Jim Corbett’s hunch seemed to have been correct. At breakfast with the Tahsildar early the next morning, having moved camp to the new bungalow outside of town, he watched as two men came scrambling frantically up the hill. Breathless, they announced that the tiger had just killed a cow in a village ten miles away.
Having already seen how efficiently the tiger had consumed its victim back in Pali, Corbett hurriedly gathered up his rifle, stuffing just three cartridges in his pocket. This was an old habit from his youth, when powder had been expensive and every bullet precious, but it was also a matter of practicality. Familiar with the speed and stealth of a tiger, Corbett knew that in the event of an encounter, a single shot was likely the best he could hope for. Either the tiger would flee or it would attack, with both scenarios offering little time for reloading. If death came for either of them, it was likely to be over in seconds. Corbett could only hope it would end in his favor. The Tahsildar wished him luck and promised that he would return in the evening to spend the night at the bungalow—assuming, of course, the hunter made it back alive. Corbett thanked him and set off with his guides, the three of them taking the packed-earth trail to the village at a blistering pace.* If it was indeed his tiger that had killed the cow, Corbett knew there was a fair chance that it was still close by, hovering near its prey.
If he was fast enough, he might still catch it.
The path was uneven and rutted but mostly downhill. The scattered stone abodes of the village materialized through the pines, as did the frantic farmer whose livestock had been killed. Corbett greeted him in Kumaoni and, rifle at the ready, asked to be taken to the carcass immediately. The farmer obliged, leading Corbett to a nearby cowshed, where the hunter would have easily detected, mingled with the usual scent of manure and hay, the unmistakable iron tang of freshly spilled blood.
Twisted and mangled in the corner was the body of a calf, already half eaten. And it had indeed been killed by a predatory cat. But no, as Corbett could tell right away, this was not the handiwork of a tiger. Even a cursory examination of the bite marks and tracks made it abundantly clear that this young cow had been killed by a leopard—an animal Corbett was on intimate terms with as well. He had killed his first leopard with a borrowed .450 Martini-Henry rifle while just a ten-year-old boy in Kaladhungi; the cat sprang at him in the forest while he was on a hunting expedition, and he acted instinctively, hitting its spotted hide in midair and showering himself in blood. The young Jim Corbett was still so small at the time, he actually had to get his older sister Maggie to help him retrieve the dead leopard and carry it back to Arundel, the little stone cottage where his family made their home.
Leopards were relatively common in both the lowland terai and the middle hills of Kumaon, and they could be just as dangerous as tigers when they took to man-eating. Although considerably smaller in size—even the largest males were seldom over 170 pounds—they were more than capable of dispatching an adult human. One of the most infamous of such cats, known as the Leopard of Rudraprayag, would go on to kill as many as 125 people in the 1920s, most of them pilgrims traveling between the Hindu shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath. In fact, man-eating leopards—though uncommon—were rumored to be even more fearless than man-eating tigers, and were known to break into homes at night and tear down walls to get their victims while they were sleeping.
This leopard, however, was evidently not a man-eater. Killing a cow, although financially onerous for a poor farmer, was not beyond the realm of normal leopard behavior. The year before, leopards had been responsible for the death of 2,744 head of cattle in Kumaon alone—almost twice the toll of 1,370 head attributed to tigers. Not surprisingly, leopards were generally classed as vermin by the colonial government. To Corbett, however, this particular leopard was a false lead and nothing more. He thanked the two men who had brought him there and gave them a few rupees for their trouble, but quickly set off back toward the bungalow.
Corbett arrived at the hut just before nightfall, disheartened to discover that the Tahsildar had not yet returned. The last of the sunlight was fading beyond the hills, and the surrounding valleys were beginning to pool with shadow; only a few minutes stood between him and the darkness. And once that darkness came, it would no longer be safe to venture outside beyond the bungalow’s door. With nothing to do, Corbett felt anxious and uneasy—he didn’t want to waste the last precious minutes of daylight. The chowkidar, or caretaker of the bungalow, must have noticed Corbett’s frustration, and mentioned a nearby watering hole where he believed he had seen a tiger drinking.
