MAN AGAINST LEOPARD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 504, 18 February 1949, Page 14

MAN AGAINST LEOPARD

THE MAN EATING LEOPARD OF RUDRAPRAYAG. By Jim Corbett. Oxford University Press, through Geoffrey Cumberlege. (English price, 8/6)., HIS is not the best book for its kind ever written, or the second best; but I can think of only two better books, and one was written by the same author.

It is’ the incredible story of a leopard which terrorised an area of 500 square miles in, the Indian hills for eight years, killed 125 people, and took Jim Corbett two years,.to track down and destroy. Most readers will be as surprised as I was to discover that a leopard can not merely kill a man in a second or two but literally carry him off. This leopard, "an outsized malé but long past his prime," carried one of his victims a distance of four miles, "for two miles up the steep slope of a heavily wooded hill, then down the other side for another two miles through dense scrub jungle." When humans were too hard to get he would of course kill goats and cows, and although he could not carry a cow off after he had killed it, he would drag it an astonishing distance if the mood took him and the ground was favourable. And when the author says that he terrorised all the villages in this big area he means nothing less than that. "No curfew order was ever more strictly enforced or more implicity obeyed than the curfew imposed by the Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag." Of the 50,000 regular inhabitants of his territory, and the 60,000 pilgrims who annually passed through it, not one would open a door at night within miles of the latest kill; not one would travel at night without lanterns and an escort and not one, if the killer had broken in and secured a victim, would follow him out again and try to give assistance. So it went on for eight years; and when the author arrived to try to end the terror-with his rifle, with poison, with a gin-trap, and with powerful netting for shutting him into caves-the battle of wits went on for two years without ever bringing the killing to an end for more than a few weeks at a time. The all-out effort that succeeded (quite simply) on Corbett’s final night lasted for 10 weeks, though "leopards have tender pads and keep to footpaths and game tracks; are not hard to locate, since every bird and animal in the jungle assists the hunter; and are easy to stalk because, though they are blessed with keen sight and hearing, they are handicapped by having no keen sense of smell." And by that time the hunter was so néar to complete exhaustion that he was about to give up and confess himself beaten. No one who once gets into the book will lay it down before the last shot is fired, and when that point comes he will discover that he has not only. been hunting a man-eater but learning a hundred things he did not know before about the life of the jungle and the habits, traditions, and superstitions of India’s hill villagers. ;

O.

D.