This is only a beginning, the general information to get prospecting participants interested! The private communication from the interested members can be directed to me by email to this University email address: click here Materials can be sent to this email as well. We will post the Mailing address as well (might be several addresses, as we have addresses of our research team in several countries, including in India). Soon you will know these addresses as well. Also, I will be posting additional posts to help participants to prepare their research, and to answer questions from interested participants! We would like to suggest to those who are interested to participate, to take research in various directions, for example:
(1) Gathering the information in the villages, where Corbett's activity took place (for example, interviewing villagers in the villages where man-eaters claimed victims), (2) A critical study/review of the existing book (books) on Corbett, (3) New research in any Corbett-related direction; If you are an avid Corbett fan, but are shy as you have never researched anything, remember that Jim himself is a great example of a person who did not have any formal training and still became a brilliant writer and naturalist! It is important that participants gradually develop elements of the scholarly style of research and writing, like (1) State at the beginning clearly the goal of the research, (2) Review the existing research on the topic, (3) Describe the materials used in the research, (4) Make clear conclusions f your research, (5) Present full reference of the sources (dates of oral interviews or full details of the written sources). The submission can be in the form of a written article or a film-documentary. Articles should not exceed 6 pages of written text, including references (Font "Times New Roman", size 12, 1.5 spaces between lines) Films should not exceed 10 minutes. As we want to encourage research activity, both articles and films must follow the vigorous research guidelines of the research goals, review of existing literature, and references, stated above. The materials should be submitted to the Jim Corbett International Research Group (by email) and will be assessed by the full members of Jim Corbett International Research Group. Timelines of the competition: (1) Submission of the article/film - between March 1 and March 20; (2) Announcement of the winner will happen annually, via the FB of the Jim Corbett International Research Group, on April 19th, from the Gurney House in Naini Tal, by the members of Jim Corbett International Research Group and/or the Consultant of the Jim Corbett International Research Group, Mrs Nilanjana Dalmia. Winners and prize money There can be one, two or three winners, and there will be a small prize as well: 1st prize - 250USD, 2nd prize - 150USD, and 3rd prize 100USD. We sincerely hope that the establishment of this prize will encourage Corbett fans to start actively research the legacy of the man they already love cordially! Jim Corbett Internations Research Group members Introduction from Dr. Joseph Jordania:
“In April 2018 members of "Jim Corbett International Research Group" visited Panar Valley where Corbett killed the Panar man-eating leopard, the most prolific man-eating leopard in recent history. Here is the text, written by Stuart Gelzer, Movie Editor and College Teacher from the USA, who took part in the 2018 expedition. The chapter is a part of Volume 2 of the book "Behind Jim Corbett's Stories", that is scheduled to appear later this year" ------------------------------------- In the first decade of the twentieth century, a single leopard killed at least four hundred people in the Panar Valley of central Kumaon –– more than three times as many as the much more famous Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag in the 1920s. Jim Corbett attributed the national (and even international) notoriety of the latter animal, and the relative obscurity of the former, to the position of Rudraprayag on the Badrinath-Kedarnath pilgrimage route: “ ... the Panar leopard operated in a remote area far from the beaten track, whereas the Rudraprayag leopard operated in an area visited each year by sixty thousand pilgrims ranging from the humblest in the land to the highest, all of whom had to run the gauntlet of the man-eater. It was these pilgrims, and the daily bulletins issued by Government, that made the Rudraprayag leopard so famous, though it caused far less human suffering than the Panar leopard.” The Panar Valley does not look especially remote on a map –– it lies in central Kumaon, not far east of Almora –– but its isolation has more to do with being a relative backwater, away from important through roads, and therefore hard to get to except on purpose. Corbett visited the Panar Valley twice, in April and September of 1910, and the long treks (a week or more) involved in his getting there produced memorable incidents that are the subject of another article in this book. More than a century later, the Panar Valley is still off the beaten path, though now you