No Beast So Fierce
Maneaters of Kumaon
Images
World Wildlife fund
some cool tiger sense facts:
6x better night vision than us,0.2 to 65 kHz that can hear breathing, heartbeats or swallowing, Special whiskers to sense all kinds of stuff, Padded feet make them nearly silent while they walk. They’re like predator. Invisible silent and they’ll rip out your spine in one go.
Wiki links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumaon_division
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champawat
Champawat Tiger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupal,_Nepal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attack
News:
https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-zoo-attack-sf-tiger-christmas-day/9072741/
Youtube links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0kzdu_wTM0&ab_channel=WildFilmsIndia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jac_K-XB5A&ab_channel=Unbelievablefacts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f9CsToZpeY&ab_channel=Animalogic
Music
Special thanks for the intro and outro music
Freesound.org users
Claiber7901
videog
Loose Transcript: (full of typos, but that's okay!)
Welcome everyone to Nightmare Now the show where we’ll learn about all the horrors of our universe and psyche and hopefully have ourselves a laugh along the way. I’m your host Erik Byrne and on this episode we’re gonna take an in depth look at the true story of a killer. A serial killer operating on the fringes of society at the turn of the twentieth century. A killer that dismembered and ate her victims. A killer with a kill count not ten, not twenty, not dozens but hundreds of victims. A killer that was a Bengal tiger. The champawat tiger single handedly killed four hundred and thirty six people in northern India and Nepal in the early 1900s.
My main source for this episode was the book No Beast So Fierce by Dane Hucklebridge. It’s a good read and if you like the story you’re about to hear check out the book in the show notes for a more in depth look.
We’re gonna start out here with a stat sheet. I want you to see what a tiger is made of. If you have a house cat handy take a look at him right now imagine that but 60 times larger! This is the worlds largest living feline, and second in history overall only to the Smilodon or sabre tooth tiger. They can range from four, five hundred pounds all the way up to seven hundred pounds and extraordinary specimens tipping the scales at over eight hundred pounds. They range anywhere from ten to even thirteen feet long with their tails included. That is a very big kitty.
Lets talk equipment. First of all musculature. On our housecat George you can see his clearly defined muscles and he’s only 11 pounds or so so when we ramp that up to six to seven hundred pound cat we’re talking serious strength. Even without claws a single swipe of a tigers massive paw could knock your head clean f***ing off your body and easily break bones. They have a jaw that can bite down with over a thousand psi which can crack through a water buffalo’s head. And wielded with that force are a set of 3 to 4 inch fangs. Big enough to slam into a brain or rip out a spine. On their front paws they have ten claws that are also about four inches long.
That musculature isn’t just there to knock heads off, it’s built for speed and finesse too. Capable of short bursts of forty miles per hour speed and the demonstrated ability to leap thirty feet through the air to pounce. They are fantastic swimmers and comfortable on land and in the water.
They are very smart hunters and adaptable when it comes to their prey. They’ll cripple larger prey by the legs and drive others towards the water where they are far easier to take down. They’re solitary animals generally but the cubs stay with the mother for about 2 years learning all these and other ways to kill. There have even been some recorded incidents of tigers mimicking the sounds of other animals to lure them out. Like predator. The predator comparison becomes more apt when we take into account its spine ripping behavior and spectacular stealth ability. When it wants to be seen and heard though, you’ll know. A tiger can roar at a hundred fourteen decibels which is like being next to 25 lawnmowers going at once.
They’ll eat pretty much anything they want. A tigers diet includes but is presumably not limited to
fish, turtles, badger, rabbit, mice, bears, wolves, sandar deer, water buffalo, crocs, pythons, seals, even elephants, rhinos, leopards and of course, the reason we’re talking about them today. Humans. We’ll get into how the eat a little bit later but suffice to say for now that it isn’t pretty.
