A massive hunt has been
launched in this part of northern India to catch the killer cat. At this
point, two months into the Royal Bengal's deadly spree, Khan sees no
good ending.
The young wildlife
conservationist knows the animal will either lose its own life or, at
best, be captured and sent off to a zoo. It's either the death penalty
or life imprisonment for the Queen of the Jungle.
Either way, it will be
wretched for both the cat and the conservationist after years of efforts
to save India's tigers from extinction. But frightened villagers and
the families of victims want a swift end to the tiger's reign of terror.
The tiger in question,
believed to be a 4-year-old female, is thought to have killed 10 people,
some mauled beyond recognition. Since late December, she has painted a
trail of blood over an 80-mile swath of India's Uttar Pradesh and
Uttarakhand states, where villagers are left with a kind of pervasive
fear they have never before known.
Nazim Khan and other conservationists hope to find the tiger so it can be captured and not killed.
The tiger's last victim, a
50-year-old man, was killed February 10. She is past due for another
kill. Nobody knows where she might strike.
Still, Khan is hopeful
that he and a team of conservationists from the Wildlife Trust of India
can get to the predator before anyone else does.
Dwindling population
On this day,
conservationists and hunters have gathered to comb through territory not
far from Jim Corbett National Park, India's oldest wildlife park and
one of several government-funded reserves set up to help conserve
tigers.
At the start of the 20th
century, nearly 40,000 tigers roamed freely in what was then British
India. But the cats fell victim to hunters, poachers and development,
and now their number has dwindled to 1,706, according to the last census
conducted by the National Tiger Conservation Authority. Even with that
low number, India remains home to the largest tiger population in the
world.
Khan finds himself in a
bizarre situation working in tandem with furious villagers who,
understandably, show no sympathy for the feline and hunters armed with
.357 Magnum rifles, eager to lodge a bullet in her heart.
"Their anger is justified," Khan says.
He gets off an elephant
at a remote outpost being used by both wildlife officials hoping to
tranquilize and capture the tiger and a group of sharpshooters out to
kill her.
The hunters use open
four-wheel drive vehicles. Khan and his colleagues have been tracking
the tiger atop well-trained elephants.
Each elephant stands up
to 13 feet tall and can plod through the roughest terrains. It's the
safest and best way to track a tiger, Khan says, though it can still be
risky. Tigers can leap high -- a 2008 tiger attack on a man on an
elephant was documented in a video that went viral on YouTube.
Khan says he views himself as sort of a firewall between hunter and hunted.
At the outpost, he puts
down his tranquilizer gun and walks over to the hunters on their lunch
break. He smiles and talks with the tiger's enemies as he shares a lunch
of puris (fried bread) and sabzi (vegetables) with them. But he keeps
mum on tracking information. He always erases fresh paw prints he finds
to throw the hunters off.
It's a matter of who can get to the tiger first. But that is far from simple.
Like a serial killer
The rogue tiger wandered
off Corbett and began stalking human beings for prey, though no one can
be sure why. Her first kill was on December 29.
Since then, the big cat
has traveled from village to village, like a serial killer on the prowl.
She has crossed train tracks and highways and taken advantage of uncut
sugarcane fields and dense lantana growth on forest floors as
camouflage.
"Usually tigers that
have roamed off follow the same path back home to the park," Khan says.
"But this tiger is roaming all over the place. Clearly, she is looking
for something."
She can smell prey from
two kilometers away and is known to patiently lie in wait for vulnerable
victims, all men and women from villages on the fringes of forest lands
that form one of India's last wild tiger habitats.
Mithilesh says women in her village are scared to work in the fields since the attacks. Many go out in groups of 15 or 20.
People have been
attacked from behind while tending to crops or collecting firewood or
taking cattle out to graze. Some were mauled in during the day. Others
were taken at night and devoured, only to have their remains discovered
many hours later. Sometimes the only clues to a grisly attack were a
headscarf or a pair of shoes left behind and drying blood.
It takes an adult tiger a
mere 30 seconds to a minute to kill a person, says Khan, with the
reverence for the animals that he's developed from childhood.
"A tiger is a perfect killing machine."
Shoot to kill
Tigers have always been a
part of Khan's life. He was, after all, born and raised in Sherpur,
which means tiger town in Hindi and was so named for the prevalence of
the animals in these parts of Uttar Pradesh.
He grew up with
sightings of tigers that roamed from forested lands into territory taken
over by humans. He decided to dedicate his life to conservation when,
as a child, he came across tiger cubs he thought cute.
He'd always known tigers to keep away from human beings; he'd certainly never seen them hunger for human flesh -- until now.
Some media reports
suggested the rogue tiger was separated from her cubs and was on a
bloody quest to find them. A more plausible explanation for Khan is that
the tiger was hurt in some form -- perhaps a canine tooth injury --
that prevented her from attacking stronger beasts.
After the first few
kills, the tiger may have realized how much easier it was to seek human
prey. Very few tigers that turn man-eaters revert back to their natural
ways.
Officials in Uttar
Pradesh have issued a shoot-to-kill order and licensed gunmen to hunt
the tiger down. One of them, Rajendra Singh Raju, is convinced the
animal injured her left hind foot. He insists he has seen paw prints
that indicate the tiger is twisting her foot when walking. This, he
says, would also explain why paw prints have been seen in ravines and
soft sand, where it's easier to walk.
