No Beast So Fierce. Dane Huckelbridge
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Both were likely mitigating factors in the 1974 mauling, though luckily not death, of one tiger researcher in Chitwan, Dr. Kirti Man Tamang. At the time, he was perched some fifteen to eighteen feet up in a tree—a distance considered to be safe from tiger attack—to monitor signals from a radio-collared mother tiger dubbed “Number One” by the team. What he didn’t reckon on, however, was just how protective a mother tiger can be. Fellow researchers Fiona and Mel Sunquist, who were working in Chitwan at the time of the attack, describe it in the following passage from Tiger Moon, as witnessed from atop a nearby elephant:
Kirti was moving around in the tree, pointing with the long aluminum antenna. He began to speak; then everyone heard the miaow of a young cub . . . Number One exploded out of the grass with a shattering roar. She made one leap up the tree and in a split second was on top of Kirti. He saw her coming and tried to ward her off with the antenna, but she flung it aside without noticing. She sank her claws into his thighs and buttocks and bit deeply into his leg. The force of her acceleration ripped Kirti off the branch and they both tumbled to the ground fifteen feet below . . . No one could believe what was happening. Kirti’s wife Pat repeated “Oh, my God,” over and over again, her voice rising in hysteria, but everyone else was dumb with shock. Before anyone could move the tigress charged again, her roars blasting through the silence. The elephants spun on their heels and bolted in blind panic ahead of the enraged tigress. Nothing could stop them. Equipment flew everywhere in a wild confusion of screaming and trumpeting. People clung to ropes or whatever they could find, trying not to be swept off the elephants in the headlong dash through the bushes.
The research team’s elephants may have bolted, but a battle-scarred old tusker was on hand that had participated in royal tiger hunts years ago, before they were banned. It had been trained to be fearless around tigers and had few hesitations about going back into the jungle to recover the fallen researcher before it was too late. Dr. Tamang was found to be in shock but still alive, with a “grapefruit-sized” chunk taken out of his thigh and deep claw marks raking his legs and buttocks. By tiger standards, this was a relatively mild attack—a defensive swat by a mother to deter an over-curious researcher—and yet it still cost the poor man an emergency medical flight to Kathmandu, multiple skin grafts, a nasty bacterial infection, and five full months of painful recovery.
The attack may have involved an outside researcher, but the vast majority of human–tiger conflict occurs among local populations, in the tight-knit rural communities that tend to border tiger territory. And when they do occur, there is a considerable and understandable amount of confusion, heartache, sadness, and anger. A regrettable human tragedy, no matter how you look at it. Hemanta Mishra, a Nepalese biologist with a focus on tiger conservation, was responsible for capturing a number of man-killers in Chitwan National Park, and encountered the sites of recent attacks on multiple occasions. One incident, which occurred in 1979 in the Nepalese village of Madanpur, involved a beloved local schoolteacher who was killed by a predatory bite to the neck. A crowd of villagers was able to scare the tiger away, however, and the schoolteacher’s body was saved from being carried off and eaten. After finally assuring a furious mob that he would deal with the problem—after all, the protected tigers were technically still considered government property in Nepal, just as they had been a century before—Hemanta Mishra describes the following scene:
The disfigured body of the schoolteacher was lying flat on the ground, facing upward. His mutilated face was covered with dried blood. A group of the dead man’s relatives squatted around his body, mourning the unprecedented tragedy. They were surrounded by a large crowd of villagers, silently lamenting the tragic loss of their only schoolteacher. The scene was somber, sorrowful, and silent. The aura of death hovered in the air. From a nearby hut, the wailing of the schoolteacher’s wife weeping in pain with her two children periodically broke the silence. A white blanket of cotton and a freshly cut green bamboo bier were laid next to the body. The dead man was a Hindu. His death ritual demanded that he be wrapped in the shroud of white cotton, fastened to the bamboo bier, and transported to the cremation site on the banks of a river. The scene [was] both heart wrenching and gruesome—reminiscent of a nightmarish movie.