can get there by jeep instead of on foot, the way Corbett traveled. Still, it is quite possible that when members of the 2018 Corbett research party (Joseph Jordania, Fernando Quevedo, Paata Natsvlishvili, and Stuart Gelzer) reached the Panar Valley village of Sanouli, we were the first outsiders to go there after Jim Corbett himself in 1910 and Corbett enthusiast Peter Byrne in 1998. The length of Corbett’s journey from Nainital to the Panar Valley has a direct bearing on the challenge of locating the kill site now. In some of Corbett’s hunts –– for the Champawat and Mohan man-eaters, for examples –– he was able to track the tiger directly from the site of a fresh human or buffalo kill, following blood or drag marks in a more or less continuously unfolding and uninterrupted action that ended with the tiger’s death. In those cases the site of the last victim’s death, if known, therefore provides an important clue, one end of a dotted line on a map that links the victim to the man-eater’s kill site. When Corbett returned to the Panar Valley in September 1910 (having done no better on his April visit than a fruitless overnight vigil), it took him several days just to gather news of where the leopard had struck most recently, and then –– once he had been pointed toward Sanouli –– two more days, including a dramatic crossing of the Panar River, to reach that village. He writes, “The last kill had taken place six days before...” There would be no fresh blood or drag trail to follow in this case, nor any half-eaten kill for the leopard to return to. In April 2018, in a Mahindra jeep climbing by a bad and winding road up from our previous campsite on the bank of the Panar River, it still took us almost two hours to reach Sanouli. The main road passes some distance above the village, and we were met up there by the village headman, Kunwar Singh Negi. We were surprised and delighted when, on being asked about Corbett and the Panar Leopard, he immediately began to point and explain –– perhaps our search would be over by lunchtime! But as our expedition leader, Kamal Bisht, translated, we learned that what the headman was pointing to was the site of the death of the leopard’s last two human victims. Each of those women, on separate occasions, had been killed in the open and then dragged into what Corbett calls a “patch of brushwood” to be eaten. (To defang potential rebellion, the British colonial government had confiscated firearms, even in remote rural areas, so no one in Sanouli had a gun with which to pursue the mean-eater; in fact, having never been hunted by anyone, the Panar Leopard had no fear of humans –– important later in its behavior leading up to its death.) Headman Kunwar Singh said the victims were named Sheela and Debuli, and that since 1910 the villagers had commemorated their deaths by naming the place they were killed after them: Sheela-Deb (pronounced in the local dialect more like “Sheela-Doob”). We were certainly moved as we reflected on the power of local oral history in preserving the memory of those poor women. However, we quickly reminded ourselves, our mission was to find the place where Corbett killed the leopard, not the place where the leopard killed Sheela (or Debuli) six days before Corbett got here. But, perhaps because he misunderstood our specific interests, perhaps because he had nothing better to offer us, Kunwar Singh appointed his deputy, a man named Diwan Singh Negi, to guide us down the mountain to the place called Sheela-Deb. The site of almost every Corbett adventure –– and indeed most of the landscape of Kumaon –– seems to lie on a near-vertical plane. So the zigzagging paths along which we followed Diwan Singh led down, down, down, down, and then more steeply down. A little below the road we passed through the village, the effective center and crossroads of which is the village shop. (For those readers trying to locate Sanouli and the surrounding area on a map, or on Google Satellite, for instance to get a sense of Sanouli relative to Almora, the GPS coordinates of the Sanouli village shop are 29°28'26.9”N 79°52'08.8”E.) In our descent we soon left the village behind. The hillside all around is cleared and carved into terraces for cultivation, and our path led down across one terrace after another. Further down Diwan Singh led us past an isolated temple, and then bore slightly right (southwest) and down again. Rain threatened, and our entire hike down was punctuated by flashes of lightning and frequent booms of thunder rolling around the mountainsides. As it began to sprinkle, Diwan Singh paused on the path and pointed (down, down, down) to a broad flat space near the bottom of the steep valley cut by the Kutar, a small tributary of the Panar River. So much further down to that terraced field was it from where we stood that it looked no bigger than a postage stamp. Diwan Singh announced, “Sheela-Deb.” We conferred and took stock: It was raining. The field he was pointing to seemed vertically at least as much further down the mountain as we had already come –– no joke if the steep ground got