The Champawat Tiger
Another man-eater shot and then immortalized in print by the great Jim Corbett, this female tiger was responsible for around 436 deaths in northern India. Its body count is recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the highest number of fatalities perpetrated by a single tiger, and amongst Indian cats is rivaled only by the Leopard of Panar (see above). Like the notorious leopard, the Champawat Tiger lived in the Kumaon, an area so rich in man-eaters that Corbett wrote a superb book on the subject, which the reader is urged to track down.
The tigress was notorious throughout India, and even parties of Gurkhas from nearby Nepal tried and failed to end its career. A sense of the tigress’s reputation can be gleaned from Corbett’s account of his first steps on the hunt. Arriving at the village of Pali five days after a woman had been killed by the tiger, Corbett found the entire population locked indoors and reluctant to greet even their would-be savior. They had remained in self-imposed incarceration ever since the woman’s death, as the tigress had been heard calling barely a hundred yards from the conurbation for several days.
The tigress’s custom was to surprise agricultural workers, maul one, and drag the sometimes-living victim to the thick jungle where it trusted its meal would be undisturbed. In one remarkable tale of bravery, the tiger surprised two sisters cutting grass near their hut. Seizing one and carrying her off, the tigress was pursued by the other sister begging it to take her instead. After a hundred yards’ pursuit, the tigress dropped its victim and chased the pursuer into a nearby village. Despite the wily scheme to get help, the discarded sister was already dead. The survivor never uttered another word.
Corbett was fortunate to catch up with the tiger after it had killed a teenage girl in a village near to the bungalow in which he was staying. Summoned moments after the tigress had seized her from a twelve-strong party collecting sticks, Corbett actually managed to surprise it at its kill, and was enabled to track the animal by its paw-prints and furious growls. After narrowly avoiding becoming its next victim by luck rather than judgment, Corbett organized a beat near to the unfinished meal, and succeeded in killing the notorious tigress in a rocky gorge.
The Champawat Tiger makes this list not merely for its world-record kills but for its uncannily-human use of fear. People working in large groups would usually deter predators, but this tigress realized that a sudden and loud attack would be sufficient to scare off large crowds, who would be too frightened to track it down. As is perversely characteristic of Corbett, his account of the tigress is sympathetic. Face-to-face with the enraged man-eater in the gorge, he noticed that two of its canines were broken by a gunshot wound, which left the tigress unable to hunt its natural prey.