A tale of a man eating tigress This true story was told by the legend hunter Jim Corbet . The incident was happened before Independence ,that is in the year of 1930 in the region of eastern Kumayun of India. Name of the place was Chowgarh. The tigress also named as the Chowgarh Tigress. That tigress killed as many as 64 people in the locality covering about 1500 sq. miles. Here I depict only few instances to make you go through the story without any monotony. Our hunter Jim Corbet reached the place from where he had to start his venture. The name of the village is Dalkania. Now I start to go as the writer told in his story book ‘Man Eaters of Kumayun’. -------------As I went down the ravine the banks became higher, and sixty yards from where I entered it I came on a steep drop of twelve to fourteen feet . The water that rushes down all the hill ravines in the rains had worn the rock as smooth as a glass, and as it was too steep to offer a foot hold I handed my rifle to the men (assisting him as porter) and sitting on the edge, proceeded to slide down. My feet had hardly touched the sandy bottom when the two men , with a flying leap , landed one on either side of me, and thrusting the rifle into my hand asked in a very agitated manner if I had heard the tiger. As a matter of fact, I heard nothing, possibly due to one of the scrapping of my clothes on the rock, and when questioned, the men said that what they had heard was a deep –throated growl from some where close at hand, but exactly from which direction the sound had come, they were unable to say. Tigers do not betray their presence y growling when looking for their dinner and the only, and very unsatisfactory, explanation I can offer is that the tigress followed us after we left the open ground, and on seeing that we are going down the ravine had gone ahead and taken up a position where the ravine narrowed to half its width; and that when she was on the point of springing out on me, I had disappeared out of sight down the slide and she had involuntary given vent to her disappointment with a low growl. Not a satisfactory reason, unless one assumes -- without any reason – that she had selected me for her dinner, and therefore had no interest in the two man. When the tree of us now stood in a bunch we had the smooth steep rock behind us, to our right a wall of rock slightly leaning over the ravine ( narrow valley) and fifteen feet high , and to our left a tumbled bank of big rocks thirty/fifty feet high. The sandy bed of the ravine, on which we were standing, was roughly forty feet long and ten feet wide. At the lower end of the ravine of this sandy bed a great pine tree had fallen across, damming the ravine, and the collection of sand was due to this dam. The wall overhanging rock came to an end twelve or fifteen feet from the fallen tree., and as I approached the end of the rock, my feet making no sound on the sand, I very fortunately noticed that the sandy bed continued round to the back of the rock. This about which I have said so much I can best describe a giant school slate, two feet thick at its lower end, and standing up – not quite perpendicularly – on one of its long sides. As I stepped clear of the giant slate, I looked behind me over my right shoulder- and looked straight into the tigress’s face. I would like you to have a clear picture of the situation. The sandy behind the rock was quite flat. To the right of it was the smooth slate fifteen high and leaning slightly outwards, to the left of it was a scoured-out steep bank also some fifteen feet high overhung by a dense tangle of thorn bushes, while at the far end a slide similar to, but a little higher than, the one I had glissaded down. The sandy bed, enclosed by these three natural walls, was about twenty feet long and half as wide, and lying on it , with her four paws stretched out and her hind( rear) legs well tucked under her, was the tigress! Her head, which was raised a few inches off her paws, was eight feet( measured later) from me, and on her face was a smile, similar to that one sees on the face of a dog welcoming his master home after a long absence. Two thoughts flashed through my mind, one , that it was up to me to make the first move, and the other, that the move would have to be made in such a manner as not to alarm the tigress or make her nervous. The rifle was in my right hand held diagonally across my chest, with the safety- catch off, and in order to get it to bear on the tigress the muzzle would have to be swung round three-quarters of a circle. The movement of swinging round the rifle, with one hand, was begun very slowly, and hardly perceptibly (audibly), and when a quarter of a circle had been made, the stock of my rifle came in cont act with my right side. It was now necessary to extend my arm, and as the stock cleared my side, the swing was very slowly continued. My arm was now at full stretch and the weight of the rifle was beginning to tell. Only a little further now for the muzzle to go, and the tigress – who had not once taken her eyes off mine- was still looking up at me, with the pleased expression still on her face. How long it took the rifle to make the three- quarter circle, I am not in a position to say. To me, looking at the tigress’s eye and unable therefore to follow the movement of the barrel, it appeared that my arm was paralysed, and that the swing would never be completed. However, the movement was completed at last, and as soon as the rifle was pointing at the tigress’s body, I pressed the trigger. I had the report, exaggerated in the restricted space, and felt the jar(jerk) of the recoil(jump back), and but for these tangible proofs, that the rifle had gone off, I might, for all the immediate result the shot produced, have been in the grip of one of those awful nightmares in which triggers are vainly pulled of rifles that refuse to be discharged at the critical moment. For the perceptible fraction of time the tigress remained perfectly still, and then, very slowly, her head sank on to her outstretched paws, while at the same time a jet of blood issued from the bullet hole. The bullet had injured her spine and shattered the upper portion of her heart.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:51:50 +0000
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