Hero of Kumaon E-Book

Duff Hart-Davis

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 435

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

 Jim Corbett became the hero of thousands of impoverished local families in the remote Indian region of Kumaon when, throughout the 1920s and 30s, he answered their pleas to rid them of the man-eating tigers and leopards which were ravaging their populations. Man-eaters roamed a region of hundreds of square miles over several years, killing the defenceless villagers at will: for example the Champawat man-eater had killed over 434 people in six years, the Panar maneater over 400.       Jim, one of 15 children, was born in 1875 to the local post-master in Nainital, and taught himself as a barefoot boy in his local jungle to become, in his spare time one, of the most skilled trackers of his day, fluent in the local dialects, patient beyond endurance and an excellent shot.       Duff Hart Davis' biography threads together the life of this very private, unassuming Indian railway clerk. Often through Jim's own written words, Duff sets out the highlights of Jim's adventures in sequence and in context, thus thowing light on Jim's remarkable character. 

Leseprobe

In memory ofBilly Arjan Singh

First published in Great Britain by Merlin Unwin Books, 2021

This ebook edition published in 2021

All rights reserved

Copyright © Duff Hart-Davis 2021

The right of Duff Hart-Davis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN 9781913159412

Contents

Glossary

Foreword

Introduction

1. Barefoot Boy

2. The Champawat Man-Eater

3. Beyond Nature

4. The Muktesar Man-Eater

5. The Panar Man-Eater

6. The Temple Tiger

7. Going to War

8. Into Business

9. The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag

10. The Talla-Des Man-Eater

11. The Chowgarh Tigers

12. The Bachelor of Powalgarh

13. The Mohan Man-Eater

14. The Kanda Man-Eater

15. Hosting the Viceroy

16. Conservation with a Camera

17. The Chuka Man-Eater

18. The Thak Man-Eater

19. At War Again

20. Author

21. Africa

22. Royal Assignment

23. The Legacy

Glossary

atta    wholemeal flour

ayah    nurse

bandobast    festivity

bhago!    run!

bhalu    bear

chital    spotted deer

chota hazri    small breakfast

churail    mysterious bird, witch

dak bungalow    rest house for touring officials

dal    dried pulses

flehmen    grimace made by tigers

Garhwali    a regiment of the Bengal Army

gharial    fish-eating crocodile

ghoral    mountain goat

gur    unrefined sugar

haldu    flowering tree

havildar    sergeant

howdah    platform on elephant

jaggery    unrefined sugar

jangias    pants

jarao    hill name for sambar

jemadar    sergeant

kakar    barking deer, also called muntjac

langur    monkey

machan    raised platform, on stilts or in a tree

mahout    elephant driver

mahseer    freshwater fish

nullah    small ravine

patwari    village headman

pundit    learned man, priest

puja    prayer sal shorea robusta, hardwood tree

ringal    hill bamboo

sadhu    holy man

sahib    mister, master

sambar    large deer

semul    silk cotton tree

sher    tiger

shikar    hunting

shikari    hunter

tahsildar    local tax collector

Foreword

For much of his life Jim Corbett was hardly known outside Kumaon, the area of northern India where he lived. He grew up in a poor Irish-Indian family, one of 15 children: a born hunter, equipped (as he himself said) ‘with a pair of eyes that few are blessed with’, he went barefoot and alone in the jungles round his home. He learnt to imitate birds and animals so accurately that he could call them to him, and he shot his first leopard at the age of ten.

His working life, as a clerk on the railways, was far from glamorous, but in his own territory during the 1920s and 1930s he acquired a god-like reputation as a destroyer of the man-eating big cats which terrorised the native population, killing hundreds of country people. The hill-folk worshipped him, and the Government decorated him for his humanitarian outlook.

Then, in the 1940s, with the publication of Man-Eaters of Kumaon – his narrative of days and nights in the jungle – he suddenly acquired international fame. First published by the Oxford University Press in Bombay, then in America and England, the book quickly sold 250,000 copies. Never since has it been out of print. The most recent British biography of the author came out in 1986, but it included little of Corbett’s own writing, and only a brief mention of the Corbett National Park and Project Tiger, the Indian Government’s last-ditch attempt to save the species. This new life describes the progress of the Park, the efforts being made to minimise conflict between its animals and the villagers living round it, and the overall success of Project Tiger to date.

My aim is to take the reader into the jungle, as far as possible in Corbett’s own words. To keep the book to a reasonable length, I have abbreviated some of his topographical descriptions, but all the exciting action is here in his own narrative, for he was a marvellous story-teller. The book also emphasises his gradual conversion from killer to preserver, and the change in the general attitude to big game animals – tigers, leopards, elephants, rhinos – which he helped bring about.

Duff Hart-DavisSeptember 2021

Introduction

When, as a boy of fourteen, I won a form prize at school, I was lucky enough to be presented with a copy of Man-Eaters of Kumaon. Immediately gripped by Jim Corbett’s life-and-death encounters with tigers and leopards in the Indian jungle, I read the book from end to end, again and again. Its magic has never faded.

Half a century later, on a glorious winter’s day in Chitwan, the great forested wilderness south of the Himalayas in Nepal, I was decanted from elephant-back into the branches of a tree, along with Hemanta Mishra, then Head of the country’s Wildlife Department. Half a mile away, ten more elephants had lined out, ready to drive a huge block of ten-foot grass towards us. The aim of the operation was to anaesthetise a particular tigress and fit her with a radio collar which would reveal the pattern of her movements.