Reshouldering his rifle once again, his expectations raised a second time, Corbett let the man guide him to the spring. But while there were indeed a few scattered animal tracks, he found no trace of the tiger he sought. He had studied the pugmarks of the Champawat closely at the kill site back in Pali, with a highly trained shikari eye. No, the man-eater hadn’t been there—not recently.
The final disappointment came soon after the arrival of the Tahsildar, just as the night was beginning to fall. He listened with rapt attention to the stories of the day, only to inform Corbett that he could not stay at the bungalow with him as he had said he would. Perhaps the Tahsildar actually did have urgent business to attend to back in Champawat, or possibly he was concerned about appearing too friendly with the British—after all, finding the tiger depended on the cooperation of the local townspeople and villagers, and managing his relationship with the colonial government was a delicate affair. Regardless, after chatting affably for a few minutes in the gathering dusk, he apologized and said that he had no choice but to return to town—a change of plans that dismayed Corbett, as he was beginning to realize just how instrumental the Tahsildar might actually be. Corbett’s growing admiration for the man is captured in his hunting memoir, Man-Eaters of Kumaon:
On returning to the bungalow I found the Tahsildar was back, and as we sat on the verandah I told him of my day’s experience. Expressing regret at my having had to go so far on a wild-goose chase, he rose, saying that as he had a long way to go he must start at once. This announcement caused me no little surprise, for twice that day he had said he would stay the night with me. It was not the question of his staying the night that concerned me, but the risk he was taking; however, he was deaf to all my arguments and, as he stepped off the verandah into the dark night, with only one man following him carrying a smoky lantern which gave a mere glimmer of light, to do a walk of four miles in a locality in which men only moved in large parties in daylight, I took off my hat to a very brave man.
It appears to have affected Corbett greatly, that image: the Tahsildar, path lit only faintly by a single swinging lantern, gathering his robes and walking into the Kumaoni night, his pale form entering the darkness unarmed and unafraid. It was the sort of courage Corbett himself no doubt wished he could summon. He knew he was going to need it soon.
With the Tahsildar gone and his men already turned in, Corbett likely spent the evening on his own, eating a simple meal prepared by the chowkidar, smoking a procession of nervous cigarettes, listening in the dark to the collected whispers of the forest. Wondering where the tiger was at that moment. He understood the stakes. And if he succeeded in his mission, he knew what such a victory would entail. There would of course be the ancillary benefits: the plaudits from Charles Henry Berthoud back in Nainital, perhaps even recognition from the lieutenant governor himself—all of which could help pull a domiciled Irish lad out of a dead-end railway job at a backwater on the Ganges. But more important—much more, knowing where Corbett’s allegiances lay—he would be saving scores of Kumaoni lives down the line. Corbett had learned from its tracks that the Champawat was an older tiger, though still in decent form—a fact that the Indian journal The Pioneer would confirm in an article published on June 7, 1907, stating that the cat “was not young . . . [but] in good condition.” Which meant that even though the Champawat was past its prime, it still had years of killing before it. More gore-spattered topis, more claw-shredded saris, punctuating blood trails across stony, cold ravines. Corbett had seen it with his own eyes; he had wrapped the bone shards in funerary cotton with his own trembling hands. And he knew that although the final hunt would no doubt require assistance, he alone was in a position to stop the tiger.
If he failed, however—if the tiger came at him and his bullet did not hit its mark—there would also be consequences far more immediate, far more personal, as well. First, there would be the sheer force of the impact: a collision unimaginable, one that de-socketed his spine and split open his ribs. Then, the claws—ten of them, long as butcher blades, that stripped the flesh from his back and punctured his lungs. Followed at last by the teeth, a crushing quartet in the nape of his neck. And if his consciousness persisted beyond that, nothing remained but to be carried in the tiger’s jaws as limp and helpless as a child, the sounds of civilization fading just as the wild chorus of the forest began, the hot rankness of its breath just a hint of the true horror to come . . .
