The Bhikiyasain Man-Eater: Lakhpat Singh Rawat and the Shot From 300 Yards
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.
A man-eater declared
Divya was not the only child it went for. Another girl in the area was attacked and survived. For the forest department, that was enough. The leopard was declared a man-eater, which in Uttarakhand means the Chief Wildlife Warden has signed an order allowing it to be shot, and the hunt began.
First came the cages, baited and set along the paths near the village. The leopard ignored them. Then came the shooters. One after another, five of them, including the experienced hunter Zaheer Bakhshi, came to Bhikiyasain, sat up, watched, walked the slopes, and went home without firing a useful shot. An old leopard does not get old by being careless.
The schoolteacher takes over
On 2 October the job was handed to Lakhpat Singh Rawat. By then the teacher from Gairsain had spent almost two decades as the man the forest department called when nothing else had worked. His first man-eater, at Adibadri in 2002, had been killing children too, and he had ended it with one shot fired ten metres from a boy's back.
Rawat does not hunt alone any more. He works with a small team, and part of what he has tried to do is pass on the craft: his son Ajay hunts with him, and so do younger marksmen he has trained. At Bhikiyasain one of them was Ali Adnan, a national-level competition shooter.
Three days
It took three days. Rawat's method has always been to understand the animal before he tries to shoot it: the paths it uses, the time it moves, where it lies up. His long experience told him something the textbooks do not stress enough. A man-eating leopard rarely comes back to a kill. Instead it waits near the village in the evening, when people are still out and about.
On the evening of Monday, 5 October, the team saw it. The leopard was a very long way off, three hundred to three hundred and fifty yards across the hillside, a distance at which most hunters would not even think of firing. Ali Adnan fired twice. Both bullets struck, one through the back and one through the shoulder, and the leopard vanished into the bushes.
Where it all began
Nobody follows a wounded leopard into thick cover in the dark, so the team waited for first light. On the morning of 6 October they found it lying dead among the bushes. It was an old animal, twelve or thirteen years of age, near the end of a leopard's natural life, the kind that often turns to easier prey when hunting deer and wild pigs becomes too hard.
The villagers noticed something else. The place where the leopard had crawled to die, they said, was the same place where they had found Divya's body two weeks before.
The divisional forest officer, Mahatim Singh Yadav, confirmed the kill. For Rawat's team it was reported as the fifty-fifth man-eater of his career, even though the finger on the trigger this time belonged to his student.
Killing is not the answer, says the killer
For a man with more than fifty leopards to his name, Rawat is surprisingly clear that shooting them solves nothing permanently. He has said that with tranquilliser guns he could catch problem leopards alive, but the department does not give that support. He has called for radio collars and for trained village teams, and he pays for his own ammunition on every hunt.
More from Lakhpat Singh Rawat: Read how the teacher killed his first man-eater at Adibadri, or meet the Pauri hunter Joy Hukil.
Sources and credits
Reporting: Devbhoomi Darshan, report on the Bhikiyasain man-eater (October 2020); Raibaar Uttarakhand (October 2020, archived); Amar Ujala interview with Lakhpat Singh Rawat and Joy Hukil (October 2023); Mongabay India (July 2020); The Washington Post (October 2009); Open magazine. This post is a retelling in our own words. Some reports place this hunt in 2021; the contemporary news reports date it to October 2020.
Illustrations: Public domain images via Wikimedia Commons: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911); Views in India, Chiefly Among the Himalaya Mountains (1838).
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