— 2 —
On a soft may night in West Bengal, when the sweet scent of khalsi flowers clung to the wet, warm darkness, when the moon shone round and white, and boatmen’s lanterns winked at one another like fireflies up and down the river, death came with an open mouth for Malek Molla.
The day’s work was over. Molla and his six companions had collected five kilograms of honey from the fat combs they’d found hanging among the small, curved, downward-pointing leaves of a genwa tree. Collecting honey is one of the most dangerous jobs in Sundarbans, yet from April to June hundreds of men leave their mud and thatch houses and their rice fields and fishing nets to follow the bees into the forest.
In little wooden boats they glide down the numberless channels that permeate the sodden land of Sundarbans. Barefoot they wade through the sucking clay mud. Carefully they step around the breathing roots of the mangroves, which spike up from the earth like bayonets. Sometimes they must pass through stands thick with hental, the palm from whose leaves the crocodiles build their nests. Its stems are armored with two-inch thorns so sharp that by the time you feel one in your foot, it has already penetrated half an inch and broken off in your flesh.
One man always stands guard for the group. There are many dangers to watch for. Tigers hunt in these forests. Crocodiles lurk in the shallows. Vipers coil in the shade. Even the bees can kill you. They are aggressive, and their sting causes muscle spasms, swelling, and fever. People who have been badly stung say that the pain can last for a year.
The honey itself is said to be an antidote to the bees’ poison. Some who have survived attacks by bee swarms say companions saved their lives by smearing the thin, spicy honey over the stings. Sundarbans honey is considered an elixir of sorts. Shamans say eating some each day will ensure a long life. The leaves of the khalsi, whose fragrant, white blossoms supply the pollen from which the earliest honey is made, are curative, too: a paste made from them will stanch the flow of blood.
But no blood had flowed on this day. The group found the first bees’ nest easily, eight feet up in a genwa. One man climbed the spindly trunk. With smoke from a kerosene-soaked torch of green hental fronds, he drove the bees from the hive and cut loose the swollen comb with a machete. Another man below caught the comb in a ten-gallon tin that had once held mustard oil. The others waited, armed with clubs, ready in case a tiger appeared; but none did. So they continued their quest through the forest, revisiting the hives they had spotted the day before. That afternoon they emerged from the forest laughing, safe, laden with their riches, the golden honey.
Now, in their low-bodied wooden boat, anchored in the Chamta River, beneath the palm thatch that roofed the cabin, the six tired men relaxed.
Their lantern gleamed. The men talked and laughed and smoked the harsh, leaf-wrapped cigarettes called bidi. A pot of curry and India’s ubiquitous dahl—lentil stew—bubbled on the boat’s clay stove. One man offered a song. The notes of the Bengali melody rose and fell, full and then empty, like the tides that rise to engulf the forest every six and a half hours and then fall back, drained.
No one felt the boat rock. No one heard a scream. But everyone heard the splash when something very heavy hit the water beside the boat.
The men flashed their torches on the water, into the forest, along the shore. And on the far bank of the river the light barely caught the figure of a huge, wet cat slinking into the mangroves, carrying the body of Malek Molla like a fish in its mouth. Molla had been quiet that evening; possibly he had been asleep. The tiger may have killed him without ever waking him up. Without making a sound, without rocking the boat, a predator who may have weighed five hundred pounds and stretched up to nine feet long had launched itself from the water, selected its victim, seized him in its jaws, and killed him instantly.
Molla’s body was recovered the following day. The tiger had severed his spinal cord with a single bite to the back of the neck. It had eaten the soft belly first.
In Sundarbans everyone watches for the tiger. But the tiger, they say, always sees you first. Every group of fishermen tells a story like this one:
“Our eyes were toward the higher ground, toward the forest where the trees were thick. We were expecting if danger would come, it would come from the forest.”
Montu Halda is twenty-six, a fisherman from the village Hingulgunge. When he was twenty-one, he saw his brother-in-law taken away by a tiger.
There were four in his party that day, he remembers: Halda, his father, his brother, and his brother-in-law. It was late afternoon; the others wanted to return to the village with their catch, but the brother-in-law insisted they stop to collect dry firewood from the forest.
They anchored and waded ashore. They kept their backs to the river and to the boat, their eyes on the darkening forest. They knew this was a dangerous time of day. At low tide the pink-faced monkeys known as rhesus macaques and the little spotted deer called chital come to the edge of the water to pick through the flowers and fruits and leaves the mangroves drop into the water, which the tide then brings to land. Tigers know the tides, and they know the habits of the monkeys and deer. And they know the habits of men.
If a tiger was near, it would know when people were coming. It would hear the oar strokes and the voices. It would know the meaning of a dropped anchor. And it would wait and try to surprise them.
