THE PIPAL PANI TIGER

"QEYOND the fact that he was born in a ravine running deep
JDinto the foot-hills and was one of a family of three, I know
nothing of his early history.

He was about a year old when, attracted by the calling of a
chital hind early one November morning, I found his pug marks
in the sandy bed of a little stream known locally as Pipal Pani.
I thought at first that he had strayed from his mother's care,
but, as week succeeded week and his single tracks showed on
the game paths of the forest, I came to the conclusion that the
near approach of the breeding season was an all-sufficient reason
for his being alone. Jealously guarded one day, protected at
the cost of the parent life if necessary, and set adrift the next,
is the lot of all jungle folk; nature's method of preventing
inbreeding.

That winter he lived on peafowl, kakar, small pig and an
occasional chital hind, making his home in a prostrate giant of
the forest felled for no apparent reason, and hollowed out by
time and porcupines. Here he brought most of his kills, bask-
ing, when the days were cold, on the smooth bole of the tree,
where many a leopard had basked before him.

It was not until January was well advanced that I saw the
cub at close quarters. I was out one evening without any defi-
nite object in view, when I saw a cfow rise from the ground and
wipe its beak as it lit on the branch of a tree. Crows, vultures
and magpies always interest me in the jungle, and many are the
kills I have found both in India and in Africa with the help of
these birds. On the present occasion the crow led me to the
scene of an overnight tragedy. A chital had been killed and
partly eaten and, attracted to the spot probably as I had been,
a party of men passing along the road, distant some fifty yards,
had cut up and removed the remains. All that was left of the
chital were a few splinters of bone and a little congealed blood

160 Man-eaters of Kumaon

off which the crow had lately made his meal. The absence of
thick cover and the proximity of the. road convinced me that
the animal responsible for the kill had not witnessed the removal
and that it would return in due course; so I decided to sit up,
and made myself as comfortable in a plum tree as the thorns
permitted.

I make no apology to you, my reader, if you differ with me
on the ethics of the much-debated subject of sitting up over kills.
Some of my most pleasant shikar memories centre round the
hour or two before sunset that I have spent in a tree over a
natural kill, ranging from the time when, armed with a muzzle-
loader whipped round with brass wire to prevent the cracked
barrel from bursting, I sat over a langur killed by a leopard,
to a few days ago, when with the most modern rifle across my
knees, I watched a tigress and her two full-grown cubs eat up
the sambur stag they had killed, and counted myself no poorer
for not having secured a trophy.

True, on the present occasion there is no kill below me, but,
for the reasons given, that will not affect any chance of a shot;
scent to interest the jungle folk there is in plenty in the blood-
soaked ground, as witness the old grey-whiskered boar who
has been quietly rooting along for the past ten minutes, and who
suddenly stiffens to attention as he comes into the line of the
blood-tainted wind. His snout held high, and worked as only
a pig can work that member, tells him more than I was able to
glean from the ground which showed no tracks; his method of
approach, a short excursion to the right and back into the wind,
and then a short excursion to the left and again back into the
wind, each manoeuvre bringing him a few yards nearer, indicates
the chital was killed by a tiger. Making sure once and again
that nothing worth eating has been left, he finally trots off and
disappears from view.

Two chital, both with horns in velvet, now appear and from
the fact that they are coming down-wind, and making straight

THE STURDY, HAPPY AND UNSPOILT PEOPLE OF OUR HILLS

Jit' r /to

A VILLAGE HEADMAN

A TILI.KR OF TlfK SOIL

Berko

A GIRL CARRYING AN EIGHTY-POUND PACK

The Pipat Pani Tiger 161

for the blood-soaked spot, it is evident they wer witnesses to
the overnight tragedy. Alternately snuffing the ground, or
standing rigid with every muscle tensed for instant flight, they
satisfy their curiosity and return the way they came.

uriosity |[t is not a humanmonopolyi many an animal's life
is cut short by indulging in it. A dog leaves th.e verandah, to
bark at a shadow, a deer leaves the herd to investigate a .tuft
of grass that no wind agitated, and the waiting leopard is pro-
vided with a meal.

