The Leopard of Rudraprayag: Jim Corbett and the Man-Eater That Killed 125

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For eight years in the early 20th century, the people of the Garhwal region of India barricaded themselves indoors every night. The reason was a single male leopard, seven feet six inches long, that officially killed more than 125 people. Its first recorded victim was taken from Benji village in 1918, and its territory lay across the pilgrim road to the shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath, which supplied a steady stream of tired travelers sleeping in the open. It did not only ambush people on trails. It scraped the mud mortar from between the stones of huts or tore through thatched roofs to drag sleepers into the dark.

This episode traces the failed campaign against it and the man who ended it. Bounties, units of British and Gurkha soldiers, gin traps, and poisoned bait all failed, and each near miss seemed to teach the animal more about human methods. In the autumn of 1925 the hunter and tracker Jim Corbett took up the task, sitting through nights on tree platforms and reading the alarm calls of monkeys and peafowl. After ten weeks he shot the leopard on May 2, 1926. What he found when he examined the body changed the explanation for the whole affair.

• The official toll is likely an undercount, since many kills went unreported and victims who later died of infection or blood loss were not counted.
• Soldiers could not hide their noise or scent in the forest, and the leopard simply moved away until the patrols had passed.
• Corbett used a .275 Rigby rifle, a bolt action firing a small, fast bullet. The original is still held by the gunmaker John Rigby and Company.
• The dead leopard was an elderly male in excellent condition with sound teeth and claws, not the injured or worn out animal that usually turns to human prey.
• Corbett linked the first attacks to the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed so many people so quickly that bodies went uncremated. The leopard scavenged them, then turned to the living.