Tigers are basically perfect killers, like sharks in the water they’re predatory evolution perfected. But even still they don’t usually go after humans. They like bigger meatier game but when certain factors coalesce you have an unmistakable recipe for a man eater. We talked about the tigers' equipment earlier. teeth and claws, jaws and paws. These are all integral parts of it’s hunting kit. When there’s an injury the tiger has to adapt, maybe it can’t crush a buffalo’s neck so easily anymore. Maybe it can't keep up with a fleet footed deer quite as well anymore.
A national park in india did a fantastic study of tiger attacks on humans in their area from nineteen seventy nine to two thousand six. Some of the conclusions were that sixty six percent of the tiger victims were kind of stooped down with their backs turned. They never see it coming, but perhaps more importantly, I scrooched down human in tall grass looks a heck of a lot more like normal prey than one walking around and making all kinds of noise.
Even more incriminating was that most of the tigers that were actually able to be examined displayed injuries to their teeth or paws and in the cases of tigers that actually scooped people right out of their villages. Every single one was impaired like this. And of all the attacks over all, 90% of them occurred in areas where prey density has fallen and the habitats were degraded.
Looking at all this a clear pattern emerges. It’s hard to foist a term like motive onto an animal versus a human but lets make the case. These man eaters at the time of their first kill are acting out of desperation. They’re hungry, their habitat is being encroached on, and they’re unable to get their normal prey. They take a shot at a clumsy primate that’s on their turf, and even to an injured tiger, humans are no match. That’s when it clicks. We’re made of meat. We’re readily available. We’re weak and we’re slow. When a tiger realizes all this after grabbing a farmer by the throat and dragging him into the jungle screaming without so much as a struggle, a very very dangerous animal is born. And of those dangerous animals, there was none so dangerous as the champawat tiger.
She was born sometime in 1899 or 1900 in Nepal. We can imagine that she had a relatively normal childhood? Cubhood? What do you call it? I guess it’s not important. But at some point she was injured by a hunter or a poacher’s bullet. That shot was the catalyst for the better part of five hundred deaths.
When a tiger attacks a human usually they don’t have a chance. You’re just scrooching down to cut some grass or take a piss or something than in less than a second you hear that tremendous roar and you have 40 cumulative inches of claws entering your back before those vicegrip jaws clamp down on your neck and it’s over. And that’s before even taking into account the sheer force that six hundred pounds of muscle moving at highway speed will do just on impact alone. If by the grace of god someone can survive the split second impact like getting hit by some f***ed up mad max knife car intelligent enough to hit from behind and go for the throat, all the tiger has to do is shake it’s big head and tear those claws through you and you’re f***.
If you don’t believe me just do a quick google images of tiger attack autopsy. The hole that one fang can put in a human neck is nightmare fuel. In the book Hucklebridge sources a number of different well documented tiger attacks in all sorts of scenarios. There’s tigers that swim out and rip people out of a boat, tear people from trees, literally burst through walls of peoples huts to drag them away screaming like a god damn pitcher of orange flavored, bloodthirsty cool aid man. And a particularly brutal one where two young children watch their father get pounced and dragged away into the jungle, recounting the story having grown up fatherless.
Speaking of growing up fatherless I think it’s time we looked at the other side of the arena, The hero, so to speak of this story: Edward James Corbett. This dude was a legend. We’ll get to know him a little better over the course of the show but let’s start with the basics He went by Jim Corbett, which is how I’ll mostly be referring to him for the rest of the show. Jim was born the eighth child of sixteen of Christopher William and Mary jane Corbett in Nainital, in northern India, July of 1975. If I’m messing up the pronunciation of any of these places in India and Nepal bear with me. His parents had come over from Britain years before and lived in India for some time. The book goes into a lot of great detail about his family history and the larger scope of British presence in India during that time, but that’s kind of beyond the scope of this show for now, so if you’re interested check out the book.
