Читать книгу No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History - Dane Huckelbridge, Dane Huckelbridge - Страница 13

CHAPTER 3

A MONARCH IN EXILE

The Nepalese beginnings of the Champawat Tiger’s man-eating career may be short on documentary evidence, but it isn’t lacking altogether—particularly in a culture so firmly grounded in oral traditions. And ironically, it is in fact a former tiger hunter, not a historian or academic, who appears to have uncovered a convincing report of its early exploits. Peter Byrne (born in 1925) has long been something of a living legend—an admittedly colorful Irish ex-pat and former game manager for the Nepalese royal family, who witnessed firsthand the legendary tiger hunts of yore, before finally turning his energies toward tiger conservation. One of the few Europeans to have gained access to the royal traditions of the bagh shikar (the story goes that he won the favor of the Nepalese elite by taking their side in a bar brawl), he was given a rare membership in the postwar years to the confraternity of game wardens and shikaris that served at the pleasure of the Nepalese king. And it was thanks to this intimate familiarity with Nepalese tiger hunters that he first heard stories of “the Rupal Man-Eater,” a tiger that devoured scores of villagers in western Nepal at the very beginning of the twentieth century. He was even able to acquire a firsthand account, from the aging father of one of his Nepalese friends—an elderly gentleman named Nara Bahadur Bisht. The ninety-three-year-old man shared with Byrne boyhood recollections of how the tiger had terrified his village, and the massive hunt that was eventually organized in Rupal to stop it.

A glance at the map reveals two eye-opening facts: first, that the Nepalese village of Rupal is just across the border from the Indian town of Champawat. And given the timing, as well as the added details of the armed local response—details that corroborate almost to a tee an account Jim Corbett would later provide—it seems all but undeniable: the Rupal Man-Eater and the Champawat Man-Eater were one in the same. Two names for the same tiger, a Nepalese sobriquet acquired first, and its Indian moniker applied thereafter.

And second? That the village of Rupal is north—surprisingly north—of the prime tiger habitat of the deep terai. When one looks at the tiger reserves that exist in Nepal today—Chitwan, Bardia, Banke, Shuklaphanta—it is not a coincidence that they seem to cluster, like green beads on a string, along the tropical floodplain at the base of the Himalayas known locally as the terai. This is because prior to being deemed national parks, they were royal hunting reserves, kept by the kings for the hunting of tigers. They were chosen specifically as hunting grounds because they were prime tiger habitat, with dense populations of Royal Bengals. This was where the striped cats were to be found, and where they were naturally suited to live. Even in modern times, tigers still cling to the marshes and grasslands of the lowland terai rather than venturing into the colder and dryer hills. A 2014 study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund that measured the tiger population in Nepal found the highest tiger densities “were concentrated in areas of riverine flood plains, grasslands, riparian forests and around wetlands . . .” In Shuklaphanta, tigers much preferred the marshy banks of the Mahakali River. Meanwhile, the dry hardwood forests of the bordering hills supported very low numbers of tigers, primarily because they also offered comparatively low levels of prey. Grazing deer and the tigers that fed on them kept to the rich grasslands and humid jungles of the terai floodplain below. It was simply a warmer, greener, and more biodiverse habitat, and it is almost certainly where the Champawat’s life began.

Rupal, however, where our tiger would first make a name for itself as a man-eater, is not in the lowland terai at all. It’s farther north, beyond the first Siwalik hills, in the beginning of the actual Mahabharat Lekh, or the Lesser Himalayas. It is a harsh realm of jagged cliffs and bristling pines; a place where the winters are frigid and large animals are scarce. If we assume—and it does seem like a relatively safe assumption—that the Champawat’s origins lie in the prime Bengal tiger habitat farther south, in the lush lowland sal jungles of what is today the Shuklaphanta reserve, the obvious question arises: What drove it away from its birthplace, northward into the steep valleys and rugged foothills of the Himalayas, to kill humans on an unprecedented scale? After all, injured tigers with damaged teeth or paws were not unknown in Nepal, nor were man-eaters entirely unheard of. But in the case of the Champawat/Rupal tiger, something without antecedent appears to have occurred. Its presence at that altitude seems almost as unlikely as Hemingway’s leopard on the side of Mount Kilimanjaro. What, exactly, was it doing in such an unwelcoming environment?

