No Beast So Fierce

Such was the case of an attack that occurred in the Nagpur Division of India, and was subsequently described in Forensic Science International in 2013; an event that bears a striking resemblance to those attributed to the Champawat. The victim, a thirty-five-year-old woman, was foraging for tendu leaves in the forest with her husband and a few companions. The woman was left briefly alone while her husband scaled a tree to pluck leaves right off the branches, when shouts of “tiger, tiger” rang out through the brush. Her husband reached her just a few seconds later, and he was able to scare away the tiger by shouting and hurling stones, but it was too late—she was already dead. When her blood-soaked sari was later removed, and an autopsy performed, the examination revealed “four deep puncture wounds” on the nape of the neck resulting in a “complete laceration of the right jugulocarotid vessel” as well as “compound fractures of the C3 and C6 vertebral bodies due to through and through penetration by the canines of the tiger as a result of enormous bite force used in the killing bite at the canines.” The spinal cord at these points was “completely lacerated with multiple foci of hemorrhages.” In addition to the severed jugular and broken spine, the victim also suffered multiple deep puncture wounds from the tiger’s claws on the arms, shoulders, and torso—some almost two inches wide—as well as a fractured right clavicle and a fracture dislocation of the left sternoclavicular joint from the sheer force of the initial blow. In this case, the death was classified as “accidental,” which although true in a legal sense, doesn’t capture the purposeful nature of a tiger attack. When one sees the heart-wrenching autopsy photo of the four perfectly spaced, quarter-sized holes on the back of the victim’s broken neck, one can’t help but feel tremendous pity for the family of the unfortunate woman, and shudder at the expertise with which a tiger does its deadly work. Not malevolently, as man so often does, but naturally, with the grace and ease that 2 million years of predator evolution have bestowed upon it.

As to how the tiger can kill so effectively and quickly, we need only remind ourselves of the considerable toolkit with which the tiger is equipped. As we already know, tigers have four canine teeth that can reach close to four inches, and they have a total of ten claws on their forepaws of comparable length. This means that in the first milliseconds of a full-speed tiger attack, a human body must not only cope with a bone-fracturing impact comparable to that of a charging Spanish fighting bull, but also absorb fourteen simultaneous stiletto-deep stab wounds—four of which are usually inflicted on the back of the head or the nape of the neck. And that’s just the initial attack. If there’s any fight left in the grievously injured victim, it can usually be obliterated almost instantly with a fierce, spine-snapping shake of the head, or further flaying with all those bladed claws. Not surprisingly, survivors of actual tiger attacks are few and far between.

But they do exist. Oftentimes, victims of tiger attacks survive either because the tiger is scared away before it can finish the job, or because it is acting in a defensive manner and not a predatory one—in which case the attack is geared more toward deterrence than nutrition (although tigers have been known to eat victims even when the attack was defensive in nature). Both were likely mitigating factors in the 1974 mauling, though luckily not death, of one tiger researcher in Chitwan, Dr. Kirti Man Tamang. At the time, he was perched some fifteen to eighteen feet up in a tree—a distance considered to be safe from tiger attack—to monitor signals from a radio-collared mother tiger dubbed “Number One” by the team. What he didn’t reckon on, however, was just how protective a mother tiger can be. Fellow researchers Fiona and Mel Sunquist, who were working in Chitwan at the time of the attack, describe it in the following passage from Tiger Moon, as witnessed from atop a nearby elephant:

Kirti was moving around in the tree, pointing with the long aluminum antenna. He began to speak; then everyone heard the miaow of a young cub . . . Number One exploded out of the grass with a shattering roar. She made one leap up the tree and in a split second was on top of Kirti. He saw her coming and tried to ward her off with the antenna, but she flung it aside without noticing. She sank her claws into his thighs and buttocks and bit deeply into his leg. The force of her acceleration ripped Kirti off the branch and they both tumbled to the ground fifteen feet below . . . No one could believe what was happening. Kirti’s wife Pat repeated “Oh, my God,” over and over again, her voice rising in hysteria, but everyone else was dumb with shock. Before anyone could move the tigress charged again, her roars blasting through the silence. The elephants spun on their heels and bolted in blind panic ahead of the enraged tigress. Nothing could stop them. Equipment flew everywhere in a wild confusion of screaming and trumpeting. People clung to ropes or whatever they could find, trying not to be swept off the elephants in the headlong dash through the bushes.

The research team’s elephants may have bolted, but a battle-scarred old tusker was on hand that had participated in royal tiger hunts years ago, before they were banned. It had been trained to be fearless around tigers and had few hesitations about going back into the jungle to recover the fallen researcher before it was too late. Dr. Tamang was found to be in shock but still alive, with a “grapefruit-sized” chunk taken out of his thigh and deep claw marks raking his legs and buttocks. By tiger standards, this was a relatively mild attack—a defensive swat by a mother to deter an over-curious researcher—and yet it still cost the poor man an emergency medical flight to Kathmandu, multiple skin grafts, a nasty bacterial infection, and five full months of painful recovery.