The short version is that britain was going all over the world to kind of make everywhere like britain. Obviously this model doesn’t work for ever and is usually met with some resistance. Violent or otherwise. So the british indian relationships are often tenuous. With all that being said. Growing up as a white kid in the jungle you’re gonna take the hand your dealt. Corbett did just that, going to school in the colony and town they were at and at the same time going out and befriending the locals to learn more about the amazing natural world around him. In this unique upbringing he became kind of a missing link between the two cultures where he could rub elbows and play cricket with the rich brits and the next day go out for a hunt with a village elder in the jungle.
At six years old his father died of a heart attack so growing up with those connections to local men became even more important to forming the man he would become. His mentor gave him his first weapon and taught him everything he knew about tigers and other wildlife of the jungle. At the time he first heard of the champawat tiger, he was working at a train station likely sometime in 1903. A british friend of his told him of rumors of a single tiger snatching people away in nearby nepal. I’ll throw a map in the show notes that gives a pretty good estimation about jim and the tigers movements over those few years. Unfortunately we don’t have a lot of great records about the tigress herself in her early days in nepal. Most of the historical records point towards the cat killing two hundred people before being driven out of the country. Bounty hunters were called in, part of the nepalese army, absolutely eveything they had available they threw at her and she evaded or killed and ate all of it. The sources we do have about the tiger leaving nepal are mostly conjecture. But historically tiger hunts were accomplished by a huge amount of noise, guns, elephants and screams driving the tiger into a suitable killzone. The champawat tigress managed to escape all that and finally arrived in india.
Now is as good a time as any to talk about the math at work here. An adult tiger needs one hundred twenty five to a hundred thirty five pounds of meat per week to survive. By all accounts the champawat tiger was killing a person a week for eight or nine years. A person in india and nepal is gonna about fit that quota. We can figure one person a week for a year is fifty two people a year, multiplying that by eight years and we get four hundred and sixteen, and by nine years we get four hundred and sixty eight. The math works out well enough with the corroborating sources that the kill count was somewhere close to two hundred in nepal and continued at that pace for for another four, four and half years in the kumaon area of india just west of it’s previous territory in nepal.
In 1907 Corbett is contacted by another hunter about a tiger that needs to be put down. of course, it’s the champawat. He’s surprised that it’s still going after he puts together that shwe was the one he heard about back in 1903. When he hears that everything locals or british have thrown at this tiger had failed he agrees to take the job. But with a couple of fun caveats. This bit is straight out of a movie. I’m paraphrasing but he says, I’ll take the job but first you need to recall every other hunter or soldier already contracted to go after her, and get rid of the bounty on her head. I’m not doing this for the money, I’m not doing this for the skin, I’m not doing it to be a poacher I’m doing it because it’s my duty for the colony.
At the time you were a tiger for two main reasons. You were either a british pansy looking for yucks or an indian poacher looking for bucks. So their was the desire for getting a fur pelt from them and what really kicked everything into high gear was bounty hunting. During the british expansion in india tigers were seen as a pretty big problem. Both symbolically as the tiger represented the untamed natural india compared to a civilised british colony and also literally due of course to 700 pound cats eating people and livestock. When turning in a single tiger you could get the equivalent of months and months of pay as a lower class indian it’s no wonder why tiger hunting skyrocketed. Over eighty thousand tigers were killed in 50 years. With both the locals and europeans taking shots at tigers wherever they could, you ended up with a lot of very angry very dangerous wounded cats.
So another thing that’s important to consider here is the gun culture in india at the time, I’m not sure that’s the right word but lets roll with it. I don’t really have time to dig to deep in to the colonial politics of the time, I’m not an expert so if you’re interested pick up the book. The short version is that the british show up in india, try to domesticate it and make it more like a proper english colony. The problem with this is people usually don’t take kindly to subjugation, revolutions ensue and are subsequently put down, a big one in 1857. After this the brits basically go on a gun grabbing rampage and so functionally nobody has weapons and those that do are generally rusty pieces of s***. Anything beyond the rusty piece of s*** tier is prohibitvely expensive and also illegal.