Although the objective was research, the manoeuvre was strikingly similar to the Victorian and Edwardian shoots in which tigers were driven to riflemen safely mounted on machans (raised platforms) or elephants. The difference was that Hemanta had no lethal weapon – only a dart gun with an effective range of about forty yards, with which he hoped to anaesthetise the tigress as she crossed the open glade beneath us.

Perched in our tree, we waited breathlessly. At first only the harsh calls of hornbills broke the silence. Then, in the distance, an amazing cacophony started. Each driving elephant bore a cargo of four or five men, and at a signal all began to yell, howl, hoot, whistle and rattle tin cans full of stones. The moving wall of noise, faint at first, gradually drew closer. Soon we could hear the swish and crash as the heavyweight beaters cleared passages for themselves by swatting down the coarse grass with their trunks. Then, to our left front, an elephant screamed. Seconds later, another let fly from the middle of the beat, then one to our right. Our quarry was there, sure enough, ranging along the line, trying to break back.

Swish, crash went the elephants. The closer the beaters came, the greater the pressure on the tigress, the higher the tension up our tree. We hoped that she would come forward slowly and pause to get her bearings in the open space beneath us – but no: when at last she came, she came all-out, a lithe streak the colour of apricot jam, covering the ground in great bounds, and was gone in a flash, giving Hemanta no time to aim or pull the trigger. The drive had failed – but by heaven it had been exciting.

That experience, along with other tiger close-encounters, made me feel that, although I never met Jim, I had caught glimpses of the world that he had known, and they left me eager to help perpetuate his memory. In this book I have quoted his own narratives at length, because it is his skill with words, combined with his extraordinary prowess as naturalist and hunter, that has enthralled many million readers.

CHAPTER ONE

Barefoot Boy

He was born on 25 July 1875 in Nainital, a lovely hill-station in north-west India, 6,500 feet above sea-level, on the southern fringes of the Himalayas, in the district of Kumaon*. The fourteenth child in a family of Irish immigrants, he was christened Edward James, and always known as Jim. By the time of his birth, his family was well established in India: his grandfather Joseph Corbett had sailed from Dublin in July 1814, and although he was only 5′ 4″ tall, had served in the artillery until his death in 1830. He and his wife Harriet had seven children, the last of whom, Thomas, was tied to a tree and burned to death by insurgents during the siege of Delhi in 1857.

Christopher, Jim’s father, was the third child. He had served in the first Afghan War, the Sikh wars of the 1840s, and the Mutiny, perhaps as an Army doctor. He then set up as an apothecary, or assistant surgeon, in Mussoorie, and later became the postmaster in Nainital – not, one would guess, a very demanding position. With his first wife, Mary Anne Morrow, he had three children, and after her death in 1859 he married Mary Jane Doyle, a widow with three children of her own (another had died in infancy). She had first been married when only fourteen, and during the Mutiny she and her young family had joined other whites in the safety of the fort at Agra; but in 1858 her husband Charles was killed fighting the mutineers with the local conscripts at the battle of Harchandpore.

Thus Mary Jane had been widowed at twenty-one. With her Christopher proceeded to father nine more children, of whom Jim was the last but one. The siblings with whom he identified most closely were his step-brother Tom, fifteen years his senior, and his sister Margaret, always known as Maggie, eighteen months older than him. She was short, dumpy and snub-nosed, and rarely left home, but she and Jim remained devoted to each other throughout their lives, neither marrying, and she supported all his ventures with unstinting devotion.

A grant of ten acres of land from Sir Henry Ramsay, the Commissioner of Kumaon (known as the King of Kumaon), enabled Christopher to build a spacious house, made of locally-fired bricks and stone retrieved from the river. Known as Arundel, the house stood on a south-facing slope in the village of Kaladhungi, thirteen miles south of Nainital and 3,000 feet lower, at the base of the hills, in a modest community sustained by an open-cast iron ore working and a charcoal-burning business. Water for the house came from the river Boar, via a canal which ran along the northern boundary of the plot. A keen gardener, Christopher surrounded the dwelling with shrubs and an orchard of mango and other fruit trees, and there the family lived during the winter. In a lovely passage written late in life Jim described the scene:

The white line at the foot of the village is the boundary wall, which took ten years to build, and beyond the wall the forest stretches in an unbroken line until it merges into the horizon. To the east and to the west as far as the eye can see is limitless forest, and behind us the hills rise ridge upon ridge to the eternal snows.

Wildlife abounded in the jungle all round, and the variety of birds was phenomenal, especially when, in spring and autumn, migrants passed through on their way to and from the high mountains. In summer, from April to November, the family also migrated, and moved up to Nainital, to escape the burning heat of the plains. In the early days there was no motor road between the two: women were conveyed for most of the way in a contraption called a doolie dak – a large box suspended from poles borne by eight men – but for the final ascent they transferred to a dandy, a hammock slung from a single pole. Men and boys had to walk a steep, stony track through jungle, travelling at night as well as by day, lighting fires to scare off tigers and leopards.

