No Beast So Fierce
There is, however, a second means of attack that the tiger employs when it regards something not as a threat, but as a potential food source—one that relies less on claws than it does upon teeth. Specifically, a set of three- to four-inch canine teeth, the largest of any living felid (yes, saber-toothed tigers are excluded), designed to sever spinal cords, lacerate tracheas, and bore holes in skulls that go straight to the brain. And it makes sense a tiger would have such sizable canines given their usual choice of prey: large-bodied ungulates like water buffalo, deer, and wild boar. Two of the Bengal tiger’s preferred prey species—the sambar deer and the gaur bison—can weigh as much as a thousand pounds and three thousand pounds, respectively, which gives some idea of why the tiger’s oversized set of fangs are so crucial to its survival. They are the most important tools at its disposal for bringing down some of the most powerful horned animals in the world. To crush the muscle-bound throat of a one-ton wild forest buffalo is no easy task, but it is one for which the tiger is purpose-made.
The tiger’s evolutionary history, however, begins not with a saber-toothed gargantuan eviscerating lumbering mastodons, but with a diminutive weasel-like creature scampering among the tree branches. With miacids, more specifically, primitive carnivores that inhabited the forests of Europe and Asia some 62 million years ago. Bushy-tailed and short-legged, these prehistoric scamps lived primarily on an uninspiring diet of insects. Their bug-feast would apparently continue for another 40 million years, until the fickle tenets of evolutionary biology put a fork in the road—some miacids evolved into canids, which today include dogs, wolves, foxes, and the like, while a second group, over the eons that followed, would turn into felids, or cats. Initially, there were three subgroups of felids: those that could be categorized as Pantherinae, Felinae, and Machairodontinae, with the third, although today extinct, including saber-toothed Smilodons that were indeed capable of ripping the guts out of woolly mammoths, thanks to their foot-long fangs and thousand-pound bodies.
Tigers, however, arose from the first group. Unlike leopards and lions, which both came to Asia via Africa (there are still leopards in India today, as well as lions, although only very small populations survive in the forests of Gir National Park), tigers are truly Asian in origin, first appearing some 2 million years ago in what is today Siberia and northern China. From this striped ancestor, nine subspecies would emerge, to spread and propagate across the continent, of which six still survive today, albeit precariously.
The Bali tiger, the Javan tiger, and the Caspian tiger all went extinct in the twentieth century, due to the usual culprits of habitat destruction and over-hunting. The first vanished from the face of the earth in the early nineteen hundreds, although the latter two subspecies seemed to have hung on at least until the 1970s. The extermination of the Caspian tiger is especially unsettling given the sheer size of its range—the large cats once roamed from the mountains of Iran and Turkey all the way east to Russia and China.
Of the tiger subspecies that still exist today, the Amur tiger—also known as the Siberian tiger—has stayed closest to its ancestral homeland in the Russian taiga, and continues to prowl the boreal forests of the region in search of prey. This usually means boar and deer, although at least one radio-collared tiger studied by the Wildlife Conservation Society, or WCS, was recorded as feasting primarily on bears. It seems the Amur not only has a preferred method of killing bears, involving a yank to the chin accompanied by a bite to the spine, but that it is also somewhat finicky, preferring to dine on the fatty parts of the bear’s hams and groin. With a thick coat, high fat reserves, and pale coloration, the Amur tiger is well suited to the wintry landscape of the Russian Far East. It is generally considered the largest of all the tiger subspecies, with historical records showing weights of up to seven hundred pounds, although a modern comparison of dimensions reveals that Bengal tigers in northern India and Nepal today are actually larger on average than their post-Soviet relatives farther east. Research hasn’t effectively concluded why Amur tigers are physically smaller today than in centuries past, although the removal from the gene pool of large “trophy” tigers could well be a factor. The Amur tiger’s current wild population numbers only in the hundreds, confined to a few pockets of eastern Russia and the borderlands of China.
