Royal Bengal tigers ruled nearly 500,000 square miles of

India in 1600, the year Queen Elizabeth chartered the

British East India Company.
Throughout the next 300 years tigers slaughtered the
people of India at an estimated rate of eight fatalities per
day and claimed approximately 15 million domestic
animals.
Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith;
be men of courage; be strong.
1 Corinthians 16:13
For Terri, Sara, Megan and Brooks
In memory of Bob and Madolyn Tinsley
Mr. and Mrs. George B. Dyer
O. Wayne Lee
Special Author’s Edition
TIGER
HUNTER
Confirmed Killed & Missing: 761
Consecutive Days of Operation: 4,467
Area: 500 square miles, remote upland jungle
Human Populace Paralyzed by Horror: 107,326
Assailants: man-eating megafauna (2)
Ultimate Salvation: Jim Corbett
 Inspired by True Events
Gregory E. Tinsley
Copyright © MMXIV by Greg Tinsley
All rights reserved
The painting for the cover of this book was commissioned
by Jacobus Verkade of the Netherlands as part of a wildly
successful collector-card marketing campaign for his
family’s cookie company. Koningstijger No. 34 from
Verkade’s Album was first published in 1939, the same
year in which the story TIGER HUNTER is set.
Mohini’s Pleasures and the
Dance of the Sudarshana Chakra
Those passengers of the royal howdahs who are not doped
half asleep by the early start and the smooth motion of
colossal animals are mostly daydreaming of sensual
promiscuities:
The Rajah, for instance, is rapturously considering the
curvatures of the most provocative of his wives; while the
introspections of the Rajah’s principal business associate,
the party’s second gun, involve karma-sutra-like hijinks
with his own mistress among the pressed cotton sheets of
a five-star rendezvous in Delhi. At the creaking rear of the
swaying tower, the howdah’s teenage gun bearer,
snuggled warm as a bedstone against the cold mountain
air of northeastern India, is fighting a losing battle to keep
open his eyes.
Doranda, the Maharajah’s chief of security, fifty yards to
the left of the Rajah on an outsized Sumatran elephant, is
struck suddenly by a phantom draft of the perfume of the
Rajah’s fourth wife, who is undoubtedly soaking in a
warm bath at the palace. The Rajah’s most outgoing
spouse, on the deck behind Doranda, is recovering her
appetites. Six, as she is often referred to by the stable
boys, is intermittently imagining what she would do to a
dish of peeled fruit and the bodyguards.
The Rajah’s senior prince, accompanied by another armed
defender and the family priest, uncomfortably rides the
elephant
1
that represents the most forward starboard wing of the
trundling grey wall.
Even under the arousals of elephantry and tigers the
majority of these key-man adventurers are experiencing
the hunter’s power paradox: Men bound of wildernesses
and hunting camps are often tortured with suggestive
thoughts of women. Conversely, when men are
socializing in more sexually accommodating settings they
invariably discuss only hunting.
Darya, the most experienced mahout in northeast India,
the driver of the wisest and largest African savanna
elephant in the Rajah’s fleet, a pachyderm named Go
Ankus, is not technically in the howdah. Darya is seated
on the prickly nap of the lead gaja, his knees tucked right
behind the great bull’s leathery earflaps. There, Darya
may periodically incentivize the beast by rapping or
pricking the sacred monster’s cranium with an antique
elephant goad known regionally as the ankusha.
Given to more than thirty years of daily devotion and
discipline, Darya and Go Ankus are a battery at the height
of professional accomplishment. They are also the only
two beings of the royal hunting procession who are
completely in the moment.
Darya and Ankus are leading a delegation of sportsmen
who had previously completed an on-time sunrise
departure in a varnished retinue of gold-trimmed, horse-
drawn carriages from the Rajah’s luxurious spike camp at
the Sarak Road; overtaking the listless spear point of fifty
elephants held for them in a side canyon of the Bilaspur
River. Their target is a specific tiger, a gradually more
belligerent young-adult male who had begun stealing
chickens in the early fall of 1936, but whose weekly
intake of domestic product lately includes goat, donkey,
cattle and a successful shopkeeper’s attraction of trick
monkeys. Worse, the super carnivore’s once discreet
nature is now quite diurnal and menacing.
The tiger needed hunting, if not killing, and the Raja was
obliged and extremely capable of bringing it an active
campaign.
Uneventfully, they’ve pushed this parcel of pristine
upland for more than one hour and they are still well
away from
the tiger baits. So it is a multiplying surprise when the
beast
2
that comes through the dense understory, ascending the
craggy trunk of Ankus to overrun the Rajah’s ornate
howdah, is not a tiger but a very big leopard.
The tall, dewy grasses sizzle slightly rather than rustle as
the cat rushes through the low brush and up Go Ankus’s
leaden expression, a derisive shadow of smoke that leaves
the head of Darya jangling betwixt his shoulders.
Painted brightly with Darya’s gore, the speckled thresh-
ing machine takes on a hyper motion, unleashing its war
cry just above the huddled Rajah, alighting in a shattering
percussion of growls and shrieks to disintegrate the left
wrist and shoulder of the Raja’s business associate, who
implodes rearward with the cat attempting to swallow his
face.
The emphatic howl of bloody murder is joined by every
man and animal in this pitched jungle, and overtopping
the voice and hue of these horrors is the splitting tantara
of the gaja Go Ankus, who outrageously dances
backwards upon his hindlimbs before pirouetting to
frantically trample everything in the grass that somewhat
resembles a leopard – the business associate, the gun
bearer and his beloved Darya.
The wealthy prince is a practiced marksman. Due to the
likeliness of a deflected bullet, however, he misses the
orange brushstroke of cat as it screeches outwards to the
unarmed line of hulkaras behind them. His luck improves
with Go Ankus, who he has known since childhood. The
out-of-control destroyer is in crazed pursuit of the leopard
when the crack of the heir’s solid brings a plume of dust
off the elephant’s temple and plants him, spilling the
Rajah and his .577-caliber pistol headfirst down the
slipface of his fallen mount.
By miracle the gun bearer and the Rajah find themselves
unscathed. The sudden deaths of Darya and Go Ankus –
which within the week will be distilled to columns of type
and published by every news organization in England and
India – brings the sobbing prince to his knees.
But the real foible in the reporting is that the
businessman’s most grotesque wound will be lost to the
exaggerated
myth of the attack, untold except by those who first move
to him
as he temporarily shuffles through the superheated
battlefield.
3
Dangling from its ocular nerve, the man’s dislodged left
eye hangs like a bell striker at the center of his punctured
cheek, soon blacking him out and ending the futile search
for his missing spectacles – and his feral eyeball.
After much discussion, the royal surgeon puts his
unproven skills for ophthalmology on display, returning
the poor man’s itinerant organ to its orbit and stabilizing
the mutilation with lengths of the prince’s turban.
Mopping his sweat-sheen face with unbloodied
shirtsleeves, the medical authority speaks with sincere
amazement about how quickly these things happen.
He compares the violence to a blow by Vishuakarma’s
ultimate weapon, the sudarshana chakra, a mythological
discus ringed with opposing bands of spinning razor teeth.
The top man from the line of beaters, a barefooted
greybeard widely respected for his clarity and woodcraft,
overhears the surgeon’s last remark as he enters the
presence of the kings, catching his breath and hitching up
his tatty khadi trousers.
No, says the lithe boss of the hulkaras: Vishuakarma, the
architect of the gods, is not directly responsible for this
tragedy.
The tracks of murderer, the sage confirms, are those of the
Thak Leopard.
4
4
Camp Golden Mahseer
Corbett is studying his numb feet atop a flat of raw
marble, the complicated hymn of the surrounding river
coursing through him. He coughs up a good bit of sticky
water and closes his bulging eyes to gradually recover his
balance point, which he finds beneath the river’s verse
and chorus in the imagined peel of a subduction outro that
folds a thousand-mile husk of sea floor right into the
billowy vault of heaven.
He eventually levels himself and strums his toes in
celebration of not being drowned by the river. He resets
his spirit, carefully inspecting the demarcation of the
closest of the canyon’s rims. Himavat, he unexpectedly
remembers, is the most ancient overlord here. Himavat
the god who once authorized a deity to ride the wife of
another man to a faraway cave in the cliffs – following the
woman’s metamorphosis into a flying tigress – on the
pretense of consummating a treaty with the tiger demons.
That the devotees of such bedazzlements would construct
and operate a monastery along that precipice always
seems quite clever to Corbett, the good work of shrewd
religious geniuses.
Enjoying the sensation of the granite pillar warming the
pads of his bare feet, he laments the likelihood of never
experiencing the Tiger’s Lair for himself, or for that
matter, the magic square on the doorway of the temple at
Khajuraho.
5
What Jim Corbett has known since he was fourteen is that
his feet are tougher than any wild elephant’s four – and
enormously more useful. But he’d not devoted himself to
attentively maintaining them until the fall of 1889, when
his mentor, the great outlaw hunter and woods-wise
philosopher, Kunwar Singh, had first eulogized the
seminal importance of keeping them clean and airy.
Number one for Kunwar: the repeated use of stockings
and shoes was possibly mankind’s greatest mistake. The
boundless tracker was genuinely distrustful of shoes and
terrified of socks. Herders, loggers, mahommedan
cartmen – wastrels and paupers – whoever should wander
upon the friendly campfires of Kunwar’s bivouacs in the
forbidding jungle nightscape – all learned that socks were
another word for septicemia.
Unmoved by rivulets of molten fat tracing below the front
of his threadbare shirt, Kunwar preferred to lecture on
podiatry while chewing sizzling meats plucked straight
from greenwood spits. Feet were discussed by Kunwar at
every meal. The most impassioned of these sermons
always ended by establishing footwear as part of an evil
conspiracy to neutralize man’s natural advantages as a
stalking hunter.
Before Kunwar lost the gleaming edge of his animal
instincts to a surprising opium addiction, coupled with the
foregone infirmaries of too much exposure, he had been
the preeminent pendant of wildland hunting lore above
the primitive farming community of Mussooree – up
where the sacred Ganges River comes coalesced from the
permanent ice fields and the vertical redoubts that defend
the undisputed end of the world.
In those days at these locations the teenaged Corbett was
his prodigy, a keen and generous listener with the leonine
feet and the superb ankles of a world-class mountain
runner, appendages that now in the receding winter of
1939 remain one of the greatest sources of his pride.
Magnificent accomplishments of skin and bone that once
again have Colonel
Edward James “Jim” Corbett at a well-defended position
6
reserved for immortal boys smashed on the mythical elixir
amrita.
He drifts back from his recollections of Himavat and
Kunwar to behold more scenery from atop the granite
upheaval at the center of the great Indian River
Rāmgangā: a pellucidity of gritty roils compelled by the
collaboration of extreme forces – monsoons, typhoons,
shrieking whiteouts and high-altitude glaciers.
In his fingers balances the stiffest 10-foot salmon rod so
far produced by the famous House of Hardy, England.
The threaded bamboo switch is paired with a Palakona
Perfect large-arbor reel spiraled with a fly line made of
Indian linen, Asian silks and Scottish horsehair. It is the
treated line that represents the most important technical
frontier of deep-water fly fishing, allowing new-and-
improved access to the perpetual half-light sovereignties
where loveless eremites eat their young.
Cinched at the point of the tippet is the finest example of
fish hooks wrought by the renowned E. Von Hoff. It is a
steel 1/0 decorated with the gay plumages from nearly
one dozen different birds – jungle cock, Indian crow,
golden pheasant, kingfisher, European jay, blue chatter,
rifle bird, mallard and Kashmiri pintail and silver teal.
The fly is the work of art of a British craftsman who treats
his primary fetish with all-night binges at his tier’s bench
in an ambiguous studio brownstone squeezed among the
more powerful industries and financial institutions of
London.
The pre-paid purchase order metered in Bombay, India
had informed the elite fly dresser that the dozen
streamers, together with a new Hardy angling set, would
be presentations from the employees of the Mokameh
Ghat in Bengal to Jim Corbett on the occasion of his
retirement. The letter went on to say that all of these
special things were soon used by Corbett on the
impressive golden mahseer, the most powerful freshwater
fish in the world.
With this as close as the epicurean fly dresser would come
to the greatest of hunters, or to the cel-
ebrated carp known both as the Salmon of India and the
7
river tiger, the armchair entomologist whip finished the
flies obsequiously to the height of his dexterities. At no
charge, he’d added a “lucky thirteenth” to the ticket
together with the blessing of his most orthodox client, a
snow-capped Westminster cleric and dry-fly purest from
Victoria Street.
Multiple worlds away from the natural light drawn off by
the soot-streaked panes of the fly dresser’s bedroom
office the crystalline River Rāmgangā brightly slices her
pristine and perfumed canyon like some gigantic
automaton of liquid light, like the divine onslaught of an
eternal water saw programmed to sculpt a Hindu khillut, a
gift, by the immemorial attendant of persistency.
She is a god, this river, and all across her brow radiates
the nova of bougainvilleau, catkins, maidenhair ferns,
golden dewdrops and amaltas, wild almonds, lilies,
joanesia, aquamarine strobilanthes – and minor
subspecies and one-of-a-kind hybrids as yet unlabeled by
science. He estimates the fresh smell of it all when
blended with the new breath of the river as quite beyond
propitious. And all men who agree that the sub-tropical
highland to be the rarest environment on earth would
conclude with Corbett that the far-flung Rāmgangā
complex is the exclamation point.
Corbett determines that the word fantastical may best
represent this halcyon day in the river canyon to readers
of the first book he is soon to finish. It will be that much
more accessible than metaphorical references to Palatine
Hill or the Pantheon, none of which are his style.
Rāmgangā canyon is presently the whole scope of
magnificence, he reasons; a hinterland cathedral unscored
by discovery. So before he turns completely to the
business of catching the biggest fish in her he loses
himself for a few more moments in admiration of the
gilded mosaic of this numinous creation: the dancing
scrolls of light in her graphite-colored waters, the
amethyst bellies of stacking clouds fluffing noiselessly
beneath the high, cool sun.
He fills himself with the novel of her energy and her
grandeur before turning to locate Mrs. Jean Ibbotson
waist-
8
deep in the Rāmgangā. She is several hundred yards in the
river below, the gold spoon at the point of her fishing line
twinkling in the space above the excited drain of a glass-
slick pool.
Beyond her the increasing mirage conspires with distance
to partially cloak Corbett’s view of the encampment that
he is fishing from with Thomas and Jeanie Ibbotson. He
searches the river unsuccessfully up and downstream
from camp for Thomas before refining his search for him
at their lodgings, the oblique of the canvas awning
wavering in the sprouting heat way past the middle
distance and Jean; an outpost opened by a prickly
labyrinth of risky game trails for its final nine miles from
the increasing rusts of civilization; a forgotten X on
incomplete charts since the fifth century; the blazing
sandbar now separated from the time when a doomed
contingent of infantry-protected mahouts of the Pala
Empire watered a column of war elephants driven mad
from thirst.
Utopia, Corbett says to himself, while wondering why
Thomas is not fishing. He has the notion that Thomas
may be regrouping at camp, perhaps after breaking his rod
on a mahseer. Or maybe Ibbs is carefully out of Jean’s
sight stoking his pipe in the lee of one of boulders above
the treacherous plunge pool they’ve named The Keeper?
Corbett completes a second and more thorough search for
Thomas, again noting Jean, before disengaging from the
Ibbotsons and the idyllic conditions to focus on the meat-
and-knives tactic of sight fishing. Still-hunting fish would
be a more accurate description of the exercise: peeking
discretely over the brink of the rock but only in the
diffused light beneath the shifting clouds; sneaking on
slow and low to the cover of the boulder’s edge to new
positions where he may see fish before they become wise
to him.
He is not surprised to find himself underestimating the
advance of time by more than half. The centrality of time
is lost in fishing and this is fishing at its greatest intensity
– almost two hours pass with only a few small fish
sinking into the depths beneath his fly. Many blind casts
are weightlessly stripped
back through deep holes. The subsequent beating he
receives from the undulating glare and the physical strain
of staring
9
through the refracted depths has gone well beyond tedium
before he confirms the first forked caudle fins of big fish,
a smoky trident of mahseers suspending just above the
murkiest depths of the riverbed.
Their size sends involuntarily jitters through the upper
half of his body, besetting him with the cold flesh of a
plucked goose, reviving him with a heart shot of
adrenaline.
Displaying the patience and the discreet fluidity of owls
he observes them for a long, long while. That they can
suspend in that current with so little of their geometric
bodies in motion is recognized and prized as a
pronounced secret within the greater mystery. When the
largest of them rolls slightly, flaring the
great rubbery lips of its inferior mouth, slightly cracking
the armor plates of its massive gills, feeding, Corbett
finally exhales to a cycle of deep, rhythmic breathing
aimed at shaking him from the rushing fear of failure. He
thinks that he can smell them in the next breath he takes.
He begins pretending that they are small fish, fooling
himself with the idea that he isn’t there for the catching of
fish but for the fishing – the grand adventure of it with
best friends, the fullness of a final few campfires in this
ancient coliseum where the prehistoric grandsires of these
fish existed before the invention of hammerstones. When
these deceits no longer satiate him, crawling there across
the marble pedestal to a better position above the river’s
apex predators, he diverts to how fine it is to own the like-
new Willesden tropical gun case from Lyon & Lyon,
replacing the worn-out original that had been parcel to his
Express. He thinks of food with iced drinks and “birds”
and tennis and the upcoming presentation of his fly...
eventually dismissing these mental rues as weak-minded
dilutions to what should be the complete joy of angling.
What comes next to thought is the spider killing the fly.
Of how the precision bomb of poison, silk and physicality
had infiltrated the mayhem of the flies to leave them one
less.
What about the dynamics of that spider’s game-hauling
return to the unspeakable terms of its nest?! Bloody well
amazing, he thinks.
Tom, his much older brother, gone himself now for
10
years and years, had prized the spider epic, which had
been
spun from the ruins of the reception of their father’s
memorial. The sad tributes for a beloved postman, taken
too young everyone said, drifting dolefully in the
westering sun, infusing all those recollections of Corbett’s
boyhood in India with the evening pall of great loss and
lives forever altered.
Before she abruptly disappeared for a fortnight to grieve
alone his mother had considered her youngest son’s
version of the spider-and-the-fly to be nothing less than a
heavenly idiom sent specifically from his father.
He is now much older than his mother was when she
buried her husband; silhouetted on the rock above the fish
like a sprinter set to starting blocks, the hook pinched in
his fingers just beyond the polished rings of the reel seat.
What there is of free line not held by his left hand lies in
coils atop his forward foot, and the sun comes blazingly
from behind the scudding clouds like it never will again to
ignite the ghostly bronze and silver-skin reflections from
these three remarkably outsized mahseers.
The middle fish is a relic – five, maybe six-feet long, and
perhaps more than one-hundred pounds. The smaller
leviathans to either side are blasphemous minions by
comparison, bookend sixty pounders, the second and third
largest mahseers he’s ever seen in the wild.
Again and again in the prevailing water he swims a fly
blessed by a Catholic bishop inches over them until he is
convinced that the fish are blind apparitions. To sink it to
their level, to wisp it across their noses, he easies on
across the rock and lays the line out farther upstream.
Eventually, on his fifth attempt, he hisses “don’t” as the
point of the hook bounces lightly off the unblinking eye
of the closest fish, faintly stirring the creature. He strips in
several feet of line and water hauls while skulking a bit
farther upstream, shaking a beautiful aerial mend to the
line as his very next loop straightens above the race.
He does not allow himself to lose sight of the fly from the
time he sees it raindrop among the bubbled surface seam
of the Rāmgangā until it vanishes, he thinks, into the
closed mouth of the middle mahseer. The evanescence of
the fly, the reaction of the line bellying from the face of
the fish to his heart, is twin
to the fountainhead of self-realization ascending deep
meditation.
11
Corbett delivers a twisting strip-strike upstream, a
scissoring action with both line and rod and the rotation of
his hips that astonishes him with the fusion of a dead-
solid hook set.
Unmoved, the fish – a huge animal made almost entirely
of dense muscle and elastic bone – feigns mild surprise by
erecting every set of spine rays on its body, dramatically
doubling its mass. Its escorts delicately tap their pectorals
and plane away like swooping serpent eagles as Corbett
officially rouses the colossus with another snapping strip-
strike that threatens the connective tensions at every
terminus of his tackle.
This time the fish feels the nip of the hook all the way
into its cold guts: In chromium flashsight as though the
mighty Rāmgangā is ripped open then closed by the
wicked edge of a kukri, the mahseer bolts upstream,
positioning anxiously just above Corbett, who is
frantically piling slack line at his feet to hold some
amount of pressure. All in setup to the instantaneously
forthcoming actions exclusive to big-game fly fishing,
reptilian fascinations quite unknown to more casual
anglers:
The fish torpedoes upstream with the velocity, the
mindless determination, of a shoulder-fired harpoon!
My God, he says to himself. My God, he shouts.
This first run is an event visually calculated in the
byproducts of power: the bulging shockwave pushing
across the river’s surface and the insane reaction of the
twenty-five feet of loosely coiled line that dances up
around Corbett like a severed bundle of electrified wires.
The size and the blinding speed of the fish; the writhing
spectacle of shooting line sucking out through the guides;
the stored energy multiplied in the overloaded rod; and
the whine of the reel are incomprehensible split-second
dimensions of a warped new reality.
Together with the facts that his left palm and thumb are
quite actually burned raw and streaming blood, that he has
run out to the end of the island rock – worse, he notes, the
juggernaut will soon expose the backing’s arbor knot at
the spool. His option is tightening down to something
beyond dangerous pressures and with that the river tiger
crashes distantly into the air, a spinning girder of golden
shrapnel that’s been
12
blown right out of river’s bedrock!
The searing jump is ruthless, defining... and the behemoth
descends beneath the foamy keloid on the otherwise
tranquil water like a depth charge and explodes, thrashing
its head as awfully as it had first lashed its tail; the rod
bucking spectacularly down into the cork handle; the
split-cane bow and the inexorable gauge of the Rāmgangā
bringing the berserko back downstream.
Excellent lengths of line are recaptured to the reel in
anticipation of what surprises Corbett as the plebian tactic
of much younger and weaker fish: the slicing, sawing line
twice crossing to the canyon’s vertical wall and fully back
to starboard, the fish quixotically fighting the river and
the rod before flatly recognizing the fatal flaw in that.
And the next running aerial by the furious golden weapon,
now not thirty yards off the promontory, is a detonation
that introduces the idea that this engagement is the
mistake of an indifferent universe. The fish hangs dancing
in a sun-drenched hydrostatic halo and the explosive
smack as it reenters the river is felt in Corbett’s
back teeth. He gasps as the Expected One’s real violence
comes jolted loose by the blow, bearing witness to the
release of some primordial aptitude for motion that
outstrips by treble the swiftness of the great river’s
mightiest flood.
One-hundred yards in eight seconds – river aided – he
will proclaim that night during drinks at fireside, or
farther in seven seconds, before he stops running, trotting
and walking apprehensively behind the fish to find it
sulking and despising him from behind a submerged
boulder beyond a narrowed torrent.
The mahseer can feel him, then possibly see him in
opaque profile, and that brings the beast of the Rāmgangā
on up to devastate, to greyhound athwart the surface, to
beat everything at once that had ever been set against it –
the heaviest cross-currents and the crackling long rod
ready-set to pop.
True champions finish with combinations. This fish
sounds among the bobbing arms of a floating tree, a
preacher
trapped upright in a large whirlpool, and follows with
another breathtaking leap. And the line bighting the
petrified
13
wood must have somehow abetted in somersaulting the
freed immensity, because until that instant a complete
backflip had never seemed possible.
The imperial predator looks the fisherman dead in the eye
as Corbett falls back against these things with the rod
straightened and empty in his hands. Desperately he
moves to snatch some final sign of the fish in the empty
river. But there is nothing except the prototype line
skittering atop neutral snowmelt the color of iron.
He swings up the tattered droplet of feathers and grabs it,
surprised to find that the Von Hoff has been straightened.
This hard fact brings some solace. Excruciating defeat is
always tempered in instances of extreme tackle failure.
He finds that catching his breath is easier than mahseers,
stroking the clean palm of his non-bleeding hand across
his moustache. Out over the sound of crushing water he
speaks evenly to the fugitive:
You are a miserable dynamo, he says. A conceivably
unbreakable World Record.
Did you not know I would only hold you in the light?
Rest and admire you and let you go? Yes, of course. But
you’ve survived to become selfish and vain. Lice
wiggling around in your horrible gills that are older than
me. Surrounded by bug-eyed sycophants; turtles soon
eating your fins to pieces and you too demented to notice,
or care.
He sighs and studies the place where several layers of
skin were barked off by the stubby handle of the reversing
reel. He bites the hook from the line, moving the frayed
artificial to his trouser pocket. He turns all of the line up
through the guides, whispering the recitation of the old
fisherman’s adage to the only person present, plus a father
he can dimly remember and his dead brother, Tom:
The big ones always get away.
The vague one-note acoustic of Jean’s soft voice soon
draws his attention downstream. She has a fish, he thinks,
five-hundred yards in the river below. Quickly he wades
into the frothy water, flushing away in the tailfan of the
rock podium, working his supreme steerage to the
direction of Mrs. Ibbotson.
14
Have you the fish or does the fish have you?!
The judges have the fish ahead, I think, Jean hollers. Will
you please – Oh, my!
The six-foot bamboo casting stick long strokes
frighteningly in a series of vicious concussions with the
weight and the speed to break an arm, forcing Jean to step
unsteadily into deeper current towards the fish.
Hurry along, Jim, and help me land him?!
Corbett comes prancing to his feet across the head of the
holding water. He circles along the sandbar and wades
quickly up behind her to offer his critical assessments.
The fish is pummeling Jean. He asks: How do you know
it is not a she fish?
Because he has balls! They were pendulous when he tail-
walked out of the pool!
Well, Jeanette Ibbotson, he laughs. How deliciously
profane! I suppose big fish will completely change a
person!
No, Jim, they expose the things that were there all along.
They lay it – Oh, no!
Jean stumbles, bowing towards the boring fish to keep the
banging crescent from snapping off just above the level-
wind reel, she thinks, and her left hand comes away from
the rod. Corbett fishes her up wet from the head down. He
holds her by the shoulders until she’s reset her feet on the
slick bottom, the line now carving fast to the surface.
Don’t horse him, Jean! You’re horsing him!
Does it really appear that I’m horsing him?! Are we
talking about the same thing, Jim?! He’s killing me!
Keep the rod low with pressure when he...
Wrapped in crystal jetsam, the fish explodes big and crazy
like a random solar flare, slamming its way back into the
river.
Did you see them, Jim?!
I could not see them because his giant flaccid prick was in
the way!
Do not lose him, Jean! You’ll regret losing him for the
rest of your life!
Now Jean cannot stop laughing. Had the fish broken
15
the line or beat the brakes off the drag and spooled the
reel or thrown the spoon or had Corbett botched the
landing, there was no misery that the fish might provide
that she would not have laughed away.
But the fish eventually loses heart and Jean is soon
coaxing the temporarily subdued animal to the warmer
shallows below her, where Corbett seizes it with two
hands firmly above its tail. He wrestles it briefly before
dragging the thirty-five-pound golden mahseer
triumphantly to Jean kneeling with her eyes and mouth
competing in awe.
They sit in the Rāmgangā with the exhausted, missile-
shaped fish between them.
I suppose the camera is in camp? Corbett asks.
Yes, on the table at camp. I left it purposely, you know, to
improve the odds of catching a fish like this.
That’s the play, of course. Well, he says, let’s hold your
rod against him for a mark. We’ll know how much we
must lie when people ask for a weight. Some fishermen,
not many, will be happy that you caught such a fish and
they will give us permission to exaggerate his size.
Jean raises herself and Corbett lifts the fish to fix its
length and depth against the impromptu ruler. The
magnificent diamond patterns of the mahseer, largest and
most vivid right atop the lateral lines, are rapidly fading
and minnow fry, appearing as see-through clouds of
flagellum, gather to peck at the fish’s slime. Jean reclines
to a sitting position as Corbett re-immerses the
resuscitating animal. He holds the dorsal spine ray aloft
and whistles at the splendor and the size of it before
shifting to study the fish’s pupil.
Aren’t his barbels fun?! Look at them, Jean – like fleshy
moustaches. And just have a look at these scales! There’s
nothing to match. I would say he’s forty-five inches long
and close enough to forty pounds. What a corkingly
bloody, completely outrageous, monster! Quite
astonishing, Jean! Damn fine show and congratulations!
She moves up to her knees and runs her hand lightly
along the platinum effervescences of the mahseer’s skull,
16
turning her head to get right in the fish’s face, winking at
it.
Let’s let him go right here and see how long it takes.
With that the fish swims lethargically out of Corbett’s
hands, out just past them before laying a righteous,
twelve-foot gouge through the shallows on its way to
ultimately reclaim its feeding lane. The fish’s escape re-
soaks the onlookers. As they swipe the water from their
faces Jean notices Corbett’s bleeding thumb.
Propitious, he cheers.
What is that?!
Oh, dear. It’s nothing, really. A flesh wound. My reel
became quite angry and bit me.
Jean takes Corbett’s non-bleeding hand and they come out
of the water with their arms amiably, comfortably locked
in support.
I crave a cigarette. Any chance?
I thought you were quitting, Jim? I should not encourage
your vices.
Had I quit I would start again just to have one now. The
respites of fishing lend themselves to the pleasures of
smoking leisurely. I am not one to give up on their
enjoyments, their need to control me, while conditions are
so favorable. I am smoking heavily in anticipation of soon
giving them up forever.
When?
This could be my very last cigarette, Jean, or probably
not. Better, perhaps, I will continue to enjoy their
completely foul company through our final campfire here.
You know, smoke the last one down to my fingertips,
flicking it into the driftwood coals.
You know, done.
They have just finished second ones before returning the
hail of Thomas “Ibby” Ibbotson, the Provincial
Commissioner of the Kumaon District, who is enjoying
the genteel life abroad from the utilitarian comfort of one
of his three Goojerat chairs, cooling in the speckled shade
beneath a square of canvas sail lashed among a copes of
grandiose centennial oaks. Ibby reduces the volume of his
wind-up RCA gramophone and the sound of Benny
Goodman’s exotic clarinet in Get Happy is
17
exchanged for the more natural reverberations of the
canyon land. He shouts:
Well?!
They work out of the sandbar to the fieldstone center of
the camp before replying.
Oh, it was just cracking, darling! Truly it was. But I must
have water and a change from these terrible fishing
clothes before I begin honing my version of the
experience. It took only about ten minutes to catch the
fish, but it will require an hour to establish the first verbal
draft of the story.
Ibby is quick to finish pouring them initial refreshments,
hanging a towel around Jean’s shoulders and kissing her
on the cheek.
Wonderful, darling! Wonderful! Congratulations! Was it
a good one?!
Oh my, yes! The best ever!
Well, I can’t wait to hear all about it. The shower can is
brimming. Why not hop in and out and join us back here
for an early one? I’ve such bad news about the abrupt
ending to our holiday here.
Oh, Thomas!
It can’t be helped, I’m afraid. But you run on to the bath
and I’ll wait on you so we might discuss it all just once.
Then we’ll be done with that. We mustn’t let it spoil our
last night here. Meantime, Jim can regale me with one of
his fishing stories, which are always dramatic and full of
mendacities and half-truths. I’ll have you a proper drink at
the ready.
He continues:
Madho and the staff are preparing an early dinner, so that
we might fish in the evening cool before relaxing with
desserts around the campfire. In keeping with our early
departure, I’ve pushed the menu forward. We’re having
grilled mahseer, roast lamb, green salads, Madho’s
famous Dutch-oven bread and the most titillating
Bordeaux. Tonight we feast.
May we use up all of the butter on the Dutch-oven bread?
Why yes, dear, of course. Madho’s bread is merely a
vehicle for the last of the butter.
18
Ibby snatches a second kiss as Jean makes for the canvas
water closet.
Your dressing gown is on the nail. Darling, you must
remember to shake it out before you put it on.
Jean gives her husband “the look.” Ibby smiles at her and
moves to find Corbett missing from the caprock patio. He
calls to Corbett’s partitioned section of their sleeping
quarters.
What’ll it be, Sahib, the usual?
Please double it, Ibbs. I was booked here through
Tuesday, you know, pre-paid for an all-inclusive. I’m just
informed by management that the band has been
cancelled and that they are packing up the bar. Make-
goods are impossible. So, chum, it sounds to me like we’d
better start drinking, if we were going to drink.
Yes, well, you may stay and fish. I’ll send Madho and a
crew back in a few weeks to pull the camp after you’ve –
maybe – caught one fish on your fly rod. Jean may also
want to stay. I feel just terrible about leaving early, but
I’m afraid something quite serious has come up.
I did catch a fish with it today, Ibbs.
Ibby notes a strange shape several hundred yards in the
rocks way up on the canyon wall opposing camp. He
moves back to his chair, takes the powerful German
binocular from the table and begins trying to find and
identify the object, now temporarily distracted from
Corbett’s fishing report.
I say, Ibbs, I did catch a fish with it.
There are distinctions, Jim, between moving fish and
landing fish. I would already know if you’d actually
caught a fish with your new fly tackle, because you would
not have gone inside the tent without some bravado. You
would not be inside the tent. You would be shout-boasting
from atop the tent.
See here, Ibbs, that’s where you are very wrong, again.
Those terms are interchangeable to the fly rodder, the
sportsman. When fishing with flies, once the tippet comes
into the top guide the fish is considered caught. Angling
has its own higher set of rubrics, its own canon, beginning
with the very first of its grand distinctions, the word itself:
angling. The use of level-wind reels is not angling. The
word angling was
19
created specifically for fly-fishing by the American
philosopher and poet, H.D. Thoreau. Fishmongers using
level-wind reels, spears, gill nets and weirs have no
Thoreau and they probably never will.
Ibby’s eyes are intermittently in and over the binocular,
struggling to find the general location of the unidentified
object on the distant mountainside. Ibby whistles and says
evenly:
In record time, man, haven’t you become just the most
affected of all the fly-fishing pettifogs.
Noting Ibby’s scrutiny with the bino, Corbett comes on
barefooted from the tent and takes a seat next to Ibby,
who stands the optic on the campaign table. He downs his
ice water and swaps the position of it with the gin and
tonic Ibby has readied for him. They are quietly reloading
for more banter as Jean returns along the stone walk to the
native patio. Ibby settles her in and the men reclaim their
seats. Ibby hoists his glass and Jean and Corbett follow
his lead.
To safe travels, bold adventure and all the people we love.
They nod and drink, returning their glasses to the linen
tabletop. The rustling breeze of the banner day comes
down canyon mingling with the subtleties of the polishing
of cutlery from the cook tent.
Okay, everyone, here’s the brief:
Pierre La Fayette, Pete – the PH you’ve both met on
numerous occasions – and his pair of French-national
clients, missed check-out a few days ago. Jack Evans was
conveniently up that way at one of our stations and the
office diverted him to Pete’s camp. What he found is a
bloody mystery. We know this because J.E. dispatched a
dak runner from Nahan, who was relayed by a second
runner, arriving camp after you’d both left this morning
for fishing.
According to J.E., the client’s bedroom has been used as
slaughterhouse. There were eleven souls in Pete’s camp.
Presently, no one has been accounted for. So, I’m meeting
Jack and a few of our boys from Naini up there at noon
tomorrow.
Pierre La Fayette: scoundrel: Le Gharial, says Corbett.
And how will you, Ibbs, ever find your way from here to
there
20
by noon tomorrow? You’ll be riding unfamiliar country
for hours in the dark. I’m sure you could not find your
way to the Garuppu Road in two days.
I was hoping you’d accompany.
Without expression, Corbett takes up the binocular from
the table. The blood has drained from Jean’s rosy
complexion. Ibby is smiling nervously and fidgeting with
his wedding ring and his wristwatch.
What?! Pete would come looking for you.
No, he would not. He would get arse-slapping drunk.
He’d tell everyone within ear-shot in his slurred, silky
French accent that he’d been out looking for me on his
own. But you know as well as I that Pete, I’m sorry, The
French Crocodile, hunts only tigers, wealthy clients and
women. He doesn’t hunt lost campers. That won’t work,
Ibbs. Try something else.
I thought you liked Pete?!
Who doesn’t like Pete? That’s not the point, Ibby. Even
the cuckolds and the cheated boyfriends like Pete.
Corbett readjusts away from Ibby and begins casually
applying the binocular to the river cliffs that earlier had
interested his best friend.
Jim, you simply must go, Jean injects. There are others
involved besides La Fayette. If you would please do this
with Thomas, I’ll repair to Kaladungi and help Maggie
with the packing. I’ll take some of our help with me.
Corbett looks at Jean and Ibby, then back to Jean,
who is clearly distraught. He sighs melodramatically and
slumps back in the Goojerat. He again brings the
binocular to the piece of Shangri-La that Ibby had been
scrutinizing; resetting the balance of focus to his eyes,
wheeling the diopter until the image crystalizes. He holds
the instrument stock still, using only his eyes to search
among the wonderfully vivid field of view.
Very quickly, very luckily, he catches a flicker of
movement in his lower periphery and slightly re-centers
the tubes. It is the right ear of a young sambar bull in the
shadow of an over-achieving tree – a bodhi growing right
out of what appears to be pure rock, the bedded sambar
beneath it.
He returns the field glasses to the table, casting back and
forth at the Ibbotsons before sticking on Ibby.
21
So, Ibbs, tell us: Were you asked to name the very finest
fly fisherman in India, possibly the world, whose name
would you give?
Ibby casts back and forth at Corbett and Jean, the tension
lifted from his expression.
Well, before I divulge my surprising answer to that there
is something you both must hear.
A smiling Ibby siphons his gin and tonic and is quickly
away from the Goojerat – a purloined design first
discovered by the British military in an overrun French
outpost on the Indian frontier – to his gramophone, which
he charges with the hand crank. He replaces the vinyl disc
resplendent in the Big-Band sound of Goodman with
another record, maximizes the volume and, as the needle
cues, he addresses his campmates:
It’s not the Skillet Lickers. It’s much, much bigger than
that. The recording originated ten thousand miles away
from here in a place called Oklahoma City, delivered to
me the day before we left Naini. These boys are the new
stars of the category.
And with that introduction, “I’m a Ding Dong Daddy
from Dumas” performed by Bob Wills and the Texas
Playboys comes up to fill the quiet canyon.
Ibby lets the song soar past its signature hook before
twirling Jean up from her Goojerat, announcing
euphorically over the music:
The sophistication of great jazz piano mixed with steel
guitar, unbelievable fiddlin’. It just pops, doesn’t it!?
Sugar moon!
The Ibbotsons are immediately gyrating like instructors of
western swing across the crown of the sunken boulder.
The small, beaming wait staff hurries around the canvas
salon from the cook tent to watch. Corbett is soon moved
from clapping his hand on his bouncing leg to a bit of jig
dancing. Ibby spins Jean into Corbett’s arms, yahooing,
and, in turn, Corbett and Jean set forth riotously
‘round the edge of the marbled dance floor. Ibby hollers
at them over this completely new level of rhythm and
rhyme:
What about it big-cat daddies?! How about that!
22
23
22
Le Chasse, Unlimited
They had saddled wet horses in a steady rain and two
hours later all that they are is soaked through with dirty
runoff and everything else is muddy and slick. Below
them in the washed-out distance the recently sparkling
River Rāmgangā has become a brindled ditch. The storm
presents all of its overbearing incantations and nothing of
those previously delicious days in Camp Mahseer,
perfections alive with bright birdsong and tasting of
sunshine, can be easily remembered.
Corbett and his steaming horse have almost led them out
of the flooding canyon when the high, winsome trail quits
against a barricade of vertical rock. He twists in the saddle
and waits for Ibby and the mare to come pulling into his
eyereach through the pelting rain. His voice is strident, so
as to be heard over both the distance and the inundation:
Hold what you have, Ibbs. This game trail just quits on
these boulders.
Corbett situates the reins, tentatively dismounting uphill.
He crouches athletically on the treacherous upslope above
the horse and begins the slippery work of turning the
animal up and around on the ribbon of trail. He does this
by crabbing backwards, one hand on the greasy hillside,
one hand tight to the reins. The horse can only be
convinced to go at it with a tap to its rump and the wall-
eyed creature scrambles and comes on through the
terrifying reverse turn with free reins, loping sixty yards
to stop where Ibby stands his mount.
23
Corbett slops to them in the downpour, pressing between
the mountain and his quivering animal to take-up the limp
headstall.
Well, Jimmy, that was quite the display of horsemanship.
For a confirmed hiker and general loather of horseflesh,
bloody well done!
You are least funny when you are masquerading as a
floating rat. Consider the possibilities of losing hold of
your horse in this. Do something right for a change,
Governor.
As Ibby turns his horse, the edge of the trail sloughs
cruelly with the speed of a trapdoor from beneath the
animal, taking the splayed steed backwards downslope
with Ibby sledding along in tow. That could be it for the
horse and, maybe, Ibby, Corbett observes.
Let go, Thomas! Spread out!
At the very edge of a seasonal waterfall the horse
unpredictably rises and wildly, briefly, runs in place to
recapture the vertical ground. Ibby skids right in there at
the horse’s legs, grabbing among the mare’s chopping
blows to catch a wet stirrup, which by the grace of God he
holds. He regains his feet, wraps his hand in the horse’s
tail and struggles mightily to keep pace as the lunging
beast climbs back to the trail. They are soon arranging
themselves below Corbett and his horse.
What were you thinking of?!
Stopping, of course.
They leave the canyon through a widening nullah
defended by an orderly forest of plantation pines that goes
up into the unbroken for two miles; altogether pleasant
riding within a new country if not for the solid rain. They
cross through a tall-grass meadow on a plateau in
slackening rain where a large, loose, post-rut collection of
spotted chital deer believe the riders to be peaceful
centaurs before striking a path winding among a
deciduous belt; ghosting ever upwards and into a cold fog
and the hardest deluge yet: rain that makes them laugh
and shake their heads and say that they are underwater.
Corbett calculates they’ve come nine miles, maybe more,
with twice that to go. And by the time they’ve cut off the
next third they are in freezing rain on an escarpment that
intermit-
24
tently exposes the eight-thousand-foot crown of Cheena,
twenty miles east of their right shoulders. They ride on
single file into a land experiencing a warmer snowfall,
passing among the grounds of an ancient temple jumbled
by earthquakes and all but erased by stone robbers;
skirting the worm-wood foundation and rusted capstans of
a burning Ghat perched above the abyss of a vertigo-
inducing gorge; and then through a mile-long canebrake
where, deep within, they stand the horses so that a
lethargic king cobra might abandon the trail with dignity.
What is it?
Hamadryad... stretched atop a fallen limb all the way
across our front. I don’t remember ever seeing one in the
snow.
Big one?
Unusually.
I wish I could get around your fat horse’s arse to see it
myself, Jim – in the snow.
Lower your voice, Thomas. It may be eighteen-feet long.
Slightly louder, using the most ornately polished tone
within his classical repertoire, Ibby replies:
In this context, old boy, I propose that any snow cobras
we may encounter are possibly only Homeric allegories of
your imagination, foreboding elements...
No, Thomas. It’s not.
Corbett carefully tightens the reins, upping the pressure of
the bit in the horse’s lips. The mare steps backwards,
crowding its rump into the face of Ibby’s horse, as
Corbett withdraws the American-made semiauto from the
shoulder holster beneath his coat. He pulls the reins across
the horse’s neck, slightly quartering the animal in the
unyielding trail, craning over his shoulder to find Ibby
smiling very merrily.
Fuck on with that Latin-style dialogue, old chap. This is a
bloody serious goddamn snake.
The horse pops the reins loose from Corbett’s grasp to
better watch the snake, now coiling dangerously along the
top of the wood – Corbett feels the animal catch hold of
its breath and quiver. To the surprised horse this king
cobra registers as having the dimensions of a telegraph
pole.
And that quick the open-mouthed serpent is whipping
25
into the men and their horses with its head three-feet
above a goat trail that spontaneously appears to be
fissuring.
Corbett notes the heavy strike as likely killing one
of them.
From his back in the dirty snow, he is aware that the
snake remains fastened to the spin-bucking horse. The
unbuttoned animal, jackknifing in and out of the cane, is
so powerful and wild that he never again sees the snake.
In fact, the raving horse seems quite capable of having
eaten the monster; finally crashing onto its back from
height, its subtly vibrating legs locked straight up for a
long moment in the excited calm.
The frothing horse then convulses electrically and rolls
slowly upon its side – greatly inhaling and exhaling just
once before galloping a dying circle in the sludge.
Golly, says Ibby flatly from down the desolate trace.
Corbett begins the search for his pistol in the area where
he’d been thrown. They hunt carefully all around, back
and forth on the greasy trail, well up into both walls of
cane, before eventually arranging themselves, without
having located the gun, at the dead mare.
Maybe it’s under Jean’s horse?
Corbett steps in and hunkers at the animal,
sympathetically patting it, resting his hand on its warm
rump. He is about to speak to Ibby, or maybe the horse,
when the splendid charger rolls up wondrously to stand
blinking at each of the apoplectic riders.
I thought she was stone dead, says Ibby. I’d been
wondering how you were going to break the news to Jean.
