Cold Courage

If pest control could win you medals for bravery, Jim Corbett would have won the VC. The citation would have read something like this: ‘Regardless of his own safety, he repeatedly exposed himself to the greatest danger for the sake of others and by his heroism saved the lives of hundreds of his countrymen.’

I should never have known about Jim Corbett if my paternal grandfather, a colonial policeman in Ceylon, had not given me Man-eaters of Kumaon when I was 8. The stories gripped me, and they grip me still. Recently I lent the book to a grown-up son, then to a friend who is a property developer, and to another friend who is a well-known orchestral conductor. All confessed to being mesmerized. It is easy to explain the effect of such stories on a child brought up in the 1950s. The tiger was the most fearsome creature imaginable – T. Rex had not yet reached us – and to read of an Englishman in India who went out on foot, alone, to shoot man-eating tigers lurking in the jungle made one tremble with apprehension and excitement. But why should that sort of stuff continue to grip us as adults, in an age when to shoot a tiger for any reason is morally repugnant? The answer, I think, lies in the artlessness of the writing. So incredible were his exploits that Corbett was afraid his stories would be disbelieved, and so unconsciously he followed the sound journalistic maxim that a good tale needs no help: it tells itself. The man’s stamina was astonishing. He walked for miles every day, sat up for nights on end motionless with a rifle, surviving on snatched meals and hot cups of tea; and he did this into his mid-60s. But then his opponents were exceptional: some of these man-eaters had killed between 200 and 400 people apiece. The contrast with travellers’ tales today, when minor hardships are blown up into major dangers, could not be greater. In the books Corbett wrote of his tiger-hunting, the method is always the same, rather like that of a detective story with the added suspense of a thriller. A corpse is found, the detective is summoned and, after days and weeks of stalking or lying in wait, he confronts the murderer. A slow, careful build-up comes to a sudden, violent conclusion. The author’s memory is astonishingly clear for someone who reportedly kept no diary, and the moment he starts describing the surrounding terrain in detail, you know something nasty is about to happen. ‘Having lived the greater part of my life in the jungles, I have not the ability to paint word-pictures,’ Corbett declares at the end of one story. The remark is revealing: he wants to avoid describing the tumultuous reception given him after shooting the man-eating tigress of Thak in 1938 – one of his last – which had terrorized thousands of hill villagers and road builders. The modesty of the victor is breathtaking. Of course, modesty was a virtue prized in Corbett’s day. He was born in 1875, the second youngest of thirteen children, at Naini Tal in the Himalayan foothills, in what was then the United Provinces. His father died when he was quite small, and his elder brother taught him how to shoot. In Jungle Lore he describes how he learned to recognize every bird and animal call (many of which he could imitate) and to read animal tracks like a book. Often he slept out in the jungle beside a little fire with tigers calling all around him. But I think Corbett’s modesty was due also to his love of nature and respect for his opponent, ‘a large-hearted gentleman with boundless courage’. He himself had what is often called ‘cold’ courage. In other words, he knew exactly how dangerous his part-time job was, and how few men dared attempt it. (It was sometimes compared with making a solo attempt on Everest.) He was often very frightened: ‘An unseen tiger’s growl at close range is the most terrifying sound in the jungle,’ he says at one point; a wounded tiger is ‘the most dangerous animal in the world’. He confesses to bloodcurdling hours of fear one night when, as he sat over a kill, a storm blotted out the stars and he found himself in the pitch black, a few feet off the ground, with an angry man eater growling twenty feet away. What did he do? He reached for his tobacco and smoked until the tiger decided to leave. His admiration for the ‘jungle folk’, as he calls them, extended to the hill folk among whom he grew up, whose language he spoke and whose pleas for help he could never ignore. He respected their superstitions because he himself witnessed inexplicable things – a vision of moving lights on the far side of an uninhabited gorge, the screams of a man being devoured by a tiger which came from a deserted hilltop village. Even as a child, although scared by stories of the banshee, he dared to investigate. The cries of a soul in torment he heard one night proved to be the call of a migrant bird, the churail. The screams emanating from the depths of the jungle during a storm were caused by the trunk of a half-fallen tree scraping the trunk of another. Danger sharpened the senses, and enhanced the beauties of nature: ‘The bank of violets does not lose any of its beauty because the rock beyond it may shelter a hungry tiger.’ On one occasion while tracking a man-eating tigress the hunter-naturalist found the nest of a nightjar. He picked up the eggs in his left hand and, carrying his .275 rifle in the right, descended a ravine. Stepping past a tall rock, he had the good sense to look round it over his right shoulder. There, crouching on the sand eight feet from him, was the tigress. She had a smile on her face ‘similar to that one sees on the face of a dog welcoming his master home after a long absence’. How our hero got out of that corner, I won’t spoil the story by telling you – except to say that the eggs were returned unbroken to their owner. Jim Corbett calls his exploits with man-eaters ‘sport’. I used to think this was an ironical or quaint use of the word. Now I am not so sure. For men like him – and for all those who still hunt, shoot or fish for pleasure rather than trophies – ‘sport’ does not mean a game, but an even (and in this case deadly) contest between man and animal. The human’s superior intelligence is pitted against the animal’s superior instinct and senses. The animal is on his own terrain, the man not so. The animal has superior means of flight or attack; the man is slow and weak, but he can kill at a distance. Nothing illustrates the contest more beautifully than Corbett’s own accounts of stalking a tiger while it is stalking him. Years of hunting gave him a sixth sense of lurking danger which several times saved his life. (He once crossed to the other side of a track to avoid a tiger he didn’t even know was lying in wait for him.) The risks he took seem crazy to us, but to him they were always calculated. For example, he pursued the Talla Des tigress on foot, in the moonlight, while suffering from an abscess which had left him deaf in one ear and blind in one eye. This animal, which had turned man-eater after being wounded by porcupine quills, was a cat of many lives. It took six bullets to kill her. For fear of being doubted, Corbett would not tell the ‘incredible’ story until he had explained his field craft techniques in Jungle Lore. Only once did he gamble – and that was on the shooting prowess of the Viceroy’s younger daughter who was keen to bag a tiger. She survived, but he never did it again. In his other life, apart from interludes as a military volunteer, Jim Corbett worked for the Indian railways and later had a coffee plantation in East Africa where he died in 1955. He rarely shot trophies – the enormous ‘Bachelor of Powalgarh’, hunted for ten years by all the top sportsmen of India was an exception – and after 1929 he combined pest control with filming, using his tiger calls to bring half a dozen of them at a time into his jungle ‘studio’. Trophy tiger skins would rot away, he used to say, and the tigers too would one day vanish. Only photographs would survive. And so of course – though he was too modest to make the claim – will his stories.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 13 © Christian Tyler 2007