MANIWALA, India (AP) — She lies
in wait while her victims are collecting firewood, or taking cattle to
graze, or working in the fields. She has grabbed people in broad
daylight, carrying them away silently into the forests or the sugarcane
fields. By the time the victims are found, often little is left but a
pair of shoes, unspeakable gore and a ring of drying blood.
Over seven
weeks she has traveled, almost completely unseen, for more than 120
miles (190 kilometers). She has crossed villages, small towns and at
least one highway.
A killer is
stalking the villages of north India. She has killed at least nine
people, all of them poor villagers living on the fringes of one of the
world's last wild tiger habitats. They are people who cannot afford a
day off work, people who have no indoor plumbing and must use the fields
as their toilets. They are people who know little about India's recent
successes in tiger conservation.
But with the sudden appearance of one tiger, they look at an animal so beloved to outsiders and see only a monster.
"She
has turned into a man-eater," said Vijay Pal Singh, whose neighbor, a
22-year-old farm laborer named Shiv Kumar Singh, was killed as he worked
at the edge of a sugarcane field in January. In an area where nearly
everyone works outside, this means life has been completely upended.
"People are afraid to go into the fields," said Singh. "Everything has
changed."
While hunters are
brought in to kill man-eating tigers every year or so in India, it has
been decades since a tiger killed as many people as this one, or stayed
on the run so long.
"She won't stop now. She'll
keep killing," said Samar Jeet Singh, a hunter with an aristocratic
pedigree, a curled-up moustache and a high-powered heirloom rifle. For
almost a month he has been tracking the female tiger, most recently
through the forests and dried riverbeds near where she made her last
kill, cutting down an elderly buffalo herder last week. Searchers found
just part of one arm and one leg. The tiger left the buffalos unharmed.
When he finds her, he said, he will shoot her dead.
"The time for tranquilizing is over, the time for caging is over," he said. "Now she must be killed."
For generations, few in these
villages even thought about tigers. The encroachment of towns,
widespread poaching and incompetent wildlife programs had devastated
India's tiger populations, forcing them into ever-smaller enclaves.
Corbett National Park, one of India's premier tiger reserves, is barely
25 miles away, but while the villagers around here are used to living
with wildlife — the forests and fields shelter leopards, monkeys, foxes,
bears and wild boars — tigers were extremely rare.
The
last decade, though, has seen improvements in tiger conservation and
growth in the tiger populations. If that is good news in many ways, it
has also increased the chances of encounters between tigers and people.
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