The Schoolteacher's First Shot: Lakhpat Singh Rawat and the Adibadri Man-Eater
Lakhpat Singh Rawat had been lying on the rock ledge for three evenings. Below him lay the village green, the houses, the path down to the water. It was about four o'clock, and a boy had come out to wash the family's dishes. Rawat was watching the boy, and so, he suddenly realised, was something else.
The leopard was already in the open, flattened to the ground and creeping. It was about ten metres from the child. The boy had no idea. The schoolteacher on the ledge had one bullet in the chamber and perhaps two seconds to decide.
The teacher of Adibadri
Adibadri is a small place on the road through the Garhwal hills, famous for its cluster of ancient stone temples. At the start of the 2000s, Lakhpat Singh Rawat taught science and mathematics at the school there. He came from Gwar Malla, a village near Gairsain, he knew every family in the area, and many of the children in his classes were theirs.
He was also, as it happened, an exceptional marksman. He had been trained in rifle shooting and had come first in his class. It was a skill a hill schoolteacher had little use for. Until the children started disappearing.
Taken from the wedding parties
The leopard began killing in the villages around Adibadri, and it chose the smallest and weakest. Children were taken at dusk, near their homes, even from the edges of wedding parties, when a village was full of people, music and lamps. Within about a month nine children were dead. Some of them were Rawat's own pupils.
Shooters came from outside and went away again with nothing. For about eight months, the leopard owned the evenings.
The paperwork and the pugmarks
Rawat decided he would do it himself. But in India a man cannot simply pick up a rifle and go after a leopard, which is a protected animal. He needed a firearm licence and permission from the Chief Wildlife Warden, and paper moves slowly. While his papers were being processed, the leopard killed three more people, bringing the total to twelve.
He used the time. A schoolteacher knows how to do homework, and Rawat approached the man-eater the way he would approach a problem in class. He followed pugmarks. He studied the bite marks on the bodies. He sat with the families of the dead and asked them exactly where and when, and what they had seen. Slowly a pattern emerged: the paths the leopard used, the time of evening it liked, the places where it waited for a child to come within reach.
The pattern led him to a rock ledge above the village green.
One shot
On the third evening, at about four in the afternoon, the leopard came, and it came for the boy washing dishes.
Everything was wrong about the shot. The leopard was moving. The child was close to it and in the background. If Rawat hit the boy, or merely wounded the leopard, the result would be a disaster. If he missed cleanly, the boy would scream and run, and a running child is exactly what triggers a leopard to spring. "I had only one shot," he said years later. "If I missed, the boy would panic."
He did not miss. The leopard dropped where it was, ten metres from a boy who went home that night to his family. It was the first man-eater Lakhpat Singh Rawat ever killed.
The man-eaters that followed
After Adibadri, the forest department knew whom to call. Over the next two decades Rawat was sent after man-eaters across Garhwal and Kumaon, in Chamoli, Rudraprayag, Pauri, Bageshwar, Almora and beyond, each time with a permit signed for that one animal. He never left education, rising to district posts, and retired as a headmaster in 2024. Reports of his tally vary, but it stands at more than fifty leopards and two tigers.
He has never pretended to enjoy it. "It is a very painful job to kill such a beautiful and majestic animal," he has said. He blames people, not leopards: forests cut back, wild prey hunted out, villages spreading into the cats' land. He has argued for tranquilliser guns, radio collars and trained village teams, so that fewer animals have to die.
Why a child, and why dusk?
Rawat has observed that man-eating leopards seldom come back to a kill. Instead they wait near the village at dusk, when people are moving about, and they pick the easiest target they can find. That is why the victims of hill man-eaters are so often children, the elderly and women working alone in the fields. The rule is always the same: keep children indoors after dark.
More from Lakhpat Singh Rawat: Read every Lakhpat Singh Rawat story on Guldaar, or meet the Pauri hunter Joy Hukil.
Sources and credits
Reporting: Open magazine, "The Leopard Assassin" and "Killing Them Gently"; The Washington Post (October 2009); Mongabay India, "Living with leopards: Taking forward Corbett's legacy" (July 2020); Hindustan Times (February 2019); Amar Ujala (October 2023); News24 Hindi. This post is a retelling in our own words, with short quotations attributed to Lakhpat Singh Rawat as reported. Sources differ on the year (2001 or 2002) and on the exact order of events; we have followed the most detailed accounts.
Illustrations: Public domain images via Wikimedia Commons: woodcut after Gustav Mützel from Brehms Tierleben (1876); R. A. Sterndale, Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon (1886).
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