The Man-Eating Panther of the Yellagiri Hills: Kenneth Anderson and the Mail-Runner's Killer
Every morning at six o'clock, the mail-runner left the little post office at Jalarpet railway station and started up the steep, boulder-strewn path into the Yellagiri Hills. He carried the letters in a bag across his shoulders and a short spear hung with iron rings, which he struck on the ground every few steps. The jingling told the villagers above that the post was coming. It was also supposed to scare away snakes.
One morning, the jingling never came. By the time anyone went looking, all they found on the trail were splashes of dried blood, the runner's spear lying beside a bush, and, a little further on, what was left of the man himself.
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The hills above Jalarpet
The Yellagiris are a crescent of rocky hills rising abruptly beside Jalarpet Junction, the busy railway station on the line between Bangalore and Madras. The top is a plateau of small villages, fields and patches of forest, with a single higher peak, Periamalai, the "Big Hill". In those days the only way up was a rough zig-zag path, climbing from boulder to boulder.
Kenneth Anderson knew the hills well. In 1941 he had bought a tiny farm on the plateau, an acre and a half with two mud-walled cottages, jackfruit trees and a patch of black Burmese rice, for five hundred rupees. The previous owner's sister told him, only after the sale, that her dead brother's ghost walked among the rose bushes at dusk. On his first night there Anderson woke in pitch darkness with something cold and clammy pressing on his throat. He leapt up in terror, smashed a chair, found his torch, and discovered an enormous toad that had come in out of the rain.
A cattle-killer, and a bad shot
The trouble began, as it so often did, with cattle. A big male panther, almost the size of a tigress, took a fat brown bull from a herdsman named Nathan while the herd was grazing in the forest. Over the next three months it killed four more of Nathan's cattle and several belonging to his neighbours. When the monsoon came and the herds were kept close to the village, the panther simply grew bolder. One evening it charged a cow right in front of two herdsmen, killed it, and then crouched over the body snarling at them while they threw stones. They ran.
The villagers asked the local forester, Ramu, to deal with it. Ramu owned a single-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun, which he mostly used for quietly poaching deer at water-holes. He was not keen, but his honour was at stake. He sat in a banyan tree over a tethered goat, and when the panther seized it at dusk he fired a heavy shotgun cartridge. The panther somersaulted and crashed off into the bushes.
The next morning a large party followed a blood trail for more than a mile before it faded out. Everyone agreed the panther must have crawled away to die.
It had not.
The first attacks on people
For two months nothing happened. Then, one evening, a sixteen-year-old boy walking home alone along a forest fire-line came round a bend and found a panther sitting in the path twenty yards ahead, staring at him. An ordinary panther would have slipped away. This one crouched and snarled, and when the boy turned and ran, it chased him down and sprang onto his back, biting through his shoulder.
As he fell, the boy saw a piece of rotten wood lying across the path. He grabbed it, rolled over and rammed it into the panther's mouth. The cat let go. The boy leapt up and hit out at it again, and the astonished panther fled into the bushes. Still clutching the wood that had saved his life, bleeding from his shoulder, arms and legs, the boy staggered home. He survived.
The goatherd who met the panther three weeks later was not so lucky. It attacked his little flock on the way home and seized a goat. The goats were all he owned in the world, so he ran at the panther, screaming and whirling his stick. The panther dropped the goat and killed him instead. His body was found the next morning, a hundred yards off the track, partly eaten. The man-eater of the Yellagiris had been born.
It is hard not to connect Ramu's botched shot with what followed. A leopard carrying a load of shotgun pellets, sore and weakened, is exactly the kind of animal that turns from wild prey, and then from cattle, to people.
Round one: a shotgun and four empty nights
Anderson happened to arrive at his farm a few days later, intending only to clear the lantana that was swallowing his land. He had brought nothing but a shotgun for jungle-fowl and exactly two heavy cartridges for emergencies. Hearing about the panther, he built a machan in a jackfruit tree near where the goatherd died and sat up over a small goat.
The goat bleated so loudly that it went hoarse, then lay down and went to sleep. No panther came that night, or on any of the next three nights. With no fresh pugmarks anywhere, Anderson concluded the animal had wandered off, perhaps across to the Javadi Hills to the south, and went home to Bangalore.