"I don't know how she was injured," he says. "It could be she tried to kill a porcupine."
The day before, Raju
walked the trail of the tiger all day long. He has to be careful. His
tracking information tells him there could be six tigers in the area.
One way to make sure he has the right tiger is to compare paw prints to a
cast made of the man-eater's prints.
"We were very close," he says. "She moves two or three kilometers, then sits. She doesn't have the stamina.
"She's gotten used to killing people. This is easy prey for her. She's going to kill again."
The people who've lived
here for generations know that, too. Suddenly, the days that passed with
the drudgery of routine and backbreaking work are tinged with
uncertainty and fear. Their nights in small brick huts without secure
windows and doors are spent without sleep.
"I wasn't scared ever
before," says Mithilesh, a resident of Tanda Sahuwala village, where an
elderly man, Lal Singh, was mauled February 7.
Moti Singh found the remains of his uncle Lal Singh in a clearing. There was nothing left intact except his torso.
Mithilesh says she and
other women who grow and harvest sugarcane, mustard and wheat now go to
work in groups of 15 or 20. Others have stopped going to work in the
fields altogether.
"We will starve if this situation persists," Mithilesh says.
Lal Singh's nephew, Moti Singh, says it's not hard to understand the fear.
Lal Singh had taken his
cattle out to graze in an opening in land thick with sal and sissoo
trees. At darkness, the animals returned to the village. But not Lal
Singh.
At 8 in the morning the
next day, the search party made a chilling discovery. Only Lal Singh's
torso was left intact. Moti Singh takes out photos to show what remained
of his uncle.
"It can't be explained in words," says Moti Singh. "This tiger has become a man-eater. It should be killed."
Man vs. beast
In Tanda Sahuwala, Singh
and other men from the village have taken things into their own hands.
They've tied a calf to a tree in the very spot where the tiger killed
Lal Singh. It's bait.
They believe the tiger
will return to the place where she was successful in her hunt. They
believe the calf will lure her when she is hungry and tired. And when
she is back, the villagers will be ready. A man sits on a bamboo perch
in a nearby tree. He is armed with a gun.
It is midafternoon and
silence falls in the middle of this jungle. The only sounds are the
sporadic rustle of branches in the light breeze and the chained calf's
losing struggle to free itself. The sight of the stressed animal makes
everyone uneasy.
"I think it's time for us to go," Khan says. "We have been here way too long."
When a tiger turns into a
man-eater, it becomes faster and shrewder, Khan says. A normal tiger
would change its course at the hint of people nearby and lose itself in
the jungle. A man-eater does the opposite: It uses its uncanny sense of
smell and sight to move toward people.
Suddenly, the trek back
to the car, only about a third of a mile, seems unending, all eyes
focused on the thick vegetation on both sides of the dirt path.
On the car ride back to the outpost, where the elephants are groomed, it becomes evident how tigers have become so threatened.
The sugarcane fields are
perhaps the most blatant sign of human encroachment into tiger
territory. As people have cleared forest lands to grow crops, tigers
have run out of natural habitats and resources, says D.S. Chauhan,
project leader for the Wildlife Trust of India.
In India, tigers have
only 11% of their original habitats left. They are dependent now on
conservation, according to the international wildlife charity Born Free.
It's on the reserves where they find needed contiguous forests with
access to prey and water and undisturbed areas for breeding.
In natural habitats like
this part of Uttar Pradesh, preserving lands for tigers is up against
the needs of desperately poor people, who are spilling onto more and
more land for farming and livestock and depleting tiger territory of
land and prey.
"It's all about hunger,"
Khan explains. "People encroached on grasslands forcing small animals
to move into the fields near villages. That forces tigers to pursue
them."
Queen of the jungle
Tarabati, a woman in the
village of Maniawala, does not understand the problems posed by human
encroachment. She just wants the tiger dead.
On January 10, her
22-year-old son Shiv Kumar was coming down a poplar tree he was pruning
when the tiger leaped from an adjacent sugarcane field and snapped his
neck from behind. The tiger then dragged his body several hundred feet.
There might have been nothing left of Shiv Kumar except that villagers
arrived on the scene and scared the tiger away.
Tarabati says she fainted when she saw her son's body before the cremation.
She pulls out a
passport-size color snapshot of her son that she keeps tucked in her
blouse, as though to make sure everyone knows what he looked like before
the mauling. He was so handsome, she says. He was the breadwinner for
the family. Her daughter Pushpa will have to wait now to get married.
The family has no money. Will no one compensate them for their loss?
"A tiger's life is worth so much," she says. "But human beings? We get nothing."
Khan listens to the
grieving mother. There is nothing he can say to appease the immense
hatred she feels toward the one animal he has dedicated his life to
save.
As a conservationist,
this is the most difficult challenge he's had to face so far. With each
day, he grows more anxious about the ending to this story. But he
refuses to give up.
So when the sun rises
again, he will put on his ankle-high boots and safari hat, climb on top
of an elephant and again go deep into the bowels of a north Indian
forest, looking for a queen.
Link to source: http://edition.cnn.com
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