett’s nerve had been tested earlier. By April, 1930, the Chowgarh tigress had killed at least 64 people. A year earlier, Corbett had come upon her and her grown cub. Tragically, he’d mistaken the young animal for its mother, sealing the fate of her future victims. Now, on her track again, in jungle that held vision to mere feet, he spied a pair of rare bird’s eggs. He picked them up. Short steps on, the trail kinked, forcing a turn. Suddenly he was staring “straight into the tigress’s face,” just a spring away. The eggs in his left palm, he wrote later, checked a reflexive urge to cheek the rifle, movement that might well have brought the cat on. Instead, with his right hand Corbett eased the Rigby across his chest. He felt that glacial swing “would never be completed ….” His arm was aching, his grip failing when the rifle came to bear. His .275-grain bullet smashed the man-eater’s spine and pulped her heart.
Jim Corbett: A Predator Hunter’s Life
Before committing 32 years to the almost regular pursuit of man-eaters, Jim Corbett supported his family on the railroad, a career later to span 20 years. During WWI, he served as captain of a 500-man Labor Corps in France. Promoted to Major after armistice, he commanded a Labor Battalion in the Third Afghan War. From 1920 to 1936, he supervised coffee and maize production, seasonally, in East Africa, where he turned from hunting to filming wildlife. Still, he continued to pursue man-eating cats, killing 19 tigers and 14 leopards, his last in 1938. He traveled with a small crew and a Spartan kit. His .275 Rigby rifle “was light to carry, accurate and sighted up to 300 yards.” He defended the cartridge’s modest punch, also his habit of carrying just five rounds, citing his confidence in the rifle. Corbett didn’t proclaim himself a crack shot.
Fifty years after shooting his first man-eater, Corbett affirmed his affection for the beasts. “When I see the expression … ‘blood-thirsty as a tiger,’ I think of a small boy … wandering through the jungles … when there were 10 tigers to every one that now survives, sleeping anywhere he happened to be when night came on, with a small fire to give him company, [wakened by] the callings of tigers [but knowing] a tiger, unless molested, would do him no harm. I think of him [peering over a] bush and a tiger walking out on the far side … with an expression on its face that said as clearly as any words, ‘Hello, kid, what the hell are you doing here?’ [Again] I think of the tens of thousands of men, women and children who, while working in the forests … pass day after day close to tigers [unaware].”
Corbett wrote several books. His best-known “Man-Eaters of Kumaon” was published in 1946. A life-long bachelor, Jim Corbett died in Kenya, April 19, 1955. — Wayne van Zwoll
What Makes a Man-Eater?
The great cats have earned their reputation as “dangerous game.” Wounded or cornered, they’re lethal. Indeed, the leopard, smallest of Africa’s “big five,” is considered by some PHs the deadliest among them. The late PH Don Heath told me that 80 percent of hunter injuries caused by wildlife in Zimbabwe are the handiwork of leopards, nearly all after the animals were shot, then followed into tight places. But an injured beast is not a man-eater — one that kills people to eat them. The Tsavo lions that pulled railroad workers from camps during East African nights were man-eaters, as was India’s lesser-known man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag, which killed 125 people while eluding hunters for eight years.
Corbett pointed out that tigers and leopards are most likely to stalk humans when rendered unable to kill wild prey, or when they come upon fresh human remains. Unlike tigers, he wrote, leopards also scavenge. Some have become man-eaters after finding bodies awaiting funeral rites. Hindus in Corbett’s time and homeland were often days bringing their dead to rivers for ritual cremation. Disease outbreaks, notably cholera, and the occasional blooms of war dead, drew leopards, too. While tigers and leopards are both semi-nocturnal and share hunting habits and killing techniques, man-eating tigers lose their fear of humans and move about during the day. Leopards remain shy, killing only when they have the clear edge, after dark. For these reasons, Corbett maintained, “man-eating tigers are easier to shoot than man-eating leopards.”
He noted that while tiger cubs mimic the mother, eating what she eats and assisting with kills, he knew of no young tiger that upon leaving the care of a man-eating tigress became a man-eater. — Wayne van Zwoll
