Wild beasts

by J. Hampden Porter

This is a very disconcerting account for those who assert that the tiger is always dazed by daylight, and a coward at all times; that he shrinks from the sight and scent of human beings, flies from the sound of the human voice, and quails before the glance of a man’s eye.

Colonel Pollok (“Natural History Notes”) says he “never heard of a black tiger,” but that he has “seen the skins of three white ones; two entirely white and the other faintly marked with yellow stripes.” These came from the mountains of Indo-China. In the Himalayas they have been shot at an elevation of eight thousand feet above the sea, and, besides being what is called white, were maned. J. W. Atkinson (“Travels on the Upper and Lower Amoor”) tells of a young Kirghis who, while carrying off his bride, camped on this river and lost her there by a tiger’s attack. He threw away his own life in following this animal, dagger in hand, into the reeds. This does not always happen so by any means. Asiatics do what Europeans cannot attempt. It is well known that the Ghoorkas kill tigers with their celebrated knives; but we do not hear how many of them are destroyed in such combats. Captain Basil Hall (“Travels in India”) saw a Hindu (using one of these weapons) meet a tiger at a Rajah’s court, evade his spring, hamstring him as he passed, and cut through his neck into the spinal cord when the brute turned. In ancient times that class of gladiators called Bestiarii, encountered tigers in the Roman arena; and if one may judge from notices that are rather vague, they were pretty generally expended. The Brinjarries, says Forsyth, sometimes, assisted by their dogs, assail them with lances; and they were certainly killed by arrows at one period, but in what proportion to those whom they slew is unknown.

Certain traits are common to all the race; and as a summary of the foregoing, the appended remarks and illustrations will not be out of place. Wherever the tiger is found, water, despite Colonel Barras’ solitary voice to the contrary, must be near. He drinks much and often, and cannot live in arid places. Therefore it is that the time to hunt him in India is during the hot season. Those spots where he resorts for water, and what is equally necessary to him, shade, are well known in all parts where he is to be found; and it is there that buffaloes—young ones, for an ordinarily fastidious tiger will not touch an old, tough animal—are tied up. When taken, his trail is followed to the spot where he makes his lair.

There is one exception, however, to all rules that usually govern the pursuit of tigers. When a man-eater is the object, the trailing must go on all day and every day until this monster is run down. No better example of what is to be done under these circumstances can be given than Captain Forsyth’s narrative of his own exploit in the Bétúl jungle.

“I spent nearly a week ... in the destruction of a famous man-eater, that had completely closed several roads, and was estimated to have devoured over a hundred human beings. One of these roads was the main outlet from the Bétúl teak forests, towards the railway under construction in the Harbadá valley; and the work of the sleeper-contractors was completely at a stand-still, owing to the ravages of this brute. He occupied regularly a large triangle of country between the rivers Móran and Ganjál; occasionally making a tour of destruction much further to the east and west, and striking terror into a breadth of not less than thirty or forty miles. It was therefore supposed that the devastation was caused by more than one animal; and we thought we had disposed of one of these early in April, when we killed a very cunning old tiger of evil repute after several days’ severe hunting. But I am now certain that the one I destroyed subsequently was the real malefactor, since killing again commenced after we had left, and all loss of human life did not cease till the day I finally disposed of him.

“He had not been heard of for a week or two when I came into his country, and pitched my camp in a splendid mango grove near the large village of Lokartalae, on the Móran River.

“A few days of lazy existence in this microcosm of a grove passed not unpleasantly.... In the mean time I was regaled with stories of the man-eater—of his fearful size and appearance, with belly pendent to the ground, and white moon on the top of his forehead; his pork-butcher-like method of detaining a party of travellers while he rolled himself in the sand, and at last came up and inspected them all round, selecting the fattest; his power of transforming himself into an innocent-looking woodcutter, and calling or whistling through the jungle till an unsuspecting victim approached; how the spirits of all his victims rode with him upon his head, warning him of every danger, and guiding him to the fatal ambush where a traveller would shortly pass. All the best shikáris of the country-side were collected in my camp, and the land-holders and many of the people besieged my tent morning and evening. The infant of a woman who had been carried away while drawing water at a well was brought and held up before me, and every offer of assistance in destroying the monster made. No useful help was, however, to be expected from a terror-stricken population like this. They lived in barricaded houses, and only stirred out, when necessity compelled, in large bodies, covered by armed men, and beating drums and shouting as they passed along the roads. Many villages had been utterly deserted, and the country was being slowly depopulated by a single animal. So far as I could learn, he had been killing alone for about a year—another tiger that had assisted him in his fell occupation having been shot the previous hot weather. Bétúl has always been unusually afflicted with man-eaters, the cause apparently being the great numbers of cattle that come for a limited season to graze in that country, and a scarcity of other prey at the time when these are absent, combined with the unusually convenient cover for tigers alongside of most of the roads. The man-eaters of the Central Provinces rarely confine themselves solely to human food, though some have almost done so to my own knowledge.