Nainital was, and is, a beautiful place. Tree-covered hills slope down to the shores of a pear-shaped lake, two miles long, half a mile across at its widest, and sacred to Hindus. Legend related that the first Europeans who found it resolved to keep the secret of its existence to themselves, so attractive did it seem. ‘Forests came sweeping down to its shores, and deer drank fearlessly from its edge,’ wrote Audrey Baylis, whose family came to live there in 1912; and in the far distance, sixty miles beyond the head of the valley to the north, the snow-summits of Trisuli and Nanda Devi gleam among other giants on the horizon.

The first European settler had reached the valley in 1841, and more houses, built on plinths, with roofs of corrugated iron painted bright red, had quickly gone up as British soldiers and colonial officials discovered the beauty of the place and its climate. Then on 18 September 1880 the little town was hit by a natural disaster, as heavy rain – over fifty inches in two days – set off a mud-slide which swept away many of the houses and buried most of the shops, a hotel, a Hindu temple and the Assembly Rooms, killing 151 people, including forty-three Europeans.

Undeterred, the survivors dug in, but only six months later Christopher Corbett was struck down by a heart attack, and after a few days died, aged 58. His widow Mary Jane had already bought a plot of land on Ayaparta Hill, opposite the scene of the disaster, and now supervised the construction of a dwelling there. A two-storey structure with four bedrooms, it was called Gurney House, and it became the family’s summer home.

Nainital was then the summer capital for the British administration of the United Provinces. The Governor would arrive by the end of April, and remain in residence until the end of September. Government House was perched on the summit of Ayaparta hill, and residential houses clung to the surrounding slopes. The whole place had a strongly English air, and society was strongly colour-conscious: only privileged Indians were allowed to use the Upper Mall, which connected the ends of the lake. In contrast, Kalahundi had only two white families, and Jim – who at first was looked after by an ayah (or nurse) – grew up with the village boys, speaking Hindi and learning country dialects, so that he became able to communicate with illiterate folk at work and in the hills – an indispensable asset when he went after the man-eating tigers and leopards which were the curse of rural communities.

He loved his mother, and was fascinated to hear how, as a girl of six or seven, she had travelled by bullock cart and boat from Calcutta to the Punjab – a journey of more than 1,000 miles that took several months. In one of his few descriptions of her Jim wrote that ‘she had the courage of Joan of Arc and Nurse Cavell combined,’ and that she was also ‘as gentle and timid as a dove.’

His sister Maggie (known in the family as ‘Maggs’) gave a fuller account:

In appearance she was very small, with delicate features, lovely colouring and beautiful blue eyes. She was utterly unselfish, and never felt that any self-denial or self-sacrifice on her part was too great where her children were concerned. I have often thought that Jim inherited many of her characteristics: bravery, courage, generosity and kindness combined with a strong sense of duty.

In a room set aside for the purpose, she taught the children basic spelling, arithmetic and singing. Jim had a clear treble voice, which later developed into a tenor – a gift which helped him imitate the calls of birds and animals. Maggie became an accomplished musician, and later taught piano to hundreds of pupils in Nainital. In Kalahundi she ministered tirelessly to the sick, no matter whether they were Christian, Hindu or Moslem; she treated ten or a dozen patients a day for injuries and ailments ranging from malaria to hiccoughs, from ear-ache caused by ticks to gore wounds inflicted by bullocks. She also grew into a botanist of considerable fame in the Kumaon hills, and she loved birds, particularly those of the jungle round the village.

Over a period of ten years Jim went to three different schools in Nainital, among them the Philander Smith College; but the one he liked best was run by the American Methodist Mission, whose teachers introduced him to the adventure stories of James Fenimore Cooper. He read The Last of the Mohicans again and again – and maybe the American’s easy, natural style influenced his own writing later in life. He was often buried in a book, and in the dormitory at boarding school the boys would cluster round his bed while he read aloud to them.

School was tolerable; but he far preferred to be out of doors, for from his earliest days a powerful hunting instinct burned inside him – so much so that he was constantly wandering off into the jungle that surrounded Kaladhungi, often going barefoot to make sure that he could move silently, and to facilitate the climbing of trees – a skill rendered difficult by leather shoes. Later he remarked that being brought up in the hills made him as sure-footed as a goat.

His first weapon was a catapult, given him by his brother Tom, to help him recover from a dangerous bout of pneumonia; and with this primitive equipment he became a deadly shot, killing dozens of small birds which he skinned to mount and add to his collection, or to give to his cousin Stephen Dease, who was writing a book about the birds of Kumaon. He then graduated to a pellet bow, which had a small square of webbing fixed between its twin strings. This weapon was more powerful than a catapult, but less accurate, and Jim never really liked it. All the same, he became proficient enough with it to defeat the havildar (sergeant) of the Gurkha detachment that guarded the Nainital treasury, in a contest aiming at a match box set on a post twenty yards away. When the deficiencies of the pellet bow became too annoying, he made himself a bow and two arrows, basing their design on hints picked up from reading the Fenimore Cooper novels, and setting out to emulate the Red Indian warriors depicted in the books. Conceiving an ambition to be a lumber-man in Canada, he became so skilled with an axe that (it was said) he could split a match-stick.