There’s the pistol.
Moving very softly, Corbett swipes away a level cupful of
poisonous yellow goo from between the bottom edge of
the saddle pad and the horse’s quivering shoulder. Then
he moves forward to soothingly stroke his hand along the
jaw line of the beautiful mare; finding and hesitating in
her fantastic eyes, whispering:
Welcome back.
He takes the gun from Ibby and moves a few paces
through the sucking mire to clean and disarm it safely
behind
26
and away from the revenant steed. He drops the magazine
into a coat pocket, picks the gritty gum away from the
striker, lightly lowers the hammer and spins the round
from the chamber into the cupped fingers of the same
hand that worked the slide. He admires the gleam of the
dry bullet, letting it sift in with the magazine and says:
My grandmother always told me that bad luck comes in
threes.
Still sliding about in the gullet of the smothering cane, the
wet snow reverting to its more standard currency, they
strike the Garuppu Road, a trail not much wider than what
they’d been fighting.
The slushy mud is cut in with human tracks and the spoor
of many kinds and sizes of deer, plus one outsized male
leopard and a female tiger and her twin 200-pound cubs.
They shadow these fellow travelers northeast for a full
hour until the marks of the wild animals melt into the
jungle at either side of the road.
The weary men arrive just before noon at the isolated patti
of Nahan, where from the saddle they expeditiously take
up hot teas that have been graciously provided by the
disfigured Tahsildar and his fetching young wife.
The one-eyed Tahsildar has no information concerning
the happenings at Camp La Fayette. He does, however,
know exactly where the Frenchman’s compound is
located and he impresses himself greatly in explaining the
route to Corbett
and Ibby with his mix of broken English and dramatic
hand gesturing. Not counting them, he has recently
directed a total of four English soldiers astride exceptional
horses to those tents during the past three days, he says.
He further explains that his brother’s youngest son had
been the daring and swift carrier who had delivered the
first and longest leg of the recent dispatch concerning
these matters to the vacationing Commissioner Ibbotson
thereon the River Rāmgangā.
The men nod and thank him and hand the empty cups
back down to the Tahsildar’s wife, who retreats quickly
from the downpour to her husband’s side beneath the
overhang of the tiled veranda. He accepts their thanks and
27
thanks them, in turn, and invites the riders back under
more optimistic conditions.
The next two hours are the most tortuous of all, enough of
the sort of aching, misery-induced subterfuge to enliven
even the ghastly trappings of Pierre La Fayette’s joyless,
water-damaged camp. Two men quick-step from the main
tent to the clutch of ginger trees and enter the fretwork of
wire-and-wood that serves as a kedad, inaudibly shooing
Ibby and Corbett away from the processes of unsaddling
their exhausted steeds.
The roofs of the outlying tents are low-slung catchments
of rainwater and each of the five primarily cloth structures
are individually fortified with blackthorn security fencing.
The site wafts of rendered bear fat and bacteria. Corbett
and Ibby shed their drenched outerwear beneath the
canvas-covered wooden landing of the main lodge.
It’s just warm enough to prevent freezing fog, says
Corbett.
Like Christmas Eve in Hell, Ibby declares.
Slightly harder light escapes from the angular space of the
unfurling tent door and Captain Jack Evans Coogan is
standing backlit in that rush of warmth with a pair of
robust robes spun from bleached Egyptian cotton.
Take it all off and wrap yourselves in these, gentlemen.
Dink drew short straw for laundry detail, so he’ll handle it
right where you drop it once he’s back up from the corral.
There is water, wine, an unopened bottle of Blood Hound,
clobber and sour, warm baths and dry bedding. We expect
the dancing girls to arrive in just a jiffy.
Coogan hands the robes to the nudes and backs into the
German-made, high-ceiling custom salon with the flap
held exaggeratingly wide.
Please, gentlemen, come in, enjoy the fire.
Thanks, Jack. I knew all along you would make a proper
soldier.
Ibby and Corbett have donned the iron-dried extra
clothing from their saddlebags, eaten and are sipping at
the popskull called Blood Hound before Ibby makes
mention of what might be known about this ghost-camp
assignment
28
they’ve ridden to Hell and back to attend, this missing-
person fantasy where they are preparing to spend the
night.
Jack Evans begins his official report:
I’m afraid, Commissioner, regrettably, there’s really not
much news. Dreadful, worsening weather, really, since I
arrived,
and so we’ve concentrated our efforts inside the tents.
Nevertheless, it was quick, I believe – we’ve established
that some of the servants came away from a table of food.
But at this point in the investigation, I’m only guessing
when I say that others stayed on here for a day or two
before the whole place was abandoned.
You see, gentlemen, a second smaller number of people,
likely La Fayette and his clients, seem to have left a capon
slow roasting in the oven by the look of things, possibly
the day after the staff vanished, continues Coogan. Maybe
around the time that someone seems to have been brutally
murdered on the bed in the client’s tent. We’ve taken a
forensics approach in there and I would stake my
reputation on the fact that someone’s throat was severed
before the body was dragged off into the jungle.
Interestingly, there was one footprint in the blood: a
woman’s bare foot, I’m sure.
Have you conducted any sort of serious search for that
victim and the woman?
No, Commissioner. Not yet. You know, with all the riding
in and out to contact the office, the weather, the work of
an active crime scene. No, I judged the victim’s wound to
be quite catastrophic and there is no sign of the woman, or
anyone, at this camp, so I’ve concentrated on other tasks.
I understand, Jack, but we’ve ten, eleven people bloody
missing nighon four goddamn days with enough idle
firepower standing in that gun rack to defeat a hoard of
mounted Turks. Is this some sort of goddamned
massacre?! How is it that so many people step off the
world together?!
Is there no gin and tonic in this camp? Corbett injects.
Yes. Right. How in God’s good name can perplexities be
solved, cases closed, without the clarity of the second
gin? What’s more, how can one conduct a proper shikari
without
29
that in the evenings, by the fires?
All these things – lost clients, a feral staff, not one last
drop of gin? I’ll tell you what boys: it’s just that degree of
slipshod that can get La Fayette’s PH license revoked.
I suppose it was the end of the season for Pierre La
Fayette, says Coogan. Maybe it was the end of
everything.
I did notice a bottle of gin in your saddlebags, sir, blurts
Corporal Timothy “Dink” Lewis.
Shahbash! Good old Madho. Now there’s a seasoned
valet, cries Ibby.
Corbett and Ibby snap-to, smiling broadly at one another
as Dink hurriedly begins procuring the product and a pair
of clean tumblers. In double time, he cracks watery ice
chunks in his hand with a serving spoon and dumps the
glistening contents into a small pan together with an ice
pick, setting all before the two senior investigators.
Speaking of guns, Captain Jack, I see the three rifles and
the shotguns there in the rack that Pete was known to
have in camp, plus one extra. Concerning this excursion,
is that all the arms your office has travel permits for?
That’s a great question, Colonel Corbett. The answer is
no. The primary rifle of client Monsieur Laurent Acelet
has not been discovered in camp. Yes, I’m quite sure we
are at least missing Acelet’s fieldpiece.
The grand dining hall and cigar room of La Fayette’s
luxury encampment balances atop a heavily timbered
mountain ridge resplendent in wild Bengal tigers and
leopards. It is a spacious tent elegantly appointed from the
campaign furniture
showrooms of Allahabad. There is a twenty-six-candle
chandelier above the cloth-covered banquet table to be
enjoyed from six well-cushioned Chippendale high backs.
The serving tables along the side walls hold a larger
number and wider array of candles than any Hindi lamp
shop in Calcutta, offering whatever amount of posh,
indirect lighting that might be preferred by the prosperous
customers of Pierre “Le Gharial” La Fayette.
The missing professional’s complete arsenal is racked in a
teak stand-up in one corner. The sterling silver table
setting is conspicuous. Nothing suggests theft or looting.
30
Nightfall has won again as Jack Evans provides the loose
discoveries from the bloody bedroom. He produces the
items on a towel to the main table, carefully arranging the
collection beneath the jetting glare of the gas lantern slung
from the chandelier. The men quickly gather over the
items, except for Corbett, who is taken aback by the sight
of the wavering antennae and the broad head of a very
large insect in the chandelier. The creature notes Corbett’s
attention, discreetly withdrawing from sight in the fixture.
There are rings, necklaces, bracelets of pure gold, silver
and platinum, an emerald brooch, a diamond-encrusted
Swiss wristwatch, diamond hatpins, a mother-of-pearl
hair comb sculpted in the form of a running leopard with
a ruby eye; .375 cartridges, a lightly funded woman’s
wallet, an empty coin purse made possibly from the
scrotum of a Cape buffalo bull, two French passports,
prescriptive medicines, a small-shouldered dark brown
bottle filled with processed coca and a crystal dildo,
which preoccupies the men.
A neat, thick stack of month-old magazines and
newspapers from London, New York and Paris sits at the
end of the table and Corbett picks out the Times, tearing
away the Front Page. He is handing it over to whichever
enlisted man is about to need it as Ibby says:
Jack Evans, Dink, one of you men, please, what say we
take the unusual device out of play here and store it in the
woman’s valise.
Careful, we may only speculate as to exactly where that’s
been. We might need you to dust it for prints, Corbett
says with a wink.
Dink wraps the erotic tool in the broadsheet and removes
it to the client’s baggage at the corner of the canvas
chamber. Corbett then rolls the rest of the front section of
the Times tight as billy club, pulls his chair to the edge of
the table and stands in its seat. Blocking the intense
lantern light with his left hand, he draws a fine bead with
his weapon and deftly, instinctively, smacks the insect
twenty feet into the side of the tent. He returns with the
bug alive on the end of the ice pick, the handle reversed
into a soft candle, setting all near the
31
towel with the jewels, so the display can be easily ogled
by the now awestruck men in La Fayette’s camp.
It is an Asian giant hornet, Vespa mandarinia, says private
first-class E.H. Thompson, who until that moment had
never been known to speak Latin.
The yak killer.
In unison at least three of the men exclaim: Good God!
Yellow-and-brown banded, the hirsute body of the
horrible insect is slightly more than two full inches in
length. It showcases an orange head with stunning
compound eyes and, altogether, the saw-toothed
mandibles and face of the wee monster are the width of
the nail of a man’s pinky. It has a three-inch wingspan,
hence its seldom-used Chinese moniker, the giant sparrow
bee, and it briefly buzzes those darkly transparent wings
out on the end of the ice pick, so that those men who do
not recoil from their movements will feel the amazing
draft of them in the stale tent.
The bloody gold chain lying broken there on the towel
with the woman’s charms is La Fayette’s, Corbett says,
not looking away from the super hornet. I know, because
the only time I ever saw him not wearing it was after he
lost it to Tiny Robinson in an all-night card game at the
officer’s club in Naini. Tiny sold it back to The Croc the
next day for thrice what he had in it.
Ah, so, Ibby says, briefly feigning the inflection of an
oriental detective. What do we make of that, gentlemen?!
How does a necklace belonging to Pete wind up shattered
in a pool of blood in...
The boudoir of Mademoiselle Constantine Acelet, says
Captain Jack Evans.
Yes, Jack. Thank you.
Well, Pete was a determined gambler, Corbett announces.
Maybe the mademoiselle won it from him in a friendly
game of dominatrix?
Scrutinizing the weakly animated Asian hornet, some
might say from a reckless distance, Private R.E.
Buchanan, who until that precise second had been mute
and expressionless throughout the entire evening,
explodes with laughter.
32
He has absolutely no control of himself and when he rises
from the doubling over effects of his runaway delight to
find Commissioner Ibbotson’s cold glare the yak killer
rattles off the tip of the ice pick, sticking itself to the left
lens of Buchanan’s eyeglasses like it had been shot onto
his face through the compressions of a blowgun. His
scream has too much falsetto, and as he madly rips off the
vermin-decorated spectacles there is a concurrent attempt
at a complete back flip, which he fails miserably to rotate,
landing neck-crusher style on the top of his head.
And for a good while thereafter the tears of weary and
anxious men spill at the hysterics of such instant karma
inside the cryptic confines of La Fayette’s unnerving
lodge. Corbett catches his breath first:
You’ll have to excuse the Commissioner, gentlemen. I
think he was teasing us about not knowing that the
delivery mechanism for Pete’s necklace was Pete himself.
The Commissioner did suffer a life-or-death equestrian
event this morning in a cold rain, weathers which
persisted for a full day of hard riding.
What’s the plan? Ibby questions, his eyes drifting among
the soldiers.
I suggest leaving three men here in the morning to begin
systematically packing this camp. You and I,
Commissioner, might plink about up north. Corporal Dink
located a terrific map in La Fayette’s quarters that we
believe details the locations of his tiger baits. The primary
site, I think, is about one mile straight north on the main
trail, the Kiwar Crest, at the convergence of a wonderful
set of ridges.
There are two bait sites farther south, Colonel.
Considerably more walking but the slope is comparatively
gradual.
I expect reinforcement to us by noon tomorrow, Coogan
concludes.
CORBETT WAKES in the night to an environment so
darkened that he questions if his eyes are open, whether
he’s gone deaf and blind. Maybe this is an event of
parasomnia and he is not truly awake at all. He lies there
33
wondering. Incredibly not one of the men is snoring or
even breathing heavily.
He turns into the blank wall of the ringing silence and is
almost back asleep when he hears the tigers: two, at least,
and initially the most vocal is so close that he perceives it
softly grunting with each spongy step.
A second tiger, farther out, woofs once as loudly as a big
dog and with that they take up a constant series of breezy
ahoos and velvety, guttural moans and birdy purrs,
pushing on passed the campsite to the south like ecliptic
destroyers dead-drifting through black curtains of smoke;
obviously, loosely, traveling together and communicating
across the lightless space with the erudite whisperings of
a monocyclic language gleaned in the moonless nights of
the Pleistocene. Far away from him in the distance, long
after the carry of their gentlest murmurings is beyond his
hearing, one of the tigers sneezes.
To himself, he says: God bless you, Shere Khan.
He fluffs up what he has for a pillow, brings his holstered
sidearm fully on into the cot and lights a cigarette.
BOTH FIELD PATROLS have timed themselves to return
together from opposite directions at exactly noon, where
they find nothing of the camp packed or even dismantled,
owing to the gruesome discovery of the three bodies.
The dead are young teenaged males who, it is
summarized, were the detail organized to excavate a new
latrine several hundred feet east of the old one. Two of the
dead coolies have been liberally powered with lime and
hastily shrouded in feed sacks and placed across rough-
hewn sawhorses behind the servant’s quarters, the only
non-temporary structure at this end of La Fayette’s
seventy-five-mile hunting concession. The other boy had
been killed outright and left at the dig.
Come see this, Dink says.
At the corporal’s direction, Captain Jack Evans Coogan
holds the binocular on the dead boy who’d been killed
clawing his way out of the hole. Coogan is steadily
maintaining the field of view when a thumb-size hornet
bombs in behind the
cadaver, which he is concluding his assessment of as two
more
34
hornets the size of hummingbirds streak from the pit.
Except for these unexpected and remorseless brushstrokes
of inexpressible horror, the patchy sunshine of the cool
spring day is a spectacular example of the best of the
Himalayan foothills. Jack Evans blanches as he hands the
binocular back to the corporal.
They examine the bloated, blackened faces of the other
boys behind the small wooden bunkhouse before all of the
morning’s reports are given in the cavernous chill of the
grand salon. There are plates of salamis, cheeses, olives
and crackers, for which Jack Evans and Dink have no
appetite.
The northern team has drawn nothing from its search of
the primary bait site or the country betwixt. Corbett is
explaining the circular travel route of the tigress and her
grown cubs, the ones he’d heard in the night, and showing
the men the small ivory buttons from a woman’s blouse
he’d found in the mud beneath the machan of the once
active bait site to the south, when a rider ties off his well-
lathered mount at the kedad and comes saluting his way
right up to the main table.
All present stand and shake the hand of Lieutenant G.B.
Toms, whose grandfather had regulated frontier India
quite capably in much more dangerous times, before the
Fusiliers became the Royal Rifles, before technology
mercifully made smoothbore muzzleloaders obsolete in
tiger country.
Toms downs the glass of water handed him. Pleasantries
are exchanged before he produces a folded page from the
breast pocket of his jacket and begins abridging a
translated dictum from La Fayette’s personal manservant,
Mr. Sayhar Dholam, who has given this testimony, Toms
says, from a morphine haze at the intensive-care ward of
the army hospital in Naini Tal.
Toms searches the faces of the men before beginning the
script: For many days there had been problems with the
aggressive tigress. There were problems between the
French couple, and the Frenchman and Mr. La Fayette.
The Frenchman missed the tigress and the tigress stalked
him the next day and he missed again. The Frenchman
began living alone.
35
The camp was attacked by bees while the hunters were
hunting, last Thursday, Toms says, looking up – last
Thursday is mine.
The bees killed three boys. One boy died on our way to
Naini Tal. Nothing could be done except to pray for them.
Mr. La Fayette said he would finish hunting. He paid us
but he did not pay the families of the dead. I regret that
the boy died along our way. He was my brother’s son.
Mr. Dholam wrote this on a chalk slate, as he was unable
to speak due to the terrible reaction to a sting to his jaw,
says Toms. You cannot imagine the mutilations and
suffrages of the four survivors, gentlemen. In fact, I regret
to inform you that Mr. Dholam did pass from his injuries.
There is a moment of grieving reflection as the men
consider this statement and arrange it among the silent
declarations from so many other dead witnesses.
Heroic, Corbett says finally. And whatever might be
beyond that.
He stands and wipes his eyes and tells the men that he
wants his own look at La Fayette’s premier bait site to the
north.
Toms tells Corbett that he is not leaving, that he is there
for the duration, and then Toms explains to all of the men
that there will be no others in support of this rescue party
until the morrow.
Ibby suggests that one of the men, or he himself, should
accompany Corbett, but Corbett rebukes the idea,
explaining to Ibby that they would be better served to get
the dead boy out from under the control of the hornets
without suffering
more casualties; best to begin knocking out the significant
work of decamping this place as soon as that was
possible.
Corbett is a proper distance up the trail to the north before
the emotions of a gravely wounded man abandoning his
brother’s fallen son overwhelms him beneath a budding
jural. He waits until his eyes have cleared before
continuing on to the bait site.
La Fayette could not track a monkey leading a bleeding
36
elephant through fresh snow. He was not a hunter driven
by
the inner furnace, Corbett knew. Pete’s modest success
rates on shikari were very much below average, but every
year at least one true vermilion-striped monster that was
taken by one of his people made the front page of the
sports section of the Pioneer & Statesman.
Pierre “Le Gharial” (The Crocodile) La Fayette was a
very handsome, statuesque former minor-league soccer
star funded by a small trust held in a Venice bank, whose
eye for the ladies was usually met with whole-hearted
enthusiasms. Further, he had arguably the best small
hunting concession in the Almora District of the Kumaon
Division of the United Provinces. And what he had
learned was how to perfectly control the cuisine and the
accommodations, while mastering the art of baiting tigers.
La Fayette specialized in providing close-range
opportunities at the world’s most dangerous cats to the
very richest and most unfailingly inept of the globe-
trotting sports, while many of their wives, girlfriends,
daughters and/or mothers-in-law often observed the
clandestine, off-menu thrills of jungle life.
La Fayette’s aplomb redefined all reference to the most
dangerous game.
Corbett spends hours touring and appreciating La
Fayette’s vision for the supreme bait site, an ambush that
the Frenchman had anointed Le Corbin, the little crow, on
the maps in his guidebook. The locus of power features
two metal washtubs filled with clean water placed
strategically within the core proximity of the set, because
tigers enjoy drinking when their paunches are filled with
bullock and goat.
La Fayette’s water vessels were not as flashy as those of
solid gold and silver placed nearby the tiger baits of the
Maharaja of Orccha, but they were every bit as effective.
The Frenchman had also ingeniously directed the
construction of
blackthorn fencing sections, altogether more than one
mile of flow-inducing barricades, Corbett guesses, that
discreetly encourage ridge-running tigers to the bait.
Naturally, La Fayette kept the damp killing floor clear
37
of vegetation, so he might assess the size of the tigers that
visited
the place on moonless nights.
The spacious bench seat of taut rope that was the grand
centerpiece of the well-hidden machan was pillowed and
the layout featured padded bamboo gun rests to every
spoke of eyereach, a rectangle of canvas roofing and a
latched dry box filled with refreshments and a weathered
first edition of The Jungle Book.
Corbett is leaving the tree stand for the second and final
time when he notices a thin, flatten object driven flush
with the bark of a stout oak limb that has been rasped
smooth to prevent the game-spooking scraping noises
from clothing brushed against it. He chips away at the
entity with the point of his belt knife, discovering that the
body is a steel arrowhead, which he calculates the flight
path of before going fully at its extraction with the
smattering of tools in the dry box, including, thankfully, a
deformed pliers, the strong tang of a bastard file and a
tack hammer, breaking the arrowhead free in ten minutes
time.
He drops the massive head in his pack and descends to the
projected launch site of the arrow. There, he eventually
establishes the almost indistinguishable left footprint of
an archer with extraordinary feet. He picks at the debris
and scrutinizes the smooth-sole indention and stakes it
lengthwise with twigs to measure his foot against it.
The spot is perfect to the tight shooting lane where the
archer had undoubtedly pin-wheeled the alleged cuckold,
Monsieur Laurent Acelet, from a frontal blind side.
He returns again to the foundation of the machan. On the
upper side of one of the tree’s lowest limbs, he eventually
discovers a congealed daub of old, black blood that had
not been completely scoured by the recent snow and rain.
Corbett uses the darkening main trail as the axis by which
to serpentine his way back to camp. In the last of the
direct light he steps over an improved example of the
archer’s big feet in the mud, which convinces him that the
intruder had worn heavy socks, rather that some sort of
leather stockings o
rubber shoes or soft-soled desert boots, in approaching
Acelet at Le Corbin.
38
Many animals to include elephants ply the Kiwar Crest
but it appears to be the busiest of feline highways. Within
the great assortment of cat tracks that he has seen since
dawn are the possibilities of marbled cats, golden cats,
leopard cats, jungle cats, civets, Pallas’s cats, panthers
and tigers.
In fact, Corbett has just turned from the spoor of a caracal
to proceed uphill and reclaim the Kiwar Crest, concluding
what he reckons will be his last swing through the
darkening forest, when he walks across a wide, dim
consistency of bruised grass. The runway is actually too
vague to notice unless you have the eye for it. Most of the
grass stems have recovered. The farther he follows it
downhill, away from camp, the more convinced he
becomes that it is a drag.
He walks it out to its end point in the gloaming and the
rising fog to stand pensively in a circular pad of matted
and crushed grass that before the rains had been a
bloodbath.
The ghastly artifacts he finds there are wrapped in a
cheese-cloth game bag that is constant to his pack.
HALF OF THE SOLDIERS are engaged in the clipped
accuracies of King’s English discussion when Corbett
reenters the salon after his trek of discovery. Cheery
hellos go up and Dink asks Corbett if he is hungry.
You can close the kitchen, Dink. I would, however, enjoy
a tall gin with a splash of tonic, if that remains an option
in this dispirited wasteland.
Corbett pops the bolt handle of his Rigby .275, laying the
rifle pointing outwardly across the foot of his cot. He
moves a chair to the far head of the table, away from the
cluster of
men, so as to somewhat isolate himself, and he drops his
pack on the slat-board flooring near his seat. He takes the
iced gin
from Ibby, thanking him, and places the drink where he
will be sitting and arranges the papers and the old
magazines to the floor, using an unfolded section of the
Paris flagship to cover a considerable swath of the table.
39
There is a recently opened bottle of Chardonnay and an
empty one between the men. He moves to the bottles and
tops off the glasses of those who are drinking white and
tips the remains up and finishes it straight from the neck,
returning to his seat conspicuously with both bottles
emptied. He notices that these actions have quieted and
mesmerized the men, so he takes up his gin and salutes
them with the old-fashioned glass – a hail that comes back
to him devotedly – and he swallows all of the clear in the
glass without ado.
He wipes his face, grooms his moustache and opens his
airway.
I have a theory as to what has happened here, he says.
Go on.
Soon after the staff abandoned this camp to seek medical
attention in Naini, La Fayette parked Monsieur Laurent at
the nom de guerre Le Corbin machan, challenging Acelet
to prove himself a man by killing the tigress alone –
ostensibly while he hunted and played grab-arse from the
active southern machan with Mademoiselle Acelet.
Anyway, the short version is that La Fayette was killed by
a tiger while enjoying a game of chance with the
mademoiselle in her boudoir. Pete was removed by the cat
and devoured a quarter mile to the northeast. Of that I am
almost certain but, hereafter, you please must open your
minds to a careful review the evidence.
There was a third party, a stranger, or maybe someone
known by La Fayette, who killed Acelet as he sat the Le
Corbin machan. I speculate that the mademoiselle either
ran away, unlikely, or was killed, or, perhaps, was
abducted by the stranger.
Corbett pauses, shaking his empty glass slightly above the
tabletop at Ibby.
Mind if I have the last one?
That’s what it’s for, my good man. But how do you
reason that La Fayette didn’t kill the jilted husband?
Ibby and Corbett exchange the fresh drink for the
recovered broadhead.
Because La Fayette was not an archer, says Corbett,
4o
much less an accomplished bowman hunter. That
arrowhead
was imbedded in the tree Acelet was hunting from. It was
liberated through an exceedingly tight window in the
brush from thirty yards by a man with really, really big
feet. La Fayette had remarkably small hands and feet.
Ibby turns the silvery triangle of polished steel in his
fingers under the lantern light before passing it off to Jack
Evans.
Toms, please do remember to question the camp’s
survivors about a strange archer with big feet, maybe
someone they met on the trail to Naini, someone who
might have visited this outpost during the shikari, Corbett
continues. That’s now a very critical follow-up question.
Yes, sir.
Well, how do you know that La Fayette had small feet? I
spent a good amount of time in his company, says Ibby. I
don’t remember ever noticing that.
Corbett strains a smile and pulls the cheese-cloth bundle
from his pack, rolling a pair of severed hands out onto the
Paris review, a Benrus wristwatch spilling therewith.
I’m sure there’s some shrinkage, but his hands, at least,
appear quite diminutive.
Corbett notices that the soldier named Buchanan has
turned as fiercely white as the noonday sun. He advises
the young man to back his chair away from the table, to
put his head down between his knees and to not look up
until the dizziness has passed.
How do you know those are La Fayette’s hands and not
Acelet’s, a noticeably shaken Ibby asks quietly.
There is the clinking of glass as Corbett works for a
moment with the things at his feet. He carefully brings up
the wine bottles, which he is using together like a wig
mannequin
to display the complete headskin of La Fayette. He sets
the
putrefying death mask out on the edge of the paper and
looks around at it and then at Ibby.
Yes, well, the hair color is a match and no one else in
India has the confidence to wear a Fu Manchu.
Buchanan bolts to his feet unsteadily, like he has been
shot in the back from a great distance, and cascades,
smash
41
ing his chin on the table on his way to the floor, which
stimulates the ghastly condition of Pierre La Fayette.
Corbett looks quizzically at the jiggling face of La
Fayette, speaking to it:
I told the lad, didn’t I? Did you hear me tell him to stand
up? Say, man, I was just about to mention my suspicion
that your killer is the Champawat Tigress.
Corbett comes back to the dumbfounded men, none of
whom have thought to assist Buchanan.
I postulate that the reason she skinned La Fayette’s face
from his skull and did not eat it, or his hands, was because
they were flavored bitterly of insect repellent: citronella
and camphor.
Corbett swivels his head from side to side disapprovingly
at the drawn eye sockets, the frowning expression of La
Fayette, whose own terrible condition best articulates the
shock of his situation.
Oh, yes, the bugs, right? The bugs, Corbett says with a
mixture of sarcasm and sympathy, are just murder up
here.
42
The Tigress of Champawat
Up from the flooding river arises an Indian princess. She
is nude and the silky fan of her long, luxuriously black
hair reaches flat against the small of her back.
In tender light a chubby middle-aged ascetic of European
complexion is leaping and twirling in the Holy water of
the River Ganges. His dreadlocks are flying and his arms
are raised. The white power that covered him as he
entered the water is guttering down his skin and into the
pool; his eyes roll to white and his mouth opens and the
roar of the voices of one-hundred-thousand ascetic
pilgrims comes up through the breach of his cavernous
mouth.
Fantastically arrayed, stupendously attractive twin nagi
sadhus materialize behind the ascetic and begin to move
in subtle rhythms. They are pouting and exquisitely
exotic. Laceworks of platinum-colored beads are draped
between the priestesses’ otherwise bare breasts. Sleeves
of platinum ringlets adorn their arms. There is the waft of
traditional Hindu music.
The silent view is a soaring aerial through the mountain
passes of the Himalayas, but the swelling sound of
rushing water becomes omnipresent across forested
ridgelines lightly scarred with terraced fields – the
landscape of subtropical India of the 1930s, decades
before nearby Mount Everest will be conquered by high-
altitude climbers.
43
There is the sudden confrontation with the wildly gyrating
eyes and the steam-like hissings of an enraged Bengal
tiger – a youthful, recently trapped-from-the-wild male
Bengal tiger – and the racking view lengthens to expose
the out-and-out ferocity of its manic countenance and
situation – the jittery quickness of its blazing yellow eyes,
its flattened ears and the heavy iron bars of its prison. The
spitting tiger appears to be in a transportation cage on the
loading dock of a warehouse.
Between the tiger’s explosively agitated breathings and its
piercing roars men are heard jabbering excitedly in Hindu,
fading to grey.
The sight and sound is next through eyes quickly
penetrating scrub jungle. The animal’s heavy shots of
breath are rhythmic, big-bored and long spaced. The
running beast parts bracken, leaps mossy logs and crashes
headlong down a black-dark path that slices through a
young stand of nal grass. Emerging from the curtain of
canebrake and back to sporadic shafts of lunar reflection,
the running animal hurls itself across a wide mountain
runoff and lands with a deep, loudly guttural whroomph
amid a fountain of spray.
As the scene clears of water, a hand lurches into view and
continues dead dangling until it becomes the shattered
forearm of a young boy or girl. A flock of kaleege
pheasants – the smashing sound of flushing wings – the
deafening screams of avian panic.
From his platform just above the floor of a remote two-
room hut, Jim Corbett springs startlingly awake from his
fevered dreams of man-eating tigers, noisily striking his
head on a table above him, disarranging dishes, brass pans
and clay water vessels. Coming to he looks banally
around the small and dimly lit room. His searching eyes
settle on the grinning face of Rui Singh.
Outside waits the starry-morning cold of January 1939,
pre-runoff springtime in the mountains of northern India.
Has the tiger of your dreams caught you yet again,
Sahib? I believe you to be the only person of my
acquaintance
44
who is usually killed by the monsters who inhibit these
curious worlds of our sleep, says Rui.
Corbett turns on the low campaign cot to fully appreciate
his Hindu companion, wiping the glistening sweat from
his concentric face and straightening his moustache with
his thumb and index finger. He runs his hand through his
straw-colored hair, clearing his throat and addressing his
campmate.
No, certainly not, my good friend. As I’ve told you, Rui, I
do not think I am the ones killed in the dreams. I believe
that I am usually the beast; though, sometimes, perhaps, I
am dismembered spirits, third-person watchers. Mostly, I
think, I may be Shakespearian entities looking on in
philosophical horror.
More slowly Corbett again wipes his face.
But in this case, my friend, I dreamt of catching mahseers
in the Almora River, the cream-skinned maidens of his
Highness, the Maharaja of Jind, luridly astride the wet
rocks. Somehow Rui smiles even more broadly and
readjusts his cross-legged position, eyes brightly dancing
with Corbett’s story in the reflection of the small cook
fire.
Ah, Sahib, you dream of all men’s treasures! You must
have found the harem of his Highness of Jind quite
intriguing. River mists goose-fleshing these maidens
below their clinging silks and wet cottons. The rising river
sprays beading across their ripening...
Yes, that’s quite the right image, my good friend, Corbett
interrupts. Really, Rui, quite astonishing with their
glistening feet, their eyes afire like amulets. They were
almost as glorious as the angling.
Corbett flashes a smile of his own and blinks and rubs at
the red-rimmed sockets of his bloodshot eyes.
Now tell me, Rui: What is there to know of the honorable
Bali Singh?
Lighting a dish candle from the small cook fire that is
contained by shingles of rock in the center of the room,
Rui turns and vaguely illuminates the mute form of Bali
Singh, who
45
sits cross-legged, eyes sunken and fixed with the catatonic
one-thousand-yard stare of a man unjustly condemned to
death. Corbett is made incredulous by the surprisingly
deteriorated condition of his lifelong friend, Bali.
Has he spoken, Rui? Has he said anything at all in the
night?
Rui turns slowly back to face Corbett, blowing the candle
out, speaking most solemnly.
No, Sahib, there has been no word from our brother.
Nothing since he told us at the campfire that he had
swallowed the evil spirit of Trisul. I suspect that anything
Bali may say now is only the wicked thoughts of Trisul.
Though we cannot know that or anything regarding Bali
and Trisul with certainty until we have consulted with a
shaman, who may perform a puja to exorcise the demon.
Or we ask a certified madman, who may interpret
between the voices.
His mouth slightly agape, Corbett turns away from Bali to
Rui, the perplexity of his manner deepening to an even
resolve.
You cannot believe that he had a devil soar down his
throat?!
It just does not happen, man, Corbett continues slowly.
I have not seen it before with my own eyes, Sahib. No, I
have not. But it has been written of and spoken of by my
people for thousands of years before the coming of your
Jesus or the false prophet Mohammad. Perhaps you may
explain to me what affliction has besieged poor Bali,
whom we have known since his childhood? For lack of
such explanation, I will say that it is very unfortunate and
unsettling that Bali has been stricken.
Trisul is not a minor spirit. Trisul is among the most
feared of all the devils.
Well, I have no choice then but to accompany Bali back
to his people in Naini Tal, says Corbett. Walking hard,
that’s three days ‘round, four tops with stops, leaving us
with eight or ten days upon my return to sort out the
Champie tigress. Then off to Rudraprayag.
Yes, Sahib. Thank you. Bali’s people will be grateful to
see him before he dies.
46
Rui’s comment exasperates the world-class naturalist.
Corbett continues without letting on that he’d heard all of
what Rui had said:
Break camp and move ahead to Champawat and
reestablish us there in the forest commission’s bungalow.
Make contact straight way with the locals in charge – the
Jemadar, if he is around, Sergeant Fitts – for any fresh
khabar concerning the tiger. Please do not venture widely
afield until I catch up with you.
Secure a few goats, a fat bullock.
The Tahsildar of Champawat is a good man. At his
suggestion, set the bullock and a machan overlooking it in
the head of the nullah, above where the tigress killed the
young brothers. Maybe I’ll come back from Naini to an
active bait and a quick hanka. Quick if you don’t count
the sixty days of hunting over eighteen months we’ve
already invested up there.
Corbett smiles and brushes his fingers through his
moustache and holds keenly eye-to-eye with Rui.
Make it happen, Rui. It would seem to be yours now.
You’re the guru askari for this fragile little outfit. These
men are yours to direct until we get Bali back on his feed.
You must treat the men with respect or there will be
heartache. Good morale is everything, you know.
Yes, Sahib. Thank you. Breakfast for you is warming in
this pan. It was prepared before the tiger pounced upon
you in your dreams.
Thank you.
Rui rises gracefully.
It is nothing, Sahib. I will prepare food for your trip with
Bali. I will inform the men of your decisions.
Thank you, old friend.
Rui offers namaste to Corbett, the dignified praying hands
salutation of Hindu-Indian origin. With utmost respect,
Corbett returns the heartfelt gesture.
47
48
Refreshments in the Garden
with Victoria Hardcourt
Thomas “Ibby” Ibbotson, Deputy Commissioner of the
districts of Naini Tal, Almora and Garhwal, is sipping tea
and observing the streets beyond his courtyard from the
shadow of his third-floor, corner-office balcony. The
harsh buzzer of his intercom flickers sound and then
becomes incessant as he walks to it, grimacing. He lets it
buzz for a second more before curtly responding.
Yes, Miss Kim?!
Silence.
Yes, Miss Kim: push the button, please, to speak and be
heard.
Commissioner Ibbotson, Kim shouts through the box,
Miss Hardcourt of Southampton, England has arrived to
see you. Shall I send her in?
Magnificent! Yes, but, I say, Miss Kim – as mentioned –
you please do not have to smash and strangle the buzzer
of the intercom. Push the toggle down, count two, free
yourself from the switch and I will answer. Perhaps not
immediately. You see I could be on the telephone or
writing a telegram or performing some other official duty
of the district. But I will always acknowledge a quick
buzz.
49
Now, yes, Miss Kim, please do show in our special guest,
Miss Hardcourt.
One moment later there is a knock on the door of Ibby’s
office and now, standing behind his desk, he calls in Miss
Hardcourt and Miss Kim, waving them up across the
spacious wainscoted office that swallows the massive skin
rug of a Royal Bengal tiger, a beautiful immensity which
Hardcourt first begins to skirt and then stalls besides,
transfixed.
The young, handsome secretary, Kim, arguably the most
beautiful woman ever born in Bombay, is nearly invisible
beside Victoria Hardcourt, a petite porcelain-skinned
coppery-red redhead in incredibly stretched jodhpurs, a
crisp cotton blouse and a stylish cotton-canvas shooting
vest that seems possibly two sizes too small for her overt
voluptuousness. She is crack-your-teeth gorgeous, Ibby
thinks, with enough cute-as-hell to get several men killed
on the same day.
Ibby snaps around the edge of his desk to take the hand of
Victoria Hardcourt, who looks up smiling from the
impossible dimensions of the exquisite tiger skin rug and
into Ibby’s eyes, jumping his pulse.
Well, Miss Hardcourt. What a pleasure! On behalf of the
Kumaon Providence, India, welcome.
Thank you, Mr. Ibbotson. It is indeed a profound marvel
to be in your office in India. Head spinning, really, to
think that I was in my apartment in London just two days
ago.
Oh, now, isn’t this dashing about on airplanes just the
complete rage?! I’m very interested in the equipment that
provided your passage. Not five years ago your trip would
have taken the better part of two grueling months. Now
people are whisking about continentally. What’s next, the
moon?!
They laugh quite happily.
Well, let’s see. There was the de Havilland Dragon
Rapide from Heathrow to Paris to Istanbul, where I
changed carriers and picked up one of Air India’s
Douglas DC-3s. We added fuel and rotated passengers
before arriving, yesterday, in Delhi. Wonderful flying: It’s
true what they say about it being the only way to travel.
50
I find the Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasps to be the perfect
lullaby. Were you able to sleep over the noise of those
engines, Miss Hardcourt?
My only memory between Paris and Mashhad was the
bounce at landing. Please do call me Victoria, won’t you
Mr. Ibbotson?
Good God, yes! And you, please, in turn, must make
every effort to address me as Ibby. Everyone except my
dearest mother calls me Ibby.
Yes I will, Ibby.
Victoria, what say we take our refreshments from the
shade of my mirador? There could be no better place to
discuss your assignment and the impeccable Colonel Jim
Corbett, who now, by the way, will be receiving you at
his winter home in Kaladungi before travelling with you
by horseback to Champawat.
The veranda sounds perfectly lovely, Ibby.
Ibby gestures stiffly to the open French doors, the curtains
wavering softly in the morning breeze. He follows his
guest to a linen-topped table on the porch, jumping ahead
at the last moment to draw out the Chippendale campaign
chair and helping her into it, adjusting her to the setting
just so. He moves his seat close to her right side where
they both have excellent views of each other and a
courtyard alive with the colorful birds and the flowering
plants of perhaps the most meticulously kept garden in
Naini Tal.
Miss Kim returns with a silver serving tray. Her
magnificent globe of raven hair is pinned back chignon
style.
Staring in slanting light at the point where the dusting of
freckles across the bridge of Victoria’s delicate nose
disappears beneath her eyes, Ibby thanks and dismisses
Miss Kim.
Milk and sugar, Victoria?
Yes, please. Splashes of both, if you wouldn’t mind?
Ibby nods in affirmation and has almost sorted out the tea
before he speaks again.
So, your final telegraph before disembarking England
suggested that you might be traveling without a
photographer. Did that change?
51
I am afraid not, Ibby. No, my publisher, a delightful man
who now spends hours on end bemoaning the effect of
radio on newsprint, with flashes of paranoia regarding the
financial ruin that magazines represent to tabloids, could
not spare one photographer for this series. The company
has outfitted me with the latest German camera, American
film and the promise of docking my pay for any losses.
To just below the garnets that are her eyes – eyes colored
like slightly melted palls of fluorite crystal – Victoria
hoists her cup and announces:
Brisk cheers for leaner costs to market, your incredible
hospitality and India.
Hear, hear! All blessings! And to your safe return from
adventures with the wild beasts!
They sip tea and synchronically clink their cups back to
the saucers with Ibby discreetly swiping his mustache and
Victoria daubing the corners of her lips.
Yes, well, that’s quite impressive, Victoria: writer and
photographer. They must have doubled your
compensation and tripled the per diem.
Actually there is a bright young Oxford grad, whose
father is the paper’s comptroller, sitting at my desk in
London right now, probably using my dictionary for the
definition of nepotism.
Ibby doesn’t let on that he has noticed Victoria’s
aggressive remarks, her suddenly dialed up demeanor.
He’s completely smitten with her, starting with her
spectacularly pale green eyes. He needs to process her
through the office quickly, though, because she has many
hard miles to travel. And they both know that the sticky
business of her sport-hunting predispositions may yet
make for uncomfortable, if not volatile, conversation.
Say, did we ever enjoy your most recent treatise on Jack
the Ripper! Quite sensational, you know. All the talk.
Your editors must have great confidence to send you all
this way.
Or it might be that my presence here is a challenge to our
old-guard newsroom in Delhi.
Ibby and Victoria are alternately sipping their teas.
Before I ask what you mean by that, please do announce
52
your reaction to the local tea? It’s a Darjeeling, quite
colorful and rare in Europe. And two questions at once:
Have you ever seen a tree more beautiful than the jarul
there at the corner of the courtyard? It must have come to
bloom just this morning. You may know, as trees go, it is
officially recognized as the Pride of India.
It’s delightful, Ibby. Truly.
We – we as in the pool of journalists of the New London
Times – believe that our office in Delhi – in particular, the
shoddy cronyism of the reporting – has been corrupted by
the sport-hunting industry, she continues.
Ibby’s jaw tightens and juts slightly. He inhales noisily
through his nose, finding the sweet textures of the jarul.
Well, I say. Thank you for the compliments and please do
go on, Victoria.
Therefore, Ibby, I must confess that I am not here to write
another series of stories about how wonderful it is to hunt
tigers, or a fluff that further burnishes the hyperbole
surrounding Jim Corbett. To be very direct, Ibby, I am
here primarily to expose the atrocity of sport hunting,
which an ever-increasing citizenry, including writers,
publishers and influential members of ownership, have
come to believe is the most barbaric crime that can be
committed against nature.
Ibby is unfazed. He speaks unflinching right back into
Victoria’s lustrous eyes.
You know, Victoria, the jarul is a very sacred tree. Like
most all of our trees here in India, including the great
banyan, the national tree of India, the jarul is literally
worshiped by those indigenous to this spectacular
country. There’s really nothing to compare it to when it is
a fountain of catkin, as we see it here this morning.
Victoria, who had leaned forward for her confession, now
cups her tea with both hands and provocatively slumps to
the back of her chair. Ibby repositions, squaring his
shoulders to her. He lowers the lilting voice of his earliest
exchanges with Victoria to a softer and more confident
level.
We knew you were coming, Victoria. Well, no, not you
exactly, for who could have foreseen such an exquisite
53
scribe. But here you are, flying your prejudices,
brandishing the broadsword of moral justice. Oh, I do
appreciate your honesty and I, in turn, shall now be
completely candid with you.
Ibby clears his throat and fingers the blood-colored knot
of his silk tie.
When you leave India your first-hand accounts of your
time here will pay homage to Jim Corbett. You see, it will
be only his actions that will allow you to go on writing, to
move forward with your career and whatever else comes
of your life. He will give all of the blood of one man, as
necessary, to see that no harm befalls you during this
upcoming shikari.
I believe you to be a very noble and capable woman,
Victoria. I have every expectation that you will come
through this with each of your lovely arms – that you will
retire from India on your own delightful legs, if, indeed, it
is possible to ever completely leave these ancient cultures
and captivating landscapes. But your philosophies about
hunting will be dramatically altered by your experiences
here. You will be a changed woman, Victoria, which is
precisely why we are imposing you on Jim Corbett,
allowing you all-access to his last hunts for man-eaters.
To yet another level of stiffens and concern, Ibby leans
right up across from Victoria, his voice dropping to a
whisper.
More tea, Victoria?
Yes, please, one more. The tea is delicious.
Victoria’s shoulders shiver as she takes a more attentive
and aggressive posture.
And how dangerous could it be, Ibby? Stomping around
atop trained elephants with dozens of well-armed men,
hundreds of beaters and packs of hunting dogs? I may
not look it, but I am very good with a firearm. My father
trained champion pugilists in Hampshire. I grew up
striking the heavy bag. I have the kick of a red, twelve-
hand, fence-jumping mule.
