In spite of the hazards and the discomfort, Jim spent twenty nights on that high perch, with the arches left open, in the hope that the leopard would try to cross, and give him an easy downward shot. But during all that time the only animal that came over the bridge was a jackal.

One morning, as he descended from his vigil, he met a strange, white-robed figure standing on a rock by the river. When asked what had brought him there, the stranger replied that he had come from a far land to free the people of Garhwal from the evil spirit that was tormenting them.

This he proposed to achieve by fashioning an effigy of a tiger: then, having induced the spirit to enter his creation, he would launch it into the river, which would carry it down to the sea.

Split bamboos, string, paper and cheap coloured cloth went into his construction, and on the final day the tiger – according to Jim “about the size of a horse, and resembling no known animal” – was lashed to a long pole and carried down to a beach, escorted by more than a hundred men, many of them beating gongs and blowing long trumpets.

At the river’s edge the effigy was unlashed from the pole. The white-robed man, with his silver crosses on headgear and breast, and his six-foot cross in his hands, knelt on the sand and with earnest prayer induced the evil spirit to enter his handiwork – whereupon the effigy, with a crash of gongs and a blare of trumpets, was consigned to the Ganges, and sped on its way to the sea by a liberal offering of sweets and flowers.

Jim did not say whether or not he told the old man that the animal he was hunting was a leopard, rather than a tiger. But his pursuit continued, soon reinforced by the arrival of Ibbotson and his wife Jean, who took over the bungalow in which Jim had been staying.

Driven into the open, he and his men set up a little tented camp, protected by a circle of thorn bushes, and there they lived for several weeks.

One great advantage of having Ibby along was his perennial optimism: he always believed that if they did not get the man-eater that day, they would surely get it tomorrow. At school he had been captain of the rugger XV, and “of all the men I have been on shikar with”, Jim wrote, “he is far and away the best, for not only has he the heart of a lion, but he thinks of everything, and with it all is the most unselfish man who carries a gun.”

Another advantage of having the Ibbotsons in camp was that Jean appealed strongly to Jim: attractive, intelligent and a good shot, she was at home in the jungle, and in every way a useful addition to the team.

Within days there came two reports of cows being killed by a leopard, one inside a house, the other in the open. Over one of the bodies Jim and his colleague set up an ambush, building a machan inside a hayrick, and reinforcing their armament with a huge gin trap, weighing 80 lbs.

An hour after dark, angry roars betrayed the fact that the leopard was in the trap, and in the beam of the electric light Jim saw the raider rearing up with the trap dangling from his forelegs.

He took a hurried shot, but all his bullet did was to sever the chain which had secured the trap, and the leopard went off along a field in a series of great leaps, carrying the trap in front of him, hastened by a bullet from Jim’s second barrel and by two slugs from Ibbotson’s shotgun.

Hearing the roars of the leopard and our four shots, the people in Rudraprayag bazaar and in nearby villages swarmed out of their houses carrying lanterns and pine torches, and converged from all sides.

Shouting to them to keep clear was of no avail, for they were making so much noise that they could not hear us. So while I climbed down the tree, Ibbotson lit and pumped up the petrol lamp we had taken into the machan.

Together we went in the direction the leopard had taken. Half way along the field there was a hump caused by an outcrop of rock; this hump we approached, with Ibbotson holding the lamp high above his head, while I walked by his side with rifle to shoulder. Beyond the hump was a little depression, and crouching down in this depression and facing us and growling, was the leopard.

Within a few minutes of my bullet crashing into his head, we were surrounded by an excited crowd, who literally danced with joy round their long-dreaded enemy. For the first night in many years, every house in the bazaar was open, with women and children standing in the doorways.

Progress was slow, for every few yards the leopard was put down to let the children cluster round. At the father end of the long street our escort left us, and the leopard was carried in triumph to the bungalow by our men.

Ibbotson, and all the men who came to see it, were convinced that the man-eater was dead; Jim, in contrast, found it hard to believe that this was the leopard he had seen at such close range while sitting up over the body of the woman.

But after a long debate, he and his colleague agreed that this was the killer, and that in the morning they would return to their civilian pursuits. Both were exhausted, and went to bed early.

Next morning, while it was still dark, and Jim was having his chota hazri (early breakfast), he heard men outside, and when he called to ask what they were doing, four of them climbed the path to his camp, sent by the patwari (village headman) to tell him that a woman had been killed by the man-eater on the far side of the river, about a mile from the Chatwapipal bridge.

With a swift change of plan, he and Ibbotson procured two good horses and set off for the north. At the bridge they were met by a waiting guide, who led them down into a densely-wooded ravine with a stream flowing through it. There they found the patwari and some twenty men, beating drums to guard the body.

The kill was a very robust and fair girl, some eighteen or twenty years of age, lying on her face with her hands by her sides. Every vestige of clothing had been stripped from her, and she had been licked by the leopard from the soles of her feet to the neck, in which were four great teeth-marks. Only a few pounds of flesh had been eaten from her body.

The house from which she had been snatched had only one room, and was made of stone. Early in the night she had handed her baby to her father-in-law and had gone outside (as Jim put it) ‘to squat down’.

Close inspection of the surroundings showed that the leopard had crouched behind a rock about thirty yards from the door, and that it had lain there for some time before creeping forwards, belly to the ground, to grab its victim from behind.

It had then picked her up, and holding her high, so that no mark of hand or foot showed in the soft, newly-ploughed ground, had carried her across one field, down a three-foot bank and across another field which ended in a twelve-foot drop onto a well-used path.

Down this drop the leopard had sprung with the girl – who weighed about eleven stone – and some idea of his strength could be gained from the fact that when he landed on the footpath he did not let any portion of her body come in contact with the ground.

Peter Duff Hart-Davis, generally known as Duff Hart-Davis, is a British biographer, naturalist and journalist.

Excerpted with permission of HarperCollins from The Hero of Kumaon by Duff Hart-Davis.

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