Fuzz, p.7
Fuzz, page 7
The elephant’s intelligence has not always served it well. Elephants have been put to work—by the Indian military, historically, and more recently by the timber industry. They’re treated like employees, in that the forest department keeps a log of their hours on a work register. These “duty elephants” are of course not paid a salary but, Naha told me, at age fifty they receive a “pension,” in the form of retirement lodgings at a pilkhana with meals and a daily bath followed by a rubdown with oil.
As people get up from their chairs to leave, I ask Aritra to introduce me to the woman who dared to speak out. Her name is Padma. She has reason to be upset. A week ago, she was awakened at 4:30 in the morning and saw that an elephant had smashed through a wall and eaten the grain she sells in a small bodega in the worker colony. She has yet to receive the compensation owed to her from the tea estate.
A subset of managers hovers within earshot. One sidles up to derail the conversation. “Hello, you are from America, my son works in Memphis, in the best hotel, do you know the Memphis hotel ducks?” I actually do know this hotel, these ducks that descend the lobby staircase for no discernable duck or hotel reason. I keep my focus on Padma.
Aritra continues translating. “This is the second time it has happened to her.”
Still playing on the manager channel: “At five o’clock the ducks come down …”
Naha joins us. He suggests we drive over to the workers’ colony to see the wreckage of Padma’s shop. The managers exchange urgent looks, but it’s too late. We squeeze into our car with Padma and back away.
The tiny bodega isn’t so much ransacked as flattened. A wall of corrugated metal lies crumpled beneath a concrete support beam. On another occasion, an elephant broke into Padma’s home while she slept. This is a place where “the elephant in the room” is not a metaphor, where elephant jokes are no joke. What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence? Probably around 11:00 p.m.
Elephants are vegetarians, but they are not picky eaters. They’ll eat most parts of a plant—grains, grass and leaves, stems, twigs, bark. On a tea estate in the Sonitpur district of Assam in 2017, three wild elephants broke into a workers’ shop at 2:00 a.m. and helped themselves to the cotton fiber product known as rupees. They broke open the cash box and consumed 26,000 rupees in large denominations.
One thing Indian elephants won’t eat is tea leaves. Everyone here likes to drink tea, but few, human or beast, like to eat it. The leaves are too bitter. Small crop losses result when elephants trample plants as they pass through an estate, but, by and large, it is the workers, not the owners and managers, who suffer.
Nonetheless, Padma and her neighbors say they feel no anger for the elephants. Seventy-five percent of the people Naha interviewed about elephants that come into their villages report positive feelings for them. Given the amount of death and destruction caused by elephants in North Bengal, retaliatory killings are surprisingly rare. Naha says just three to five elephants a year.
With Aritra’s help, I tell Padma what happens to large mammals in the United States that injure humans or break into homes. I ask her whether people she knows ever express a desire to kill an elephant that has broken into their home or shop. “Why would you kill a god?” she says, referring to the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh. “We just say, ‘Namaste and please go away.’ ”
Padma leads us out to the tea field currently being harvested. Leaf collectors are spread out along the rows, working the waist-high bushes. Only the new, tender bright green leaves are plucked. The workers remind me of steel pan drummers, standing still with their arms moving crazy quick. They are fast because they have to be. If they don’t meet a set quota, their pay is docked.
Naha bends down to show me the empty space below the tea bushes. The leaf pluckers sometimes surprise a female leopard resting in the shade with cubs. The animal may awake in a panic and, if it feels cornered or threatened, jump at the worker. Deaths are rare, but injuries happen. Ninety percent of leopard attacks in North Bengal happen on tea estates.
We watch the women work. As soon as their hands are full, they reach behind their heads to stuff the leaves in a cloth sack slung over their foreheads. Now I understand why Padma, earlier, had shown intense interest in my backpack. You’d think the managers could spring for bags more ergonomically suited to their task. I say this to Naha.
He rolls up his sleeves. “They are paid one hundred fifty rupees a day.” This is less than the cost of a cappuccino at the Delhi airport. “It’s a colonial mentality. They are the same tribal laborers that the British brought in from central India. They use them because they are considered hardworking and obedient.”