He was also a gifted mimic, and learnt to imitate the birds that lived in or passed through the forests – crow pheasants, golden orioles, bulbuls, rosy pastors, scimitar babblers, drongos, parrakeets, laughing thrushes, kingfishers, jungle fowl, hoopoes and peacocks, among many others. He would go off into the jungle for days at a time, accompanied by an old gardener to carry his bedding roll and a small bag of atta (wholemeal flour) with which to make chapattis. At night they would keep a fire burning, for warmth and as a deterrent to tigers.

Soon, from bird calls, from the alarm cries of deer and monkeys, from the way vultures were circling in the sky, he could divine the movements of predators, and in time he became so skilled that he could call leopards and tigers up to him. Later in his life a legend grew up that he could converse with animals – and even if they never answered in words, they certainly responded to his overtures. ‘Animals who live day and night with fear can pinpoint sounds with exactitude,’ he wrote, ‘and fear can teach human beings to do the same’.

Sounds that are repeated – as for instance a langur [monkey] seeing a suspicious movement, or a peafowl calling at a tiger – are not difficult to locate, nor do they indicate immediate danger calling for instant action. It is the sound that is heard only once, like the snapping of a twig, a low growl or the single warning call of bird or animal... that is of immediate danger and calls for instant action. Having acquired the ability – through fear – of being able to pinpoint sound, I was able to follow the movement of unseen leopards and tigers, whether in the jungle by daylight or in bed at night.

He later reckoned that from his experience he ‘absorbed’ jungle lore, rather than ‘learnt’ it, and he went on doing so for the whole of his life. One key skill which he gradually mastered was that of tracking. At first he found it hard to distinguish between the pug-marks of a tiger cub and those of a leopard, which were much the same size; then experience showed him that he could differentiate by concentrating on the imprint of the toes, for those of a young tiger are larger, and out of proportion to those of a leopard. In the same way, he learnt the difference between the prints of a wild pig and the similar indentations left by a young sambar deer. An even more arcane skill was his ability to deduce, from its track, the identity of a snake and the direction in which it had been moving. ‘When you see the track that shows excessive wriggling,’ he wrote, ‘you can be reasonably sure it is the track of a poisonous snake.’

At the age of eight one of his duties was to chaperone the girls of the family when they went swimming in the canal which formed one boundary of the Corbetts’ land in Kaladhungi. They went every day of the week except Sunday, and he found the task intensely embarrassing, for decorum obliged the young women, between nine and eighteen, to wear their nightdresses while they swam, and as they entered the water, the flimsy cotton garments were liable to float up round their heads – to the edification of villagers walking along the far bank of the canal to collect firewood from the forest. ‘When this happened, as it very frequently did,’ Jim wrote later, ‘I was under strict orders to look the other way.’ Some commentators have suggested that glimpses of pubescent girls’ bodies may have left him with inhibitions about women which made him a lifelong bachelor.

His earliest experience with a gun was nearly his last. One day Dansay Fleming, a burly young Irishman who had been disinherited by his father (a general) for refusing to join the army, took him into the jungle to shoot a tiger, carrying not only a muzzle-loading rifle, but also a muzzle-loading shotgun slung on his shoulder. Luckily they found no tiger, but on the way home Dansay suggested that Jim should try the shotgun on a flock of white-capped laughing thrushes which were scratching up dead leaves in search of ants. Obeying instructions, he took aim, gently squeezed the trigger of the ancient weapon – and was blown backwards, heels over head, not injured but severely shocked.

Soon he had a weapon of his own – a double-barrelled, muzzle-loading shotgun that had seen better days. Someone had split the right-hand barrel by over-loading it, and the hand-grip, cracked in the explosion, was held together by lapping of brass wire. The budding hunter formed a close association with Magog, a liver-and-white spaniel, who doted on him. While he was still small, the dog was strong enough to carry him about, and later he took the boy for walks in the jungle. From this useful companion Jim learnt a great deal – not least that it was unwise to pass close to thick cover in which animals might be asleep. Magog also taught him how to walk noiselessly – and they had some stirring adventures together.

Once, when they were out after peacock, the spaniel followed a covey of the birds into thick cover, out of which there suddenly erupted the angry roar of a disturbed tiger. ‘Magog, after his first yelp of fear, was barking furiously and running,’ Jim remembered:

The tiger was emitting roar upon roar and chasing him, and both were coming towards me. In the general confusion a peacock, giving its alarm call, came sailing through the trees and alighted on a branch just above my head, but for the time being I had lost all interest in birds, and my only desire was to go somewhere, far away, where there were no tigers. Magog had four legs to carry him over the ground, whereas I had only two; so, without any feeling of shame – for deserting a faithful companion – I picked up my feet and ran as I had never run before.

Another day, stalking a cock jungle fowl, he got another bad fright. As he put a bare foot down into some long grass that grew in a hollow, he trod on the coils of a python. That made him jump ‘as no boy had ever jumped.’ Clearing the depression, he whipped round, fired a shot ‘into the writhing mass’ and ran – for pythons, he knew, could reach a length of eighteen feet, and a diameter of over two feet, and if this one had caught him, it could easily have crushed him.

Many years later he recalled the fear that accompanied his early forays into the forest:

After a lifelong acquaintance with wild life, I am no less afraid of a tiger’s teeth and claws today than I was the day that a tiger shooed Magog and me out of the jungle in which he wanted to sleep. But to counter that fear and hold it in check, I now have the experience that I lacked in those early days. Where formerly I looked for danger all around me and was afraid of every sound I heard, I now knew where to look for danger, and what sounds to ignore or pay special attention to. And, further, where there was uncertainty where a bullet would go, there was now a measure of certainty that it would go in the direction I wanted it to. Experience engenders confidence, and without these two very important assets, the hunting of a man-eating tiger on foot, and alone, would be a very unpleasant way of committing suicide.

