The Black Panther of Sivanipalli: Kenneth Anderson, a Blood Trail and a Cave Full of Bees

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.

Animal: Black panther (a melanistic leopard, Panthera pardus fusca)
Victims: Cattle, goats and a donkey. Never a man-eater
Territory: Sivanipalli, Salivaram, Anchetty and Aiyur, near Denkanikottai, today in Krishnagiri district, Tamil Nadu
Hunter: Kenneth Anderson, with his .405 Winchester and a village dog named Kush
Original account: The Black Panther of Sivanipalli (1959)

Plate IA black panther on the move. Engraving from Brehm's Life of Animals (1895).

A hamlet at the edge of the forest

Sivanipalli was barely a village at all: half a dozen thatched huts sitting right at the edge of the Reserved Forest, about forty-five miles from Bangalore past the town of Denkanikottai. The last five miles had to be walked on a footpath. Streams tumbled through gorges on two sides, rocky hills rose in every direction, and a herd of cattle lived in the hamlet because there was always water nearby.

Anderson loved the place. He had first come there in 1929 and returned again and again, often just to wander the forest on moonlit nights. Around Sivanipalli you could meet elephants, hear tigers moan, and listen to leopards "sawing" in the dark. Plenty of ordinary spotted leopards lived there, drawn by the water, the game and the village cattle.

The devil at the water-hole

In 1934 a herdsman driving his cattle home at about five in the evening saw a panther drinking at the water-hole. It was completely black. When the cattle came near it looked up calmly, and when the man appeared it simply melted into the undergrowth.

Nobody believed him. A black panther had never been seen in those hills. The herdsman himself was sure that what he had seen was not a living animal at all, but the Devil in one of the many forms he was said to take in the jungle.

Plate IIThe black panther among its spotted cousins. From The Animal Kingdom (1897).

There is nothing supernatural about a black panther. It is simply a leopard with too much dark pigment, a condition called melanism. One cub in a litter may be born black while its brothers and sisters are the usual gold with black rosettes. If you look closely at a black panther in good light, the rosettes are still there, faintly visible under the dark fur. Black leopards are more common in the wet evergreen forests of the Western Ghats and the north-east, where a dark coat is good camouflage. In the dry scrub of Salem district they were almost unheard of. In his whole life Anderson saw only one other wild black panther, a brief glimpse as it leapt across a road near the Cauvery River.

A cattle-lifter in black

A few months after that first sighting, the black panther made its first kill. It was midday. The cattle were resting in the shade and the two herdsmen were asleep after their lunch. The panther came out of nowhere and seized a half-grown brown and white cow by the throat. She bellowed and lurched to her feet with the cat still hanging from her neck, and her cry woke one of the men.

Normally herdsmen will rush a panther with sticks and shouts to drive it off a kill. These two did not move. They stood and watched while the cow died, and when the black cat lifted its head and looked at them, its muzzle wet with blood, they turned and ran.

From then on the black panther took a regular toll of cattle. The people of Sivanipalli kept their herds within a quarter of a mile of the huts, so the panther simply widened its range. It killed cattle from Anchetty to the south-west and from Gulhatti and Aiyur to the east, and it even carried off a large donkey from Salivaram, well outside the forest.

It is worth saying clearly: this panther never harmed a human being. It was a cattle-lifter, not a man-eater. What made it famous was its colour, and the extraordinary way the hunt for it ended.

Stalking a black cat in the dark

Anderson heard the story on a Sunday visit and was determined to see the animal for himself. He offered to pay for the next beast the panther killed, plus a reward of fifty rupees, if the villagers left the carcass untouched and sent him a telegram. The nearest telegraph office was at Hosur Cattle Farm, a bus ride away.

The call took more than a fortnight to come, and it came late. The panther killed a cow at ten in the morning; Anderson's local shikari, Rangaswamy, raced to catch the bus and sent the telegram; it reached Bangalore at four. By the time Anderson arrived at Sivanipalli it was a quarter past seven and completely dark.

Rather than wait a whole day, he made a bold decision. The kill lay only about half a mile away, beside a dry stream. He would stalk it at night, on foot, and try to catch the panther feeding. He changed into a black shirt and soft rubber-soled shoes, clamped a torch painted black to his .405 Winchester, and walked alone up the sandy stream bed, counting its bends in the darkness.

At the second bend he climbed the bank into thick jungle and crept forward, stopping every few yards to listen. The sky was overcast and he could see nothing at all. He wandered off his line, lost his sense of direction, and then, suddenly, heard it: the sound of tearing flesh and crunching bone, somewhere behind him and to the left. The panther was on the kill.

He turned and slid his feet forward inch by inch towards the sound. Then the feeding stopped. In the silence that followed he heard a soft, continuous rustle coming towards him through the grass, like a snake, or like a cat creeping on its belly. The rustle stopped. Then came a faint hiss, the sound a leopard makes as its lips draw back before a snarl.

Anderson pressed the torch switch. Two reddish eyes stared back at him out of nothing. The black body was invisible in the night; only the eyes showed. He aimed between them and fired. The panther did not fall. It bounded away with a series of roars and was gone.

