Jungle Jim

Corbett’s boyhood wanderings and lessons in the forest made him the formidable hunter he grew up to be. From 1906 and 1941 Corbett hunted down at least a dozen man-eaters. His very first man-eater, the Champawat tiger, was responsible for about 436 documented deaths.

The Temple Tiger gives hunting tales a superstitious twist as Corbett’s expertise fails time and again to kill the cattle lifter who apparently had the blessings of the deity of Dabidhura. The Dabidhura priest’s words to Corbett — ‘‘I have no objection, Sahib, to your trying to shoot this tiger but neither you nor anyone else will ever succeed in killing it’’ —become a prophecy.

Corbett’s hunting career was not without mistakes. In The Chowgarh Tigers, he sees two tigers near a cow, one with a lighter colouring and, assuming it was the old man-eater, shoots it. It turns out that it was the cub.

It’s appropriate that the collection ends with Just Tigers where Corbett talks of how a good photograph gives greater pleasure to the sportsman than the acquisition of a trophy. By the mid-thirties Corbett had almost given up hunting and was disturbed over the increasing number of hunters in the forest. Leafing through Fred Champion’s book With a Camera in Tiger-Land first gave him the idea of photographing tigers.

No Corbett collection is complete without his stories of the people of India. If Kumaon and Garhwal were the landscape of his wild tales from the hills, Bihar was the everyday backdrop where Corbett lived out his life as a railway official. He left home as a seventeen and a half year old and for the next 22 years worked in Mokameh Ghat where he had the contract for transhipping goods. ‘‘Loyalty’’ and ‘‘Chamari’’ are two such stories taken from Corbett’s My India.

But the most glaring omission in this collection, as the publisher himself acknowledges, is The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag. Space constraints are justified but its omission is really inexcusable. For the terror the Leopard of Rudraprayag evoked in Garhwal between 1918 and 1926 is captured by Corbett in unparalleled chilling prose. The eeriness of a leopard breaking down a door, entering a room and killing a sleeping boy, while not touching the 40 goats in the room, stays long after the book has ended and the man-eater hunted. By not including this, the readers have been spared the terror but also some great writing.