slippery. Anyway, Sheela-Deb was the place the women were killed, not the place the leopard was killed. More to the point, we had come too far from the village to match Corbett’s account (see below). We turned back, and in a gentle rain, but still accompanied by plenty of lightning and thunder, we retraced our steps, climbing –– much more slowly now –– up, up, up the path toward the village. We paused just below the isolated temple to pace out a couple of larger terraced fields, just in case, but nothing matched Corbett’s account, and we climbed on up as far as the village shop to rest and regroup and hide from the cold rain. We found shelter from the rain in the small crowded storeroom next to the village shop, and there, perched on large tins of cooking oil and sacks of gram flour and boxes of soap, we combed once again through Corbett’s account of the Panar Leopard in The Temple Tiger and More Man-eaters of Kumaon, in search of a definitive list (not given in any one place by Corbett, but scattered through the text) of the kill site conditions implied by the narrative: Condition 1. For his stakeout perch overlooking his second (successful) bait goat Corbett chose a tree “on the near side of the patch of brushwood” –– meaning the brushwood patch from which the leopard had emerged to kill Corbett’s first bait goat, and probably the same brushwood patch into which the leopard had earlier dragged Sheela and Debuli. Corbett describes the brushwood patch as being “some twenty acres in extent.” But a century later, with the mountainside now so densely cultivated by a much larger village population, even if that brushwood patch survived, would it cover the same area as in 1910? Could either its presence or its absence near a potential kill site serve as evidence? Condition 2. Corbett’s stakeout tree was “an old oak tree... growing out of a six-foot-high bank between two terraced fields... leaning away from the hill... with a branch jutting out....” On our morning hike down the mountain we had seen a number of trees growing that way, rooted in the terrace wall and with their trunks angled at 45 degrees or more over the lower field. But none were oak trees (Kamal said they were mostly Mau trees). Still, this clue was of little or no help anyway, because more than a century has passed since 1910, and that oak tree was already noticeably “old” in Corbett’s time, and he describes the branch he chose to sit on as “hollow and rotten.” We should not expect such a tree, already in its twilight then, to have survived till now as a convenient landmark at the kill site. Condition 3. Still, with or without an oak tree, we needed “a six-foot-high bank between two terraced fields.” Of course, terraces can be rebuilt and reconfigured over a century. But, considering that earth-shaping work of that sort is still done laboriously by hand in India, it seemed more likely that –– unless it had collapsed in rain or earthquake –– a six-foot terrace between fields in 1910 would still remain more or less a six-foot terrace now. So far the needed conditions we had listed were relatively minor and contingent: there might or might not be an area of brushwood, an old oak, or a six-foot terrace at the site –– and conversely finding any one of them would not significantly narrow the search. On the other hand, the last two conditions given or implied by Corbett were major and relatively inalterable: Condition 4. In the dramatic final scene of his account, Corbett describes how, having shot at and at least wounded the leopard as it attacked his bait goat, he led the men of the village across the terraced field from the upper end, where he sat in the oak tree, toward the lower end, where the leopard had vanished over the lip of the next terrace down, to die or to wait in ambush, they didn’t know. With his characteristic narrative flair, Corbett expands the moment to heighten the suspense: “Thirty yards to the goat, and another twenty yards to the edge of the field.” He was counting from the foot of tree, after his men had helped him down; earlier, before the arrival of the leopard, he mentioned that the goat was tied “thirty yards in front of me.” Therefore –– stepping back now from the drama of the story to the pedestrian level of the clues it gives about the location –– the field the men crossed must be fifty yards wide, meaning from its uphill limit to its downhill limit. (I will use that sense of the “width” of the field from here on, since the dimension along the contour of the hillside is not at issue. I will also treat meters as a good enough equivalent to yards, over a distance merely estimated by Corbett and paced out rather than measured to the inch with a tape measure.) We now realized that this requirement in Corbett’s account –– a terraced field 50 meters wide –– had the effect of excluding almost every field on the mountainside. I have mentioned the steepness of the slope: on a steep slope the terraces must be built narrow, and on a very steep slope the terraces will be very narrow. Most of the terraces we had passed on our climb down and back up in the morning