Corbett has just begun thinking about how he’s gonna bag the tigress when a man breathlessly runs into the village saying that the tiger has killed another person in pali, 60 kilometers away. He gathers up the six or seven kumaonis that he’s recruited, packs up his gun and supplies and starts the trek towards pali. The hunt had begun.
The group takes off towards pali. And they are hooffing it big time. they carry their gear because keep in mind cars are a long way off at this point. The model T doesn’t come out until the next year and rural india wasn’t exactly first on the list to get them. So they’re hiking at 30 kilometers a day to make it to pali in two days. For us americans that about thirty seven thirty eight miles total and about nineteen miles per day.
When they finally arrive they’re surprised to find it a ghost town. There is nobody in the square or on the street and they call out basically just to scream if anyone is there. And then the smell kicks in. the whole village smells like p*** and s***. A few of the villagers cautiously emerge from their homes. The whole village has been locked down and everyone has been inside for days. People are literally staying inside their houses s*** their pants with fear. They’re too afraid to even go out to dump the human waste or gather more food. So on top of those unsanitary conditions they’re also beginning to starve. A few villagers explain that the demon tiger is here and it has been for a few days. At night they cower from it’s roars in the jungle. All this makes everything all to real to corbett. If he didn’t know it wasn’t an ordinary tiger before he sure did now.
He asks to see the kill site but nobody in town is willing to go anywhere near that accursed place. Corbett needs to see the tracks and other markings from the tiger to get a better picture of the size of her. Again we’re hit with the distrust of whites in india. Even when corbett can speak the language and grew up there nobody is willing to risk going out to the kill site. Corbett takes the message and decides he needs to earn their trust. The first night he goes out alone and sits next to a tree, trying to keep watch all night. Corbett writes down in his own book just how terrified he was sitting out there alone. He says he saw dozens of tigers behind the trees, tricks of the light. His teeth chatter from the terror and the cold and eventually he falls asleep hunkered down under this tree. To him it’s a miracle he survives the night. The tiger was still without a doubt nearby, possibly even watching him that night. To me it’s a miracle he survived the night too, especially considering the nighttime capabilities of a Bengal tiger. Their eyes have night vision six times more sensitive than our own, and their radar like ears can pick up the faintest sounds like a breath or even a heartbeat. Couple those with their bigass padded paws that make them nearly silent as they walk, he wouldn’t have stood a chance if she was hungry.
While the village were impressed with his bravery or stupidity they still refused to take him to the kill site. He takes off into the bush with a few of his crew for a little while until he finds a few goorahl deer sitting up on a ridge. That's good eatin. He readies his rifle and fires, bam the deer falls down the hill, but the shot scared out two more . BAM BAM he hits both of those at two hundred yards like he’s putting together a call of duty montage. All three animals fall and he brings them back to the village. Finally, when given food a villager agrees to take him to the site, and explains what happened. They were all out in the field and the girl climbed up into the tree and got ripped out of it with such force that the skin from her hands still clung to the bark. They followed the trail of dried blood and eventually made it to a clearing. This place looked worse than carries prom night, there was blood everywhere but no tiger, and even more disturbing, No body, at least not intact. Just a few scraps of flesh and bones that would have fit in a restaurant to go box. F***. Looking over the pawprints corbett judges the tiger to be female, around 12 years old. This tracks well with everything we already know about her time in nepal and across kumaon.
