No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Man-Eater in History

by Dane Huckelbridge

when a tiger is no longer physically able to defend its territory, it has no choice but to leave. And if available territory is limited to begin with, that usually means that the exiled tiger, cut off from its natural habitat and normal prey, will end up somewhere it’s not welcome, scrounging for food in places it does not belong.

grown males will try to kill cubs fathered by rivals. Mother tigers are notoriously protective, and they will battle to the death to protect their young.

The cubs, however, made the mistake of returning too soon, only to discover a furious male annoyed at being disturbed and bent on tearing them to pieces. The mother tiger, with a resounding roar that could be heard at a guard post a full two kilometers away, objected.

the Champawat did not have a complete set of canine teeth—a serious handicap that would have left it at the mercy of more fully abled cats, not to mention other species. Besides contending with territorial rivals, wild tigers must also occasionally spar with other dangerous animals as well.

Leopards, wolves, sloth bears, and even wild dogs can all pose potential threats to a wounded tiger, and sometimes even a healthy one as well. Kenneth Anderson, the aforementioned tiger hunter, once observed an entire pack of dogs—nearly thirty total—chase down a tigress and eventually gang up to kill her, although not before she managed to snap the spine of one “with the sharp report of a twig,” and claw the life out of five more.

downing a Homo sapien was an entirely different story from taking on some of the largest and most aggressive animals in the natural world. Unable to defend its territory against rivals and aggressive males, incapable of taking down much of its usual prey or fending off competitive predators, its existence was gravely threatened.

thanks to malaria, the terai was still not terribly populated. While logging and agriculture undertaken by absentee landlords had begun to transform the landscape in a decidedly human direction, the Tharu settlements to be found there were still relatively sporadic and widely distributed.

No tiger in its right mind would pick the outskirts of the noisy towns and nearly deerless forests of the Nepalese middle hills as home, but it had virtually nowhere else to go.

Tucked into the folds of the mountains, in the district of Dadeldhura, is the village of Rupal. A place so perfectly situated for the hunting of human beings, the tiger has no reason—at least no natural reason—to ever leave.

Even today, upon examining Rupal from a bird’s-eye view, an obvious truth emerges: the village is, almost literally, a human target.

From accounts of more recent Nepalese tiger attacks recorded outside Chitwan, it has been well established that the most “successful” man-eaters—meaning those that are able to evade capture and continue killing on a regular basis—are those that have adopted the technique of snatching humans from the edge of villages and quickly dragging them away into steep, wooded ravines, places where hunters often cannot give chase even if they wanted to.

With this dense pocket of human settlement, surrounded on all sides by wooded gorges, the tiger could essentially attack from any angle, keeping the populace constantly guessing and in fear.

To a normal tiger, the steep, rocky terrain of the Nepalese middle hills would not have been ideal habitat at all. The lowland terai would have been a much better fit, full of game and bountiful in potential mates. But to an abnormal tiger with limited prospects for establishing its own territory, and an inability to catch much of its natural prey, the terai would have no longer sufficed.

Further, with increased competition for diminishing habitat, it would not have been able to hold its own against competitive tigers. The hills to the north, on the other hand, would have provided exactly what a tiger like the Champawat was searching for: unclaimed territory full of human food.

The Champawat chose this location because of just how conducive it was to its new mode of hunting. It was, in effect, a strategic choice. And as a strategy, it proved extremely effective.

while the tiger was able to evade bounty hunters and paid shikaris for several years, its weekly toll of human victims eventually mounted to the point where something drastic had to be done.

All accounts seem to agree that the ensuing hunt was extremely large and logistically complex. It is logical that the common beaters, walking at arm’s length and making as much noise as possible, would have been volunteers from the local population. And it could have been they, under the leadership of the village headman, who demanded the hunt and organized its logistics.