While the northernmost realms of East Asia are prowled by what little remains of the Amur tiger population, the warmer climes to the south claim their own small subgroups of Panthera tigris, in the form of the Indochinese tiger, the Malayan tiger, the Sumatran tiger, and the South China tiger. All of their populations are atrociously small, with the South China tiger bearing the ignominious distinction of being categorized, at least recently, as one of the ten most endangered animals in the world, and quite possibly extinct in the wild. The future of all tigers is precarious at best, but in the case of these lithe jungle dwellers, considerably smaller on average than their brethren to the north, it is even more so.
Farther west, however, in the forests of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, there is another tiger yet, and although endangered, it has miraculously managed to maintain numbers that border on the thousands. It is the tiger of Mughal emperors and maharajas, of Rudyard Kipling and William Blake. The tiger that Durga, the Hindu mother goddess, rode into battle to vanquish demons, and that the rebellious Tipu Sultan—also known as the Tiger of Mysore—chose as his standard. It is the tiger that yanked British generals from their howdahs atop elephants, that turned entire villages in Bhiwapur into ghost towns, and that is responsible for the vast majority of the million people believed to have been killed by tigers over the last four centuries. It is the tiger of nursery rhymes, the tiger of nightmares, the tiger our imagination conjures when the word itself is spoken. It is identified by scientists, rather prosaically if not redundantly, as Panthera tigris tigris, but it is known to all as the Bengal tiger.
There is no shortage of shades or strokes one can employ when it comes to painting a portrait of the Bengal tiger, but to begin: Bengal tigers are big. While females tend to max out close to 400 pounds, adult males regularly achieve body weights in excess of 500 pounds, and some exceptionally large individuals have been documented at weights of over 700 pounds. Royal Bengal tigers, the subset that lives in the sub-Himalayan jungle belt known as the terai, tend to be even bigger. One extraordinary specimen—reportedly also a man-eater, at least until David Hasinger shot it in 1967—weighed in at 857 pounds, measured over 11 feet long, and left paw prints “as large as dinner plates.” For its last supper, it managed to drag not only a live water buffalo into the forest, but also the eighty-pound rock to which it was tethered. The humongous tiger’s man-and-water-buffalo-eating days may have ended shortly thereafter, but it still prowls today—in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, in fact, where it is on permanent display in the Hall of Mammals.
Second: Bengal tigers are fast. In short sprints, they can achieve forty miles per hour, which is almost three times as fast as the average human being, and roughly equivalent to the top speed of a Thoroughbred racehorse. In other words, it is futile to try to outrun a dedicated tiger. And when it comes to their leaping prowess, there are plenty of examples of tigers clearing tremendous hurdles to get their claws on a target. In an incident recorded in Nepal in 1974, a startled tigress protecting her cubs had little trouble mauling a researcher hiding fifteen feet above her in a tree. The aforementioned tiger from Kaziranga National Park managed in 2004 to take three fingers off that unfortunate elephant driver’s hand—a hand that appears to be at least twelve feet off the ground—with barely a running start. And on Christmas Day, 2007, a tiger (Amur, not Bengal, although their abilities are comparable) escaped the ostensibly inescapable barriers of its open-air enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo, for the sole purpose of going after a trio of young men who had provoked its ire. Accounts vary as to what caused the attack—the zoo accused the victims, all of whom had alcohol and marijuana in their systems, of taunting and harassing the animal, something the two survivors vigorously denied. What is certain, however, is that the enraged tiger got across a thirty-three-foot dry moat, cleared a nearly thirteen-foot protective wall, and emerged snarling from the pit like the wrath of God. Police arrived in time to save two of the young men from almost certain death—the third, who received the brunt of the initial attack, was not so lucky—but stopping the crazed tiger proved anything but easy. One officer fired three .40-caliber-pistol rounds into the charging cat’s head and chest, and that only seemed to anger it further. It wasn’t until a second officer put a fourth bullet in the tiger’s skull at point-blank range that it finally ceased its attack and fell to the ground. A more nightmarish scenario is difficult to imagine, but it is at least worth mentioning—this was only a captive tiger. Experienced wild tigers, accustomed to bringing down big game and fighting off territorial rivals, are generally much more athletic and aggressive when their hunting or defensive instincts kick in. A tiger in its natural habitat—alert, attuned, muscles rippling beneath its tawny striped hide—is another creature entirely from the languid, yawning pets of Siegfried & Roy. As lethal as this urbanized West Coast zoo tiger proved to be, it was a flabby house cat compared to its country cousins, ripping apart wolves and chasing down bears in ancient forests across the sea.