We get into the feeding habit of the tigers here: So these tigers can basically scoop anything by the neck and just take off. That’s how it can snatch people so damn easily. They can drag 500 lb water buffalo around so they can pick up an indian woman like they’re playing fetch. The average indian woman today is 5 feet tall and weighs 120 pounds.
tigers scoop their prey and find a nice secluded location to basically gorge themselves for a few days. Once it’s in a suitable locale they’ll just start chomping and ripping away at the meat starting with the butt. They’ll eat for an hour or so, then just lounge till they’re hungry again. Is this the right script? Is that my saturday plans or a tiger? They will repeat this cycle until everything edible is consumed. The place is basically gonna look like the set of the thing, just a few shards of bone left and a lotta blood. They have sandpaper-like tounges to strip away flesh, several types of teeth to help tear apart meat and consume everything. A starving tiger can eat a cow in 4 days so estimating the time to eat a person is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3 days. When they are done they just leave behind this crime scene and go somewhere else to hunt for the next meal. When they take off like this they can become difficult to track over such a huge territory
Tigers in their territory move on a constant patrol while they hunt. After the whole process I just described takes place and the tiger moves to a new location it repeats. Realizing this the village people werent able to track it perse but were able to sort of tell when it was in the area. Mostly because one of them would get carried off screaming. When this occurred, the whole village would lock down until the tiger moved to a new locale.
This certainly contributed to the tigresses colossal kill count was that there's a hugely delayed response when the tiger attacks someone. Nobody really has guns due to some uprisings against british takeover of indian most notably the one in 1857 So they have to send some dude over on foot to a place with british govt, and getting the wheels of government moving in order to even to dispute a goddamn parking ticket is nearly impossible so setting up a bounty and hiring a hunter contractor to go after it will take like a week. By the time the hunter gets over there there’s nothing left but splotches of blood and little bits of bone and the tiger is 30 miles away to do it again. If you thought herding cats was hard imagine trying to do it with govt assistance and the cats are 700 pound killing machines.
Back to our story: When they bring home what’s left of this girl, they ask around to see where the tiger is now or where it might be headed. Nobody really knows but the consensus is it’s going back to champawat village. The tiger operates in a huge swath of land all around kumaon, kumaon itself is about the size of wyoming and the champawat tiger was responsible for 95% of the tiger fatalities in the region during that time. but the nexus of the deaths and sightings is right in champawat.
They pack up and get ready to hike up to champawat.
Jim Corbett arrives in champawat on may 9th 1907 with his kumaoni buddies plus one or two extra guys from pali brave enough to try to end the reign of terror.
In corbetts memoir he makes an interesting note about the tashlidar, who from what I can understand is some sort of village elder/ caretaker like figure. This isn’t a local indian politics podcast. Sue me. He makes a note about how the guy was gonna spend the night at his bungalow and just says screw it and walks home last minute. I’ve done my fair share of long walks home at night but this is in a time and place where any average dude is afraid to walk the streets without a group of at least four people just in case one of them gets attacked and carried off. This dude just peaces out and walks 4 miles home alone in the dark.
He spends the night basically having nightmares of getting ripped apart by a tiger and barely sleeps a wink. After all the research I did on tigers I cant say I blame him. But he’s actually going after the most notorious one in history. I’m sitting in a closet just making jokes about it.
When corbett wakes up he’s chatting with his squad of six or seven guys trying to assess where the tiger might strike next and what their move should be, he’s doing the 1907 version of where we dropping boys?” and as if on cue this dude runs down the road screaming that the tiger has grabbed another girl. Victim 436.
When he gets to the site of the attack he does a quick interview about how it went down and he's surprised to find that the tiger snatched this girl up in broad daylight, in a field, surrounded by a dozen other people. It was very good at what it did.
A little bit more about tiger stealth, A tiger is able to conceal itself in knee high grass, approach almost without sound and jump out with ludicrous speed. They are well camouflaged, you might think orange isn’t a great camo color, but look at hunters. They wear bright orange tree camo. Prey animals dont see it. And animals that do, like us would even have trouble picking out the orange from light filtering through the trees.
