#40 - Jim Corbett (Hunter)

She was dying already.  The two cubs, dependent on her for all things, did not know. Though the pain from her wounds was oppressive, she fought it, refusing to let them see weakness in her posture as she led them silently through the tangled jungle along the Nepalese border. When the cubs slept, she cleaned herself, licking the oozing holes in her flesh, desperate for relief. Even the gentle pressure of her tongue brought intolerable pain. The scabs would not seal, and the odor and bitterness of the yellowish exudation warned her of something slowly attacking her body.

The cubs were growing quickly, but still unable to hunt for themselves. They needed meat, and this fact plagued her, always.  Though she had successfully hidden her weakness from their eyes, she was ever conscious of the lead fragments lodged and festering in her body, and the new limitations this injury imposed upon her. The tigress was reduced, her strength and speed sapped. The wild prey they had come upon in recent days sprang forth from the thickset undergrowth with acceleration she could not match. This compelled her to search for meat in more treacherous parts of the jungle, ever closer to the low villages of the Thakkhola Valley.

The tigress understood the danger. She carried on her body the marks of her most recent encounter with humans. But the cubs needed to eat. They also needed to learn. It wouldn’t be long before they would hunt for themselves. When she led the cubs to the edge of the jungle, to the hills overlooking the village of Thak, it was a calculated decision. Humans represented danger, but they also offered opportunity.

For days, the tigress positioned herself and her cubs at a safe distance. There, she was able to observe life in the village. Women setting out beetroot to dry, children playing chanting games, chasing one another through the tall grass, and the men, traveling in small groups along the worn trails that connected Thak with the nearby villages of Sem and Chuka. The cubs slept the greater portion of each day, stretched out lazily, hidden by leaves and vines. The tigress dozed, but not restfully. She remained alert, waiting.

One morning, she woke the cubs and led them along a very narrow, sloping path, through dense foliage that, at the bottom, gave way to an expanse of high bajra millet. She moved haltingly, cautiously, the cubs instinctively mimicking her, their white-furred bellies close to the ground. She left the path, pressing blindly into the grass, glancing back to check that the cubs were still following. They came to a place where the millet stalks had been trampled. It was less than a trail, but someone had used it not long before to pass through the field.  The tigress followed this vein of bent and displaced stalks until she stopped sharply and turned her broad head to make eye contact with the larger of the two cubs. Some silent message passed between them, and the cub moved swiftly past her, the smaller sibling following in step. 

Before them, in a very small clearing, the body of a thin and dark young man was opened up upon the ground, his skin torn in various places, pink inner flesh exposed and mangled with his shredded clothing. His blood speckled the grass and dampened the soil beneath his body. His throat had been slashed by the tigress’ claw and then crushed between her carnassials. She had killed him efficiently, surprising him as he crouched to defecate in the cover of the high grass. Leaving the cubs to hunt had been a risk, but it had paid off. The two cubs attacked the body, furiously biting and pulling at the meat, their white muzzles turning red. The tigress watched in the direction of the path they had followed, her ears perked. She nudged one of the cubs aside and began to consume the man at his midsection, never dropping her guard.

When they had finished, the clothes that had covered the man had been ripped apart, and most of the muscle tissue and fat had been eaten. The body was small, it hadn’t taken long. The tigress knew that the nourishment provided was temporary. But her cubs were satisfied, and that afternoon they slept soundly. After the sun was down, they woke and played fiercely together, wrestling in the moonlit chaparral high above the village.

The tigress and her cubs remained on the outskirts of Thak for weeks, and then months, feeding on the Thakali villagers. As she became weak, the cubs became strong. She continued teaching them to hunt, and together they prowled the edges of the village after sunset. Under the cover of darkness, they killed indiscriminately. The first victims were male. Men were more often found alone at night, when the tigress preferred to hunt. But once the villagers knew that a man-eater was lurking nearby, no one wandered far after the sun had dropped behind the hills encircling Thak.

That’s when the tigress’ hunting became even more jeopardous, and she and the cubs began slipping into the bajra fields in the morning, waiting for children to wander close. They snatched two small girls in one morning, leaving behind only the small weed-doll the girls had been playing with. Such an audacious attack changed life in Thak, and for days, the tigress and her cubs saw no one on the paths leading in and out of the village. The Thakalis stayed indoors. When it was necessary to visit a neighbor, they ran from the door of their home to their neighbor’s door. During the day, the men patrolled the edges of the village carrying muzzle-loaded rifles. At night, everyone disappeared behind walls.

Again, the tigress and her cubs were without food. With time, they retreated into the hills, hunting further and further from Thak. They prowled the trail leading from Thak to Chuka, needing desperately to find travelers making the journey alone. But they remained hungry.

The tigress’ blood was filling daily with the slow poison of her rotting wounds. She could barely keep up with the cubs. Every step sent a shock of pain through her muscles and joints. One day, she fell asleep beside the twisted roots of a banyan tree, the cubs lying nearby. When she woke, they were gone, and she knew that they had gone for food, and that they would not be back. She waited by the tree for many hours, and then wandered a familiar path that ran parallel to the trail used by the humans. She moved toward the village in a senseless haze of pain and hunger and loneliness. Along the way, she collapsed. She slept where she fell, and then hours later, in the dark, she woke, startled by a sense that somewhere in the jungle, in the darkness, something was closing in on her. With agonizing effort, she stood and moved again, silently, in the direction of the village.

Occasionally, she paused to listen. It became evident that something was tracking her. She felt an instinctive urge to find cover, to hide deep in the contorted and intertwined brush of the jungle floor. But instead, perhaps because she had some animal-sense of her own inevitable end, she turned on the trail, and approached her hunter.

A long way up the trail, she caught a brief glimpse of him, just before two bullets from his gun caught her in the chest and side. He was unlike any of the men she and her cubs had hunted and killed in the weeks prior. He was pale faced, and his broad shoulders were squared. His hands were unflinching.

The tigress’ body slumped to the ground. Her chest expanded once, a deep, final gasp of air. She died on the trail. 

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To learn more about Jim Corbett, read the original Wikipedia article HERE.