The sun is nearing the winter line when a movement to the
right front attracts attention. An animal has crossed an open-
ing between two bushes at the far end of a wedge of scrub that
terminates thirty yards from my tree. Presently the bushes at
my end part, and out into the open, with never a look to right
or left, steps the cub. Straight up to the spot where his kill
had been he goes, his look of expectancy giving place to one
of disappointment as he realizes that his chital, killed, possibly,
after hours of patient stalking, is gone. The splinters of bone
and congealed blood are rejected, and his interest centres on a
tree stump lately used as a butcher's block, to Which some
shreds of flesh are adhering. I was not the only one who car-
ried fire-arms in these jungles and, if the cub was to grow into
a tiger, it was necessary he should be taught the danger of care-
lessly approaching kills in daylight. A scatter-gun and dust-shot
would have served my purpose better, but the rifle will have to
do this time; and, as he raises his head to smell the stump, my
bullet crashes into the hard wood an inch from his- nose. Only
once in the years that followed did the cub forget that lesson.

The following winter I saw him several times. His ears
did not look so big now and he had changed his baby hair for
a coat of rich tawny red with well-defined stripes. The hollow
tree had been given up to its rightful owners a pair of leopards,
new quarters found in a thick belt of scrub skirting the foot-
hills, and young sambur added to his menu.

162 Man-eaters of Kumaon

On my annual descent from the hills next winter, the familiar
pug marks no longer showed on the game paths and at the
drinking places, and for several weeks I thought the cub had
abandoned his old haunts and gone further afield. Then one
morning his absence was explained for, side by side with his
tracks, were the smaller and more elongated tracks of the mate
he had gone to find. I only once saw the tigers, for the cub was
a tiger now, together. I had been out before dawn to try to
bag a serow that lived on the foot-hills, and returning along a
fire track my attention was arrested by a vulture, perched on
the dead limb of a sal tree.

The bird had his back towards me and was facing a short
stretch of scrub with dense jungle beyond. Dew was still heavy
on the ground, and without a sound I reached the tree and peer-
ed round. One antler of a dead sambur, for no living deer would
lie in that position, projected above the low bushes. A convenient
moss-covered rock afforded my rubbershod feet silent and safe
hold, and as I drew myself erect, the sambur came into full
view. The hind quarters had been eaten away and, lying on
either side 6f the kill, were the pair, the tiger being on the far
side with only his hind legs showing. Both tigers were asleep.
Ten feet straight in front, to avoid a dead branch, and thirty
feet to the left would give me a shot at the tiger's neck, but in
planning the stalk I had forgotten the silent spectator. Where
I stood I was invisible to him, but before the ten feet had been
covered I came into view and, alarmed at my near proximity,
he flapped of his perch, omitting as he did so to notice a thin
creeper dependent from a branch above him against which he
collided, and came ignominiously to ground. The tigress was
up and away in an instant, clearing at a bound the kill and her
mate, the tiger not being slow to follow; a possible shot, but too
risky with thick jungle ahead where a wounded animal would
have all the advantages. To those who have never tried it, I
can recommend the stalking of leopards and tigers on their

The Pipal Pant Tiger 163

kills as a most pleasant form of sport. Great care should how-
ever be taken over the shot, for if the animal is not killed out-
right, or anchored, trouble is bound to follow.

A week later the tiger resumed his bachelor existence. A
change had now come over his nature. Hitherto he had not
objected to my visiting his kills but, after his mate left, at the
first drag I followed up I was given very clearly to understand
that no liberties would in future be permitted. The angry growl
of a tiger at close quarters, than which there is no more terrify-
ing sound in the jungles, has to be heard to be appreciated.

Early in March the tiger killed his first full-grown buffalo.
I was near the foot-hills one evening when the agonized bellow-
ing of a buffalo, mingled with the angry roar of a tiger, rang
through the forest. I located the sound as coming from a
ravine about six hundred yards away. The going was bad,
mostly over loose rocks and through thorn bushes, and when
I crawled up a steep bluff commanding a view of the ravine the
buffalo's struggles were over, and the tiger nowhere to be seen.
For an hour I lay with finger on trigger without seeing any-
thing of the tiger. At dawn next morning I again crawled up
the bluff, to find the buffalo lying just as I had left her. The
soft ground, torn up by hoof and claw, testified to the desperate
nature of the struggle and it was not until the buffalo had been
hamstrung that the tiger had finally succeeded in pulling her
down, in a fight which had lasted from ten to fifteen minutes.
The tiger's tracks led across the ravine and, on following them
up, I found a long smear of blood on a rock, and, a hundred
yards further on, another smear on a fallen tree. The wound
inflicted by the buffalo's horns was in the tiger's head and
sufficiently severe to make the tiger lose all interest in the kill,
for he never returned to it.