Corbett tells the villagers to stay inside and wait for him to get back. starts tracking after the tiger from the site of the attack and finds a swath of destruction in its wake. There’s hair, clothing and blood leading into the treeline. Partway along the course of this blood trail he hears fast footsteps behind him and goes and whirls around thinking he’s about to be desert and almost shoots a villagers head off. We have a unique scenario here where we can kind of hear corbetts internal monologue in a way because he recorded his thoughts on the hunt in his books. I’ve got some juicy bits from maneaters of kumaon in just a minute.
Luckily he doesn’t unload his weapon on this poor bastard and the guy explains hes here to help because he is one of the only guys in town that actually has a gun. Imagine you’re on the trail of this legendary tiger and something comes crashing through the bush behind you without warning. I would have gunned him down accidentally and been thrown in indian prison. The problem is this dude is an oaf. He’s loud and doesn’t know much about hunting so he’s more of a liability. He makes the guy climb to the top of a tree and just sit there until he gets back. He can’t send him back because then the guy would have to go back alone. That’s just a little part of the story that’s so f***ing funny to me
After leaving the guy up on top of the tree he finds the tigers feeding zone and hoo boy it’s a doozy. From his own words:
“Splinters of bone were scattered round the deep pugmarks into which discolored 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 maneaters 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 warm blood was trickling.”
Jesus. For the record pugmarks are the tiger tracks. While he kneels down to inspect the carnage he hears a growl in a split second whips around and fires off both barrels of his weapon. This is it. The tiger is f***ing here. In his haste he misses both shots but the gunblast sound alone is enough to give the tiger momentary pause. It dashes off the collision course, drops the body of the girl and lets out a colossal roar.
The tiger roars and just takes off with the body in her teeth. And jim just follows right after it even though he’s only got one bullet left. But a person isn’t gonna keep pace with a tiger under pretty much any circumstance and after a few hours the trail goes cold. And night begins to fall. If you’re taking your chances with a single bullet with a murder tiger from hell you’re brave, if you’re doing it at night you’re stupid.
He goes back to grab the villager off his tree that he’s STILL SITTING on. While the stooge comes down off the tree he looks out at the valley. Jim knows that almost being the tigers next meal and hopelessly trying to keep up with it through the undergrowth is not a winning strategy and would end either with him being ripped apart by the tiger or losing it in the night as it goes off to its next victim which could be dozens of miles away. It has to be here. And it has to be tomorrow.
In the movie of this I direct once that fat podcast money comes, this where I put the heist scene where they show everyone laying down the blueprints and also cut to each part of it as it’s being planned. I can't remember if that's an oceans 11 thing or usual suspects or what, I guess it’s not important. I’ll fix the movie trivia when we do our bank robberies episode. But this is where corbett gets his crew together. All he has to do is convince a bunch of people that are already so f***ing scared they won’t even leave their house to take a s*** when the tiger is around, to join him in a hunt, the likes of which they have never done before. Not to mention the fact that they are in an area that has had its fair share of horrors come directly from britain to help out jim corbett the whitey. Easy right?
He asks his guide in the town to help rally the troops so to speak, and heads to bed. The next morning he sets up hoping to get a few hundred people to help bring down the beast. This is beowulfs assault on grendels lair, this is going after smaug, this is ahabs white whale, this is f***ing legendary.
Annd nobody show up then at ten am his buddy from the village shows up with the oaf from the other day. It’s a nice gesture but it’s not enough to slay the beast by any stretch. Twenty minutes pass and two or three more show up, then a few more, five here three more there. And by noon almost 300 people show up. Many of them with illegal guns, the elders in the village hinted that nobody would care about the guns JUST THIS ONCE.
So they’ve put together this literal ragtag army of farmers and craftsman wielding old guns, sticks, makeshift spears, wood axes, basically anything they can pick up. Corbett meets one lunatic with a hammer that had two sons and his wife eaten by this thing. This was a les mis style moment where the people rise to fight against natures tyranny.
I want to take a quick second to reiterate that this is a 100% true story. It’s unbelievable.
