The Leopards of Kandha: Joy Hukil and the Mate That Would Not Leave
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.
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A road blocked with grief
The next morning, the people of Kandha did what hill villages do when they have run out of patience with the forest department: they walked down to the highway and sat on it. Traffic stopped. Their demand was simple. They did not want another cage that the leopard would walk around, or another promise. They wanted the animal dead.
They also had something to tell the officials that made the job much harder. There was not one leopard around the village. There were two, a male and a female, and they had been seen moving together.
Why a pair is worse
Leopards are solitary hunters. A pair usually means a courting male and female, and for a few days or weeks they travel, rest and sometimes hunt together. For a shooter this is a nightmare. Two sets of pugmarks cross and overlap. A kill may be shared. And when you finally have a leopard in front of you, in the dark, you have to be sure it is the right one, because shooting the wrong animal does not make a single villager safer.
Joy Hukil, the Pauri contractor who had become the forest department's most trusted hunter, was sent in with a shooting order. By then he had killed around thirty-five leopards and one tiger in these hills, and he knew the first rule of the work: villagers only believe a man-eater is dead when the attacks stop.
Days of watching
The work in the days that followed was the same slow craft as always: reading the slopes around Kandha for where the pair crossed from forest to field, and where they might lie up in the heat of the day. Man-eating leopards are creatures of dusk and night. They wait near the edges of villages as the light goes, when people are coming home late with fodder or water, and they almost never return to a kill the way a tiger might.
On the night of 28 October, at about eleven o'clock, a leopard came within range. Hukil fired. "I shot down the leopard at about 11 p.m.," he told reporters later. It was the male.
The mate that would not leave
Normally the hunters would walk up to the body at once, with torches, to be sure the animal was dead and to take it away. That night they could not. The female was still out there in the dark, and she would not leave her mate. She kept circling the place where he lay.
No one goes into thick cover at night towards an agitated leopard, and so the dead male stayed where he had fallen until daylight. Only in the morning, with the female gone back into the forest, could the team recover the body.
The operation was declared a success, and the man-eater was dead. But the people of Kandha did not sleep much better. Somewhere above their fields, the female was still alive.
The hunter who says "not that one"
Hukil is not a man who shoots anything with spots. On another occasion, at Devprayag, he talked a crowd of about a hundred villagers out of killing a leopard that had been caught in a cage, because he did not believe it was the man-eater. Shooting the right animal, and only the right animal, is what separates a hunter from a killer.
More from Joy Hukil: Read how he ended the Gajald man-eater on the temple path outside Pauri, or meet his fellow hunter, the schoolteacher Lakhpat Singh Rawat.
Sources and credits
Reporting: The Statesman, "Man-eating leopard eliminated in special operation, villagers now fearful of jungle cat's female partner" (October 2019). Background on Joy Hukil: Hindustan Times (February 2019) and The Christian Science Monitor (April 2025). This post is a retelling in our own words, with the short quotation attributed to Joy Hukil as reported.
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).
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