The attack may have involved an outside researcher, but the vast majority of human–tiger conflict occurs among local populations, in the tight-knit rural communities that tend to border tiger territory. And when they do occur, there is a considerable and understandable amount of confusion, heartache, sadness, and anger. A regrettable human tragedy, no matter how you look at it. Hemanta Mishra, a Nepalese biologist with a focus on tiger conservation, was responsible for capturing a number of man-killers in Chitwan National Park, and encountered the sites of recent attacks on multiple occasions. One incident, which occurred in 1979 in the Nepalese village of Madanpur, involved a beloved local schoolteacher who was killed by a predatory bite to the neck. A crowd of villagers was able to scare the tiger away, however, and the schoolteacher’s body was saved from being carried off and eaten. After finally assuring a furious mob that he would deal with the problem—after all, the protected tigers were technically still considered government property in Nepal, just as they had been a century before—Hemanta Mishra describes the following scene:

The disfigured body of the schoolteacher was lying flat on the ground, facing upward. His mutilated face was covered with dried blood. A group of the dead man’s relatives squatted around his body, mourning the unprecedented tragedy. They were surrounded by a large crowd of villagers, silently lamenting the tragic loss of their only schoolteacher. The scene was somber, sorrowful, and silent. The aura of death hovered in the air. From a nearby hut, the wailing of the schoolteacher’s wife weeping in pain with her two children periodically broke the silence. A white blanket of cotton and a freshly cut green bamboo bier were laid next to the body. The dead man was a Hindu. His death ritual demanded that he be wrapped in the shroud of white cotton, fastened to the bamboo bier, and transported to the cremation site on the banks of a river. The scene [was] both heart wrenching and gruesome—reminiscent of a nightmarish movie.

Though shaken by what he had witnessed, and uncertain of his ability to actually capture the man-eater, Hemanta Mishra did keep his promise to the people of Madanpur—he eventually shot the responsible tiger with a tranquilizer dart and carried it via elephant to a waiting transport cage, and later, an enclosure at the Kathmandu zoo, where it lived out the rest of its days eating goat legs and chickens instead of human beings.

As disturbing as such attacks can be, the above are not the worst cases. The results can be far more gruesome when a man-eater is not scared away or interrupted before it has begun to feed. The tiger’s preferred method of feeding is to drag its fresh kill into a secluded part of the forest, feast on the meat until it can stomach no more, rest for a spell nearby, drink water, and then return to the carcass to continue feeding. It is this behavior that enables trackers to find tigers with bait—once the cat has made the kill, it will generally linger around its prey for several days—but it also means that once a body has been taken into the forest by a man-eater, it is very seldom recovered anywhere near intact. Take, for example, another of Hemanta Mishra’s accounts of surveying a kill site following a man-eater attack in Nepal in 1980, involving a cat dubbed “Tiger 118”:

Except for the skull and part of the victim’s lower leg, the tigress had eaten almost all of the man. An iron sickle glowed in the bright sun next to the victim’s toes. A Nepali topi—a kind of cap—and some bloody rags of clothing were scattered all over the kill site. With a wrenching heart, I watched the two villagers collect the remains of their relative and put them in a jute sac.

Far from being an extreme and unusually disturbing outcome, this scene is fairly typical of a full-scale man-eating event. In a scenario that bears an unsettling resemblance to the aftermath of a suicide-vest bombing, it is often only the human head and extremities that remain, scattered about a welter of blood and shredded clothing where the tiger has been feeding. And in some cases, not even that much is left. In one Amur tiger attack that occurred in the Russian Far East in 1997, virtually all that remained after a young hunter was killed in the forest was a pile of bloody clothing, a pair of empty boots, a watch, and a crucifix. The actual physical remains—a few splinters of bone and bits of flesh—could have fit in a coat pocket. One can only imagine what it is like for friends and family having to contend with the fact that their loved one is not only dead, but actually ingested by an oversized predator still at loose in the forest. And as already mentioned, in western Nepal and northern India, where both Hindu and Tharu funerary rites were closely observed, the lack of an intact body served as a spiritual sort of insult to injury, making the catastrophe that much more traumatic.