The tiger is somewher down in a nearby gorge feeding on that poor four hundred and thirty sixth victim. There’s only one way out of the gorge short of climbing the ridges on 3 sides. The team lines up equidistantly all along the top of the ridge. And corbett and his buddy from town hide alone at the mouth of the gorge with his gun ready. All was set up for corbett to give his signal for everyone around the ridge to just start making a f***load of noise from all 3 sides, throw rocks and cause disturbances to flush her out into where corbett was waiting.
There was one problem. You guys remember that scen in lord of the rings where the one eyed dude accidentally shoots an orc too early and f***s up the whole seige? That happens, the people on the ridge get antsy and someone blasts off a gun prematurely and everyone else follows suit. The problem is corbett and his buddy aren’t in place.
He has to run 500 feet to get to his planned position and the tiger comes careening out of the forest like a f***ing bat outta hell. There’s no time and theres just a split second of realization likely from the tiger and corbett both that only one of them is getting out of this alive. But he hesitates!
His buddy doesn’t and takes a shot with his piece of s*** shotgun and misses wide. The panic messes up corbetts shot as well. It’s just enough to throw the tiger off though and she runs BACK into the gorge. They messed up their one chance.
…
The people up on the ridge however, well out of sight of any of this behind the trees here the gunshot and they all assume corbett shot the tiger. THey shoot off their guns into the air and start cheering. THis second wave of sound is enough to give the operation a second chance. The tigress runs back out from the gorge where corbett is waiting. Corbett sees the tiger fly out of the gorge and raises his rifle and fires off a shot that actually hits her back flank. She twist in a rage and agony and turns to face him and charge. He fires again and hits her in the shoulder.
I assume after that he s*** his pants.
Jim corbett carries a double barrel rifle. He’s got no bullets left. He’s got a VERY F****** ANGRY maneating tiger and she isn’t down for the count yet. He has one shot insane chance at survival. He has to run to his buddy from the village and get HIS gun. He makes the breathless dash and in doing so the tiger finally sees what all the searing pain she's experiencing is from. Zeroed in on corbett she charges. His partner from the village must have his eyes go wide from shock as it dawns on him what jim is doing. Corbett is gesturing for him to THROW his gun to him while he runs by!
He tosses the old shotgun into the air, disarming himself and that gun must have hung in the air for what seemed an eternity in that split second. Corbett catches the shotgun and whirls around with the tiger twenty feet from him ready to leap, moving at forty miles per hour.
He raises the shotgun and
The champawat tiger is dead at his feet.
Upon investigation of the body they could see the cause. The cause of all the mayhem and carnage, of all the literally ripped apart families, all the fear, all of it. The tigress’s teeth were wrecked long ago one fang taken clean off and another broken in half. She was unable to hunt her usual prey. It was some unknowing hunter that had done this to her and set her on this path. Nature isn’t evil.
In the village people celebrated, they were free from the grip of fear.
There’s a substantial epilogue to this story though. The champawat tiger may have been the first super maneater in 1900s india but she would be far from the last. THe conditions of habitat destruction, colonial encroachment, industrialization, poaching and all that werent going anywhere anytime soon and many more tigers and leopards claimed many more lives, some estimates put the toll close to a million people over the last five hundred years or so.
Jim corbett went on to hunt a few more of these notable maneaters including a leopard that had at least one hundred and twenty nine confirmed kills. He went on to publish his memoirs and several other books about his time in the indian jungle and those all sold fantastically well. In his later years he dedicated himself to tiger conservation founding a national park to preserve them that now bears his name.
In 1907 there was an estimated 100 thousand tigers in the wild and now there’s somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand in the wild. Fur trade in china ( We’ll get into china don’t worry) and other countries, poaching and tigers losing ninety percent of their habitat presents a bleak picture but not an impossible one. Many governments have put together a pact to try to double tiger populations by 2022.
If you want to help out tiger conservation, first, don’t kill them. Secondly I’ll put in some links to the world wildlife fund in the show notes