Third: Bengal tigers are strong. A tiger’s jaw is capable of exerting around a thousand pounds of pressure per square inch—the strongest bite of any cat. That’s four times as powerful as the bite of the most menacing pit bull, and considerably stronger than that of a great white shark. Even Kodiak bears, which can weigh as much as 1,500 pounds, can’t keep up. The bite of a tiger can shred muscle and tendon like butter and crunch bones like we might a stale pretzel stick. And if their bite is terrifying, a swipe from their retractable claws is just as bad if not worse. A single blow from a Bengal tiger’s paw can crack the skull and break the neck of an Indian bison, and can decapitate a human. Aggressive tigers have been known to rip the bumpers off cars, tear outhouses to splinters, and burst through the walls of houses in search of food. They can drag a one-ton buffalo across a forest floor with ease, and are capable of carrying an adult chital deer by the neck as effortlessly as a mother cat does a kitten. It’s less apparent on an Amur tiger, with its heavy fur and fat reserves, but on a Bengal tiger, the musculature is unmistakable—this is the middle linebacker of the animal world, the perfect melding of power and speed.
And last: Bengal tigers are smart. Predation of almost any kind requires intelligence—a carnivore must discern what prey is ideal, where to find it, and how best to stalk it while evading detection. Tigers excel at all of the above, thanks to skills acquired during a lengthy tutelage with their mothers. Cubs typically stay with their mothers as long as two and a half years, during which, under her ceaseless care, they learn the many, complicated tricks of the trade. And tricks, at least according to some sources, they most definitely are. During the British Raj, hunters took note of tigers that could imitate the sound of the sambar deer—what naturalist and tiger observer George Schaller would later refer to as “a loud, clear ‘pok,’ ” although he admitted to having seldom heard them make the noise while actually hunting. In colder climes to the north and east, there exist tales of tigers imitating the calls of black bears, ostensibly so they could snap their spines and dine on their fat-rich meat. Tigers frequently adjust their attack strategies to fit their quarry, and whether it’s chasing larger animals into deep water where they are easier to kill, snapping the leg tendons of wild buffalo to bring them down to the ground, or flipping porcupines onto their bellies to avoid their sharp quills, tigers are quick studies in the arts of outsmarting their prey. This intelligence, coupled with their innate athleticism and sizable frame, makes for one exceptionally effective natural predator.
Indeed, when one considers the raw physics of a collision with a five-to-six-hundred-pound body moving at forty miles an hour, the equation starts to feel less like one belonging to the natural world, and more akin to that of the automotive. Only this Subaru is camouflaged, all-terrain, and has one hell of a Klaxon—not to mention a grill bristling with meat hooks and steak knives. And when it comes to putting a tiger in its tank, this high-performance vehicle runs almost purely on meat—sometimes as much as eighty-eight pounds of it in one sitting. It has its own favorite sort of prey, the hooved, meaty mammals that graze in its domain. But a hungry tiger will eat almost anything.
Of course, there are the more pedestrian items on a famished tiger’s menu. Turtles, fish, badgers, squirrels, rabbits, mice, termites—the list is long and inglorious. But then there are the more impressive items that a tiger may take as quarry when the conditions are right. In addition to bears and wolves, tigers have been documented ripping 15-foot crocodiles to pieces, tearing the heads off 20-foot pythons, and dragging 300-pound harbor seals out of the ocean surf to bludgeon on the beach. Bengal tigers in northern India are known to have killed and eaten both rhinos and elephants, and while they tend to prefer juveniles for obvious reasons, full-grown specimens of both species have been victims of tiger predation. In 2013, a rash of tiger attacks upon adult rhinos occurred in the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve in northern India, with a 34-year-old female rhino—almost certainly over 3,000 pounds—being killed and eaten. In 2011, a 20-year-old elephant was killed and partially eaten by a tiger in Jim Corbett National Park, and in 2014, a 28-year-old elephant in Kaziranga National Park farther east was killed and feasted upon by several tigers at once. Keep in mind, a mature Indian elephant can weigh well over five tons; the Bengal tigers responsible essentially took down something the size of a U-Haul truck just so they could gnaw on it. Oh, and lest we forget—tigers eat leopards too, fearsome predators in their own right. Among the most muscular and ferocious of predatory cats, leopards are themselves capable of downing animals five times their size, and hoisting their huge carcasses high up into the trees. However, that doesn’t seem to discourage Bengal tigers from crushing their spotted throats and dining on their innards.