were (estimating by sight) no more than 5 meters wide, many even less. A field 10 meters wide would have counted as “big.” We had noticed that just below the isolated temple the ground flattened out a little, and on our way back up the hill we paced out the comparatively wider fields there: but the widest was still no more than 20 meters –– not even half the width of the kill site field, and neither Corbett nor anyone else would be likely to estimate that distance wrong by a hundred percent. The only ground we had seen that could conceivably support terraced fields 50 meters wide lay at the very bottom of the valley, where the land seemed to level out slightly just above the Kutar River. I say “seemed” because we had not been there; we had observed the valley bottom, where Sheela-Deb was located, only from far away, high up the hillside, at the point where we turned back. And we had turned back in part because of the final but critical condition: Condition 5. The kill site had to be close to the village. How close? Within easy earshot. After Corbett’s men had wrapped blackthorn shoots around the oak tree he had chosen to wait in –– the blackthorn shoots that saved his life by preventing the leopard from walking out along the trunk of the tree (growing out of the bank at 45 degrees) and killing him –– Corbett had the men “return to the village” to be safe. Later, while the leopard was struggling to get past or even to undo the blackthorn barrier to get at him (remember, the Panar Leopard had never been hunted and had no fear of humans), Corbett writes that the angry man-eater “was growling loud enough to be heard by the men anxiously listening in the village.” This was not a guess or a figure of speech: they told him so afterward. Later, when the leopard had given up on Corbett and gone after the goat instead, and Corbett had shot and hit it, and it had fled over the next terrace wall, he waited, listening. After a while, “my men called out and asked if they should come to me.” Corbett responded with detailed instructions: the men should “light pine torches,” and before they came he made sure that they “circled around above the terraced fields and approached my tree from behind.” (All this because he still did not know where the leopard was, and if alive or dead.) It is one thing to call out a lung-bursting halloo from one hilltop to the next to get someone’s attention. It is another thing to hold a lengthy two-way conversation, especially one dense with instructions. When this point is joined to the point about the men safe inside the village houses being able to hear the leopard growling on the oak tree, the conclusion is clear: the kill site must be within easy conversational distance of the village. When we reached this point in our analysis of the kill site conditions required by Corbett’s account –– still sitting on our makeshift stools of bulk goods in the village shop storeroom –– and we compared it to what we had observed of the area around the village that morning, we felt at an impasse, checkmated. To cite only conditions 4 and 5: without a doubt, we had seen no terraced field 50 meters wide anywhere within easy earshot of the village. (It had taken us at least half an hour’s walk downhill to reach even the point from which we could see the river bottom still far below us.) It seemed like an unresolvable contradiction. It was cold and rainy and still barely noon on our first day in Sanouli, and we were stuck, facing failure. So we did the only reasonable thing: over lunch, with help from Diwan Singh Negi and the Wildrift expedition crew, we drank a whole bottle of Gulab brand “country liquor” –– rum made from Uttarakhand sugarcane –– and we toasted to the inevitable and unstoppable success of our mission to find the Panar Leopard kill site. The alert reader will remember that the pioneering Corbett researcher Peter Byrne visited Sanouli in 1998. In fact, when older villagers were shown a snapshot, reproduced in Behind Jim Corbett’s Stories, of Dr. Jordania dining with Byrne in the United States a few years ago, they recognized Byrne immediately –– though they had met him only briefly twenty years ago. (That suggests the rarity of foreign visitors to the Panar Valley.) Would the chapter on the Panar Leopard in Byrne’s book, Shikari Sahib, resolve the impasse and contradictions in which we found ourselves at this point in our own visit to Sanouli? Byrne writes that he was taken to the kill site, and he includes a photo of himself sitting in what he says is the same oak tree used by Corbett. So all we needed now was to find Byrne’s field! Unfortunately, Byrne’s account raises more doubts that it resolves: • The terraced field visible in the background of the Shikari Sahib tree photo is indistinct and generic and without surrounding context: no help in identifying one field among many. • The tree Byrne is sitting in is clearly not an oak. And besides, we have addressed above the unlikelihood of Corbett’s already old and rotting oak surviving for another hundred years –– much less remaining strong enough after all that