Alwar : This clever and man-eating tigress in Ramnagar area was fooling us hunters for months. She had killed two people and injured three. When we were given the task of killing her, it was not easy for us either. I think that maybe even Jim Corbett himself would not have been able to hunt her then because he would have never met any animal as fast as this tigress was learning and thinking. To target the tigress, I myself sat in a cage as bait, but she did not come. We also put a buffalo calf as bait. But she attacked that too when there was no hunter on the platform that day. She was so clever that she would remain hidden even when we shouted. If we sent elephants into the sugarcane fields, she would keep playing hide and seek but would not come out. I have hunted 49 man-eating leopards and tigers from 2002 till now. But this was my first encounter with such a clever animal. For one and a half months, we five hunters were after this tigress. On the day we killed her on 20 October, one of the three bullets that hit her was mine. You can guess our preparations from the fact that the Uttarakhand Forest Department had installed 120 helicopter drones and camera traps within a radius of 20 kilometers so that they could locate the tigress.
But this tigress was no less clever. She was always one step ahead of our technology. She was never seen again in any trap camera that captured her picture. Once, she passed through the camera which was under camera surveillance. The evening before this tigress was killed, we had set up a trap. There were no elephants in it that day, but people had set it up. Suddenly she came out of the sugarcane fields and came in front of one of our teams. One of the hunters from our team immediately shot at her. However, we came to know later that this bullet had hit the corner of her front paw. After this one shot, continuous firing started and she ran away in fear.
Seeing the blood, the chasing team thought that she must be somewhere around here. Thinking this, they set up traps. It was about to be evening. Immediately we set up search lights in the field with the help of five generators to break the darkness so that she could not run away anywhere else and 150 people surrounded the field and stayed there the whole night. Next morning when preparations were being made for the final operation, it was found out that the tigress was missing.
Despite the presence of so many people, that cunning tigress escaped by breaking the cordon of light and people. Only then did we come to know that she had hidden in the bushes next to the paddy field. Immediately the hunters surrounded her there. I and the other hunter with me, Harish Dhami, both were on a platform about 22 feet high from where we had a view of an area of about 300 feet. As soon as the elephant was driven, I saw the bushes in front of me shaking. I immediately fired a shot and the tigress let out a loud sound. I thought the tigress was injured. The other hunter near me, Joy Hukil and my assistant Hari Singh were also sure that she had been shot.
As soon as this became clear, they also started firing and after this we started firing indiscriminately. We fired about 30-32 rounds of bullets.
But you see that despite this, the tigress was hit by only three bullets – mine, Joy Hukill’s and Hari Singh’s. Hukill’s gun has killed 20 man-eating leopards before this. But he said that the whole matter had become complicated because of the angry villagers, onlookers, media and forest officials chasing the tigress. He admits that we had got the opportunity to kill the tigress by surrounding her twice before, but we could not take any risk because of the presence of onlookers. However, we feel that the fear and anger of the people regarding the tigress was not without reason.
Govindi Devi, a resident of Talla Gojani village, was killed by this tigress on 6 September in the forests adjoining Jim Corbett Park, just 200 meters away from her house. Even Govindi’s son stopped going to work out of fear after this incident. We believe that she became a man-eater because this six-year-old tigress’s nails had worn out and she was not able to hunt wild animals. So she started choosing easy prey. And these victims were living humans.
