MANIWALA, India — A killer is stalking the villages of north India. She has killed at least nine people, all of them poor villagers living on the fringes of one of the world’s last wild tiger habitats. They are people who cannot afford a day off work, people who have no indoor plumbing. They are people who know little about India’s recent successes in tiger conservation.
In a country with India's economic growth?
But with the sudden appearance of one tiger, they look at an animal so beloved to outsiders and see only a monster.
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While hunters are brought in to kill man-eating tigers every year or so in India, it has been decades since a tiger killed as many people as this one, or stayed on the run so long.
“She won’t stop now. She’ll keep killing,” said Samar Jeet Singh, a hunter with an aristocratic pedigree, a curled-up mustache, and a high-powered heirloom rifle.
For almost a month he has been tracking the female tiger, most recently through the forests and dried riverbeds near where she made her last kill, cutting down an elderly buffalo herder last week. Searchers found just part of one arm and one leg. The tiger left the buffalos unharmed.
When he finds her, he said, he will shoot her dead.
“The time for tranquilizing is over, the time for caging is over,” he said. “Now she must be killed.”
Sadly, I suppose the taking of life is sometimes necessary.
For generations, few in these villages even thought about tigers.
The encroachment of towns, widespread poaching, and incompetent wildlife programs had devastated India’s tiger populations, forcing them into ever-smaller enclaves.
Corbett National Park, one of India’s premier tiger reserves, is barely 25 miles away, but while the villagers around here are used to living with wildlife — the forests and fields shelter leopards, monkeys, foxes, bears, and wild boars — tigers were extremely rare.
The last decade, though, has seen improvements in tiger conservation and growth in the tiger populations. If that is good news in many ways, it has also increased the chances of encounters between tigers and people.
“This area is so rich in wildlife,” said Vijay Singh, a top regional forestry official in the nearby town of Bijnor (and who, like so many people in this region, has the last name Singh). “That is the problem.”
Wildlife experts know little about the tiger they are hunting. They know it is a female because of the shape of its paw prints, and many believe it is somehow injured, which could explain why it overcame its natural fear of humans.
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My stomach is growling, meaning it must be time for lunch.