But of all the wide variety of flora and fauna the tiger habitually kills, all the Latin dictionary’s worth of taxonomy it is willing to regularly gulp down its gullet, there is one species that is notably and thankfully absent: Homo sapiens. Perhaps it’s our peculiar bipedalism, our evolutionary penchant for carrying sharp objects, or even our beguiling lack of hair and unusual smell. For whatever reasons, though, Panthera tigris does not normally consider us to be edible prey. As we know, they go out of their way to avoid interacting with our kind. But as many a tiger expert has noted, what tigers normally do, and what they’re capable of doing, are two very different things. And in the case of the Champawat Man-Eater, normality seems to have vanished the moment our species stole half its fangs—a transgression that the tiger would repay two hundred times over in Nepal alone.
CHAPTER 2
THE MAKING OF A MAN-EATER
Long before an emboldened Champawat Tiger was terrorizing villages and snatching farmers from their fields, it was a wounded animal convalescing deep in the lowland jungles of western Nepal, agitated, aggressive, and wracked with hunger. And it is a safe bet that its first attack occurred there, in the rich flora of the terai floodplain, the preferred habitat of the northern Bengal tiger. The terai once was—and still is, I discovered, in some isolated areas—a place of enormous biodiversity and commanding beauty. Dense groves of sal are interspersed with silk cotton and peepal, imposing trees that look as old as time. Islands of timber are encircled by lakes of rippling grasses, their stalks twice as high as the height of any man. Chital deer gather at dusk along the rivers, wild pigs root and trundle through the leaves, and even the odd gaur buffalo can make an appearance, guiding its young come twilight toward the marshes to feed. But there are people who make their home here as well: the Tharu, the indigenous inhabitants of the region who lived in the terai then as some still do today, in close proximity and harmony with the forest. Residing in small villages composed of mud-walled, grass-thatched structures, and combining low-impact agriculture with hunting and gathering, the Tharu are experts not just at surviving but thriving in a wilderness where few others can. The spirits of the animals they live beside are worshipped, and the largest of their trees are as sacred as temples. In short, they are a people with tremendous respect for and knowledge of the natural world. And the Champawat Tiger’s first victim was almost certainly one of them.
A woodcutter, possibly, or someone harvesting grass for livestock. A worker whose stooped posture resembled an animal more than a human. Perhaps he was a hattisare—a Tharu working in the royal elephant stables, on his way into the land’s bosky depths to harvest the long grasses upon which the elephants fed. It is a scene still repeated in the forest reserves of Nepal to this day, and instantly retrievable. We can imagine it: the air spiced by the curried lentil dal bhat simmering on the fire, and rich with the tang of fresh elephant dung. Our hattisare rides through these aromas atop a lumbering tusker, ducking his turbaned head to clear the low-hanging branches of trees, guiding his tremendous mount with gentle prods of his feet away from the stables toward the dense jungle and grasslands beyond.
The forest is still a wild place here, despite the farmland and pastures being cleared on its fringes, despite the outsiders from the hills who are beginning to buy up the land. But he has committed his puja for the week, making offerings to both the appropriate Hindu gods and Tharu spirits, and besides, he has lived and worked here all of his life—he is a phanet, a senior elephant handler with decades of experience. The terai has been good to him, he has nothing to fear. He loves the creatures here, and he respects their power, always granting them the wide berth that is their due. Respect, yes, but fear? No, that has never been necessary.