time to support Peter Byrne, who is not a small man. • Byrne, who did not have Corbett’s text with him on his visit to cross-check against claims and clues on the spot, refers to the kill site as being located “halfway down the hill and about three hundred yards from the nearest village house.” But, as argued above, a distance of a third of a kilometer –– and that only to the very nearest (lowest) house –– is too far to sustain plausibly the complex two-way conversation between Corbett and his men. As a result it seemed to us, coming to Sanouli twenty years later, that whatever Peter Byrne thought he had found, it was not what we were looking for. In a fine example of Nature rhyming its moods with human thoughts and emotions, in the middle of the afternoon, as the rain cleared and the mist rose up from valleys through the village and was followed by sunshine, we began to see our way clear to solving the puzzle. Of course, after eleven decades, no eyewitness to the original events would survive. But the headman, Kunwar Singh Negi, had said there were a few village elders whom we could interview to learn what they remembered being told about Corbett or the leopard when they were young. (Both Kunwar Singh and his deputy, our guide Diwan Singh, looked to be in their forties, and therefore several generations removed from Corbett’s time.) So when we finally emerged from the shelter of the village shop we followed Diwan Singh uphill to find those elders. In the flagstone-paved courtyard in front of a village house, we met first with Durga Singh Negi, a man 95 years old. He was soon joined by another man, Kharak Singh Negi, aged somewhere between 85 and 90. (Byrne includes a photo of him –– twenty years younger –– in his book, spelling his name “Karok Singh,” and writes that he “helped the author in his research at Sanouli and offered the use of his house.”) Those two men together were already a fountain of memory and knowledge –– addressing the questions Kamal passed on from us to them and then elaborating with energy and humor –– but a useful reinforcement followed: Kala Bisht, the village schoolteacher, who was of a much younger generation, but who added clarity and broader factual context, and most importantly specific dates, to the story the old men were telling us. (Kala Bisht’s husband was a great-grandson of one of the Panar Leopard’s local victims, possibly Debuli, though she was not sure which.) We had now spent half a day traipsing up and down through a village whose last foreign visitor came twenty years ago, and by this time we were the biggest, most entertaining show in town. As our interview went on, it seemed as if at least half the village, people of all ages but notably teenagers, had gathered to watch, and the audience for the old men’s reminiscences had grown from four Corbett researchers to several dozen people, some of them eager listeners and some just there to enjoy the unexpected crowd scene. What we learned from the collective memory in that cheerful gathering cut through the mystery, the contradiction, the confusion, like a knife going through a knot: In 1910 the village of Sanouli stood much further down the mountainside, just above the broad fields around Sheela-Deb and the Kutar River, on which the villagers then depended for water. Starting in the early 1960s the government tapped springs much higher up, and ran gravity-fed water pipes down the slope. No longer dependent on the river itself for water, and with better land available higher up for pasturing animals, the villagers began to follow the water pipes uphill, moving not en masse but one or two households at a time over several years. They abandoned their old houses lower down, but many of the ruins still stand now, the broken stone walls and slate roofs marking the site of the original Sanouli. (If, instead of turning back, we had continued down the mountain toward Sheela-Deb on our morning trek, we would soon have found ourselves passing through the ruins.) It was instantly clear that moving the village solved our logical problem, which had been that all the suitable fields (50 meters wide) were down there by the river, yet the village was up here, much too far away for conversational earshot. But in Corbett’s time the village was down there, by the wide fields. (Oddly, in his book Peter Byrne makes no mention of the old village or its ruins. Yet if he went down to a site near the river he must have passed through the area of abandoned houses.) A few puzzle pieces remained. Sanouli sits on a very large mountainside, and –– having not been down that far –– we still had no clear sense of where (how far down, in what direction) the abandoned village stood. We had also seen the valley bottom only from much higher up, so we had no real certainty that any terraced field down there would really measure 50 meters wide. Kamal therefore asked the villagers the essential question: “Are there fields 50 meters wide near the old village?” Everyone present said yes, without a doubt. One man, Lakshman Singh Negi, volunteered to guide us down to look. It was now