The Panar Leopard: Jim Corbett and the Forgotten Man-Eater of 400 Lives
The door of the little house was open, as hill doors often were on a warm night. The leopard came in without a sound, took the sleeping woman by the throat, and dragged her across the floor. Somehow, she was torn free of it, and the leopard slipped back out into the dark.
But it did not leave. For the rest of that night it walked round and round the house, trying to find a way back in, while the husband sat inside with his torn and bleeding wife, unable to go for help, because to step outside was to die. Only at dawn did it go. This was the Panar leopard, and by the time Jim Corbett came for it, it had killed some four hundred people.
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The forgotten man-eater
Everyone has heard of the Leopard of Rudraprayag. Its story became a bestseller, and it has been made into films and documentaries. Far fewer people know about the Panar leopard, even though it killed around three times as many people.
The reason is geography. Rudraprayag sat on the great pilgrim road, where thousands of travellers passed every year and news spread quickly all over India. Panar was a remote corner of eastern Almora district, a tangle of steep valleys and small, scattered villages far from any road. News, when it travelled at all, travelled slowly. The deaths there were counted, but hardly anyone outside Kumaon heard about them.
Like so many hill man-eaters, the Panar leopard is thought to have begun by scavenging. A severe cholera epidemic had struck the area, and in the chaos the bodies of the dead were not always properly cremated. Corbett believed that the leopard fed on them, developed a taste for human flesh, and then, when the epidemic passed, began to hunt the living.
A railwayman goes hunting
Corbett had first heard about the Panar leopard in 1907, when he was hunting the Champawat tigress. At the time he was working for the railway at Mokameh Ghat in Bihar, and he could only hunt man-eaters when he could get leave. In 1910, he finally went to Panar.
He marched into the valley on foot, a long, hard walk of more than twenty-five miles over the hills. Before long he met the husband and wife from that terrible night. The woman's throat and neck were badly clawed, and the wounds had become infected. Corbett sat up at the house, hoping that the leopard would come back as it had before. It did not. A man-eater that has been driven off rarely returns to the same place on the next night.
The birds that never lie
What followed was a long, patient hunt, and Corbett's fieldcraft was at its finest. In country where a leopard can move through the scrub without a sound, he relied on the birds. The laughing thrushes and babblers of the Kumaon hills scold furiously at a leopard or tiger, and Corbett trusted them more than any human tracker. Where the birds raised the alarm, he knew the cat had just passed.
Later in the year, word came that the leopard had killed again, in a village a long march away. Corbett went at once. He tied out goats as bait. The leopard took the first one without being seen. Then it came back for another, in the dark.
A white cloth in the dark
On that night, Corbett was sitting in a tree with a shotgun, and there was no moon. To aim at anything at all in such darkness, he had tied a piece of white cloth to the end of the barrels, so that he could at least see where his gun was pointing against the pale coat of the goat below.
The leopard came in with the confidence of an animal that had killed hundreds of people and never been caught. It prowled around the foot of the tree, rattling the thorny bushes, growling. Then it went for the goat. Corbett fired at the place where the dark shape met the white of the goat's coat, and heard the leopard crash away. It was hit, but not dead.
A wounded leopard in the dark is the most dangerous animal in India. Corbett did not wait for morning. With villagers carrying burning torches to light the way, he followed it into the scrub. When they found it, the leopard charged. By the light of the flames Corbett fired again, and the man-eater of Panar fell dead.
The first of his leopards
The Panar leopard was the first man-eating leopard Jim Corbett ever killed, sixteen years before Rudraprayag. He had already shot the Champawat tigress, which killed 436 people, and between them these two animals made him the most famous hunter in India. Yet for more than forty years he did not write about Panar at all. The story only appeared in 1954, in his book The Temple Tiger, when he was an old man living in Kenya.
Why so many victims?
A man-eating leopard is harder to stop than a tiger. It is smaller, it needs less cover, it can climb, it can enter houses, and it will often kill in a completely different village the following night. In a remote region with few guns and no roads, an adult leopard in its prime could keep killing for years. The Panar leopard's toll shows exactly what one animal could do before anyone came to stop it.
More from Jim Corbett: Read every Jim Corbett story on Guldaar, including the famous Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag.
Sources and credits
Original account: Jim Corbett, "The Panar Man-Eater", in The Temple Tiger and More Man-Eaters of Kumaon (Oxford University Press, 1954). This post is a retelling in our own words; Corbett's own account is well worth reading. Background: Wikipedia, "Leopard of Panar"; Guinness World Records, "Most prolific man-killing leopard".
Illustrations: Public domain images via Wikimedia Commons: Forest and Jungle, or, Thrilling Adventures in All Quarters of the Globe (1896); William Butler, The Land of the Veda (1895).
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