The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag: Jim Corbett and the Terror of the Pilgrim Road
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 road to the gods
Rudraprayag is where two sacred rivers meet: the Mandakini, coming down from Kedarnath, and the Alaknanda, coming down from Badrinath. In the early twentieth century, tens of thousands of pilgrims walked this road every year, many of them old, many of them poor, sleeping in the open or in crowded pilgrim shelters along the way. For a man-eater, it was a moving feast.
The first recorded victim was taken in 1918 from Benji village. That was the year of the great influenza epidemic, the "war fever", which swept through the hills together with cholera. So many people died that the survivors could not cremate them all. By custom, a live coal was placed in the mouth of the dead, and the bodies were carried to the hillside and rolled down into the valley. Corbett believed this was how the Rudraprayag leopard, and others like it, first learned what human flesh tasted like. When the epidemic ended and the easy food ran out, it came looking for the living.
Eight years of terror
The leopard ranged over some five hundred square miles, on both banks of the Alaknanda. It killed on the pilgrim road and it killed in the villages, and it had an unnerving habit of doing what leopards are not supposed to do: going inside houses to find its victims.
Everything was tried. Gurkha and British soldiers were sent to hunt it. Famous sportsmen came, sat up, and went home. The government offered rewards. Gin traps were set, and poison was put in the bodies of its victims. The leopard survived all of it, and the killing went on. The question of the Rudraprayag man-eater was even raised in the British Parliament.
Corbett comes to Garhwal
In the autumn of 1925, Jim Corbett, by then famous across Kumaon for the Champawat tigress and the Panar leopard, agreed to go. He worked closely with A. W. Ibbotson, the Deputy Commissioner of Garhwal, and for weeks at a time over the following months he lived in the leopard's country.
It became one of the hardest hunts of his life. The leopard was old, cunning and endlessly patient, and it seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. Corbett spent many nights watching the suspension bridge over the Alaknanda at Rudraprayag, a crossing the leopard was known to use. He sat up over kills, over goats and over paths. He and Ibbotson tried traps and poison, and the leopard shrugged them off. Weeks became months, and Corbett had to leave and come back more than once.
By the spring of 1926 the leopard had outlasted everyone. But it had one weakness. It used the pilgrim road like a highway.
The mango tree at Golabrai
Near the village of Golabrai, a few miles from Rudraprayag, a mango tree grew beside the road. Corbett climbed into it and settled down to wait, night after night, for the leopard to come along the track below.
On the night of 2 May 1926, it came. It was dark, and Corbett had a torch fixed to his rifle. When he heard the leopard on the road beneath him, he switched on the light and fired. The leopard sprang away into the darkness.
At first light the next morning, Corbett found it dead, a short distance from the road. The terror of Rudraprayag was over.
It was a big male, about 7 feet 6 inches long, old but still in fine condition, and its body carried the healed marks of the many attempts to kill it over the years. Word spread down the valley faster than any runner, and people came from the villages to see with their own eyes that it was really dead.
Rudraprayag today
Rudraprayag is now a district headquarters on the busy highway to Kedarnath and Badrinath, and the pilgrims come in buses and cars. At Golabrai, a signboard marks the place where the man-eater died, and an annual fair is held to remember the day the valley could sleep again.
How the Rudraprayag leopard turned
Corbett's explanation is still widely accepted: epidemics left bodies in the forest, leopards scavenged them, and some of those leopards, finding people easy prey, kept hunting them afterwards. A leopard can live for years, and one that learns to kill people can do terrible damage before anyone manages to stop it.
More from Jim Corbett: Read every Jim Corbett story on Guldaar, including the Panar leopard, which killed even more people than this one.
Sources and credits
Original account: Jim Corbett, The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag (Oxford University Press, 1947). This post is a retelling in our own words; Corbett's full account is one of the great books of the Indian jungle and well worth reading. Background: Wikipedia, "Leopard of Rudraprayag".
Illustrations: Public domain images via Wikimedia Commons: Louis Figuier, Mammalia: Their Various Orders and Habits (1870); Views in India, Chiefly Among the Himalaya Mountains (1838).
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