The Gajald Man-Eater: Joy Hukil and the Leopard on the Temple Path
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.
%20(6221060606).jpg?width=1000)
A town that stopped
Gajald is not a remote hamlet at the end of a mule track. It sits on the hillside just outside Pauri, the town that gives Pauri Garhwal district its name. That was what frightened people most. If a leopard could take a man on the temple path here, it could take anyone, anywhere.
The anger came first. Villagers surrounded forest officials and refused to let them leave until something was done. The district magistrate ordered schools and anganwadis closed. The family was promised ten lakh rupees in compensation. Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami told the forest department to act, and a team led by the state's Principal Secretary drove up to the village. In the Chaubattakhal area nearby, a woman had already been badly mauled, and cattle were being taken from the sheds.
Then the Chief Wildlife Warden signed the order that only he can sign in Uttarakhand: the animal was declared a danger to human life, and a shooter was to be sent.
The shooter from Pauri
The man they sent lives a few kilometres away. Joy Hukil makes his living as a contractor and runs a homestay near Pauri, in an old stone house built by American missionaries in the nineteenth century. He is soft-spoken and, by every account, has great respect for leopards. He has also killed nearly fifty of them, every one on government orders, along with one tiger.
He took up the work in 2007, when a leopard in the Badiyargarh area was blamed for eleven deaths and nobody else could stop it. Since then the forest department has called him again and again. He is not paid for it. He buys his own ammunition and his own food on the hunt, and there is no insurance if a wounded animal gets to him first. He reads Jim Corbett and Kenneth Anderson, the old hunters, to learn what they learned.
Three nights in the dark
Cages had already been set around Gajald, and the leopard had ignored every one of them. Trap cameras in the forest had caught a leopard moving near the village, but a photograph is not a man-eater in the sights. Hukil and his partner, departmental shooter Rakesh Barthwal, moved in on the night of Monday, 8 December, and began the slow work of watching.
Hunting a man-eater in the hills is mostly waiting. You read the ground for pugmarks, you listen to the dogs and the langurs and the barking deer, you learn which paths the animal uses between the forest and the fields, and then you sit, cold and silent, on the ones it is most likely to take. A leopard that has learned to kill people has also learned to be careful. It rarely comes back to the same place twice in a row.
For two nights the team tracked and watched. On the third, late on Wednesday, 10 December, the leopard came. The shot was fired in the dark hours between Wednesday night and Thursday morning. When the hunters went forward, the animal was dead.
The right animal?
This is the question that follows every shooting, and Hukil knows it better than anyone. Villagers often complain that the "wrong" leopard was killed, and in his experience they only truly believe it is over when a month or two goes by without another attack.
The Gajald leopard was a female, about five years old, in her prime. The divisional forest officer, Abhimanyu Singh, said she matched the animal seen on the trap cameras, and samples were sent for DNA testing to confirm the link. Her body was taken to the Nagdev range office. Sixty-two schools stayed shut one more day, and then, slowly, Pauri went back to walking its own paths.
Why the hills are losing this war
Hukil has said that thirty years ago nobody in these villages was afraid of leopards. Since then, people have left the hills in huge numbers, fields have gone back to scrub, and the scrub has brought wild pigs and leopards right to the doors of those who stayed. More conflict drives more people away, and more empty land brings more leopards. He calls it a self-perpetuating cycle. Once a leopard has eaten a person, he believes, humans are simply on its menu.
More from Joy Hukil: Read every Joy Hukil story on Guldaar, or meet his fellow hunter, the schoolteacher Lakhpat Singh Rawat.
Sources and credits
Reporting: Garhwal Post, "Man killed by leopard in Pauri district" and "Villagers in Pauri relieved as man-eater leopard is hunted down" (December 2025); The Week / PTI (4 December 2025); Lokmat Times; ETV Bharat (11 December 2025); Uttarakhand Morning Post; Devbhoomi Darshan. Background on Joy Hukil: The Christian Science Monitor (April 2025), Hindustan Times (February 2019), Open magazine (2019). This post is a retelling in our own words; details the reports disagree on, such as his exact tally, have been kept general.
Illustrations: Public domain images via Wikimedia Commons: Forest and Jungle, or, Thrilling Adventures in All Quarters of the Globe (1896); Views in India, Chiefly Among the Himalaya Mountains (1838).
Comments
Post a Comment