Guldaar

Rajendra Nautiyal walked the same path every morning. At first light he climbed through the oak and pine above Gajald village to the little temple of Bala Sundari, said his prayers, and came back down the forest trail in time for the day's work. On the morning of 4 December 2025 he was halfway home, at about half past six, when something came out of the trees beside the path. He was forty-five years old. He did not reach his house. By the time the village found him, the whole of Pauri already knew what had happened: the guldar had killed again, on a path a few minutes from the district headquarters, in daylight.

Divya was seven years old, and she was playing near her own front door. It was 19 September 2020, in Badikot village in the Bhikiyasain area of Almora, a place of terraced fields and pine slopes above the Ramganga river. One moment she was there. The next, she was gone. Her family found her about a hundred metres from the house. She was the daughter of Girish Singh, and she had been killed by a leopard that the whole district would soon be hunting, and that would outwit five professional shooters before it met the schoolteacher from Gairsain.

In the hills of Garhwal, October is grass-cutting month. The monsoon has gone, the slopes are thick and golden, and the women of every village go out with sickles and ropes to cut fodder for the long winter. On 23 October 2019, Meenakshi Nautiyal, forty years old, went out from Kandha village near Pauri to do exactly that. She never came back with her bundle. The leopard that killed her had not come alone, and the man sent to end it would spend the most unnerving night of his hunt not waiting for a killer, but waiting for its mate to leave.

Lakhpat Singh Rawat had been lying on the rock ledge for three evenings. Below him lay the village green, the houses, the path down to the water. It was about four o'clock, and a boy had come out to wash the family's dishes. Rawat was watching the boy, and so, he suddenly realised, was something else. The leopard was already in the open, flattened to the ground and creeping. It was about ten metres from the child. The boy had no idea. The schoolteacher on the ledge had one bullet in the chamber and perhaps two seconds to decide.

For eight years, no one on the pilgrim road to Kedarnath and Badrinath slept with a door open. Every evening, in every village along the Alaknanda valley, doors were barred at dusk and nobody went out, not to answer the call of nature, not to help a sick neighbour, not for anything, until the sun was well up. Even that was not always enough. The thing they feared learned to break through doors, to dig through mud walls, to take a sleeping man from a room full of people. By the time it was dead, it had killed at least 125 people, and the whole British Empire knew its name: the Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag.

The door of the little house was open, as hill doors often were on a warm night. The leopard came in without a sound, took the sleeping woman by the throat, and dragged her across the floor. Somehow, she was torn free of it, and the leopard slipped back out into the dark. But it did not leave. For the rest of that night it walked round and round the house, trying to find a way back in, while the husband sat inside with his torn and bleeding wife, unable to go for help, because to step outside was to die. Only at dawn did it go. This was the Panar leopard, and by the time Jim Corbett came for it, it had killed some four hundred people.

Every morning at six o'clock, the mail-runner left the little post office at Jalarpet railway station and started up the steep, boulder-strewn path into the Yellagiri Hills. He carried the letters in a bag across his shoulders and a short spear hung with iron rings, which he struck on the ground every few steps. The jingling told the villagers above that the post was coming. It was also supposed to scare away snakes. One morning, the jingling never came. By the time anyone went looking, all they found on the trail were splashes of dried blood, the runner's spear lying beside a bush, and, a little further on, what was left of the man himself.

Some jungle stories are about terror. This one is about a ghost. For a few months in the 1930s, the herdsmen of a tiny forest hamlet south-east of Bangalore were convinced that Satan himself had come to live beside their water-hole, wearing the body of a jet-black cat. It was not Satan. It was a black panther, one of the rarest animals in the Indian jungle, and Kenneth Anderson's hunt for it ended in a pitch-dark cave, a charging cat, and an attack by thousands of wild rock bees that very nearly killed him.

There is a particular kind of silence that falls over an Indian village when a man-eater is working the area. The dogs stop barking. Doors that were never locked are barred with logs before sunset. Nobody steps out to relieve themselves after dark, not even when they are sick. And every morning, before anything else, people count heads. In the dry, boulder-strewn scrub country south-east of Bangalore, that silence lasted for years. The cause was a single leopard. By the time it was finally shot, it had killed around forty-two men, women and children, and the villagers had given up any hope that it could be stopped. The man who stopped it, Kenneth Anderson, later called it "the Spotted Devil of Gummalapur". This is its story, retold.