late afternoon, and new rain clouds were gathering, meaning that daylight would not last much longer, and we all had a vivid mental picture of how very far and very steep downhill it was from this courtyard (near the top of the modern village) to the village shop, and then from there down to the isolated temple, and then from there down to the valley overlook point where we had turned back, and then (on new ground unknown to us) from there down all the way to the ruins, and then from there down still further to the wide fields. We decided that for the sake of speed one of us (Stuart, the youngest and fastest-moving) would join Kamal and our new volunteer guide, Lakshman Singh, and do what Kamal would call “a recce” to learn if there was anything worth bringing the whole group back to see in the morning. Lakshman Singh and Kamal and I set off at a pace that can only be described as a run, or maybe a gallop, down the mountain, at first following the same route we had taken in the morning –– though now with every few rapid strides we covered a length of path that then had filled a minute or more of leisurely downhill stroll. Yet even as we ran we were easily overtaken by others: four or five boys who had enjoyed the village gathering around the old-timers’ interview and who didn’t want the fun to end, and who now raced past us, sometimes circling back behind us to overtake us again for fun –– and all this they did wearing nothing more sturdy on their feet than thin plastic flip-flop chappals. Below the isolated temple Lakshman Singh again led us slightly to the right (south) as we descended, but this time instead of turning back left (southeast), as Diwan Singh had in the morning to show us Sheela-Deb, we kept on going straight and a little to our right, and of course always down, down, down, and always at a near-run. Finally we came off the slope onto a somewhat more level space, a lumpy irregular clearing that could at one time have been a field, though it seemed long abandoned. But it didn’t feel right: I didn’t even have to pace it out to see that it was not 50 meters wide; and there was no terrace at its upper end –– the natural mountain slope just emerged onto the field. Where then would Corbett’s oak tree, growing out of the upper terrace wall, have stood? I asked Lakshman Singh if there was another choice, another wide enough field. Yes, just below this one. We scrambled down the terrace wall. This next field was more level, and possibly wide enough, and it had an uphill terrace wall. Could this be the place? While Kamal and Lakshman Singh and the five village boys watched me, I wandered around, considering. Again, it didn’t feel right: • First, this time what was lacking was a terrace wall at the downhill end, since Corbett writes that after he shot it the leopard “disappeared down another high bank into the field beyond” and later he refers repeatedly to the leopard’s hiding place as “the terraced field below.” But here there was no field below this one: instead, following the natural slope, the ground dropped off steeply toward the river, which was near enough below us that we could hear the water flowing. • Second, rather than a lack, was an instance of something present that should not have been: the far (south) side of this field was bounded by a very deep and almost sheer ravine formed by a side stream entering the Kutar. It was such a prominent feature, such a significant aspect of the landscape at this spot, that I could not believe that Corbett would have omitted it from his description. Yet nowhere does he mention a ravine, just the “patch of brushwood” bordering the site. • Most importantly –– and this applied to the upper as well as the lower field here –– when I asked Lakshman Singh where we were relative to the old village ruins (which I still had not seen), he pointed away around the slope to the northeast. The abandoned village was not visible from here, he said, because the ridge blocked it from view. He assured me that a loud shout would be heard across that distance, even over the noise of the river, but I reflected again that Corbett’s account implies a comfortable conversational distance, not merely the possibility of a desperate halloo. Adding up my doubts about this spot, I realized that what we needed was three terraced fields in succession: (1) an upper field of undetermined width, from whose downhill bank the oak tree grew; (2) a middle field 50 meters wide, where the kill occurred; and (3) a lower field of undetermined width, where the wounded leopard hid before his final charge. And above all, these fields should be much closer to the old village. I asked Lakshman Singh if there was such a thing, gesturing with my hands to show three terraced fields descending from the old village in stepwise succession. He said in English, “Step by step?” –– “Yes. Near the old village.” He nodded and set off, naturally at a run, and we all followed, the excited boys leading the way. This time, instead of trekking steeply uphill or down, we stayed more or less level, following the contour of the mountain along the