The Devil of Champawat: The Tiger That Hunted Humans

“There is no more terrible thing than to live and have one’s being under the shadow of a man-eater.” - Jim Corbett

There are murderers, serial killers and wild animals throughout history whose names have become synonymous with death. Few, however, can compete with a single Bengal tiger that stalked the forests of Nepal and northern India at the beginning of the 20th century. She was not unusually enormous, she was not possessed and she had no supernatural abilities, despite what terrified villagers may understandably have thought at the time. She simply became extremely good at hunting one particular animal: us.

The Champawat Tiger is credited with killing 436 people, making her the deadliest recorded man-eating tiger in history. Guinness World Records still recognises the figure of 436 fatalities. To put that into perspective, it is difficult enough to imagine 436 people being killed by wild animals collectively. In this case, all of those deaths were attributed to one tiger.

Her story did not actually begin in Champawat, or even in India. It began across the border in Nepal. According to Jim Corbett, the tiger had already killed around 200 people there before the Nepalese authorities finally mobilised armed men against her. They failed to kill her, but succeeded in driving her across the border and into Kumaon in northern India. This solved Nepal's problem in much the same way as throwing a burning sofa into your neighbour's garden solves a house fire. The tiger simply established a new hunting ground and carried on. Corbett recorded that during the following four years she added another 234 people to her tally before the final deaths brought the accepted figure to 436.

The authorities tried almost everything. Rewards were offered, experienced shikaris or hunters were sent after her, and parties of Gurkhas were deployed from Almora. Nothing worked. The tiger continued killing and, more importantly, gradually learned that human beings were frightened of her. Normal tiger behaviour began to disappear. Villages became hunting grounds and roads became dangerous places to travel alone.

It is difficult today to understand what living in one of these villages must have felt like. When Corbett arrived at the small village of Pali after another killing, he found approximately fifty men, women and children effectively imprisoned inside their own homes. Nobody had ventured beyond their doorsteps for five days. Food was beginning to run out. At night the tiger could be heard calling on a road roughly one hundred yards from the houses, and during the day she had been seen wandering across cultivated land below the village. People could not work their fields, collect food or safely travel between villages. One animal had essentially imposed a lockdown on an entire community.

Some of the individual stories Corbett encountered were horrific. In one attack, a group of women had climbed oak trees to cut leaves for their cattle. As one woman climbed down, the tiger approached unseen through a ravine, rose onto her hind legs and caught the woman by the foot. She desperately held onto the branch, but was pulled down and killed. Corbett later found skin from the palms of her hands still attached to the rough bark where she had tried to hold on.

Another woman demonstrated an almost incomprehensible level of bravery. When the tiger carried away her elder sister, she chased it for around one hundred yards, waving a sickle and screaming at the animal to release her sister and take her instead. Eventually the tiger dropped the body, turned around and charged her. The woman escaped back to the village, but the trauma was apparently so severe that she lost the ability to speak. When Corbett met her twelve months later, she was still unable to talk.

The most disturbing account, however, may have come from a group of twenty men travelling towards Champawat. They heard a woman's screams coming from the valley beneath the road. Then the tiger appeared. It was carrying a woman in its mouth, holding her across the lower back while her hair dragged along one side and her feet hung from the other. The woman was still alive. The twenty men stood together on the road and watched as she cried for help while the tiger carried her away.

By this point, the Champawat Tiger had stopped behaving like an animal that feared humans.

Humans feared her. But there was something wrong with the tiger.

When Jim Corbett eventually examined her body, he discovered that the upper and lower canine teeth on the right side of her mouth were badly broken. The upper canine had been snapped roughly in half and the lower one was broken almost to the bone. Corbett believed the damage had been caused by an earlier gunshot wound.

A tiger relies on its enormous canine teeth to seize and kill powerful natural prey. With half of one side of her killing apparatus effectively destroyed, animals such as deer and wild pigs became considerably more difficult to tackle. Humans, unfortunately, were slower and far easier.

Corbett concluded that the injury had prevented her from hunting normally and had ultimately caused her to become a man-eater. In other words, the most prolific man-eating tiger ever recorded may have been created by a human being who shot her and failed to finish the job. In 1907, the Deputy Commissioner of Naini Tal asked Jim Corbett to deal with the problem. Corbett agreed, but made two unusual demands. The financial reward for killing the tiger had to be withdrawn and the other professional hunters and soldiers searching for her had to leave.

Partly, he did not want to be regarded as a reward hunter. More practically, he did not particularly fancy crawling around dense jungle hunting a tiger while several other armed men were crawling around the same jungle hunting the same tiger. Being eaten was already enough of a concern without being accidentally shot as well.

Corbett was an exceptional tracker, but he was not fearless, something he was refreshingly willing to admit. During his first attempt to wait for the Champawat man-eater at night, he sat alone beside a moonlit road with his rifle. Every time branches moved in the wind and their shadows shifted across the road, his imagination produced another approaching tiger.

He later admitted that his teeth were chattering from both cold and fear.

This was a man who would eventually become legendary for hunting man-eaters, sitting alone in the darkness wondering whether his first one was about to appear behind him.

The end finally came in May 1907.

The tiger killed another young woman near Champawat. Later historical research identified the victim as Premka Devi of Phungar, although Corbett himself did not record her name. Following the trail left behind by the tiger, Corbett entered the jungle and came across blood, human remains and extraordinarily fresh pugmarks.

The tiger was nearby and knew that she was being followed.

Continuing alone through dense vegetation against an animal that specialised in ambushing humans was approaching suicide, even for Corbett.

He decided on another strategy.

With assistance from the local Tahsildar, hundreds of villagers were organised into a huge beat. The idea was simple, although carrying it out was anything but. The men would spread through the hillside, shouting, beating drums and firing weapons to force the tiger out of the dense vegetation towards Corbett.

These were people who had spent years terrified of leaving their houses alone. Now nearly 300 of them were deliberately walking towards the most successful man-eating tiger in recorded history. The plan worked. The tiger broke from cover. Corbett fired and hit her. He fired again. Still she did not fall.

Then he discovered the minor inconvenience that has ruined more than one gunfight: he had run out of ammunition. Corbett obtained the Tahsildar's gun and went after her. The badly wounded tiger crossed the Champa River and climbed onto a projecting rock where she attempted to disappear into vegetation. Corbett closed the distance and fired again. From only around twenty feet away, the shot finally brought her down.

On 12 May 1907, the killing stopped. Villagers who had spent years frightened to walk along roads could finally travel again. Corbett later recalled crowds celebrating because paths and routes that had effectively been closed for four years were once more safe to use. Yet the examination of the dead animal changed the meaning of the entire story.

The broken teeth suggested that the Champawat Tiger had not suddenly developed some demonic desire for human flesh. She had adapted. An injured predator had discovered prey that was easier to catch, and once humans became a successful food source she continued hunting them with terrifying efficiency. The animal responsible for hundreds of human deaths was therefore simultaneously a killer and, in a strange way, a victim of an earlier human act.

That distinction mattered enormously to Corbett. The man who became famous for shooting man-eating tigers eventually became one of India's most prominent early advocates for protecting them. India's first national park was established in Kumaon in 1936 and today bears his name. Tourists now travel to Jim Corbett National Park hoping for the privilege of seeing the very animal that once made his name famous by hunting it.

There is something fitting about that. The Champawat Tiger killed 436 people and deserves her grim place in history. But perhaps the most unsettling part of her story is not the number of people she killed, or the terror she created, or even the fact that an army failed to stop her. It is those two broken teeth. Because the deadliest man-eating tiger ever recorded may not have been born a monster at all.

A human bullet may have made her one.