Even more traumatic still, however, is the possibility that a man-eater might return—that such a tiger may have acquired a taste for its new prey and actually begin seeking humans out on a reoccurring basis. In these instances, attacks change from chance encounters in the forest to the deliberate stalking of villagers and even predation within their homes. Man-eating leopards are more famous in India and Nepal for dragging victims from their houses, but tigers have been known to do it as well. In addition to the previously mentioned tiger attacks, Hemanta Mishra also relates in his memoirs an attack that occurred in the Madi Valley of Nepal, by a man-eating tigress known as Jogi Pothi. Like the Champawat, this tigress had ceased being an elusive, nocturnal predator and began conducting raids on the edges of villages in broad daylight. And also like the Champawat, this tiger proved extremely difficult to find or catch, as it had a knack for concealing itself immediately after a kill in nearby ravines. The houses of the villagers tended to be simple mud, wood, and thatch structures, economical but not terribly sturdy, which meant that a tiger could break in and drag its victims from their homes. This was very nearly what occurred in the village of Bankatta in 1988. A local yogi—an ostensibly celibate holy man—happened to be furtively entertaining feminine company in the wee hours of the morning when he thought he heard a knock at the door. His “guest” made the mistake of answering said door, as described in the following account:

Upon hearing the knocking sound, the jogi’s lady friend peeked through a hole in the wooden door. Shocked to see a huge tiger, she shrieked “Bagh! Bagh!” (“Tiger! Tiger!”) in terror at the top of her lungs. Her jogi consort jumped out of his bed and joined her, banging pots and pans in the hut and yelling for help. Their cries rang across the forest to the village. Equipped with axes and khukuris, Nepalese machetes, villagers rushed toward the jogi’s hut, causing the tiger to flee into a nearby ravine.

The yogi’s reputation as a holy man may have been ruined, but both his own life and that of his guest were preserved, and the tiger was scared away before it could force its way into the house and complete the kill.

If the thought of a man-eating tiger bursting through wooden doors or mud walls to drag away a sleeping victim isn’t sobering enough, there are stories of Bengal tigers braving water and currents to carry off people from their boats. In the aforementioned Sundarbans, a region famous for its unusually aggressive tigers, the cats have been known to swim out and snatch people from their vessels. Despite the mangroves being officially off-limits, locals still do enter into the protected forests to cut firewood and poach animals, activities that put them at risk from a dense population of environmentally isolated tigers with a limited food supply. Inevitably, human–tiger conflict follows. That was precisely what happened in 2014, when a sixty-two-year-old man from the village of Lahiripur set off in a boat with his two children to catch crabs on a small river in the forests of Kholakhali. In this instance, the stalking tiger leapt from the bank of the river, over the water, and into the boat, where it immediately attacked the father. The man’s son remembered the tragic attack vividly, as reported by The Times of India:

Suddenly, my sister cried out: ‘Dada, bagh (tiger)’. I was stunned, and my body froze. All I saw [was] a flash of yellow. It took me a moment to register the gruesome sight before me. My father was completely buried under the beast. I could only see his legs thrashing about. I shook off my numbness and grabbed a stick. Molina, too, took out a long cutter we use to clear foliage in the jungle. Together, we poked and battered the tiger, but it refused to give up . . . It jumped off and landed on the bank in one giant leap. We saw it disappear into the jungle with my father still in its jaws.

Indeed, tigers do not share the common house cat’s fear of water, and at times, they can even incorporate it into an attack strategy. The renowned filmmaker and tiger expert Valmik Thapar took note of how one tiger he observed in India’s Ranthambore tiger reserve had mastered the technique of chasing sambar deer into a lake, where, once they were hampered by the water, it would drag them under and kill them beneath the surface. Something similar may have occurred on a human target in the Sundarbans in 1997, when a man named Jamal Mohumad narrowly escaped a watery death. This is his version of the attack, which occurred while he was fishing:

The tiger lunged at me with its paws. It dug its claws into my legs and dragged me under the water. I struggled under the water and dived down about 10 feet under the water. The tiger let go of me. I swam deep under water as fast as I could. After a while, when I reached the surface of the water, I couldn’t see the tiger. I swam down the river for a bit and saw a boat and cried out for help.

Jamal became something of a local legend in the Sundarbans, as he was perhaps the only person on earth who had survived three—yes, three—separate predatory attacks by tigers. Despite his harrowing encounters with the animals, he would continue to venture into the forest, driven by the same need for food, firewood, and animal fodder that would have compelled the Tharu people a century before. But in the case of the Champawat, this tiger was no longer content waiting for humans to come passing by. It had begun, by the first few years of the 1900s, to leave the protection of the forest and go out looking for them, undergoing as it did so the transformation from a killer of men, to an eater of men, to an active hunter of them. And in its quest for fresh kills, it would eventually travel away from the marshy grasslands and dense sal jungles of its birth, and begin wandering northward and ever upward, into the populated hills that lay beyond.

* For those interested in a more detailed examination of documentary evidence, there is an epilogue at the end of the book which lists the various colonial records, newspaper articles, and physical artifacts that specifically mention the Champawat and provide insight into its attacks.

† While generally lauded as a landmark event in tiger conservation, the creation of Chitwan National Park involved the forced displacement of dozens of indigenous Tharu families who had called the central forest home—a traumatic event that continues to haunt the Tharu communities that live today on the edge of Chitwan’s buffer zone. There has been some progress in terms of giving the Tharu access to the central forest for the traditional gathering of food, fodder, and building materials, although it is highly restricted, and continues to be a source of friction between the Tharu community and park officials.

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