As to how the events unfolded, there is no recorded tiger hunt in recent times to compare it with—tiger hunting has been banned in Nepal since 1972, and the royals seldom allowed videos or photographs to be taken in the decades prior.

The village is surrounded on all sides by steep hills and ravines, a landscape that is not conducive to the traditional Nepalese “ring” hunt method practiced in the flatlands of the terai. There is, however, a single outlet from the valley to the west, leading directly to the Sharda River. With this army of men and elephants forming a U and slowly closing in on the tiger like a massive pincer, it would have been feasible at last to funnel the cat into this narrow pass, and then to corner it against the steep banks of the river.

when it sees them break through the trees, when it spies the puffs of smoke from atop the elephants and the harsh spouts of gravel at its feet, it knows, in whatever way a tiger can, that its only hope lies across the river, in the strange land beyond. And with that it roars and it leaps, a tiger falling, orange and black stripes plunging against the gray bands of rock. It vanishes with a splash just as the first team of shikaris reach the ledge; they fire shots into the rushing water far below, and they continue firing when the tiger finally emerges, soaked and scrambling, on the opposite bank of the river.

A blue blood like Knowles would not have been caught dead pacing the family estate in high tweed with a “country bottled” railroad man from the sticks like Corbett. But India was not England, and the vicissitudes of colonial life rendered social boundaries somewhat more fluid.

As a domiciled colonist born and raised in the hills of Kumaon, he was one of those rare figures who seemed equally at home in two separate worlds. He was as comfortable chatting in Kumaoni as he was speaking “the Queen’s,” and as at ease tracking sambar through the jungle as he was playing bridge at high tea.

Corbett could imitate the grunts of a leopard or the chuffing of a tiger with an accuracy that sent a collective shiver through a dinner party; his ability to pick up a spoor in a waterlogged forest put the keenest bloodhounds to shame.

For his friend, hunting is purely sport, a source of recreational adrenaline and trophies for the parlor. For Corbett, however, it was how he had helped feed his family following the untimely death of their father.

As a young boy, not so very long after the death of his father, he was walking alone in the forest when he stumbled right into a large Bengal, peering out at him from a plum bush. The tiger could have easily made a meal of the young Corbett with nothing more than a swipe of its claws, but it did not—it merely watched him inquisitively for a moment with its piercing golden eyes before melting away, back into the forest. It

“A tiger’s function in the scheme of things is to help maintain the balance of nature,” Corbett would later write, “and if, on rare occasions when driven by dire necessity, he kills a human being or when his natural food has been ruthlessly exterminated by man . . . it is not fair that for these acts a whole species should be branded as being cruel and bloodthirsty.”

Corbett was neither Hindu nor Tharu, yet in his descriptions of the animals, he readily identified something almost omnipotent, perhaps even divine. In short, he understood as only those who live in partnership with the forest truly can that to venture into its borders was to enter the realm of another lord’s kingdom.

the divinity of tigers—indeed, the necessity of tigers—had been a tenet of faith on the subcontinent since ancient times.

The tiger perishes without the forest, and the forest perishes without its tigers.

Durga, the warrior goddess charged with driving evil and darkness from the world, is almost universally depicted as riding a tiger as she battles demons.

Among the Warli tribes north of Bombay, a wedding cannot be consecrated nor fields planted without first paying tribute to the tiger god Vaghadeva. His blessing is seen as a critical component in any reproductive act, be it farming or childbearing.

As projections of royal power, tigers represented omnipotence and omnipresence alike. Even as late as the eighteenth century, the Sultan of Mysore was clothing himself completely in tiger stripes, and displaying to his enemies a banner that decreed “The tiger is God.”

Of all the dynasties that exercised control over India’s many territories, few had a more intimate relationship with tigers than the Mughals. Between 1526 and 1827, this Muslim family of central Asian origin ruled over an empire that at its height covered almost all of modern India.