Ibby shakes his head yes, then no, as Victoria establishes
herself as a relevant woman of action.
You will be one-on-one with Corbett and his
54
handful of askari. This is not an elephant beat from how-
dahs with a thousand pan-beating hulkaras, dear woman.
Only by staying very handy to Corbett, following his
instructions to the letter, are the odds favorable that you
will emerge from this unscathed.
Victoria’s eyes widen slightly and her lips part almost
imperceptibly.
It will be a completely new level of moribund, as in Jack
the Ripper becomes a sort of Porto Crayon children’s
romp across grandmother’s quilts, Ibby says. The
Champawat tigress has appalling appetites. She is a
remorseless killer who wields the massive strength to
quickly transfer a full-grown cow an uphill mile through
thick jungle.
Ibby clinches his teeth at the repulsions he has seen
personally, the things he knows.
Not drag it, Victoria, but carried – bombastically – in
strong canine teeth the length of your middle fingers.
Victoria opens her mouth to speak but Ibby raises his
hand slightly to her so that he may carry forth
uninterrupted.
The Thak panther is a mythically invisibly and ancient
ten-foot leopard that we have recently sequestered to a
five-hundred-square mile labyrinth of thickly wooded
canyon land. We did this by closing off three suspension
bridges above the Sarda River. Over the past seven, eight
years he has killed and eaten: Three frightfully well-
armed and experienced sportsmen who were actively
hunting him and one additional professional hunter – a
man of considerable multinational experience and
reputation with dangerous game. But now you must really
grasp this part of the story, because it is quite astonishing:
The Thak panther has killed an additional four-hundred
and thirty-six innocent Gujars, peaceful villagers who in
most every case never saw the Thak panther coming.
Victoria brings up her napkin to cover her mouth.
The Thak monster has the unprecedented distinction as
the only individual animal to have ever warranted in-
session discussions on the floor of the House of
Commons.
Yes, Victoria, if it is days and nights of blood-curdling
55
drama you seek, India is, forgive the cliché, precisely
your cup of tea.
There is a moment of collection before Victoria moves the
napkin back to her lap and begins speaking:
Why not live-trap the Champawat Tigress, the Thak
Leopard, and relocate them, Ibby? And why must the
Crown continue to oversee the destruction of one-
hundred-thousand Bengal tigers in India per annum?
Have you people lost your very souls?
At present, Victoria, we only have the resources and the
technologies to relocate the man-eaters to some version of
a pussycat heaven for the very naughty. As of bedtime
last evening, averaging three members or our farming and
ranching communities per week, this Champawat tigress
has eaten more than one-hundred-and-sixty people! Have
you ever really considered tigers and leopards just
roaming about in the evenings, Victoria?
No, Victoria, please hold your reply, because I know your
answer. It was poor form to even ask the question. Of
course, you have not. Well, we aim to expose you to that
on this outing. Now, regarding your question about the
sport hunting of tigers, the answer is not complicated if
you accept the principles of science, religion and
accounting.
Ibby motions to both Victoria’s cup and the teapot, which
is declined with the shake of her head. He helps himself to
another spot of tea, adjusting the Windsor knot of his tie
and finally looking back deeply into Victoria’s
smoldering eyes.
Do go on, Ibby. I’m anxious to see how one justifies
grand-scale slaughter of the priceless while sipping his
morning’s cups.
Yes. Well. The male-versus-female tiger harvest this year
in my districts will be at a ratio of seventy-five to twenty-
five percent, allowing for mistakes and whatever
additional number of depredations we issue to targeting
problem tigresses.
For the fifth consecutive year, the total number of tigers
on license for all of India has been reduced, in this case to
no more than thirty-six-thousand tigers. Leopards are still
considered
56
vermin and I would hope to be dead and gone myself
before they are classified any other way. The persecuted
leopard will always remain quite capable of inheriting the
earth.
Victoria Hardcourt is noticeably, sincerely, stunned by
Ibby’s cavalier comments.
You did not say that you were condemning thirty-six
thousand tigers to death this year, did you, Mr. Ibbotson?!
Yes, quite. In fact, our biological surveys suggest that
there are more than a quarter million adult tigers in India
today. The loss of twenty-thousand males would have no
impact on our long-term tiger population, which is
actually – quickly – outgrowing any number of the key
habitats that tigers have already lost to civilization,
progress.
You simply must stop it.
Which one, Victoria: the killing of tigers or the impact of
human encroachment?
Perhaps we might start with the extermination of tigers.
Oh, good. I’m not in charge of manifest destiny. The
machine, you know, is over that, the processing of India
for the arrival of one billion people.
The other business, the hunting of tigers, is impossible to
completely stop. Not on my watch, anyway. You see tiger
hunting is rousing business these days: Ten million
pounds sterling last year in total tourism, steady thirty-
plus-percent increases in year-to-year net profits with the
prospect of doubling itself every year beyond Nineteen
Forty-Five.
Well, I hope to stop it, Mr. Ibbotson – Ibby. This
wholesale slaughter of the innocents must end.
There’s really nothing wholesale about it. It’s super-
inflated luxury. You see, as an example, exactly sixteen
Americans are in my districts this month hunting tigers.
They are paying fifteen-thousand U.S. dollars each, plus
licenses and gratuities, for the jollies of living in tents for
three weeks and, perhaps,
contracting some incurably wicked disease, malaria tropic
for instance. Maybe one of them will be struck by a king
cobra or receive an old-fashioned mauling by what you
must envision to be stuffed, perfumed animal toys among
the pillows.
57
Anyway, on average, only three of those Americans will
kill tigers and, so, those dead tigers, hopefully old, non-
breeding males.
Likely shot by non-breeding males, Victoria interrupts.
Oh, dear, you would be surprised, Victoria, by the young
wives and the lively mistresses of these moneyed
industrialists and financers. Shocking. Anyway, as I was
saying.
Ibby clears his throat, cutting his eyes at Victoria.
Anyway, those three dead tigers have a value of two-
hundred-and-sixty-thousand U.S. dollars to British India.
It’s one of the ways we fund things like tiger research,
anti-poaching operations, non-hunting promotional
activities like you, vaccinations, food, fuel. Well, suffice
to say that hunting tigers is a bit like running a brothel:
The hunters come and they go and, largely, you are left
with all of the things you had before they came.
Yes, certainly, there’s the science card and the financials,
the money. But what sort of religion allows for the
murdering of innocent tigers? Is there something in the
New Testament about the sacrament of beautiful, innocent
animals to the rich?! Have I missed that Ibby?!
Maybeso, Victoria. It’s that passage where God gives us
dominion over all of His beasts. It’s early on in the Good
Book, the part where He first becomes instructional, puts
us in charge of managing His plants and His animals. You
know, where He sort of commands us to worship Him
while we pro-create, prosper, manage His investments.
What about the explicit ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, Ibby?
The hunting of tigers will stop, Victoria, but not for
awhile. What crushes out hunting the magnificent Tigris
Regalis is the exponential ground swell of human
population mixed with the blasted loss of tiger habitat,
and the habitats of its prey species. The black-market
poaching of tigers, of all wildlife, is appalling. Maybe
there’s forty years of legitimate tiger hunting left or,
sadly, probably only about half that.
So had God just thought to say ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill
Thirty-Six Thousand Tigers’ perhaps you would have
placed fewer of these beautiful creatures on license this
year? Is that
58
the logic, Ibby?! My God, He, God, was too busy creating
tigers to ever consider you killing them by the railcar.
Ibby, the slaughter of thirty-six thousand tigers is
incomprehensible. It makes me want to slap you.
Very bad form, you know, to sharply project tiger
fatalities as one mountainous pile of dead tigers, Victoria.
Not the right picture. Please forgive me.
What I can envision is your retirement party, Victoria.
What fraud to send you off as the first female Publisher of
the Times, throngs of miscalculating well-wishers
toasting your tireless efforts to save the tiger from legal
hunting. But I do hope it’s not like that. I’d rather like to
think that you will come away from your first trip to India
with an appreciation for modern wildlife management and
the hunter’s key role in the conservation of the species,
individually and collectively. Victoria looks to the jarul
tree then back to Ibby, who says:
One more thing, Victoria: how tragic will it be when an
Alpha predator that was once so wide-ranging and
completely dominate, so inscrutable as the tiger, becomes
so drawn down and marginalized that it cannot be hunted,
or even exist outside of some sort of enclosure?
It will be unspeakable, Ibby. But I don’t buy it, which is
to say that with all due respect, your lecture sounds like a
contrivance, like the twisting of convenient truths
designed to ease the miserable consciences of the serial
killers of wildlife.
Ibby smiles wryly, brushing the tablecloth smooth. He
locks on Victoria’s right eye, her master eye.
I’m betting that you will come to it, Victoria. This takes a
vibrant intellectual who is active and well rounded. It
takes someone wholly germane and beyond the reach of
the anti-hunting money; someone with experiences in the
field.
Oh, Ibby, do go on with the flattery. Yes, thank you.
Nevertheless, my resolve is great on this matter. When I
think of you dolling out sport-hunting licenses for the
destruction of so many lovely tigers, I agree with that
German philosopher, the one who believed that there was
a God but that He certainly must have died.
Ibby diverts his eyes. He ticks them across Victoria
59
and resets them mainly to the bridge of her freckled nose.
He has found that her eyes – when taken squarely and for
even moderate periods of time – are simply too
remarkable to bear.
Gentleman Jim Corbett will help with all of this. He’s a
perfectionist of woods lore, a first-class naturalist and a
freakish hunter.
Ibby folds his napkin and returns it to the starched,
bleached faultlessness of the tablecloth.
These are to be his last hunts for rogue tigers and
leopards. Jimmy hasn’t killed a big run-of-the-mill
predator in years. He’s set his retirement date and he will
be immediately moving to a plantation in the green hills
of Kenya, Africa. Jim has alluded, privately, of course,
that his nerves have been shot out by his work with these
man-eating cats.
Victoria recoils and throws back her head, feigning a
deep, wonderful laugh, exposing the carotid artery of her
tender neck.
Smashing! So I’ll be hunting man-eating carnivores on
foot with a fellow with the yips. An old man on his way
out to African pastures. The headline, please – Wildlife
Protectionist Killed by Corbett’s Last Tiger.
Ibby smiles and rests his clasped hands on the edge of the
table.
He decided some time ago to move to colonial Africa
where he plans to write books, grow tea, run a few cattle
and keep his gardens safe from weeds and antelopes. He
and his sister, Margret, will be living in Africa soon after
your shikari. We will miss them and India will never be
the same without Jim Corbett.
India is well beyond the same even now isn’t it, Ibby?
This place is not the India Corbett knew so well as a boy.
I think that he must leave soon, so that he can still
remember its shine and its freshness. He must be the first
wave of abandonment by those of British descent who
love it most. The exodus of the damned, in Corbett’s
tiger-killing case, before the mysterious footpaths up
through the clouds are the roadways of trucks and cars.
Yes. Many of us would prefer to be gone before liberated
India experiences its independence from British rule,
agrees
60
Ibby. That’s coming, and if the French Revolution teaches
us one thing it is that the wildlife and wildland of India
will be decimated once we pushed on.
Corbett is a saint, as you’ll see. He is a god to thousands
of pastoralists in the remote reaches of the Himalayan
foothills. But the rest of your perceptiveness is as
shockingly clear as your karma, Victoria. In meaning and
sound, karma, of course, must be of the most delightful of
all the great Hindu terms.
With her hands to the seat of her chair, Victoria now
bores deep into Ibby’s eyes. She’s returned to the strong
calmness that most becomes her.
I’ll have to think about all that, Ibby. I must weigh it for
sincerity and for the blushing personal effect it has on me,
and for how your obsequiousness may frame my
assignment. I have preconceived notions about all this, of
which you are keenly aware. I’d prefer to keep them at
least until I meet my first man-eating tiger.
That has been arranged, Victoria. Oh, boy, do we have a
tiger saved for you. And as it is past the noon hour in
London, I propose a proper toast to brace you against a
long day of hard riding. You will be led first to Corbett’s
winter home in Kaladungi by the preeminent horseman of
the Ninth Bengal Lancers, our frightfully able Captain
Jack E. Coogan, our very best man.
I would drink a scotch to that, Ibby. Let’s make it a tall
one, so we can salute India and the gracious
accommodations that you and yours have held out to the
Times and this humble correspondent. Thank you.
Ibby excuses himself and whisks smartly away, returning
quickly with two iced scotches. In his absence Victoria
has observed a strutting peacock move in and out from
behind the catkin of the jarul.
Yes, much better to start this part of the trip with a dash of
fortification. The travel now becomes completely
murderous. The Tigress of Champawat is a demanding
ride beyond Kaladungi. I’ll see to it that there’s an
unopened bottle of gin
61
for your saddlebags and another one for you to pad away
in your valise.
Ibby hands the drink to Victoria, setting his on the table
and readjusting his chair so that he will be just a bit closer
to his guest. Leaning to her, his voice is low and
velveteen.
Would there be anything else, Victoria? Are there other
needs that would help you cope with life in the open?
Thank you, Ibby. Yes, there is perhaps one more thing.
Name it. Just say it.
Victoria stretches her back provocatively and takes the
big braided rope of red hair in her hands and holds it off
her neck for a second before letting it fall softly, leaning
in to Ibby to whisper:
Could I please have loan of, something, well, something.
Their faces are now inches apart. Ibby’s index finger
comes up to his lips and he must catch himself from
mistakenly moving it onto hers. Victoria nods slowly,
leaning in, perhaps just winking her right eye.
Yes, I have it: The Model Number Three Light Weight,
Two-Seventy-Five Rigby, he says. It is my wife Jean’s
rifle.The boys will pack it in a saddle scabbard, a
matching box of one-hundred-and-seventy-grain
cartridges against the bottle of gin in your saddle bags.
Therewith a complementary hunting license for one tiger,
just in case you need it.
You’ve read my mind, says Victoria.
She carefully brings up her glass, admiring the midday
sun bending among the alcohol and ice. Ibby follows her
lead.
To the glories of India, she says softly.
And to the blessing, Ibby agrees, of seeing this once, at
least, before it is gone.
Victoria drinks fully half of the highball, pauses, and
finishes it. Ibby struggles to down his in three quick shots,
returning his empty to the table just behind that of
Victoria’s. They stare at each other smiling.
62
65
54
The Pangolin Canyon Event
The high country above the thin air of Champawat begins
near the edge of the troposphere. Falling back southwest
towards town, below the ice-capped promontories of the
Himalayas, the forbidding vertical of a no-man’s land
guarded by eternal snowfields and glaciers, arises a
tropical woodland of oceanic immensity. It is the foothills
of the Mountains of the Gods.
One mile northeast of Champawat a mother pangolin with
young comes snuffling along noisily through the sun-
dappled forest, occasionally turning over leaves to search
for insects and other morsels. From some middle distance,
the call of a tiger rolls through the forest. There is no roar
on earth to match it in volume or innate ferocity.
The pangolins freeze as one. They test the air cautiously
with their absurd noses before hurrying away downhill.
Thunder rolls over the sound of the tiger’s next roar.
Wind stirs the trees.
Beyond earshot of the tiger, Rui, district ranger Sergeant
Grant Fitzgerald and Corbett’s primary Garhwalis,
Dhanban and Dharmanand, are in lengthening shadows
searching near the snapped end of a thick rope tied to the
trunk of a stout cannonball tree. The leaves at the base of
the tree are scarcely disturbed. And though they’ve been
inspecting the location for some time, there is yet no sign
of what has become of the three-hundred-pound bullock
that had been attached to the rope.
63
The damn cow has just disappeared, eh? Fitzgerald says.
Probably broke its lead and wandered off. Well, so,
nothing left to do now but trot right back to Champie.
Return in the morning with more people. Be dark soon.
Rui, who is uphill from the sergeant and the cannonball
tree, looks frowningly back at Fitz and waits for him to
stop talking, to look in his direction. When the sergeant
eventually casts about, spying Rui squatting in a clearing
of maidenhair fern, Rui flags the officer up to his position.
Fitz and the Garhwalis collect at Rui, who nods at a
depression in the soft ground. Fitz slowly bends closer
and closer to the spot that interests Rui. He is flatly unable
to distinguish anything until the Indian spreads his fingers
across the center of the track and quickly removes his
hand. And then it gushes up to the gasping Fitz.
There before his eyes the indentions of the toes and the
pad, the whole deep forepaw print of a tiger, rises up from
what had been a blank canvas of detritus. The
circumference of it is mind boggling to Fitz, who, as a
boy, once saw a tiger distantly at a zoo.
It is the tiger’s right front foot, Sahib, Rui says quietly.
Rui stands with the green leaf of a clerodendron in his
hand. Near its center, a gooey white droplet slides
downward across the veins of the leaf as he tilts it for the
sergeant’s inspection. Fitz shrugs his shoulders in
question.
I believe it is a pinpoint of spinal fluid from the neck of
the cow, Sahib.
Fitz is made ashen, dizzied and slightly nauseated by the
proclamation. He’s shaky, too, with sweat now splashing
down through the center of his lower back. He spreads his
legs and bends his knees, springing on them like an
athlete preparing to run. He pulls off an expression of
hyper lucidness, wiping the sweat off of his face with a
white kerchief. He looks Rui in the eyes, half whispering:
I have no training in irregular warfare, or in the hunting of
man-eaters. I do not intend to follow that track, or come
along as you follow it. Or proceed, with or without you, in
what strikes me as a northerly direction. I am seconds
away
64
from vigorously setting sail for Champie and I strongly
recommend that you boys...
Fitz realizes that there’s something of significant size
stirring in the nullah above them.
The men begin listening carefully, readying the party’s
pair of rifles. As the sound of movement grows stronger,
the roar of a tiger comes faintly up beyond this closer
thing. The voice of the tiger has reached them from way
up the side canyon, well beyond where Rui had left the
bullock standing forlorn and perplexed; well north of the
four men who now position alertly in a vacuum of forest.
They are maybe three miles from the pasture-ringed
jungle where, weeks before, a pair of village boys –
brothers, in fact – had been killed in numbingly rapid
succession, victimized like nestlings by the Tigress of
Champawat.
Directly, the pangolins appear shuffling hurriedly from
the tongue of clerodendron.
With the buttstock of the rifle still to his shoulder, Fitz
clicks on the safety catch of Corbett’s .275 Rigby bolt-
action rifle and tilts the muzzle skyward. He smiles. Then
he squints with concern deeper into the jungle. Behind the
pangolins comes something heavy and determined, a
downhill shockwave through the understory.
He has leveled the rifle as the black beast barrels out at
them from close range, as though the shrubs have spat it
out. All motion is compressed and blurred and then the
cracking percussion from the Rigby seems to excitedly
scramble every molecule within a radius of ninety feet.
A gigantic wild boar penetrates the frontier of this
distortion, cartwheeling dead between Rui, who’d held his
ground, and Dhanban and Dharmanand, who’d buried
themselves headlong into a patch of maidenhair.
It is the sort of spectacular kill that most gun writers live
to novelize. The bristling boar features a smoking pock
the diameter of a shilling that oozes blood and matter just
above its left eye. In death the pig seems to be smiling
madly about the
cruel tricks that sometimes befall even the greatest of the
jungle masters.
65
Fitz unsteadily lowers to one knee, the butt of the gun
resting beside him. He begins gagging up parts of his
breakfast.
In the short time it takes for Fitz to again feel himself
each of the Garhwalis stand shouldering the quarters of
the pig, butchered with kukri knives, whose fresh
backstraps fill Rui’s haversack.
Sergeant Sahib, let us move on now so that we might feast
on the meat of this pig tonight in Champawat. Tomorrow
we should sleep into the morning before walking back up
here to the home of the pangolins, where you may shoot
the Tigress of Champawat in the eye, as you have done
for the boar. Jim Corbett will be very proud of us. That
will be that.
Can you stand, so that we might begin walking?
Rui and Fitzgerald are seen in silhouette, the perspective
angling upwards from ground level, up through the challis
of limbs and leaves to a patch of partly cloudy sky. Rui
has his hand on Fitzgerald’s shoulder.
66
57
58
Unsettling Bachelors
The very old Brittney spaniel barks three times in an
exacting measure, almost politely, at Victoria Hardcourt
and Jack Evans Coogan, who stand their horses near the
front entryway of Corbett’s Kaladungi country estate.
High-backed rocking chairs decorate a veranda wrapping
the home. A brick walkway bisects two massive,
blooming flowerbeds that extend well beyond either side
of the front of the house.
Jack and Victoria look up from the dog and the flowers,
respectively, as Corbett’s slightly younger sibling,
Margret “Maggie,” now the middle-aged matriarch of the
family, comes through the heavy teak double doors of the
home. She welcomes her guests by name from the landing
before descending to take up the headstall of Victoria’s
chestnut mount.
Maggie casts into the afternoon sun for Victoria’s eyes,
extending her arm for a handshake.
I am Maggie Corbett, Jim’s sister.
Hello, Maggie Corbett, says Victoria. Thank you. What
an exquisite property up in the complete wilds of India.
Why, thank you, Victoria. It was my mother and father’s.
The thought of having sold it off is deeply troubling to us
all. We are too far out of town to entertain much, and we
are leaving soon to make a new home in Africa, so please
excuse the present situation. And don’t mind Robin, Jim’s
dog.
67
We cannot leave India until Robin has been buried there
in the flower garden among his favorite bones.
Robin has gone creaking over to the shrubs at the foot of
the steps, precariously, dryly, hiking his back leg before
settling on his side in the grass.
Jim would soon be telling you exactly how many times
Robin has saved his life were he here, as planned, to meet
you.
Maggie shoots a look at Jack, who is tying his horse to the
almost unused hitching post, anticipating his reaction to
the news that Jim Corbett has moved on.
Then Colonel Corbett is not here, Miss Maggie?
No, Captain, he is not. He asked me to tell you that he
will meet you at Hardwar, or on at the forest station in
Champawat. He handed Bali to his uncles at the Tanakur
switch and he stopped here long enough for a cup of tea
and a change of clothes.
How is Bali?
Jim says that Bali is ruined.
That’s a damn pity; though I do expect Bali to pull on
through based on snippets Mr. Ibbotson was able to share
before Victoria and I left town.
I am afraid that Bali’s condition has sort of flummoxed
Jim. I hope you’re right about Bali, Captain, and please
excuse me for not being more personable with you. It is a
pure delight to see you again, young man.
It is so very good to see you, too, Miss Maggie. You look
wonderful, as always, and thank you for accommodating
us tonight.
Well, anytime, soldier, anytime.
Maggie steps back so she may better address both the
Captain and Victoria.
You are right as the mail regarding your timing for
dinner. We will eat once you’ve had a chance to freshen
up. I’ll send Harkwar to tend the mounts and the
packhorse. Now, what say we have a look at the rooms,
the soaps and the towels before we dine?
68
RUI AND THE GARHWALIS are seen sweeping
the bottom room of a small, two-story bungalow at the
northern limits of Hardwar. Corbett peeks around the door
frame unseen, watching them briefly before roaring like a
tiger, which startles the men terribly: Dhanban leaps in
blind panic, smacking full-body into a back wall;
Dharmanand and Rui tightly scrunch and duck.
No man in the world can produce the scalding call of the
tiger with the resonance and the inflection of Jim Corbett.
The reaction from his men to the blast of air from
Corbett’s lungs soon dizzies them all with laughter. Using
the backs of his hands, Corbett clears the tears from his
eyes.
I am truly – sincerely – so very sorry to have done that,
fellows. That is not me at all. I do apologize for lowering
myself to such mischief and for then laughing like a dirty
hyena. Shahbash! Your call of the tiger is as convincing
as the tiger himself, Sahib.
Very sorry, Rui. Dreadfully poor form given the mission,
says Corbett.
It is fine, Sahib. Once we knew that no one of us would
be carried away by a tiger, when we observed you
laughing, and we began laughing, it has been refreshing.
While you could not know to look at it now this room was
filthy with dust and cobwebs when we began. The
Tahsildar of Hardwar made these rooms available to us
for the night. Pigs would not have slept in this place
before we cleaned it.
It seems quite livable now, Rui. Thanks to you and
Dhanban and Dharmanand for bringing it up to speed.
Rui and the Garhwalis file out the doorway past Corbett
and into daydown’s pink of evening. Corbett claps his
hand to Rui’s shoulder as he passes, rising a heavy plume
of dust up from the khadi cloth of Rui’s shirt. When the
men get out in the courtyard they slap and rustle at their
clothing, sending up storms of particles that take the
breeze as though their shirts and trousers were
smoldering.
There is a place not far up the road to wash ourselves in
the stream, says Rui. We will bring water for tea and
cooking.
69
We will eat and be prepared to leave here for Champawat
tomorrow as soon as there is light enough to see.
We are of one mind on this, Rui. Say, I doubt there’ll be
any trouble, but it’s the crocodiles you don’t expect, you
know, that make the most trouble. Take the rifle, man. It
will soon be very dark.
MAGGIE, VICTORIA AND JACK are enjoying the last of a
bottle of French wine after roasted chicken, cream corn,
fried sweet potatoes and buttered scones. Earlier, before
dinner, Victoria had noticed a picture on the wall that she
now excuses herself to fetch, returning to study it
carefully under the light of the candelabra. It is the image
of Corbett and the Bachelor of Powalgarh, a tiger
considered by most experts to be history’s top big-game
hunting trophy.
That is Jim, of course, with the tiger who Percy Wyndham
named the Bachelor of Powalgarh, says Maggie. Jim
credits Commissioner Wyndham with knowing more
about Royal Bengal tigers than any man who ever lived in
India. But it was Jim who killed the Bachelor when
Wyndham and so many others could not. The Bachelor
was the most beautiful tiger I have ever seen, perhaps
because there was so much of him.
Ten-feet, seven-inches over the curves, tip-to-tip, nose-to-
tail, announces Jack. He was chipped at quite
unsuccessfully by plenty of very capable sportsmen for
more than ten years. A real ghost ship of the forest, eh,
Miss Maggie?
Maggie and Jack subtly raise their wine stems to the
gallantry of both Jim Corbett and the Bachelor of
Powalgarh, nodding ever so indiscreetly. Victoria shifts
her focus to each of them in turn and straightens in her
chair and clears her throat.
Was the Bachelor a man-eater, Miss Maggie?
No, Victoria, the Bachelor kept a very natural diet. Jim
considered the Bachelor to have been the perfect
neighbor, the truest of country gentlemen. You are sitting
near the very center of what was believed to have been the
Bachelor’s home range for perhaps twenty-five years.
7o
I believe that Jim’s expression in the picture you are
holding to be the face of pure remorse.
You see, Jim had finished with non-man-eaters years
before the Bachelor, after falling short with the renowned
Temple Tiger, who lived up near where you will be going.
The Priest of Dabidura told Jim that the Temple Tiger
could not be killed. Jim proved the old priest right,
missing the cat twice at close range.
Regarding the Bachelor, Jim got caught up in what he’d
heard of the tiger’s size and when he found him, quite by
accident one afternoon with Robin, he went back the next
morning and...
Slaughtered the Bachelor of Powalgarh, exclaims
Victoria, her green eyes ablaze.
Maggie clears her throat, takes a sip of wine and quickly
wraps up the story of the hunt for the Bachelor of
Powalgarh:
Oh, yes, the Bachelor was a sweet old grey-whiskered
tomcat with wild, clear eyes. But getting him to pose for
that picture you’re holding was a genuine complexity, a
study in dread that we shall now save for another time and
audience.
I do wish you well, Victoria, and I do hope you will come
visit us in Africa.
Maggie turns to Jack, who has used the women’s
discussion to stare shamelessly for long periods at each of
Victoria’s physical highlights, a ruse that has, of course,
been noticed peripherally by both women.
The animals will be saddled, packed and ready for travel
before dawn, Maggie concludes. Our housekeeper, dear
Kunthi, will wake you both in time for a light breakfast in
the kitchen. Harkwar will have placed cold meats, cheeses
and bread in the saddlebags. Please lay whatever mail and
telegrams you may have here on the table. I will see that a
runner delivers them to the post office for you tomorrow.
It will be your last chance to communicate with the
outside world for a good while.
Maggie is quickly to her feet. They all stand, including
the house servant, Harkwar, who has been seated at the
edge of the candlelight near the double doorway to the
great room.
71
Maggie first addresses Jack:
Godspeed, you young and lovely ranger. I hope to see you
again before my departure, but, if not, I will count the
days until you’ve made your way to visit us in Africa.
They take each other’s hands.
I cannot quite believe that you and Colonel Jim are really
leaving India. I will miss you terribly; the whole of India
will mourn this loss.
Jack bends low and hugs Maggie. They part and look into
each other’s eyes and smile. Maggie’s shoulders drop as
she turns from Jack and moves to Victoria, who speaks
preemptively:
Please forgive my rudeness. Please accept my heartfelt
gratitude for your hospitality and your many
considerations. Thank you.
Oh, please, dear. Yes, you’re welcome and, yes, apology
accepted, Victoria, but truly an apology is not necessary.
Your opinions matter more than most, because they are
educated and far-reaching ones. Please know that the
Corbetts share many – most – of your attitudes towards
tigers. We cannot, however, stop what is happening to
India and the terrible effect that it will have on tigers, on
all of India’s wildlife – and her people.
The road you and Jack came up to reach this house will be
paved before year’s end. Jim Corbett can kill a tiger. He
can hunt them alone and fairly, with his feet right in their
hot tracks. But seeing tigers smashed by logging trucks –
trucks hauling the last of the old timbers, which were only
seedlings when the Dutch pirates found India...
Maggie’s brown eyes search a space of nothingness in the
corner of room and she sighs heavily, shaking her head as
though to clear it.
Well, I do look forward to reading your articles, Victoria.
Have a magnificent shikari, Victoria Hardcourt. I am sure
that we will meet again one day. We will have many
things to share. For now, however, good night, good luck
and goodbye.
JIM CORBETT IS AWAKENED in the cold, milky blue light
of
dawn to find an animated silhouette rocking dangerously
close to the head of his campaign cot. He snicks off the
safety of the 1911 pistol,
72
which is in his hand beneath the covers. Corbett’s eyes
flicker, even-
tually focusing on the hooded profile of a ghoul smoking
a cigarette.
I have been admiring your fine skin. I’ve found you
sleeping in my house.
Good morning, says Corbett.
I wonder? Should I reach out grabbing at you, would you
shoot me with that pistol under the sheet?
No breeze rustles through the open windows or the door
of the room. The still air is preponderant with cold. The
unanswered call of a jungle cock comes faintly from the
east.
Corbett clicks the pistol again, reversing the safety catch
of the handgun without stirring his bedding.
No, sir, I would not. Initially, I thought you might be a
tiger.
The leper laughs softly and wetly, bringing up the melted
stumps of his rag-wrapped hands, a mix of nubbins and
missing fingers – the outline of a horrible bleeding socket
through the bandages where his right thumb should have
been. He pulls back his hood to expose the souring meat
of his pathetic face. One of his ears is long gone and the
other, dangling precariously, could have dropped away
completely as the shroud whisks across it.
When I was a child the priests told me that twice I’d lived
as beautiful tigers; fishes, too, swift, bright-colored fishes
of the oceans and the streams. From the time I could first
speak until I was a young man enjoying the miracle of a
good family I meditated for understanding. I prayed to the
gods with more belief than any priest. Now I find comfort
in questioning the value of priests. What could priests
know of who we were or who we are?
The leper sways unsteadily to the stumps of his feet. He
uses the black tip of his tongue to push the cigarette from
his decomposing lips. It ticks against the floor, sparks and
rolls a few inches as Rui moves silently to the open, east-
facing doorway behind the leper.
Until I can find someone to buy the house, or shoot me,
you and your men are welcome here. It’s a fine house
built by priests and true believers. What I could not know
when I lived in it was that it would become a house of
despair. The spirit inhabitants who found my family and
besieged us here also followed us away. I’m not one to
believe bad luck seethes in the floors, the walls and the
roofs of houses; trees and rocks, perhaps, not houses.
73
I am sorry for the loss of your friend.
The leper had been shuffling slowly towards the door,
speaking finally to both Corbett and Rui. With this last
refrain he is past Rui and into the dawn, which snaps on
all at once to the bright lumen of pre-sunrise, abruptly
energized with the high-pitched calls from multiple
species of many birds.
Rui stares at the floor for a long moment before
quizzically catching Corbett’s eye. He flashes away in
pursuit of the leper.
CORBETT IS LEAVING the courtyard of the cursed house,
a bar of soap in his right hand and a towel wrapped
around the receiver of his W. J. Jeffery .450-400 Nitro
Express double rifle in his left. Rui returns, equally on
mission to decamp.
Was he speaking of Bali?
I could not find the leper, Sahib. I hoped that if I at least
found a piece of him, the poor man’s ear, it would
confirm his direction. Perhaps he became a tiger or a bird.
More likely a mushroom, the poor bugger.
Rui smiles before shaking his head disapprovingly “no”
while studying his own bare feet in contemplation of
Corbett’s black humor.
Yes, Rui. Terrible. I’m becoming irascible. And right now
I’m hastily hopping upstream to scrub off the dust and the
dandruff. To my thinking there’s no greater threat than
leprosy. More than once as a lad I cried myself to sleep
wondering how and when I would contract it. If I don’t
get it now I must be immune.
Please inform the men that they are under orders to join
us in the bathing, the washing of clothes and bedding,
continues Corbett. That will give them an honest chance
at simple desertion, rather than the humiliation of being
shot by me for not following my directive.
Yes, Sahib. Of course they will protest vigorously. I
believe after some consideration they will comply, so as
to stay with us.
Corbett salutes Rui with the bar of soap, smiling as he
74
turns for the road and the stream. He pulls up short for a
bit more discussion:
They will say that I am using a brief stay in the leper’s
dwelling as an excuse for bathing. They will curse and
despise me. If you offer to give them their leave with pay
then it will be their choice on the soap and water, and I
will not be obliged to shoot someone else before
breakfast.
Please do come right along, Rui. The deadline to find this
needle in a stack of needles, Her Highness, the Tigress of
Champawat, has become quite pernicious. Every college
man knows that bad luck is always just there in the back
corners patiently weighing every opportunity.
Bad luck is counting on this expedition.
Middle-aged men hurrying along after the last of their
tigers must seem to bad luck like an easy chance to get
well.
JACK IS SITTING on his roan in the middle of a dusk-
darkening road only a few miles, he reckons, from the
village of Champawat. The lead rope of the packhorse is
wrapped around his saddlehorn where he balances his
rifle. Jack is thinking about his next cigarette and carnally
of women, holding the reins of Victoria Harcourt’s mount
while she tends to nature’s call on the ground above him
towards the village.
Victoria, emerging from the roadside, steps into full view
of Jack, who quickly returns her beautiful smile. Victoria
waves and begins to watch her feet as she moves forward.
She is about to say something witty and flirtatious to Jack,
who sits the mare and wonders at the fantasia that is this
woman, Victoria Hardcourt, when a large object flies in
from the darkening forest to smash among the mass of
horses, two of which are struck completely down, as if the
earth itself has been torn from beneath them.
Victoria’s perception of the attacker is peripheral – her
mind perceives the monstrous beast as something from a
folktale, chimerical and avian. As one, the horses cry out
viciously with the obscene pitch of heavy animals
unaccustomed to disastrous predation, a felt vibration that
unsteadies the legs of
75
Victoria Hardcourt. She wilts to her knees in the sandy
track, her own screams lost in the horrific anguish of the
horses’.
The deafening concussion of Jack’s heavy rifle and the
angry whine of a tumbling bullet end the chaos almost
instantly, which is replaced with the rapidly diminishing
sounds of cracking brush and choking struggle.
Victoria gathers herself and walks to the point where
seconds before stood three horses and a rider. There is a
fresh kind of silence unlike any calm before or since as
she begins through the tunnel in the undergrowth created
by the bowling over of Jack and the horses – a distinct
groove of snapped and uprooted saplings that is new to
her, new to these woods. Days after her return to
consciousness, Victoria’s only memory of this brief
journey down the darkening hole to Jack was brushing
aside a heavy vine that she discovered was snotty with
blood.
MISS HARDCOURT? Miss Hardcourt?
Victoria’s eyes flutter open.
Miss Hardcourt, I’m Jim Corbett. My men and I were just
minutes behind all of this.
Yes, of course, what a relief; for a moment I thought you
might be God Himself.
Victoria looks wide-eyed to her left but Corbett is ready
for that. He takes her chin with his fingers and draws her
eyes quickly back to his in the bright moon glow.
Jack Evans Coogan has very recently been evacuated to
the hospital in Naini Tal where he will completely recover
from his slight injuries. Fully recover, he says with
emphasis. He will be fine. Better than before, actually,
with his newly heightened senses for stalking ambush,
plus, perhaps, the smallest, straightest, most rakish hint of
a scar right here on his
cheekbone: the sort of irresistible disfigurement that
makes all the ladies uncomfortable.
And I believe that you must have struck your head. Can
you stand, Miss Hardcourt?
76
I am relieved that Jack is alive. Therefore, Colonel, if
none of the blood that I am sloshing around in is mine,
then perhaps I momentarily lost consciousness. The shock
of the attack and the condition of its victims.
The blood is from Jack’s beloved Blixen, Corbett says.
He accidentally shot into him when the string was pulled
down: an abominating case of friendly fire. But, as
always, it could have been fully ten-million-times worse.
Corbett begins helping Victoria to her feet, verbally
outlining the evening before them.
Miss Harcourt, I would please like you to go on to
Champawa with my gun bearer, Rui Singh. He’ll take
good care of you. We have impeccable shikari
accommodations there. Rui will prepare a hot bath for you
while you enjoy a proper fortification and a scrumptious
dish before your bedtime. Most importantly, Rui will see
that you are only awakened well up in the morrow by the
happy ringing of birdsong.
So, what say, Miss Victoria Harcourt? Would you be up
for a brisk walk in the moonlight?
When you put it that way, Colonel, how can I resist?
Corbett carefully leads Victoria back to the moonshine-
dappled road where Rui waits at attention, Corbett’s bolt-
action Rigby at right-shoulder arms.
Miss Victoria Hardcourt, please allow me to present Rui
Singh – decorated jungle fighter, award-winning
bartender, master chef, valet and renowned campfire
philosopher. Rui, Miss Victoria Hardcourt – writer,
voyager, adventure survivalist.
Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Singh.
The pleasure is distinctly mine, Miss Hardcourt. With this
quartering wind, I will walk to your right. We shall go
now?
Victoria robotically moves to Rui in the direction
suggested by his gesture. She turns quickly back to
Corbett after a few steps.
Oh, Colonel, my manners have been frazzled: thank you.
Will you be joining us for dinner?
77
No, I’m afraid it will be the noon meal tomorrow, Miss
Hardcourt. Meantime, I hope to recover your lost baggage
and persecute a horse thief. As terrible as the late
afternoon was for our party, it has opened a very exciting
new possibility.
I am not a tiger hunter, Colonel Corbett, but I am struck
with the notion that following such a dangerous animal
into the wild night is perfectly mad.
I am a tiger hunter, Miss Harcourt, and you are correct.
Victoria backs away in the silvery mottling of moonlight,
her eyes fixed to the position where Corbett’s face is
completely blacked out by the shadow of his pith helmet,
the stiff brim of which he tips with the hand that’s not
clasp to his .450-400 double rifle.
Cheerio, Miss Harcourt. See you tomorrow, he whispers.
Victoria. Please, Colonel, address me by my Christian
name, Victoria. Would you?
Victoria.
He says it deliciously, almost provocatively, happy that
she cannot see the heat prickle his cheeks. He nods and
tips his helmet again as she walks backwards a few steps
and turns to begin traveling with Rui to Champawat. They
wonder, Rui, too, if Victoria will be the last word spoken
by Colonel Jim Corbett.
He watches after them until the footfalls of Victoria and
Rui can no longer be heard on the blood-stained footpath
to the north.
CORBETT CLICKS OPEN the boxlock action of the
Express, extracts a pair of massive cartridges and snugs
each into his breast pocket. He snaps the receiver closed
quietly and knots a white handkerchief to the twin
muzzles just behind the single blade of the front-sight,
opens the gun, reloads it and closes it
as quietly as before. He checks that the receiver has
locked and switches on the gun’s safety catch.
He sits fully awake for nine hours, fights to stay
conscious for two and instinctively clicks off the safety as
he awak-
78
ens during the hyena’s quarter-wind, midmorning
approach to the dismembered packhorse.
Fully downwind of the carcass, the big, capable scavenger
flinches visibly and shuffles out of view to a new
trajectory, giggling nervously at the smell of tiger and the
click of the safety. Corbett checks the area upwind of the
hyena’s approach. Except for fidgeting the rifle around in
the cup of his shoulder, Corbett has remained completely
motionless for many hours, since the time he found the
horse at moonset and began sitting with it, his back
aching against the broad trunk of a walnut tree.
Corbett cuts his eyes farther right, studies the view and
moves his head glacially to gain a next new periphery. He
repeats that, surveying everything to his downwind. He
pays little attention up into the breeze because stalking
tigers always ambush from downwind, honoring the acute
olfactory of their deer, their antelope and their wild and
domesticated goats, sheep and cattle. Tigers, he knows,
mistakenly perceive that humans have noses as keen as
quadrupeds.
Corbett lowers the rifle, removes the kerchief from the
muzzles, which he tucks into his shooting vest. The white
cloth has acted as a lowlight, close-range gun sight.
He is fifty-two years old and stiff as a corpse in the cold
morning of coming springtime. He straightens his back
and walks slantwise to the horse, peering into the
downwind brush. Like a deer feeding nervously, he gives
the tiger something to think about by twice feigning
interest in the packhorse before snapping gazes back into
the brush.
When he is sure there is no tiger he frees himself to
inspect the massive socket and bare bone where the pack
animal’s right haunch had been, the deep lacerations
across the shoulder and the punctures at the base and
underside of the neck. For those people with the hunter’s
constitution there is cryptic
captivation in the examination of fatal wounds, whether
by arrowhead, spear tip or fang.
The omission of the mark of the right eyetooth where the
tiger has bitten through the horse skin is noted.
79
For Corbett, the absence of those incisor punctures
distinguishes the deeds of the Tigress of Champawat as
certainly as the way she steps unevenly with her damaged
left front paw.
Corbett kneels to the work of removing the rope in raspy
hisses. The blood-splashed panniers begin to loosen and
come away.
The new sound begins as he is the releasing the last of the
rope, imposing itself on the tranquility of the setting as he
is hefting off the first bag, which he drops back to the
ground. He creaks sorely to face the rising noise from the
valley of Chuka.
Far, far below his position the morning sun has crept to a
few of the higher roofs of Chuka, a once-thriving village
that for centuries had supported hundreds of inhabitants.
Once the Tigress of Champawat had intensified her
killings of Chuka’s gujars – pastorialists of the Himalayan
foothills – more regularly in broad daylight – mothers,
daughters, sisters and a sprinkling of old men and boys,
ripped flailing way across the woodlot terraces in the
manner of terrified lambs – Chuka was completely
abandoned.
Domestic routines in progress – meals half eaten, some
still cooking; baskets of dresses and shirts left below
those sun drying on hemp clotheslines; strewn bundles of
collected grasses and sticks dropped where they were;
doors and windows agape – the entire population,
livestock too, had rapidly evacuated Chuka on the second
Tuesday in July of 1938.
The piercing ululation from the ghost town is comparable
to a whistling train slowly advancing across a still plain.
The sound becomes a mechanical screech of steel on
steel, increasing in volume and octave as though a giant
machine could protest in agony. It deepens, taking the
vague comportment of a human wail before becoming so
loud and so ongoing that Corbett brings his left hand to
his ear to deflect some of the vibration.
And then it soars beyond the misery and the torture of the
terrified superhuman to an altogether inscrutable
crescendo: the din of a localized Armageddon, the deathly
howl of all of the damned souls of the underworld venting
from Chuka
80
like pressured steam blasting up from a fissure in the
earth.
For its incredible intensity, its length and its
uncontaminated horror, Colonel Jim Corbett would never
forget that bloodcurdling scream, nor could he ever
explain it.
He stands in silence to allow the forest to clear itself, to
normalize, shifting only the weight on his feet. Eventually
a white-winged bulbul calls from a golden shower tree
and a pair of flycatchers are seen flitting across the
treetops down towards Chuka. The Colonel shivers
violently, exhales powerfully and grooms through his
moustache. He slings a bloodied pannier over his right
shoulder and strikes off for a promising dinner with
Victoria in Champawat.
He sees it all in the grand scale of his mind’s eye: The
unbroken jungle of northern India at the close of the
1930s: waterfalls disappearing into enormous plunge
pools; long and undulating knife-back ridges; hand-cut
terraces; small, scattered villages and corrals; wild forest
meadows with grazing chital, greatly muscled guar
buffalo and barasingha.
Like he has known it since he was a boy, and as a young
man: Vermillion and cobalt clouds of skipping butterflies
beneath the serrated demarcation of the steaming
Himalayan Mountains; ominous storm clouds roiling
above the steep woodland; altogether a foothills region
rivaling America’s Rockies in altitude.