It would have been enough to give anyone nightmares, and it seems even Jim Corbett was not immune to bad dreams. In his account of the ordeal, he writes only of what transpired that night in the bungalow as something best left unwritten, a tale “beyond the laws of nature.” And while the meaning of that phrase is not immediately clear, it seems reasonable to presume that he suffered some sort of panic attack or night terror, alone in the darkness, that left him sleepless and profoundly shaken. And who can blame him? In the inscrutable night, deep in hostile country, with a creature on its way that was believed to have killed nearly half a thousand people, terror was a sane reaction. With the bands of shadow turning to stripes in the cold glare of moonlight, and with dark shapes shuffling through the dust of the courtyard, it must have been difficult not to imagine, while gasping for breath and unable to move, that the Champawat was just outside, golden eyes watching, a Grendel come to collect its due. Years later, Corbett described such visions:
Few of us, I imagine, have escaped that worst of all nightmares in which, while our limbs and vocal cords are paralysed with fear, some terrible beast in a monstrous form approaches to destroy us; the nightmare from which, sweating fear in every pore, we waken with a cry of thankfulness to Heaven that it was only a dream.
Only, for the people of Champawat, among whom Corbett now found himself, the monster that stalked them was no dream. Affirmation of that fact came the next morning after the arrival of the Tahsildar, who had kept his promise and returned to the bungalow as soon as he was able. Corbett, no doubt groggy after his harrowing night, was much relieved to see his friend arrive safely. The two men were talking, discussing the tiger’s habits and attempting to presage its next move, when a runner from a nearby village suddenly appeared. The messenger came screaming up the side of the mountain, and in doing so, rendered their divinations all at once superfluous.
Come quickly, sahib, the man begged of Corbett, using the deferential form of address generally reserved for the British, the man-eater has just killed a girl! *
It was a bittersweet reckoning. Another life had been stolen by the tiger’s claws; but it meant there was a chance, if they were quick enough, of stopping the cat. The advice of the Pali villagers and the instincts of the hunter had both proven correct—the tiger had indeed returned to Champawat. It had killed again.
Corbett didn’t waste a minute. He was already dressed in short pants and rubber-soled shoes—his outfit of choice when it came to pursuing large game. All that remained was a rifle. Informing the Tahsildar of his intentions as he raced past him, he ducked back into the bungalow to fetch a gun. Rather than selecting his old friend the .450 black-powder Martini-Henry rifle, or a lighter, more manageable .275, which he would come to rely on later in his life, Corbett chose from his private arsenal a double-barrel .500 modified cordite rifle, swapping out conventional black-powder cartridges for their more powerful nitro counterparts. Effectively, this hybrid weapon was a converted elephant gun, a new firearm-and-ammo combo capable of taking down everything from rhinoceros to Cape buffalo to the biggest of tuskers. High-powered double-barrel rifles of this kind had been first developed for hunting in Africa and Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, when it became clear that neither muzzle-loaders nor single-barrel rifles were up to the challenge of stopping charging large game in its tracks. With the arrival of cordite propellant in the late nineteenth century, however, bullet velocities became attainable that had never been possible with the older, black-powder cartridges. In 1907, Corbett was straddling two eras—that of black powder and that of cordite—and by deciding to use the upgraded cordite cartridges in an oversized black-powder weapon to take on the Champawat, he made a strategic choice. As to why, exactly, he would choose this unwieldly twin-barrel shoulder cannon over something less awkward, the answer is simple: just like elephant and rhinoceros hunters in Africa, he had to stop the Champawat from charging. A smaller-caliber or lower-velocity weapon might have been easier to move through the jungle with, but it would have been far more likely to leave a wounded, enraged animal. In the case of a normal tiger, hunted from atop an elephant or raised machan, this would not have been so problematic—upon fleeing, a wounded tiger could be easily tracked and finished off later. But with a creature that had already attacked and devoured close to five hundred people, there was no guarantee that a hunter on foot would cause it to flee. An aggressive attack in defense of its kill seemed more likely, in which case blowing a pair of fist-sized holes through its striped hide was not an issue. After all, Corbett wasn’t interested in acquiring a pristine tiger skin—he was trying to stop a serial killer.
