No Beast So Fierce by Dane Huckelbridge

Author:Dane Huckelbridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-12-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Together, in the Old Way

The jungles of northern India were hardly a place for the inexperienced or the uninitiated. Poisonous snakes, fractious sloth bears, lurking crocodiles, aggressive elephants—not to mention protective mother tigers—all could and occasionally did prove fatal to humans. And as a boy growing up in Kumaon, Jim Corbett had mentors who taught him the art of survival in the forest. His cousin, Stephen Dease, an amateur naturalist, gave Jim his first gun, a derelict muzzle-loader, in exchange for helping him collect specimens of local birds. There was Dansay, the disinherited son of a general and fellow Hibernian who entertained the young Corbett around the campfire with tales of Irish banshees and Kumaoni churails, forever mingling in his mind the superstitions and folklore of his two homelands. And of course there was Jim’s older brother Tom, whom he worshipped like a hero and did his best to imitate on their earliest hunts together for peafowl.

Of all Jim Corbett’s teachers, however, none would equal the lasting and profound influence of Kunwar Singh. In addition to serving as the headman of the village of Chandni Chauk, just a short hike from the Corbett family’s winter lodgings near the terai, Kunwar was also, in Jim Corbett’s own words, “the most successful poacher in Kaladhungi.” As to what he meant by the term “poacher” isn’t clear—game restrictions were still few and far between at the time—although it seems Kunwar didn’t have much regard for the Indian Forest Act of 1878, and even less compunction about hunting in the protected timber reserves that the colonial government had deemed off-limits. His defiance of such policies could have been simple economic necessity, but there is also a revealing bit of information to which Corbett makes only a passing reference. Kunwar Singh was of Thakur descent—essentially the Kumaoni equivalent of minor nobility—and it’s very likely that prior to the arrival of the British, those same “protected” forests he was trespassing upon had served as his family’s hunting grounds for generations. To such a man, hunting for food and sport among the same sal and haldu trees as his ancestors would not have been “poaching” at all, but rather the exercise of an ancient birthright—one he refused to yield to the foreign rulers of an alien government. A Kumaoni Robin Hood, you might even say.

With all this in mind, a friendship between a Thakur elder and an eight-year-old colonial boy must have seemed highly unlikely. Yet Kunwar not only took a young Jim Corbett under his wing, he actually became a father figure after the boy’s true father passed away. Such a relationship would have been next to impossible in the provincial capital of Nainital, where a state of social segregation between Europeans and Indians was actively enforced. However, in the scattered villages around Kaladhungi, where the Corbetts spent the non-malarial winter months, such strictures held little sway, and the family mingled freely with their Tharu and Pahari neighbors, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian alike. It was

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