All just as it is now: The dense mile-wide cyclone of
crows spiraling on earth’s greatest updrafts to thousands
of feet above the core habitat of the Tigress of
Champawat. A slow measure of the ghostly Chuka village
and the obscure tree-lined canyon he thinks is there,
running northeast from the abandonment. Like the single
blow from a titanic axe, the secret canyon (“gill” in the
lexicon of British colonialists) therein the inky shadows
beneath the overhanging jungle canopy.
He walks on to Champawat with these visions, drawing
on the veranda of its official forest bungalow where Rui is
arranging a teapot to a table set with vessels and utensils
of coin silver and discretely ornate china, all on loan from
the home and offices of the Tahsildar.
The day is remarkable in temperature, fresh-
81
ness and clarity. Blooming plumeria and shorearobosta in
hanging crocks from the lattice-roofed pergola of the
bungalow frame a million-dollar, thirty-mile view of the
Uttarakhand’s pristine highlands.
Salam and good morning, Rui. Or is it afternoon?
Good morning, Sahib. Yes, it is late morning, Rui
confirms. How was your hanka?
Disappointing, really. There was no more action in the
night with our tiger. The effort, however, has worked at
my appetite. What, may I please ask, have you been able
to wheedle for Miss Victoria’s introductory luncheon?
Corbett moves to wash and towel his hands after securing
his rifle.
I am happy to report that through the kindnesses of local
businesses, including the Tahsildar and his withered staff,
I will be serving a small banquet.
Oh, do tell, Rui. Please go on.
The Colonel turns reflexively as Victoria emerges to the
veranda behind Rui. She is damagingly crisp, Corbett
thinks.
And here she is, Victoria!
The Colonel gently shakes her hand and he and Rui usher
her into a seat at the table.
So glad to see you, Colonel. At some point of lying awake
reliving the momentousness of my first tiger attack, of
thinking of you out there in the dark with that animal, I
fell into a light coma and slept peacefully on into the
morning.
Well, you have impeccable timing, Victoria. Rui was just
about to review our selection.
Corbett pulls away to Rui, who offers the namaste
salutation, first to Victoria and then to the Colonel.
If it pleases you both, we will start with the delicate flesh
of a yearling hangul, supremely rare in these parts and
difficult to procure, curried and cooked patiently in ghee,
with onions and garlic and any number of spices. We
have both snow-white rice and saffron-tinted rice cooked
as it is only cooked east of Suez.
The most delicious bantam patties of minced lamb,
82
curried and spiced and seasoned with the dust of red
chilies, very fiery, indeed – wrapped in a veil of quiche.
Small side dishes of hard-boiled eggs of jungle fowl diced
with a regional cucumber; sweet, petite native tomatoes
cooked and seasoned with red peppers and ground
peanuts; a green-pea-and-carrot medley under a smoothly
whisked white sauce; and slices of ripe pawpaws,
mangos, oranges, lemons, grapes and pineapple to be
served and enjoyed all as one.
We conclude with tangy Turkish coffee with jaggary and
milk and Turkish cigarettes.
Rui’s bow takes him quickly to the silver pot of tea,
which he expertly floats to smoothly top Victoria’s china
cup.
With open mouths, the Colonel and Victoria lock widened
eyes. The Colonel nods and winks his right eye
dramatically at Victoria for Rui to see.
This blasted tiger hunting is simply pure punishment,
Victoria, Corbett says.
I do not believe you, Rui. We are, however, as hungry as
harpats in autumn. We pray that the hangul is not
overcooked or too heavily seasoned and, in any event, we
are very thankful to have you mending the cook fires.
Yes, my good friend, by all means, let the games begin.
Rui whisks smartly away.
Wouldn’t it be grand to be on shikari all the time? The
food, I mean, with a man like Rui, is such a treat when so
far afield.
Colonel?
Yes, Miss Victoria?
What is hangul?
It is a large, burrowing rodent similar to the brown rat of
Europe.
Victoria has a queasy reaction, instantly bringing up her
napkin.
Oh, please, Victoria, do forgive me. I’ve recently become
such a complete scoundrel. No more coarse food jokes
during meals, ever. The hangul is actually a spectacular
deer, very much related to what you Europeans call the
red deer. In fact, it probably is the red deer of Sherwood
Forest, the most prized
83
wild-game delicacy among English gentry even today.
The females and their young are highly prized for their
deliciousness.
And the harpat?
Yes, the harpat. That would be the Himalayan black bear.
As in we are as hungry as bears, wouldn’t you say?
Yes. Completely. You must be starving, Colonel – out
bivouacking all night on the kill of a tiger. That is
remarkable, I think. What do you have to say about such
daring do?
If you’ve been in it for as long as me I’m not sure it is
anything remarkable. I was not born to the prep leagues of
London. I didn’t take hunting and shooting up as a hobby
later in life, though nothing against either of those
situations. I have a modest formal education but I’ve
always been happiest outside. I crave seeing animals,
being near them and learning about them. I’m also nutty
about fishing. I have a collection of bird’s eggs... Well,
suffice to say, I’ve become quite comfortable with the
challenges and the hardships of the out-of-doors –
actually pretty good at that – for a long, long time.
But you are increasingly uncomfortable with it now? The
killing, I mean. Some say you’ve lost your nerve? Have
you, Colonel?
Yes, well, the fortitude is probably still intact but the
reaction time, the strength and the drive may be ebbing
and giving rise to a little doubt here and there. To have
one of these big cats crash through your office one
afternoon to tell you that you should have retired years
ago would be a completely unpleasant way to the leave
the corporation.
I’m really happiest now to hunt with the camera, rather
than the rifle, Corbett continues. God willing, this tiger
and the Thak leopard will be my last kick at the cat, so to
speak. Together they have killed hundreds people.
Using most every spare day I’ve had from work, I’ve
hunted them off and on over many years. I suppose some
people go to the Alps or to Paris for their vacations.
Do you regret the killing?
Oh, yes, of course. What true hunter using this modern
technology doesn’t feel the guilt of that, the shame? These
big cats are glorious creatures. This is their home, the way
God
84
intended. With one exception: man-eating. Killers of
cattle,
sheep and goats will do what they do without any trouble
from me.
Why not a non-lethal solution for all of them, Colonel?
Untenable, I think, with these high-profile denizens. Play
around with live capture, and miss them, because of the
difficulties of that and many people are likely eaten.
These aren’t troublesome pests rattling about in the
Abby’s ash cans, Victoria. This particular queen of the
she-devils, this effing shrew, has become the first-ballot
legend of darkness to generations of people. Across
hundreds of miles in any direction, she is the Dark One,
the Archfiend, a cunning and lucky supernatural of six
times your weight, one-thousand times your power.
She can see almost as well by starlight as you can right
now.
This is not simple terror, or someone’s adventure fantasy,
Victoria. This is the multiple of petrified: Here we have a
real-life, one-of-a-kind beast addicted to human flesh.
The Colonel collapses loosely, informally back in his
chair. His eyes have come away from Victoria’s for the
first time in minutes. He blinks them moist again,
collecting himself.
And I have spent months of my life pursuing her over a
three-year span.
You know, Victoria, she stalked you and Jack for more
than one-half mile, sequentially lining across the
meandering outward loops of the ascending road to
overtake you, to slip in tight against ten pairs of eyes and
ears. She sprang twenty
feet in ambush – measured. Then, like with a captive bolt,
she outright kills a grown packhorse under the armed
protection of a fine soldier. Runs off with it, eats forty
pounds of it raw.
Goddamn, Victoria, what does that?!
The Colonel long arms his tea cup, taking its contents in
one gulp, grimacing as though it were a shot of bald
whiskey.
A sore-footed old tiger, he says softly, his eyes boring
85
hers, with bad teeth.
Please excuse my French, he continues. I come from an
honorable, hard-working family. No one who raised me
could have the slightest inkling that I might spin into
raised voices and oaths so quickly on a bright, sparkling
day in these glorious highlands.
Yes, what a beautiful day, Victoria. Tell me what part of
this you find confusing?
My world view of tigers and their executioners has been
much altered by these earliest of my experiences in India,
she says. Very recently, in fact, just this morning, I’ve
come to accept that I am here first to gain knowledge.
And then I will syndicate my truthful observations, so the
people, my readers, may decide for themselves. After the
misfortune with Blixen and Jack – who Rui says might
have a badly broken arm – I have realized that I may
never be qualified to judge any or all of it.
I am sure I care not one whit about what people may or
may not decide about this, says Corbett. But, well,
excellent: right foot, left foot and all that. What else
would you need to know before our saffron rice and our
spicy lamb patties are eaten? What more before we begin
our pleasant strolls and our tedious waits for an
unpredictable killer?
Exactly how much do you have me weighing, Colonel?
Rui enters with steaming plates of food balanced up each
arm. He is wearing a bright velvet fez and a royal-purple
vest with yellow tassels, neither of which the Colonel has
ever seen.
Yes, Rui, thank God! You have saved me once more from
being flayed like a goat, snatched me from the jaws of
certain self-destruction by appearing on cue as a well-
dressed Arab.
A genie decorated in food stolen from the finest café in
Delhi. It’s just like we drew it up, man! Pure magic!
Rui squats at the table’s edge and gives the Colonel a
stern look for his remarks while expertly removing the
dishes from his arms.
86
76

Secret Meetings and Sideshows

The stained oak conference room of Commissioner
Ibbotson’s office is bustling with a contingent of waiters
collecting dishes. A well-dressed man, Harrison Tisdale,
Chief of British Intelligence in India, rises as his plate is
cleared and takes position at the end of a row of large,
reversed-to-blank poster cards on easels. He opens the
brief afternoon session of the meeting:
Terrific lunch, again, Commissioner. Had I known the
delight of roasted peafowl, I should have taken up
wingshooting years ago.
Now, lastly, Maximillian Von Geipel: Nazi, thirty-four
years of age.
Tisdale nervously fumbles the large poster-card as he’s
turning it, snatching at it awkwardly as it wheels to the
wall. He recovers Von Geipel, whose image joins the
meeting from its place on the wooden stand.
Geipel, Tisdale continues: six-feet, seven-inches and
seventeen stones of super-broad-horned bastard. He is an
alleged serial killer, a known gunrunner, aspiring
international war criminal of the Third Reich. We have a
warrant to search his plantation where we will discover
shallow graves, illegal explosive devices, a sundry of
arms, one operational whiskey distillation, stolen art, an
expired visa, desk drawers of unpaid receipts and a
ghastly collection of Armenian-made toupees.
87
Tisdale smiles and chortles at his last descriptor to no
reaction from the room.
Well. In a nutshell, one-hundred Gurkha regulars under
the command of Captain Russ Peterson will be deployed
for arrival at the Geipel complex in the early morning of
February eighteen to serve the warrant. Total electronic
blackout on this one gentlemen, very hush-hush. Sealed
details, including those of the company’s rendezvous with
the Ibbotson contingent and the location and transfer
points to the subject’s initial incarceration to be delivered
only by secure messengers.
Are there any questions?
Eventually the old man with thin, snowy hair, a patriarch
who will never live to fill out his new lightweight wool
suit, feebly waves a gnarled, blue-veined hand. He has the
pearly translucent skin of a dying cave fish.
Yes, Lord Hewett?
The shadow chancellor Hewett opens and closes his thin
lips twice as if to speak. He nods his head and softly
closes the papery lids of eyes that glisten in any light with
the color of tropical reef water.
Yes, Lord Hewett?
Hewett starts his question with closed eyes. His voice is
startlingly powerful.
Mr. Ibbotson whispers to me that Colonel Corbett has
agreed to help with this caper as part of his Indian
swansong.
Yes, Lord Hewett, I believe that is accurate. All
contingent, of course, on his work with the Tigress of
Champawat.
Position him where you think you may need the stopper,
the strongest gun, says Hewett. Protect him with a good
number of the best of the Gurkha and at least one or two
of our top men. Please do understand this: if the Colonel
is creased during this whacky sidebar to take Mister Von
Nazi every man in this room will receive a very personal
fuck you letter from His
Majesty, the King of England. You lose Corbett and a
88
summary series of demotions and reassignments knocks
you all to the Crown’s most isolated outposts: Unnamed
border checks at the darkened edges of time that will
make this sweet-smelling whistle stop to nowhere look
like Eden.
The corners of Tisdale’s mouth flicker an impish smile.
And the narrowing of Hewett’s blue eyes promptly spears
Tisdale for his miscalculation.
You had better have all of this in one sock, Mr. Tisdale. If
not, the dailies of Southampton will be first to report that
you have been tragically lost at sea.
DID YOU HEAR THAT?
I did not.
Were you asleep?
Yes, of course, I was asleep.
They are under a bright full-moon atop a small, well-
designed machan overlooking the remains of the dead
packhorse.
Well, it is your turn to be watching and my turn to be
asleep, says Corbett.
I did not lend my full support to that schedule, Colonel.
This is your hunt. I am an observer on assignment from an
international periodical.
Yes, of course, well, maybe ten minutes ago, a langur
picked up the tigress way, way down the ridge. A kakar
has just validated. Langur and kakar are never ever wrong
about tigers.
What time is it?
It’s my turn to be asleep; about two forty-five, fifteen till
the devil’s hour.
One mile away the faint woof of the langur drifts up
through the forest.
Yes, I heard it very distinctly. What are langur and kakar,
and which was that?
That was a golden langur, our jungle’s biggest primate.
The one you just heard was a male. The female only
shouted
89
once at the tigress. The male then swung up from the
south to escort the interloper out of their territory.
The kakar is a very local term for one of our musk deer, a
species of tusked deer. When someone refers to a kakar
you know that you must only be in the Kosi River country
of the Kumaon.
The sharp bark of the kakar is blunted by distance and
forest.
That’s the kakar?
Yes. The tigress is coming on with the quarter wind to her
advantage, despising the langur and the kakar with every
step. I will wake you when the tigress appears.
Do you think that it is possible to sleep as a man-eating
tigress approaches our position?
This will be tedious. She may not come at all. I will wake
you.
What time is it?
About two forty-seven. I will wake you.
Victoria wiggles attentively up to the grab rope stretched
across the front of the tree blind. She blinks her big eyes
into the flood of moonlight and squints into the leaden
moon shadows of the trees. That is all she will remember
of the night.
CORBETT HAS BEEN STUDING a sleeping Victoria for
several minutes in the diffused light of morning. She
catches him.
Has she come?
No.
What time is it?
You need to begin wearing a watch. It’s a touch past eight
with thick, heavy fog, so it feels earlier.
How long have I slept?
Since about two forty-nine.
Impossible.
Okay, since three. I’ve not been referencing my watch. It
makes the waiting worse and tigers are hell for picking up
movement. Good morning.
90
Yes, good morning, Colonel.
Colonel, to simply strip away every modicum of pretense
and female decorum, I hate to say, but I must soon relieve
myself.
Do you think you might be able to do that from here atop
the machan?
No, Colonel. I will need to go down the ladder to the
ground.
Certainly. Well, let’s not dally. Let’s get this rope around
you and ease you down.
Victoria raises her arms and Corbett loops a rope over
them and snugs the slip knot loosely below her breasts.
They stand together and turn and Victoria begins down
the forty-foot ladder with the Colonel playing out rope.
The wafting fog lifts to partially expose the indistinct
silhouette of a large animal stepping behind them back
downrange.
With the shape of the animal clear, Corbett, who is
belaying Victoria, has a “second sight” intuition, casting a
quick look over his shoulder. He does a double take as for
one full second he beholds the tigress at the horse bait –
looking up into the tree at the hunters – broadside
between the undulations of veiling fog. He drops the rope,
grabs up his rifle and turns stepping into the gunstock. He
fires swinging in that fleeting instant when the foggy
jungle clouds the escape of the leaping tiger.
Victoria makes one quick step back up the ladder to see
past Corbett as the second volley booms into the jungle.
And with Corbett swinging the rifle well out in front to
where the tiger might be evading him through limbs and
leaves, she sees the recoil of the passing gun rock Corbett
as his third blow is delivered into the wall of vegetation.
Without raising his cheek from the rifle stock he has
bolted two rounds and fired three in a span of four
seconds, which innately impresses even a shooting novice
of Victoria’s skills. Ears ringing, she comes right back
into the machan.
Did you hit her?!
No.
They are looking into the jungle in the direction
that the tiger escaped.
91
How can you be certain? She was very close.
Well, you just know. I remember feeling like the sight
picture was still too high when the rifle bucked the first
time, the best shot. The tiger would have reacted to that
bullet, which I think I saw clipping into the foliage just
above her. The others now strike me as very low-
percentage, if not desperate, particularly the third.
Corbett is speaking in a low voice, which he drops to a
hissing whisper.
The third shot was just so goddamned regrettable and
foolish.
But can you be certain that you missed?!
Not without looking around. You stay here while I have a
peek, won’t you?
Yes, alright. I will go down with you and then come back
up. Remember? But what should I do if you’ve wounded
the tigress and she is lying in wait?
Then I will shoot her and I will come back to see you off
the machan. We will repair to Champawat for an early run
of sundowners.
What if you fail to see her and she gets to you from the
side, or from behind, and mauls you?
He continues staring in the direction of the tigress.
In that case, push the ladder off and wait very quietly for
Rui.
Big tigers are reluctant tree climbers.
I will be dead.
FROM A KNEELING POSITION under a noonday sun above
the backyard of the Sayra Tal train station on the Ouda-
Terhut Railway, an exceedingly ominous-looking Negro
lowers the stiffened corpse of a back-and-tan big-game
hound into a shallow grave. A spade heap of dirt plops
unexpectedly between the man’s hands onto the bloated
belly of the dog.
You da foo, Bon-ham.
The Negro stands, slapping up a cloud of dust from his
trousers and shaking the dirt out from beneath his leather
wrist cuffs.
92
Young fool widout no respect fer ol’ mens and good
dawgs is you, fool.
Goober weren’t no kind uh dawg lessen ye-all gofer
dawgs thet’ll run phantom tracks, bite yer huntinist dawgs
in the face, an divert to chase deer off a hot run, says
Bonham. Now, Jess — that boy’s a goddamned
superprime. If you’da jest set ole Jess in at hole this outfit
wouldn’t mount to nuthin. We’d be done, mi ole negra
pardio. We’re down ta one real dawg – Jess – and you’d
better taste his food, Holt Collier, better let’um drink outta
ye canteen, cause if ‘n thet dawg ain’t with us you might
ought ah jest skedaddle on back to’da Congo an save ye
sef the longer boat ride.
The bearded men are tall, lance-like and dressed in the
fanciful style of late 19th Century New Mexican cowboys
with grandiose hats, knee-high leather boots and big,
colorful blousy neckerchiefs. They finish covering the
dog with one spade and one shovel borrowed from an
Indian shopkeeper, a lala who has been suspiciously
overseeing the work and keeping inventory of his
implements from just a few feet away.
Finished interning the dog, the Americans hand over the
tools and a Mexican peso to the Indian, who turns it
quizzically as the pair saunters ’round to the back of a
warehouse vibrating in the heat of the high tropical sun at
the rails of the Tanakur train station. A crowd of Indians
has gathered.
Now these here dee real Indiuns, ol’ Holt. Ain’t that
sumpin’?! Ours ain’t Indians et all. They’s native
American Injuns. Maybe that makes you jess a burnt-up
old Mexican.
And maybe you a broke-dick cracker goat sucker who
cain’t hardly ride, rope, shoot er pitch knifes.
In a literal flash Collier knocks away Bonham’s hat and is
threatening the bearded half of the younger man’s Irish
white face with the double-edged blade of the Arkansas
Toothpick that the Negro sheathes horizontally across the
back of his gun belt.
Hash Bonham stands calm. Directly he smiles generously,
steps back and carefully replaces his hat.
Well, ain’t you the black vaudevillian? Naw, you
93
right as a week of slow rain, Mister Collier; I ain’t no
knife thrower. But if you’ll back off a mite I will not kill
you when I bring up the six.
Collier lowers his knife, retreating by two steps. Bonham
slowly withdraws his Colt, twirls it happily and moves to
apply it to the wall of the loading dock of the warehouse,
shooing Indians with the muzzle until there is a clear
opening to the wall, settling the handgun to a level fine-
bead on a grey swift, a small lizard just into the deep
shade of the building’s overhanging roof.
Ya see thet reptile yonder, ‘bouts head high?
The gun blasts before Collier has time to answer,
evaporating the lizard. There is now only a smoky hole
ringed with cold blood on the wall of the warehouse
where the animal had been. The Indians close ranks to
look up at the hole. The few who saw the shot express
approval; others are cupping their ringing ears with
pained, then delighted, expressions.
Collier lets the smoke settle, inviting the gaze of the
Indians to return to the cowboys on the main stage before
leaping into the aggressive throw of his wicked knife,
which glints among the crowd and sticks with a knock at
the bullet hole.
The Indians yelp and cheer!
Bonham is next seen shaking out the one-of-a-kind latigo
that hangs from his left flank, an amazingly strong and
thin cowhide and horsehair whip the length of a reata that
had been made to order by an ancient vaquero in Sonora,
Mexico; a tool with the well-crafted balance of a fine fly
rod and matching line. Bonham quickly has it up and
circling.
He cracks it once to fine effect: the mob winces and awes
collectively. He returns it to maximum velocity and
moves it in perfect synchronicity to his graceful sprint
forward, bringing it within range of the knife in the wall.
Kerrwhack!
Bonham has thrown five wraps of the whip’s tippet
around the handle of Collier’s muy cuchillo and in one
motion he sets himself and snaps the knife from the wall,
flashing it back at Collier, who must sidestep the
94
whirling lancet to keep it from slicing him about the neck
or head.
The Indians roar!
Bonham expertly jerks the whip towards Collier and
himself, skittering the deadly knife across the sand that
margins the trestles to rest at Collier’s boots.
The Indians are ecstatic!
Once Collier has freed his knife, Bonham instantly
recovers the coil and has it again sizzling in the hot air.
He turns to find that a Hindu boy has crept within his
range.
He makes eye contact with the lad, pointing to the boy’s
bright green fez. The chosen victim wheels and runs.
Too late: Bonham’s whipshot bursts the pot-like hat from
the boy’s head, sending it flying. He snakes the whip,
retracting it expertly to the collective pandemonium of the
Indians.
Ain’t ‘hit sinful?! That’s quite enough showin’ out, Hash!
An pay that young’un sumpin’ fur his troubles!
Bonham and Collier find Ben Lilly on the platform
between passenger cars, among a second crowd of Indians
and the few European and Arab tourists who have been
cheering on the cowboy’s activities from the train’s
windows. Ben Lilly, the most celebrated houndsman of
the American frontier, is nearly 80 years old, but he can
still issue an order that must be obeyed while walking
most any man right into the roughest terrain. He is the
name-brand behind this international expedition to bring
the Thak Leopard to justice. And when Lilly says to move
out, Hash Bonham and Holt Collier never linger.
You and Collier get on back inta dis whistlin’ gut shaker
so we kin get on wid’er huntin’. Almighty God hain’t led
us up here fur middlin’. He’s sent thy and thee from
Silver City fur nuthin’ ‘ceptin’ta kill a devil catamount. I
ain’t no sprang
ducklin’. I gonna be uh sight easier fur you boys ta travel
wid live den deed. Day burn day dead folk here in Indiuh
at a cream-a-tortium dat day call a Ghat, an that’s again
my upbringin’. I ah-gunna go in dee dirt whole. New
Mexico dirt. Let’s go on an get dis circus wagon on up the
rail fur I get too old fur ‘hit an die.
95
Lilly turns to the English and Indian journalists on the
ground below him and the expedition’s promoter, Nathan
L. Withers. He pushes back the formless fop that had
perhaps never been a proper hat, winking his faded blue
eyes and exposing teeth worn to the gum line.
Ain’t no boys kin run whips an knives an lariat lassoes
like dim boys, says Lilly. We aim’ta catch dat devil
catamount of Indiuh fer you’uns alive, er, mayhaps – if he
make a fuss – deed. God Almighty, the One Christian
Father, is the Captain uh dis particular gallivant’in an
you’uns kin write ‘hit in all-y’all’s papers an tell’em I
mean whadda says.
With that, Ben Lilly withdraws decidedly to the coach,
leaving Withers to decode his words and their meanings
to the scribes. Up track, the engineer briskly taps the
engine’s steam whistle.
AREN’T THE CLOUDS BREATHTAKING?!
Yes, Victoria, they are. But clouds of that sort are
particularly hazardous this time of year. Springtime heat
rising off the Gangetic Plains below us collides with the
world’s tallest mountain range calves biblical storms.
That’s what those clouds remind me of. Typhoon-force
weather.
Victoria stops dead in her tracks. Corbett walks a few
steps before realizing that she has drawn up. He turns to
her.
You mustn’t worry yourself about missing the tigress, she
says.
Who said I was worrying?
Aren’t you?
Yes, of course. But what has the weather to do with it?
You are troubled about everything except what should
concern you.
Yes, the situation does seem a bit daunting. But now I am
curious that you’ve identified some new anxiety.
At that moment Corbett sees Rui, Dhanban and
Dharmanand dogtrotting up the road from the south.
Without taking his eyes off of them, Corbett walks past
Victoria towards the approaching men. Namaste all
around begins the meeting.
96
There is a moment more before words are spoken as the
men are out of breath from their high-speed hike in thin
air.
I bring such terrible news, Sahib.
Corbett shoots a look at Victoria, then back to Rui.
As do I, Rui. Please, my friend, you first. Carry on.
Rui collects himself, looking to the eyes of everyone
before coming back to Corbett.
Bali Singh is dead.
Rui immediately grabs at the tears that flush
uncontrollably.
Corbett’s chin trembles, his mouth comes involuntarily
agape. Corbett breathes very carefully, strongly, through
his nose. He gives Rui a measured pause.
What?!
Rui pulls himself together, blinking and wiping at his
face.
Bali had been no better, only worse, for many days,
Sahib. He grew much worse than his condition when we
last saw him.
Bali finally did come out of the room where he had been
kept, out to the group of his family who had been praying
for him. Kunwar Singh was there, your dear, old friend,
Kunwar, the great hunter. Bali was himself again. He had
been fully restored. He spoke to everyone in the room by
name and wished them well, Sahib.
They greeted him and welcomed him back and everyone
was very happy.
Bali then surprised the people, announcing very clearly to
all of his many friends and his family in the room, his
wife and children and his mother and his father, that he
remained tormented by Trisul. Trisul had told him that the
only way it would be possible to be rid of him was to die.
Trisul told Bali this.
The people were very saddened. They made room for him
there where they were and our friend, Bali, laid down on
the floor. Bali closed his eyes and died.
Rui tears again, bringing both hands to his face, his
shoulders shuddering in cascading convulsions. Corbett
backhands
97
away a tear of his own and moves a firm hand to Rui’s
shoulder. There is pause as Rui weeps.
I know that the Creator gives Bali peace in the afterlife,
Rui. I know that my Creator has banished the fiend,
Trisul, back into the frozen mountains for the rest of our
lives. I am as sure of those things as I am that Bali, the
angel, now watches over us.
Rui lifts his shoulders, raises his head and puts his hand
on Corbett’s shoulder. They steady themselves in the
quite jungle beneath the towering clouds on the road to
Champawat.
THEREIN THE LONG SHADOWS of evening a giant man
wielding a magnifying glass hovers over the yellow-and-
white stamen of a sky-blue strobilanthe. He straightens to
full height, lowering the magnifier as his manservant
announces dinner from the back of a sprawling plantation
home.
What have you had the staff prepare, Mr. Haasfeld?
Beef tenderloins and garlic potatoes with fresh rye bread
and butter. There is double chocolate cake with very cold,
very fresh milk for dessert. Will there be anything
additionally, sir?
Yes. Cut me a slab of uncooked from the beef. Prepare
the tray of fruit. I will feed the animals before I eat.
Yes, sir, immediately.
You must keep these strobilanthes healthy in my absence,
Mr. Haasfeld. We’ve made great progress with the grafts
and the cross pollinations. Engineering new subspecies is
godly, don’t you think?
Yes, Mr. Geipal, ambitious work. Have you decided when
you will disembark for Germany, Mr. Geipal?
Nein. But soon, I think, Mr. Haasfeld. There is urgent
business in Berlin. War is in the air.
Of course, Haasfeld answers. The food tray for the
animals is next.
Haasfeld swings quickly from the small field of flowers to
face the main house of the plantation, which he has
walked
98
away from to be closer to Geipal. Zeroing in on the faces
of two servants waiting on the back porch, he raises his
right arm and begins snapping his fingers. The men
disappear through the door.
Haasfeld places a tray of fresh meat and fruit on a small
table near the door leading to the basement. Geipal waits
until Haasfeld has withdrawn before carrying the tray
down the steps, passing through a pair of thick, heavy
doors, which he closes behind him. He switches on two
long rows of lights and flips a second switch, which
draws back a wall of curtains to expose a cage at the far
end of the dungeon.
A very large male leopard rises growling and begins
pacing behind the iron bars.
Geipal trips a third switch. Along the right wall three
more enclosures open to expose two teenage girls and a
woman.
Good evening, he says in German.
I bring food.
CORBETT IS WALKING towards the weak lamplights of
the hamlet of Champawat. Continuous lightning from a
hundred-mile cloudbank obscuring the Himalayas flickers
in the distance. Pye dogs bark as thunder rolls softly in
from the north. He achieves the gun rack on the porch of
the forest bungalow and there is the hollow metallic
sound of the bolt of Corbett’s Rigby rifle opening. He
steps into the light of the main room of the bungalow
where he is greeted by Rui Singh.
Ah, Rui, most wonderful to see you old chappie.
I have been anxious about your safety, Sahib, so I have
been at my best cooking. There is the wash basin on the
commode behind you. Are you ready to eat?
Yes. Thank you. I suppose you and Miss Harcourt have
eaten?
Hours ago. After, Miss Harcourt bathed and now she
sleeps.
How can you be sure she’s not lying awake in there
thinking about what a crack shot her old hunter is?
She snores faintly when she is exhausted from fright-
99
ening encounters with man-eating tigers. I will bring the
food, so we can talk while you eat. Please, sit, Sahib, after
you’ve washed. There is cool drinking water and hot tea.
Rui returns with a plate piled high with steaming food
almost before Corbett has reached for the water glass.
Both men settle in the soft light of a single lantern at the
far end of the table. Corbett begins shoveling.
Were you able to spoor the tigress for any distance?
Yes. I worked an additional mile from the point where I
left her track. The first bullet – I’m sure – cut her across
the nape of the neck, producing very little blood. Dark
blood at first that became increasingly watery. I did the
last quarter mile on only the scuffs of her paws. I failed to
deliver any sort of solid blow, which maddens me to no
whistle-effing end.
Miss Harcourt blames herself.
Well, she shouldn’t, because she wasn’t shooting. Had
she been shooting, she probably would have stoned the
tigress and we’d be packed up here rather than just
starting again on a superior killer.
Miss Hardcourt said the shooting was very difficult.
Did she? Well, she is very kind, because there wasn’t
anything remotely hard about the first shot. It was
instinctively quick and easy and I rushed it and got ahead
of it and pulled the trigger rather than breaking it. That’s
the God’s truth. But the silver lining in all of it may be the
strong hunch that I now have about where she goes to be
alone.
I think she lays up in the vertical bush somewhere north
of Chuka. It’s a real badlands from what little I’ve seen of
it. So, I want to get some baits and machans in there for
evening and night hunting.
Good big moon for that. Start pecking about in there afoot
during the day.
We must burn from both ends, Rui.
Yes, Sahib.
I’m having a very difficult time with this news of Bali. I
know you are devastated, Rui. Do you need to be with
your family?
I am better. Thank you, Sahib. A peace has come to
100
me that must be from dear Bali himself. They entered him
today at the River Mandal, Sahib: that most beautiful,
sacred place with the pipal trees and the golden dewdrops
that overlook the great bend of the river.
Rui follows these thoughts with many moments of silence
before continuing:
My family understands the importance of the work here
with you. I am not a good comforter. In times of loss I am
out of step with the old men and the women. They ask me
questions that I cannot answer. I would only remind them
of Bali. I please need to stay here and help you kill the
Tigress.
Good enough, my friend. So, I will wake you in the
morning, or you please wake me.
Yes, I am anxious to sleep, Sahib, because I know I will
see and speak with Bali in my dreams. He will know
where this tiger is.
In the morning, please tell me what he said, won’t you?
Yes, Sahib. Sleep well.
Corbett and Rui lift their chairs back noiselessly and stand
smiling. And then Rui picks up the dishes and says
goodnight. He is crying again.
SITTING ON THE DEAD TRUNK of an enormous
cannonball tree that lies prostrate across the floor of the
forest, Corbett and Victoria are in the low-light of the
deep jungle beneath Champawat. The coals of their
cigarettes wink in the gloaming and the mist. A jungle
cock crows to the east and another answers it from the
north.
Moving off the cannonball, Corbett crushes his smoke
and begins rifling quietly through the rucksack, producing
a jar filled with fruit juice. He unscrews the lid and hands
the jar to Victoria, motioning simultaneously for her
cigarette. They transfer the items with the synchronicity
of people who have been briefed. He pinches the cherry
off the cigarette and steals a few seconds of discreetly
watching her gulp the juice.
101
He produces a pair of black, all-rubber slippers from the
bag and a pair of thick socks, which he places next to her
on the log. She hands him the juice jar, which he finishes
and tucks back in the pack.
The dueling cocks are next answered by a third, far below
them in thicker fog.
Corbett pops the laces of Victoria’s left boot and gently
pulls it off by the heel, then the right. Her warm feet must
be simply exquisite, he thinks.
Victoria leans down to Corbett, whispering:
What are you doing?
I believe you will need an extra pair of socks with these
plimsolls.
Those aren’t plimsolls. They are rubber shoes. Why do I
need them? My boots have very soft soles.
So you can walk more quietly.
Oh, well, I can barely see those rubber shoes but I can see
them well enough to tell you that I categorically refuse to
wear them.
Corbett looks at her quizzically in the dim light of
daybreak.
Why not?
I cannot wear them because those shoes are a clown-like
and perfectly hideous abomination, that’s why. I will not
be killed wearing those shoes. In fact, I had rather be dead
than wear them. What I will do is put on your extra socks
or go barefooted. Or I will sit on this log until you come
back. Thank you. I’m sorry.
I believe you are being irrationally style conscious and
insensible.
A word to the wise, Colonel.
Yes?
I am in charge of what shoes I wear.
Why, of course. Let’s try the socks.
Capital.
Appropriately shod for stealth, the couple begins a
creeping descent into gradually steeper terrain as the
jungle awakens. After illustrating the pace and the
footwork, Corbett
102
moves Victoria to the lead. He can direct her better to the
sights of fauna – a golden langur stirring in the treetops at
the fringe of their eyereach is the first animal they briefly
discuss and avoid by altering their course; and flora –
pausing in wonder at a massive bauhinea, the silk cotton
tree.
Away from the terraced farms of Champie, the sub-
tropical highlands of northern India in the spring of the
year 1939 remains as it was created to evolve. The couple
moves quietly on, pausing intermittently so that Victoria
can align gold-fronted green bulbuls, Himalayan blue
magpies and coveys of bush quail in the lenses of
Corbett’s German binocular. He directs her with subtle
touches, hand gestures and whisperings. He accidentally
touches his lips to her ear twice, an amazing sensation, he
thinks, that she seems to take no notice of.
Eventually, Corbett finds movement to their left and more
than one-hundred yards below. He halts Victoria with his
hand pressed to her shoulder and they kneel. He gestures
for the binocular, takes it and rises slowly back to a
crouching position to identify the animal. Distance,
vegetation and the roll of the topography make the animal
very difficult to discern. Corbett’s heart rate begins to
climb, because it is a long-bodied animal.
Ultimately, however, he decides that the creature’s
movements are those of the herbivore. One minute later it
reveals itself as a guar meandering towards them. Corbett
prods Victoria to her feet, launching a whispered
narration:
It’s a big, big water buffalo looking to advance across us
at arm’s length. See him, Victoria?
My, yes, I see him. Is he a wild water buffalo?
Wild and fairly rare at these elevations. The gaur is the
largest wild bovid on earth and this one is a real
blockbuster, easily more than two-thousand pounds on the
hoof.
The muscularity is quite beyond any imagination, she
says. Would you consider these animals to be truculent?
The bull stops forty yards below them after advancing
rapidly upon a small meadow to pensively graze, tossing
his head at the flies that have begun to worry him.
Seconds later Old Sol escapes from the clouds and the
mist and the bull is
103
bathed with bright morning sunshine. In such illumination
the animal appears to be a mass of molten rock, a giant
liquid-solid of rippling, glissaded black glass.
Victoria involuntarily gasps at a vision of pure
masculinity heretofore unknown. Corbett admires the
colossus, too, noting with a fiber of silk from the bauhinea
tree that the slowly warming air is oozing consistently
uphill. There is no wind to speak of. They are clearly
down scent from the bull, and at that moment the sweet,
pungent smell of the muddy animal becomes a taste for
their very tongues.
I’ve not ever seen a larger one, Corbett whispers. To your
question – no, interestingly, thankfully, they are not
mean-tempered like the Cape buffalo of Africa. He’s the
undisputed king of the buffaloes, though, make no
mistake. He could be deadly business in another situation.
The gaur passes them and moves out of sight on thick legs
foreshortened by its unforgettably defined mass. A few of
the animal’s horseflies sample the hunters before buzzing
away to recover the moving feast.
Let’s wait a bit to see if anything is following him.
Do you mean a tiger?
Yes.
A tiger would have no chance with him, or would it?
Oh, yes, certainly. But with a bull that size, probably not
our tigress. Let’s spend a few minutes and rule out such
mischief, okay by you?
Directly a racket-tailed drongo begins to chatter excitedly
from downhill, where the buffalo had first come to view
for Corbett. He notices the bird as he passes the binocular
strap back over Victoria’s head, holding it so that she may
move her arm through the long carrying strap and
distribute some of the weight of it off of her neck. He puts
the field glasses directly in her hands.
The drongo soon loses focus on what had interested it and
disappears, squawking defiantly.
When they have pussyfooted to the place where the gaur
first emerged, where the inquisitive drongo alarmed the
forest, Corbett finds disturbances in the grass paralleling
the
104
gaur’s heavy hooves. He drops to prone position for an
extremely close-up, slantways look at the tracks.
With his head essentially on the ground, he watches the
single best track of the tiger for more than a minute.
Eventually he is quite sure that he is observing the bent
and lightly crushed grass in the footfall springing
imperceptibly back into place.
He stands to and begins analyzing the immediate terrain,
rotating his perspective, calculating the lay of the forest.
He spies a tall rock outcropping about two-hundred yards
from them, noting that the dim north-south trail on which
they stand may well pass right beneath the esker.
The forest seems increasingly impenetrable below them,
toward Chuka: a world-class labyrinth of blackthorn,
nettles and prevalent stands of nal grass, a bamboo-like
curtain attaining heights of fourteen feet. It is a vegetative
edge at an indistinct grade change featuring a dim
perimeter trail, he knows.
Textbook, he whispers. Let’s have a look at things from
atop that pile of rocks, shall we?
May I get back into my boots?
Certainly, up there while I’m clambering around on the
promontory.
Alright, Colonel. Thank you.
At the rocks Victoria sits to begin trading up for dry socks
and shoes. Conscious of what a perfect micro-habitat the
outcrop is for snakes, Corbett carefully picks his way to
the top where he sees the funneling effect very clearly: the
dim trails coming up from the thorn-and-nal-grass thicket
connecting to the trail on the bench just below the rocks.
He is delighted to find that human sentinels have held
sway there before, fashioning a nest among the rocks that
offers concealment for two, plus a built-in rifle rest. He is
quickly back where Victoria is checking her boots for
tightness.
This is perfect for baits. We will probably kill the tigress
from here, if not tonight, then soon. Are you ready to get
back to Champie?
The boots are wonderful. Yes, please, lead on.
105
Can you tell me the direction of Champawat?
Victoria studies the forest and the sky and points in the
general direction of the village. They notice that dark
clouds are banking fantastically from the northeast.
Thunder rolls.
That way?
Close enough. You are off by only about thirty degrees,
but you would have hit the road because it runs mainly
north and south. When you struck the road, which way
would you have turned?
Left.
Exactly. You’d come right to Champawat.
Precisely. But I’m sure I could not find my way back to
this specific spot ever again.
There’s a method for that called trailblazing. We are
going to drop bread crumbs, sort of. I’m going to snap
twigs and branches at head height all the way out. Rui and
the boys will follow those blazes back in with the goats. I
will instruct them to add the visibility of strips of white
cloth, too.
Ingenious.
Well, clever, certainly.
Yes, Colonel, quite right. I suppose gasoline engines and
printing presses best describe ingenuity. Trailblazing
really isn’t calculus, now is it?
Corbett lifts his pith helmet and daubs at the sheet of
sweat pooling on his forehead. He wrinkles his face.
I suppose I should have left well enough alone.
Yes, always, she instructs.
You stop while you are ahead and rest and gather your
wits. If you feel like it, you then start again swiftly when
you see them coming. I thought you were an expert on the
laws of the jungle?
Could we just leave it at clever?
Maybe.
Victoria is feigning displeasure, maybe not.
It is not so much the right word, or the wrong word,
Colonel. It’s the dashing of it, the whole lost moment.
The record is the record, so I think you must limp away
and hope that the entire sequence might eventually be
forgotten.
106
She is both vexing and bewitching, Corbett thinks. He
decides he is fighting way above his weight, so he can
only smile and try to pass his blushing off as exertion and
rising temperatures.
Do you mean forgiven, he asks.
In this milieu, forgiven and forgotten are probably the two
halves of the juxtapose.
This being neither the time nor the place, I cannot dispute
it. Shall we?
With a friendly grin, he motions her to accompany him
uphill and a trudging march ensues.
HAVING WALKED STEADILY more than one steep mile,
they are resting, blowing like winded horses, when a
nilgai bull exposes itself through the patchy jungle. They
each take a knee, lowering their silhouettes to behold the
great antelope as it angles down and across the hill.
The bull is a large odd-looking brute with a rather long,
thin tail that works at the blanket of flies at his rump. His
short, tight coat is deeply blue-black in color, covering
massive forequarters and tapering flanks. He has a white
throat-patch, a foot-long hair tuft below it and short,
sharply pointed 12-inch black-spike horns atop a rather
miniaturized horse-like head. The horns stand like
parentheses, all but lost against the majesty of his seven-
hundred-pound frame.
What is it, Colonel?
That is a very, very big nilgai antelope or, in some circles,
the blue bull, he whispers. Again, surprisingly rare in
these parts. His horns appear small, but quixotically, they
are actually quite wonderful: thick bases and
astonishingly long. Quite propitious. Very naturally, he’s
the best I’ve ever seen. It’s the land of the giants up here
today, nothing but big heads.
Do you want to shoot him?
I would never kill a larger one, not in ten million years.
Why don’t you? The tigress would probably approve of
such a big, lovely carcass.
107
These tigers much prefer the discretion of eating fresh
meat. I suppose with an eat-what-you-kill policy there are
fewer worries from the incidental harpat. Some of our
bears are absolute giants, you know.
The nilgai hesitates at a blackout of brush, looking this
way and that before disappearing evanescently.
He had trophy-class antlers?
They are actually horns, because he is an antelope, rather
than a deer, the latter of which are all antlered. Yes, he
had world-class horns, comically short as they are. When
you’ve studied a few of them – the really mature males –
you discover that their hides are incredibly thick: tough
and inches thick over those slabs of muscled shoulders. I
suppose the short horn length keeps bulls from killing one
another as they establish pecking orders. But they are the
perfect weapons, I think, against a thin-skinned tiger, who
matches so well against big solitary animals like nilgai
bulls.
Victoria’s sudden and comely eye-to-eye intensity sets
Corbett slightly aback.
Divine inspiration, she whispers.
He tries to match the expression of her eyes, which makes
him feel like a foolish old man.
Yes. Well. Perhaps we should be moving. There is the
smell of rain.
At that moment thunder rumbles down from an advancing
storm, through their tightening chests. The hunters
advance to a bald overlook in time to face the shimmering
undulation of a silver curtain of rain thousands of feet
high. They are on the well-defined edge of a cloudburst,
the great sound of which reminds Corbett of the time he
took the steam-powered sightseeing sloop to the foot of
Victoria Falls in Africa.
Have you ever?
I have not.
Their eyes dance across it, sharing the intimacy of a
spectacular weather effect that neither of them had ever
seen, nor will see again, except, possibly, in their dreams
of India.
108

Flowers Dead and Dying

Corbett and Victoria are still talking about the rain core as
Rui greets the hunters with namaste at the steps to the
bungalow’s veranda.
Ah, Miss Hardcourt, Sahib Corbett, your blessed return is
much anticipated. Was the morning productive?
Yes, Rui, it was magnificent, really. Miss Hardcourt and I
found a very promising place for baits.
Excellent, Sahib, another small gift from the heavens.
With great servitude Rui now turns to their female guest.
Memsahib, lunch will be served after you have had a
chance to cool off. The commodes and the bath are being
filled now. Drinks and appetizers await you with dinner to
follow.
Thank you, dear Rui. You certainly do have a way with
women.
Rui offers namaste to Victoria, bowing more deeply than
ever before.
You are my greatest pleasure, Memsahib.
Thank you, Rui. Well, then, please excuse me, gentlemen.
I will see each of you in a few moments at the table.
The men appreciatively watch Victoria disappear up the
steps and into the bungalow before returning to
discussion.