Though shaken by what he had witnessed, and uncertain of his ability to actually capture the man-eater, Hemanta Mishra did keep his promise to the people of Madanpur—he eventually shot the responsible tiger with a tranquilizer dart and carried it via elephant to a waiting transport cage, and later, an enclosure at the Kathmandu zoo, where it lived out the rest of its days eating goat legs and chickens instead of human beings.
As disturbing as such attacks can be, the above are not the worst cases. The results can be far more gruesome when a man-eater is not scared away or interrupted before it has begun to feed. The tiger’s preferred method of feeding is to drag its fresh kill into a secluded part of the forest, feast on the meat until it can stomach no more, rest for a spell nearby, drink water, and then return to the carcass to continue feeding. It is this behavior that enables trackers to find tigers with bait—once the cat has made the kill, it will generally linger around its prey for several days—but it also means that once a body has been taken into the forest by a man-eater, it is very seldom recovered anywhere near intact. Take, for example, another of Hemanta Mishra’s accounts of surveying a kill site following a man-eater attack in Nepal in 1980, involving a cat dubbed “Tiger 118”:
Except for the skull and part of the victim’s lower leg, the tigress had eaten almost all of the man. An iron sickle glowed in the bright sun next to the victim’s toes. A Nepali topi—a kind of cap—and some bloody rags of clothing were scattered all over the kill site. With a wrenching heart, I watched the two villagers collect the remains of their relative and put them in a jute sac.
Far from being an extreme and unusually disturbing outcome, this scene is fairly typical of a full-scale man-eating event. In a scenario that bears an unsettling resemblance to the aftermath of a suicide-vest bombing, it is often only the human head and extremities that remain, scattered about a welter of blood and shredded clothing where the tiger has been feeding. And in some cases, not even that much is left. In one Amur tiger attack that occurred in the Russian Far East in 1997, virtually all that remained after a young hunter was killed in the forest was a pile of bloody clothing, a pair of empty boots, a watch, and a crucifix. The actual physical remains—a few splinters of bone and bits of flesh—could have fit in a coat pocket. One can only imagine what it is like for friends and family having to contend with the fact that their loved one is not only dead, but actually ingested by an oversized predator still at loose in the forest. And as already mentioned, in western Nepal and northern India, where both Hindu and Tharu funerary rites were closely observed, the lack of an intact body served as a spiritual sort of insult to injury, making the catastrophe that much more traumatic.
Even more traumatic still, however, is the possibility that a man-eater might return—that such a tiger may have acquired a taste for its new prey and actually begin seeking humans out on a reoccurring basis. In these instances, attacks change from chance encounters in the forest to the deliberate stalking of villagers and even predation within their homes. Man-eating leopards are more famous in India and Nepal for dragging victims from their houses, but tigers have been known to do it as well. In addition to the previously mentioned tiger attacks, Hemanta Mishra also relates in his memoirs an attack that occurred in the Madi Valley of Nepal, by a man-eating tigress known as Jogi Pothi. Like the Champawat, this tigress had ceased being an elusive, nocturnal predator and began conducting raids on the edges of villages in broad daylight. And also like the Champawat, this tiger proved extremely difficult to find or catch, as it had a knack for concealing itself immediately after a kill in nearby ravines. The houses of the villagers tended to be simple mud, wood, and thatch structures, economical but not terribly sturdy, which meant that a tiger could break in and drag its victims from their homes. This was very nearly what occurred in the village of Bankatta in 1988. A local yogi—an ostensibly celibate holy man—happened to be furtively entertaining feminine company in the wee hours of the morning when he thought he heard a knock at the door. His “guest” made the mistake of answering said door, as described in the following account:
Upon hearing the knocking sound, the jogi’s lady friend peeked through a hole in the wooden door. Shocked to see a huge tiger, she shrieked “Bagh! Bagh!” (“Tiger! Tiger!”) in terror at the top of her lungs. Her jogi consort jumped