Refresh @ 10 - IX

STORIES as that of the Baria man-eater can qualify as once-in-a-life-time for a hack. A Leopard in the jungles of Panchmahals and Dahod had turned to killing humans and had eaten up over a dozen in less than two months. Apart from becoming a local terror, the cat had become a big story for its guile at deceiving the forest department. Innumerable bait-cages lay strewn in its track to no avail. I made at least three field trips to cover the sensation, reliving the Jim Corbett chapters from school textbooks on the Nanital man-eater. 

On one such trip, we came to know that the cat had made a fresh kill of an old woman in a village of Devgadh Baria. As we were near by, I and photographer Chandan Giri decided to visit the spot. The hut was at some distance in the fields at the base of a hillock. We had no option but to leave our car and walk the distance – about half a kilometer from the road. We must have done about 200 steps through the standing Maze crop, me with a stick in hand and Chandan following, when a humming noise distracted us. Or rather got us focused. It was a consistent sound of grrr grrr grrr. I froze in my steps. So did Chandan. I poked the stick left and right in the maze with trepidation taking over. Was the cat lurking somewhere around? Before I could sense more, Chandan whispered a fearful ‘Sirrr’ and scooted back in the direction of the road. In less than a split second I followed suit. 

It was too risky to even bother to confirm if it was the man-eater in the thick vegetation. I thought Chandan had seen something. We ran helter skelter as they say till we reached the car, breathless. I asked Chandan if he had seen something. He said he thought I had and that’s why I had stopped. Even as we gathered breath, we realized the humming had not stopped yet! That’s when we looked up. In the sky – a plane was passing over causing the sound.

The whole setting – fields, jungle, village – and the story in our mind had created a hallucination where we thought we encountered the man-eater cat. By this time an administration car came to where we were standing and informed that the half eaten body of the woman had been found some 3 kms away and had been taken to hospital for post-mortem. We were relieved. Though the hallucination was over, we both had no stomach to take the track again.

But the story I wrote following the visit can be seen here: http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=63637