109
We were so frightfully close to the tigress this morning,
old friend, Corbett says, kicking at the dirt with his boot
before coming fixed to Rui’s eyes.
So from the main trail south to Chuka, you’ll take a
downhill line from my mark on a one-hundred-foot sal
tree. There you will follow my blazes for more than a
mile down slope. A good bit along the side of a rocky
nullah, you’ll strike a conspicuous forty-foot spire of
rock. Supply the hollow at the top of the rock with fuel
and starter for a small fire and rations for two meals.
Rui begins shaking his head in agreement.
Rui, please do poke around carefully in those rocks for
any sign of a denning hamadryad. It’s a classic spot for a
fourteen-footer. Look downhill, southwest towards
Chuka, there is a dim trail, left-to-right, below the rocks,
with a young walnut far left. Secure a goat to the walnut.
Tie a second goat to the joanesia below the machan and a
third goat to the Bombay malabaricum, far right.
As long as we have the moonlight of clear skies, the Miss
and I will attach ourselves to the rocks on through midday
tomorrow. We will come back here around noon to clean
up and stretch out. There’s space in the crow’s nest for a
pallet. Please have the boys pack enough bedding so the
Miss can curl up with some comfort against the cold.
Yes, Sahib. You have great confidence in the location.
We will have a chance at her there within a few days. It’s
a real bottleneck for game. It can’t be much more than
two miles above Chuka, where she was a regular until her
appetites forced the town folk to abandon it.
I will place food on the table and the men and I will leave
immediately with the provisions and the goats, says Rui.
The basin is ready with soap and towels.
VICTORIA HAS ALL BUT COMPLETELY finished the last
melting bite of spicy short ribs from the boar killed by
Fitz. Corbett has been with cigarette and coffee for
several minutes, relaxing with his legs femininely short-
crossed, alternating his
110
silent admirations for his guest and the sun-splashed
forest. He is smitten by her as are all men and most
women. What luck, he thinks, to have been assigned
Victoria Hardcourt.
There are a few things I wish to tell you about man-eating
tigers that may help with your stories, Victoria.
So good of you, Colonel, yes, thank you. This might also
be the time to ask you a few questions of my own.
Corbett fidgets ever so briefly, readjusting his chair more
directly to her.
Yes, well, first – and this is interesting: In my lifetime, in
these districts of India, there were no known cases,
reported cases or otherwise verified instances, of man-
eating tigers until the Nineteen Hundreds. Past
generations of natives certainly respected tigers,
worshiped them, were eaten by them in droves, but the
record includes very little about tigers marauding the
populace until Nineteen Three.
Now as you contemplate that, please do dispense with the
Colonels and please use Jim. Most all of my friends call
me Jim. I would please enjoy that.
Have you any idea, Jim, as to why the man-eaters are a
new condition?
There’s been much speculation, but no real science, on
why we heard so little of man-eaters until the last few
decades. I find myself siding with those who believe it is
an historic combination of forces: A permutation of
exponential human population and encroachment and
habitat destruction, combined with widespread and local
human epidemics. The dietary preferences of this terrible
leopard that we will have a go at is linked, I believe, to a
catastrophic influenza outbreak.
You think the leopard developed a taste for human flesh
on the dead and dying?
Yes, exactly.
Victoria contemplates this, sighs and is back to Corbett.
Few man-eaters before Nineteen Hundred?
I’m told that in some regions, in some lost periods of
time, humans suffered overwhelming losses to tigers.
Accurate record keeping, you know, is a British import to
India.
111
In some places stories are still told of huge, organized
sweeps by stone-age natives through vast blocks of tiger
habitat; the rioters dodging among the adult tigers to club
and spear as many tiger clubs as they could find. All just
to keep the equilibrium, so human civilization could
evolve here.
In my lifetime, in my experience, says Corbett, it was
Nineteen Three before I was confronted with a situation. I
was twenty-eight. I took leave from the railroad to
dispatch a man-eater that was operating not far from
where we are now, in the country I understand best.
Did you know anyone who had been killed by that tiger?
The township that collectively pleaded by telegram for me
had recently lost a child who was very distantly related to
Bali and Rui. The hunt became an on-again, off-again
campaign of twenty-four months. Once I met the pitiful
young mother who had lost her baby, and heard the
terrible story of what happened, that tiger was on the
clock. I was young and strong and willful.
What did happen to the baby?
You really do not want to know.
Yes, I do.
It is perpetually disturbing.
Yes, Jim, I think I must hear it.
Corbett lifts his napkin, daubs at his moustache and
uncomfortably clears his throat.
What I mean to say is that it is...
Please just tell it. I’m well-tempered, Jim.
Corbett organizes his thoughts and begins:
Mother and daughter were in the hills bundling and
transporting grass for the livestock.
Our young lass, age nine, apparently heard something in
the tall, uncut grass nearby and began running somewhat
blindly to safety, which was in the general direction of her
mother.
Mother was very close at hand. She had also heard the
same out-of-place something that spooked her daughter.
112
The short of it is that in one blurred motion the tiger
sprang to full view and struck the girl with a paw to kill
her, beheading the child.
The cartwheeling body of the girl was taken in the air, the
tiger springing away with it in a wink.
The child’s head rolled to rest between the bare feet of her
mother.
As they sit with these thoughts Corbett decides that he
should not have told the story. Corbett lights twin
cigarettes and hands one to Victoria. He rises to the
setting of liquor and pours them each two fingers of
Canadian malt whiskey.
I don’t drink at dinner unless someone is telling ghost
stories about murdered children, he says. A salute: To the
bravest people in the world, to the good and caring
mothers of the poor.
They gulp their whiskies. They pull aggressively at their
cigarettes, exhaling noisily.
The child’s mother was mid-twenties, about my age at the
time, Corbett continues. She had gone completely white-
headed before I arrived to first hunt the tiger. She did not
utter a single word – not to her husband, her family or her
closest friends – until the day she thanked me for killing
that tiger. It made a lasting impression.
They finish their cigarettes silently with private thoughts.
I can think of nothing worse, she says, to which Corbett
agrees with the nod of his head.
The other thing: I have yet to kill a man-eating tiger, or
read the autopsy report on a man-eater, who was not
suffering from some pre-existing physical complication.
Old age, broken canines, lost claws, septic wounds, he
continues. Mostly these man-eating tigers are in their
primes, with one or both of their forefeet in ruin from the
quills of porcupines. Damned odd but hese tigers just
have no idea of how to properly process porcupines. By
comparison, the leopard is something of a porcupine
specialist.
113
You have killed man-eaters and non-man-eaters, correct,
Jim?
Yes.
I hear the respect for them in your voice. I see it in your
eyes.
I have great admiration for them. When you remove these
rare but spectacularly destructive and demoralizing
anomalies, when you take the man-eaters out of the
equation, the tiger is a true gentleman. They are a
mystical God-given species to be admired and revered. I
am notably less crazy about leopards.
Why so with leopards?
It is my opinion that leopards are brilliant assassins:
cowardly, lazy assassins. The poor of India are an almost
completely unarmed population. To a leopard targeting
the young and the weak, these poor hillfolk are somewhat
easier to kill than porcupines.
Why are you leaving India, Jim? Is it because there will
soon be no more tiger hunting?
My India is coming to an abrupt end before my very eyes.
And leaving her has torn the heart from my chest. It is
impossible to imagine better people than these indigenous
folks, or a finer or more interesting environment. I cannot
say why it is, exactly, that I am leaving her. Maybe I have
an unconscious need to live at the last of the frontiers.
Africa is a few years, several million open miles and tens
of millions of people behind India, I think.
There are no logging trucks in the part of Africa where I
will settle.
Then comes the roiling political atmosphere of India: self-
rule. Now make no mistake, he continues, none of the
historians will ever confuse us as a perfect race of people.
But I do find many – not all – of India’s newly minted
ruling elite to be as ungrateful and impatient as some of
the politicians they are replacing. When you liberate
people from ignorance and build them a track that will
take them into the future and hoist them up on the rails.
Well, you would expect them to have a level of tolerance
114
– God forbid, gratitude – that accepts with some humility
that this was the best that could have been done for them.
I abhor the public and private insolence of some of these
recently anointed powerbrokers, their viral resentfulness
pushed out for effect. That sort of behavior seems in
conflict with whom they would have had us believe they
are.
Regarding the impending loss of tiger hunting, you should
know that for a good while now I’ve been much more
interested in hunting tigers with cinema cameras than with
rifles.
Corbett stops mid-thought, craning his head down the
main road as the first animals in the long pack string
come to view.
My word, I do believe that’s old Willy, the heartiest of the
old-style campaigners. Let’s suspend conversation,
please. I want to introduce you to this man. He’ll also be
carrying our mail and whatever news we’ve been missing.
Corbett sweeps around to help Victoria with her chair.
EVEN IN THE RELATIVELY RAW isolation of 1939
Kumaon, India, the gradual approach of a fourteen-camel
pack train is the rich experience of a bygone epoch.
Williamson, still some three-hundred feet from the yard of
the bungalow, acknowledges Corbett with a waving
salute. Corbett and Victoria respond in kind.
With all of the camels eventually standing calmly, the
mahommedan footmen of the shikari begin helping
offload the riders, including Williamson, by jockeying
their smelly, preposterously ugly-faced mounts to an
alertly prone position, so that the riders might climb off
more closely to the ground.
One of the animals positioned very far back in the line
balks and wrecks spectacularly. Williamson doesn’t give
the unruliness behind him more than a glance.
Although he is initially speaking to Corbett, he is fixated
on what he believes to be the most ferociously green eyes
he’s ever seen, the eyes of Victoria Hardcourt.
What champion luck to catch you in camp, Colonel!
115
And this must be the brilliant Englishwoman, whose
abject beauty has set off paralyzing chain reactions across
the whole of northern India?!
Yes, Willy, it most certainly is her, presenting Miss
Victoria Hardcourt. And, Victoria, please allow me the
pleasure of introducing William Westin Williamson, who
is best known throughout this arc of sub-Asia as simply
Willy, esteemed professional hunter and raconteur.
I am very pleased to meet you, Willy.
Williamson removes the leather glove from his right hand
and doffs his dusty broad-brimmed planter’s hat. He
sweeps up Victoria’s hand and, bowing, kisses it
powerfully.
I understand that you have only known me now for a few
heart-stopping seconds, Miss Hardcourt, but I must tell
you that I have driven these wretched camels up this
mountain expressly to trade them to Colonel Corbett for
your hand in marriage. The Tahsildar will be here
momentarily with a wedding dress; I have two good men
fetching the high priest of Dabidura.
Victoria blushes shyly, rocking her shoulders coyly from
side to side. She throws her head back, which shakes the
mass of her fiery hair, and laugher comes up from her
diaphragm.
You are quite the fun-loving scoundrel now aren’t you,
Willy? Well, I question the number and the quality of
your camels. Jim turned down that many, and better
camels by the looks of yours, just yesterday.
Yes, now see here, my good man. The cost to simply
enter the negotiation process to wed Miss Hardcourt will
require what camels you have here, plus the four horses
with you and all the associated tack.
Willy gives Corbett a very hard look before turning to
stare softly at Victoria.
Oh, I see. Jim, is it? Very scandalous, I think, the use of
these Christian names. Well, if it were that easy I would
drain the Sahara of camels. I would drive ten thousand of
the horrible creatures up here as a deposit.
Now Willy is blushing, right through almost seventy
116
years of outdoor exposures and an inch of camel-driving
grime. He touches his hat brim.
Please do forgive the foolishness, Miss Harcourt. I mean
no disrespect and I shouldn’t want you to interpret me as
an ill-mannered old fool.
I’ve never felt so flattered, Willy. Thank you.
Victoria takes his hand again like a close, long-lost friend.
Williamson squeezes it, tipping off his hat.
Jimmy, where must I start? First and foremost: very sorry
to hear about Bali. Please accept my heartfelt
condolences. What a loss, man. You just don’t get over
that sort of shock for a long, long time. Great young Bali.
There is a moment before Willy again replaces his hat.
Secondly, half of those saddle horses there are yours, on
loan from the Commissioner, replacing what was lost and
run off a few days ago. I will see that they are confined to
the Tahslidar’s kedad with instructions for their care.
The update on the lad, Jack, is that he is gingerly
crutching around and out of action for several weeks. His
arm’s in a plaster cast and it’s thought his knee is badly
sprained.
The man who disappeared after shooting the pig with Rui,
Sergeant Grant Fitzgerald, has been apprehended
following a mid-morning scuffle in a Calcutta barroom.
He told the papers that he had gone to the dogs over his
encounter with a man-eating jungle tiger. He is expected
to use a battle-fatigue defense to overturn whatever the
military will charge him with.
Lastly, I’m returning all of Miss Hardcourt’s shikari
effects, including Ibby’s wife’s unscratched Rigby. Both
of Miss Hardcourt’s bottles were salvaged unbroken,
which is more proof of God’s tolerance for the use of
medicinals.
Ibby put those in there, Victoria says.
Williamson smiles broadly.
Yes, of course, Miss Hardcourt. It is well established that
Ibby uses his office to run gin and whiskey into the
backcountry, so that went without saying.
Oh, that’s terrific, Willy. You don’t say, all of it, eh?
Everything.
The camera?
117
Yes, ma’am.
Cracking!
So, Willy, all of this means that your own shikari was
made. Here you are once again with paid clientele, eh?!
As I remember, you would be entertaining a plutocrat
from the American automobile industry and a hillbilly
archer who has liquidated his modest holdings and
divorced his family.
Victoria sighs with some exasperation.
That’s correct, Jimmy. The plutocrat has interestingly
offered another ten-thousand on the spot to spend one day
on hanka with you for the man-eater.
Ten Thousand?!
U.S. greenbacks.
I’m afraid there’s quite enough to say grace over here
with Miss Hardcourt. But I actually could see us teaming
up, Corbett continues, if my plans for the next seventy-
two hours bear no fruit. The running noose is tightening
but this old girl is certainly quite the phantom. I would
send a runner to fetch you if a new plan with the need for
more guns were to develop. I’m afraid the archer would
have to take up a fusil, of course. This business wouldn’t
allow the imposition of an arrow-spitting stuntman.
My two nimrods will be ecstatic with potentially
reinforcing on a man-eater, says Willy. Meantime, I hope
to have the archer converted to bangsticks fairly quickly.
I’m told that I still have a very big tomcat on the dole up
near the headwaters of the Bhabar, and tomorrow we shall
begin offering him fresh sacrifices of goats and archers.
At this level of investment, the archer will soon take up
the rifle. I don’t think he’s a purest.
Williamson is smiling; Corbett chuckles.
I cannot believe that Ibby licensed a bow hunt for tigers?
Yes, well, Ibby does have a cryptic sense of humor. He is
also well aware of how easy a bunch of archers will be on
our tiger populations. You pay us quite a lot of money to
feed yourself to our Alpha predator. It’s pure genius,
really. And he knows I’m pretty handy with the archer’s
best friend: the Holland Paradox. Good old George
Fosbery was right on time
118
with that rifled eight-gauge and those brutal Nitros.
Corbett is shaking his head disapprovingly at the slim
odds that a tiger will not bite, scratch or kill someone on
Willy’s upcoming escapade.
Say, Jim, this particular Sagittarius paid a twenty-five-
percent premium for his licenses. Ibby wrote it up as
dangerous-game-with-primitive-tools tariff.
No, you don’t say. That’s crazy.
As outhouse rats. And at what point did I convince myself
that any of this was a good idea?
Inscrutable, really, ineffable, says Corbett.
Corbett notices the plutocrat and the archer have
converged down the camel line, perhaps mulling the idea
of inching up to join the conversation.
Well, dear friend, you’ve just caught Miss Hardcourt and
me running out to the theater. We’re told it’s an adventure
flick pitting a beautiful heroine and a washed-up codger
against a five-hundred-pound man-eating tigress. The
critics, you know, often disparage these animal
exploitation pot-boilers for ending happily, so we’d better
dash along and disappoint them again.
Everyone smiles nervously, the light mood ebbing.
Do take every precaution, Will. Send someone for me, as
needed. It’s a great comfort knowing that you are now in
operation up here.
Jim, you must believe that I would make every effort to
ride back down and love on that dead tigress, to see you
and
Miss Hardcourt on your way. I recognize, however, that
you’re fighting a very tight schedule.
I know you would. Say, man, we really must be hopping
off in quite a rush, says Corbett.
I’m coming to kill a Kenyan lion once you’re settled,
Willy retorts, backing off toward his pack string. I’m told
I’ll need one to give balance to my memoirs of a wasted
life spent shooting. Lions are the new tigers, you know.
So, all best to Miss Maggie, and to you, too, Miss
Hardcourt, and, well, safe travels, kid.
Corbett comes forward and embraces the dusty old
119
campaigner, catching the eye of his approaching clients.
With the timing of a master introvert, he dodges meeting
them by flagging a grandiose goodbye. Victoria shakes
the old man’s strong hand again and everyone turns on
their heels to get back to work.
I’ll have you a rocking chair right next to mine on the
porch, Will. But I won’t promise that we can just cheek
off into the bush for a few days and find you a fluffy old
lion.
Corbett draws up stiff and straight and swings to face
Willy, who himself has stopped and turned. He is relieved
to notice that the advance of Willy’s clients has stalled.
Yes, Willy says, I know what you’re thinking, Jim:
What dryness to escape this flaming funhouse only to be
eaten in open country by a silly little lion.
Take no prisoners, Sahib.
Yes, same to you, bwana. Godspeed and all of that.
120
107
Blood Rain
The bolt of Corbett’s Rigby Model No. 1 flashes dully in
what the iconic bard of Indian hunting lore, Franklin
Russell, would call the “modulated gloom” of moonlight.
He bolts a 175-grain .275 cartridge into the rifle’s firing
chamber, flips on the gate safety, rests the up-pointed
fieldpiece carefully into a crevasse in the rock and quietly
loads Jean Ibbotson’s Model No. 3, a lighter weight clone
of his own rifle. He places the second shooter upright in a
similar “monkey” next to his own.
Corbett superstitiously checks his rifles periodically by
completely unloading and reloading them. Once with an
unloaded rifle he was stalked by a tiger and he’s kept his
promise to never make that mistake again. He peeks
above the rim of rock and studies all three of the white
goats in the silvery glow. The luminous conditions are
such that he can see the eyes of the farthest, most nervous,
goat when it is not standing in moon shadow. The other
goats are placid. A sambar hind “bells” several hundred
yards to the north, but from the sound of her voice Corbett
doubts that she is so alarmed as to call out anxiously
again. He withdraws back into the funnel of rock and
swivels to face Victoria.
I like to have one in the chamber at night.
Name a man who doesn’t, she replies.
121
What does that mean?
Nothing, Jim. Like you, I was trying for a laugh.
Corbett smiles and runs a hand through his dirty blond
hair and streamlines his moustache.
Oh, sure, relieving the tension, he says.
Those poor goats. Do you think you can please shoot the
tigress before she kills one of them?
How about if we try to shoot the tigress before she kills
one of us?
Alright, that too.
Here’s how this works. I’m going to blink off while you
try not to. When you get tired, I will watch so you can
sleep. Say, did I mention the scream that I heard coming
up from Chuka a few days ago? Unbelievable. Blood
chilling. Like nothing I can describe.
Corbett drops, cuddling into a sleeping position.
No, you are not. What if I see her, Jim? Would you prefer
that I wake you before I begin emptying the guns?
Victoria peeks over the lip of rock and finds each of the
goats in the moonlight. Corbett begins breathing deeply
almost instantly. Victoria retreats to locate him in the
shadow. As her eyes become adjusted, she recognizes that
he has somehow fallen fast asleep. She sighs and turns
again to peer into the foreboding forest from over the cusp
of rocks. She breathes deeply, eyes wide and darting.
Very sweetly, very silently to the forest, with silvery
clouds racing across the full moon of the sub-tropical
Indian highlands, Victoria says:
Here pussy, pussy, pussy.
THE BRASS KNOB IS TURNING on the heavy door leading
into the study of Max Geipel. The door opens and Mr.
Haasfeld enters with a sterling service tray balanced of
food and drink.
Geipel is seated at his desk. A 66-inch recurved laminate
of bois d’arc loaded with a 33-inch, footed Port Oxford-
cedar
122
arrow rests on the upper left corner of the German’s
mahogany workstation. A massive two-blade broadhead
vertically aligned to the thick shaft shines in the
lamplight. Scaled to the hunting of gaur buffalo, the
powerfully graceful archery set appears toy-like compared
to the giant German, who looks up from the volume he
has been reading, holding the page by facing the book
down on the desk. Haasfeld progresses across the room
with more and more light falling on him from the
kerosene lamp.
Geipel whisks off his wireframe readers and drops them
haphazardly to the desk.
I will not be able to take you to Germany, Mr. Haasfeld,
because your German is as poor as my English. Because
you are English and Germany is no place right now for an
Englishman. Nor is there future for you here, as these
plantations soon return to the wild.
You have two choices and my hope is...
Geipel moves to take the bow.
Haasfeld, moaning now continuously, smashes the tray to
the floor and spins running wide left before taking more
directly to the exit, as though this evasiveness might help
his cause. As seen from over the top of Geipel’s string
arm, the arrow cracks Haasfeld between the shoulders,
mere inches right of the poor man’s spine, throwing him
onto the edge of the heavy, partially opened door.
He is dead as he hits the floor.
Geipel comes around his desk and picks a damaged
sandwich up from the debris of the tray. There are faint
sounds – a muffled thump and the scrape of a boot
twitching on the floor, of gurgling air escaping a cavity –
as the super Nazi reshuffles the meat and cheese to an
original state within the fresh-baked bread. He holds it
under the light and flicks a splinter of crystal glass from
the crust, quartering the sandwich with one easy bite.
Through his thick German accent and his chewing he
speaks to the emptying and rapidly cooling body of his
former assistant:
As I was saying, Mr. Haasfeld, my hope is that you do not
run. It is the flight of prey, I postulate, that is the primary
123
trigger of the predatory response, the killing blow.
Attack is the best form of defense.
VICTORIA HARDCOURT’S EYES ARE WILD in the
candlelight. Dense clouds have taken the mountain and
the moon has set. The closed eyes of Jim Corbett
eventually open, flicker and then hold on Victoria’s
hysterical eyes. Victoria puts her forefinger to Corbett’s
lips for quiet.
Have you heard it?
What?
The tigress, I think.
No, I have not, he says. What time is it now, he asks,
smiling and streamlining his moustache.
Just past three o’clock in the morning: the unguarded
hour, she says.
How can you be sure it is the tigress?
At that second the tigress triple roars from about a quarter
mile behind them, to the north towards Champie. The
mating call of a heated tigress at noon on a sunny day in
Delhi would freeze the human population for a square
mile and close half the city within the hour. In a lightless,
cloud-smothered forest the hollow voice from this apex
predator is a scrambling near knockout to the senses.
Because I’m a good guesser?
Over the next few minutes, the tigress roars, double roars
and triple roars with great regularity, which soon becomes
an ever-more terrorizing fascination to the hunters.
She has come cravenly into her season; she is demanding
a mate, he says.
Like the cats in the alleyway.
Yes, Victoria, but on the magnitude of one-hundred
thousand.
The tigress has not announced her position or intent in
many long minutes.
She is at the glade where we saw the nilgai bull.
124
His thought is truncated by the ferocious din of two
roaring tigers, whose screams and howls grow to
permeate the quaking forest. The mind-bending shrieks of
the tigers rise and fall continuously for a full minute
before there is nothing more of them but the ringing of
their erotomania in the ears of the hunters.
And she has found a capable enthusiast.
They sit in silence for a moment.
How long does it take?
What?
The lovemaking.
Well, I am sure that is an exceedingly personal question,
which might even offend the most savage of tigers. My
guess is that they copulate for as long as they please, for
hours or days even, suspending play only to stop and eat
the misguided voyeur.
Corbett’s smile is barely visible even inches away in the
darkness. Victoria meets it with a faux grin and a sarcastic
shake of her head. Corbett attempts pragmatism.
It is your turn to sleep, he says.
Sleep?! I may not sleep again, ever.
Corbett laughs quietly and snuggles back against the
padding on the rock.
As unfortunate as that is for you, your condition does
work quite favorably for me. Do keep track of the goats,
won’t you? And please jab me lightly should I snore, or if
either of the longtails decides to climb in bed with us.
Insomnia is plus-plus on the application of a tiger-hunting
apprenticeship. This will reflect auspiciously on your
application: Ultimate sentinel, check.
You, however, seem to fit the medical definition of the
narcoleptic, she hisses. Jim? Jim?!
The sound of Corbett’s quiet sleep breathing fills the little
hollow at the top of the rock spire overlooking the valley
of Chuka.
125
VICTORIA AWAKENS to find Corbett hunched over a
small one-burner gas stove.
Good morning, Victoria.
Victoria wipes her eyes and revives her throat.
Good morning, Jim.
I have made tea for two, he says. Afterwards, I would like
to slip about and cut the tracks of the tigress. I have the
feeling that she went on east, southeast, following her
tryst. As hot and heavy as it is this morning, I have an
inkling of powerful storms today. Rather than trying to
fend off the weather in the open, we should plan to be
back at the bungalow by mid-afternoon. We will clean up,
eat, relax and then I will come back in here for another
night atop this lovely pile of rocks.
He hands Victoria a tin cup of tea, which she cradles with
two hands.
I like it best when it is as strong as sheet metal with one
spoon of sugar and a splash of milk.
I enthusiastically agree. Thank you. Would there please
be anything to accompany the tea?
With apologies for the frugality of it, and the preparation,
yes: there are fresh, hot chapatties and dal, liberally
seasoned with green chilies and salt and cooked in
mustard oil.
Mmmm, that sounds somewhat delicious.
The bell of the collared goat below them tinkles. A strong
breeze comes up the valley. Victoria and Corbett both
flinch as a gold-fronted green bulbul flickers to perch at
the rim of their rocky overlook. The bird cocks its head at
Corbett, then Victoria.
I’m glad you have come, he says to the bird. Will you
please lead us to the Tigress of Champawat, mister
bulbul?
The bird fixes on Corbett before launching itself with a
squeak. Corbett rises to follow the flight of the bulbul,
which is first in the direction that he himself had earlier
decided would intersect the track of the tigress. The bird
lands on the high branch of a deodar tree, seets
dramatically and then purposely flies straight down the
valley in the direction of Chuka. Corbett fully charts the
winging bulbul, brilliant in any light.
Yes, bird, that too is what I had been thinking.
126
After breakfast they move a good distance in the direction
of the tigers. They are eventually standing over the
complete front paw track of a big male tiger, which is
sided with Corbett’s hand to lend perspective.
This is where they diverged: the male going north,
perhaps along the southeastern limits of Champawat, he
says. The tigress goes right at those dwellings up ahead at
the outskirts of the village.
Distant thunder has been a constant background element
since the hunters dismounted the rock pile, but it is
suddenly letting loose to become an immediate threat. The
anvil-topped mesoscale cumulus is a glowing 45,000-foot
colossus. Powerful updrafts are stripping weak leaves
from the trees and lifting debris from the forest floor.
Let’s find refuge under the roof of a friendly villager, he
shouts.
They are moving briskly towards the cluster of dwellings
when a drawn-out blood-curdling scream stops them both
cold. The storm is now animating every piece of flora and
into this scene springs the tigress, running as though she
is inherent to the gale, bounding greatly with a native girl
clamped horizontally in her jaws.
Through the crashing cyclone the hunters clearly hear the
girl cry out once for her mother.
They have but one glimpse of the tigress before she
disappears leaping downhill with the girl. The image that
Victoria will try to describe for the rest of her life is the
way the victim’s long black hair flows among the bar-
striped shoulder of the tigress. The impression is one of
heroic friendship, Victoria thinks: the girl is alertly
hugging the tiger’s neck as it moves her urgently, lovingly
out ahead of the storm’s advancing devastation.
Victoria’s moaning cry is unrecognizable.
Corbett is swinging his rifle and breaking its trigger,
because he is the judge advocate of this inconceivable
thing. And in that instant the girl and the tiger are taken
by the jungle.
He brings up the unfired rifle and levers on the safety.
Shaking in anger, he shouts goddamn into the tearing
wind and
127
the stinging rain. He is calculating what he must do to
gain on the escaping tiger, so he does not turn when
addressing Victoria over the howling storm.
Do not follow me; I will find you in the village.
Yes! Go!
Working with gravity, Corbett is quick to reach his
maximum speed. He is not young but he has remained a
fluid runner in mountain shape and he is awash in
adrenaline. He must throttle back occasionally to stay on
the fall line, swiveling between trees and crashing through
the low growth, leaping logs and rocks. He feels as
though he might see the tiger as his strides open each new
eyereach.
He has been running like this for seconds that feel like
minutes when he passes a snatch of the girl’s hair, a
streamer caught to a blackthorn spike at shoulder height.
And as he passes it, looking away from his line, he falls
smashing to a grinding halt at the maidenhair-lined bank
of a mountain stream. He rises to leap the freshet, to
continue, but through the glasslike water of the brook he
is faced with the small, unblemished lower leg of the
tigress’s teenage victim lying in the clear water on the
colorful pebbles of the streambed.
Lightning is exploding now and thumb-size raindrops are
dimpling the surface of the stream. He knows that a
flashflood will scourer the creek, so he swings off his
pack, withdrawing from it a long piece of white cloth that
he wipes out smooth on the ground. He reaches into the
water and delicately brings up the leg of the girl –
completely bloodless, severed as though a surgeon has
taken it at the knee – and places it carefully on the linen.
He wraps her leg judiciously and tucks it in his pack.
Corbett sloshes across the creek, walking downhill in her
blood. The massive storm calved from the Tibetan plateau
and raked by the Himalayan Mountains empties as he
comes to semi-open forest. First, raindrops the size of
smashing fists, which solidify into immense hailstones
with the near density of four-pound cannonballs. The hail
crushes and rips down half of everything seen before him.
He absorbs the brutal force of the weather and wonders at
it and is alloyed by it and the weight of the leg of the girl
in this pack. Then the lightning: a final,
128
spectacular, continuous bombardment that begins
exploding the defoliated forest. The thunderbolts seem to
hit every tree within his view, some are struck two and
three times. A giant sal is vaporized by a rope of
electricity the diameter of the tree’s trunk.
It is like a lost verse from the book of Revelations, he
thinks, and he turns away from it and begins the climb to
Champawat.
Standing with a group of villagers beneath the roof of a
small veranda, Victoria is the first to recognize Corbett
emerging from the denatured and smoking forest. With
the core of the storm a crashing, indigo backdrop, she
runs awkwardly through the mud and drizzle and throws
herself into his arms. She hugs him pressingly and then
kisses him flush on the mouth, which seems to bring him
back to the moment. They both breathe deeply after the
embrace, searchingly holding each other’s eyes.
I was quite sure that I would never see you again, Sahib.
Corbett takes a half step backwards. He grooms his
moustache with the palm of his hand. His face is grim and
old.
The leg of an Indian princess is in my pack wrapped
lightly in our picnic spread. Her family must have
something of her to bury. The misfortune of my blown
shot now takes on an unbelievable consequence.
Any chance you made the acquaintance of her family?
The neighbors at the southern end of Champawat have
collected around the hunters in the muddy lantana grass at
the edge of the stricken town. The hunters turn and step to
a man and woman who have tentatively come forward.
Mother and father slump to the ground in each other’s
arms, and the arms of Jim Corbett and Victoria Hardcourt.
There is shock, wailing, screaming and fainting. Most of
the womenfolk have collapsed in the mud. A few of the
hardiest people press closer to form a comfort around
those who have just lost everything.
129
NOW IN THE EVENING on the veranda of the Champawat
forest bungalow, Corbett and Victoria are very quietly
finishing a candlelit four-course meal prepared by Rui.
Low voices and the scruff of feet announce the arrival
of the contingent of village officials that Corbett has
requested. Rui leads them upon the terrace and Corbett
stands and greets them all with English handshakes. Rui
introduces the guests by name, starting with the Fakir and
the Havildar, before moving to the most important, the
Tahsildar, the mayor of Champawat named Ganga Ram, a
big Indian who speaks impeccably clipped English.
Thank you for coming, gentlemen, Corbett says.
I would like to beat the jungle below us starting from the
Chuka Road, moving all the way across the face of the
mountain. I would begin that operation day after
tomorrow. I prefer the drive contains at least four-hundred
men. Rui Singh will organize the line and, briefly, well:
the idea will be to move the tigress downhill toward
Chuka. It will be a complex beat and Rui and my other
men, Dhanban and Dharmanand, will
be charged with the organization of it once you’ve please
assembled your fellows here in Champie.
Gentlemen, will you please help us with this?
The Tahsildar proudly steps forward.
Mr. Corbett, your presence gives us hope against this
great scourge. Thank you. I will see that we have gathered
six-hundred men for you by the day after tomorrow. We
will leave you now to your planning with all of our
salutations. Good evening to you, to you, Miss Hardcourt,
and your brave men.
Very well, sir. Thank you and good luck to us all.
The assembled village militia, brandishing a total of three
muskets lashed together with wire wrappings and nails,
parts so that the Tahsildar and his police chief and his
constable may first exit the balcony. When they have
gone, Corbett looks to Rui and Victoria.
We will leave tomorrow midmorning to overnight in
Chuka. I will get us ready this evening, clean the guns and
so forth. I would prefer that you retire now, Victoria,
because
130
this next phase will reward us with very little sleep.
Moreover, I have details to cover with Rui and the men.
Yes, of course. Good night, Jim, Rui.
There in her bedroom Victoria moves to the dimming
lantern atop her dresser. She fusses with the dying lantern
to no avail. It is burning out of fuel. She looks to her right
as the lamp goes dark and the hooded face of a very large
king cobra rises to within only a few feet of her right arm.
The room is now very dark save the ambient light through
the doorway behind her and the pulsing of the starry
evening through her open window.
Jim!
Corbett and his men look up from the map they had been
studying.
Jim!
Yes, Victoria?!
Jim, I need you to quietly come to my bedroom door with
your pistol and the electric torch.
In seconds Corbett and Rui are in the darkened doorway
of Victoria’s bedroom. Victoria blocks their view of the
swaying head of the cobra at her right elbow. She is
certain that it flicks its tongue to taste the men as they
make the doorway.
Yours seems a very provocative request, Victoria. I’ve
brought Rui, but I can send him away.
Put the light on my left hip because that is approximately
the line of the snake’s head. I must remember to keep my
left arm at my side when I spin away.
Victoria is warmed by the sound of the silky action of
Corbett’s pre-war Colt Model 1911 A1. Rui, aiming the
flashlight, takes a knee and finds coils of snake just
beyond Victoria’s legs.
It is a very large cobra, Sahib. Yes, yes, very large,
indeed.
No, Vic. No spinning. Just hold what you’ve got and I’ll
come in under your right arm.
On my word, Rui, move the torch beam to the mirror over
the dresser and steady it.
131
That should give me enough light behind the memsahib to
operate. Do you understand?
Yes, Sahib. Steady to the mirror.
On bare feet Corbett has soon lightly, fully, pressed
against Victoria’s back half. He has his left hand to the
left bend of her hip. As he begins peeking over her right
shoulder to find the snake he slowly starts the pistol from
beneath her right arm. All of this, plus the smell of her
clean hair, makes the play quite sensual, he thinks, if not
dangerously erotic.
Rui, please light the mirror.
The room flashes nova white the second that Corbett
projects the gun sight onto the cobra’s orange throat. He
pushes back with Victoria as the snake’s great trunk
explodes in convulsions, writhing enormously in the
dancing beam of the flashlight, shattering a footstool in
death. As thick as the fetlock of a horse and 15-feet long,
packing enough venom to kill everyone in the room twice
over, the massive hamadryad could still be made to coil
reflexively the next morning when the hunters began their
march to Chuka.
Victoria steps around to Corbett, kissing him on the
cheek.
Oh, thank you, darling! Quite impressive really, and
oddly erogenous, she says. Delightfully symbolic, as
though we shared some primal intimacy in the firing of
your gun – slaying the mutual menace, the serpent,
together. Now would you be a pet and please ring the
front desk? Imagine my disappointment: I explicitly
ordered the delivery of Clark Gable and a pair of juvenile
saltwater crocodiles. Who on earth is running this strange
little hotel?!
Rui, please pour the missus a tall nightcap, and let’s move
her to my room. She is obviously in shock. I’ll take the
balcony tonight and relocate altogether to these quarters
upon our return from Chuka.
Yes, Sahib.
It is smashingly good luck, you know, Corbett says to
Victoria.
What is? Pouring me a nightcap and moving me into your
suite?
132
In my experience, the killing of a hamadryad while
hunting a tiger is always propitious. Any of the venomous
snakes, actually. It doesn’t have to be a king cobra – and
killing one never fails to bring the tiger.
Oh my, yes, how wonderfully mysterious. Mysterious
India. Say, if you’re still up when Mr. Gable arrives, will
you please advise him that I’m drinking alone in my
upgraded room?
Yes, certainly. But don’t stay up too late awaiting Mr.
Gable. This tiger hunting business is about to take off.
When the moment comes up on you it will be too late for
you to wish that it hadn’t found you weak and sleepy.
133
133
134
Uncommon Bravery
Therein the late afternoon on the remote dirt track
northwest of Champawat an Indian girl child is tugging
mightily on the lead rope of a stubborn bullock of at least
ten times her weight. She is pleading with the animal.
You must not do this, she shouts.
The child yanks the rope. The animal blinks its beautiful
and empty brown eyes but does not budge.
You must come because it will soon be night. You are
afraid of it, the darkness. You will not have anything to
eat. Hunger will be upon you.
Please, you cow, Move! MOVE!
The Colonel and Victoria step quietly into view from up
the road. For a moment before approaching her, they
study the child’s plight.
I see that your bullock can be very difficult, Corbett
announces.
The girl is dusty and sweat streaked. She is trying to
hypnotize the beast between digging her heels into the
road and snapping on the lead rope, so she doesn’t
physically acknowledge Corbett.
He is not my bullock.
Oh, I see. Whose bullock is he?
135
He is father’s.
Where is father?
He is at my house, resting.
Where are you going with his bullock?
He has told me to take this stubborn animal to my uncle.
Corbett moves to the rear of the bullock, clicks air
through his cheek and touches the young bovid with the
muzzle of his .275 Rigby. The animal begins walking.
The child glances at Corbett and begins leading the
lumbering animal up the road. Victoria falls in behind
them.
What is your name, young Miss?
I am just a girl, sir, named Paki.
You have a beautiful name, Paki. And I must say you are
courageous beyond any expectation to be transporting
livestock alone in these hills. How far is uncle’s farm?
It is not far. You do not have to follow me there. I am
brave enough for this.
Yes, dear, you are well past bravery. Truth be told, I am
not as brave as you are, so I would please like to follow
you to your uncle’s and then return with you to your
house. I will feel much safer in your company.
I am Jim Corbett. This is Miss Victoria Hardcourt. If you
don’t mind, she will be traveling with us.
I know who you are, Mr. Corbett. I don’t mind if Miss
Harcourt comes with us. The road is very dangerous.
THE MOSTLY SILENT ROUND TRIP through the desolate
hunting grounds of the Tigress of Champawat takes more
than two hours. Nearing Paki’s clean-swept hovel, the
young girl finally begins to speak freely.
Because you are very old, I have cried to God every night
for your health; for your safety and return. From the day
you left at the start of the mango season, I cannot sleep
without crying. I am too old to cry, my father says. He is
very sick.
I will take the tiger with me when I leave, Paki. It will not
be long now.
This is my house.
136
It is a fine house in a beautiful setting. It reminds me of
where I grew up in Kaladungi. Now I have made you a
promise about the tiger that I intend to keep and, in return,
I will ask one of you. I want you to stay here with your
mother and father until word comes that this tiger has
been killed. Will you promise me?
Tears well in Paki’s deep brown eyes and she trembles.
She considers protesting the request.
Yes, you must promise me and you must tell your father
of your promise to me.
Corbett swings off his pack, kneeling. From it he
produces a bundle, and from a smaller pouch, a handful of
worn rupees. He transfers the bundle and the rupees to
Paki before rising.
The food will help you spend a few days in your home
with your mother and father. The money is for leading
Miss Hardcourt and me safely down your dangerous road.
Thank you, Mr. Corbett. These gifts can help me keep my
promise. Will you stay at my father’s house tonight? You
cannot return to Champawat before the night.
Miss Harcourt and I will be sleeping in Chuka, but thank
you for your offer.
My father says that Chuka is where the souls of my
brothers awaited their funerals. Father says that the tigress
has many of her bones in the nullah above Chuka, where
he played as a boy. The tiger keeps her ghosts in the
village. No one visits Chuka, not even the dacoits.
Paki looks away for a moment, shaking her head in
protest and wonder at Corbett’s camp selection.
I will cry tonight again for you but not for your safe
return, Mr. Corbett, because those prayers were answered.
Thank you for not forgetting us, for coming back to us.
All that is left now is to tell you that our prayers are with
you.
Paki turns quickly, tears welling. She begins advancing to
her house. Corbett considers calling out to this skinny
girl, but he spins with drooping shoulders instead and
resets them and begins double-timing the long walk to
Chuka, Victoria intermittently running and walking at his
heels.
137
Corbett is carrying his Rigby casually across his left arm,
a big enactive flashlight in his right hand. South to north,
they walk quickly through the village, selecting a
spacious slate-roofed cottage in which to sleep. Corbett
leaves Victoria out under the pergola, moving alone
briskly to secure the interior of the dwelling. He
reemerges.
It is not exactly like the brochure, but the walls are thick,
the roof is new and the front door and the shuttered
windows are solid.
Corbett latches the front door, seats Victoria and begins
tightening up the hut. Within a moment he has candles
pluming on the clean table and tea boiling; the beds are
dusted and re-spread with brushed up, if not musty,
covers. After they take cool water from the small chagul
that rode in his pack, he refills whiskies into the tin cups
from a silver flask. There are two kinds of cold, spicy
meats, small bars of cheeses, chocolates and a round of
fresh bread. Victoria eats ravenously while Corbett
finishes the housekeeping.
The hearty life out-of-doors will enliven any appetite,
according to Teddy Roosevelt, he says.
I am waiting on you like one dog waits on another, Jim.
My manners have been run through. I may soon belch
very loudly to complete the effect.
Don’t hold back. Eat it all if you can. I prefer to hunt on
an empty stomach. We will enjoy the light packs as we
move uphill tomorrow morning.
There is a moment of silence before Victoria speaks:
Why are you abandoning her, Jim? India is your first love,
your seductress.
There is another pause as he adjusts a chair to the table
and sits across from Victoria.
The idea of leaving India physically makes my heart hurt.
It feels like I decided that I had no choice. Now I’m
simply
trying to find ways to live with a verdict that sees me
missing her with every breath left in me.
Corbett pours Victoria another finger of whiskey and
138
nibbles some at the food as Victoria is finishing.
But...
Corbett takes a large piece of meat and cheese whole with
a crust. He chews it considerately and swallows loudly in
the stagnant room. He has a bite of the whiskey.
India’s forests and wildlife, as I knew them, the
diminished resources you witness today, resources that
you could not recognize as being reduced because of your
perspective, are standing at the rabbit hole of a darkening
stage. The natives of British descent like me are soon to
find her disappearance, her extinctions and near
extinctions, to be quick, painful and dangerous. Tigers,
barasingha, wild almond groves, white-capped babblers,
the Indian hill people, white people.
The system’s death clock has been activated. It is evening
and all of the things that matter to me most stand teetering
at the margins of annihilation, he says. What is not wiped
out, re-administrated – obliterated – will be marginalized
to ghettoes and preserves. I suppose my departure is a
self-imposed exile. An escape with dignity before
something such as the standardization of forests – which I
believe is a shortsighted and ruinous British policy based
on domestication and yield – becomes a smoldering
continent-sized clear cut.
I am out before the racially motivated money grubbers
whip up the blind mobs. Before the frenzied masses and
the criminals short sell and gut the only true civilization
India has ever known. Two-hundred and fifty-years of
infrastructure, education, peace keeping, economic self-
sufficiency, records, accountability — blown to
smithereens.
The French Revolution all over again, Victoria questions.
It will be worse than that for wildlife, worse than
America’s wildlife atrocities of the Nineteenth Century.
Post-Revolution, post-Industrial Age with this population
– three hundred and fifty million people and this just
Thirty Nine?! The wildlands of India are set to pop out
like a comet, gone
in a wink. India’s glories reduced to what can be seen in a
few snow-globe-type habitats.
Tigers need big wildernesses, says Victoria.
So too the imperialists, the colonizers and an old man-
139
eating tiger hunting hobbyist like me.
Corbett and Victoria now sit in thought, neither looking
away from the flickering candles twinkling in their eyes.
I’m glad a few people like you saw it as it vanished on the
skyline. I am privileged to have shown you a bit of it, to
have introduced you to people like Rui and Paki, the
bravest young girl in the world. Certainly there are folks
like them who can summon the will and the support to
save some pieces of it for their children.
Victoria slides her hand across to the top of Corbett’s.