With his rifle and customary three cartridges in hand—two for the twin barrels and one for an emergency—Corbett joined the Tahsildar and the messenger, and the three of them sprinted in silence down the hill. For a few minutes there would have been no noise but the sound of footfalls on packed earth and their own harried breathing.
When they arrived at the village, just a few miles outside of Champawat proper, a riot of yelling and pleading broke loose, as the frantic residents attempted to explain all at once what had occurred. One man among them was able to help calm the hysteria, and it was he who Corbett asked for a full report. Taking Corbett aside, he pointed to a scattering of oak trees just two hundred yards from the village. The story that followed was achingly familiar. A small group had been collecting firewood beneath the trees for their midday meal, when the tiger had materialized and come tearing into the group like a covey of quail. The others screamed and ran for their lives as a lone girl was engulfed by its stripes and claws—the tiger latched onto her neck before spiriting her away into the depths of the forest. The wife of Corbett’s new confidant, who had been among the foraging party, pointed out the specific tree where the attack had occurred—she explained how they had not even seen or heard the tiger until the creature already had the poor girl in its jaws. The silence and suddenness of the attack are corroborated by the aforementioned June 7 article published in the The Pioneer, which describes how “about mid-day of the 11th some 25 women and girls were gathering leaves together when a tigress appeared, and, seizing a young girl, carried her off with hardly a sound.” It was a tragedy that no one saw—or heard—coming.
Telling all gathered to stay where they were, Corbett checked on his rifle and started across the exposed fields to the kill site.
Arriving at the tree, Corbett was struck by the lay of the land. It was, in his own words, “quite open,” and he found it “difficult to conceive how an animal the size of a tiger could have approached twelve people unseen, its presence not detected, until attention had been attracted by the choking sound made by the girl.” Later in his career, Corbett would become more intimate with the incredible ways in which man-eaters downed their human prey, but the Champawat was the first of its kind he had encountered. Unlike wolves, for example, tigers virtually never hunt in packs; they are not especially long-winded and seldom chase prey over long distances. Their chief weapon, rather, is stealth—coupled with an astounding burst of speed. Belly flattened to the ground, creeping up in small increments on padded feet, they are capable of making themselves hidden in grass that’s no more than knee-high.
Aiding them in their clandestine endeavors is one of the most effective sets of camouflage in the animal kingdom. The stripes of the tiger naturally break up its outline, blending seamlessly with the shadows of tall grasses and jungle leaves. Since most of its prey is color-blind, the tiger’s orange fur is not noticed, and for those animals that can see color—including humans—its tawny hues meld extremely well with crepuscular light. This inherent stealth capability, when partnered with a leap radius that can reach thirty feet, and a top speed close to forty miles per hour, means that the eventual strike—when it finally comes, for tigers are also nothing if not patient—is almost always a surprise, and blindingly fast. And with their propensity for attacking from a rear angle, it’s also very likely that in this case, the Champawat’s human victim never even knew what hit her. Perhaps the faintest of rustling when it launched from the ground, a soft puff of displaced air from its careening body, all registered in the back of the mind at nearly the same moment nature’s nearest equivalent to a short-range missile exploded upon its target.
And the evidence of that collision between predator and prey was right there beneath the oaks for Corbett to see. The exact spot where the girl had been killed was marked by a fresh pool of blood and a broken necklace of bright azure beads; the moment of her death, at least in Corbett’s mind, was rendered starkly by that sickening contrast of crimson upon blue. No doubt swallowing down a lump of fear, and perhaps some inklings of nausea too, Corbett raised his rifle and followed the tiger’s tracks, which were interrupted at steady intervals by splashes of blood where the girl’s head had hung down from the tiger’s mouth.
