MANIWALA, INDIA – 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. 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.
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