valley going downstream (north or northeast). But for the first time in our exploration of Sanouli we left behind the familiar landscape of open terraced fields and plunged into a snarl of thick undergrowth –– weeds and small trees and thorn bushes so dense I had to hang onto my hat and my backpack to keep them from being stripped away. There was no path to follow, and each of us tunneled through the brush as best he could on all fours; even here the village boys, of course, somehow scrambled ahead and doubled back to help pull me through when I got stuck in the brambles. Ten exhausting and painful minutes later we emerged onto an open field. At a glance I guessed it to be about 50 meters wide. At its downhill end a high terraced bank dropped to a much narrower field. At its uphill end a terraced bank about my height (six feet) divided it from another much narrower field: no surviving oak or any other significant tree, of course. Just beyond that upper field stood the ruins of a small stone hut or shed –– too close to be where Corbett’s men went, since that would hardly constitute “going away to the village” –– but dotting the slope higher up, maybe seventy-five or a hundred feet away and overlooking the wide field, I could see, half-hidden here and there, the scattered ruins of houses. Looking back the way we had just come, I realized that the belt of almost impenetrably dense undergrowth we had forced our way through to get here could easily be what remains of Corbett’s 20-acre patch of brushwood adjoining the kill site. (In fact, because the lower fields around the old village were abandoned when people moved uphill to better pasture, the long-overgrown lower slopes now have much more tree cover than they did in Corbett’s time, when “there were no other trees within a radius of several hundred yards” of the oak he chose.) Looking much further up the mountainside, and locating the field in which we now stood relative to the whole slope, and picturing what it would look like from up there, I realized that this field must be exactly the one Diwan Singh had pointed out to us from high above that morning: Sheela-Deb. So if this spot was in fact the right one –– and everything about it felt right to me –– then the place where Corbett killed the Panar Leopard was the same place where the leopard killed its last human victims, Sheela and Debuli, and in the morning we had been on our way straight to it when we stopped and turned back. I asked Lakshman Singh if he knew whether Peter Byrne had come to this spot. “Yes,” he said, “I brought him here myself.” (Lakshman Singh looked to be in his mid-forties, so he would have been in his twenties when Byrne needed a guide down the mountain.) I still couldn’t understand why Byrne had not made note of the abandoned village immediately above the kill site. For this reason, and others enumerated below, I suspect that though Byrne visited Sheela-Deb he did not consider it to be the place where Corbett killed the leopard, but only the place where the leopard killed the women. But the essential thing was, I was here now. We rested in the middle of the field and had a snack, and Kamal opened Dr. Jordania’s copy of The Temple Tiger and translated out loud for the village boys Corbett’s account of the grand finale of the Panar Leopard: the leopard clawing at the thorn branches to reach Corbett, Corbett shooting the leopard as it killed the goat –– on the very spot where we now sat listening to the story –– the wounded leopard fleeing over thelower terrace, the men coming down from the village, the men dropping their pine torches when the leopard charged, Corbett firing the final shot by the light of the torches scattered on the ground.... As I listened I thought, I might be the third foreigner ever to stand here: Jim Corbett (not really a foreigner!) in 1910, Peter Byrne in 1998, and me. The next morning all of us returned to Sheela-Deb for a collective assessment and more accurate documentation. We asked our guide, Diwan Singh once again, to lead us down this time by way of the abandoned village, so below the isolated temple we bore left (southeast) and after a while followed the path as it zigzagged down between the old houses scattered over a wide area on the steep descending terraces. The final approach to Sheela-Deb from the nearest (lowest) village houses follows the curving contour of the terraced fields and reaches the broad field from above and behind it, exactly the way Corbett directed his men to come when they had to release him from the thorn-wrapped tree. The Sheela-Deb field is located at approximately 29°28'06.2"N 79°52'21.7"E, which (on a flat map, disregarding vertical distance) is about 715 meters in a straight line southeast of the village shop. Peter Byrne‘s description of the kill site he was shown “three hundred yards from the nearest village house” remains a puzzle: from Sheela-Deb up to the modern village it is much further than 300 meters (three-quarters of a kilometer in a straight line and much more by footpath), but to the old abandoned village it is much closer than 300 