His elephant rumbles beneath him, still content from the dana of rice and molasses that composed its last meal. He scratches it behind the ear affectionately, and directs it with a grunted command across a shallow river, toward the plains of high elephant grass beyond. Normally, the harvesting of grass is done with his mahout, but today he let the boy sleep in. He likes being alone with his elephant on mornings such as this, riding up front just behind its head, plodding through the blankets of steam that rise from the marshes and cling to the banyan trees. There is something relaxing, almost hypnotic in the slow, seismic gait of the elephant. From his perch atop its neck, he takes great pleasure in watching the swamp deer graze at the water’s edge, or catching a passing glimpse of a rhino calf—or, on rarer occasions still, a fleeing tiger. They, like him, call the forest home, and in that he finds no small sense of kinship.
When they arrive at the spot, he gives the elephant the signal to stop and gathers his sickle. He dismounts, with a little help from the animal’s forelimb, and steps gingerly over the swampy ground. At the choicest stalks, he stoops over and begins cutting the tough grass with short, hasping strokes, humming as he works. When he has harvested enough for his first batch, he takes a thin rope from his dhoti cloth and begins to tie up the shock, squatting as he knots the twine.
It’s the elephant that senses it first—even though the man cannot see his old friend through the tall grass, he hears his uneasy snort and sudden grumble, deep, resonant, and ominous. He knows that sound well, and all too well what it implies. Perhaps it is best to hurry with his task. The last thing he would want is to stumble upon a fresh kill at the wrong moment, although he does not recall any warning calls of chital deer or flocks of waiting vultures.
But then there is another sound. One with which he is also well acquainted, although he has never heard it so close before. A roar, nearer than he ever thought possible. Close enough to make the grass stalks tremble. Heart seizing, his thoughts clarified by fear, he drops the shock, stands upright—and mounts a lightning-quick debate between the competing instincts of fight and flight. But in the end, there is time to do neither, as the realization comes to him with a stark limpidity that he is the fresh kill. He has essentially stumbled upon his own death. With a snarl and a snap and a bold rash of stripes, the tiger is upon him. It has attacked, just as it would a boar or a deer. To the wounded predator, the unknown creature it has caught is so slow and so soft, it barely has to try. It is a revelation of sorts, in whatever shape it is that such things are revealed to the mind of a tiger. A quick bite to the throat, and it’s all over. There is no struggle. The nearby elephant trumpets hysterically, but there’s nothing to be done—the famished tiger is vanishing back into the tall and rattling grasses, to gorge on its feast, its senses galvanized into a frenzy by this entirely new and imminently available class of prey . . .
The Champawat’s first taste of human flesh almost certainly began with some such scenario, probably around the year 1899 or 1900, although the details of its initial kills, before it arrived in India, are likely to stay murky. Jim Corbett, one of the few primary sources for the early exploits of the tiger, gives nothing in his account beyond the number of its Nepalese victims. And even in the present day, documenting tiger attacks in the remote frontier of western Nepal is difficult at best—many attacks go unreported, and problem tigers only gain recognition in the press when they’ve claimed unusually large numbers of victims. Not surprisingly, finding tangible evidence of specific tiger attacks more than a century old in the region is next to impossible. Unlike the United Provinces, just across the border in India, there was no colonial government to publish eyewitness accounts or squirrel away records in faraway archives.
As for the Tharu, who constituted the bulk of the population in the lowland terai at that time, they possessed a culture that, although abundant in tradition and nuance, was primarily oral—literacy, except among a privileged few, was all but unknown. Traditionally, tigers were considered royal property, and only relevant to the government when it came to sport hunting. A man-eater, unlike a sport tiger, was greeted with relative indifference, and official “documentation” would have consisted simply of a tiger skin gifted to the village shikari who killed it. In the Panjiar Collection—one of the few historical archives available of communications between the Nepalese government and Tharu communities—problem tigers are only mentioned twice over the course of fifty royal documents. And in both cases, the responsibility to “protect the lives of villagers from the threat of tigers” was delegated to the local authorities, with the warning that “if you cannot settle and protect this area from these disturbances, you cannot take its produce.” Essentially, to the Nepalese government, man-eating tigers were the Tharu’s problem—not theirs. Rather than send in hunters, they preferred to let the locals handle it.