History’s deadliest single animal? Story of the killer Indian tiger and the man who hunted it down detailed in new book

No Beast So Fierce by Dane Huckelbridge, published by William Morrow. 3.5 stars

A man-eating tiger that stalked India more than 100 years ago was history’s deadliest single animal, according to a new book by Dane Huckelbridge.

In No Beast So Fierce, Huckelbridge tells the exciting true story of the attempt to exterminate the Champawat tiger in colonial India in 1907. This was no safari with a fleet of elephants and an army of bearers: it was one man named Jim Corbett with a rifle and three cartridges on foot against a tiger that had killed and eaten about 440 people over a span of about a decade. The numbers are inexact because deaths of rural women collecting firewood weren’t carefully recorded in those years.

Huckelbridge visited the site of the hunt, and No Beast So Fierce is illustrated with photographs of the tiger’s hunting ground and last dining nook.

Only about a third of the text is devoted to the hunt itself. As background, there is a great deal of information about the intrepid hunter and about the culture of the Pahari people who constituted most of the tiger’s diet. There is also a review of life in rural India in colonial times, and some information about colonial government and about the history and politics of northwest India and Nepal. Readers will, of course, also learn a lot about tigers and their habits and about some of the myths surrounding them.

A mature tiger needs to kill at least one 60kg (132 pound) animal a week to survive. Usually that’s a boar or a deer, but obviously a woman collecting firewood would do nicely. A hungry tiger, though, will eat almost anything. Tigers worldwide are estimated to have consumed about a million humans over the past 400 years.