In answering the question of why a tiger would leave its natural habitat in the terai, it only makes sense to look at what was happening in the terai at that time. What becomes evident is that the long-standing dynamics between this ecosystem and the human beings who lived within it were undergoing seismic shifts in the late nineteenth century. The deforestation of the terai and the displacement of indigenous Tharu people is often attributed to the eradication of malaria in the 1950s via chemical spraying—and there certainly is considerable truth to that attribution. But what history, taken with a healthy dose of analysis, reveals is that while the delicate threads that bound the terai, the Tharu, and the tigers may have unraveled almost completely in the twentieth century, they were already frayed long before—as early as the mid-nineteenth century, when the policies of the new Rana dynasty began to take hold. And the early damage done to those intertwined and interdependent cords goes a long way in explaining the emergence of a tiger like the Champawat. When those strands came undone, they released a man-eater like none other upon the world.

Some 50 million years ago, when the miacid ancestors of all cats were still scurrying through the treetops and the Paleocene Epoch was still in full swing, a tremendous collision took place. The continental plate of India, which had been an isolated island since drifting away from Africa more than 100 million years before, slammed into the Eurasian Plate. “Slammed” in the geologic sense, as it was a slow-motion impact by human standards, occurring at a speed of less than fifteen centimeters per year. But it was dramatic, nonetheless, in the mountain range it eventually produced: the Himalayas. The world’s tallest and youngest mountains, born of a buckling that only a head-on collision between continents can provide. This upward thrusting of the earth’s crust would eventually engender a bristling range of peaks, reaching well over twenty thousand feet in height, stretching some fifteen hundred miles across, and spanning what is today Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. From their snowcapped heights, these mountains would in turn beget three major rivers: the Indus, the Ganges, and the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra. The name Himalaya means “abode of snow” in Sanskrit—an ancient Indo-European language that serves as the sacred mother tongue of Hinduism, and that has existed in the subcontinent since at least the second millennium B.C., when its earliest speakers began pouring in from the west. They were hardly the first ones to call the mountains home, however. In what is today Nepal, in the Kathmandu Valley, archaeological evidence has been found that suggests human habitation in the region for at least eleven thousand years. The new Sanskrit-speaking Indo-Aryan arrivals lived right alongside preexisting populations, and in many cases mingled, creating a patchwork of ethnic groups interspersed throughout the range’s peaks and valleys.

In some instances, the Indo-Aryan groups who arrived in the Himalaya region—relative newcomers in the grand scheme of things—clung to geographies they were familiar with, while avoiding those that were beyond their ken. They effectively left such domains to the indigenous inhabitants who predated them, while still technically incorporating them into their burgeoning kingdoms. In few places was this practice more pronounced than in Nepal. In the foothills and mountains of the Himalayan range, a series of Hindu kingdoms arose, beginning with the Thakuri dynasty, who ruled parts of Nepal up until the twelfth century; the Malla dynasty, which held dominion until the eighteenth century; and the Shah dynasty, which unified a number of the region’s warring kingdoms into a single Gorkha state in the late eighteenth century. These mountain dynasties spoke a host of Indo-Aryan languages, including Nepali, and embraced the tenants and traditions of the Hindu faith, caste systems included.