meters (no more than 50 to the nearest houses.) So where was Byrne measuring from and to? And why would he describe the kill site as being "halfway down the hill"? From the modern village or the road, Sheela-Deb is very far down, almost at the very bottom of the hill, near the river. The houses visible in the background of Byrne’s 1998 photos look well maintained and inhabited –– not like houses abandoned for over a quarter century by then. (And again, nowhere in his account does Byrne mention the existence of the old village.) My own untested surmise is that Byrne took those 1998 photos from somewhere in the fields downhill (northeast) of the section of the modern village near the shop and the school, at about 29°28'32.1"N 79°52'16.2"E, looking uphill toward the modern village –– a place that is not only too far from the old village to be the kill site, but that in 1910 was probably a slope not yet even terraced and cultivated. In any case, wherever Byrne was standing when he took those photos and climbed in that tree, it was not at Sheela-Deb. The height of the uphill terrace wall that bounds the field at Sheela-Deb varies with the slope of the terrain, but much of it, especially in the middle, rises roughly 2 meters or six feet high. On my return uphill to our quarters at the headman’s house the previous evening I had reported to the rest of the party that I had seen no oak or other significant tree growing from that terrace wall, and Dr. Jordania had predicted that we would still find some trace of where it had grown –– either root remnants or at least a gap of some sort in the wall. And indeed, by morning light, we saw at one point near the middle of the wall a break or interruption in the smooth line of stones that might be the remaining mark of where the roots of a large tree, now gone, were once anchored. According to Diwan Singh, with confirmation from Kamal, oak trees are uncommon these days at that elevation; most of the larger trees on that terrain now are Bimal or pine (including many planted by the Forest Service) or Mau. But they agreed that one isolated oak tree –– as Corbett describes the tree he chose –– is not impossible down there, and would have been more likely in the past. Diwan Singh said that the area of dense brush bordering Sheela-Deb to the southwest –– the tangle of thorns and low bushes I had crawled through the day before, and that I speculated to be Corbett’s “patch of brushwood” where the leopard lurked –– was not the result of recent growth overtaking abandoned fields but had always been there, left uncleared because the slope was too steep even for terraced cultivation. Because of the natural contour of the slope, the field at Sheela-Deb is not a parallelogram but is shaped more like a rounded V. From the uphill terrace wall, at about where the break in the stones is now, to the far (downhill) point of the V we measured the distance to be about 50 meters. To the nearer edges, though, such as the terraced bank immediately left (northeast) of the presumed oak tree location, the distance is much less, barely 5 meters. All the way around the lower edge of Sheela-Deb the drop down to the next field below is about 5 meters or fifteen feet, more than enough to conceal an animal from view even from someone looking down from quite close to the edge. The most obvious inconsistency between the actual ground and Corbett’s description of the kill site might be that about two thirds of the way across the Sheela-Deb field (counting from the uphill end) a low break or bank runs across it diagonally from southwest to northeast. The height of that drop varies: At the south end of the field it is at least two feet –– more than a comfortable step down and requiring at least a small hop, and arguably enough to hide a crouching leopard from sight much closer to the presumed oak tree location than the 50 meters Corbett describes. A straight line from the presumed oak tree location to the point of the V, however, runs closer to the north end of that diagonal break in the field, and crosses it where the drop is six inches or less –– barely noticeable when walking, and a trivial detail that (assuming the shallow ledge was present at the time) would not matter to the description of the setting even if Corbett remembered it when he wrote his account decades later. Considering all of the factors together –– the testimony of the village elders based on oral memory, the many corroborating details on the ground, the overall consistency with Corbett’s written account –– the collective sense of the members of the Corbett research party present was strongly affirmative: beyond almost any doubt, the place we found below the village of Sanouli, the field called Sheela-Deb, is indeed the spot where Jim Corbett killed the Panar Leopard in September 1910. July 2018 New Mexico, USA 1. Dr. Joseph Jordania contributed valuable information for this article, especially about our oral interview subjects in Sanouli, and about Peter Byrne’s earlier visit. Fernando Quevedo contributed useful GPS data collected on the spot. I thank them both. |