The Jim Corbett Omnibus, Volume 1 Read online

  THE JIM CORBETT OMNIBUS

  Edward James ‘Jim’ Corbett (25 July 1875–19 April 1955) was an Anglo-Indian hunter and tracker-turned-conservationist, author and naturalist, famous for hunting a large number of man-eating tigers and leopards in India. He played a key role in creating a national reserve for the endangered Bengal tiger in what is now Uttarakhand. In 1957 the national park was renamed Jim Corbett National Park in his honour.

  Published by

  Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2016

  7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj

  New Delhi 110002

  Edition copyright © Rupa Publicatons India Pvt. Ltd 2016 Introduction copyright © Ruskin Bond 2016

  The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him/her which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-81-291-0000-0

  First impression 2016

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This edition is for sale in the Indian subcontinent only

  Typeset by Jojy Philip, New Delhi

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Ruskin Bond

  Author’s Note

  MAN-EATERS OF KUMAON

  The Champawat Man-eater

  Robin

  The Chowgarh Tigers

  The Bachelor of Powalgarh

  The Mohan Man-eater

  The Fish of My Dreams

  The Kanda Man-eater

  The Pipal Pani Tiger

  The Thak Man-eater

  Just Tigers

  THE TEMPLE TIGER AND MORE MAN-EATERS OF KUMAON

  The Temple Tiger

  The Muktesar Man-eater

  The Panar Man-eater

  The Chuka Man-eater

  The Talla Des Man-eater

  Epilogue

  THE MAN-EATING LEOPARD OF RUDRAPRAYAG

  The Pilgrim Road

  The Man-eater

  Terror

  Arrival

  Investigation

  The First Kill

  Locating the Leopard

  The Second Kill

  Preparations

  Magic

  A Near Escape

  The Gin-trap

  The Hunters Hunted

  Retreat

  Fishing Interlude

  Death of a Goat

  Cyanide Poisoning

  Touch and Go

  A Lesson in Caution

  A Wild Boar Hunt

  Vigil on a Pine Tree

  My Night of Terror

  Leopard Fights Leopard

  A Shot in the Dark

  Epilogue

  INTRODUCTION

  In the long run, the pen is mightier than the gun.

  Most of Jim Corbett’s hunting exploits involving man-eating tigers and leopards took place in the 1920s, and by the time he was fifty he had acquired a reputation as a good shot and skilful tracker and shikari. But it was only when he published his first book, Man-eaters of Kumaon, in 1944 (by which time he was in his late sixties) that he became truly famous, both in India and abroad. So successful was this book of true adventure in the jungles of north India that Hollywood snapped up the film rights and turned out a film of the same name (confining it to a single man-eater); unfortunately the film was a great disappointment, bearing little or no resemblance to Corbett, Kumaon, or a man-eating tiger, the tiger of the film being a tame one on loan from a circus.

  I was a schoolboy when Man-eaters of Kumaon was first published, and I remember reading it with mounting excitement, for the stories were so obviously authentic, true in every detail, and told in a natural, free-flowing, unadorned style that brought out the terror and suspense of every encounter with those great predators of our hills and forests.

  And today, almost seventy years later, I read them again… And they are as fresh as ever!

  So what is the secret of these books that they should still be selling in hundreds of thousands, seventy years after they were first published? Hunting big game is no longer a fashionable pastime, nor even a legal one. There are not many tigers left in the world, and we seldom hear of man-eaters terrorizing districts; but seventy to a hundred years ago, the big cats—tigers, leopards, even lions—held away over large parts of the country, and when a man-eater arrived on the scene, entire villages were affected by its depredations. A tiger with a liking for human flesh would become a serial killer—stalking and carrying off men and women at work in their fields, preventing children from attending school, preying on travellers and pilgrims and making certain roads or footpaths almost unusable.

  This conflict between man and beast is captured vividly by Corbett. His knowledge of the habits of wild animals is matched by his sympathy for the simple hill folk who find themselves at the mercy of the larger predators. He lives amongst them, eats with them, assesses the situation, and then goes out into the jungle to track down the killer.

  And he goes alone. A companion with a weapon is only a hindrance, liable to get in the way and cause an accident. Corbett prefers to be on his own and on foot.

  On foot, Corbett can track a tiger by following its pug-marks, by examining broken twigs and branches, by seeing a blood trail, by picking up bits and pieces of the victim’s clothes or even body parts. On foot and alone, he can also get a better shot at the tiger when he does encounter it.

  Shooting from a swaying elephant presents a problem, as does shooting from a machan or tree platform.

  Corbett puts himself at risk when he does this, especially if the tiger is wounded. A wounded tiger will turn on its tormentor. And a man-eater has little or no fear of humans, having discovered how easy it is to kill such puny creatures. But Corbett has grown up in the hills and jungles, and he is as sure-footed as his quarry.