Among the skills which he gradually perfected was that of sleeping up trees – an expedient to which he frequently resorted when sitting over a man-eater’s kill. As a boy he would often go up a tree with a book, and sit happily on a branch, reading. Also, by constant practice, he became a skilled fisherman. Maggie told how he once caught a 60lb mahseer in the lake at Nainital: ‘It was so big we felt it should go to an institution where there were a lot of people to eat it, so took it to the YWCA, and they said it was one of the best they had ever eaten. I took it up with two men carrying it slung from a pole.’

After the death of their father in 1881, when Jim was only six, his stepbrother Tom, whom Jim hero-worshipped, took over as head of the family and looked after his tribe. It was he who fostered his young brother’s hunting instincts most keenly – but was it not dreadfully irresponsible of Tom to initiate a bear hunt when Jim was only ten? In spite of protests from their mother, off they went together, with Tom carrying two weapons – his own rifle and a double-barrelled shotgun. When they came to what Jim described as ‘a deep, dark and evil-looking ravine’, Tom left his young companion sitting on a rock with the shotgun while he himself went off to perch in a solitary oak tree on the side of a mountain half-a-mile away. If Jim saw a bear approaching his brother’s position, he was to go and tell him. As Jim recalled,

A wind was blowing, rustling the dry grass and dead leaves, and my imagination filled the jungle round me with hungry bears... That I would presently be eaten, I had no doubt whatever, and I was quite sure the meal would prove a very painful one for me. Time dragged on leaden feet, each moment adding to my terror, and when the glow from the setting sun was bathing the mountainside in red, I saw a bear slowly making its way along the skyline a few hundred yards above Tom’s tree... The opportunity I had been praying for to get away from that terrifying spot had come... So, shouldering the gun, which after my experience with Dansay’s muzzle-loader I had been too frightened to load, I set off to tell Tom about the bear and to re-attach myself to him.

Jim soon became more proficient with weapons, for, still at the age of ten, he joined the school cadet company of the Nainital Volunteer Rifles, and on the range began firing a .450 Martini carbine – a heavy rifle with a notoriously vicious kick, quite unsuitable for a boy of his age. Then the sergeant-major in charge, seeing his eagerness, lent him a muzzle-loading .450. Armed with this clumsy weapon, he would go off on solo hunting expeditions into the dense jungle round Kaladhungi, shooting birds for the pot. This required no mean skill, for the rifle had only iron sights – no telescope – and unless he managed to decapitate a jungle fowl or partridge, rather than hitting it amidships with one of his heavy bullets, there would be nothing left for his mother to cook. As he himself wrote later, he ‘revelled in the beauty of the jungle,’ and rejoiced whenever he gained access to ground that he ‘loved and understood.’ Time spent in the jungles ‘held unalloyed happiness for me.’

His own reminiscences reveal this as a slight exaggeration, for he also had moments of sheer terror – not least when he shot his first leopard. He was out after jungle fowl with his .450, and was sitting on a rock on the edge of a steep little ravine when he saw a leopard bounding towards him. Seconds later it appeared on the lip of the gully, only fifteen feet away. Taking careful aim, he fired at its chest. A cloud of smoke from the black powder cartridge blocked his view, and he caught only a fleeting glimpse of the animal as it sailed over his head, leaving splashes of blood on his clothes. Following up, he made his way along a steep hillside dotted with rocks and bushes, behind any of which the wounded animal might be sheltering.

Moving with the utmost caution, and scanning every foot of ground, I had gone half-way down the hillside when from behind a rock, some twenty yards away, I saw the leopard’s tail and one hind leg projecting. Not knowing whether he was alive or dead, I stood still until presently the leg was withdrawn. Having already hit the leopard in the body, and not killed him, I now decided to try his head, so, inch by inch, I crept to the left until the head came into view. He was lying with his back to the rock, looking away from me. I had not made a sound, but he appeared to sense that I was near, and as he was turning his head to look at me, I put a bullet into his ear.

It is not possible to describe my feelings as I stood looking down at my first leopard. My hands had been steady from the moment I first saw him bounding down the steep hillside and until I pulled him aside to prevent the blood from staining his skin. But now not only my hands but my whole body was trembling with fear at the thought of what might have happened if, instead of landing on the bank behind me, the leopard had landed on my head. Trembling with joy at the beautiful animal I had shot, and trembling most of all with anticipation of the pleasure I would have in carrying the news of my great success to those at home who I knew would be as pleased and as proud of my achievement as I was. I could have screamed, shouted, danced and sung, all at one and the same time. But I did none of these things. I only stood and trembled, for my feelings were too intense to be given expression in the jungle, and could only be relieved by being shared with others.

At that date – around 1890 – ideas about big-game hunting were totally different from those of a century later. Indian potentates, their guests, their sons and relations, as well as British officers and officials, all went out on shikar – hunting – as a matter of course. Of all trophies, tigers and leopards were the most highly-prized: because they were so powerful, and quite capable of killing a human aggressor, the pursuit of them was exciting and dangerous. A big male tiger might weigh 500 lbs, could move as fast as a racehorse, and was armed with formidable teeth and claws. A leopard, though much smaller, was equally well armed, and very fast and agile. Even if the rifleman was mounted on an elephant or sitting on a machan, the element of risk was high.