CORBETT IS DRESSED and wearing his rucksack and
sitting at the edge of the bed. His eyes are down at his lap
where he moves some unseen device, which claps
metallically. He sits unmoving, transfixed. The firing pin
of his John Rigby and Company .275 cracks loudly on an
empty chamber. He sits unflinching for several seconds
before opening the bolt of the gun. He loads four
cartridges into the rifle and snaps on the gun’s three-
position gate safety. He brushes his moustache, licks his
fingers, again brushes the stash, re-wets them and pinches
off the candle flame.
Starlight penetrates the black-dark room and retreats as
Corbett steps through the door and out to the harder
thatched moonlight of the pergola. He is soon moving
quickly among the night shadows, casting about the town
for fresh signs left in the dirt. He pauses and moves on.
He examines a track carefully and strides forth. He is
working tracks in the half light of pre-dawn as fast as a
man can walk.
The world is strange and fuzzy blue when he comes back
to Victoria at the Chuka house. He enters her cold room
with a steaming cup of tea, which he sets on the stand at
her bedside.
Good morning. I will have hot water out here for your
face and hands.
Good morning. Thank you.
Take your time.
Corbett opens the shuttered window to give Victoria
140
some light and quietly closes the door to her room as he
leaves. He is listening from the street to birds awakening
when Victoria comes out the door. She is quite starched
and beautiful, he thinks, her hair glowing red in the blue-
white light just before sunrise. A jungle cock catcalls
admiringly as if cued by her appearance.
The idea is to still-hunt in a zigzag fashion uphill to the
rock pile, he whispers. The beat will come to us in two
swings from both the east and the west. I sense she is
between us and the pile of rocks.
Let’s load your gun.
Victoria hands Jim Jean’s sweet little .275, which he
quickly loads with the final round beneath the bolt.
You will have to bolt a round into the chamber to shoot.
He shows her the move in the air above the rifle’s receiver
and he nods yes.
Yes, she says.
Stay an arm’s length just back and off of my right
shoulder. Do not bolt a round unless you are even with me
or in front of me. Do not put your finger on the trigger
until you are prepared to shoot. Are you familiar with the
term muzzle control?
Victoria is shivering from the morning chill and the
excitement.
Vaguely.
You are constantly aware of the muzzle’s position. It must
never be pointed at a piece of your body or mine. Never
ever. Very important, eh?
Never ever.
We will speak only if we see a tiger. Okay? Ready?
Victoria’s teeth are chattering.
Yes. Ready.
Corbett fishes into his front pocket and produces a pair of
cigarettes, which he strikes together. He hands
one to Victoria and takes a clearing drag from his. He
holds up the stick and watches the smoke wander and
curl.
Tigers have a poor sense of smell, but in the scheme
141
of things their noses remain quite impressive weapons.
Our wind is indecisive, he says. Let’s take it very slowly
until the wind stabilizes.
They are creeping through the last vestiges of Chuka,
disappearing into the jungle, still-hunting upwards.
Corbett is cradling his .275 with his thumb on the gate
safety and his finger in the trigger guard. They move
rhythmically: two steps – hesitate and survey; two steps –
stop and look and listen. Corbett swings the gun to action
at each flitting bird.
The chill is gone and they are sweating. Later, with the
sun now bearing, he hears a kakar bark once very faintly
from far to the northeast. He waits until he hears it again
before setting a slow, careful course at it. He is moving as
silently and fluidly as any hunter has ever skulked, or will
ever skulk again.
Victoria is making enough noise for both of them. She
cracks small sticks regularly.
Soon they are standing in the shadow created by a deodar
tree festooned with bauhinia creepers and lianas, which
further breaks their outline. They are as difficult to see
there in the shadows as a four-hundred-pound tiger, which
can lie flat and hidden in grass five-inches tall. Corbett
lights a smoke to test the wind and share with Victoria.
There is almost no breeze. He hands the cigarette to
Victoria, who pounds at it voraciously. Their shirts and
the tops of their trousers are sweat soaked. Corbett can
hear the beat of his heartbeat and he feels the vibrations
from Victoria’s in his spine.
Up ahead a flock of babblers begins chatting harshly.
Soon a pair of red-wattled lapwings has joined the
increasing trill. There is a rippling of agitation spreading
from that defined point in the east, and Corbett is positive
that only the tiger would cause that level of disruption; no
other creature generates such tremors through the jungle
community.
Victoria Hardcourt, a social denizen of London culture,
understands innately that the tiger is responsible for this
wilderness distortion.
142
Corbett now follows the nose of his rifle into the
thrumming condition, which had quieted long before they
find themselves poking out of the brush-covered ledge of
the north-south running nullah.
He studies what can be seen of the exceedingly rocky
ravine, easing out of the thickened forest with its twisted
thorn and into the openness of a dim trail that leads to the
sloping floor of the dry wash.
They have descended to a position on the rind of trail just
above the sandy gravel of the gill, which is dotted with
limpid spring-water pools and rainwater catchments,
when a bird flushes from beneath Corbett’s left hand,
which he has been running along the wall of the nullah to
steady his progress. The bird is a nightjar, he notes, and
beneath his left hand sits the nightjar’s nest and a pair of
blue-speckled, khaki-colored eggs of two contrasting oval
shapes. He takes them up reflexively and warm as only a
man who collected bird’s eggs as a boy would do,
deciding that he should examine them more judiciously in
the bright late-morning sun at the floor of the ravine.
In harder light they are appreciated as the first nightjar
eggs he’s ever seen or held. They are remarkable. The
blue speckles across their surfaces glint like white-topaz
crystals.
He crosses his rifle atop his left arm and, absentmindedly,
still holding the eggs, begins moving uphill across the
deep, silent sands of the debris-strewn wash. Within fifty
feet he has drawn even with a huge slab of rock, a
rectangular shingle the size of a small house jutting from
the sand and angled to him like the ridgeback osteoderm
of some partially buried saurian. He moves to see around
it.
The barrel chest of a large dead tree lies recessed well into
the sand on the backside of the immense dorsal-plate
boulder, which Corbett miscalculates as not sufficient
cover to conceal a tiger. And, so, when he casts back over
his right shoulder after clearing the slate and the log, he is
looking slightly downhill at a tiger facing him, flattened
to the gravel in a shallow form in the sand that runs tight
and parallel to the petrified tree trunk.
143
Corbett and the tiger are separated by forty feet of
openness. Between them a few suspended dust motes and
detached filaments twinkle in a sunbeam. Victoria cannot
see the tiger, but she knows it must be there.
Corbett snicks off the rifle’s safety and begins a slow 160-
degree arc of the muzzle using only his right arm, the
eggs of the nightjar still in his left hand.
The tiger blinks its acknowledgement with glistening
yellow-green garnets, the best and most captivating eyes
of all of the carnivores in the universe. It feathers ears the
size of tea cups smooth to the orange topsides of the Old-
World’s original, unmistakable, black-striped face of
death, a sound like lapping water coming up subtly from
the tiger’s throat.
The speed of the rifle’s swing is increased to the sweep of
a watch’s second hand and the tiger tightens and
accelerates – now a rolling undulation of red-glowing
liquid muscle. There are subtle noises as the tiger
launches itself across the last sixteen feet of ground: a
grunting whroomph, virtually inaudible, and the swish as
heavily padded paws backsplash bursts of sand and
cobblestones.
Corbett punches the rifle the last eight inches of its
trajectory as though he were blocking a backhand volley.
For one-half instant the concentrated frenzy of the fully
extended beast, the thunderclap of the rifle shot and
Corbett’s receipt of a five-hundred-pound missile at his
twisted waistline blur wildly, horribly, together.
The speed and the weight of the tiger crush Corbett into
the sand. The heavy face of the cat rests bobbling on
Corbett’s crotch, the animal’s long claws pricking lightly
to the undersides of both of his arms. He is entirely
pinned to the ground by the dead tiger and as he begins to
pull and wiggle free a second point-blank muzzle blast
again scrambles the calm of the picturesque little canyon,
sending up a dense blossom of burning
sand one foot from Corbett’s ribcage.
Victoria!
Victoria cranks the rifle’s bolt and the big smoking brass
hull spins loose from the Rigby, which remains pointed
directly at man and tiger.
144
Darling!
She looks up from the rifle to Corbett.
He’s dead! This tiger is dead! Point the muzzle away from
us – muzzle control! And finish bolting a new cartridge –
now!
Rattled from the depth of her the debilitating surprise,
Victoria begins performing expertly as Corbett starts out
again from beneath the body of the brained tiger.
The tigress: Find her! Take aim and shoot every
goddamned tiger you see!
He is working almost free when the tigress first appears
hurriedly beginning her climb up across the east palisade
of the canyon. Victoria sees her, too, and she
professionally sets her feet and raises the rifle to engage
the stunning cat.
BOOM!
The 175-grain pill from Victoria’s fieldpiece blows a
large hole from the wall of rock several feet above and
behind the tigress. Victoria lowers the rifle, ejects the
spent case, rams a live shell into the chamber and ejects it
onto the sand floor of the ravine.
She recognizes her mistake and seats the last cartridge
into the spout, closing the bolt.
Get the sight out to her head, Corbett says evenly. Swing
the gun with her and shoot her.
Victoria’s final round at the tigress loping free along the
rim of the gully is a very well-executed miss. The bullet
passes in front of the tigress’s head, detonating the trunk
of a dead tree, blowing a cloud of shards, chips and dust
into the face of the tigress, which infuriates the animal.
The tigress hurls herself up into the tree with a single-
minded ferocity heretofore unknown: leaping among the
branches – roaring and tearing at it. She mauls the tree
with tooth and claw affixed to inexplicable power, and the
attack on the tree becomes a fantastical dismantling that
has rained slivers of bark and splintered wood to the
ground where she comes to stand, composed, to the
immediate uphill of a once-sizable tree that within
seconds has been boiled away to a small, stumpy
snag. She is facing the hunters, sides heaving, eyes locked
145
in a gunfighter’s glower that for all the world is exacted to
Victoria.
The twiggy crack of the Rigby’s steel firing pin striking
an empty chamber is deafening. And with great yellow-
green embers unflinchingly branding the soul of Victoria
Harcourt, the tigress begins pouring herself back down
into the canyon towards the hunters.
Pristine nightjar eggs in his left hand, the dead weight of a
tiger still holding his legs, Corbett hears the dread in
Victoria’s whispered, throaty lament as he skins his John
Browning-designed .45 auto.
Oh, God! No!
The profane condition is punctuated by the rattling report
of Corbett’s .450-400 Express, and the legs of the tigress
disappear as though she has stepped them all at once into
four matching holes in the pure rock. The Tigress of
Champawat has been stopped dead in her tracks,
completely stilled a few feet below the rim of the canyon.
Rui Singh steps carefully out of the jungle and into view
just behind the tigress. For a time he stands watch over
her with the Express leveled before circling around her
and picking his way down into the bottom of the nullah
where Corbett is embracing Victoria. Without a word they
welcome Rui, enlarging themselves to a tight circle of
three lending perspective to the enormity of the prostrate
body of the male tiger.
The men of the beat begin trickling and then cascading
towards this center point from northerly directions. Those
who enter the scene from the east near the tigress gawk
hesitantly before moving carefully on into the nullah to
jubilantly surround the hunters. Some of the men collapse
in supplication at the feet of the hunters; others kneel
reverently around the tiger.
HUMPED ABOVE HER FOREARMS and knees on a small
Turkish prayer rug at the back of her steel cell in Max
Von Geipel’s heavily secured torture chamber, Alwara is
quietly praying for her salvation to a slightly misogynist
god. Nanda Devi, named for the highest peak in India,
reclines on her rug in the adjoining cell humming a Hindu
folk song.
146
The exceedingly large male leopard who shares this
prison in a barred case spanning the backend of the long,
rectangular space is pacing across the front of its
enclosure, as it is wont to do from evening until dawn,
day in and day out.
They all perk at Geipel unlocking the top door. They hear
him move abruptly down the stairs to the second entrance.
Deadbolts shift in their clasps and Geipel rises like a
gothic nightmare into the shop, igniting half of the room’s
ceiling fixtures and closing off the room.
He is strappingly clad in an aproned breechcloth and
breastplate from the heavy, pliable shoulder skin of a bull
nilgai; knee-high boots with iron grieves; a spiked collar
of Spanish leather; and a burnished bronze helmet of the
type worn by Corinthian warlords in the sixth century
B.C. His left hand to elbow is protected by a well-plated
gauntlet; his right fist features a hammer-welded gladius
with razor-sharp edges that gleam like fascia.
He breathes in deeply, filling the creaking breastplate to
its seams before turning to Alwara and Nanda, who have
cowered to the far corners of their cells. Grandstanding,
Geipel points the dagger-sword at each of them in turn.
Die groBen Fische fressen die kleinen, he announces.
He lets them consider what they cannot understand before
using the point of the blade to trip the gear switch that
springs open the holding trap of the leopard cage, then the
automated outer door latch of the pen, which the big cat
screams obligingly through to meet Geipel’s advance.
Neither of the combatants engages in any sort of show-of-
force maneuvering. They leap into one another
headlong, unchecked, with Geipel delivering his left
forearm, an eye-to-eye blow against the fanged enamel of
the completely fearless, unfazed leopard. The cat’s back
legs fire piston-like across Geipel’s apron, its front claws
a raking blur. But it is its work on the sheathed left arm of
Geipel that is the leopard’s unexpected masterpiece.
During a second-splitting, three-bite combination, the
cat’s violently powerful, scissor-meshed
molars purée the more vulnerable left fingers of Geipel,
who, in
staggering sidestep, slings the massive cat onto the exit
door.
147
Brave beyond all comparison in the kingdom of
quadrupeds – an apex predator with electric speed – the
exquisite animal bunches and drives forth again for the
German’s throat as Geipel’s blade splits the sternum of
the two-hundred-pound cat and, artfully, its heart.
Geipel thrusts and squats, letting the leopard drive on over
the top of him.
The killer of killers twists crisply to find the fallen cat
running its grotesquely abbreviated final race in a
spreading loch of its own thickening blood.
Geipel, blood splashing across the polished stone floor
from his own significant lacerations, sets the short sword
under his damaged left arm, doffs the Greek helmet and
tosses it at the head of the leopard. Without an utterance
or a sideways glance at the women, he withdraws upstairs
to his throne to brood and tend his rendered flesh.
CORBETT AND RUI fortify themselves with strong coffees
and smokes. Corbett strikes a match and uses it to light a
coded telegram to him from Ibby that had been delivered
sealed to the wife of the Tahsildar the day before, the day
that the man-eating Tigress of Champawat had been slain
by a formerly low-caste Indian gun bearer. He places the
burning paper on a dish where it turns to white ash.
You’ve done well, my friend. All of India will soon speak
your name. It was one-hell-of-a shot.
Thank you, Sahib. I was merely at the wrong place at the
right time. The work of the Gods is mysterious.
True, indeed. You can’t trump blessings. Everything can
be beaten but that. When you match high performance
with a blessing it’s quite imperial. And with it your stock
among the people of this state, and every state touching it,
has ascended to the rare air, as they say.
Bhaagy saahasi kaa saath detta hai.
Jis ke lathi usi ki bhains, answers Rui.
Corbett laughs quietly.
That four-fifty-four you shot her with certainly qualifies
148
as a big stick. The technology of the double-barrel
Express has been the game changer, the equalizer.
Speaking of luck – had it not been for the clutch of eggs
the tiger would have scratched me up as truly as we sit
here. With both hands free I would have instinctively tried
to pivot and shoot from a classic stance. I know I would
have. And that playful kitten would have licked this
dreadful little moustache right off my face. Yes, Rui, by
all means, here’s to the imperialness of good luck.
Bloody, exclaims Rui.
They hoist tea cups filled with burned and scalding
coffee.
So, you will leave this morning with full oversight to the
safe delivery of Miss Hardcourt to the Panar River
encampment of His Eminency, the Maharaja of Jind, says
Corbett. She will enjoy the Raja’s considerable
hospitalities for several days – the exact stay remains to-
be-determined. She and I will then travel on to the old
Temple at Rudraprayag, our new base of operation for the
Thak leopard.
Yes, Sahib.
The tigers are in the salt but Dhanban will need to turn
their paws, faces and ears. I have tagged the big male for
Miss Hardcourt and the tigress for you, Rui. Ibby will
clear the paperwork for us. Here is the men’s pay, sorted
individually, plus yours, plus a draw against further
expenses. Please do keep receipts.
Remind the men that I will send word of a going-away
gathering in Naini before I embark for Africa. Please do
reiterate my profuse appreciation for their services, here
and elsewhere.
Thank you, Sahib. Yes.
Corbett stands quietly. He observes a few men stirring in
the streets of Champawat.
With the tigress lying in wake, normalcy is returning to
these beautiful hills. You’re a very relevant part of that,
Rui. Again, congratulations and thank you.
It is my honor and complete good fortune to have held
position with you, Sahib. I cannot think of India without
you.
149
I know. I feel the same way about it, about you. Well, stiff
upper lips and all that. See you at Naini and, well, for now
old chum, goodbye.
Safe travels, Sahib.
Corbett bounds softly off the veranda and takes up his
loner horse resplendent with a pair of filled rifle scabbards
and bulging saddle bags packed with rolls of freshly
washed clothing. He leads the horse away, stopping at the
edge of town. He checks the stirrup and as he grabs the
pommel to swing into the saddle, he hears Dhanban call
his name. Dan and Dharmanand are shuffling up in the
receding grey light.
Sahib, wait. We come to goodbye.
Dhanman! English! You will yet make a proper subject of
the Crown.
Yes, Sahib. We have been learnt, so that we goodbye
English.
They are on him now and he can see the tears streaming
down their faces. These are hard men, jungle fighters and
trench infantrymen of the First World War, and the tearful
sight of them is difficult to process. Corbett comes
forward and takes them both around the neck. He
squeezes them gently and then steps back. It is not the sort
of affection the men would ever expect from an officer, a
world-famous Sahib.
I hope to see you both at Naini in a few weeks. This is not
goodbye; I will see you there.
Yes. In Naini, Sahib. But nothing is known.
You, too, Dharmanand!? Wonderful! Jolly good show
you two! Really quite impressive!
At that, Dhanban takes one step back and delivers a very
square salute. He is followed in salutation by
Dharmanand. Corbett straightens his sore back, sets his
shoulders and pops off a salute befitting three centuries of
British rule in India. And then he shakes their hands
warmly.
150
The Man-Eating Machine
Ben Lilly is standing in the softer light of late afternoon
beneath a wild pipal tree watching a hummingbird busily
network the golden blooms of a proud stand of amaltas.
He has never seen such flowers and as the hummingbird
draws nearer across their tops he is dumbstruck to
discover that the hummer is actually a tiny cardinal bat, a
bat just larger than the Kitti’s hog-nosed bat, which places
the cardinal in league with the world’s smallest mammals.
Lilly shakes his fop of a hat at the mini-beast and it
buzzes off into the cooling western sun, Lilly squinting at
the ghoulish mechanics of its opaque leather wings.
He listens rapturously as one of his hounds begins to bark
from the direction the bat has taken. His pale-blue eyes
work blindly across the hillside, but he can see the dog
unraveling the track clearly in his mind’s eye.
Collier and Bonham ride up, stopping on opposite sides of
Lilly. They settle their mounts.
It’s Peter, Ol’ Pete, says Lilly.
The men listen, the horses blow and snuffle and listen,
too. A second Walker hound begins to bark listlessly
down in the canyon near the dog named Pete.
151
That’s that new dawg. Ain’t named her. Liketaname’er
Tiger. You’uns go roundup Withers an skedaddle back
here induh mo’nin’ with Jess and Preem. All tag along
with these here bunch uh dawgs and that fee-rocious bat.
Happy ta comelong wid ya, Mister Lil’. Holt kin fetch
Withers back to camp.
The voices of Pete and the unnamed dog have grown
slightly more intense. They are joined by a third hound
and Lilly begins moving towards them. Lilly has soon
toddled out of sight without ever answering Bonham.
Crazy ol’ foo. Whaddya reckon he seen uh bat?
He’s a driven sumbitch. Ain’t never been a’nuthern to
match. Ben Lilly’s plain fearless to a fault. One afternoon
he told his wife he was goin’ out ah huntin’ and he jess
kep on. Walked ta New Mexico from Louisiana readin’
scriptures to where’da mountain lions was still thick an
found killin’em was his Godly callin’. Showed back up on
his farm in Louisiana four year later an lef Miss Lilly fur
good.
Naw, dat man dare dist full uh crazy. Did he say he seen a
bat?
Bonham catches Collier’s brown eyes and shrugs. They
turn their mounts and spur them uphill to the whereabouts
of Nathan Withers.
COREBETT IS RESTING the handle of a shovel at the foot
of a small grave in what had been his family’s front
flower garden for more than half a century. A langur
monkey barks from down the freshly paved road where a
new Model A truck driven by Thomas “Ibby” Ibbotson
will soon emerge. The call of the monkey sharpens the
exotic meaning of the lonely quiet, in contrast to the new
sound of the downshifting Ford.
A covey of cukor, hill partridge, that had been graveling
in the sands of the crushed rock driveway scramble across
before the truck. The fresh smell of the partridges is
usurped by the Ford’s exhaust, Corbett thinks, as Ibby
emerges, quickly stretching his back, then on up to meet
his best friend.
Well hello, Ibby!
152
Wonderful to see you, Jimmy boy. I hear you shot a tiger.
Nodding yes, Corbett comes from the flowerbed to shake
hands with Ibby, who motions to the grave.
And that would be dearest Robin, Ibby says. The legend:
The only tiger-pointing spaniel in India, undoubtedly the
world.
That’s him. He honestly waited until I got back home.
Incredible.
I put his head in my lap and stroked his muzzle and he
exhaled softly, gone.
You don’t say?!
I cried like a child, Ibby, like something very strong and
durable had broken inside me.
That would be quite the natural emotion. I will weep for
Robin myself when I am alone. He was quite astonishing.
Yes, he was and, well, now, let’s do have another look at
what really kept him alive while I was poking about in the
hills.
Ibby at heel, Corbett strides out to the corner of the
flowerbed and crouches over the tracks of a large male
tiger that has been cutting the corner of the house.
Paying his respects, says Ibby.
Routinely for many weeks by the look of them.
Incredible.
Quite.
Corbett stands and faces Ibby, who quickly looks down
and away from the anguish and the fatigue of his friend’s
red-swollen eyes. Corbett recognizes Ibby’s feign.
Yes, well, not to worry, chum. I will bounce back after
dinner and a drink and a good night’s sleep in the bed that
I do not technically own anymore. Kunthi has been
rattling the pots and pans all day.
Corbett turns and begins moving into the house ahead of
Ibby.
Now what about this man Geipel? What sort of fellow are
we dealing with?
Clever, unpredictable, an exceptionally well-armed
Goliath, answers Ibby. Our man inside has not been heard
from in
153
weeks. But perhaps some surprise still exists. We will be
throwing a contingent at him that rivals the re-taking of
Calcutta.
The men have mounted the top steps.
Too many soldiers might, perhaps, confuse the arrest?
We are not anticipating capture, you know, in the sense
that we expect this man will hold his wrists together
passively while we clap him in irons, says Ibby.
Then he’s a desperate man?
No. No intelligence on that, really. I’m confident this
bloke has yet to feel the level of harassment that’s
sneaking up on him, or the blood-boiling falseness of his
considerable pride. That’s the real rub here, I think, the
empirical whimsies of doom. Or, on the other hand,
maybe he will surrender meekly to the legal system.
Unlikely.
Yes, remarks Ibby, I expect that he will die furiously
among the killed and wounded.
Corbett smiles and shakes his head.
Will you remind me why would I have ever agreed to do
this with you? I’m retiring to Africa, or haven’t you
heard?
Jimmy?! Firm up here soldier. You’re strictly LRO on
this bantam caper. You’re not the muscle. You’re playing
a cameo. In the sniggling event of a wounded fugitive,
you are the heavily guarded tracking consultant. Damn it,
man, it was your work on the Garuppu murders that
fingered this hyena. It wouldn’t be proper for you not to
appear at the press conference.
With grim expression Corbett nods affirmatively.
Nevertheless, old chap, the essence of why we arrive at
pivotal decisions requires the afterthought and the
absolute clarity of the second drink, wouldn’t you agree?
Corbett runs his fingers through his moustache, his
grimace becoming a faint smile.
Always has, hasn’t it? I do know where a portion of one
last bottle exists in this house. I hadn’t planned to travel
with it. As I remember, it’s the self-same flask of clear
that volunteered me to the policing of Nazis in India. I
really must add
154
the beloved sundowner to my list of perpetual wonders to
give up on. I’ve outgrown it, Ibby. Men of my age must
begin to take the consequences seriously.
But, you know, even here under the pretext of wholesale
evacuation, I have just enough spring-water ice and tonic
and clear to toast the stout heart of a three-legged friend
on his death day. Try to get your head around it, Ibbs: a
bird dog with a penchant for pointing man-eaters lying
invisibly weaved into the elephant grass.
Hear, hear Colonel. What a weapon! Nor may we fail a
few ringing hails to Miss Victoria Hardcourt. By Jove!
Corbett tightens at her mention, leers and ushers Ibby on
into the sterile foyer of the Corbett main house in
Kaladungi, leaving the teak doors wide to the manicured
lawns, the breathing wall of the jungle and the wild,
crepuscular inhabitants of northern India.
Yes, well, there is no whiskey, Ibbs. There’s only gin.
BEN LILLY IS SITTING on his heels before a very small
campfire chewing a last piece of stale, stringy jerky. It has
grown cold and dark enough that he can see the vapor of
his breath in the firelight as he stares myopically forward
into the black woods. His 1873 Winchester lever rifle in
.32-30 is in the grass at his right foot, an unlit torch neat
to it.
He has spent more than eighteen thousand nights alone
beneath the great pulsating starfields of the frontier of the
American Southwest, but this is his premier exposure to
the domain of tigers and leopards. The windy winter cold
of a betrayal blows through him, the emotion of being
overmatched, and he decides to appreciate the trilling
antiquities of it, because his choices have been made.
He has a dry branch in his left hand, the Scriptures in his
right. He weighs them both and drops the stick in the
nearest of the coals. The fire springs and expands its edge
of light to a small deer with large tusks, the likes of which
Lilly did not know to exist on earth. It’s a muntjac, a
barking deer, and as it passes noiselessly back through the
cloak of darkness its eyes
155
and surprising teeth glint in the firelight. Lilly wonders at
the empty space that had been occupied by the deer and
then he takes the Good Book in both of his hands and
begins hunting among pages that are as thin and brittle as
the driest of the winter leaves. When he catches the words
he sought, he drops another dry stick in the fire and pulls
one up that’s caught flame, which he uses as a book light
to begin reading aloud.
An ‘hit was told, ‘Arise, devour much flesh. And lo,
another, like a leopard, with four wings of a bird on its
back; and the beast had four heads; and dominion was
give to it. After this I saw in the night, visions, and behold
a fourth beast, terrible and dreadful and exceedingly
strong; an ‘hit had ah great iron teeths.
Lilly trails off and studies the direction from which he
reckons the fanged deer had come. Another animal is
making its way slowly to the fire. Lilly does not grab for
his Winchester. He allows it to expose itself in the
firelight as one of his unnamed big-game hounds.
The dog turns a circle to bed and topples straight onto its
side – dead without a whimper.
Lilly recognizes that grit alone had gotten the dog to him.
He’d seen the long, deep gashes, the shiny black patch
where a soft ear had been bitten clean away to the skull
and the raw stump that had been the dog’s triumphant tail.
He closes the Bible and lays the torch head on the fire. He
addresses the dog first, before discussing any of his
grievances with the black wall of jungle.
Ye musta come widdat baby deer, duh one widduh
dreadful fangs. He musta brung ya from where ye ran
afoul widdat devil cat an got yesef kilt. Well, theys an
eye-fur-an-eye waitin’ on dat vermint an ye kin rest
peaceful wid knowin’ ‘hit.
Still crouched, Lilly puts the Bible in a long cloth bag
from his pocket and stuffs them in his dilapidated coat.
He takes up the familiar Winchester at its weathered case-
colored receiver and begins spreading out the hot of the
fire with the igniting torch. He addresses the Erebus
slowly with a secondunexpected utterance that takes him
as closely to the King’s English as he’s ever likely to
come:
156
And this is the judgment, that duh light has come to the
world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light,
because their deeds were evil. Fur everone who does evil
hate the light lest his evil deeds should be exposed.
He rises with the torch above his head and works cold air
into what is left of the fire with the toe of his boot,
crushing out the weak embers with his heel.
But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it
may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought in
God.
With an arcing whoosh of torchlight, Lilly begins
backtracking the bloodtrail of a once-fierce big-game
hound that the leopard of Thak had used as an
amusement.
THREE MEN HURRY together from beneath the canopy,
away from the lantern-lit scrolls on the camp table,
leaving Corbett, Ibby, three officers of the Royal Gurkha
Rifles and the unnamed British officer in charge. The top
man points down to the map.
We’d please like you here, Colonel Corbett: Three
hundred yards to the northeast and slightly uphill from the
compound.
All of the men, sans the well-briefed Gurkhas, now bend
to the open scroll.
From a high vantage you will be partially covering his
retreat to the river, should he make a break in that
direction: House, river, you. Should by some off chance
he enter your field of view, please do introduce yourself
to the wolf by shooting him. Square him up, Colonel.
Again, we will serve the warrant just after dawn,
supported by one of our armored vehicles from the motor
pool in Delhi. Whatever siege we may encounter will be
brief.
The unnamed commander motions to the Gurkhas.
These fine gentlemen who will be helping you into
position are known to toss about on brimstone pillows
dreaming of the next bad guy that needs killing. They are
wickedly clear, strong, talented, and, in fact, all of the
men immediately around you are grizzly destroyers of an
apocalypse.
157
Questions?
No sir, says Corbett.
Comments?
Well, I’d like the record to show that my last words were
that we will all be better served if Ibby is in the armored
car, or behind it.
I’m right here under the tarpaulin, dear friend. I’m the
chief executive on sight in charge of security for the
command post and triage unit.
That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.
Corbett addresses the men individually.
Yes, well, stay in touch and good luck and all of that.
Same to you, Colonel. And please remember to let our
Royal Rifles get some shooting.
Ibby squeezes Corbett on the shoulder, smiling.
Keep thy head low, pilgrim.
Corbett immediately raises his shoulders, a comic gesture
that seems to drop his head between them. The unnamed
officer cannot help but to laugh quietly. He then turns
seriously to the lead Gurkha, whose full, jet-black beard is
incapable of disguising the strength of his hawk-like
cheeks and nose, the deadly judgments of his eyes:
We need you where you need to be a good bit before there
is light in the east.
With that the Gurkhas nod to the officer without salute
and motion the direction of their trajectory to Corbett. The
final contingent quickly evacuates into the foggy darkness
from beneath the lighted canopy.
THE GERMAN HULK that is Max Von Geipel slouches
barefooted in an oversized wicker chair with his house
coat agape to expose his flat, muscular midriff. On the
table before him is a coffee setting, a pack of smokes, a
pad and pencil for notations and a lovely matching pair of
nickel-finished Mauser
Model 1898 “broom-handle” semiautos made in
Oberndorf. These particular pistols have been re-gripped
for a more contemporary fit and their conspicuous box
magazines are each
156
flush with 10 rounds of 9mm ammunition.
Geipel wears clean bandages where the leopard bit into
the cluster of his left fingers, which throb slightly in the
cool humidity. The jungle is too quiet, he thinks. For
some time he has been studying an interesting shape in
the new blue light in the trees out where his drive merges
the main road. He pays little attention to the flock of
fancy chickens that he has designed through progressive
husbandry as they come around the house to feed on the
grain that he scatters for them each morning. The rooster
stretches its wings and crows.
Geipel stands and moves quickly into the house, leaving
open the double doors. He advances to his study, lifts a
powerful Zeiss binocular off the corner of his desk and
moves to a discreet position at the open front window of
his office where he can observe the upper reaches of his
drive without detection. In time he finds the matted
reflection of the objective lens of the riflescope, the
indistinct outline of the head and shoulders of the Gurkha
sniper. He notes the exact situate of the soldier before
continuing a careful sweep of the forest around that
sniper. Then he re-adjusts himself in the room to glass the
other half of the wooded drive.
The rifle barrel of the second assassin gives that man’s
position away easily in the increasing light. With the
binocular, he notices no one in the bush to the farthest
side of the main road.
Geipel moves to his gun rack and extracts a Winchester
.270 bolt-action rifle featuring German glass and a
suppressor. He clicks three 100-grain cartridges into the
magazine, closes the top round into the chamber and takes
up a six-foot tripod shooting stick. He swings the left
window shutter to widen his field of view and withdraws
carefully to the back of the oak-paneled room. There with
the concern of a first-year accountant at tax time he kills
the snipers lining his driveway.
Geipel has added a thin shirt of steel mail and his
breastplate to the space beneath his drawn robe, and a pair
of glossy black jump boots, before reemerging to the
veranda to enjoy the unrequited love of his chickens and
his second cup of the day. He is into his third cigarette
when the rooster begins
157
crowing at the indiscernible vibration of the armored car
whirring up the main road.
There are five men at the spear-point warrant party, which
is led by a British officer who waits until the ARR12 has
completely extinguished itself before announcing to
Geipel that he is Staff Sargent K.E. Elliott of the 1st
Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles.
The clucking fancies rapidly muster to the back of the
house.
Geipel is standing with the Mausers crossed behind his
back, grinning brightly.
The Gurkha infantrymen flanking Elliott to each side are
holding their Enfield rifles at port arms. The snout of the
Vickers .303 machine gun protruding from the domed
turret of the well-plated Rolls Royce Silver Ghost is
relaxed and honorably just off of Geipel, who’d
predetermined that additional movement from the heavy
gun would be the start of things.
Are you men lost?
No sir. Are you Max Von Geipel?
If I am not then I must favor him, no?
We are here to arrest you, Mr. Geipel.
And what is the charge, the keeping of too many
chickens?
Murder and espionage.
Which?
Which what, Mr. Geipel?
Which murder, Sargent Elliott? You have yet to discover
the murders of your snipers, so it must be one of my
earlier murders that brings you. What one?
Elliott is still considering his answer as Geipel runs both
magazines half empty into the Cyclopes socket around the
Vickers, neatly head shooting the two Gurkhas who
mistakenly
believed that there was time to aim and shoot from classic
kneeling positions. The front centerline of Elliott’s shirt
puffs twice as the German’s chest armor absorbs one
bullet strike from Sergeant Elliott’s undersized Webley.
Unflinchingly, Geipel puts what is left in his magazines
on the retreating force.
158
As Geipel bolts the main doors of his fortress, the effect
of the launch of a frantic frontal assault to rescue the
warrant officers is the gentle patter of bullets and sporadic
shouting. Geipel, however, has armed his IED at the head
of the stairs and has descended into his dungeon as the
Vickers strafes the length of the house, as though
despoiling the siding was always the backup gunner’s first
intention.
Geipel has remotely fired the big smoke canisters that lie
buried in strategic array across his property before the
.303 begins drilling at the threshold, so he is aware that
the unstoppable process of cloaking his immediate
holdings in India is underway.
Corbett and his personal league of Gurkha assassins
readjust slightly across the hillside as the first shots of the
engagement are fired at the front of the plantation. They
are now crouching together at the edge of the ravine when
the smoke pots pop and began cooking. The scope of the
tactic and its execution and the resources in play awe
Corbett and set the men muttering. While it is almost
impossible not to watch the curling columns of smoke fill
the pastoral valley, Corbett knows that a very bad man
will likely be coming up through the smoke soon, up this
gully.
In that moment of certitude, he notices a suspicious
growth on one of the stately sal trees that line both side of
the nullah. Corbett motions for the use of headman’s field
glasses. He understands instantly that the sal is wired with
an explosive. Most all of the trees down towards the
house, and some back behind the ravine, are rigged.
Corbett is looking exactly at the house through the
binocular when the improvised explosive at the head of
the basement stairs blows one Gurkha out through the
roof of the estate.
Burning men are screaming.
Corbett stands to height in the intermittent shroud of
white smoke with the recognition that explosives are also
set to the sals on his side of the nullah.
Geipel, in black silhouette, pulls the pin-bar that drops the
wooden gate at the terminus of a short tunnel leading
from his arcade of horrors to the canalled ravine, to the
ridgeline,
159
to the hidden cove in the river where his well-supplied
powerboat drifts ready against its moors to set him free
towards his Fatherland. The fog-diffused reddish shafts of
sunlight create a scuttling ground-storm atmosphere.
A bandoleer holstering a pair of 1908 Erfurt Military
Lugers, magazines and several potato mashers is held
tight to Geipel’s chest by the rings of his breastplate. To
include the hostage over his left shoulder, they are the
only non-facial parts that this child of God has not
camouflaged with a thin layer of snowy powder. He is
holding a rare-to-one-of-a-kind EMP 44 Maschinenpistole
by the grip with his right hand and a thick, trailing
electrical cord in his left, which rests on the nude buttocks
of the bound girl, Nanda Devi. He wears a steel skull-cap
helmet, a pair of yellow-lens tank goggles and a half mask
of stretched black silk painted to depict the mandibles, the
teeth, the glaring cheeks and the nasal cavity of a human
skull.
Geipel thumbs the plunger, which causes a stupefying
length of the still forest before him to be ripped down in
the percussive blur of a spreading blast, the great treetops
of the 200-foot sals cascading outwardly and disappearing
beneath the billowing smoke screen. He drops the fuse,
brings up the blue-black Schmeisser and casts himself and
his captive at full speed into a blinding thickness of
roiling smoke.
Corbett is lying on his back in the bottom of the nullah,
his head filling with the buzzing crackle of a colony of
angry bees. He cannot hear the eight-rounds-per-second
burst from Geipel’s EMP that shreds the Gurkha who’d
risen to his right between the undulating draperies of the
smoke, but he can feel the hydrostatic shock of the
deforming bullets rending flesh and bone.
And when a limited view is wafted open again by a
subtlety of wind, the giant skull-faced apparition, his
bright
yellow eyes out on stalks, is standing almost exactly over
Corbett, refreshing an empty magazine and shifting the
dead weight of the girl to better accommodate her for his
next sprint uphill.
Why it is that the monster ghost cannot see him slowly,
detachedly, raise the gun upwards and lock it to a point of
160
tongue-and-brain triangulation is a wonder to Corbett.
How could the all-knowing not sense with some second
sight the hammer poised to strike? Were his goggles
restricting his peripheries? Was he experiencing a
premonition, some preoccupation with the opening gates
of hell?
Corbett could not feel the trigger, so his eyes squint
involuntarily when the .45 pops dully.
If the man’s head twitches Corbett cannot be sure. Time
stands still. Has he missed?! Then the angular machine
gun and the powered captive detach themselves as the
dead giant implodes accordion-style – poleaxed, toppling
away from Corbett, rather than flopping right across his
lap.
Corbett continues to hold the Colt pistol where Geipel’s
head had been until a panicked Gurkha infantryman
emerges from the thinning fog. Corbett lowers his arm
quite slowly while deafly watching the scout call
emphatically to the surrounding troops.
Suddenly, Corbett’s head is pounding like it has been split
through to the pons. He tolerates the searing pain
fleetingly, so he might watch the Gurkha soldier silently
assist the snow-white princess to her feet, blacking out as
she levitates across his subconscious, a complete darkness
devouring her.
JIM CORBETT AWAKENS to a young maiden in fine
oriental silks dabbing at his forehead with a cool, soft
cloth. The woman with buttery brown skin immediately
moves to her feet at the edge of the big firm bed. She
places the washcloth on a stand next to a basin with inlays
of brass, German silver and coin silver and disappears
through a flap held open by fixtures with settings of gold
and semi-precious stones and gold-braided lines.
The rhythms of a drumming woodpecker come discreetly
through the tent wall. He listens as it cries out twice
before returning to its seismic labors. He moves his hands
up through the satin sheets and brushes them delicately
over his fresh-shaved face. The feel of slightly bending
his legs is wonderful and he wiggles his toes.
161
Ibby enters the room, moving earnestly to Corbett’s
bedside. A servant closes the door flap behind him.
Welcome back, soldier! It’s jolly good to see those blue
eyes again. How do you feel?
Dry as a popcorn. Please pour me some water, won’t you
Ibbs?
Yes. Gladly.
Ibby comes up from behind Corbett with a crystal glass
and a pitcher of water. Corbett drinks two tumblers,
ahhhing loudly after finishing the second. Corbett clears
his throat, sips again and hands the glass back to Ibby.
You were saying?
Yes. Right back to it, eh? Well, you’ve been in something
of a light coma for several days.
How many days?
Better than a full week, I’m afraid. You see, apparently,
according to your surgeon, the blunt trauma you
experienced while killing the hyena Geipel set off a
landslide relapse of your malaria. And, so, initially, you
were in a real bind.
Surgeon? There was a surgery?
Yes. Well, no. I mean your doctor is a surgeon but your
condition has not required his specialty. He will be back
through tomorrow to assess your case and, hopefully, tell
us when you might return to action.
There is a moment of reflection, which Corbett tires of
first. He impatiently pantomimes a rolling circle with his
right hand, so that Ibby might continue to catch him up
with current events.
Yes, well, regarding khabar: The Thak panther killed a
beekeeper two nights ago near the hamlet of Boom.
Dragged the poor bugger out of his bed and onto his front
lawn and
ate his stomach first and then stripped all of the meat from
his legs. He was paralyzed, you know, from a bite to the
spine, so the beekeeper conversed with his wife, children
and the panther for some few moments before he perished
from being eaten alive. He mentioned you by name, to the
panther – that you would be his avenger.
You made up the last part of that.
162
Incredibly, no, I did not. It’s all in the wife’s statement to
the police.
Corbett and Ibby briefly ponder the unspeakable tragedy
in silence.
I have established our hunting camp in the ruins of the
abandoned temple at Rudraprayag. It’s quite nice,
actually. I had some of the men construct doors of
blackthorn to secure our sleeping quarters. And a very
liberal priest has blessed our temporary stay there, so long
as we don’t ring any of the temple’s sacred bells.
The men nod and look off and away from each other.
And what else might there be? It feels as though there is
some subject. Oh, yes, of course, Ibbs. That’s it. Please
tell me what has become of dear Miss Harcourt in all of
this?
Yes. Well. On the day you were wounded, unwittingly,
Miss Hardcourt and the prince left in the Maharaja’s
motorcar to experience the Taj. Loved it, she said. They
were actually invited to dine and overnight there; sort of
fell in with a somewhat sketchy contingent of visiting
Chinese ambassadors.
You made the last part of that up.
It truly happened. They would not learn of your condition
until their last evening on shikari.
Shikari?!
Yes, well, they left the Taj Mahal straight to a tiger hunt
from elephant-back that the prince organized for Miss
Hardcourt at his father’s estate near Sayra Tal.
The prince really rolled out the magic carpet, didn’t he?
Did they kill any tigers?
Yes, he did – the red carpet, I mean. No, they killed
everything – actually, two of most species – except for a
tiger.
The prince never could kill a tiger. And how is he?
He is approaching middle-age ungracefully. He is heavier
than you might remember but his wealth remains beyond
human comprehension.
He’s a good kid and, yes, he has it all.
Not everything.
Meaning?
Yes, well, here’s the real curiosity: Once they learned
163
of your condition, the prince and Victoria rushed back
here from shikari to see about you. Found you much
improved. The fever had broken and it was just a matter
of time before you awakened to resume your immortality.
So, with everyone milling about in rapture of Miss
Hardcourt and her effect on the weather, with hovering
nurses and doctors back here injecting you with caplets –
day before yesterday, quite out of the blue – a mangy
American cowboy rides into campo with three dogs.
Nash, Bash, Hash. I don’t know – man’s last name was
Bonham. He’s the top hand of this Lilly leopard
expedition from America.
Well, Bonham and Rajah Senior proceed to spend their
first several hours together discussing dogs, and viewing
dogs, because, as you know, the Rajah’s kennels bristle
with world champion bird hunters.
Wait, Ibbs. Stop. Would you please get to it? The point
is?
Ibby takes a deep breath, stiffens, exhales and continues
very reluctantly.
Right. Yes, well, Miss Harcourt and Bonham departed
this morning for the Lilly camp. The despondent prince
jumped immediately thereafter for Calcutta to treat his
broken heart with big-ticket purchases – his own sixteen-
valve, four-fifty-two Cadillac touring sedan, a king’s mix
of Holland double guns and several cases of Scottish
whiskies.
Ibby shakes his head sympathetically.
Before she ascended her first elephant, he’d presented
Victoria with a priceless sapphire necklace and an antique
howdah pistol bedazzled of matching stones. The ayah
told me
that the Miss returned the prince’s gifts before galloping
off with Bonham.
The men are now careful to avoid direct eye contact.
I must have dreamt that there was something between us.
Yes. You, the Crown Prince of Jind, every man she’s
heart shot with those big green mesmerizers of hers. Why
Bonham decided to shave his beard one can only
speculate. But shave it he did and, voilà, the fresh face of
a matinée idol.
164
At the Rajah’s request, to the abject amazement of
everyone in camp, the new ‘boy flashed and cracked a
buffalo whip he carries opposite his six shooter.
Victoria’s dog’s eyes never fell from him again. She
called goodbye to us over her shoulder while reveling at
the way Bonham carried himself in the saddle. All of
which left the once vital and dashing prince, heir to
thirteen-thousand square miles of country – with the rent
rolls from three-hundred and twenty-four-thousand people
– hung there at the road like a jackass that’d been
poisoned and stabbed.