Round two: the donkey under the cashew tree
Seven weeks later came the telegram about the mail-runner. Anderson caught the evening express, got off at Jalarpet at half past ten at night, and climbed the eight miles up to the village by the light of a hissing petromax lantern, which he knew no panther would approach. Unknowingly, he walked straight past the bloodstains on the trail.
He had three donkeys tied out as bait, one of them under a cashew-nut tree near where the runner had died. On the third night the panther killed that donkey and ate half of it. Anderson had a charpoy tied in the tree as a machan, carefully hidden with leaves. It was only ten feet off the ground, and the tree was easy to climb, which worried him.
It was a moonless, cloudy night. Far below, the lights of Jalarpet station twinkled and goods trains puffed up the gradient. At about twenty to nine Anderson heard a faint sigh below him: the panther had arrived at the carcass. He decided to let it settle to its meal before switching on his torch. It was a decision he regretted for the rest of his life.
The panther never started eating. Instead, twenty minutes later, a deep growl came from the boulders to the right. The panther had sensed him. The growls grew louder and faster, as if the cat were working itself into a rage, and then it charged the tree with a coughing roar.
Anderson leaned over the edge of the cot, pointed the rifle down and switched on the torch. At that exact moment one of the camouflage branches came loose and fell right on top of the panther, hiding it completely. All he could see was a violently shaking bush of leaves. He fired into it. The panther fell backwards, tore free of the branch and was gone into the undergrowth before he could reload.
At first light there was no blood anywhere, only a bullet hole in the ground under the tree. A clean miss. Angry with himself, Anderson went home.
Round three: the hunter in the man-eater's bed
Nine weeks later the panther killed again. This time it was a young woman who had gone in the morning to fetch water from a small pool dug in a sandy stream bed below Periamalai. Once again it had struck in broad daylight, which leopards very rarely do.
Anderson crawled around the pool on his hands and knees and found what he was looking for: a hollow under a thick lantana bush, right beside the water, with a faint smell of big cat. It was the panther's ambush point. He could lie up there, out of sight, and pounce on anything that came to drink.
So Anderson came up with a daring plan. He would stake a goat beside the pool, as if it had come to drink, and wait for the panther, not in a tree, but inside the panther's own hiding place under the bush. The only way in was from the front, where the goat was. The village headman thought he was mad.
The first night was a farce. The goat was an old black one that bleated a few times, then lay down and slept soundly till dawn, while Anderson sat motionless under the bush, bitten by mosquitoes, with insects crawling over him and a snake of unknown kind sliding past him in the dry leaves. In the morning the goat stood up, stretched, and looked at him as if to ask which of them was the real goat.
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The next evening Anderson bargained hard for a half-grown goat that bleated the moment it was left alone, and kept on bleating. He crept back under the lantana before five. It grew dark under the bush long before sunset.
About an hour after dark he heard it: the faintest rustle, and the snap of a dry twig. Then nothing. Then a soft hiss, the sound of a leopard's lips curling back as it realises something is wrong. The panther had seen or sensed him.
Anderson pressed the torch switch. The beam fell straight into two reddish-white eyes, perhaps ten feet away. He fired at the throat. The panther came forward a step and reared up on its hind legs, and his second bullet hit it full in the chest. It fell backwards out of sight, thrashed in the bushes for a few seconds, and went still.
In the morning they found it where it fell. It was an old male with a pale, scraggy coat. Its canine teeth were worn down with age and its claws were blunt and frayed: an animal that could no longer hunt wild prey easily. No more people were killed on the Yellagiris or the Javadis after that night.
Yelagiri today
The Yellagiris are now Yelagiri, a popular weekend hill station in Tirupattur district of Tamil Nadu, reached by a winding ghat road with hairpin bends instead of a boulder track. Visitors come for the cool air, the lake and the orchards. Few of them know that the mail once came up those hills on foot, or that for one terrible year the man who carried it had to fear more than snakes.
How the Yellagiri panther turned
The pattern here is classic: a cattle-killing leopard, a half-hearted attempt to shoot it with a shotgun, a wounded animal that survives, and then attacks on people. Old age did the rest. Anderson often warned that the most dangerous thing you can do to a big cat is wound it and let it go.
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 Man-Eating Panther of the Yellagiri Hills", 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: 19th-century French engraving of a panther; "Doon Valley" steel engraving (1850s); India Post 2-anna "Dak Runner" stamp (1937); Big Game Hunting in Africa and Other Lands (1910).
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