INDIA ADVENTURE STORIES VOLUME ONE by Patrick Griffith

Author:Patrick Griffith [Griffith, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-02-25T18:30:00+00:00

THE BANDYPORE MAN EATER.

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It was before the days of railways when the Seegor pass via Mysore was the only road to Ootacamund, and bullock transits the quickest means of traveling. It was a fair road from Bangalore to Mysore, but from thence onwards to Seegor at the foot of the Neilgherries there was nothing but a clayey track (known as a second class road) with quagmires and pits during the rainy season, in which it was a miracle if your coach wheel did not stick and remain a fixture till help was procured from Bandypore or Mussencoil, the only large villages along this route. Such had been my fate the previous July, when traveling to Madras from Ooty via Bangalore. My transit came to grief in a mud-hole in the center of the road and in our efforts to extract the wheel by means of a long pole used as a lever, a spoke was smashed. This necessitated a delay of two days at the Bandypore bungalow, before a new spoke could be made by the village craftsman, and it was while thus stranded far away from the haunts of civilization that I first heard of the Bandypore man-eater. Having nothing better to do I had strolled into the village to watch the carpenter at his work, and help with advice as to the repairs of the transit, and was soon in friendly converse with the villagers who crowded round the “ Doray ” (gentleman). “Had the Daveru heard of the ‘ pille’ (tiger) perun pillee (large tiger) which was feeding on them and on their children, and their cattle? Would the Doray stay a day and try and shoot the brute; the children (a motley assemblage) would be grateful for ever.”

The Doray had nothing better than a six-shooter —a kind of traveling companion—with which to try conclusions with the monster if met with, and as he did not like to add himself to the already long list of those the brute had killed and eaten, he, with many expressions of what he would do if he had the weapons, gratefully declined the offers of those who volunteered to lead him to the edge of the forest the tiger haunted, and leave him there. On my return journey to Ooty some eight months after, I again found myself delayed at Bandypore, and this time because the transit drivers refused to drive through the Tippoo Kadu as that portion of the forest was called, as two transit drivers had been carried off from their coaches only a few days before by the man-eating tiger.

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