Long before an emboldened Champawat Tiger was terrorizing villages and snatching farmers from their fields, it was a wounded animal convalescing deep in the lowland jungles of western Nepal, agitated, aggressive, and wracked with hunger. And it is a safe bet that its first attack occurred there, in the rich flora of the terai floodplain, the preferred habitat of the northern Bengal tiger. The terai once was—and still is, I discovered, in some isolated areas—a place of enormous biodiversity and commanding beauty. Dense groves of sal are interspersed with silk cotton and peepal, imposing trees that look as old as time. Islands of timber are encircled by lakes of rippling grasses, their stalks twice as high as the height of any man. Chital deer gather at dusk along the rivers, wild pigs root and trundle through the leaves, and even the odd gaur buffalo can make an appearance, guiding its young come twilight toward the marshes to feed. But there are people who make their home here as well: the Tharu, the indigenous inhabitants of the region who lived in the terai then as some still do today, in close proximity and harmony with the forest. Residing in small villages composed of mud-walled, grass-thatched structures, and combining low-impact agriculture with hunting and gathering, the Tharu are experts not just at surviving but thriving in a wilderness where few others can. The spirits of the animals they live beside are worshipped, and the largest of their trees are as sacred as temples. In short, they are a people with tremendous respect for and knowledge of the natural world. And the Champawat Tiger’s first victim was almost certainly one of them.
A woodcutter, possibly, or someone harvesting grass for livestock. A worker whose stooped posture resembled an animal more than a human. Perhaps he was a hattisare—a Tharu working in the royal elephant stables, on his way into the land’s bosky depths to harvest the long grasses upon which the elephants fed. It is a scene still repeated in the forest reserves of Nepal to this day, and instantly retrievable. We can imagine it: the air spiced by the curried lentil dal bhat simmering on the fire, and rich with the tang of fresh elephant dung. Our hattisare rides through these aromas atop a lumbering tusker, ducking his turbaned head to clear the low-hanging branches of trees, guiding his tremendous mount with gentle prods of his feet away from the stables toward the dense jungle and grasslands beyond.
The forest is still a wild place here, despite the farmland and pastures being cleared on its fringes, despite the outsiders from the hills who are beginning to buy up the land. But he has committed his puja for the week, making offerings to both the appropriate Hindu gods and Tharu spirits, and besides, he has lived and worked here all of his life—he is a phanet, a senior elephant handler with decades of experience. The terai has been good to him, he has nothing to fear. He loves the creatures here, and he respects their power, always granting them the wide berth that is their due. Respect, yes, but fear? No, that has never been necessary.
His elephant rumbles beneath him, still content from the dana of rice and molasses that composed its last meal. He scratches it behind the ear affectionately, and directs it with a grunted command across a shallow river, toward the plains of high elephant grass beyond. Normally, the harvesting of grass is done with his mahout, but today he let the boy sleep in. He likes being alone with his elephant on mornings such as this, riding up front just behind its head, plodding through the blankets of steam that rise from the marshes and cling to the banyan trees. There is something relaxing, almost hypnotic in the slow, seismic gait of the elephant. From his perch atop its neck, he takes great pleasure in watching the swamp deer graze at the water’s edge, or catching a passing glimpse of a rhino calf—or, on rarer occasions still, a fleeing tiger. They, like him, call the forest home, and in that he finds no small sense of kinship.
When they arrive at the spot, he gives the elephant the signal to stop and gathers his sickle. He dismounts, with a little help from the animal’s forelimb, and steps gingerly over the swampy ground. At the choicest stalks, he stoops over and begins cutting the tough grass with short, hasping strokes, humming as he works. When he has harvested enough for his first batch, he takes a thin rope from his dhoti cloth and begins to tie up the shock, squatting as he knots the twine.
It’s the elephant that senses it first—even though the man cannot see his old friend through the tall grass, he hears his uneasy snort and sudden grumble, deep, resonant, and ominous. He knows that sound well, and all too well what it implies. Perhaps it is best to hurry with his task. The last thing he would want is to stumble upon a fresh kill at the wrong moment, although he does not recall any warning calls of chital deer or flocks of waiting vultures.
But then there is another sound. One with which he is also well acquainted, although he has never heard it so close before. A roar, nearer than he ever thought possible. Close enough to make the grass stalks tremble. Heart seizing, his thoughts clarified by fear, he drops the shock, stands upright—and mounts a lightning-quick debate between the competing instincts of fight and flight. But in the end, there is time to do neither, as the realization comes to him with a stark limpidity that he is the fresh kill. He has essentially stumbled upon his own death. With a snarl and a snap and a bold rash of stripes, the tiger is upon him. It has attacked, just as it would a boar or a deer. To the wounded predator, the unknown creature it has caught is so slow and so soft, it barely has to try. It is a revelation of sorts, in whatever shape it is that such things are revealed to the mind of a tiger. A quick bite to the throat, and it’s all over. There is no struggle. The nearby elephant trumpets hysterically, but there’s nothing to be done—the famished tiger is vanishing back into the tall and rattling grasses, to gorge on its feast, its senses galvanized into a frenzy by this entirely new and imminently available class of prey . . .
The Champawat’s first taste of human flesh almost certainly began with some such scenario, probably around the year 1899 or 1900, although the details of its initial kills, before it arrived in India, are likely to stay murky. Jim Corbett, one of the few primary sources for the early exploits of the tiger, gives nothing in his account beyond the number of its Nepalese victims. And even in the present day, documenting tiger attacks in the remote frontier of western Nepal is difficult at best—many attacks go unreported, and problem tigers only gain recognition in the press when they’ve claimed unusually large numbers of victims. Not surprisingly, finding tangible evidence of specific tiger attacks more than a century old in the region is next to impossible. Unlike the United Provinces, just across the border in India, there was no colonial government to publish eyewitness accounts or squirrel away records in faraway archives.
As for the Tharu, who constituted the bulk of the population in the lowland terai at that time, they possessed a culture that, although abundant in tradition and nuance, was primarily oral—literacy, except among a privileged few, was all but unknown. Traditionally, tigers were considered royal property, and only relevant to the government when it came to sport hunting. A man-eater, unlike a sport tiger, was greeted with relative indifference, and official “documentation” would have consisted simply of a tiger skin gifted to the village shikari who killed it. In the Panjiar Collection—one of the few historical archives available of communications between the Nepalese government and Tharu communities—problem tigers are only mentioned twice over the course of fifty royal documents. And in both cases, the responsibility to “protect the lives of villagers from the threat of tigers” was delegated to the local authorities, with the warning that “if you cannot settle and protect this area from these disturbances, you cannot take its produce.” Essentially, to the Nepalese government, man-eating tigers were the Tharu’s problem—not theirs. Rather than send in hunters, they preferred to let the locals handle it.
There is another reason tiger attacks may have gone unpublicized,