All this Halda and his relatives knew, so they were careful. If there was a tiger, and if it wanted one of them, their only chance would be to see it first. Their eyes never left the forest.
The tiger leaped onto the brother-in-law’s back. It knocked him face down in the mud, grabbed him by the back of the neck and, in one fluid motion, bounded into the forest. The tiger had not approached from the forest but from the river, where the men had not bothered to watch.
Agie Bishas, too, saw a tiger take a man away into the forest. Bishas, fifty, from the big village of Gosaba, knows many tiger stories. This attack he had witnessed only three months before he told me about it.
He was on a boat in a group of four or five that were tied together, waiting near the forest for the tide to drop so they could collect wood. No one knew it, but all the while, he said, a tiger was watching them from the opposite bank.
Unseen, the tiger swam across the river until it reached a bush that drooped over the water. With the bush masking its head, and the lower part of its body submerged, it waited, watching. It watched the men for hours, Bishas said. It waited right beside their boat.
In a steady voice, with clarity and precision, Bishas told me, through a translator, what had happened. “The tiger, it had to wait some time,” he said, “for it could not climb into the boat because there were so many boats together, and the people were not getting down from the boats because they were waiting for the water to recede. The tiger was getting impatient. As long as the boats were tied together, the tiger was kept waiting.”
As the tide went out, the party decided that the man in the head boat, which was tied to a tree on the bank, would collect the wood. The other boats separated to anchor midstream.
“As soon as the tiger saw the boats had separated and that this one was alone now, it swam out from its hiding place,” Bishas said. One person was alone at the boat’s bow. The tiger surged from the water, its front paws gripping the craft; the boatman fainted from shock. Immediately the tiger leaped into the boat, seized the boatman, and carried him by the back of the neck into the forest.
These stories are told again and again in steady, reasoned voices by people who saw the events take place. The tiger flew from the forest. The tiger launched itself from the water. The tiger lay invisible for hours. The tiger materialized from thin air.
Sometimes a tiger swims after a boat the way a dog chases a car on the road. Kalyan Chakrabarti, a former field director of India’s Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, tells the story he heard of a steel-hulled motor launch whose crew of ten tried to rid themselves of a tiger swimming after them. They shot at it five times with a rifle. They threw lumps of coal. They tried to push it away with bamboo poles. The swimming tiger grabbed the poles with its paws and chewed them to shreds. The pilot tried to run over the tiger to drown it; the cook splashed boiling water over the animal’s head. But the tiger never tired. In fact, it was gaining on them and even managed to board the dinghy tied to the side of the launch. The crew let the rope out so the tiger could not use the dinghy as a stepping stone to the launch. The terrified crew finally locked themselves in the cabin.
Three hours later the tiger was still there. Only after they entered the rough waters of the river Matla did it depart. The big waves overturned the dinghy, and the tiger swam ashore.
“If a tiger really wants to kill you,” Kalyan says, “it can take you. There is nothing you can do. Not even a gun will help you.”
According to government figures, thirty or forty people are killed each year on the Indian side of Sundarbans. But these figures are misleading. No one except Forest Department officials are allowed inside Sundarbans Tiger Reserve’s 514-square-mile core area, which is set aside for wildlife alone. Ringing the core is a buffer zone of 562 square miles, where people may fish, collect honey, and cut wood, but they must have a permit to do so. If a permit holder is killed inside the buffer zone, the government compensates his family for the loss, and the death is officially tallied. But families of tiger victims who are illegally inside restricted areas are not compensated, so there is no reason for them to inform the authorities; in fact, these families fear they might be prosecuted. In the rare cases when the victim’s body can be retrieved, the bereaved cremate it hastily, sometimes at night, before forest officials can find out.
The boatman with whom I traveled in Sundarbans, Girindra Nath Mridha, lost three of his four uncles to tigers; one was killed before his eyes. None of those deaths was “official.” On a trip in December 1992 I met an older fisherman who showed me a puffer fish he had caught. By the time I returned to Sundarbans in January, the man had been “unofficially” eaten. So many are killed by tigers here that some villages are known as vidhaba pallis—tiger widow villages. Arampur, near Gosaba, is one such village; in each of its 125 families is a woman whose husband or brother or son was killed by a tiger.
One hundred years ago it was reported that 4,218 people were eaten by tigers in the Sundarbans over a period of six years. One study estimated that one-third of the tigers here will try to kill and then eat any person they see. Almost invariably the person they see is a man, for in Sundarbans, as in most of India, only men work in the forest, while the women work in the village. Oddly, tigers seldom stray into the villages; when they do, they do not stay long, and they do not hunt people. But in the forest they consider humans suitable prey.
