No Beast So Fierce

All the books you mentioned look interesting. I will pick one and see how I like it. 

Right now I’m about 55% into The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag by Jim Corbett. This is a free version converted via OCR. And there are lots of OCR errors but they are navigable.

This leopard is having the luck of the devil. It’s made many impossible or improbable escapes, often relying on chance events that spoil the hunters’ stakeout of the kill sites.

Once it gets dark (without a moon), there is no further point in staking out the leopard’s kills with guns. So they’ve also used a gin trap as well as poisoning the kill. But even massive doses of cyanide didn’t seem to have much effect. To quote Corbett:



Many of the villagers think that Corbett and his men are daft. They’re not going to be able to kill what they deem an evil spirit with just guns. And you might understand where they are coming from. This particular beast does seem to have a supernatural quality.

You might find this small piece of history interesting. The Raffles Hotel in Singapore played this up a bit the first time I lived in Singapore, which was before the hotel was renovated and became another overpriced pleasure palace for tourists and businessmen on big expense accounts. 





Last tiger shot in Singapore

One of the amazing things is the passivity and primitivism of the Indian populace at the time. I finished Jim Corbett’s book about the man-eating leopard. The book was okay and not too long.

This was a leopard that almost always attacked after dark. There were a few exceptions. If nothing else, all you had to do to protect yourself was barricade inside your home at night, reinforcing doors and windows where needed.

Believe me, if there was a man-eating leopard about, that job would get done day-one. And despite the apparent fact that indoor plumbing or facilities were pretty much non-existent in the rural areas, I would have at least had a bottle to pee in.

But still, despite eight years of knowledge of the tactics of this leopard, villagers routinely were taken when someone stepped outside to go to the bathroom or when the leopard was able to open a week door.

That’s just for starters. I mean, if Dracula was known to be haunting my neighborhood, I’d have garlic smeared around all the windows and doors and have crosses tied up everywhere. Day one.

But the populace remained terrified by the leopard but at the same time many would not take effective action to safeguard themselves, even if the effort was minimal. No wonder that the British, with a relative handful of people, could take over the entire continent.

Besides the simple defensive actions, there was little to no offensive action. Imagine (as I’m sure has happened) a dangerous cougar — known to have recently killed three people — roaming around Texas or Arkansas. There would be independent posses springing up all over with guns a-blazin’. There would not be a general attitude of passivity. That cougar wouldn’t last a month, let alone eight years of man-eating.

This is only hinted at in the book, Jim Corbett being too polite to call a spade a spade. There was one darkly funny event. The newspapers (after several years) were putting pressure on someone to do something, They were aware that Jim Corbett was on the job but he was only one man. Several newspapers put out an appeal for people to do something. They had only two replies. One of them from some yahoo who said pretty much “If you pay all my expenses in luxury, I’ll come and give a hand.” Two replies. I think the other one was non-serious as well.

Corbett was doing it for nothing and at great personal risk. What he was doing was hard and dangerous. And he did have some loyal local companions and friends who helped. But it was definitely the white man’s burden to kill the leopard because locals clearly were not going to lift a finger.

Can you imagine being a dirt-poor son of the soil, dependent on the sun, the rain and manure for your survival? If you are a Hindu, your earthly situation is all that there is. You have earned it, due to your past lives.  What's the point?  A fatalistic view toward life is the result. 

Perhaps cliche's and generalizations, but no less true for that. 


In my first or second year of college, I recall a professor of physiology or something similar giving a lecture about fitness. He said something to the effect that contemporary Westerners were in absolutely horrible physical condition compared to our ancestors. To his mind, the only people that might be comparable to our ancestors are modern long-distance runners. 

One other thing which he said stuck in my mind. That was that a little fat around the middle was not necessarily a bad thing as the organs in the stomach area had no protection like those protected by our ribs or skull.  Thus a little fat might serve as something of a shield. 

All joking aside, that is the nascent thought I had in the back of my mind while reading this, although it was nowhere near as clearly articulated as you wrote.