Until well into the 20th century local governments looked on big cats as vermin, and offered farmers rewards for their destruction – but, 5,000 miles away in London, someone thought he knew better. On 10 July 1906 a suggestion was made in the House of Commons that the bounty should be discontinued, on the grounds that the carnivores were performing a useful function – that of keeping ‘down the head of deer and the sounder of pig, which destroy the crops of the cultivators.’ The idea drew a dusty answer.

The Secretary of State does not consider that the discontinuance of these awards is advisable. Any indirect advantage to crops that might result from the multiplication of tigers and leopards would be more than counterbalanced by the increased danger to human beings, cattle and domestic animals.

In any case, prodigious numbers of tigers were shot. The Maharaja of Sargujah, though only one-eyed, killed 1,157. The Maharaj Kumar of Vizianagram – known as Fizzy Vizzy from his predilection for champagne – claimed a personal total of 383, and lined the entrance compound of his palace with mounted victims set in ornamental niches. During King George V’s visit to India in 1911 the monarch and his retinue shot thirty-nine tigers, eighteen rhinos and four bears. Shikaris had no qualms about such slaughter, for, especially in the north of India, the supply of tigers seemed endless: no matter how many were killed, more kept coming down from the vast forests in Nepal to replace them, and occupy the territories left empty by their predecessors.

Grandfather Joseph Corbett had been tiny, but Jim grew up into a wiry six-footer with sturdy legs and formidable endurance, easily able to walk 20 miles a day, sometimes on earth roads, sometimes on the zig-zag tracks, worn by bare human feet, that wound up, down and around the steep, densely forested hills of Kumaon. By the age of seventeen he was sporting a moustache, and he kept it, thick but neatly trimmed, for the rest of his life. His voice was engagingly soft, his manner attractively modest. For preference he wore shorts (ridiculed by one Indian colleague as jangias – panties) and knee-length woollen stockings, as the combination was cooler and less restricting than long trousers, and had the extra advantage of not brushing noisily through grass or other vegetation when he was moving in thick cover. Sometimes, when caught up in the tension of a man-eater hunt, he would go without food for days. He was naturally abstemious, and hardly ever drank alcohol; for refreshment after hard work or a marathon trek he relied mainly on tea, which he liked made with warm cows’ milk and brought to him in bowls. For him, ‘a dish of tea’ was the great reviver. His worst weakness was that he smoked heavily – a habit that must have exacerbated the bouts of malaria from which he suffered later in life.

Smoking may have accounted for – or at least contributed to – one strange gap in his otherwise-prodigious knowledge of wildlife. Tigers, he repeatedly wrote, have no sense of smell. This is not true. Tigers have a good sense of smell, and rely on it for marking their territories. By spraying urine on the trunks of trees, they delineate the boundaries of their domain and seek to warn off intruders; they pick up essential information by sniffing deposits left by rivals, especially by using the grimace known as flehmen, in which they lift their head and wrinkle their upper lip while inhaling. It seems very odd that, in all his accounts, Jim never mentions this essential element of tiger behaviour. He believed, on the other hand, that leopards do have a sense of smell – for he recalled that, when he was trying to poison the man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag, he was afraid the killer would detect the doses of cyanide which he had hidden in the body of a human victim.

Even in later life, when he came to write his books, and he had turned firmly in the direction of conservation, he showed no shame in describing his blood-lust as a youth. On countless forays he was accompanied by Robin, a cocker spaniel whom he bought as a three-month old puppy, and who for almost thirteen years became his constant companion when after big game, often detecting the presence of tigers or leopards before his master.

In an affectionate chapter describing their partnership Jim told how one evening, out on his own in the jungle without the dog, he fired his rifle at an outsized male leopard which emerged from the undergrowth only fifteen yards away. At the shot, the animal rose high in the air, turned a somersault, and went crashing off through thick cover. The sudden silence that followed could mean one of two things: either the leopard had died, or it had reached open ground. Because the sun was setting, and Jim was four miles from home, he decided to leave it for the time being, and resume the hunt in the morning.

Before sunrise he was back on the scene, this time with Robin leading – and in the hunt that followed, the spaniel played a leading role, guiding his master with his nose. After much further manoeuvring, Jim set out to circle a fallen tree, in which the wounded animal had taken refuge. Gradually closing in until he could see under its branches, he and Robin had gone about two thirds of the way round when the dog stopped.

There was a succession of deep, angry grunts, and the leopard made straight for us. All I could see was the undergrowth being violently agitated in a direct line towards us, and I only just had time to swing half-right, and bring the rifle up, when the head and shoulders of the leopard appeared out of the bushes a few feet away. The leopard’s spring and my shot were simultaneous, and stepping to the left and leaning as far back as I could, I fired the second barrel from my hip into his side as he passed me.