“As soon as I could ride in the howdah [Captain Forsyth was suffering from an accident at this time], and long before I was able to do more than hobble on foot, I marched to a place called Chárkhérá, where the last kill had been reported. My usually straggling following was now compressed into a close body, preceded errand followed by baggage-elephants, and protected by a guard of police with muskets, peons with my spare guns, and a whole posse of matchlock shikáris. Two deserted villages were passed on the road, and heaps of stones at intervals showed where some traveller had been struck down. A better hunting-ground for a man-eater certainly could not be found. Thick, scrubby teak jungle closed in the road on both sides; and alongside of it for a great part of the way wound a narrow, deep watercourse, overshadowed by jámare bushes, and with here and there a small pool of water still left. I hunted along this nálá the whole way, and found many old tracks of a very large male tiger, which the shikáris declared to be those of the man-eater. There were none more recent, however, than several days. Chárkhérá was also deserted on account of the tiger, and there was no shade to speak of; but it was the most central place within reach of the usual haunts of the brute, so I encamped there, and sent the baggage-elephants back to fetch provisions. In the evening I was startled by a messenger from a place called Lá, on the Móran River, nearly in the direction I had come from, who said that one of a party of pilgrims who had been travelling unsuspectingly by a jungle road, had been carried off by the tiger close to that place. Early next morning I started off with two elephants, and arrived at the spot about eight o’clock. The man had been struck down where a small ravine leading to the Móran crosses a lonely pathway a few miles east of Lá. The shoulder-stick with its pendant baskets, in which the holy water from his place of pilgrimage had been carried by the hapless man, was lying on the ground in a dried-up pool of blood, and shreds of his clothes adhered to the bushes where he had been dragged down into the bed of the nálá.

“We tracked the man-eater and his prey into a very thick grass cover, alive with spotted deer, where he had broken up and devoured the greater part of the body. Some bones and shreds of flesh, and the skull, hands, and feet were all that remained. This tiger never returned to his victim a second time, so it was useless to found any scheme for killing him on that expectation. We took up his tracks, however, from the body, and carried them patiently down through very dense jungle to the banks of the Móran,—the trackers working in fear and trembling under the trunk of my elephant, and covered by my rifle at full cock. At the river the pugs [footprints] went out to a long spit of sand that projected into the water, where the man-eater had drunk, and then returned to a great mass of piled-up rocks at the bottom of a precipitous bank, full of caverns and recesses. This we searched with stones and some fireworks I had in the howdah, but put out nothing but a scraggy hyena, which was, of course, allowed to escape. We searched about here all day in vain, and it was not till nearly sunset that I turned and made for camp.

“It was almost dusk, when we were a few miles from home, passing along the road we had marched by the former day, and the same by which we had come out in the morning, when one of the men who was walking behind the elephant started and called a halt. He had seen the footprint of a tiger. The elephant’s tread had partly obliterated it, but further on where we had not yet gone it was plain enough,—the great square pug of the man-eater we had been looking for all day! He was on before us, and must have passed since we came out in the morning, for his track had covered that of the elephants as they came. It was too late to hope to find him that evening, and we could only proceed slowly along on the track, which held to the pathway, keeping a bright lookout. The Lállá [Forsyth’s famous tiger-hunting shikári] indeed proposed that he should go on a little ahead as a bait for the tiger, while I covered him from the elephant with my rifle. But he wound up by expressing a doubt whether his skinny corporation would be a sufficient attraction, and suggested that a plump young policeman, who had taken advantage of our protection to make his official visit to the scene of the last kill, should be substituted—whereat there was a general but not very hearty grin. The subject was too sore a one in that neighborhood just then. About a mile from the camp the track turned off into a deep nálá that bordered the road. It was now almost dark, so we went on to camp, and fortified it by posting the three elephants on different sides, and lighting roaring fires between. Once during the night an elephant started out of its deep sleep and trumpeted shrilly, but in the morning we could find no tracks of the tiger near us. I went out early next morning to beat up the nálá, for a man-eater is not like common tigers, and must be sought for morning, noon, and night. But I found no tracks save in the one place where he had crossed the ravine the evening before, and gone off into thick jungle.