Anderson got so lost finding his way back that he came out on the Salivaram track near midnight. He spent the rest of the night in a haystack, where the grass ticks ate him alive.

Plate III"Tracked by a panther." Wood engraving, 1890.

Kush, the dog with no ears

In the morning Anderson wanted to follow up. The villagers had no buffaloes to push through the scrub and nobody would risk their cattle near a wounded panther. After much discussion one dog was produced: Kush, a lanky brown village bitch whose ears had been cut off as a puppy to keep the ticks away. She had never been trained for anything.

She turned out to be a natural. Near the kill she found a smear of dried blood on a blade of lemon grass, and then she was off, nose down, following a trail no human eye could have seen in that undergrowth. Under a babul tree they found where the panther had lain down and rolled in pain. The trail led down a steep slope to the Anekal Vanka stream, where the cat had stopped to drink. Oddly, there were two separate sets of blood marks there, one much heavier than the other, although Anderson had fired only once.

The panther had crossed the stream, climbed the far side and crossed the Denkanikottai to Anchetty road right at the ninth milestone. Beyond the road the trail went under lantana and thorn so dense that the men had to crawl on their bellies, swearing, with Kush waiting impatiently ahead. It led at last to a big rocky hill behind the hamlet of Kundukottai, a hill full of caves.

The cave of the rock bees

The blood led up a slope of smooth rock to the mouth of one of the largest caves. From its roof, just inside the entrance, hung nine huge combs of the giant Indian rock bee, each about a yard long, humming with millions of insects. Rock bees are peaceful when left alone. Disturbed, they are among the most dangerous creatures in the Indian forest.

Anderson sent the three men up the rock to a safe spot above the cave and walked in with Kush. The daylight reached only about thirty feet. Beyond that was total darkness, and he had not brought his torch. He shouted and whistled. Kush barked. Nothing. Then, instead of walking back to fetch the torch, he did something he later admitted was lazy: he picked up a heavy stone and threw it into the dark.

It clattered across the floor. The next instant the panther came out of the blackness at him with the coughing roar of a charging leopard. Being black, it was invisible until it was two or three yards from the rifle. Anderson fired, the cat slid forward on the rock with the force of its charge, and he fired again. The two shots boomed and echoed around the cave.

Then the roof came alive.

The hum of the bees rose to a roar. The light at the cave mouth filled with black specks. Anderson pulled off his khaki jacket, threw it over his head and ran, and the bees poured onto him. They stung his hands, his neck, his face, and one got inside his shirt. He slid down the rock with Kush yelping somewhere behind him, and in desperation crawled under the thickest lantana bush he could find.

For years he had cursed lantana as a weed that choked the forest. That afternoon it saved his life. Bees must sting on the wing, and they could not dive through the tangle of branches. Anderson lay there, burning with pain, for more than two hours until the swarm settled.

That evening the doctor at the Denkanikottai dispensary pulled forty-one stings out of Anderson and nineteen out of Kush. Both of them ran a fever all night. One sting near his eye left it half closed the next morning.

The end of the black panther

The following day Anderson went back up the rock, very quietly, with Kush. A few paces inside the cave, curled into a ball, lay the black panther, dead and stiff. His two shots in the cave had done their work: one had struck it in the chest, and the second had gone into its open mouth as it slid towards him.

The mystery of the two blood trails was solved too. His shot in the dark the first night had not hit between the eyes. It had grazed past the panther's temple and ear and buried itself in its groin, leaving two wounds, one light and one heavy.

It was a male of normal size, six feet seven inches long, and in good light the rosettes showed clearly under the black fur. When the men picked the barbs out of its coat they counted 273 bee stings. The bees, Anderson reckoned, would have finished the panther even if his bullets had not.

It was the first and only black panther he ever shot. He went home to Bangalore with a very rare skin, a swollen face, and a new companion: he bought Kush from her owner for seven rupees.

Sivanipalli today

The country Anderson describes lies in today's Krishnagiri district of Tamil Nadu, between Denkanikottai and Anchetty, close to the Karnataka border. Much of this forest is now protected as part of the Cauvery North Wildlife Sanctuary, and elephants still move along the valleys of the streams Anderson followed. Black leopards remain very rare in this dry country, which makes this story all the more unusual.

Not every leopard in this blog is a man-eater

The black panther of Sivanipalli killed cattle, not people. We include it because it is one of Anderson's finest pieces of jungle craft: a night stalk, a tracking dog and a cave. It is also a reminder that most "problem" leopards in India, then and now, are livestock killers, and that conflict over cattle is where most human and leopard trouble begins.

More from Kenneth Anderson: Read The Spotted Devil of Gummalapur, or browse every Kenneth Anderson story on Guldaar.

Sources and credits

Original account: Kenneth Anderson, "The Black Panther of Sivanipalli", in The Black Panther of Sivanipalli and Other Adventures of the Indian Jungle (George Allen & Unwin, 1959). This post is a retelling in our own words. Anderson's full account is well worth reading.

Illustrations: Public domain images via Wikimedia Commons: Brehm's Life of Animals (1895); The Animal Kingdom, Plate VIII (1897); "Tracked by a Panther" (1890).