One thing they did not do—at least very often—was leave the hills for the marshy grasslands and jungles below. This was the terai, the rich northern floodplain of the Ganges, a green belt of land that ran a verdant course along the southern base of the Himalayas. The word “terai” itself is an Urdu term meaning something akin to “marsh” or “basin,” and this is a fairly accurate description for much of the territory. Vast expanses of elephant grass—which can reach up to seven meters—covered wide swathes of the damp ground, and provided ample habitat for deer, rhinos, sloth bears, wild elephants, and of course, tigers. These flat, rippling grasslands were cut through by tributaries of the great rivers that flowed down from the mountains above, and were interspersed by dense patches of forest (aka, jungle), marked primarily by the famous sal trees, which in the terai were able to keep their leaves throughout the year. As one might expect, the soil in this floodplain was exceedingly fertile, and with the proper irrigation systems could produce considerable yields of grains like rice and millet. Yet the Hindu Pahari people—who inhabited the hills and mountains above—were generally reluctant to visit the flatter, wetter lands below, for one convincing reason: the entire region was infested with malaria. Whatever agricultural promise it held was offset by the very real risk of contracting a potentially lethal blood parasite. To go into the terai, particularly during the warmer monsoon months of the year, was considered a near–death sentence for the people of the Nepalese hills. As the colonial forest surveyor Thomas W. Webber noted in 1902, “[P]aharis generally die if they sleep in the Terai before November 1 or after June 1.” And even in the cooler months, the risk of contraction still existed. The presence of malarial mosquitoes throughout much of the year provided a natural deterrence against any sort of large-scale settlement. Living year-round in the terai, for most Nepali people, was simply out of the question.

There was, however, one group that felt remarkably at home in the terai: the Tharu, a people who predated the arrival of the Indo-Aryan Hindus, and who had developed over many centuries a genetic resistance to malaria. They were able to not only survive but thrive in the tropical lowlands, living off the land in small family-based clan units. While their Pahari neighbors clung to their dense villages and terraced fields in the mountains to the north, the Tharu lived in relative isolation in the jungles and grasslands of the terai belt below, with small communities strung all along its verdant length. There existed—and continues to exist today—some differences in terms of languages, traditions, and religious beliefs among the various Tharu groups. Many eventually adopted the Indo-European languages of their neighbors, and some, like the Rana Tharu of far western Nepal, even hesitate to label themselves Tharu at all, and insist instead that they are descended from an ancient Rajput king. However, one thing the Tharu all share, from the Rana Tharu of the far west, to the Chitwania Tharu in the central region, to the Kochila Tharu of the east, is a common identity as a “people of the forest.” Their own sense of self is intimately and inextricably linked with the natural environment of the terai. It is their mother, and it is their home. And for most of the nineteenth century, they depended upon it for virtually every facet of their existence.

This isn’t to say, however, that they had no effect upon or interaction with the environment. They most certainly did. There is an increasingly antiquated notion that indigenous peoples engaged in sustenance-based survival strategies exist in a sort of innocent and Edenic bliss within an ecosystem. But with the Tharu, as with people just about anywhere, this was simply not the case. The Tharu did create irrigation canals to yield better harvests from their fields. They did engage in a slash-and-burn system of grass husbandry to feed their animals, not least of which were the elephants they caught and domesticated. And they definitely did cut down trees for timber when needed, and clear space for fields in the forest when advantageous. But they did so with the knowledge firmly in place that the forest could serve as both a natural and a renewable resource. To destroy the forest and the animals that lived within it would have been a form of cultural, if not literal, suicide. They relied upon it for building materials, for firewood, for animal fodder, and for a host of wild foods that they could only find there. This included game such as deer, boar, and rabbit, as well as fish and the freshwater ghonghi snails that served then, as they still do today, as the unofficial national dish of the Tharu people (and that taste exceptional, I discovered, thanks again to my host, Sanjaya, when paired with moonshine rakshi liquor and served with an eye-wateringly hot ginger-curry sauce). Edible ferns, mushrooms, and wild asparagus were gathered on a daily basis, and a host of medicinal plants were available when needed. The existing ecosystem of the terai provided a veritable cornucopia of materials and provisions necessary for survival—without it, they would have had no homes to live in, no fuel to cook with, no animals to raise, and practically nothing to eat. Keeping the forest intact and productive was a priority above all else.

To this end, the Tharu across the full range of the terai engaged in a sustainable form of short-fallow-shifting cultivation, growing rice, mustard, and lentils, and rotating crops to allow the soil to recover between plantings. Being seminomadic, most Tharus lived in low-impact mud and grass structures and stayed at a given habitation site for only a few years, ensuring that no single patch of forest would ever be over-farmed or over-hunted. In western Nepal in particular, where the Champawat was born, the Tharu lived communally in family-based longhouses called Badaghar—a collective labor strategy that enabled them to pool resources, maximizing their yields while minimizing their environmental impact. All in all, it was a lifestyle that both demanded and ensured a productive forest.