After half a mile of steady tracking, he came across the girl’s sari, and at the top of the following hill, her skirt, both evidently ripped off by the tiger as it prepared to feed. From there, the drag marks took him to a thicket of blackthorn, from which strands of something long and dark were dangling and billowing from the stickers. Corbett stopped to examine one, puzzling over the peculiar moss, until he realized it was not moss at all. It was the girl’s hair, which had snagged on the branches as the tiger passed.
Sickened and saddened by the sight, irrefutable evidence of the horror that had passed through the brambles only minutes before, Corbett was steeling himself for a prolonged pursuit into the brush when he heard it—the sound of feet, approaching fast from the rear.
There was no time to think, no time to plan. Time only for instincts, honed from all those years spent hunting in the jungles of Kaladhungi and the forests near Nainital. Corbett turned on a pivot, rifle at the ready, knowing one shot was all he would likely get off, and that he’d be lucky to get even that.
Alas, there was no tiger, and his fingers must have quivered for an instant before releasing whatever feeble amount of slack the twin triggers gave. Running up behind him was a man from the village, oblivious to just how close he had come to having two barrels unloaded upon him. He had been following right on the hunter’s trail, his own beaten-up rifle swinging clumsily in his hands. Corbett’s initial reaction was one of anger, as he had—in addition to almost blowing a local resident in half—explicitly asked that everyone stay put in the village until he had located the tiger. But his new companion, a patwari, or low-level village official, named Jaman Singh, informed him that the Tahsildar had sent him, as one of the few men in legal possession of a rifle, to go help the sahib—a gesture that Corbett apparently appreciated in spirit, no matter how misguided it may have seemed. Giving in, Corbett asked the village patwari to at least remove his heavy boots, which he feared would make too much noise in the forest, and that he keep his eyes behind them in case the Champawat circled back and attacked them from the rear. After all, two sets of eyes were better than one—particularly when a potential tiger ambush was involved.
Pushing on through the stinging nettles and scratching burrs, Corbett and his new companion followed the blood trail as it turned sharply to the left before plunging into a ravine choked with bracken and wild ringal bamboo. Then into a steep watercourse, scattered with loose stones and earth that the tiger had upturned on its way down—they were only seconds behind it now and they knew it. The watercourse became even steeper yet, cascading ever-downward and filling the ravine with a steady rush of falling water, amid which any number of muffled forest sounds could have been a lurking tiger. With the sheer rock walls rising on either side, they were easy targets should the tiger turn around—this they knew as well—and as the walls closed in the deeper they ventured into the gorge, the more perilous, perhaps even suicidal, their pursuit became.
The village patwari tugged on Corbett’s sleeve on multiple occasions, his whispers wracked by sharp tremolos of fear, informing Corbett that he could hear the tiger, behind them, all around them. It was becoming increasingly clear that the patwari, despite his possession of a rifle and admirable determination, was a town dweller with very limited experience hunting, and that he was proving to be more of a liability than an asset. Corbett had a deep mistrust of guns in the hands of others, and an even firmer unwillingness to put others in harm’s way. Arriving at last at this inevitable conclusion, he stopped at a steep stone spire, some thirty feet high, and told his companion to climb the pinnacle of rock and wait for him there. The patwari did so, and upon giving the signal that he had arrived at the top, Corbett went on alone, his thin, rubber-soled shoes angling and slipping over the wet rock as he sidestepped and shuffled his way down the vertiginous ravine—which, after a straight, steep shot of a hundred yards, ended at a dark stone hollow with a pool of still water at its middle.
