How a lone Irishman killed a terrifying, people-eating tiger

When the strike came, it happened without warning. Some rustling in the tall grass maybe, or the whisper of padded feet, but nothing to suggest the explosion of primal savagery that followed.

With stunning speed, the beast would pounce. Razor claws shredded the victim’s flanks, powerful jaws snapped the neck, and in seconds it was over, the beast dragging its quarry into the trees for a gorging.

This Bengal tiger was no ordinary beast. It was the legendary Man-Eater of Champawat, which at the turn of the 20th century inflicted a seven-year reign of terror on swaths of rural India and Nepal, killing an estimated 436 men, women and children.

Operating with “almost supernatural efficacy,” the tiger was “the most prolific serial killer of human life the world had ever seen,” writes Dane Huckelbridge in “No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History” (William Morrow), out Tuesday.

The tiger started his campaign of death with the indigenous Tharu, who lived in mud-walled huts in the jungles of Western Nepal, before moving on to the Kumaon region of Northern India, bringing entire villages to their knees.

“They had become veritable refugees in their own homes, stalked by a specter that seemed able to kill them at will,” Huckelbridge writes of the residents of one such village. “The entire countryside was paralyzed, as no one knew where or when the tiger might strike.”

An adult tiger can weigh more than 500 pounds, with 4-inch canines and paws that can decapitate a human with a single swipe. Tigers can sprint as fast as a racehorse, and have hyper-tuned ears that can hear “the swallowing of saliva and the whistling of breath through nostrils.” The striped predators have pulled sleeping people from huts, swum out to drag them off boats, and leaped a dozen feet in the air to yank them out of trees.

It’s rare that tigers will attack a person, and it’s rarer still that they’ll eat one, but the Champawat came to rely on human meat as a result of several factors.

One is loss of habitat, after the English colonial government that ruled India plowed grasslands and razed forests for timber and farmland.

Another is loss of prey, which came with habitat loss and was worsened by poaching and disease.

Finally, the tiger had a hidden wound: An attempted kill had shattered its upper and lower right canines, leaving it unable to defend its hunting turf against other tigers and forcing it to look farther afield. Venturing out into inhabited areas, at some point it discovered that humans were a ready source of protein, and human settlements “became a veritable smorgasbord.”

In addition to its other gifts, a predator that emerges from the wild only to launch sporadic lightning attacks is a tough foe to vanquish. The Champawat survived many extermination efforts over the years.

The English government sent bounty hunters to no avail; police and army troops tried and failed to capture the tiger. As fear mounted, the tiger became a source of embarrassment for English officials, who unlike the Indian citizenry had no reverence for tigers, seeing them as forest vermin to be dominated like they’d subjugated India’s populace. They set a bounty on tigers, which led to the killing of tens of thousands of them. But they couldn’t conquer the Man-Eater of Champawat.

So, in 1907, Charles Henry Berthoud, the deputy commissioner of Nainital, paid a visit to his friend Jim Corbett. Corbett was “something of a curiosity.”

The son of an Irish postmaster who’d settled in the region, he was a railroad worker who’d been born and raised in the hills of Kumaon. One of 15 children, he’d “spent his formative years tracking alongside indigenous [hunters] in the jungles of Kaladhungi,” killing his first leopard at 10.

Among colonists, the enigmatic Irishman was a rarity, “as at ease tracking sambar through the jungle as he was playing bridge at high tea.” A master tracker and an expert marksman, Corbett “could imitate the grunts of a leopard or the chuffing of a tiger with an accuracy that sent a collective shiver through a dinner party.”

Berthoud often turned to Corbett for local insight, but on this visit he had something bigger in mind. He wanted Corbett to kill the Champawat. He was their last hope, Berthoud told him. Corbett, who despite his deep hunting experience had no roadmap for bagging nomadic man-eating tigers, agreed to try.

He didn’t have to wait long.

Five days later, a breathless runner arrived to report a fresh killing — a woman who’d been ripped from a tree while gathering leaves to feed cattle in a town 60 miles away.

Corbett set out immediately, with a team of six natives in tow. After a few days’ hike, he arrived to find the villagers, as he later wrote, “in the state of abject terror,” unwilling to leave their homes. Corbett spent days looking from dawn to dusk, but the trail went cold. The tiger would strike again soon, but where?

At the suggestion of villagers, he headed for the nearby village of Champawat, the site of numerous attacks. Sure enough, soon after his arrival, a 16-year-old girl was dragged into the forest, and Corbett had a fresh blood trail.

A gruesome trail it was, leading deep into a ravine where Corbett found her skirt, then bone splinters and finally a human leg still trickling warm blood. The man-eater was nigh, a realization both hopeful and terrifying. But several pulse-pounding hours yielded nothing and he retreated — but with a plan.

The next morning he returned with 300 villagers, who under Corbett’s direction formed a line to rake the ravine where the tiger lurked, “firing rifles, pounding drums and screaming as loud as their lungs would allow.”

As they did, Corbett lay in wait by the mouth of the gorge with his rifle. He knew he’d have only seconds to take his shot at a target moving at lightning speed. He also knew the likely price of missing was death.

It appeared, “a striped apparition, too fleet to be real, erupting from the shadows.” Corbett shot — and missed. A second shot found its mark, and a third, but the snarling, enraged cat still came — and Corbett was out of cartridges. Desperate, he sprinted across the valley to grab a shotgun from a villager, ran back and from 20 feet leveled a blast that brought the Champawat’s campaign of carnage to an end.

For the villagers, a celebration followed. The tiger was paraded through surrounding villages, festivities went deep into the night and preparations were made for a feast the next day. Corbett, a quiet and humble man who was exhilarated by his victory but also shaken by the killing of a tiger, skipped the feast and instead headed home on a borrowed horse. With him, he carried a trophy: the skin of the formerly nameless tiger, now forever known as the Champawat, rolled up and strapped to the saddle.

Vanquishing the killer made Corbett a celebrity — and the go-to hunter for tracking the man-eaters that struck in the ensuing decades, from marauding leopards to the Thak Man-Eater, the final tiger he dispatched, in 1938 at the age of 63. He became a favored dinner guest of colonial elites, a best-selling author, and was honored by both the Indian and British governments — heady business for a man who’d spent years laboring at a cholera-ridden railway outpost in the jungle.

In the decades after he dispatched the Champawat, the number of tigers in India plummeted, and while Corbett was their most famous hunter, he was also a lifelong lover of Indian wildlife. Shaken by their decline, “the legendary tiger hunter became the animal’s most dedicated conservationist,” spending the last two decades of his life lobbying for their protection.

Today only some 4,000 tigers remain in Asia, and between poaching and habitat destruction “the animal’s future is imperiled, to say the least,” Huckelbridge writes.

Endangered though they may be, the occasional tiger takes to attacking humans, and in that sense the spirit of the Champawat lives on. In 2014, a tiger killed 10 people during a six-week rampage after it escaped from a nature preserve in Northern India — one named for none other than Jim Corbett.

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