Both the books by Huckleberry and Corbett let on that there was a great amount of superstitious belief amongst the Indian sons-of-the-soil, of whatever religion. Whether many tended to envision the man-eater (leopard or tiger) as an evil spirit in order to release them from responsibility for doing anything about it, I don’t know. But it’s a distinct possibility. But the fatalistic passivity that you described was clearly there.

That said, again, Corbett writes of many villagers who gave him aid in some way at no small risk to themselves. Simply walking alone or in a group after dusk what dangerous — extremely so if the (leopard, in this case) was known to be in the area.

If the story he relates is true, Corbett more or less fell into being the go-to guy for hunting man-eaters. He was a good shot. He spoke the local language. He was know to have a Quatermainesque sixth sense regarding animals. And he just happened to have a couple well-placed friends in relatively high places. If the accounts are accurate, he took on the job because he felt it was his duty to save people from a man-eater, especially since no one else was doing anything. He knew he had the skills to do it and his conscience forbade him from just walking away.

Again, if the descriptions are accurate, Corbett was an exceptional man. At great personal risk (and ongoing hardship), he hunted first the tiger and then later a variety of man-eating animals that emerged arguably because of a combination of illegal hunting and loss of jungle. There is little doubt, for instance, that the Champawat tiger’s behavior was modified when he had two of his incisors blown out by a hunter.

And there may have been some good reasons why nobody wanted to make the effort to hunt these man-eaters. When you read of the hardships that Corbett underwent, it was a truly Herculean task. It sounds as easy as just tying a goat to a pole and waiting. And, indeed, after many failed attempts, this is how he finally got his leopard.

But the difficulty was that these animals are extremely cagey. They tend not to return to a kill (or make a kill) until it is dark. Corbett, by his own account, said he had extraordinary night vision. Even so, without a moon, a leopard is very difficult to see. And if clouds obscure the stars, even exceptional night vision is of little use.

But that’s the easy part. The hard part is sitting in a blind of some kind on a thin layer of straw for ten nights straight just in hope of getting a shot — and making a somewhat educated guess that the leopard or tiger would actually make an appearance. And then doing that again when you’re unsuccessful, perhaps sitting in a tree because there is no other perch or there is not time to build a platform. Rinse and repeat for dozens of failed attempts. He related in no uncertain terms just how physically demanding it was. More than once they (he often had a partner with him) lost a chance because someone had to finally move their cramped leg a little. This happened once and the small noise scared the leopard off.

Or you have all the stars aligned: There’s a bit of moon in the sky, you’ve got a good shooting platform, it doesn’t rain (it’s critical, if only for your own safety, that you can hear), and you’ve picked a spot where the leopard does indeed return. You might hear it directly underneath your tree or platform wondering if it has heard you (as happened regularly). But then it starts to wander over to its recent kill that you have staked to the ground. Just then (as did happen) a woman in a nearby house makes a noise and the leopard is scared off.

Corbett faced so much bad luck like this that most mere mortals would have quit a long time ago.

I’ve read before about the Indian brain drain and the government’s attempts to counter it. For what it’s worth, Apple Computer has recently made inroads in both selling and manufacturing in India. That can’t help but keep more brains there and is probably an overall positive sign beyond just Apple.

Speaking of Sikhs, they are the Rodney Dangerfield of religions. They are constantly mistaken for Musselmen.

Wanting to learn more about the general period and region, I began reading With Clive in India by G. A. Henry. It’s a historical novel set in the near beginning of the East India Company’s battles with the French in dominating trade in India. The book starts well but soon devolves into, in my opinion, ill-written, boring, and confusing descriptions of battle after battle. It’s no longer a novel. It’s an encyclopedia.

So I moved onto something else I found at the local online library: Hira Singh: When India Came to Fight in Flanders. It’s early days, as the British say, but 15% into it, it’s going well.

This is a story that is apparently loosely based on a true incident about a Sikh calvary unit (Squadron D of regiment, Outram’s Own) who remained loyal to the British during WWI. The book is told through the eyes of Hira Singh, one of the Sikh officers in the unit. You pick it up from where war breaks out. Singh explains, in presumably the way a good Sikh would, why he and the others are fighting for the British. Here’s a small piece of that:



Eventually they are captured by the Germans and then escape. And I take it that the majority of the novel is the tale of their struggles and adventures as they make their way home.