The pure blessing of my unconsciousness, says Corbett
softly.
Quite.
There are a few more seconds of silence and diversions
with the bed’s satin spread.
I’m going to get dressed now, Ibbs.
Bad idea. No. You’ve not yet received your medical
release by a proper Hippocratic authority.
About that you have two choices, Ibby. You may watch a
pallid, skinny old man wearing a nappy struggle out of
bed. Or, better, you may see if the Rajah’s chef might
prepare me a dozen eggs.
Your clothes are behind you. I’ll have the kitchen staff
fire-up the stove.
Thanks, Ibbs.
Corbett decrepitly eases his feet to the plush Turkestan
rug. A punkah wafts from the centerline of his canvas
room powered by a servant working from some hidden
catacomb of the tentplex.
He stands stronger than he could have imagined he would
and finds his clothing arrayed carefully on a teak butler.
Each and every garment arranged there has been washed
in hot water with sweet-smelling soap, sun dried and
starched with a burning, coal-powered brass iron. The
material for his underclothes, his shirt and his breeches
are from the famous British mills in Cawnpore, India, cut-
and-sew copies by a local durzi using patterns
standardized by the acclaimed rag barons of London.
165
He recalls a profundity – the first axiom for camp is not to
do without comfort – from Annie Steele’s The Complete
Indian Housekeeper and Cook, circa 1890.
His mind traffics to Victoria. He thinks about what has
become of them, about what she might be doing with her
cowboy. He sinks back onto the edge of the bed with his
hands on his knees, his shoulders slumped in supplication
to the wave of unsteadiness he feels coming.
JIM CORBETT IS HUNKERED in the sun-mottled jungle
near the village of Thak at the shoulders of the naked
body of a teenage woman lying exactly face down. Her
arms and legs are together, as though she had been
standing at strict attention when the world was pulled
straight from beneath her. An Indian fakir stands tensely
at the woman’s feet, though the buttstock of his British
Enfield rifle is resting perhaps a bit too lackadaisically on
the arch of his shoe. Ibby comes in and kneels by Corbett,
who wastes no time beginning his report in a very low
and worried voice.
Not a blemish, except for these canine punctures on the
back of her neck. A perfect track right there. It’s him, of
course: three-and-a-half toes on the right hind pad.
He moved her a good distance without losing his bite. No
accidental claw nicks in removing her bodice and skirt.
Oddly fastidious, says Ibby.
Speaking of mercurial, notice anything else?
What?
She has been licked clean, Corbett says. Head to toe. He
spent a good bit of time on her feet and legs. The salt, I
suppose, must be akin to the icing of a birthday cake.
He didn’t wash the beekeeper, says Ibby. With him he
was very direct.
They stand observing the jungle in the rapid evaporation
of the afternoon heat and light. Corbett motions to the
makeshift hide by the road:
As ghoulish as it must seem, as unpleasant as it will be, I
think we should stay over her and hope for her killer’s
return.
166
What’s it like from the upturned tree, room for two in that
root ball?
It’ll be tight, says Ibby. There’s nice elevation and just
enough relief to keep from silhouetting us on the roadbed.
What I don’t like is that there is minimal protection on
our flanks. We’ll need to brush in the front. She’ll be few
steps under forty yards, so, if he doesn’t come before
dark, the moon may be enough.
You’ve got the electric torch?
Correct. I also have the dandiest little gas lantern and
reflector that you’ve ever seen, says Ibby.
I’ll start brushing us in while you, please, direct the fakir
to act as our syce. Tell him we will be up for breakfast
and the horses by midmorning.
Yes, Sahib.
IN THE STRONG TWILIGHT, Ibby’s chin has fallen to his
chest and he is snoring quietly.
From great heights, flocks of bar-headed geese call
wistfully among themselves in a migration that will take
them through the highest valleys of the Himalayan
Mountains.
The dead woman glows faintly in the last light. Corbett’s
double rifle rests on a horizontal root, loose to his
shoulder, pointing at the body. Soon thereafter, a golden
langur monkey raises its voice hysterically in the distance
of the deep jungle behind the men, who adjust themselves
to crane briefly in that direction. The throbbing of heavy
thunder begins to overpower their senses.
The body is now almost indistinguishable except during
the lightning. It remains very calm before the storm, so
Corbett
and Ibby clearly hear the breaking snap of a stick behind
them, an alien sound that seems a harbinger for the first
huge raindrops, which slowly intensifies the darkness
until they find it difficult to see each other. And then the
big rain comes all at once and they can hear nothing over
the beating of it. One minute ticks by. Corbett pulls into
the rifle.
Try the light on her, Ibbs.
167
Ibby switches on the flashlight. The weak beam is
absorbed by the wall of the rain. He switches it off and
they sit in the pounding darkness.
I’ll hold the torch for you while you strike your lantern.
Ibby’s compressed-gas lantern and his flashlight are
relatively new technologies in 1939 India. Eventually,
Ibby pops the lamp to life and they find themselves at the
center of a very small shell of light in a crushing rain, rain
that diffuses everything, including the lightning. Now
Corbett and Ibby speak loudly.
I’d like to think the lantern may be enough to keep him
from killing one or both of us, says Corbett.
Agreed; that stick didn’t break on its own.
He was stalking us. The breaking of the stick unnerved
him, it gave him pause.
The rain by itself is blinding and noisy and it gutters their
faces in sheets.
You first. When we’re up on the road, I’m going to take
hold of your belt and literally walk backwards. We might
win this bet if we play it with a two-headed coin.
They make good time on the road to the village through
the rain and then the lantern darkens and sputters out
altogether. They work on restarting it until the weak
yellow beam of the flashlight is exhausted. Sick with
dread they plunge frantically on for a mile in a black dark
slackening rain that’s mixed with occasional strokes of
lightning. They walk and stumble and fall until they are in
new rain on a night as black as the rings of baked blood.
They break and run for the first house they come to in the
village, noticed by the dim light coming from beneath the
locked door.
Ibby pounds his fist and demands entry. The light from
within is extinguished soundlessly. He puts his cupped ear
to the door and listens and then he tries kicking in the
door. He screams through the door. Corbett places his
hand on his friend’s shoulder and pulls him to the side
before addressing the entire east end of the village. The
night’s second deluge is throttling. Corbett announces:
168
Occupants of this house! Now see here! If I must blow
this door off its hinges, I will. If you force me to shoot the
door open I will kill every person who is hiding inside
this house.
The door swings wide and Ibby and Corbett back in,
slopping wet with their rifles trained to what has become
a black waterfall behind them. Ibby closes the door
quickly and hasps it and the hunters turn to the small and
darkened room. The Englishmen can tell that the area is
packed with Indians. They can see and smell the cherry
ember from the smoldering bowl of a large hookah rising
from the hard-dirt floor. Corbett commands:
Light something other than the pipe – lantern – candle.
A pathetic lantern is struck and as the light is dialed up to
its feeble maximum lumen, Corbett and Ibby regard a
surprisingly large number of men. Corbett wipes the
rainwater from his face. He squeezes it from his
moustache. He looks across them and settles on one of the
youngest, the one who lit the lamp. The young man blinks
as though he might begin to cry, so Corbett directs
himself to a greybeard.
Why did it take you so goddamn long to open the door?
Much silence follows from men terrified twice over. Rain
pounds the roof of the wilderness house. Corbett is about
to ask again when someone at the back of the room takes
the question:
We thought you were the leopard, Sahib.
With that, with deadpan expressions, Corbett and Ibby
slide down to tailorwise positions, their backs against a
door that separates them from the darkness and the
mystifying wilds and the grim weathers of India.
CORBETT TURNS the beautiful bay mare he is riding from
the Kashi Road towards the canvas campaign tent, the
small barn and the corrals that is the headquarters of the
Lilly Expedition. He passes a long line of picketed
coursing hounds that barely pay him notice. He dismounts
at the corral and has made his way past the barn to the
roofed opening on the big
169
tent when Victoria hails him from the door of the barn,
coming his way.
Jim! Jim! You survived!
You sound so surprised, Corbett says with a smile.
Well, no, I’m not surprised. It is good to see you.
Victoria is wearing her own khaki jodhpurs, but the
heeled boots and the pearl-button shirt she sports are new
to her collection. Her huge volume of flaming red hair is
disorganized.
And you’ve gone native, he says.
They hug lightly, awkwardly.
Wonderful! I can now consider my recovery complete.
You are a smashing sight for sore eyes!
I’ve met someone, Jim.
Yes, I believe I’ve heard that. Congratulations.
Victoria begins framing thoughts but drifts from each.
Finally she simply looks away.
I mean that. I am very happy for you. You seem
contented, joyful. Yes, I was mad about you. Your
radiance makes me more doleful and more prone to
diseases. But, on the bright side – well, you are the one on
the bright side, so tell me about it.
Victoria appears to find her voice. Corbett raises his hand
to please interrupt.
Thank you. I am genuinely delighted for you. Really, I
am. But please flatter me by not using my complete
surrender on this as an opportunity to carry forth about
how adorable your cowboy is. I know he’s magnificent. I
would be pleased to meet him – immediately.
Not to toast him for sweeping you off your feet. Not to
mention you and me to him, because, honestly, I guess
that was a misinterpretation. I am here to invite him and
his dogs on an adventure that might provide us with the
skin of the Thak panther. Is he about? And where, please,
is this man, Ben Lilly?
Hash was still sleeping when you rode in. I will wake
him.
Yes this worn-out young cowboy will need his boots.
170
Please don’t: the innuendo, the guilt. The Hash Bonham
reference as my cowboy is unbecoming. I fell in love,
Jim. I am not sorry about that, because I don’t yet
understand what happened. What I do know, what I will
always regret, is someone was hurt by it – by me.
Right-o, darling. Yes, of course, he says more evenly.
Very little of this is really anyone’s fault, I suppose.
These matters of the heart can be electrifying
complexities. No regrets.
Corbett smiles and shakes his head approvingly. He steps
to Victoria and takes her shoulders and kisses her on the
forehead.
I am genuinely happy for you. That’s it, really.
That’s more than I deserve, I think. Thank you, Jim.
Victoria moves in to kiss Corbett on the cheek, which
warms him.
She steps back, all business.
Holt Collier left camp two days ago to search for Mr.
Lilly, who’s been off alone in the mountains for several
days. Now both men are missing. There’s coffee in the
tent. I’ll get Hash.
As Corbett watches Victoria traverse to the barn, Nathan
Withers calls out from inside the big tent:
Milk, sugar with the coffee, Mr. Corbett?
Yes, both, please, Corbett answers. My dear mother
instructed me to never pass on those when they are
available.
Withers emerges into the big square of tented shade with
two coffees and stands by Corbett, who releases his gawp
at the barn door Victoria has closed behind her. Corbett
takes the coffee and the two men address one another with
a handshake.
I’m Nate Withers, the promoter of this international
menagerie. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Corbett. We’ve
heard a lot of good things about you from Miss Hardcourt
and others.
Hello, Nate. The pleasure is mine.
Withers motions to the first-class campaign setting, a
table and chairs by Raja Bhagmal Jat of the royal house of
171
Bithur, within the cool shade of the tent’s large awning.
Shall we respite?
Corbett raises his coffee in salute and the men move to
arrange themselves among the fine furniture.
I understand you’ve had considerable experience with the
Thak Leopard, Mr. Corbett. What exactly are we dealing
with here?
Please call me Jim, Nate. I’m updating my persona and
reinventing myself as the vigorous middle-aged man.
How old are you, Jim? Forty?
Corbett chokes at the idea and the hot coffee and cackles
with great emotion. He composes himself with the coffee
out from him, so as not to slosh his khakis before resting
the cup very steadily to the table.
I knew I liked you, Nate. Thank you. Yes, I needed a
really good pat on the back. In contrast, Nate, this kitten is
quite the serious old bastard. He’s like the Gordian knot.
Are you familiar with the Gordian?
Yes. Wasn’t that the loop Alexander cut with his sword?
By Jove! A man with wit and a grasp of the classics!
Excellent!
Yes, well, last night a friend and I were within a breath of
becoming the Thak panther’s umpty-hundredth human
victims. So, I am all too familiar with this eight-year
nightmare:
He’s the fear of God in this country. He’s a freebooter
that’s proven impervious to traps and snares of every
description. Insidiously poisoned baits, bombs, stakeouts,
beats and chance shots by everything from exceptional
hunters to idiots. When it comes to invincibility this
despot is the vengeful king of unholy terror.
Corbett turns to stare off over the trees, which have begun
to catch the breeze. With a hollow childlike cry, a
peacock launches itself from a mimosa tree and glides out
to the road. Corbett takes the rest of his coffee, sets the
empty cup carefully on the corner of the table and speaks
precisely:
He is beyond the reach of the gods.
Corbett switches to the internalization of more pleasant
172
thoughts, like the way the sun may be striking the peaks
of the Himalayas. The peacock’s lonely cry comes
questioning from the road.
The syndicate that I represent believes that, alive, he’ll
bring several million dollars at the box offices from
London to San Francisco.
Nate’s asinine presumption jolts Corbett away from his
idle reckonings. He stares incredulously at Withers.
Alive!?
Yes – alive, Mr. Corbett. These men and these dogs are
very specialized capturers.
Well, see here, Nate, that’s the problem. The misguided
consider that the leopard and the American mountain lion
share a similarly shrinking temperament when run by
dogs. You hear about men who course leopards in Africa
but you never see it, because by the time you get there all
the dogs have been killed. At least six leopards in ten
must think: How curious and wonderful that these dogs
are delivering themselves to me to be eaten.
This leopard is the one-in-one-hundred-million worst of
them. He’s an old, outsized male with astonishing power.
He carried one of his victims, a portly Indian shopkeeper
a mile, much of it vertically.
So, you doubt our abilities?
I do believe from what I’m told that these westerners and
their packs are first-rate trackers and killers. I just don’t
think they’ve faced a menace of this caliber. There’s no
equivalent. At the same time, I pray that I am wrong.
Just then Hash Bonham stoops through the threshold of
the barn and begins sauntering towards the big tent.
Corbett sizes him up as six-feet, four-inches of pig-iron
wedge with arms that swing like mauls. As they introduce
themselves, Corbett discovers the cowboy’s hands are
mallets with the texture of leather gloves.
Jim Corbett.
Yes, Mister Jim. Pleased to make your acquaintance. I’m
Hash Bonham.
He acknowledges Withers as Mister Nathan.
173
Good morning, Hash.
And then it’s all to Corbett’s main point:
Hash, I have a hot track that might interest you. The
panther has killed a woman near the old fort at Najibabad.
I’m wondering if it is something your group might take a
look at today? I can get us there in less than three hours of
riding.
Yessir, five uh them dawgs on the picket’er mine, so we
kin make a hunt with’em and not cause too much fuss
from Mister Lilly. That right, Mister Nathan?
That would be fine, Hash. I will instruct the cook to pack
some food; the syce will saddle your mount. I will arm a
tranquilizer while you eat something. How about one
more shot of coffee before you ride, Jim? Something to
eat?
Withers and Bonham are breaking for the interior of the
tent. Corbett begins fishing for his cigarettes.
I’ve eaten but another cup of Joe would be propitious here
within the shade. Thank you.
174
155
Sacraments and Rites
Corbett and Hash and the five big-game hounds often
weaving between them are transitioning across the great
Indian outback: fording streams, climbing their mounts
along dim switchback game trails, bursting from nal grass
thickets and easing through stands of blackthorn. At a
high ridge overlooking the immensity of a frighteningly
steep and bounder-strewn canyon they allow the horses to
blow. The dogs immediately fall to sleep among the shale
and the new bunchgrass, just off the legs of the horses.
The woman was killed on the backside of this canyon. I
know this hellhole to be one of the panther’s primary
lairs, says Corbett.
I’m pert sure Collier and Mister Lil’er down in there. The
cat ate up three of the dogs, kilt’em at the head there, no
more’nuh week ago. I hope Collier finds the old man an
gets um back ta camp. The geez ain’t nuthin’ if he ain’t
eighty year old.
Corbett is framing questions about the tranquilizer and its
delivery system and Victoria when the thin, collective
voice of several dogs wafts to them from high up the
opposing ridgeline. Hash nudges his horse even with
Corbett’s and both men cup their hands around the backs
of their ears to amplify their hearing. The distant dogs are
working towards them across the face of the mountain.
Yessir, they’s Fire and Brim and Luke workin’ a trail.
They’s sum fine damn dawgs and I wished we could
throw ol’ Jess in amonst’um but he’d be sleepin’ at camp
with what we left. We oughtta try an get wid dem dawgs
like los vivos.
175
Corbett affirms with a nod and the men and dogs plunge
down the trail. Hash’s hounds quickly leave the riders to
excitedly join those running the cat.
Twenty minutes later, the men are standing their horses
on a shelf of land in a picturesque wild almond grove,
listening to a chase that has become a catch. Hash and
Corbett are smiling at the crazy baying chaos of the
tumbling dogs.
Will you try the tranquilizer?!
Maybeso. Or maybe we’ll just put a bullet ‘tween that
sumbitch’s eyes and let them dogs chew on um till theys
tired uh chewin’!
With that, the dogs, all of them, cease barking. Corbett
and Hash sit listening to the shocking silence. There is not
one additional bark or even a yip from what had been at
least nine dogs fighting a leopard.
Now ain’t that jest the goddamndest thing?!
The riders have gone at it for many minutes – leaping
gullies, smashing through brush and driving upwards –
before bursting into a clearing where stands a bearded,
shoeless man in long white robes streaked with dirt and
ash. He is supporting a heavy wooden cross leaned
against his shoulder that’s two feet longer than he is tall.
One of the dogs lies with its throat ripped out in a bright
pool of blood at the man’s bare feet. The rest of the dogs
are strewn quietly around the pastoral setting: a one-of-a-
kind climax stand of red oaks that will be
unceremoniously chopped from the face of the earth
during the next decade.
Ben Lilly sits worn through on a fallen oak in a bed of
bracken at the edge of the setting. Holt Collier looks up
quizzically from the robed one at Hash and Corbett
reining in. Hash dismounts and walks a full circle around
the men and comes to stand off the right shoulder of
Collier, both facing the religious nomad. Collier begins
speaking very steadily to Hash without looking off from
the stranger before them.
Dem dawgs was all up in dee cat’s ass and dis here’s
whadda fown. He says he come up on’em draggin’ dat
cross an dee cat run off wid Brim’s neck in ‘hits jaws, and
dees dawgs jest uh sittin’ round like ever thing jess fine.
Like nuthin’ I never saw, Hash.
176
Hash looks back at Lilly, whose chin has fallen to rest on
his chest, and then he returns to sizing up the man whose
weaved crown of fresh cuttings sets off his flowing robes.
What’s ye name, pard?
I am the acolyte of Parmeshwar.
Whaddya see here, Mister Acolyte?
The wild onset of the wolves had ceased before I came
upon them. The cross is a symbol of patience, tolerance.
The wicked one cast a spell on the wolves. It had taken
the boldest one, was lapping at its blood, when I came
upon them. It held me with a bad eye and ran on its back
legs before setting wing.
How many wings wuz they? Lilly asks weakly.
Four. But it only extended two of them in flight.
Ah’muh thinkin’ it had four heads.
The men have turned to watch Lilly make that last
proclamation, and with it he slips heavily from the log
and tumbles face down into the ferns. The men run to
him, Corbett carrying a skin bag of water.
There were four wings and several heads, but I did not
count the heads. Yes, perhaps four.
By the time the men have Lilly back up against the trunk
of the tree, and his bewildered eyes begin focusing, and
he’s taken two thirsty gulps of water, they discover that
the stranger has vanished.
Go get the acolyte, Holt.
No I ain’t, Hash. I show ain’t. That ain’t no man ta bother
wid lesson you-all wanna swim ‘cross the river uh fire. I
cain’t do it, Hash. Don’t ast me gen now, ‘cause I ain’t
gunna.
Well, you spooky old goat.
Bonham has mounted his black horse, Beau, and has
called up his best dog, Franklin, and has trailed off on the
tracks of the acolyte before Collier and Corbett have
another draw of water in Lilly. They help Lilly back to the
top of the log where the water continues its powers of
rejuvenation. Lilly validates Collier with a knowing
glance before turning to Corbett.
Who’er you?
Jim Corbett.
177
Lilly stands slowly with help and stretches his back and
takes another long pull from the water bag. He looks at
Collier and motions with his gnarly thumb to Corbett.
The tiger hunter.
As Corbett fidgets with the description there is a
commotion that newly fixates the men. Beau and Hash
thunder into the clearing and Beau begins dancing crazily,
then bucking and kicking out spectacularly. Hash subdues
the animal with the grace of a big athletic man not likely
to be thrown. He eventually walks the heaving horse to a
stop in front of the men and stands him. Breathlessly, he
asks the men:
You-all like apples?
For several minutes Bonham leads the men slowly
through the forest, eventually pulling up and casting
upwards into a tree.
Well, how y’all like them apples?
Above the men in the crotch of the tree lies a tangled man
wearing a provincial uniform. The corpse is splayed to the
heavens and the dead man’s head is adjusted unnaturally
away from the posture of his body. There is a giant raven
hopping about picking at what is left of the man’s ruined
face.
It is the fakir, Corbett says, the regional policeman that I
met at the dead woman. He must have decided to
freelance a bit after I went for you men.
A thick drop of blood dangles from the dead man’s throat,
eventually splatting on the ground beneath the
policeman’s nearly severed head. Having left his camp
afoot, Lilly is astride Collier’s horse. There will be a long-
running debate before they reach camp that night about
tying Lilly into the saddle. Lilly appears frail and deathly.
In the canyon, night is coming suddenly.
Corbett walks his mare to a nearby oak. He takes a fold of
cloth from of his saddle bags that contains scones and
cold meat and pushes it into his shirt. He shimmies into a
looped coil of rope and he pulls his Express from the
scabbard and breaks the action, so it will be easier to
handle while climbing. He slings the half empty chagul
over his shoulder, addressing Collier: Will you please
steady this horse?
178
Collier hands the reins of his horse with Lilly to Bonham
and moves to take Corbett’s horse by the reins, the bridle
and the saddle bow. He uses his weight to off-balance the
horse against the tree. Corbett climbs from the horse’s
back into the oak, ascending to a pair of high branches
where he fashions a seat with the rope.
Mister Collier, please find the electric torch in my saddle
bag and pitch it up, won’t you?
Collier drops it right in Corbett’s lap, thirty feet up in the
oak. Corbett slides it between the ropes of the seat and
smiles happily down to the men.
Wonderful. Thank you. I’ll be by your camp for my horse
as soon as possible.
Corbett points up and around in the direction of the Lilly
camp, whispering more loudly, looking at Hash first:
Northeast to camp. I blazed it until we ran the horses.
Nice to meet you, Mister Lilly, Mister Collier. I will see
you soon and, well, good luck to you all and safe travels.
The men are taken aback by the sight of Corbett in the
tree. They watch him carefully with some amazement,
and they look to the surrounding jungle suspiciously as
they walk their horses down into the canyon and out of
sight.
WITH THICK WRAPS OF CLOTH tied around his neck to
deter the leopard from easily tearing out his windpipe,
Corbett is staring unsurely through the darkness at
something obscene through a ghostly fog of varying
consistency. There is a very large thing stirring in the tree
with the dead policeman. Corbett extends his left arm –
the flashlight and the forend of the Express together in his
left hand – and he moves his cheek tight to the rifle’s
stock. He thumbs on the flashlight, the stream reflecting
into pockets of fog.
What he eventually sees for milliseconds in the poor light
and the swirling vapor is a bearcat-like creature of the
subconscious, the nightmare. The teeth are a meshwork of
glistening rods beneath non-reflective eyes with the
diameter of empty post holes. It is wingless and fantastic
– more real than anything he has ever seen. Corbett does
not hesitate to smash
179
the rifle’s back trigger, and the muzzle flash seems to lick
all the way to the tree where the animal had been a second
before. The flashlight is lost in the recoil and as it caroms
among the limbs beneath him he feels and hears the
animal coming up the tree he is in. He leans out –
pointing the rifle almost straight down between his legs –
and parallels a 400-grain slug to the tree trunk.
He is reloaded in six seconds to address the beast that he
believes has returned to the cache.
BOOM!
As seen from some distance above the fog-shrouded
forest, the muzzle flash from Corbett’s rifle lights a dome
of the dense forest like an internal burst of lightning, the
echo of the shot rolling out across the Indian backcountry.
IBBY AND CORBETT are enjoying gin, tonic and campfire
from a pair of rosewood, canvas and leather Sinde Salon
folding chairs with side tables on the stone court of the
slowly disintegrating temple of Rudrapraygue. A cloud
filled with lightning is exploding silently in the
background to the west as Corbett reattaches the slide to
the frame of his Colt 1911 and begins wiping the auto
pistol down with an oily rag. His Express is handy on a
stack of remnant flagstones.
And, so, you wandered along for five days after meeting
with the acolyte and the phantom bearcat, the cryptid,
never once cutting the panther’s track?
That’s incorrect, Ibby. After my brush with the bullet-
proof vision, I never located a leopard track of any kind. I
really went back on in, too, you know, and found tiger
tracks. Big female and a really outsized male, maybe
a 500 pounder, at the eight-thousand-foot pass at Cheena.
There was another female with a grown cub on the track
north of Kasauil.
There’s never been a wheel on any of those roads, Ibby
says. That region is strictly dim-trail-to-trackless
wilderness winding right up into the maw of the tallest
mountain range
180
on earth. As much as a tender-footed panther loves to
travel a smooth, clean road, you would’ve expected one
leopard track in all of that.
At least one, eh? Inscrutable, really. Quite convinced that
my hunch had been completely wrong, that the fugitive
had not gone north but south, I’ve hustled back here to
congratulate you and your world-class network of man-
eating panther informants for killing the rogue in my
absence, only to find you hugging camp with no news of
panthers. Ibby, imagine my disappointment.
Yes, well, you want the information to be able to find
you. Speaking of bloody news, the office tells me that
Adolf will invade Poland by year’s end.
I suppose the Americans remain – unimpressed – aloof?
Completely bored by it. They can’t come to the phone.
I won’t say I blame them.
Dreadfully bloody mess, allows Ibby.
Well, one accidentally killed Nazi is my limit. I’m not
young enough or smart enough – better, lucky enough –
to kill another anything. Not even a fussy cook in the
German army. Maybe not even one last pussy cat.
Perhaps you could help train the Indian guard to the ways
of jungle warfare in this next one?
I’d be honored to do that, of course. But I don’t think you
understand where I am with this leopard, Ibbs.
Where are you?
Corbett takes a long pull of his gin and stares into the
low-burning fire. He shuffles about and drops a piece of
dry walnut on the coals.
Hemmed in, he says. I’m quick to treat my psychosis and
paranoia with huge volumes of alcohol. I’ve been talking
to myself aloud for two weeks.
Are you asking yourself questions and answering them, or
are you merely speaking out loud?
Is there a difference, Ibbs? Are there degrees of madness?
Corbett finishes the gin, stands rigidly and moves to
181
mix another of industrial strength.
The devil himself is hunting me. This cold, calculating,
sadistic beast for the ages is watching me right now.
There’s nothing terribly new about that, I’ve had cats hunt
me many times before. But there’s a gap in my experience
to compare this for length, intensity or dread.
Corbett gulps his drink and makes another roundhouse
with a splash of tonic:
I am scared shitless, old fellow. And I’m leaving India at
the height of her perfection and accomplishment, so she
can be remade by her recently educated native people –
reconstructed to support one billion people. All very
damn fine people but, just the same, a seething mass of
increasingly entitled, bitter people who are incapable of
loving or caring for her any more than we have loved her.
I’m moving to Africa to spend what time I have left as a
romance novelist and small-time planter.
Corbett quaffs the contents of the highball glass, wipes his
mouth on his sleeve and places the empty carefully atop
the flagstones. He pushes his arms out and groans while
stretching his sore back. He teeters out to the edge of the
firelight and retches until his eyes are full of strain and
tears and he returns better to the fire.
This is all about Victoria Hardcourt, isn’t it?
Corbett laughs and swings up his Express by the muzzles,
cross-holstering the Colt into his waistband with his weak
hand.
I am at peace with that man-eater. Victoria is splendid and
she is engaged to a matinee idol and we must respect that.
We must honor her and young Mister Bonham, Ibbs. And
besides that, Ibbs, any sort of indiscretion from you sees a
jilted Jeanie Ibbotson shooting you in your dominate eye
at dinner at the polo club. She’d drop you face down into
your grilled
mango salad like a butter-baked crouton. And then she’d
politely request the wine list and a new table by the
fountain.
Yes, I suppose she would. She’s wonderful.
You know she would and wonderful doesn’t come close
to describing her, you lucky trout. She’s multiples more
than you deserve.
182
So true.
There is a moment of contemplation for Jean Ibbotson in
the last cracklings of the walnut stick. Corbett is facing
the stars above the distant thunderstorm. The questioning
voice of an owl to the south is answered by one to the
north, and another farther.
Here’s the deal, commissioner: In ten days I’m done with
this. Either I kill him or he kills me or we call it a draw
and some young hotshot kills him. Or better, he chokes
and dies trying to swallow the foot of an opium dealer or
a black-market hunter. Ten days starting tomorrow.
That’ll be ninety days I’ve personally given to him since
April of Thirty Seven and that’s quite enough. I say, Ibbs,
it seems ten days more than I have left.
I’m shot out.
Goodnight.
The owl to the south hoots forlornly once more across the
stormy nightscape. Corbett turns smartly, if not tipsily,
and takes his leave to the grey-stone temple of
Rudraprayag, to his catacomb behind the blackthorn door.
Ibby is slouched in his chair, gazing at the brightest
pinpoints among the firmament.
Goodnight, Edward James. You’re not as old as you feel
you are. You’re just, you know, dehydrated and drinking
heavy. You’re spending too much time hunting a supreme
killer over dead people. That can’t be healthy. I’m not
sure it’s even legal.
IN THE BLUE LIGHT before dawn Corbett is sipping tea at
the warm ashes of the fire pit. Ibby comes from the
interior of the temple and takes up a teacup of his own.
Morning, Jimmy.
Morning, Tommy-son. Sleep well, I trust?
Quite.
At that moment Harkwar leads Ibby’s saddled
horse around the ruins of the temple and ties it off to the
stump of a deodar tree. He offers a long-distance namaste
to the men,
183
which is returned to him from around the fire.
I see that you have early plans for my day, says Ibby.
This morning, Ibbs, His Eminency, the Bloodless Hellcat,
ambled right there across the apron of our encampment.
He was traveling north. He angles back to the main road
after checking on us. I’d like for you to please rouse the
Lilly expedition while I work the trail afoot. The gods
must have heeded my divine theatrics. Satan in the
spotted suit hath delivered himself unto the merry chase.
I will depart immediately, once Harkwar has saddled a
second mount for my slovenly twin brother, Julius of
Hangover.
Corbett stands with his Express, tipping a farewell and
calling to Ibby as he strikes forth to press the track
northward: See you at the end of the violent road to
redemption.
IBBY GALLOPS HIS HORSE into the southwestern section
of the Lilly camp from an overland course paralleling the
Kandi Sarak Road, which is increasingly busy with
Hindus on their annual pilgrimages to pray among the
circuit of the high temples. He notices all of the Lilly
campers down at the dog’s picket line. He ties his horse to
the post by the main tent and walks up among them to
discover another ghastly new reality:
Bonham and Collier are grave digging; Lilly is sitting
cross legged in the dirt with Victoria; Withers is pacing.
There are seven freshly covered burial mounds and four
open holes counting the ones Bonham and Collier are
working. Four dogs lay stark. Victoria rises and meets
Ibby with a hug.
He killed and maimed all but six of them, Ibby.
Who did?
The panther, she says. Hash had to put down three of the
wounded with his pistol.
You don’t say?
He ripped right down the line. Killed eleven dogs in
maybe eighteen seconds, Withers exclaims.
That doesn’t seem possible.
’Hit ain’t possible. ’Hit a fact, says Lilly.
184
About what time was this?
Two hour ’for dawn I settin’ in dee tent havin’ cups wid
Widders. Widders held the torch and I shot at’em an
earholed ol’ Freckles on ax-cee-dent. Dat devil ain’t got
no wings, ain’t got but one heed, but he got three toes on
dat back right, so ‘hit’s show ‘nuff he. ‘Bout kilt ever
dang dawg in dis outfit.
He paid our camp at visit this morning just before dawn.
That’s why I’m here, Ibby says. Do you men have the
capacity and the will to run him?
Lilly levels up hardbitten, his powder-blue eyes flashing
at Ibby. He thinks on it and soon begins nodding his head
affirmatively. Bonham and Collier step out of the graves,
staking their shovels. They lift the final four dogs into the
ground.
We still got Jessy Taylor, Primo an Frankie, an two more
real good dawgs ‘sides them. One young whippet lookin’
mongrel thet’s suspect, buts he light on he feet. They’s
still uh tumblin’ ball uh butcherin’ knives to be had, Lilly
says.
We’ll get back to the buryin’ later, adds Hash. Anybody
wanna ride better come an hep us try’tuh saddle all y’all
one’uh these crazy-ass horses. Sum uh y’all may be a
walkin’.
Yes, well, shahbash, as we say in India, Ibby says
enthusiastically, and tally ho.
CORBETT IS STANDING before a nine-foot wall of
misplaced elephant grass on a shelf of marshy land a half-
mile south of the winding Kandi Sarak Road. A
twistification of blackthorn and small trees further
encapsulates the thicket where a dim trail disappears
holding the unmistakable pugs of the Thak leopard.
He has the stock of his .450 tight to his ribs as he backs
away to the vantage of a twisted-over banyan, which he
climbs to give himself something of a top view to the
seven-acre oval stand of grass.
There is a small clutch of trees in the center of the patch
and one is a tremendous pipal. As he is formulating his
counter
move, a crow lands in the fig’s uppermost branches and
caws
185
three times loudly down into the tree and Corbett knows
that the cat is sleeping in the limbs there below the crow,
which is soon slapping its wings rigidly towards another
neighbor to harangue.
The crow flew in on the track of the leopard and it flies
straight on away, northwest, where Corbett decides he
will wait on the cat and the dogs. He slips off the banyan,
hurrying around the grass thicket to take a position.
Twenty-five minutes later Corbett is resting on one knee
at the trunk of an old-growth pine. He readjusts one of the
large cuttings that he has hastily stuck in the ground in
front of him to defuse his outline. The temporary hope is
that the cat will slink out on the almost invisible trail that
streams directly from the grass thicket on past the pine.
He can shoot kneeling, preferably, or rise and cover more
ground standing. He opens the boxlock Express,
withdrawing the brass casings to expose the round-nose
bullets. He lets the cartridges drop back with satisfying
tinks and snaps shut the action, which he double checks
for complete closure.
A whistling schoolboy flits among the stems of a
flowering clerodendron to the right of the trail and begins
singing all of the songs ever written for the Himalayan
thrushes. There may be nothing to match the schoolboy in
Africa, he thinks, as the songster beelines away through
the canopy.
Other paths come in and out of the elephant grass. As he
scans the southern edge of the stand the joyous concert of
bawling big-game hounds instinctively pulls his attention
back to the northeast. No sound is more promising to the
huntsman. He cannot help but smile.
The “second-sight,” the mysterious intuition known to
only hunter and prey, swivels Corbett’s attention again to
the south where the Thak man-eater is springing easily
across moderately open jungle. In that agile, of-one-
motion action reserved for the truly talented time-bending
professional, Corbett rises to the bark of the pine,
shelving his rifle against the trunk
with the cup of his left hand, smacking the back trigger as
the gun sight sweeps across the yellowish cat.
He reloads the empty barrel and sprints maybe eighty
186
yards before hauling up winded and buzzing with
adrenaline
to approach the potential point of impact. He slows to a
creep, the happy tongues of the dogs at his back, and he
stops to wait on the closing party, still some distance from
the location where he’d last seen the man-eater.
With that rifle or any fieldpiece on running game it had
been a long shot by every definition. He begins to breathe
again as the dogs react wildly to the leopard scent at the
resting tree inside the labyrinth of elephant grass.
Hash rides Beau into view on the same path Corbett used
around the green wall. At Corbett’s position, Hash begins
trying to steady Beau but the anxious horse is powerful
and unruly.
Beau’s way too smart for this shit, Hash yells out.
The horse snorts, bunches himself and kicks with all four
feet off the ground. Hash reins him into something that
passes for complacency.
He’s one step from a runaway, Hash shouts.
Beau snorts again forcefully and shivers, his ears
spinning. Bonham nods to the thicket.
Holt went in there ’cause he’s hardheaded as Beau and he
don’t never waste one good minute on easy. But Jess’ll
deduce that cat is jumped out and they’ll all be by here
directly. Did ya hit’em?!
I think not.
The volume of Jess’s bawling among the canine overture
is suddenly increasing.
We’ll know real quick if you hit’em.
Who’s with you, asks Corbett.
We’ll be comin’ in waves, I suppose. Mister Ibbotson
sort’uh volunteered to keep tabs on the stragglers. Mister
Lilly’s slow but he’s got the ears of a black-tail jackrabbit.
He can hear them dawgs two days away.
A hound the color of sandstone and cream with the voice
of a baritone virtuoso is first to blast from the bamboo
grass and on past Corbett and Hash. Bonham swings his
big hat overhead circularly and whisks it across Beau’s
rump as the dog catapults by them. The cowboy screams
the salute of a
187
West Texas Comanche and punctuates it with three, quick
whistles. Beau bunches and they are right after Jessy.
Jessy! You big, beautiful bastard! Come on Preem! Here
she go ol’ Frankie! Here she is boys, here she go!
Separately but of one sentiment, each of the hellbent dogs
rockets past Corbett from the elephant grass drunk with
the wild scent of carrion and cat. Low-slung across the
back of his smaller, rougher paint, Holt comes thundering
by Corbett on the heels of the last dog, flashing every
tooth in his head, rakishly tipping the brim of his hat.
The jubilance of the hot race fills Corbett.
ONE-QUARTER MILE past the grass thicket, at the shadow-
speckled edge of a cross-timbered necropolis of dead
aspen timber, the waiting leopard catches the offside of
Jess’s face as the dog passes full-tilt through high grass.
At that velocity the effect of a spinning stop fractures
Jessy’s neck; the steel-set jaws of the Thak man-eater blur
down to crush close the hound’s soft muzzle, preventing
little more than a yip from the surprised victim.
Fate has spaced the entrances of the dogs so that they are
all dispatched quickly, discreetly, individually, from the
ambush of a good wind and dense grass. Primo, Frankie,
the seemingly misplaced wire-haired overachiever that
never made a name for itself – all very dangerous animals
by themselves and collectively – slain in a quick series of
awful flashsights by a specter unmatched for deadliness.
The crazy whippet dog will be the only canine survivor,
turning out of doomed line of big-game hounds at the last
instant.
The leopard recognizes the tactical loss of the favorable,
fickle mountain wind that had made for such easy killing.
Leopards are the only wild animals known to possess the
reckless temperament to fight off a mature elephant. And
so with the temporary loss of its good wind, withdrawal
or skulking ambushes are immediately revoked in favor of
a spectacular last-stand offensive.
He has been a Roaring Hell for a furlong when he
188
alights as a snapping, slashing flurry atop Beau, who the
Thak monster uses as a roiling springboard to access the
rump of Collier’s horse. There he dispenses an
indescribably quantum mauling to the screaming man that
ends only when the little Comanche horse blindly runs an
indiscriminate joust of bamboo through the cowboy,
cracking it off into Collier, dismounting him, detaching
him from the frenzied shredder.
A PERCULIAR SORT OF QUIETNESS has befallen the
woodland arena. The questioning call of a rufos-backed
shrike mingles with the sound of raspy breathing, the
pathetic moans of defeated men, the jingling of a loose
headstall. One of the horses coughs and wheezes. Collier
is slumped to his knees, head down. He looks to be
pressing a bamboo baton close to his right side. He raises
his head slowly to find the leopard slightly more than an
arm’s length from him, panting heavily, noiselessly.
The international cowboy finds no pity, remorse or fear in
the smoldering balls of the leopard’s eyes. Collier is going
to tell the cat something but he must close his own eyes to
form the words. When he has summoned the energy to
reopen them the cat is bounding across his battlefield
towards the blurring graveyard of aspen, a tightly jumbled
arrangement that might be mistaken for the tall, heavy
spires of big-congregation churches – swept up
cataclysmically and left unattended to return to the earth.
Until he notices the slinking, tail-tucked retreat of the
whippet-faced dog, Corbett has been trotting along
thinking that the merry roundup must have moved from
earshot. But the sight of Beau splay-legged near a huge
column of thorn, then Hash, soaked glossy black by his
own blood, completes the puzzle and tightens Corbett’s
throat. He is suddenly aware, acutely conscious, that the
victorious leopard remains at large. Accordingly, he slows
his approach to the dead and wounded, fighting off the
urge to run to them.
Hash is sitting tailorwise by Collier, who remains humped
over. Corbett easies up and squats close by the men,
posting the .450 to brace his position. The song of a
Himalayan blue magpie wafts across the tender light
beneath a Bombay malabaricum.
189
With what is left of his might, Collier raises his face to
better address the kindred.
Drop me right in here, Hash. Dis real good ‘ol groun’ fer
buryin’, here by dem ol’ church steeples. Deep in here,
boys, so – grimacing back a flood of pain, he tails off,
resuming with what is left of him to a final thought:
I ain’t never spoke much’ta God, but ah’m muh hope He
knowed ah love Him all my days on dis ert.
With his last and greatest testimony, Collier bows deeply,
reassuming the position of Eastern worship. Tears
streaming, Corbett reaches to lay his hand on Collier’s
back above the bamboo protrusion. He holds it there until
he is sure. Hash is sobbing recklessly now, gagging on the
torment and the taste of blood. He sighs in frustration,
catches his breath to cry out in the bewildering
resignation of abject tragedy and anguish:
Awe, he a good man.
Yes he is.
Corbett soon turns his full attention to Hash, who has
been half scalped. He flips the man’s hair back in place;
daubing with his one clean kerchief at a ghastly puncture
that stops on the cheekbone. He bandages the cloth
around the man’s head at an angle.
Both muh arms is broke. The cat bit down on muh left
shoulder. I heard it cracklin’ loose and when I slung off
Beau I hit funny on the right and ‘hit popped and I cain’t
do nuthin’ with nigh a one.
We’ll get you fixed up. Sit there very still for us and
concentrate on not bleeding, okay?
Okie dokey dominokie.
Corbett catches Beau and uses him as a confidence decoy
to get his hands on the lead rope of Collier’s blood-soaked
Comanche pony, tying them both to a cluster of small
aspens.
He removes the tarp rolled to the back of Beau’s saddle.
How bad are the cuts to your body?
Cain’t say how much with these broke arms.
Let’s take a look, Corbett says.
He lifts away Bonham’s tattered, blood-drenched pearl-
button to expose the stretched gashes and the oozing holes
across his right chest and back. It is a stomach-turning
collection
190
of non-mortal bleeders. The tarp is torn to strips and used
as dressings with pieces of cotton duck cloth tape from
the roll in Bonham’s saddle bags. With Corbett’s help,
Bonham takes long pulls from his canteen.
Thankin’ ye kindly.
You are welcome, my good friend. I suspect that a man of
your reputation has had worse scratches on his eyeballs.
Bonham, trembling crazily, grimaces with quiet laughter.
Granpap useta say that when sumpin’ couldn’a been more
terrible.
Wondering at how you’ll manage to ride Beau out of
here?
I’ll show ya how if you’ll hep me astraddle. Phsheet, he
whistles, and away we shall go.
They have gone past the elephant grass where the leopard
had been caught napping before Ibby, Victoria, Withers
and Lilly are located coming down from a northerly
trajectory that would have otherwise missed Corbett and
the cowboys. As the riders close in, Corbett directs Ibby
to lead the procession to halt upwind. The reinforcing
party is soon standing their mounts in a loose crescent
uphill from what had once been their invincible forward
retinue. There is great shock at the sight of Bonham, who
is blazingly pale and bloody.
Disaster has struck. Mr. Collier is dead. The hounds are
all dead or missing. Regrettably, the madcap panther has
escaped unscathed. Ibbs, ride hard and upgrade our
capabilities to receive Hash at the temple; then on
wherever, Tanakur, perhaps, to summon a physician good
with needle and thread.
With nary a word, Ibby immediately turns his horse out
from the group a safe distance before spurring away for
the Temple of Rudraprayag.
CORBETT COMES WALKING UP the weedy flagstone path
to the temple’s front entrance with the whippet-faced dog
beautifully at heel. The green- and the blue-rock pigeons
that had been graveling in the ruins of the once lavish
grounds burst before them, winging to perch gently
among the eaves of the
191
rock shrine. Two men stand from campaign chairs to
welcome Corbett.
Hello to camp!
I hate to tell you this, old sport, but that is not a leopard,
says Ibby, nodding at the whippet.
It’s not? Well, I will return him to the lala who cheated
me and demand to have my money back.
Good to see you, Sahib.
Good to be seen, Sahib.
The old friends shake hands and Ibby turns and presents
Nathan Withers.