Three years later the tiger, disregarding the lesson received
when a cub (his excuse may have been that it was the close
season for tigers), incautiously returned to a kill, over which a

164 Man-eaters of Kumaon

zatnindar and some of his tenants were sitting at night, and
received a bullet in the shoulder which fractured the bone. No
attempt was made to follow him up, and thirty-six hours later,
his. shoulder covered with a swarm of flies, he limped through
the compound of the Inspection Bungalow, crossed a bridge
flanked on the far side by a double row of tenanted houses, the
occupants of which stood at their doors to watch him pass,
entered the gate of a walled-in compound and took possession of
a vacant godown. Twenty-four hours later, possibly alarmed
by the number of people who had collected from neighbouring
villages to see him, he left the compound the way he had entered
it, passed our gate, and made his way to the lower end of our
village. A bullock belonging to one of our tenants had died the
previous night and had been dragged into some bushes at the
edge of the village; this the tiger found, and here he remained
a few days, quenching his thirst at an irrigation furrow.

When we came down from the hills two months later the
tiger was living on small animals (calves, sheep, goats, etc.)
that he was able to catch on the outskirts of the village. By
March his wound had healed, leaving his right foot turned
inwards. Returning to the forest where he had been wounded,
he levied heavy toll on the village cattle, taking, for safety's
sake, but one meal off each and in this way killing five times as
many as he would ordinarily have done. The zamindar who
had wounded him and who had a herd of some four hundred
head of cows and buffaloes was the chief sufferer.

In the succeeding years he gained as much in size as in
reputation, and many were the attempts made by sportsmen,
and others, to bag him.

One November evening, a villager, armed with a single-barrel
muzzle-loading gun, set out to try to bag a pig, selecting for his
ground machan an isolated bush growing in a twenty-yard-wide
rowkah (dry watercourse) running down the centre of some
broken ground, This ground was rectangular, flanked on the

The Pipal Pani Tiger 165

long sides by cultivated land and on the short sides by a road,
and by a ten-foot canal that formed the boundary between our
cultivation and the forest. In front of the man was a four-foot-
high bank with a cattle track running along the upper edge;
behind him a patch of dense scrub. At 8 p.m. an animal appear-
ed on the track and, taking what aim he could, he fired. On
receiving the shot the animal fell off the bank, and passed with-
in a few feet of the man, grunting as it entered the scrub behind.
Casting aside his blanket, the man ran to his hut two hundred
yards away. Neighbours soon collected and, on hearing the
man's account, came to the conclusion that a pig had been hard
hit. It would be a pity, they said, to leave the pig for hyenas
and jackals to eat, so a lantern was lit and as a party of six bold
spirits set out to retrieve the bag, one of my tenants (who declin-
ed to join the expedition, and who confessed to me later that he
had no stomach for looking for wounded pig in dense scrub in
the dark) suggested that the gun should be loaded and taken.

His suggestion was accepted and, as a liberal charge of powder
was being rammed home, the wooden ramrod jammed and broke
inside the barrel. A trivial accident which undoubtedly saved
the lives of six men. The broken rod was eventually and after
great trouble extracted, the gun loaded, and the party set off.

Arrived at the spot where the animal had entered the bushes,
a careful search was made and, on blood being found, every
effort to find the ' pig ' was made; it was not until the whole area
had been combed out that the quest for that night was finally
abandoned. Early next morning the search was resumed, with
the addition of my informant of weak stomach, who was a bet-
ter woodsman than his companions and who, examining the
ground under a bush where there was a lot of blood, collected
and brought some blood-stained hairs to me which I recognized
as tiger's hairs, A brother sportsman was with me for the day
and together we went to have a look at the ground.