When Naha told me about the work register for animals, about pensioner elephants and their bathing regimens, I was initially impressed. Here is a government guaranteeing working animals some of the same benefits normally accorded human workers. Seeing, now, how the tea collectors are treated, are legally permitted to be treated, it’s less uplifting than it had seemed. Depending on your species, religion, gender, and caste, India may be a better place to be an animal than it is to be a human. In 2019, the government of Delhi announced plans to revamp one of the five sanctuaries it maintains for the city’s free-ranging, traffic-snarling, sacred cows. Perhaps in response to criticism that the city provided better care for its cows than for its citizens, the city’s Minister of Animal Husbandry announced, “We are planning a unique coexistence programme where elderly will be allowed to stay with the cows.”
Things have lately grown more extreme. The current prime minister, Narendra Modi, rose to power on a surge of Hindu nationalism. This is a man who bestowed personhood status on the Ganges. A river enjoys human rights protections, while women like Padma earn 150 rupees a day and Muslims are lynched for selling beef.
As we get in the car to go, the assistant manager trots over with an armful of Mylar bags: a pound of tea for each of us. Aritra thanks him, then turns to Naha as the car gets underway. “It’s CTC.” (The acronym describes a processing method.) To me he explains, “The cheapest kind.”
Wildlife is the theme at the government-owned Jaldapara Tourist Lodge, where I’m staying tonight. The grounds feature life-size plaster models of local wildlife. A number of the figures have been knocked over or have broken-off appendages that lie where they’ve fallen, on the incongruously well-manicured lawn. The whole courtyard has the feel of a miniature golf course after a party of drunken golfers played through, beaning the statuary with errant balls or maybe their golf clubs.
I love this kind of place, love the surreal decay of it, love the clerk who does not know where breakfast is served or even if breakfast is served, love everything, really, except the rat turds on my balcony. I tried to imagine what could be the draw, for a rat, of a balcony with no food and nothing in which to nest and not even much of a view. It appeared to be simply the place rats go to have a dump. The Jaldapara rat toilet.
The lodge is scheduled for a remodel, because the West Bengal forest minister is working with the West Bengal Tourism Development Corporation to create a rhino preserve out of the neighboring forest. This happens to be the forest to which Naha, Aritra, and I are shortly headed. We’re going to track a radio-collared “conflict leopard”—leopard 26279—that was relocated here a year and a half back, when the land was earmarked to become a wildlife preserve. The animal was not full-grown then, and Naha wants to check to be sure it hasn’t outgrown its radio collar.
While he’s here, Naha will talk to villagers who live on the edges of the forest. Radio-collaring provides points on a map, but it doesn’t answer the questions that ought to be asked when a predator is released into people’s backyards. Has the leopard been taking your goats? Are people okay with it being here? Naha has been following up, like a social worker on a foster care placement. He’s been tracking this leopard remotely and phoning alerts if he notices it moving toward their homes.
This morning we have a new driver, Ashok. He rarely joins the conversation, preferring to give his full focus to the driving. This is a switch from the last driver, who, to keep himself from nodding off, suction-cupped his smartphone to the inside of the windshield and began streaming a sitcom. (Naha was unalarmed. “One eye is on the phone, and one eye is on the road.”)
We turn off the paved roadway onto a dirt track through increasingly thick underbrush. Branches scrape the sides of the car. Ashok has grown quiet. He seems tense. Did I say something wrong? Is he worried about scratching his paint job?
Just past a cluster of homes, we pull up alongside a man dousing his cauliflower patch with pesticide from a backpack tank. Naha gets down from the car, and the man shuts off the nozzle. One eye is cloudy. Three other men wander over. Aritra listens in. Nothing to report. They haven’t seen the leopard in a while.
We drive on. We pass a watchtower used by anti-poaching squads. Naha asks Ashok to stop so he can climb up and get a better signal. Aritra tells me to stay inside the car with him.
Naha descends the tower stairs and gets back in the car. He reports that we’re now just a thousand feet from the leopard.