You remember Nate Withers, promoter and raconteur
from the Great American West?
Yes, of course, old chap. It’s been, what, all of five days?
I hope you are bearing some report on the improved
condition of the survivors of the Lilly Expedition.
I do, Mister Corbett, good news, in fact.
Good news?!
Corbett looks impishly at Ibby who takes the cue, clearing
his throat.
Yes, well, see here, Mr. Withers: Please do respect the
fact that it’s quite against the policy at Camp Rudraprayag
to process good news. Our business from this outpost on
the Indian frontier is strictly pathos.
Or no news, Ibbs, don’t forget that our primary product
here is ignorant bliss.
Withers looks from one man to the other and laughs. In
parody, Ibby and Corbett laugh woodenly after Withers,
stopping simultaneously without emotion.
Now before we get to Mister Withers information, I’d like
for you, Ibbs, to please pour me a stiffie to salve my
parched pipes. I air the – dogs.
Corbett shoots a frown at the whippet. The dog paces off
a few steps, curls up and is asleep almost immediately.
Ibby hops to the makeshift bar and prepares Corbett a gin
and tonic. Corbett leans the muzzles of his Express into a
crack in the rock liquor stand and is seated – unshod – to
accept the drink from Ibby.
192
Cheers!
Corbett enjoys a long drink, aaahhs and winks at Ibby.
You are a great man, Ibbs, a perfect man.
Now, Nate, please do forgive the delay and continue.
Where was I? Hash, most importantly, was stabilized in
Naini Tal and will be moved to complete his
convalescence in Delhi. There is optimism for full
recovery. Mr. Lilly was admitted to the hospital for
exposure and fatigue at the time Hash went in and it is
thought, last I heard, that he might be released as early as
today.
Yes, well, cheers!
Cheers!
Miss Harcourt’s second dispatch from India appeared last
Monday in the London Times. I’ve brought copies of both
the first and second installments, as well as a private letter
to you that she asked me to deliver personally.
Have you read the stories? Corbett asks Ibby.
Yes.
Corbett shrugs his shoulders, lifting his hands palms up.
Well?
Introductory pieces slanted sentimentally to the
abolishment of hunting for the pleasures of hunting, and
tiger hunting in particular. But there are rays at the end of
part two that hint at revelations and prevailing truths. She
writes beautifully, of course. Anyway, unfortunately for
Victoria, for all of us, Germany’s ambitions are now
driving the news business.
So that’s going to happen?
They are calling it The Big One, all caps.
The men sit reflectively sipping their highballs, gazing
into the cold fire pit, the religious ruins – the jungle.
I went through it all, Corbett begins. The roads, the bigger
trails – spent a day behind the glasses overlooking the
canyon of wickedness where the incapable fakir tried to
avenge the murder of his lover. I talked to one hundred
people and gave all of them our temporary address here,
which they already had.
193
I worked one panther track for hours and hours that I
initially picked out of the edge of a dust pocket where
partridges dry bathe on the Garuppu Road. Same worn
pads but smaller, I thought. I knew they were smaller,
because when you lay your eyes on this chap’s feet you
know that they are the biggest you’ve ever seen. I
eventually got a nearly perfect back right foot the
following evening on the mud bank of a little stream –
four full toes. I wish the corporal who shot that bastard in
the foot five years ago had been better. But at least he got
a toe, which has saved us some time.
And I wish to God that I could still shoot, so Collier
would be alive.
Ibby clears his throat to comment on Corbett’s running
shot. Coming up from his tipped glass, the downcast
Corbett stops him; exhaustedly waving off what he knows
will be a complementary critique. There is some silence.
The wail of a distant peacock comes beseechingly from
the cock bird’s secret strutting zone in the jungle.
On a complete whim, Corbett continues, I sat over a
borrowed goat for two nights where the Haldwani Road
spurs down to the River Tanakur, you know. Rather than
a comforting old friend, I found the darkness has become
a frightening monstrosity of its own. And there was
nothing in it willing to trade another toe for a free goat.
At some level all of my moves are reactionary
assumptions to the random impulses of a man-eating
canard; natural beauty mingled with moments of sheer
pandemonium, death; I’m trapped on the fluid bull's-eye
of a relentless psychological horror.
The men swish their drinks in long repose, avoiding eye
contact.
Well, how about you Nate Withers? I feel certain that you
would not have braved these dangerous roads on a
paperboy’s wages.
Withers straightens at Corbett’s frankness and abrupt
attention, as though pulsed with a low dose of electricity.
He transfers the sweat of his palms to his trousers. He
clears his throat strongly, yet he begins with a dry,
cracking voice.
194
In all honesty, Mister Corbett, I’ve also come here with a
proposal.
Corbett’s comportment flushes with friendly interest.
Why, yes you have, Nate! What’s the play?!
Well, I would ask for you to consider – consider – taking
the Thak Leopard alive.
Corbett smiles warmly, motioning to Withers’ leather rifle
scabbard.
Yes, well, how does that dart gun function? I assume you
mean to use it?
Chirpily, Withers withdraws the ugly little single-shot
rifle from its case and hands it admiringly to Corbett, who
clicks it open, in turn, and runs his forefinger into the
breech, professionally exposing that the gun is unloaded.
It’s the technological marvel in wild-animal capture,
Withers exclaims. The tranquilizer darts are very
powerful; the leopard will be incapacitated in seconds.
Lovely popgun, Corbett says. What about compensation
for such a lark? This adds some risk to the enterprise, of
course.
There’s ten​-thousand cash in U. S. dollars as a starting
bonus, which you keep regardless; fifty-thousand more at
capture. Plus an additional ten thousand to you for a few
days of re-creating the adventure on film once we have
the leopard. My associates have broken the bank on this
one.
Shahbash if they haven’t, my good man! Seventy-
thousand?! They’ve robbed the payroll train!
Corbett comes up on the balls of his bare feet, nodding
approvingly to Ibby, smiling at Withers. He takes up his
Express at centerline from its position on the drink stand,
tosses up the dart gun, reversing the attitude of his right
hand to catch Withers’ rifle near its muzzle. He makes eye
contact with Ibby, then the bottle of gin sitting the rocks.
Ibby is dexterously saving the liquor when the dart gun
explodes on the offside of the stacked flagstones. Shards
of rock and pieces of rifle stock ricochet dangerously.
Corbett’s next swing breaks off the exposed hammer of
the gun and spins loose the forend. A final heavy blow to
the edge of the structure
195
seems to bend the barrel. He lets the remains of the gun
clatter to the stones of the patio.
His mouth agape, Withers sits frozen to his chair.
Tell your people that the besieged hillfolk of the Almora
District, India considered their offer and politely told
them to fuck off.
That said, the barefooted Corbett picks gingerly away
through the vibrating rubble to his cot in the temple.
Jim Corbett is never anguished by moral choices, Ibby
says softly. Those who would say that every man has a
price, that true incorruptibility is dull and boring, never
met the man. All the drama, the suspense, was in your
bid, of course. You knew that. Everyone knew it.
Ibby takes a nip of gin straight from the bottle. Offering it
up to Withers, he says:
The confusion was with the number. You know, at what
higher figure does he use your head to break the gun?
SATINWOOD BRANCHES POP and spark in the fire pit in
the softest light before dawn. Corbett, dressed for the day,
rucksack packed full, is fire gazing as Ibby walks in with
cow-licked hair straight from his bunk.
What was it Kipling said about the morning?
I know it was profound, Ibby answers, bending to the
setting of tea on the rock stand. Probably something that
was there all along, just past the frontier of description.
What was it?
A jungle cock calls at the northern reaches of their
hearing over the happy sounds of a new fire.
Morning waits at the end of the world and the whole
world lies at our feet.
You know, Jimmy, I am not an early riser. Unlike the
jungle cock, I am sure that I have never waxed poetic at
dawn. In truth I am at my sleepiest in the half light.
I woke to a premonition. I couldn’t go back to sleep, says
Corbett. Instead, I studied my thin jumble of notes from
the past three years, convincing myself in the process that
he’s
196
soon scheduled to appear on the Rampur section of the
pilgrim road. So, I’m moving to the forest bungalow at
Rampur.
And leave all of this?!
The men feign a quick laugh.
Immediately. You know, Ibbs, we’ve heard all our lives
that game moves in circles through its core habitats.
We’ve talked about it, seen it, learnt the truth of it
ourselves. Well, so, it comes spitting out from my notes
this morning that this panther orbits his range every ten
days. He is more likely to soon be nearer Rampur than he
is here, or north or east of here.
That road will be swelling with sticky pilgrims on their
way to the high temples, says Ibby. Our kitten is very
fond of winter-fattened wayfarers. I will close things here
and follow along behind you. So, yes, well, you’d better
set the sails, old boy, to make that by nightfall. Do travel
days count towards your deadline?
Corbett stands hefting his pack, the scabbard of his .275
Rigby attached tight to the top of the load, and takes up
the ten-pound double.
Yes, Friday night the twelfth will be all for me, which
means you will kill him on the thirteenth.
Of which year?
Corbett hesitates, smiling, casting about for the very last
time in his life at the Temple of Rudraprayag.
I will miss these places and sharing them with favorite
comrades. I surely will. I will not have dinner and drinks
waiting on you.
You are a barbaric heathen, my friend. I will mix my own
refreshments. And I’ll host a big, wonderful brunch for
you day after tomorrow, because you will be hungry.
Moving briskly, Corbett calls without turning:
Hunt better hungry, as they say. Safe travels and all of
that.
Ibby is sitting very comfortably, legs out, hands folded to
his lap. He turns down from Corbett to gaze into the fire,
whispering – And God save us all.
197
CORBETT, NOW SWEAT-SOAKED, is intermittently trotting
and running down a very steep and treacherous section of
trail. Using his forward momentum to its pendulum effect
at the bottom, he runs powerfully up the opposing hillside
a good distance before slowing to a very strong, climbing
walk. As a younger man, Corbett was famous for eating
up forty-plus-mile stretches per day in the paper-thin air
of steep, high mountains by leveraging his uncommon
stamina with this technique.
Today he will do 36 miles with a fully loaded pack and
two heavy rifles beneath a canopy of doomed forest set
for clear cutting. But now this timberland is lightly
civilized mountain woods featuring an oceanic
immensity, the ice-covered peaks of the Himalayas
radiating on the unseen horizon like the white teeth of a
one-thousand mile whipsaw.
FROM COOL SHADE looking past the large pair of white
goats tied to pickets, Corbett is quietly observing an array
of pilgrims down through the trees. They are working
tender-footedly up the road to pray to the idols of the
northern temples. Ibby steps to the veranda from the
bungalow with a steel pitcher of ice water and a covered
pan,
which he places on the table before seating himself to an
even better view of the traffic.
It is a perilous hardship for most of these low-country
townspeople to come up here on bare feet, to sleep out on
the roads exposed to the elements, Corbett says with
concern.
It makes me appreciate the imperialness of selective
adaptation, replies Ibby: The Greeks with their shoes and
the Romans with their great networks of roads and
roadhouses; the organization and the record-keeping of
the British Crown – together, the very pillars of
civilization. There must be some assumed sacrifice with
proper religious pilgrimages, you know.
Speaking of adversity, Ibby continues, dearest Kunthi has
prepared our early dinner to honor the culinary acumen of
our peaceful neighbors, the Bhutanese.
Ibby lifts the lid of the pan, which exposes a collection of
dumplings beneath a mushroom cloud of steam.
198
Authentic momos with Bhutan masala, Ibby announces.
Where would dear Kunthi have found the meat of yak for
genuine momos?
Ibby lifts an eyebrow at Corbett while heaping several
dumplings upon his plate.
Chital, dear boy. We’ve substituted chital for yak meat
because yaks are in such short supply here before the
monsoons. There are also momos with diced cabbage.
Help yourself.
For a while the men eat hungrily like beaten-down
jackals. A gold-fronted green bulbul lands on the railing,
carefully inspecting the men and their meal before
winging into the forest.
What did Victoria have to say in her letter to you?
She is pregnant. She does not know if I am the baby’s
father or if Bonham is.
Now that is rich, young fellow, Ibby chortles. Rich! You
simply cannot be serious!
Corbett cocks his head as if to ruminate on Ibby’s remark.
He takes a bite and turns upwards as if to think about the
savories of all these things as he’s chewing. He swallows.
If you say so. No, of course not.
He continues to eat nonchalantly.
What did she say?
Her boss wants her in Poland immediately to write poems
about the drums of war, but instead of that she is seriously
considering a move to the town of Reform, New Mexico
to raise cattle and bear a troop of redheads with Hash
Bonham. Her first pregnancy is a complicating factor.
She is not pregnant!
No, she is not. That part is probably make-believe, so far
as you know.
Stop with the so far as you knows and the winking.
You’re a terrible winker.
Okay, I will. Yes, let’s please change course to the places
we will spend these final forty-eight hours I have allotted
for catching a tiger by the toe.
199
Let’s, Ibby agrees.
Well, I have decided to move my goat to the ridge that
runs east-west across the road below the old kedah near
the house...
Movement in the road catches Ibby’s attention, which
also gives Corbett pause. Ibby alone sees that it is a man
in bright orange robes ascending hastily to the bungalow.
Near the house of the priest of the temple of Rampur,
Ibby says flatly.
Yes.
That wasn’t a question. The guru of Rampur is now
coming up to our bungalow.
Ibby stands, followed by Corbett, and they move to
arrange themselves congenially at head of the steps
leading up to the balcony. The priest makes eye contact,
still some few feet down the walkway, and all of the men
exchange namaste.
We were just speaking well of you, your highness.
That is a standard revelation of reincarnation – speaking
of someone before they unexpectedly appear, returns the
priest.
We know it less theologically as a coincidence, says Ibby,
but who would we be to dismiss even one small revelation
at this late hour?
Will you please join us, your Holiness, for momos and ice
water in the shade?
No thank you, Mr. Corbett. This is one of our busiest
times in the priesthood. I must return to my place among
the flocks.
I have come, the priest continues, with urgent khabar to
share of a very recent event at the covered landing of the
abandoned goat shed near my quarters. Disregarding my
protests for them to please sleep behind the protected
stockade at my house, secured with thorn, many of our
followers sought refuge last night at that kedah across the
road. The men said that their numbers protected them.
The men said that they would sleep encircling the women
and children, so that they were protected.
That sounds just like crazy city folks, doesn’t it?
200
Yes. They are very sophisticated and vain, and who am I,
Mister Corbett, but an impoverished teacher to poor
mountain farmers?
Forgive my interruption. Please go on with your story.
Very late last night a man was awakened by something
pulling at his foot, the priest continues. He drew away and
kicked at it. He thought it a dream and went back to sleep.
It was very, very dark after the moon set, as you are
certain. Not long later, he was dragged screaming from
the mass of people off the elevated floor of the kedah to
the road below. All of the people awoke to scream with
him and the animal released its hold and ran away unseen
into the darkness.
From what I may know of such things, the priest finishes,
the imprints in the road are those of the Thak panther.
Ibby immediately descends the steps to the priest,
withdrawing every rupee from both of his trouser pockets,
which he passes to the priest. The priest arranges the
coins to one hand and places the money in a small satchel
crossed over his shoulder. He again offers namaste.
The poor castes of Rampur will be very grateful. Thank
you.
Thy pilgrim man with the golden foot was born beneath a
lucky star, says Corbett.
I am sure he has come to fully appreciate the small things
of life. He is now living with a new level of self-
realization, returns the priest.
The men admire the truth of the priest’s words. Corbett
stops smiling and clears his throat.
Priest, you know, we must completely close that length of
the road at night to commerce and personal travel. Close it
in Muktesar by four o’clock each afternoon. Can you do
that for us, priest? Today, starting now – stop people in
the road this evening and turn them, escort them back to
Muktesar?
Yes, I will.
Let the officials there know what we are up against. Tell
them to detain all travelers; to only allow passage of big
groups, fifteen or more, and only with enough daylight to
reach us here in Rampur. No exceptions. Tell them until
further
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notice that this is the new law of the King. Tell them that
the King’s enforcing officers regret that the man-eating
leopard is inconveniencing religious tourism and trade.
The priest mops the glistening perspiration from his bald
head.
Yes. I will do that. I should hurry.
You please should. Yours is a very dangerous assignment.
I will meet you tomorrow, mid-morning, on the road, or at
your house or your temple. Thank you, and safe travels.
The guru turns determinedly down the hillside to the road.
He hesitates as he is passing one of the two tethered white
goats loaned to Corbett by the owner of a feedlot near
Rampur. The priest speaks to the goat, gently touching its
head, before moving on rapidly to the road, south towards
the small Temple of Muktesar.
See that?! Did you see the way he touched your goat,
spoke to it? He completely ignores my goat, didn’t even
look at it, says Ibby.
Corbett laughs.
Who said that was my goat? They are identical goats.
If it wasn’t your goat before, it is now.
A COTERIE OF CHATTERING PILGRIMS is coming up the
road from Muktesar to pass Corbett’s hide in a massive
black oak. The travelers give some pause when they see
the white goat lying peacefully in the center of the trail.
Voices lower, fingers are pointed. They become
noticeably apprehensive enough with the sun-dappled
setting, a place that tastes completely of blooming flowers
and sweet air, to increase their pace.
Unlike all of the tree stands of Corbett’s vast experience
this machan on Rampur Road is designed for comfort,
concealment and protection. Starting head high off the
ground, he has spun a web of blackthorn nearly the
circumference of the tree’s great trunk. Corbett’s access to
the rope seat high up in the branches includes negotiating
a tight crack in the thorn facade that’s stepped by wooden
chalks applied with long, heavy nails.
202
A handful of the savviest pilgrims begin looking into
the trees to either side of the trail as they part widely past
the goat. Only a young boy, wiry and straight as a pick at
the back of the procession, discovers Corbett smiling to
him from the tree. The lad turns and walks sideways,
grinning, falling behind the rest. When Corbett waves
friendlily, the boy waves hesitantly, walking backwards
for a time before spinning athletically to rejoin the fading
group.
Corbett sighs, stretches his arms out over his head and has
a last careful look around, paying particular attention to
the forest toward Muktesar. He lets his gun to the ground
with a pull rope and descends. He unties the rope and
winds the tag end around one of the chalks, so the wind
will not blow it about loosely and entangle it, so it will be
more difficult for passersby to detect.
He starts along the road towards Muktesar to begin a
perimeter search of the area around the setup. There are
the tracks of a mature hyena, a heavy chital stag and three
kakar
that were made in the night where the road is bisected by
a game trail. He’d seen only the chital, fleetingly, in the
moon shadow. Corbett walks up from the direction of
Muktesar to the goat, who bleats once very loudly.
You won’t like to hear this but I’m giving you one more
night to disappoint me.
The goat stares blankly. Corbett pops the knot that secures
the goat to the eye of an iron stake hammered into the
road and walks the goat to another stake where it is re-tied
in deep shade. He stands with the goat.
You did not talk me out of one more night over you
because you are an uncommonly brave and selfless
mother goat. Everyone knows that mothers are far
pluckier than fathers.
The goat begins nibbling on the white flowers of box
bushes.
Under the bright speckling of the noonday sun Corbett
comes heavily up the flagstones to the bungalow. Ibby is
sipping ice water on the porch. The whippet-faced dog
leaps to Corbett, who pays it no mind.
203
Where is your goat, Sahib? Did the panther carry it off
without any shots fired?
Corbett mounts the steps, passes Ibby and drops the
Express off of his shoulder and into the gun rack. It is a
best-grade double without remarkable wood or gold
scrolling or intricately engraved hunting scenes. To
Corbett it’s simply a tool. I am postponing my retirement
a few days, he says.
Ibby lifts an eyebrow and smiles.
Impossible, my good man. We don’t have an extra day in
the budget for you. The district cannot continue to throw
good money after bad. Oh, wait, we’re not paying you for
any of this. Yes, that’s right, you do this simply because
you are a thrill seeker and a publicity monger. Well, in
that case, damned glad to have you, Sahib. Stay the
course.
Corbett takes up the un-sweated glass of ice water that
Ibby had poured for him when he had first come to view
on the road below the bungalow.
What has spurred this additional stay, Sahib? Tracks –
intuition – another dream vision?
The goat, you know, and I have become something of a
scandal.
Enough said, old chap. Quite right, mum’s the word.
They take seats, Corbett slumping heavily to his.
I’m going to sit in the tree until I cannot sit any longer,
says Corbett. It’s comfortable, so maybe three days
straight. When I just can’t do it anymore, that will be that.
It’s the perfect location, you know. A high, long travel
corridor that cuts across a road filled with unarmed,
barefooted transients. There are just two words for it: pro
pitious.
Should we receive definitive intel on the panther from
somewhere else in the district?
Come and get me, Ibbs, so that I can be on my way to my
new life in the green hills above the arid plains of Africa.
Corbett is looking towards the Himalayas, which cannot
be seen except in the mind’s eye.
Will you eat now, or dine after you lie down?
I am too tired to eat.
Corbett leans forward to the cold platter of sausages,
204
cheeses, pickles, olives and crackers on the table. He
quickly begins feeding on all of these things, his arms
working the plate like herons spearfishing a school of
minnows.
You’ve been keeping odd hours. I’ll have Kunthi ration
you for a few days. Let’s eat about five o’clock, which
will give us enough time to get back out before the dark
of the evening. I will hold all of your calls.
Let Victoria through, of course.
Do you consider me a complete disappointment?
Corbett nods yes as he stands for a better angle to build
three cracker sandwiches.
He soon falls to the pillow in the cool gloaming of his
room in the bungalow. Birds sing from every distance
beyond his open window. He closes and opens his eyes
three times before shuttering them to his nap.
LATER THAT EVENING Corbett walks vigorously past a
hand-drawn, red-lettered white sign on the darkening,
deserted road, which reads: DANGER! MAN-EATER!
ROAD CLOSED!
AN UNSHAVEN, RUMPLED CORBETT has been sleeping in
the oak tree that overlooks the goat staked to the road.
The kakar that wakes Corbett to the smell of rain barks
again alarmingly close by. From a deep sleep he very
slowly raises his head to find the goat rigidly glaring
directly away from him.
The goat is studying the defeat and desolation of Bone
Valley.
He has no idea which night this must be. He believes that
it may be his third or fourth. He finds that the moon’s
reflection would soon have awakened him had the kakar
not snorted its alarm. The moonlight is bright enough to
read a newspaper.
He scans everything within his eyereach before the
banking clouds occlude the moon and the black of night
com-
presses this part of the end of the world with the
lightlessness of
a sealed subterranean vault. He feels the vibration of
lightning
205
overtop his racing heart and a distant bolt weakly flickers
the otherwise blacked-out jungle. He immediately begins
breathing deeply to ebb the nauseating influence of panic.
Many minutes pass as he throttles his breathing back to a
calming rhythm.
He is certain that all tragic endings set off under brighter
skies.
The moment of truth is at hand, he knows. The kakar is
infallible. And all of what is poised to happen to them will
occur in lightning-lit sunspots and corollas pinned to a
speeding black screen like a kind of terrifying
autosuggestion. It cannot be otherwise. The hypnotics of
killing are often like that, but this will be the epitome of
enigmatic.
A popping flash of electricity exposes a mysterious shape
in the trees beyond the goat. Still half asleep, he knows he
must be callous. Corbett allows the cruelty to come into
him and the personification of lucidity is its welcomed
side effect. He melds to the big-bore’s metal and wood
and blindly buries
the blade down into the leaf sight of the twin barrels
where the cat’s heart must be in the darkness. He catches
himself compromisingly holding his breath.
Across in the trees beyond the goat the entire length of the
huge leopard becomes a bold intaglio in the very next
saturation of lightning. The burst of light exposes that the
beast is personally menacing Corbett, the imprint of the
glowering leopard suggesting that the goat has become an
afterthought.
Corbett is therefore on plane with the gun site, tightening
on the back trigger to pop the center of the image of the
cat branded onto the curtain of darkness when lightning
reveals that the man-eater has vanished.
More sporadic flashes of lightning demonstrate the goat
writhing violently at the end of her rope. And up from a
complete darkness she bawls once, as if to rattle the
gilded armor of the closest of the sleeping gods. This
summons is answered with a second of brightness greater
than any sun and in it Corbett finds the goat smothered by
the black-spotted blanket of fire. His right barrel ignites
the darkness and the horrible coupling
beneath him is laid open by the blazing tongue of the
Express.
Now he is blinded by lightning, muzzle flame and
darkness, and over the thrall of the maddened leopard an
inner
206
voice urges him that the cat is coming dead set. He stands
on the limb, leans out into the crossing branch and lets off
a swinging, downward burst of cordite and copper-patch
lead that illuminates the soaring panther as it takes the
barricade of thorn in the oak tree below him.
Therein the storm’s most uninhibited pulses, the
screaming leopard ascends with the berserk speed of a
thing falling upwards, twistingly askance at Corbett in
frames per second: merciless eyes, streaks of tooth and
claw and blurring rosettes – now and forever an
overexposed series of flashsights in the tempest’s white-
hot strobes.
The Colt breaks loose in its holster to an awkward probe
from Corbett’s weaker left hand, but he recognizes that
there will not be time for it. He stops withdrawing the
gun, hoping that the slightly disturbed pistol is not lost
when he comes out of the tree wearing the leopard. There
is remorse in not letting the emptied Express plummet to
the ground, about not going one second sooner with
everything he had for the Colt. Hands filled ultimately
with the pistol and the belt knife represent a millisecond
of wistfulness. He regrets closing his eyes.
The cat lands all around Corbett’s feet and legs without
sticking to them or the walkway limb or entangling in the
hammock tree seat. Instead, the cat is heard to deadfall to
the ground though the branches below him. It is then that
Corbett recognizes no difference in what can be seen with
his eyes opened or closed.
WHISPERS OF MISTY RAIN from the blown-out storm
come to him gradually. He looks up appreciatively to
wonder at the sequestered moon edging across the hidden
face of time. Fresh as she-rain, the icy prickling of
Trisul’s liquefied glaciers chill his skin. When he next
opens his eyes he finds single-digit lumens of the cloudy
pre-dawn. In it he wobblingly racks the
empty Express in the branches and carefully seats himself
to shiver violently among the ropes of the tree sling
All at once he can see well enough to determine that the
wet, pitiful goat has somehow found her legs. She is
watching a soggy and foreshortening procession of men
led by Ibby,
207
his rifle at port arms, and the priest, who angle off the
road to the foot of the oak tree where the men flinchingly
discover the ubiquitous cat sprawled in a crushed bed of
maidenhair fern and nettles.
Ibby scans the monster quickly, looks up at Corbett and
then returns to ogling the leopard.
It’s alright, Jim. You can come down now. He’s dead.
Corbett rolls his tired eyes and shakes his head. He begins
using one of his pull ropes to spider the W. J. Jeffery
.450-400 Nitro Express to the forest floor next to the cat.
Who’s dead?
Well, for starters, this panther here at the base of the tree
is extremely dead. And here’s a real curiosity: the
animal seems to match the description of the man-eating
vermin known locally and world-wide as the Thak
Leopard.
Corbett has unwound the elaborate tree seat, using those
ropes to lower his nearly empty rucksack.
The man-eater?! Impossible! Was it shot? Corbett asks as
he begins his tricky descent.
Yes, the by-god man-eater. It appears that a four-hundred-
grain bullet will kill everything, even a ghost.
Ibby studies the cat hesitantly from a forward position
before crabbing to review the toes of its right hind paw.
Then he stands to run his eyes up the trunk of the oak
where splashes of the cat’s pink, frothy blood offer slight
contrast on the wet bark. When Corbett drops from the
final peg and turns to the men, Ibby can see the blood
across Corbett’s trousers, that gouts of wet blood stain the
cloth of his right shin.
Both men are smiling.
How long were you planning to stay in the tree, Sahib?
I don’t know, Corbett replies. Not much longer, today if
not tomorrow, too. Have you had a look at the back foot?
It’s him, Corbett. It’s over. That ringing in your ears isn’t
from the Jeffery. It’s church bells. Eight-years of
suffocation, human suffering and death have passed on.
Corbett exhales and deeply breathes in the rain-washed
jungle morning. His eyes widen and normalize.
Well, to my dear colleagues and companions, I would
208
say there lays the only animal I have killed that I did not
love and admire. I completely despised that bastard.
Perhaps that’s why this took so long.
Ibby initiates a crushing embrace that’s accepted fully by
his old friend. All of the men move in close to press
Corbett’s shoulders.
Colorful jungle birds begin trading about in the fog-
streaked dawn, the early-morning storm receding out
across the subtropical steppes of northern India.
CORBETT AND IBBY ARE SEATED behind the crumbs of a
very early breakfast. They are smiling at a thrush that
stands smartly on the railing of the porch. Corbett flicks a
tiny bread crust to the edge of the table and the schoolboy
flits to it and eats. Corbett holds his hand flat to the table
with more bread and the schoolboy hops across and onto
his palm, eating a piece of bread and grabbing another
before flushing into the treetops.
There will be the cooing of doves from the acacias in
vermillion light but the whistling schoolboys don’t make
it into Africa. I suppose it’s too hot and dry for them, Ibby
says.
A recording of one would make a good Christmas gift for
an expatriate. I will miss the people terribly, you and Miss
Jean most of all. The fishing camps with you and her on
the Rāmgangā were the very best of times, my friend.
But...
Corbett rises from the table just a second before Ibby.
Well, the offer to help you get the boys ready to survive
the jungle fighting may bring me back temporarily: a visit
to see if it’s true that you can never go home; something
soon while these magical settings can still be recognized.
They shake hands warmly. Corbett turns to find Kunthi
and Harkwar in the doorway, tears streaming down
their cheeks. He moves to them and hugs each tightly.
I love you both. Do not be sad, old friends. This too shall
pass.
He slings his pack, rifles and all, and catches Ibby rubbing
his eyes.
Fond farewell!
209
Corbett is off the steps and rounding the porch to corner
into the east road.
I’ll overtake you in Naini, shouts Thomas Ibbotson.
I can’t be caught today unless you run the horse. So long,
Ibbs!
FROM DISTANCE-LENDING PERSPECTIVE Corbett is seen
walking briskly for many minutes along a length of road
beneath a commodious Pantheon of climax sal trees
tasseled with bauhinia creeper, all beneath a goldenrod
sun. The setting is Godhead arboretum exuding one-
hundred times the power of Copley’s Ascension, a living
mosaic soon lost.
The regional link to villages that was once a game trail is
bisecting a great stand of heavy bamboo. Wet now with
sweat, he walks up some distance behind a tigress and her
big cub ambling away from him down the road. He stops
and watches until the adult cat angles into the cane in the
direction of a spring pool he knows to exist off that side
of the trail. The rollicking cub dallies, chasing a lizard,
Corbett assumes. But when mother issues a heavy growl
the cub freezes to attention before comically bounding on
after her into the jungle.
Smiling, Corbett is bending to the smoking fresh tracks of
mother tiger and cub in the muddy seep that undercuts the
road. He looks up from the spoor and into the cracks in
the green wall of the mysterious forest. He rises happily
and starts again.
He eventually comes even with a well-kept rock house set
a good piece from the pathway. A dog stands to see who
it is and Corbett recognizes the whippet-face canine
survivor of the Lilly Expedition. He turns and strides up
to the animal and finds it tied carefully with new rope,
polished brass clasps and a chain collar. He sees that it
had been sleeping on a clean piece of carpet with fresh
water nearby. Corbett looks about
for the notably missing occupants of the house, sheds his
pack and sits to rest with the excited dog, calming and
soothing it with strokes and scratches.
Ibbs told me that you’d gone to an exceptional home but
who could have foreseen you falling right into the butter
churn?
21o
He takes the birdlike face of the dog in his hands and they
hold eyes. He tries briefly to teach the animal how to say
propitious.
HE FINDS HIMSELF WALKING into and through a stunning
gathering of ultramarine butterflies. Like tiny buzz bombs
of feldspar, dozens of hummingbirds whir among the
insect hatch to stimulate the blooms of big round bales of
plumeria, karaunda and clerodendron. It is a dizzying
attack of color, movement and whistling sound – an
altogether numbing microburst of life. His face suggests
that he could stay in that spot with those creatures for the
rest of the day, forever, but he pushes gently through,
looking back once to admire Mother Nature’s goodbye
kiss beneath a friendly sun, the good road leading to the
next phase of his unassuming destiny.
He is soon standing in deep shade observing from
moderate distance the gigantically quivering fan of a
strutting peacock. The object of the cock’s attention is an
un-amused peafowl that approaches up the road though
edged shafts of slanting sunbeam. The female launches
into a mimosa tree, then on to more of the pristine jungle;
and the peacock wails, streamlines its preposterous train
and follows undauntedly.
Striding among sunlight cut in with the diagonals of
black-green shade, Corbett notes a small person ahead, a
teenage boy, he thinks, who turns and immediately
disappears behind the sharp bend of the road. He stands
over the spot where the lad had apparently stood awaiting
him for a long time. He proceeds to lay his tracks atop the
boy’s for a quarter mile until the prints angle away into
the trees where the trail broadens enough to be called a
road.
Farther, where the canopy thins to allow in more and
more streams of sunlight, Corbett strikes a demarcation
on a smooth level of the dirt track that stuns him with
wonder:
It is the leading edge of a carpet of bright red flower
petals placed carefully to cover the entire road, an
unbroken perfumed runner for as far as he can see.
211
THE SPONTANEOUS CHEER that is soon unleashed from
the people awaiting him at the village is a shocking
barrage:
There are thousands and thousands of people and they
pour over him and lift him back with them into the center
of the celebration, setting him gently in front of a flower-
garnished platform where the white goat stands
quizzically. The nanny seems to recognize Corbett, who
rubs her muzzle, acknowledging to the deafening crowd
that he sees that the goat wears an exquisitely handcrafted
bell-and-chain of solid gold.
Banners and cards of colored silks and fine-spun white
linen and bunting are swaying and the rain of confetti may
represent the complete harvest of every wild flower
within many miles of Panar. Bells and cymbals of all
sizes are ringing; songs and chants fill the sweet air.
People are touching him and pulling gently at the cuffs of
his clothing and he begins taking all of the hands within
his reach and looking into all of their eyes. And who there
could not stop smiling?
The Maharaja of Jind and his large family, to include his
many beautiful wives, wave from the canopied shade of
bejeweled howdahs atop seventeen fantastically painted
and parade-armored elephants.
Wonderful dishes of rich food and drink from fine saucers
and cups are extended to him, but he graciously tells his
poor hosts that he must keep moving, that they should
please enjoy the feast that they have made for him. He
asks them to share the bounty among the guests who have
traveled here from far and wide. He thanks them, bowing
respectfully to the elders, sporadically returning namaste.
Working steadily though the beautiful outpouring, he
parts the crowd to bare a wildly beaming Jack Evans
Coogan, who snaps off a crisp salute before embracing
Corbett and falling in behind the blushing hunter of man-
eaters.
The astounding Jean Ibbotson appears next from the
throng. They hug euphorically.
It’s all for you, Jim! Can you believe this?!
I’m so humbled by it, so flattered. I regret that I ran off
and left Ibby. I hope he comes along in time to share
some of this. He’s the one reason why we finally got him,
you know.
212
Jean’s expression flashes to one of warmth for such
a man.
They’ve only continued to work the crowd for a few more
steps before a young, well-dressed Indian emerges to
walk alongside the tiger hunter.
I am Ethan Sherzing, Mr. Corbett. I write for The Pioneer.
Would it be too much of an imposition to ask you a few
questions as you make your way through this jubilation?
Corbett warmly shakes the hand of the political journalist.
I’ve greatly admired your writing for a good long while,
Mr. Sherzing. You have a tolerant voice, satirically
pointed to all authority, an establishment that must find
you troublingly relevant in these political times. Yes, I’m
happy to meet you and accommodate such a talent.
Thank you, sir. It is the greatest pleasure to finally meet
you. Is it true, Mr. Corbett, that you killed the Thak
Leopard as it attacked you?
No, I shot the panther as it hove upon a lucky goat who
now wears a golden bell. Femme fatale, indeed; and that
she did not suffer a scratch from the panther, or my bullet,
is the trick of great noir, I think.
Sherzing scribbles onto his pad and asks his second
question without looking up.
Why are you leaving India, Mr. Corbett?
Corbett is stutter-stepped by the question. He continues to
work the crowd, although he now appears metaphysically
removed from it. He eventually answers after some
rumination: He who seeks the truth should be of no
country.
Voltaire, says Sherzing.
There is a lot of the French Newtonian in why I am
leaving India and most of what I know of Voltaire can be
seen in your writings, Mr. Sherzing.
That’s a great compliment, Mr. Corbett. Thank you.
Would you say that your departure signals your personal
recognition that cultural imperialism, the noble experience
of Eurocentric racism, is dying?
Corbett considers that, smiling.
213
No, he says. But perhaps it does speak some to my fatigue
with the big questions, of my feelings of helplessness for
my country’s inability to harmonize, much less solve, the
truth of Kipling’s burden. For the record, I believe he
proposed that to Indian intellectuals as a complete satire.
As you are well aware, Sherzing, the trouble with
enlightenment is the damage it must inflict to dark
superstitions,
fanatical religious crusades, witchcraft. You know – all
these things, plus the bloody land grabs and the
consolidations of absolute power into the wrong hands.
Sherzing comes up from his notations to offer a quote:
A peaceful and innocent people, equally incapable of
hurting others or of defending themselves.
Voltaire, again, Mr. Serzing – propitious. Yes, he seems
to have deeply admired Hinduism, the truth of the Vedas.
He did not live to see those Indians of whom he spoke
fight with distinction on the right side of World Wars.
He was not so kind to the Islamic or the Christian faiths,
says Sherzing.
The sweepingly rhythmic chant CORBETT! CORBETT!
now comes booming from the crowd. The reissued hero
stops in the road, facing the able young journalist with the
voice of the people growing ever stronger, more
impatient.
For what it’s worth, Voltaire was often awash in caffeine.
I’m told he drank fifty cups of coffee per day, every day,
Corbett replies. Good for him.
Corbett smiles, theatrically shrugging his shoulders,
shouting over the trilling throng:
Some people will feel sorry for the dead tiger that ate our
babies. The tiger was only doing what tigers do, they will
complain. They are immorally wrong, of course, but great
rivers of blood are spilled so that even the radicals remain
free to express their ignorance.
There it is Sherzing: Voltaire, the British Empire, India.
The deadly physics of a universal accomplishment in the
works, incomplete, coming together, pulling apart.
Now struck with the miserable idea that these are ab-
214
solutely his very last steps on the cherished dirt roads of
his India, Corbett pauses to frame a final thought:
We did our best. The best was working. It will be the
Indians of English descent who must prove once and
forever that empirical humanitarianism can never be swift
enough to suit everyone. Keeping up with it, Mr.
Sherzing, figuring out who is right and who was wrong,
now waits impatiently to be
sorted out by smart young people like you. And so long as
you and your civilization strive to lift everyone –
particularly the impoverished, dignified people like the
ones you see here today – I can rest wherever I am in the
knowledge that God is with us all.
Corbett pulls up and shakes his head affirmatively to
Sherzing and begins turning slowly in the pressing crowd
for one last look at the population.
Now the masses are writhing and screaming his name. His
eyes come over the seething river of humanity on the
road, finally holding the largest multitude of villagers
there atop the Hill of Panar.
The reaction to his eyes-on attention gives new, unabated
octave to the surging voices of these poor, proud, rural
inhabitants of India.
Reluctantly, Jim Corbett waves a reaching goodbye and
this inconceivable cheer comes up from the people, a
celebration of liberated human spirit that must transcend
the roar of 10,000 tigers.
215
215
228
193
Postscript
Based on his own best-selling adventure books and
historical accounts and observations through 1940,
Lieutenant Colonel Edward James “Jim” Corbett –
working mainly alone at incalculable personal risk –
liberated hundreds of thousands of his beloved Hillfolk
from the unimaginable terror wrought by more than one
dozen man-eating Royal Bengal tigers and leopards
lurking the backcountries of the Kumaon Division of the
United Provinces of India.
Collectively, according to official government records,
these anomalies sought by Corbett had attacked, killed
and devoured more than 1,200 humans while operating
unabatedly in the isolated upland jungles beneath the
eternal snows of the mighty Himalayan Mountains.
Today, Jim Corbett National Park (JCNP) near Ramngar
in the Nainital District of Uttarakhand – India’s first
national park and the site of the original Project Tiger
sanctuary – stands as a living memorial, a wilderness
bulwark against deforestation, construction and
population, that hunter/naturalist Corbett helped create for
the people and the wildlife of his beloved India.
The remote and mountainous biosphere featuring 1,086
species of birds and plants, an enchanted forest by every
definition, is the site where renowned ornithologist David
Hunt was killed by a Bengal tiger in 1985.
Tigers killed more than 20 humans in 2014, reports the
BBC; the same year that a 30-percent uptick in the tiger
population was heralded by Indian wildlife authorities.
The supreme and self-perpetuating value of licensed
hunting was abandoned by India in 1969. Nevertheless,
India’s human population (1.3 billion in 2016), large-
scale poverty and Asia’s ever-increasing black-market
consumption of wildlife continue to dangle many of
India’s natural treasures out over the very brink of
extinction.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
After some bragging to a seventh-grade lab partner about
a deer-hunting expedition to Mr. Ernest Broughton’s Hill
Country ranch near London, Texas, my associate
announced unforgettably that he and his father were
actively saving for a trip to hunt Bengal tigers in India.
What neither of us knew in the fall of 1972 was that
licensed tiger hunting on the Indian subcontinent had
ceased at the close of 1969.
Jim Corbett was only a vague recollection years later
when John Wootters, Ken Elliott and Craig Boddington
positioned me as the editor of Petersen’s HUNTING
magazine. Corbett remained an obscure character, often
confused with J.H. Patterson, the author of The Man-
Eaters of Tsavo, until my stepmother, Patricia Lee, gave
me a first edition of Corbett’s bygone best seller, Man-
Eaters of Kumaon, following the death of my father in
2004. At that time, as today, very few of my peers knew
of Corbett and almost no one had read him.
With that book in hand and others from his oeuvre
increasingly available online, I eventually came to know
Jim Corbett as the hunter’s hunter, the warrior
humanitarian and the most influential conservationist in
India through his literary treasures first published by
Oxford University Press. If you truly love tigers, their
extraordinary environments and the courageous people
who live in the heartbreakingly diminished empire of
Panthera tigris tigris, I encourage you to read each of
Corbett’s epic jungle adventures.
Mike Evans, Brooks Tinsley, Jim Helveston, Joe Coogan,
Tim Irwin, Thomas Easterling, Josh Raggio, Jim Gaddy,
Jessy Taylor, Abe Walsh, Stuart Whitaker, Dennis
Presley, Greg Ashley, Bobby Cole, Joe Davis and Tack
Robinson were kind enough to read early versions of this
project and offer encouragements.
Evans, an insightful poet and aficionado of great literature
– and a supremely capable hunter of dangerous game –
was particularly reassuring to this neophyte. It was his
discovery
of Franklin Russell’s masterpiece, The Hunting Animal,
published by Harper & Row, which gave additional
authenticity and important vision to this story: a fictional
novelization inspired by historic events.
The generous consultancies of Dennis McCarthy, a close
friend of Evans who became, in turn, one of my luckiest
charms and a great friend, eventually broke through to me
to establish that TIGER HUNTER would require ruthless
clarity and consistent tempo. He also provided John
Gardner’s classic “The Art of Fiction” before it was too
late to affect this effort. Perhaps this is my favorite of
McCarthy’s observations: “Every once in a while a
Samuel Johnson comes along who can draft an exquisite
page, hand it to a printer’s devil, then draft the next one
while the last one is being turned into type. But those
folks are rare as stubfoot toads. The other 99.9 percent of
writers rewrite and rewrite and rewrite again.”
Brother George Robert Tinsley was an invaluable match
to McCarthy. Metaphorically, these two fellows were the
right and the left barrels of the literary Express rifle that
every first-time novelist would be blessed to wield.
The unforgettable art for the cover of the book was
discovered three years ago by my oldest daughter, Megan
Toms, while Christmas shopping online for a present for
me. She nailed it. Nathan Wilson, a great young talent and
colleague, designed the cover with a bit of tweaking from
my old friend Tim Irwin, who owns the Madison Agency
in Gallatin Gateway, Montana.
There was no greater inspiration than daughter Sara, who
listened to and read bravely of raw passages from what
was becoming a treatment called TIGER HUNTER. Sara
is a confirmed non-hunter with the immense heart of Jim
Corbett. In the flower of her youth, she is the unseen force
in these pages holding fearlessly to Miss Kitty, one of her
most beloved friends – a rescued tabby not far removed
from the Tigress of Champawat.
Greg E. Tinsley
October 29, 2016
About the Author
Greg Tinsley is the former Editor of HUNTING,
BOWHUNTING, FAIR CHASE and Texas Outdoor
Times. His writings have appeared in a variety of
traditional-outdoor magazines, including American
Hunter and Sports Afield. As an executive for MOOSE
Media, a subsidiary of Mossy Oak Brand Camouflage, he
is currently involved with Remington Country and Ducks
Unlimited television.
TIGER HUNTER, the author’s first novel, was initially
conceptualized and finished as a screenplay. His second
book, an Alaska-based thriller, is in the works.