By GANESH SAILI
“Forty-five traps have been set up along East Canal Road and the nearby villages of the Doon!” the headlines scream. Earlier, a leopard had struck and mauled a young boy on his way home at dusk after a cricket match. The youngster survived and, as I pen this, is recuperating.
On the outskirts of Dehradun’s Defence Colony, I met Professor Bimal Gairola, whose grandfather, the legendary Tara Dutt Gairola, was delivering a lecture on Himalayan Magic. The Scotsman Philip Mason, the Commissioner of Garhwal, was seated amongst the audience; he would later go on to write A Matter of Honour and Call the Next Witness.
“Have you heard of werewolves in Garhwal? Men who turn into wolves at night?” he asked.
“Here, they become lurking leopards!” answered the great scholar.
Chasing ghosts of the past, I travel upstream along the Alaknanda River where, rest assured, that if you as much as blink, you miss out on Gulab Rai, which lies just before Rudraprayag on the pilgrim trail to the shrines of Badrinath and Kedarnath. This is the site where the epic battle between Jim Corbett and the most notorious man-eating leopard in history took place.
My well-thumbed copy of the book The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag reveals a creature with exceptional cunning who manages to evade traps, poisoned bait, and the bullets of bounty hunters and achieves the dubious distinction of getting a special mention in the British Parliament. However, to the hill folk, the animal was an evil spirit who terrorized 350 square miles of Northern India for eight long years. By the end of its reign, it had killed over 125 men, women, and children.
With their backs to the wall, the authorities hired sixteen shikaris, including expert trackers and hunters, to go after the leopard. An extra bounty awaited those who got the animal. For nearly a month, Jim Corbett and A. W. Ibbotson (the Deputy Commissioner of Garhwal) stalked the elusive leopard, and in frustration, both came close to sharing the locals’ belief that the nocturnal creature was indeed a human spirit. The more he was hunted, the more wary he seemed to become.
Corbett’s tale is about his last-ditch campaign against the animal. He had figured out that every five days the leopard would travel between Gulab Rai and Bhainswara and had a haystack-machaan built next to a mango tree. For ten long nights, he was atop his hide, a goat with a bell around its neck, tethered below, and was about to throw in the towel because nothing was happening. But on a whim, he stayed on for an extra night. In the dark, he heard something rush down the road. The goat’s bell tinkled, he aimed his rifle at the blur under the beam of a rickety torch, drew a bead, and pressed the trigger. The animal lurched away. In the pervasive darkness, he could not see whether he had scored a hit or not. Daybreak revealed a blood trail leading to a hole where the dead leopard lay. It was huge, measuring seven feet ten inches from tail to snout.
Corbett’s book was written twenty-one years after the event. He was seventy-two years old when he recalled his skirmishes with the leopard. But what rises beyond the words is his empathy for the jungle’s denizens: “Here was only an old leopard, who differed from others of his kind in that his muzzle was grey and his lips lacked whiskers; the best-hated and the most feared animal in all India.”
To me, the epilogue written in 1942 is an ode to the strength and resilience of the people of Uttarakhand. Of course, much of the credit for the crisp writing goes to Roy Hawkins or “Hawks,” the Oxford University Press General Manager. Given the gift of an enchanter’s words, he turned Jungle Stories into The Man-Eaters of Kumaon, which sold half a million copies around the world.
As I go past Gulab Rai, a garish bust of the great hunter-conservationist plonked alongside the tourist office greets the visitor. What would the self-effacing Corbett have to say about airport expansion, road widening, and the subsequent loss of habitat? I wonder.
Ganesh Saili, born and home-grown in the hills; illustrates his words with his pictures. Author of two dozen books, some translated into twenty languages, his work has found recognition worldwide.
