Guldaar

Divya was seven years old, and she was playing near her own front door. It was 19 September 2020, in Badikot village in the Bhikiyasain area of Almora, a place of terraced fields and pine slopes above the Ramganga river. One moment she was there. The next, she was gone. Her family found her about a hundred metres from the house. She was the daughter of Girish Singh, and she had been killed by a leopard that the whole district would soon be hunting, and that would outwit five professional shooters before it met the schoolteacher from Gairsain.

In the hills of Garhwal, October is grass-cutting month. The monsoon has gone, the slopes are thick and golden, and the women of every village go out with sickles and ropes to cut fodder for the long winter. On 23 October 2019, Meenakshi Nautiyal, forty years old, went out from Kandha village near Pauri to do exactly that. She never came back with her bundle. The leopard that killed her had not come alone, and the man sent to end it would spend the most unnerving night of his hunt not waiting for a killer, but waiting for its mate to leave.

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.

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 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.

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.