:: Shekhar Bhatia

A ghost who stalks

By Shekhar Bhatia

Nov 13 : Some years ago I was fortunate to see a tiger in Ranthambore, and believe me it’s an awesome sight. We were on a jeep as the tiger appeared from the undergrowth and walked alongside for a good 10 minutes — though it seemed a lot longer. There was an arrogance with which it ignored us as it walked with majestic grace towards a pond on the other side of the path. Seen at close quarters, it was a hair-raising experience.

Tigers are now refugees in shrinking reserves. But there was a time when they hunted with impunity. By the time Jim Corbett, the hunter turned conservationist, killed the dreaded man-eater of Champawat in 1911, that single tigress had devoured 436 humans — 200 in Nepal and 236 in the Kumaon region of India where she hunted unchallenged for four years.

In his Man-eaters of Kumaon, Corbett gives a riveting account of how the Champawat tigress carried its victims ("I have not seen anything as pitiful as that young comely leg —bitten off a little below the knee as clean as though severed by the stroke of an axe"), and how he hunted her.

I looked up Corbett’s tale when I came across a new study about the legendary man-eaters of Tsavo, the two lions who are believed to have killed 135 people in just nine months.

In 1898, the British East Africa Company hired a military engineer, Lt. Col. John H. Patterson, to build a bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. When Patterson reached the remote outpost he saw hundreds of Indian and Kenyan workers living in fear of lions who attacked the camp at night and dragged people from their tents. He may not have believed their stories had a lion not entered the camp on the night of his arrival.

The British Company hired an American big-game hunter, a man named Charles Remington, who brought with him some seasoned Masai warriors. But the Masai believe the lions have supernatural powers, and deserted the hunt; soon the workers fled the camp, leaving the engineer, the hunter and another officer to tackle the two male beasts that the natives had nicknamed "the Ghost" and "the Darkness".

When Remington killed one of the two lions, the three decided to celebrate and got drunk. As if in revenge, the other lion dragged Remington out of his tent at night. His mauled body was found nearby. In the end Patterson managed to kill the remaining beast and sold the skins to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

I have not read Patterson’s account, The Man-eaters of Tsavo, but I have seen a gripping movie based on it, The Ghost and the Darkness, with Val Kilmer playing the role of Patterson and Michael Douglas acting as the American hunter.

I saw the movie late at night some years ago in a remote bungalow in a forest in Dehra Dun. I didn’t know what I was in for. Trust me when I say, it was scary. The scenes are bloody and graphic, and the suspense nail-biting.

Patterson claimed that the two lions had killed 135 people; the Ugandans, however, put the number at 28. Now scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, say the number could be 35: one lion possibly ate 11 humans and the other 24. At most the number was 75, but no more. They have analysed the hair and bone samples from the pair of lions in the Chicago Museum, picked up human samples from that region in Kenya dating back to those days, and say they are certain about the number.

What amazes me is how, after more than a hundred years, scientists can come to such a definite conclusion: they calculated not just the number of humans devoured by the beasts but also figured out the lions’ hunting strategy.

According to published reports of their research, both lions were male. One "was getting nearly one-third of its diet from human meat, while the other about half that much". The rest came from grazing animals. Extrapolating this to how much a lion needs to eat to survive they arrived at the figure 35 human kills.

There’s another bit that I found fascinating: the Tsavo lions hunted together in a phenomenon known as "cooperative hunting", but did not share their kills. Their tastes differed, and yet they hunted together.

There’s a similarity between the man-eaters of Tsavo and Champawat: one of the lions, according to the scientists, had a fractured jaw which inhibited its ability to hunt; in the case of the Champawat tigress a gunshot wound on the teeth "had prevented her from killing her natural prey", writes Corbett. "Human beings are not the natural prey of tigers", he says in the preface to his book. Lions and tigers, say wildlife experts, are more likely to attack humans if they have an injury or are too old to hunt other wildlife. And humans are easy prey.

Today, it’s the other way around. We are encroaching into their territory, pushing them into a corner. They have nowhere to go.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com