The reconstruction of jungle events from signs on the ground

166 Man-eaters of Kumaon

has always held great interest for me. True, one's deductions
are sometimes wrong, but they are also sometimes right. In the
present instance I was right in placing the wound in the inner
forearm of the right foreleg, but was wrong in assuming the
leg had been broken and that the tiger was a young animal and
a stranger to the locality.

There was no blood beyond the point where the hairs had
been found and, as tracking on the hard ground was impossible,
I crossed the canal to where the cattle track ran through a bed
of sand. Here from the pug marks I found that the wounded
animal was not a young tiger as I had assumed, but my old
friend the Pipal Pani tiger who, when taking a short cut through
the village, had in the dark been mistaken for a pig.

Once before when badly wounded he had passed through the
settlement without harming man or beast, but he was older
now, and if driven by pain and hunger might do considerable
damage. A disconcerting prospect, for the locality was thickly
populated, and I was due to leave within the week, to keep an
engagement that could not be put off.

For three days I searched every bit of the jungle between
the canal and the foot-hills, an area of about four square miles,
without finding any trace of the tiger. On the fourth afternoon,
as I was setting out to continue the search, I met an old woman
and her son hurriedly leaving the jungle. From them I learnt
that the tiger was calling near the foot-hills and that all the
cattle in the jungle had stampeded. When out with a rifle I
invariably go alone; it is safer in a mix-up, and one can get
through the jungle more silently. However, I stretched a point
on this occasion, and let the boy accompany me since he was
very keen on showing me where he had heard the tiger.

Arrived at the foot-hills, the boy pointed to a dense bit of
cover, bounded on the far side by the fire-track to which I have
already referred, and on the near side by the Pipal Pani stream.
Running parallel to and about a hundred yards from the stream

The Pipal Pani Tiger 167

was a shallow depression some twenty feet wide, more or less
open on my side and fringed with bushes on the side nearer the
stream. A well-used path crossed the depression at right angles.
Twenty yards from the path, and on the open side of the depres-
sion, was a small tree. If the tiger came down the path he
would in all likelihood stand for a shot on clearing the bushes.
Here I decided to take my stand and, putting the boy into the
tree with his feet on a level with my head and instructing him to
signal with his toes if from his raised position he saw the tiger
before I did, I put my back to the tree and called.

You, who have spent as many years in the jungle as I have,
need no description of the call of a tigress in search of a mate,
and to you less fortunate ones I can only say that the call, to
acquire which necessitates close observation and the liberal use
of throat salve, cannot be described in words.

To my great relief, for I had crawled through the jungle for
three days with finger on trigger, I was immediately answered
from a distance of about five hundred yards, and for half an hour
thereafter it may have been less and certainly appeared more
the call was tossed back and forth. On the one side the urgent
summons of the king, and on the other, the subdued and coaxing
answer of his handmaiden. Twice the boy signalled, but I had
as yet seen nothing of the tiger, and it was not until the setting
sun was flooding the forest with golden light that he suddenly
appeared, coming down the path at a fast walk with never a
pause as he cleared the bushes. When half-way across the
depression, and just as I was raising the rifle, he turned to the
right and came straight towards me.

This manoeuvre, unforeseen when selecting my stand, brought
him nearer than I had intended he should come and, moreover,
presented me with a head shot which at that short range I was
not prepared to take. Resorting to an old device, learned long
years ago and successfully used on similar occasions, the tiger
was brought to a stand without being alarmed. With one paw

168 Man-eaters of Kumaon

poised, he slowly raised his head, exposing as he did so his
chest and throat. After the impact of the heavy bullet, he
struggled to his feet and tore blindly through the forest, coming
down with a crash within a few yards of where, attracted by
the calling of a chital hind one November morning, I had first
seen his pug marks.

It was only then that I found he had been shot under a
misapprehension, for the wound which I feared might make him
dangerous proved on examination to be almost healed and
caused by a pellet of lead having severed a small vein in his
right forearm.

Pleasure at having secured a magnificent trophy he measured
10' 3" over curves and his winter coat was in perfect condition
was not unmixed with regret, for never again would the jungle
folk and I listen with held breath to his deep-throated call
resounding through the foot-hills, and never again would his
familiar pug marks show on the game paths that he and I had
trodden for fifteen years.