The tiger was gone, but traces of its feeding were not. Rifle poised, ears pricked, Corbett inspected the site, discovering as he did so a viscerally disturbing scene. Tigers usually feed near water—that was not unusual—but the sight that met his eyes was one that would be imprinted onto his memory:
The tigress had carried the girl straight down on this spot, and my approach had disturbed her at her meal. Splinters of bone were scattered round the deep pugmarks into which discoloured water was slowly seeping, and at the edge of the pool was an object which had puzzled me as I came down the watercourse, and which I now found was part of a human leg. In all the subsequent years I have hunted man-eaters, I have not seen anything as pitiful as that young comely leg—bitten off a little below the knee as clean as though severed by the stroke of an axe—out of which the warm blood was trickling.
Shaken, Corbett momentarily forgot the actual danger he was in. Disturbing the kill of a tiger is a perilous proposition, for if they have recently been feeding, they are seldom far away. But Corbett was, in his own words, “new to this game of man-eater hunting,” and as of yet unprepared for all the hazards it entailed.
As he lowered his rifle and knelt to inspect the severed leg, a sudden sensation of being in extreme danger consumed him; a millisecond registration that something was out of place. Perhaps the faintest of rustling, or a soft puff of displaced air. But that was enough. Once again, Corbett acted on pure instinct. Never leaving his crouch, Corbett spun on his heels, ground the butt of his rifle against the earth, and put two fingers on the triggers.
Ears ringing from the blast of the double barrels, nostrils stinging with the acrid smell of cordite, Corbett blinked through the haze only to see that, rather than an enraged tiger, just a few clods of earth and loose sand had come tumbling down from the edge of a fifteen-foot bank directly above him. There was a soft stirring of ringal, the hollow bamboo stalks chiming ever so faintly, and the tiger was gone. Having not had time to properly aim, Corbett was confident he had not hit it. But that sudden and massive burst of gunfire at close range had been enough to discourage the ambush. The tiger had been on the cusp of a strike when his barrels roared.
Now it was the Champawat’s turn to roar. Setting down what remained of the girl’s body, the tiger let loose a thunderous cry. Corbett had just one bullet remaining, but that didn’t deter him. Upon scrambling up the bank, he saw from a patch of bent Strobilanthes stalks where the Champawat had passed with its kill just seconds before. The terrain became increasingly difficult to cross, a welter of jagged rocks and deep crevasses. Despite the obstacles, however, Corbett was not far behind, following a trail marked clearly in blood. Leapfrogging over boulders, hopscotching across river stones as the tiger’s growls echoed through the rocky abyss, Edward James Corbett was in a situation that must have felt strangely surreal—like the very worst of dreams. A slow-motion chase through a literal valley of death, after a striped creature that had in its maw its 436th human kill. It took many years for Corbett to fully collect his thoughts:
I cannot expect you who read this at your fireside to appreciate my feelings at the time. The sound of the growling and the expectation of an attack terrified me at the same time as it gave me hope. If the tigress lost her temper sufficiently to launch an attack, it would not only give me an opportunity of accomplishing the object for which I had come, but it would enable me to get even with her for all the pain and suffering she had caused.
Bouncing from rock to rock along the bottom of the ravine, an awkward primate pursuing the single most lethal apex predator in the world, watching as, according to the article in The Pioneer, “portions of the body and its clothing were left behind,” Corbett would have been unable to ignore the unpleasant truth that if the tiger were to decide to abandon its kill and turn around—and if his aim were to prove less than perfect—it would be his dismembered limbs scattered about the canyon floor. But after four grueling hours of pursuit, of seeing the thick clumps of rhododendron leaves stir just ahead, of hearing periodic growls rumble through the rocky passages, Corbett gave up. Night was closing in, and the bottom of a black ravine with a gleaming-eyed man-eater was the last place he wanted to be. As a tide of shadow began to seep into the valley, Corbett turned back and crawled his way out, pausing only to bury the severed leg of the poor young girl so her family could later retrieve it for cremation. Upon escaping the ravine, he found the patwari still there waiting for him at the top of the stone spire, much to the man’s expressed relief—with the sound of the growls ringing through the valley, he had been certain Corbett had succumbed to the tiger. With their grim work done for the day, the two of them began the hike back to the village.