I had side-stepped to the left to avoid crushing Robin, and when I looked down for him now, he was nowhere to be seen. For the first time in all the years we had hunted together we had parted company in a tight corner. It was therefore with very great misgivings that I turned about to go in search of him. As I did so, I caught sight of his head projecting from behind a tree trunk on the edge of a small clearing only a hundred yards away. When I raised my hand and beckoned, he disappeared into the undergrowth, but a little later, with drooped eyes and drooped ears, he crept silently to my feet. Laying down the rifle, I picked him up in my arms and, for the second time in his life, he licked my face – telling me as he did so, with little throaty sounds, how glad he was to find me unhurt, and how terribly ashamed he was of himself for having parted company from me.

Our reactions to the sudden and quite unexpected danger that had confronted us were typical of how a canine and a human being act in an emergency, when the danger that threatens is heard and not seen. In Robin’s case it had impelled him to seek safety in silent and rapid retreat – whereas in my case it had the effect of glueing my feet to the ground and making retreat – rapid or otherwise – impossible.

When I had satisfied Robin that he was not to blame for our temporary separation, and his small body had stopped trembling, I put him down and together we walked up to where the leopard, who had put up such a game fight, and had so nearly won the last round, was lying dead.

In 1893, at seventeen, Jim went straight from school into his first job, as a fuel inspector on the Bengal & North Western Railway. His beat was a long way from home, but the only area in which he could find worthwhile employment. For eighteen months he lived in a tent in the forests, in charge of felling 500,000 tons of timber to provide fuel for the engines, most of which still ran on wood. The trees had to be cut into three-foot billets and hauled on carts to the nearest point of the track, maybe ten miles off. There they were weighed and measured, then loaded onto trains for dispatch to distant fuel depots. As he himself recalled, it was strenuous work, but it kept him fit, and gave him unlimited sport, for the jungle was alive with chital (spotted deer), muntjac (barking deer), four-horned antelope, wild boar and peafowl. Because his job filled every hour of the working day, he had to do his shooting at night – and at this he became expert.

Shooting by moonlight is very different from shooting in daylight, for though it is easier to stalk a deer or a rooting pig at night, it is difficult to shoot accurately unless the moon can be got to shine on the foresight. The pea fowl had to be shot while they were roosting, and I am not ashamed to say that I occasionally indulged in this form of murder, for the only meat I ate during that year and a half was what I shot on moonlight nights; during the dark period of the moon I had perforce to be a vegetarian.

After his stint in the jungle he spent a year working up and down the railway in a variety of jobs. By then many engines had been converted from wood to coal, and he rode on the footplates to report on consumption. This he enjoyed, for he was sometimes allowed to drive the engines; but he was bored by acting as the guard on goods trains – especially whenever he had to remain on duty for forty-eight hours at a stretch. Occasionally he also stood-in as assistant station-master.

Then one day in 1896, he received orders to go to Mokameh Ghat, an immense depot on the right (southern) bank of the Ganges (a ghat, pronounced gort, is a sloping river-bank or a series of wide steps going down to water; a landing-place). Mokameh Ghat was an important railway centre: not only was it a point at which the metre-gauge and broad-gauge systems converged, it was also one terminal of a ferry across the mighty river, which during the monsoon floods could swell to a torrent four or five miles wide. In the absence of a bridge, steamers and barges carried goods and passengers across the stream to Samaria Ghat on the opposite bank.

Appointed Trans-shipment Inspector at Mokameh Ghat, Jim arrived there to find a scene of daunting chaos. The Ferry Superintendent told him that not only were the sheds stacked to the roof with goods; outside in the yard 400 wagons were waiting to be unloaded, and on the far side of the river there were 1,000 more wagons lined up to be ferried across. A tour of the depot next day revealed that the congestion was even worse than the newcomer had been told: the goods sheds and sidings were a mile-and-a-half long, and beside the 400 metre-gauge wagons, the same number of broad-gauge wagons needed unloading. Altogether Jim reckoned that there were fifteen thousand tons of goods waiting to be shifted.

He was not quite 21 years old, and the hot weather was setting in – a season, he remarked, ‘when all of us are a little bit mad.’ Perhaps that was what made him take the job – but he was much encouraged by meeting Ram Saran, the black-bearded station master at Mokameh Ghat, who had been advised by telegram of his arrival, but did not know that he was to take over the handling contract. ‘When I gave him this bit of news,’ Jim recalled, ‘his face beamed all over, and he said, “Good, Sir. Very good. We will manage.” My heart warmed to Ram Saran on hearing that “we”, and up to his death 35 years later, it never cooled.’

Some 500,000 tons of goods had been passing through Mokameh Ghat every year, and it was Jim’s task to set the traffic moving. It took him two days to get acquainted with his staff, who included sixty-five clerks and a hundred shunters, pointsmen and watchmen. Across the river at Samaria Ghat were another hundred ‘clerical and menial staff’. All these formed what might be called his private army; but the main workforce came from the Labour Company, from which he found several hundred ‘very discontented men’ sitting about the sheds.

Moving swiftly, he chose twelve men and appointed them Headmen, eleven of whom undertook to recruit ten men apiece. The twelfth agreed to provide a gang of sixty men and women for the handling of coal. As only one of the twelve was literate, Jim also took on one Hindu and one Mohammedan clerk to keep the accounts.