  Sometimes he is accompanied by his little dog, Robin, who has a whole chapter to himself in this book. Corbett is essentially a lonely man. Everyone likes him, admires him, but he has few intimates or close friends. Robin is his best friend, he tells us. Brave, loyal and affectionate. What better friend could a lonely hunter ask for?

  As a writer, Corbett is a master of creating suspense. He will tell us about the man-eater and the hundreds of good people it has killed and consumed. He will then take the reader to the place where it has been most active. He will describe the pursuit—the part taken by the villagers, the part taken by himself. Then there is the final shot, as the man-eater falls to the hunter’s well-aimed bullet. All this told in a clear, simple, natural style—the style of a born storyteller.

  No wonder, then, when a copy of Man-eaters of Kumaon was placed in our school library, there was a scramble to read it. Corbett’s exploits brought him fame as a hunter. His book tuned him into a legend.

  RUSKIN BOND

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  As many of the stories in this book are about man-eating tigers, it is perhaps desirable to explain why these animals develop man-eating tendencies.

  A man-eating tiger is a tiger that has been compelled, through stress of circumstances beyond its control, to adopt a diet alien to it. The stress of circumstances is, in nine out of ten cases, wounds, and in the tenth case old age. The woun
d that has caused a particular tiger to take to man-eating might be the result of a carelessly fired shot and failure to follow up and recover the wounded animal, or the result of the tiger having lost its temper when killing a porcupine. Human beings are not the natural prey of tigers, and it is only when tigers have been incapacitated through wounds or old age that, in order to live, they are compelled to take a diet of human flesh.

  A tiger when killing its natural prey, which it does either by stalking or lying in wait for it, depends for the success of its attack on its speed and, to a lesser extent, on the condition of teeth and claws. When, therefore, a tiger is suffering from one or more painful wounds, or when its teeth are missing or defective and its claws worn down and it is unable to catch the animals it has been accustomed to eating, it is driven by necessity to killing human beings. The change-over from animal to human flesh is, I believe, in most cases accidental. As an illustration of what I mean by ‘accidental’ I quote the cases of the Muktesar man-eating tigress. This tigress, a comparatively young animal, in an encounter with a porcupine lost an eye and got some fifty quills, varying in length from one to nine inches, embedded in the arm and under the pad of her right foreleg. Several of these quills after striking a bone had doubled back in the form of a U, the point and the broken-off end being quite close together. Suppurating sores formed where she endeavoured to extract the quills with her teeth, and while she was lying up in a thick patch of grass, starving and licking her wounds, a women selected this particular patch of grass to cut as fodder for her cattle. At first the tigress took no notice, but when the woman had cut the grass right up to where she was lying the tigress struck once, the blow crushing in the woman’s skull. Death was instantaneous, for, when found the following day, she was grasping her sickle with one hand and holding a tuft of grass, which she was about to cut when struck, with the other. Leaving the woman lying where she had fallen, the tigress limped off for a distance of over a mile and took refuge in a little hollow under a fallen tree. Two days later a man came to chip firewood off this fallen tree, and the tigress, who was lying on the far side, killed him. The man fell across the tree, and as he had removed his coat and shirt and the tigress had clawed his back when killing him, it is possible that the smell of the blood trickling down his body as he hung across the bole of the tree, first gave the idea that he was something that she could satisfy her hunger with. However that may be, before leaving him she ate a small portion from his back. A day after she killed her third victim deliberately and without having received any provocation. Thereafter she became an established man-eater and killed twenty-four people before she was finally accounted for.

  A tiger on a fresh kill, or a wounded tiger, or a tigress with small cubs, will occasionally kill human beings who disturb them; but these tigers cannot, by any stretch of imagination, be called man-eaters though they are often so called. Personally I would give a tiger the benefit of the doubt once, and once again, before classing it as a man-eater, and whenever possible I would subject the alleged victim to a post-mortem before letting the kill go down on the records as the kill of a tiger or a leopard, as the case might be. This subject of post-mortems of human beings alleged to have been killed by either tigers or leopards or, in the plains, by wolves or hyenas, is of great importance, for, though I refrain from giving instances, I know of cases where deaths have wrongly been ascribed to carnivora.

  It is a popular fallacy that all man-eaters are old and mangy, the mange being attributed to the excess of salt in human flesh. I am not competent to give any opinion on the relative quantity of salt in human or animal flesh; but I can, and I do, assert that a diet of human flesh, so far from having an injurious effect on the coat of the man-eaters, has quite the opposite effect, for all the man-eaters I have seen have had remarkably fine coats.

  Another popular belief in connection with man-eaters is that the cubs of these animals automatically become man-eaters. This is quite a reasonable supposition; but it is not borne out by actual facts, and the reason why the cubs of man-eaters do not themselves become man-eaters, is that human beings are not the natural prey of tigers, or of leopards.

