XVII The Leopard as a Killer of Men
1. Twice Twenty Years Ago or More
Not long ago I read in Indian papers about a leopard in Central India which had killed about 173 men and women, and the carcass of which showed fore-paws and chest muscles of unusual size. “It had almost the front of a tiger,” wrote one of the scribes. This was exactly the description of another of the same kind, which was told me about 1888 by Colonel Bingham, then Conservator of Forests for an eastern division of Burma. He beguiled the long evening in a rest-house on the fringe of the woods by telling me the life-history of a man-killing leopard in Central India, which I believe he had hunted there about twenty or thirty years before. It made the “hours and minutes hand-in-hand go by” so light that it was long, long after our usual bed-time before we thought of looking at our watches.
If he had been the common story-teller, I could never have kept awake, much less forgotten to note the time. He was a man of accurate and scientific tastes, and great knowledge of Natural History, and, best of all, one of those rare comfortable souls who are more interested in things in general than in themselves. This makes accuracy almost easy, and modesty comes without an effort. We discussed at length the question whether that leopard had been a cross between the leopard and the tiger. The reports about it had made Bingham think it must be so, but the post-mortem upon it, at which I think he assisted, made him dubious, for, to his surprise, he found its markings purely leopard’s, and the only difference between it and common leopards to be its size, especially in front.
“After all,” I said, “the size is the chief difference between leopards and common cats.” Bingham agreed, and I found he was still of the opinion that lions and tigers, leopards and jaguars, are all more nearly related than at first sight appears. He had been, as I then was, sanguine about getting evidence that they interbred, and while telling me he had never succeeded, thought another might. Indeed it should be better known that the chief difference between lions and tigers is the lion’s way of wearing his hair. The difference in bone and muscle is less, much less than there is between varieties of domestic cats; and it is easy to exaggerate the specific importance of colour. I know a worthy Dutchman (Mr Hegt), who told me he acquainted Charles Darwin with an interesting accouchement of a lady-leopard in Holland. She brought forth at a birth kits black and white, such as the naturalists had till then classed as different species. Darwin was delighted at the news.
The best part of our talk, however, was about the leopard’s adventures. Bingham was not a man to forget that the carcass cut up after death is not the leopard. It is merely a confused conglomerate of hide and flesh and bones and teeth and claws, drenched in blood. Such things are the mortal remains of the leopard; but its spirit, the fire of life that made it terrible, that great reality, whatever you call it, has fled away on the wings of the wind. So fled the spirits of its victims. Its fleshy garment lies before you as helpless as ever were theirs, as harmless as if it had been a sheep.
It was a little playful kitten in the forests, not long before it became a terrible killer of men, for its tribe grows fast. It took to killing as its trade, like a fish to water. Its mother taught it nothing else. When her milk ran dry, she taught it how to flesh its baby fangs; and under her kind, encouraging, maternal eyes it grew up big and strong, and then it left its mother’s lair to feed itself and live alone.
There is something thrilling in the strangeness which such separation brings. The cat is a tender mother, but she soon forgets her children. A few months after parting, if this leopard and its mother met in the woods, they would glare at each other like strangers, without recognition. If you doubt this, study your civilised domestic cats, especially when they are hungry. The matter is not doubtful.
This does not mean that the leopards eat each other. As hawks do not peck out the eyes of hawks, so leopards seek for tenderer beef than that of leopards. Besides, their single aim in life being to satisfy their appetites cheaply, to risk a scratch would be bad business. So they compete in the woods exactly as mercantile firms do in the city, each grabbing all it can. They generally die of starvation, but see nothing odd in that. They have faced starvation all their lives; and even when the mother-leopard comes to perish so, there is no bitterness in her heart at the thought that it is her multitudinous kittens that have made food scarce. She has forgotten them. They have passed out of her mind completely, like the shadows of the clouds that pass across the surface of a mountain lake, and go by and leave no sign.
2. A Leopard That Loved the Ladies
Colonel Bingham had not been able to ascertain what made this leopard take early to humanity. A guess that many favoured was suggested by its life-long preference for women. The guess was that its mother had given her little ones some girls to flesh their baby fangs upon. There had been some horrible cases of that sort. One shudders to think of girls in the maws of leopards, like the little mice a tabby brings to her kittens. But, after all, many a girl meets a worse fate in a European town. The human beast of prey is crueller than any cat.
Whatever the explanation, the fact, at which the Central Provinces of India soon were shuddering, was that this great leopard grew into a man-eater, that seemed to combine the strength and stomach of the tiger and the wily familiarity of the leopard. He took girls for choice. Of two women returning with water from the well, the one was taken and the other was left, that is to say, ran screaming home. So marked was his preference for their sex, that whenever he was supposed to be near a village, the women all became like purdanishin ladies, and would not go out of doors.
