Between the final blast of the shotgun and the arrival of the beaters, there was contemplative silence. A calm minute filled with both satisfaction and regret. For while Corbett was content to have accomplished that which was deemed all but impossible, he was also deeply shaken—as he would be for the rest of his life—by the act of killing a tiger. He would later describe the peculiar sensation that followed the destruction of a man-eater as “a breathless feeling—due possibly as much to fear as to excitement—and a desire for a little rest.” The Tahsildar joined him, and the two men stood vigil together. Just above them, the Champawat’s head hung limp over the edge of the rock, releasing a slow drip of blood that dimpled the dust at their feet.
Once Corbett’s nerves settled, he mounted the steep bank of the stream and approached the ledge to inspect the dead tiger. Just as he reached its limp body, however, the first of the beaters burst through from the forest, brandishing their assortment of guns and spears, whipped into a frenzy by the sight of the striped form sprawled out across the boulder. Few among them had not lost a loved one to its claws. The man whose entire family had been consumed by the cat was especially intent on tearing it to pieces, shrieking at the top of his lungs, “This is the shaitan that killed my wife and my two sons!”
With the help of the Tahsildar and some desperate pleading, Corbett was at last able to subdue the crowd, and the men’s rage slowly shifted to a morbid sort of curiosity. One by one, they climbed to the protruding slab of rock and gazed at the Champawat up close, suddenly so much smaller and less imposing than it had been when alive. Glazed eyes, blood-matted fur, lolling tongue—it was almost pitiable, as if the shaitan that possessed it finally had been exorcised, leaving behind only the limp remains of its discarded vehicle. The men lowered the tiger to the ground so Corbett could inspect it more closely, and confirm what he had suspected at first roar: both the upper and lower canine teeth on the right side of the tiger’s mouth had been damaged long ago, cut cleanly by a misguided bullet. The upper tooth was shorn in half, and the lower tooth, broken off all the way down to the bone.
The skinning of the tiger was delayed, though—the men asked to wait until nightfall, so that they could carry it through the surrounding villages and prove to their families that the beast was actually dead. The population needed to know that they could tend their fields without fear and walk on the roads without dread; that the night was theirs again. Corbett watched as the men lashed the Champawat to a pair of stripped saplings with their unwound dhoti cloths and turbans, formed a human chain up the face of the mountain, and passed the burden of its body up along to its crest, singing an ancient hill song in unison as they did so. This procession had not been seen in half a century: Kumaoni men celebrating the defeat of an enemy that they themselves had banded together to vanquish. In the tiger’s demise, something seemingly irretrievable had been redeemed; something once lost had again been found. And now the Tahsildar joined them, as the men carried him up the mountain atop their broad shoulders, a symbol of respect, a gesture of triumph.
Corbett climbed the slope by himself, watching with a pang in his heart a celebration he knew he could not participate in. Still, it was moving to behold, and at the top of the valley, the Tahsildar rejoined him, unwilling perhaps to leave him totally alone. As the tiger was marched eastward by the assorted villagers along the ridge of the amphitheater where the killing had taken place, the two men took the road back to Champawat together. As they marched, they noticed a single ribbon of white smoke unspooling its way toward the heavens from the valley below. It was a funeral pyre. The family of the tiger’s last victim had at last been able to recover her remains from the ravine, and now, at last, they were sending her home.
* * *
The festivities went long into the night. From a courtyard in Champawat, Corbett and the Tahsildar watched a procession of pine torches wind through the valley, as the jubilant songs of the people rang out through the still air. Gradually, the procession made its way down from the surrounding hills and arrived at the Tahsildar’s door, where the body of the Champawat was laid at Corbett’s feet to be skinned at last. It was customary for the shikari who had fired the lethal shot to keep the head and skin as a trophy, and Corbett obliged. He was happy to donate the body to the local villagers and townsfolk, who believed that lockets containing pieces of the tiger could serve as powerful talismans, and protect their children from future attacks. As Corbett crouched beside the tiger’s body, running his knife along its hide, he noticed that the final shot, the coup de grâce he had delivered with the Tahsildar’s battered shotgun, had actually struck the Champawat in its foot—not its roaring maw. But that had been enough to bring the creature down.
By the time Corbett had removed the tiger’s skin, the town elders had planned the feast that was to be held the next day, to celebrate the end of their four-year ordeal. But it was a celebration Corbett either would not—or could not—attend. His railway job back on the Ganges was beckoning, Nainital was still seventy-five miles away, and perhaps he knew that while his presence at the celebration would certainly be tolerated, even welcomed, it was again a victory that was not his to celebrate.
As the last of the stragglers left the courtyard, elated at being able to travel the roads at night without fear once again, Corbett had one final smoke with the Tahsildar. Between thoughtful drags on their cigarettes, enjoyed beneath the Kumaoni stars, Corbett told his friend that he could not stay for the celebration—that the Tahsildar would have to take his place at the head of the table instead, and that he deserved it. The Tahsildar, who seems to have understood far more than Corbett lets on in his writing, may have smiled, and told him that he would be honored.
* * *
Jim Corbett left Champawat at sunrise the next day on a borrowed horse, leaving early, riding alone, the rolled skin of the Champawat strapped to the saddle. He told his men from Nainital that he would meet up with them again at Devidhura, where he intended to spend more time cleaning the hide. On the way, however, it occurred to him that there was someone in Pali—the village where all of this had begun—who might be interested in seeing the Champawat for herself. Corbett found the stone farmhouse beside the village, dismounted from his horse, and laid out the skin of the Champawat in front of the family of the girl that the tiger had killed the year before. The surviving sister of the victim, who had been too traumatized to even speak of the incident before that day, called excitedly for all the village to come and see what the sahib had brought. Corbett drank tea with the people of Pali and recounted the details of the hunt, telling them of the bravery of the men who had helped kill the tiger, not in English, but in Kumaoni.
And it was a sentiment that he seemed to have echoed in his official report to the colonial government, upon his return to British society. Several months after the Champawat was killed, Sir John Hewett, the lieutenant governor of the United Provinces, hosted a special durbar reception in Nainital to commemorate the event—a ceremony at which both the Tahsildar and the patwari were presented with an engraved rifle and knife, respectively, as tokens of the government’s gratitude. Of course, Jim Corbett doesn’t mention the following in his account—to do so would have struck him as boastful and crass—but the lieutenant governor made sure to present him with an engraved rifle as well, a sleek and modern bolt-action .275 Rigby. It was a vast improvement over his old double-barrel black-powder rifle, and a prescient gift. Because as the people of Kumaon were soon to discover, the death of the Champawat had not marked the end of anything when it came to man-eaters.
Far from it.