  A cub will eat whatever its mother provides, and I have even known of tiger cubs assisting their mothers to kill human beings: but I do not know of a single instance of a cub, after it had left the protection of its parent, or after that parent had been killed, taking to killing human beings.

  In the case of human beings killed by carnivora, the doubt is often expressed as to whether the animal responsible for the kill is the tiger or leopard. As a general rule—to which I have seen no exceptions—tigers are responsible for all kills that take place in daylight, and leopards are responsible for all kills that take place in the dark. Both animals are seminocturnal forest-dwellers, have much the same habits, employ similar methods of killing, and both are capable of carrying their human victims for long distances. It would be natural, therefore, to expect them to hunt at the same hours; and that they do not do so is due to the difference in courage of the two animals. When a tiger becomes a man-eater it loses all fear of human beings and, as human beings move about more freely in the day than they do at night, it is able to secure its victims during daylight hours and there is no necessity for it to visit their habitations at night. A leopard, on the other hand, even after it has killed scores of human beings, never loses its fear of man; and, as it is unwilling to face human beings in daylight, it secures its victims when they are moving about at night or by breaking into their houses at night. Owing to these characteristics of the two animals, namely, that one loses its fear of human beings and kills in the daylight, while the other retains its fear and kills in the dark, man-eating tigers are easier to shoot than man-eating leopards.

  The frequency with which a man-eating tiger kills depends on (a) the supply of natural food in the area in which it is operating; (b) the nature of the disability which has caused it to become a man-eater, and (c) whether it is a male or female with cubs.

  Those of us who lack the opportunity of forming our own opinions on any particular subject are apt to accept the opinions of others, and in no case is this more apparent than in the case of tigers—here I do not refer to man-eaters in particular, but to tigers in general. The author who first used the words ‘as cruel as a tiger’ and ‘as bloodthirsty as a tiger’ when attempting to emphasize the evil character of the villain of his piece, not only showed a lamentable ignorance of the animal he defamed, but coined phrases which have come into universal circulation, and which are mainly responsible for the wrong opinion of the tigers held by all except that very small proportion of the public who have the opportunity of forming their own opinions.

  When I see the expression ‘as cruel as a tiger’ and ‘as bloodthirsty as a tiger’ in print, I think of a small boy armed with an old muzzle-loading gun—the right barrel of which was split for six inches of its length, and the stock and barrels of which were kept from falling apart by lashings of brass wire—wandering through the jungles of the terai and bhabar in the days when there were ten 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 and warmth, wakened at intervals by the calling of tigers, sometimes in the distance, at other times near at hand; throwing another stick on the fire and turning over and continuing his interrupted sleep without one thought of unease; knowing from his own short experience and from what others, who like himself had spent their days in the jungles, had told him—that a tiger, unless molested, would do him no harm; or during daylight hours avoiding any tiger he saw, and when that was not possible, standing perfectly still until it has passed and gone, before continuing on his way. And I think of him on one occasion stalking half-a-dozen jungle fowl that were feeding in the open, and on creeping up to a plum bush and standing up to peer over, the bush heaving and a tiger walking out on the far side and on clearing the bush, turning round and looking at the boy with an expression on its face which said as clearly as
any words, ‘Hello, kid, what the hell are you doing here?’ and, receiving no answer, turning round and walking away very slowly without once looking back. And then again I think of the tens of thousands of men, women and children who, while working in the forests or cutting grass or collecting dry sticks, pass day after day close to where tigers are lying up and who, when they return safely to their homes, do not even know that they have been under the observation of this so called ‘cruel’ and ‘bloodthirsty’ animal.

  Half a century has rolled by since the day the tiger walked out of the plum bush, the latter thirty-two years of which have been spent in the more or less regular pursuit of man-eaters, and though sights have been seen which would have caused a stone to weep, I have not seen a case where a tiger has been deliberately cruel or where it has been bloodthirsty to the extent that it has killed, without provocation, more than it has needed to satisfy its hunger or the hunger of its cubs.

  A tiger’s function in the scheme of things is to help maintain the balance in nature and if, on rare occasions when driven by dire necessity, he kills a human being or when his natural food has been ruthlessly exterminated by man, he kills two per cent of the cattle he is alleged to have killed, it is not fair that for these acts a whole species should be branded as being cruel and bloodthirsty.

  Sportsmen are admittedly conservative, the reason being that it has taken them years to form their opinions, and as each individual has a different point of view, it is only natural that opinions should differ on minor, or even in some cases on major, points, and for this reason I do not flatter myself that all the opinions I have expressed will meet with universal agreement.

  There is, however, one point on which I am convinced that all sportsmen—no matter whether their viewpoint has been a platform on a tree, the back of an elephant, or their own feet—will agree with me, and that is that a tiger is a large-hearted gentleman with boundless courage and that when he is exterminated—as exterminated he will be unless public opinion rallies to his support—India will be the poorer, having lost the finest of her fauna.