The patwari stopped at the place where he had hidden his boots, and while he struggled with the straps to put them back on, Corbett sat and had a smoke. With the distant peaks of the Himalayas catching the last of the day’s light, reflecting it back across the foothills in a lambent gold, he studied the lay of the land and considered his next move. He knew going back down into the ravine alone was hopeless—the tiger clearly had the advantage in that rough and densely wooded terrain. One near-death encounter and four hours of hopeless chase had proved that. However, in the rippling landscape that spread out before him, Corbett saw an opportunity; a “great amphitheatre of hills,” as he would call it, with a stream forming a narrow gorge that cut west to east, and with one especially precipitous hill directly opposite. The tiger would almost certainly stay with its kill to continue feeding—which meant that it wouldn’t stray far for another day or two, at least. This tiger obviously preferred the low ground, retreating to the bottom of steep ravines that men could not easily reach, which was in part how it had evaded hunters for so long. It occurred to Corbett that if he could get enough helpers to man the length of the ridge from the stream to the hill, and then somehow manage to drive the tiger out from its quarters below, its natural line of retreat would send it out of its ravine and right into the narrow gorge that bisected the amphitheater. Where, if Jim Corbett’s incipient plan worked, he would be waiting with both rifle barrels cocked. Unlike the tiger’s present hideout deep in the ravine, this long, winding second gorge was relatively clear, free of foliage and rocks, and seemed to offer the only possibility of an unobstructed shot.
So that was it. There would have to be a beat. A line of men almost a mile long, all working together, marching into the brush to flush the tiger out into the open, while the hunter waited to spring the trap. It was roughly the same technique that had been tried in Nepal some four years before, and while it had succeeded in driving the tiger out of the country, it had also failed to capture or kill it. How much of this Corbett was aware of is difficult to say, although he did know such a beat would not be easy to replicate, particularly without trained elephants or experienced shikaris. It was to be, by his own admission, “a very difficult beat, for the steep hillside facing north, on which I had left the tigress, was densely wooded and roughly three-quarters of a mile long and half-a-mile wide.” Difficult, yes, but not impossible. He knew that if he could get everything organized correctly and have the beaters follow his directions, there was at least a “reasonable chance” of him getting a shot.
All he had to do then was convince several hundred men, none of whom had ever engaged in a large-scale tiger hunt before, and all of whom hailed from a region famous for its distrust of colonial authority, to put their faith in an outsider and walk unarmed and helpless into a monster’s lair.
He was going to need help.
* * *
Corbett’s first stop before returning to his bungalow was the little cluster of slate-shingled farmhouses that formed the village outside Champawat where the latest victim had been killed—and where, as it just so happened, the Tahsildar was already waiting. With the peach glow of sunset fading to the plum tones of twilight, the sore and limping Corbett must have been at once both nervous and relieved to see the Tahsildar—the closest thing in Champawat he had to a friend—cloaked and turbaned in dusky silhouette. Upon greeting him, perhaps Corbett related the horrendous events of the day, or maybe the exhaustion in his frame told the story for him. Smoking quietly together in the last snatches of daylight, Corbett must have finally worked up the courage to tell the Tahsildar of his plan. One can imagine the hesitancy in his voice, the uncertainty, because for once a representative of the colonial government was not giving an order so much as begging a favor—and not in English, as was customary, but in the native Kumaoni. Between puffs, perhaps, or even following a long draw, with the glowing butt held waist-high between his fingers, Corbett would have revealed the trap he had in mind, as well as his desperate need to get the people of Champawat on his side—something he feared might be impossible.
And although Corbett may not have seen it in the last of the gloaming, the Tahsildar, a man who no doubt remembered the tales of the old days, before the rebellion, before “The Mutiny,” as the English called it, surely smiled. A sly, knowing smile, one that lit up his eyes and creased his hill-born face. A flick of the butt, a cartwheeling ember, vanishing into the shadows of the fallow field beside them, and then the Tahsildar was gone, rustling away through the grass on his way back to Champawat, racing the darkness, one step ahead of the night.