Needless to say, keeping this system of continual usage and renewal running smoothly was something of a balancing act, and for the Tharu, maintaining equilibrium wasn’t just about agricultural practices or labor strategies; it had its spiritual dimensions as well. Though nominally Hindu, the majority of Tharu practiced—and continue to practice—a syncretic version of the religion founded upon older animist beliefs. They worshipped and made offerings to the familiar pantheon of Indo-Aryan Hindu gods borrowed from their hill-dwelling neighbors, but also venerated a vast array of forest and animal spirits that predated the arrival of Shiva or Vishnu to the terai. For officiating the ceremonies of the former—funerals, in particular—visiting Brahmin priests were largely relied upon, who came down from the hills in the non-malarial months. When it came to the latter, however, the more traditional, tribal elements of the Tharu religion were always conducted under the auspices of the local gurau, or shaman (our word “guru” is derived from the same root). The gurau was largely seen as the protector of villages, and the intermediary between the Tharu population and the host of bhut spirits—both malevolent and benign—that inhabited the grasslands and forests that surrounded them. Rather than stone temples, the Tharu relied on shrines within the home containing important idols, as well as ceremonies held at specific forest locations called than, where the various animal spirits could be worshipped in the open, at the foot of a sacred tree. The local population was generally served by two types of gurau, both a ghar gurau, who was something akin to a family doctor, and the patharithiya gurau, who became involved in larger issues that affected the village as a whole. For example, an illness in the family attributed to unknown spiritual causes might best be handled by the ghar gurau, who would attempt to appease the unhappy spirit and convince it to return to the forest. A plague that was affecting an entire village or region, on the other hand, would be the bailiwick of the patharithiya gurau. The process of becoming a gurau generally took several years of apprenticeship with an established practitioner. Once fully initiated, the new gurau, following a ceremonial contract of service between himself and a community or household, was responsible for protecting that community or household from any form of spiritual imbalance. Such ceremonies involved puja offerings of goats, pigeons, and rakshi liquor, and could serve as a shield against everything from house fires and crop failures to attacks by wild animals.

Including, as it were, tigers. The gurau was responsible for protecting his community from a number of potentially dangerous species, in particular the rhino, the elephant, the sloth bear, and the leopard. Yet it was the tiger to whom the gurau held an especially sacred relationship. To be able to live alongside tigers and communicate with them was seen as the mark of an effective gurau. When royal Nepalese hunting parties, both Shah and later Rana, came through the terai to hunt tigers, they never did so without asking a local gurau for assistance, as it was understood that only he had the power to summon the great cats from the forest. And even today, particularly among older Tharu, there is a belief that a truly powerful gurau can ride the tiger and use it to travel between villages at incredible speeds. Some will even swear that they’ve seen this with their own eyes, and they will describe in detail the sight of a wizened old shaman climbing upon the back of a huge, striped tiger and bounding away through the trees. While speaking with the guraus of several villages near Chitwan, I heard reference again and again to “Raj Guru,” a recently deceased gurau they had all known personally and who, despite a penchant for rakshi liquor—apparently he was equally famous for his drinking—was still able to summon tigers at will to reach sick villagers in need. To the outsider, such stories sound incredible, but to someone steeped in the cosmology of the Tharu, they are only logical. Being able to live in harmony with the tiger—even gain mastery of the tiger—represents the ultimate form of spiritual ability, because the tiger was and still is regarded as the ultimate expression of the forest’s awesome power. A person who can harness the power of the tiger can, in effect, do anything. To the Tharu, the tiger was never a monster to be exterminated, but a force of nature to be harnessed and understood. The truly great man was not he who could kill a tiger, but rather he who could make peace with it, and good use of its fangs and its claws. He who could channel that power, as it were, into something constructive.