I believe it was a police-officer, but it may have been a “man in the forests,” who told Bingham of being bothered by a nasty smell in a mango grove in which he had pitched his tent. They searched far and near for the cause of it a long time, and at last discovered the putrid half of a woman’s body, hidden in the foliage, in a fork of a mango tree. The villagers said they knew by what was left that it was the remains of the leopard’s meal, for it had an Homeric appreciation of entrails. The head was wanting, and the arms too; but the legs were little more than nibbled. About half the corpse had been put aside for further recourse, if needed. It had not been needed. The leopard must have found another. Indeed, they said that it seldom needed to dine upon cold meat.
It would often have had to do so, of course, if it had limited itself to women; but it no more thought of that than an epicure thinks of restricting himself to turtle. The women were its tit-bits; but they were so shy that it might often have starved if it had taken nothing else.
Its taste for them has often been discussed, but none of the theories propounded were more than guesses. The most interesting incident mentioned in these discussions concerned a leopard in the Shan States of Burma. It ordinarily lived on dogs and game and cattle, like other leopards, but once it killed a man and a woman. The magistrate who went to seek the corpses told me that, in following the trail, ornaments the woman had been wearing were found in bits on the ground, and then the two corpses—the man’s untasted, the woman’s more than half-eaten.
3. No Man Comes Amiss
This leopard was, without an effort, catholic in its tastes, especially when hungry. It seldom ate mere venison, or touched the dogs which common leopards love, but nothing human ever came amiss. It never heeded caste. It ate woodmen. It ate policemen. It ate the village artisans, especially leather workers, caught outside the villages. It ate a holy hermit, and was fond of priests. It ate postmen. It ate pilgrims. The pilgrims crowded into bigger parties on its account, and kindled fires at night, and took turns of watching. More than once the leopard came upon the pilgrim sentry, not very wide-awake, and killed him suddenly. The rest were safe for that night, but did not sleep much. A solitary ploughman in a field, as he turned his cattle at the corner, was seized from behind, and had rest from his toil. It seldom happened that even the bones were found. The leopard did not eat the bones, but there were other beasts of many kinds and sizes to finish what was left.
The total of its “kills” came in the end to about three hundred, more or less, spread over a “considerable time” as these things go, that is to say, a year or two, more than a year, “a good deal more than a year,” it was said. In the long-drawn life of a man, who is very long lived for a beast, it can very seldom have happened, if ever it did happen, that any man, with all the helps of mechanism, has killed so many leopards.
4. Its Way of Doing
“How could you be sure that this ‘kill’ was done by this particular leopard, and not by another?” was my frequent question, variously answered, according to circumstances. It had a style of its own, one seemed to feel, after hearing a few of its exploits. There were instances of men hunting it, who were killed instead of killing; but, curiously enough, its most peculiar feat was a failure, from the leopard’s point of view.
It went into a big village one day, between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, and in broad daylight strode through three-quarters of it, passing between two rows of houses. Swiftly as it seemed to sweep past, it must have been going slower than usual, for it looked right and left as it went, sending piercing looks into many screaming interiors. Near the farther end it turned and walked straight through the open doorway into an old man’s house, without pausing, as if it had come by appointment. The old man was alone inside, and lay dozing. It took him from his bed, and carried him away, and, strangest of all, instead of going to the outside of the village near that end, retraced its steps by the way it had come.
Men’s shouts now mingled with piercing screams and the old man’s cries for help, and the leopard saw in front of him, blocking his path, nine or ten men with big sticks. “By the grace of God” they had found it in their hearts to face the monster, with no better weapons than these. Give honour where honour is due! There was courage needed for that.
With the dexterity of a Boer commander, who had ambuscaded a detachment but found an unexpected hostile force in his rear, the leopard grasped the situation, and changed his plans. Turning aside and passing between two houses, he escaped unhurt, but dropped the old man, who was also unhurt in body, though badly shaken in nerves.
The long evening hours did not drag so much as usual that night in the village, but by three or four o’clock in the morning there perhaps was nobody living there who had not forgotten his excitement and fallen asleep; and now the hour was at hand when the cocks would waken the world; but there was a ruder awakening than usual that morning there. From the old man’s house there rang out piercing yells. In a few minutes every man within hearing had come to it, with whatever weapons were at hand, and as many as could enter crowded in to hear the old man’s story.