And here they thrive. The number of tigers the area supports is disputed. But no one disagrees that Sundarbans Tiger Reserve is the only park in India with more than one hundred tigers, and the Indian side constitutes only half of the huge mangrove tract. Including both the Indian and Bangladeshi sides, the full 3,861-square-mile area supports more tigers than any other contiguous tract in the world.
No one keeps track of the actual death toll. Forest officials privately admit that the numbers are at least double the official figures. Some experts say the total may be as high as 150 a year on the Indian side and about the same on the Bangladeshi side.
Elsewhere in the world, tigers seldom kill people. David Smith has studied Nepal’s tigers at Royal Chitawan National Park since 1977. “Over the years we’ve had people stumble right on top of tigers and not be bitten,” he says. He recalls a story about his colleague Charles McDougal, who has studied tigers intensively at Chitawan at a lodge named Tiger Tops. As McDougal was walking along a knife-edge ridge, he saw a tiger coming toward him. He decided to reverse direction, slowly, and did not look back. The tiger left him alone.
George Schaller relates a similar experience. Taking nighttime photos of wildlife in central India, he needed to adjust some of his equipment. “We stepped away from the blind and walked slowly toward the tigers,” he relates. “ ‘Go away, tigers, go away,’ I said in a tense voice as I held the cats in the beam of my small flashlight, and Stan clapped his hands several times. The tigers reluctantly retreated.”
Smith recalled another instance: a young child, following the path of Smith’s airplane flying overhead, crossed illegally into the core area of Chitawan Park and walked right up to a resting tiger. The tiger ignored him. Only when the child pushed the tiger did the animal swipe at him; even so, the boy was not seriously hurt. “Basically,” says Smith, “tigers do not attack people.”
That one of the largest predators on earth so seldom injures people has given rise to a belief in many parts of tropical Asia that tigers embody the souls of dead heroes. One morning at nine in 1974, a tiger appeared at a school in Jogjakarta, Java. First it sat quietly. Then, like a visiting dignitary, it walked slowly through the classrooms. The newspapers reported that the tiger was a reincarnation of Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president. Many tribal people believe that humans and tigers are descended from a common ancestor and that a tiger will not hurt a person who is free from sin.
Even when surprised on a kill, most tigers show commendable restraint. Typically it first gives a warning roar, affording the intruder opportunity to retreat. If he does not, the tiger roars a second time, louder. Finally it may make a mock charge; but if the intruder still does not leave, the tiger may turn and run rather than attack.
When tigers do kill people, it is often by mistake. If a person stumbles on a tiger resting unseen in the tall grass, the animal, alarmed, may strike out with a paw, as if to merely brush the intruder aside; but because of the tiger’s great strength, one blow may be sufficient to kill.
Rarely does a tiger instigate an attack. In most of the cases that Western researchers have investigated, the victim has been a child, or a woman bent over washing clothes or cutting grass or squatting to relieve herself. (These tigers perhaps should be more properly called women- and children-eating tigers.) Peter Jackson of the World Conservation Union–IUCN suggests that because the victim is not standing upright (or, because a child is so short) the tiger probably thinks the person is a monkey.
Even more rarely do tigers knowingly choose people for food. Jim Corbett, one of the world’s finest hunters, made a career tracking down man-eaters in India during the early 1900s. While a single man-eater can wreak enormous damage (one tigress Corbett tracked had reportedly killed 200 people in Nepal and 434 people in India before he finally shot her), Corbett stressed that man-eating is not normal tiger behavior. “It is only when tigers have been incapacitated through wounds or old age that, in order to live, they are compelled to take to a diet of human flesh,” he reported in Man-Eaters of Kumaon, his most famous book.
Colonel Kesri Singh, a hunter and game warden in Rajasthan, offered this portrait of the “classical” man-eater: “an aged, mangy beast with canines—normally huge in a tiger—worn down to stumps, and skeleton thin.” His postmortems on slain man-eaters usually uncovered a lead ball embedded somewhere in the tiger’s body. Indeed, most shikaris who hunted man-eaters in India agreed that the wounds that drive a tiger to man-eating are often inflicted by people.
But in Sundarbans the tigers are utterly different.
“Among these islands, it is in many places dangerous to land,” the French explorer Francois Bernier wrote in 1666, “for it constantly happens that one person or another falls prey to tigers. These ferocious animals are very apt, it is said, to enter the boat itself, while the people are asleep, and to carry away some victim, who, if we are to believe the boatmen of the country, happens to be the stoutest and fattest of the party.”
Here healthy tigers have hunted humans for centuries. Genetically these tigers belong to the same race as the others found throughout the Indian subcontinent, the Royal Bengal, the second-largest tiger on earth (the Siberian is largest), with a flame-colored coat. Yet the Sundarbans tigers behave like no other tigers in the world; in fact, no other predator of any species so aggressively seeks out our kind.