We drive on. The road dead-ends at a wide river. Naha gets out again. He walks along the sandy riverbank holding an antenna above him like a torch. On the other side, a group of men are waist-deep in the water, clearing an overgrowth of water hyacinth.
Naha leans in the car window to let us know we are now 500 feet from the leopard. Dut-dut-dut-dut, goes the receiver. We can’t get closer, because the cat is on the other side of the river. He points. “Just beyond where those men are.”
There’s no bridge near, so we turn back. On the last few miles of the drive, Ashok breaks his silence. He and Naha speak, in Hindi. After Ashok drops us off, I ask Naha what they were talking about.
“His father was killed by a leopard.”
The father had gone to collect firewood. When he didn’t return home, Ashok, who was twelve then, went with some friends to look for him. They found him, still alive, in a riverbed. The kind of place where the men were working today, a few dozen feet from a leopard. “They brought him to the hospital,” Naha says, “but he couldn’t recover. He sustained a lot of injuries. His eyes, and all that. He must have been very badly mauled.”
Ashok will not be our driver for the next leg of our trip, and this is for the best. We are headed for Pauri Garhwal, a hot spot for leopard attacks. These are not the kind of encounters that take place on tea estates when a worker surprises a leopard sleeping under the plants. These are stalkings, killings undertaken with intent.
* At the zoo where I worked in my twenties, the pay rate for the elephant keeper was slightly higher than that of workers who cared for other animals—though not because of the risks. She was paid a “shit differential” because she had to shovel excessive amounts of it. Well earned: according to a 1973 Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology document, an Asian elephant defecates 18 to 20 times a day, dropping “4 to 7 boluses” of around 4 pounds each, for a daily output of 400-plus pounds.
† That elephants are reliably spooked by fire and sudden loud noises limited their usefulness in war. Though the sight of armor-sided “elephantry” with swords lashed to their trunks conferred, from a distance, a psychological advantage, this quickly evaporated as the two sides drew closer. Records exist of elephants turning and breaking ranks at the sound of musket fire or the sight of flaming arrows. A fleeing, sword-waving elephant storming its own battalion likely racked up as many causalities as it would have inflicted on the enemy.
4
A SPOT OF TROUBLE
What Makes a Leopard a Man-Eater?
The road to Pauri Garhwal carries travelers through the Middle Himalaya—the sparsely settled, mildly mountainous realm between the low foothills and the airless white monsters of the Greater Himalaya. It’s a lovely drive but, as road signs will say to you, HIGHLY ACCIDENTAL PRONE. Landslides happen so often that the sides of some mountains, at a distance, look like ski areas. The higher you drive, the steeper the slopes and sharper the curves, to the point where you’re forced to take each bend blind, honking and bracing for impact.
The road traces the old pilgrimage trail that links the Hindu shrines along the Ganges river. In past centuries, devotees walked the trail barefoot and slept in simple thatch shelters. The danger then was not crashes but leopards, which had a documented proclivity for slipping through an unsecured doorway. Between 1918 and 1926, government recorders ascribed 125 kills to a single leopard, known in the global media of the day as the Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag.
The shrines remain and the people still come, but now they drive and book hotels. Modest accommodations line the road: Hotel Nirvana, Om Hotel, the unrelaxing-sounding Shiv Hotel. Our driver today, Sohan, is friendly and seemingly imperturbable, steady in the face of all that India drops in our path: the cows, the rockslide rubble, speeding motorcyclists, a dilapidated loom. I’ve seen the serenity lapse only once, at the sight of a man urinating over a guardrail. Sohan drives so competently that I’ve stopped fretting about the nonfunctional seat belts in the backs of Indian cars, a preoccupation Naha finds amusing. (Naha on airbags: “You mean that balloon that comes up?”)
We’ll be visiting three mountain hamlets today and tomorrow, all of them leopard attack hot spots. If there’s time, we’ll go to Rudraprayag, which has grown by now to a small city. A monument stands on the spot where the famous man-eater was killed by the famous man-eater hunter Jim Corbett. Naha made a pilgrimage of his own last year, to look for descendants of Rudraprayag villagers who may have been alive then. He leans into the back seat to show me photographs. The Corbett monument needs repair. The pedestal is cracked, and the great hunter’s mustache is chipped. Naha managed to track down a grandson of the village priest Corbett worked with. One of the things the man told him was that when a leopard stalks and kills more than three or four people, villagers consider it a demon.