To shift the tremendous traffic block, he resorted to drastic action, and took the risk of unloading 1,000 tons of wheat onto the ground in the open, so that the same amount of salt and sugar could be transferred from broad-gauge into narrow-gauge wagons, thus freeing space in the sheds. Luckily no rain fell while the grain lay out, and within ten days the whole mass of transport had been shifted. Looking back, Jim reckoned that men had never worked harder than his. They began at 4am every morning, Sundays included, and laboured through until 8pm, eating their food – brought to them by wives, mothers and daughters – in the sheds. To transfer loads from the broad-gauge trucks to the narrow-gauge wagons, coal had to be shovelled or carried in baskets across a sloping, four-foot platform. In winter, men and women worked in bitter cold, often soaked by rain for days on end, and in summer the brick platform and the iron floors of the wagons became so hot that they blistered bare feet.

Jim shared their labours, and so won their undying loyalty. For the first three months neither he nor Ram Saran slept for more than four hours a night. He recorded how, for one particularly exhausting day, he had struggled to deal with an engine which had been three times de-railed and three times hoisted back on to the track with hand-jacks:

Tired and worn out, and with eyes swollen and sore from wind and sand, I had just sat down to my first meal of the day when my twelve headmen filed into the room, and seeing my servant placing a plate in front of me, with the innate courtesy of Indians filed out again. I then, as I ate my dinner, heard the following conversation taking place on the verandah:

One of the Headmen. ‘What was on the plate you put in front of the Sahib?’

My servant. ‘A chapatti and a little dal.’

One of the Headmen. ‘Why only one chapatti and a little dal?’

My servant. ‘Because there is no money to buy more.’

One of the Headmen. ‘What else does the sahib eat?’

My servant. ‘Nothing.’

Later the old Headman requested permission to enter the room, and told Jim that his men had so little food that they were scarcely able to work. ‘But,’ he concluded, ‘we have seen tonight that your case is as bad as ours, and we will carry on as long as we have strength to stand.’

That was one of Jim’s great assets, both on the railway and in the jungle: his readiness to share whatever hardships his men were suffering. ‘As I could understand and speak their language as well as they could,’ he once wrote, ‘I was able to take part in their light-hearted banter and appreciate all their jokes.’ No less important was his achievement in securing them regular pay, and his scrupulous honesty in sharing out any bonuses that the railway granted.

For someone whose home was in Nainital, Mokameh Ghat was no convenient or congenial workplace. Some 700 miles to the south-east as a vulture might fly, but a thousand by rail and road, the depot lay in dreary surroundings and a far less salubrious environment, where cholera was rife, and the only medical man within ten miles was ‘a brute of a doctor, as callous as he was inefficient,’ whose ‘fat, oily throat’ Jim hoped one day to have the pleasure of cutting. He himself, with his father’s medical training, treated many of the small ailments suffered by his workers.

It seems extraordinary that a man of his intelligence could stick at the job for as long as he did – twenty-six years. At least he lived in a comfortable house, with a dining room, a sitting room and a bedroom opening on to a verandah, some 200 yards from the river. When he came home from work – usually at about 8pm – his house servant, waiting on the verandah, would call to the waterman to lay his bath in the little room next to his bedroom (for he always had a hot bath, winter or summer). The bath was made of wood, and long enough to sit in – but one evening he got a severe fright when, as he opened his eyes after soaping his hair, he saw a big cobra with its hood expanded looking over the rim, within inches of his toes. In his struggle to get out of the bath he extinguished the flame in his lamp, plunging the little room into darkness. ‘Here I was (he recalled later) shut in a small, dark room with one of the deadliest snakes in India,’ – and he had an agonising wait before a servant came to his rescue. Freed at last, he burst out onto the verandah stark naked.

Soon after he arrived at Mokameh Ghat he began making innovations to improve the community. The first was to start a school for the sons of his workmen and the lower-paid railway staff. Together with the station-master Ram Saran, he rented a hut, installed a master and started with a class of twenty boys. At once the organisers ran up against caste prejudices, for high- and low-caste boys were not allowed to sit together in the same hut. But since there was no objection to them sitting in the same shed, the master solved the problem by removing the hut’s walls. The enterprise flourished: the school grew rapidly, and when it reached 200 pupils and eight masters, it was taken over by the Government, who rewarded Ram Saran by conferring on him the title Ri Sahib.

Together with Tom Kelly, the stout superintendent of the broad-gauge railway, Jim started a recreation club, cleared a plot of ground, marked out football and hockey pitches, bought a football and primitive hockey sticks. These were made of naked wood, as were the balls – with the result that painful injuries were common. Jim, being fairly nimble, played as a forward, and his status in the community was revealed one day when he tripped and fell over:

All the players... abandoned the game to set me on my feet and dust my clothes. While I was receiving these attentions, one of the opposing team dribbled the ball down the field and was prevented from scoring a goal by the spectators, who impounded the ball and arrested the player!

Soon after the start of the recreation club, the Railway built a club house and laid out a tennis court for the European staff, who, including Jim, numbered four. In the evenings he and Tom Kelly would play billiards – but a more exciting pastime was shooting. At dusk in the winter, when the moon was at or near full, thousands of bar-headed and grey-lag geese would come flighting in from their daytime roost on islands in the Ganges, to graze on ripening wheat in the fields or weeds in a cluster of tanks and pools some nine miles down the line. To reach their feeding grounds, the gunners rolled down on a trolley which had been provided, along with four men to push it, for the corpulent Tom, to save him walking great distances back and forth along the sidings during his