“Nowhere else in the world is man so actively hunted out,” said one wildlife consultant who has visited Sundarbans many times. “You can feel it: someone is trying to kill you.” The idea floats uneasily in the modern mind.
Why do these tigers hunt people? The German biologist Hubert Hendrichs suggested that their ferocity might be linked to the saline water they drink. In 1971 he carried out a three-month study on the Bangladeshi side of Sundarbans. He compared the relative salinity of the water with the locations of known tiger attacks. His data correlated the most frequent attack sites with areas having the saltiest water.
Virtually no fresh water is available in Sundarbans except dug rain-water ponds. The tides of the Bay of Bengal flush through all the rivers; in certain areas the water is 1.5 percent salt. Drinking water so salty may cause liver and kidney damage, Hendrichs suggested, making the tigers irritable. Before he could test this hypothesis, his study was interrupted by Bangladesh’s war of independence, and he has never returned. No one since has proved or disproved his idea. Possibly, some have said, Sundarbans tigers learned to eat human flesh because it was brought to them, like an offering, from the holy river Ganges. Before its tributaries were dammed by the Farakka Barrage, this river nourished Sundarbans, and with its waters came the corpses of the dead who had been incompletely cremated at Calcutta’s burning ghats. The tigers could have acquired their taste for our flesh from scavenging.
S. Dillon Ripley, the former secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, theorized that Sundarbans tigers may have learned from fishermen to associate people with food. An ancient fishing method in Sundarbans is to string your net across a narrow creek and wait for the fish to become caught in it as the tide recedes. Perhaps, Ripley suggested, the tigers learned to raid the fishermen’s nets, and so learned to seek out the fishermen and their boats. Perhaps the fishy smell also attracts the tigers.
Still others have noted that in the sucking ooze of the swamps tigers might have difficulty catching their normal prey—wild boar, chital, rhesus macaques, monitor lizards, jungle fowl—so they supplement their diet with people.
In Sundarbans a human provides one of the larger food items available to a tiger. An adult male wild boar or a chital doe might weigh a bit over a hundred pounds, and in taking it the tiger faces grave risks. To attack a big animal is not easy when you kill with your open mouth. A fighting boar slashes with sharp tusks, a struggling chital thrashes with antlers and hooves. The average adult male human in Sundarbans might weigh 130 pounds. Relatively large, slow-moving, clumsy, and, without guns virtually harmless, people are easy and abundant prey.
One wonders why Sundarbans tigers do not eat people more often than they do. (One Indian expert calculated that if people comprised a major item of the tigers’ diet, then Sundarbans tigers would kill 24,090 people every year.) The wonder is not that tigers eat people in Sundarbans; the wonder is that tigers so infrequently eat them elsewhere.
But this is only one of the mysteries, for tigers are very difficult animals to study. They are secretive, and often difficult to find, even a glimpse. In his long career photographing Indian wildlife, the great naturalist E. P. Gee never got a shot of a wild tiger.
A tiger’s range can be enormous: in Nepal, Melvin Sunquist found that males established territories of twenty-three to twenty-seven square miles, and females six to eight square miles; in Siberia, where food is scarcer, a tiger’s territory may stretch for 1,544 square miles.
Tigers are mostly solitary. They will associate with others of their kind—often at a kill—and a tigress may remain with her one to four cubs for two years. Courting pairs travel together for several days. Still, a scientist usually is able to observe only one tiger at a time rather than the herds or flocks or troops of animals of other species.
Tigers live by stealth. Because they are stalk-and-ambush hunters, it is extraordinarily difficult to see one make a natural kill; you must be as stealthy as a tiger to avoid scaring away the prey, and you must be warier than the prey to see the tiger.
Most of what Western researchers know about these animals derives from two long-term projects. The first was George Schaller’s fourteen-month study of deer and their predators at Kanha National Park in central India from 1963 to 1965. He learned to recognize eleven individual adult tigers on sight, and he spent 119 hours watching them. He examined their kills and analyzed their droppings. He listened to their voices. The book presenting his results, The Deer and the Tiger, remains a landmark.
A second and larger study, financed by the Smithsonian Institution and the World Wildlife Fund, began in November 1973 at Nepal’s Royal Chitawan National Park, and still continues. John Seidensticker and K. M. Tamang developed ways to capture and immobilize tigers and outfit them with radio collars to track their movements. Their work allowed scientists for the first time to follow several tigers at once, to monitor their long-term health and growth, and to map their ranges.
But still science knows relatively little about tigers. About tigers in Sundarbans, science knows almost nothing. They are a mystery—the mystery that drew me to Sundarbans and into the spell of the tiger.