I don’t buy in to demons, but I do wonder what’s going on with these leopards. In North Bengal, where we’ve just come from, leopard attacks are inadvertent encounters. After a quick scuffle, the surprised cat takes off. There may be injuries, but rarely are there fatalities. Here in Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal district, leopards stalk humans as prey. Every year, in an area smaller than Delaware, leopards typically kill three or four humans. Between 2000 and 2016, Naha reports, leopards attacked humans 159 times. A large majority of these attacks were predatory, he says.
What causes a species to update the menu? What happened in Pauri Garhwal?
Corbett blamed the flu pandemic of 1918. So many people died so quickly, he wrote, in The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, that the Hindu funerary custom of carrying bodies to the Ganges for cremation was for a time replaced with a more expedient rite. A burning coal was placed in the mouth and the corpse cast down the hillside in the general direction of the river. A leopard will readily scavenge a meal, and Corbett surmised it was these bodies that gave the Garhwal carnivores their taste for human meat. Likewise, the man-eater of Panar—another Jim Corbett project—began its killing spree in the wake of a cholera outbreak. Corbett claimed this animal had killed four hundred humans by the time he stepped in. (The figure is questioned in Leopards in the Changing Landscapes, by H. S. Singh, formerly of the Gujarat state forest department, and by others, including Naha. Corbett stalked book sales as skillfully as he stalked big cats.)
One thing that may work in favor of the North Bengalis is that their leopards were heavily hunted by the British Raj and their royal Indian cronies. Singh wrote that between 1875 and 1925, hunting parties killed 150,000 leopards. “They may,” Naha says, “still regard humans with fear.” Now that my state’s mountain lions (aka cougars)* are no longer bounty-hunted, are they becoming less wary of humans? I posed the question by email to California mountain lion researcher Justin Dellinger (whom you’ll shortly meet). He didn’t think so. Mountain lions are not so much wary as stealthy—a trait that evolved over eons, probably because it made them successful hunters.
The hills of Pauri Garhwal have a terraced, wedding-cake appearance. Terracing creates level spaces for hillside farming, but I see no farmers and, when I look closer, no crops. Naha explains that the region has undergone a sizable out-migration. Villagers have left to look for work in cities, because almost anything is easier and more profitable than farming the hills. Terraces are difficult to irrigate, and when the crops mature, monkeys and wild boars show up to raid them. In the decade between 2001 and 2011, 122 villages were abandoned. You see it in the scenery: mile after mile of fallow terracing. It’s like driving through a topographical map. In places, the contour lines have begun to soften as the native vegetation returns. This “rewilding” creates scrubland that serves as cover for leopards on the hunt. Nearly 99 percent of the villagers Naha interviewed for a paper published in PLOS ONE reported a belief that this has brought leopards closer to people’s homes. Seventy-six percent of leopard attacks on residents of Pauri Garhwal happened in a spot with medium or dense shrub cover.
As the people have moved out, more livestock have been left to graze unguarded: easy pickings for leopards. Naha makes the point that chasing prey on steep slopes is, like farming on them, a challenge. Goats and calves make dinner a snap. Compared with deer and other natural prey, domesticated animals are slower and less wary.
As are human children. Forty-one percent of the Pauri Garhwal villagers killed in leopard attacks, Naha’s survey shows, were between one and ten years old. An additional 24 percent of the fatalities were youth between eleven and twenty.
Here Sohan joins the conversation. Aritra is dozing, so Naha translates for me. “He has seen this.” It was 1997. A thirteen-year-old girl was alone in a field, cutting grass with a sickle. It was around 4:00 p.m. Sohan was resting in a car a few yards away when a leopard appeared. “He saw everything in front of his eyes,” Naha says. “The leopard attacked from behind. It jumped on her back and pierced her jugular. There was blood coming out. It was very harsh.”