“I was sound asleep,” he said. “I seemed to dream of a rat gnawing something beside me, and, gradually, between asleep and awake, I began to hear a kind of scrape-scrape-scraping. It was so strange that I grew broad awake, trying to make out what it was. Then I knew it was some beast on the mud-roof above me. I lay and lay and listened, and wondered what it could be. It sounded like dogs at first, but I concluded it was something else. No dog could scrape like that. I thought of going outside and looking, but I felt too tired to be bothered. I lay and lay and looked at the inside of the roof, where the scraping was. I did not expect to see anything. I looked there, just because the scraping was there. The place was there, right above my face as I lay on my back. Just as I was taking a kind of last look, before falling asleep altogether, I saw the leopard’s two eyes shining at me through a big hole in the roof. There’s the hole!”...
There was indeed a hole, and some of the villagers said that in running up they saw the form of the leopard disappearing in the moonlight, and the roof outside showed marks. “Nightmare,” I suggested, but Bingham would not allow that. The marks showed that a leopard had come; and I had to admit that, though there was no direct proof that it was the identical leopard, the odds were about a million to one that it was, if, as the Privy Council Judges have suggested, as a good rule in doubtful cases, we pay regard to the likelihoods arising from known habits and undisputed facts. (I have simplified their verbiage, but that is their meaning.)
5. The Final Fight
The chief evidence that one leopard did all the “kills” credited to this one was the uninterrupted series while it lived, and the cessation, for a while, when it died. But, though practically uninterrupted in time, its killings varied in place, to the perplexity of its pursuers. More than once, when most of those who were seeking it were in one locality, ambuscading half-eaten remains, it went elsewhere, and started afresh, where it had the advantage of being unexpected. It took little pains to remain incognito. It might have travelled far without eating, as other tigers and leopards often do; but this leopard was as self-indulgent as railway passengers now can be, in comfortable expresses, and beguiled the time by eating, as they do. It seldom went a hundred miles without killing somebody for a meal.
Colonel Bingham could not say whether it was helped by the people being deprived of fire-arms; but thought that probably nothing had happened in the Central Provinces to make any difference to the leopard in that respect. A great many guns were given out to likely persons to hunt it, and many young officers, and some no longer young, not military men only, but civilians of all kinds, taking short leave on purpose, when they could not otherwise come near it, gave their leisure to the hunting of this multitudinous murderer. “I never saw such cordial co-operation,” said Bingham. “Rival hunting parties forgot their rivalries, and helped each other to the uttermost.” The beast was beginning to obsess the minds of men; and, here and there, fields were lying waste, uncultivated, through fear of it.
More than once a man with a gun was killed by it, which does not, however, mean that a leopard can openly “fight” a man with a gun. It means that when a leopard can take a man by surprise, a gun upon his shoulder is no protection. They said so and explained it, to a postman who had succeeded to a vacancy which the leopard had made. Nevertheless the man continued to flagitate his official superiors for a gun, until, wearied by his importunity, they gave him one. Then, as he went his rounds, that postman’s inquiries after the leopard had a new significance.
The sight of his gun was pleasant to the villagers, and they praised his public spirit. He deserved their praise. Bethink you of the mails he carried in the broiling sun, as he plodded many weary miles along the dusty roads, and how long you would have volunteered to add a gun and ammunition to such a burden. What made his conduct the more praiseworthy was that he knew the gun would not save him if the leopard were on the war-path and saw him first. In fighting of that kind, as in guerilla war, it is often only the first glimpse that counts. When the rule is to kill at sight, then to see is to conquer.
He had been carrying the gun in this way some weeks, at least, perhaps for months. It had ceased to be needful for him to ask questions as he went from village to village. At sight of him, anyone who had news came to tell it. Many a time he laid his burdens down, to let someone far away but beckoning to him come to where he was, and then they would sit and talk together as if time had barely even a relative existence and did not count for much. Nobody ever grumbled. The rural mails were never in a hurry.
One ever-memorable day he was met outside a village by many of the men who lived there, coming out to meet him, and hastening to relieve him of his business burdens with unusual solicitude, leaving nothing to occupy him but the gun. Then with eager whispers they led him through the village to a big tree on the farther side of it, half bare of leaves. “See the leaves at that corner, high up. He’s there, he’s there. We saw him go there. Watch till the leaves shake. He cannot move without shaking them.”
The postman got ready his gun, probably putting the end of the barrel on a rest, though I am not sure I was told that. It was unfortunate for the leopard that there was no wind. The air must have been rising, as I have seen it under similar conditions, hot from the ground, as from a furnace floor; but even through the shimmering atmosphere the postman could see the leaves were still, fixed, as if made of metal. The leopard waited long, but so did he. And all was hushed. Then he saw a slight, slight movement, just visible among the leaves; and then he fired.
It was some time before the leopard came down, and still longer before anyone ventured close enough to the body to be sure it was dead. But whatever reward had been offered was now payable to the postman. The details of the post-mortem have been sufficiently indicated already; and indeed they were no part of the life of the leopard, which, almost immediately after the postman touched the trigger, ended suddenly. And so does this—its history.