And in their own unique way, that’s precisely what the Tharu did. The key to maintaining their own sustainable way of life in the terai was to keep a certain healthy balance between forces that were ostensibly at odds. The Tharu relied on wild deer and boar as a source of meat, but both would eat their crops if their numbers became too great. Tigers solved the problem nicely, keeping the ungulate population robust but not excessive. However, if the tiger population became too concentrated, then tigers began preying upon livestock—thus, adequate habitat was needed. And because the Tharu also depended on the forests and grasslands for building materials and animal fodder, they were even further inclined to keep ecosystems both productive and intact. This in turn preserved ungulate populations, which further nourished the tiger population . . . and so on. It was a delicate balancing act of sorts, a chain without a beginning or end, that linked together the humans, the flora, and the fauna of the terai. But it was an act of balance that the Tharu excelled at. They farmed their fields, they grazed their animals, they hunted and fished in their forests, and they burned and harvested fodder from their grasslands. And they always did so alongside a healthy population of wild tigers.

This does not mean, however, that the Tharu existed in a state of perfect isolation. Their innate resistance to malaria may have allowed them to inhabit an otherwise uninhabitable stretch of wilderness, but they were not totally cut off from the cultures that surrounded them. Indeed, the lands of the terai had been incorporated into the various kingdoms and princedoms of the region for thousands of years, serving as a crossroads among the various states that straddled the boundaries of what is today Nepal and northern India. Siddhartha Guatama—better known as the Buddha—is commonly believed to have been born in Lumbini, some 2,500 years ago, in the ancient Shakya Republic of what would eventually become Nepal. People, products, and religious beliefs traveled in and out of terai settlements for millennia, and the inhabitants paid homage and taxes to the feudal lords of the region, in times of peace and war, through a rotating caste of Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist rulers. But while boundaries and allegiances shifted with time, the daily life and culture of the Tharu remained relatively stable. This proved to be true even when the surrounding kingdoms were consolidated following the conquests of Prithvi Narayan Shah, the founder of Nepal’s Shah dynasty. Between 1743 and 1768, from his home base in the mountain kingdom of Gorkha, he conquered neighboring kingdoms one by one, eventually combining them into a single, unified state whose borders more or less correspond to modern-day Nepal. From the mid-eighteenth century onward, the Tharu people of the terai valleys, although far removed from the capital in Kathmandu, became subjects of the new Nepalese king.

The relationship took time to develop. The Shah rulers of a nascent Nepal initially saw the terai wilderness of their new kingdom as a potential source of agricultural expansion, and they actively encouraged the Tharu to increase their taxable farming output through land grants and incentive packages for local communities. But it did not take long for the Shahs to realize there were even more pressing reasons to keep the forests and grasslands of the terai uncultivated and intact, and that the Tharu people were far more useful as guardians of the forest than as destroyers of it.

The reasons behind this tactical about-face are complex, but high among them was the preservation of a species whose role in the subcontinent cannot be underestimated, particularly in the preindustrial era: Elephas maximus, the Asian elephant. Long before there were all-terrain vehicles, bulldozers, or heavy artillery, there were elephants, and the kings of the Indus Valley had been using them as such since the Bronze Age. In Nepal, there are records going back to at least the sixth century B.C. of state-sponsored elephant management, as evidenced by a report of a Licchavi king named Manadeva who built a bridge across the Gandaki River solely for the transportation of hundreds of war elephants. Works of Sanskrit literature such as the Arthashastra are filled with detailed instructions on elephant husbandry, and the Muslim Mughal Empire relied on the exchange of elephants to cement relationships with their neighbors in the Nepalese hills throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Elephants were often decreed as royal property, regardless of their provenance, and when one considers the raw potential of their bodies—both constructive and destructive—the reasons for their regal status become abundantly clear. With males reaching weights in excess of 5 tons, with maximum shoulder heights approaching 12 feet, and with trunks that contain more than 40,000 muscles, the Asian elephant possesses awesome strength coupled with tremendous dexterity. For constructive purposes, these traits could easily be harnessed to fell timber, haul stone, erect columns, and steady walls—all of which were necessary for the infrastructure and ceremonial needs of an expanding kingdom. For destructive