Elaborate tiger hunts, conducted on a rotating basis at a series of royal hunting reserves throughout their empire, served a function that was diplomatic, militaristic, and even religious. By incorporating local villagers as beaters and headmen as organizers, they were able to forge cooperative alliances with distant vassal states, while at the same time make a clear demonstration of their martial capacity should those alliances ever break down.

these hunts were never intended to deplete the tiger population or rid a region of predators. Indeed, tigers were considered precious royal property—only the king and his vassals had the right to hunt them, and they seldom did so on a scale that threatened their existence as a species.

Ensuring a healthy population of tigers throughout their territory was more than just a familial whim; it was their responsibility as Indian kings.

The first serious incursions wouldn’t occur until the latter half of the sixteenth century, though, when a trio of London merchants—Ralph Fitch, William Leeds, and James Story—set sail for the east in 1583, aboard a ship aptly named Tyger. Disembarking at Tripoli, they made the rest of the journey by foot, covering three thousand miles on their march to the subcontinent.

by 1612 the East India Company had convinced the Mughal emperor Jahangir—that same legendary hunter and great lover of tigers—to give them permission to trade at the port of Surat. This small mercantilist concession may not have seemed especially portentous at the time, but its effects would be felt for centuries.

Those tensions would culminate in 1757 with the Battle of Plassey, when the Company’s own private army defeated a local Mughal vassal and his French allies on the battlefield, resulting in direct Company control over all of Bengal.

The role of the British had substantially transformed. They were no longer foreign merchants looking to make a tidy profit—they had become governors. A small, damp, windswept island a full hemisphere away had come to rule, via the East India Company, a sprawling and complex subcontinent it barely understood.

The solution came in the form of a carrot-and-stick-style collaboration with India’s minor nobility. Specifically, between the local princes, who were generally allowed to keep their fiefdoms in exchange for loyalty and tribute, and British colonial officers, who were charged with gubernatorial oversight.

This collaboration in turn created a certain amount of shared cultural space between the Indian and British colonial elites, and the exchange of aristocratic traditions was not uncommon. The children of maharajas learned to play cricket and speak Oxford English, while British ministers developed a fondness for lofty elephant rides and elaborate hunts in jungle reserves.

the techniques the English adopted were not substantially different from those of their Mughal predecessors. They sat perched in the same howdah, atop the same elephant, while the same local shikaris served as guides, and the same villagers were drafted to beat the tigers out of the bushes. The hunt had all the familiar ostentation, all the connotations of military might, and much the same ritualistic importance as that of the Mughals’. The fundamental difference, however, was what the ritual signified. The tiger held a different implication for the British than for the Mughals and other Indian rulers.

the ritualistic slaying of the animal took on a new meaning—and the tiger itself would become a symbol of local defiance.

this was a most curious piece of mechanism as large as life, representing a Royal Tiger in the act of devouring a prostrate European officer: within the body of the animal was a row of keys of natural notes . . . intended to resemble the cries of a person in distress intermixed with the horrible roar of the Tiger: the machinery was so contrived, that while this infernal music continued to play, the hand of the European victim was often lifted up, and the head convulsively thrown back to express his helpless and deplorable situation.

The mechanical device with its haunting organ depicted an actual event—Hugh Munro, the only son of a British general who had defeated Tipu’s own father in a previous Mysore rebellion, had been killed by a tiger while hunting with friends on the Bay of Bengal in 1792.

Tipu Sultan had used his emblem, the tiger, as a projection of his own defiance against the British, and the British were more than happy to bend that analogy to fit into their own worldview.

Whereas the kings of India had regarded the tiger as a powerful yet benevolent manifestation of their own royal mandate, the British viewed the very same animal with suspicion and disdain.

And while the hunting of tigers had once been an affirmation of identity for India’s ruling class, it became under the British a sort of ritualized reenactment of the colony’s subjugation—the slaying of the rebel Tipu ...

The existence of tigers in the wild was viewed, both symbolically and literally, as a direct challenge to British hegemony.