The Silent Scream

May

be it's the silencing stare of the leopard that explains why none of the five children and two women carried off by big cats around the southern Indian village of Bori Budruk cried out. To look a leopard in the eye is to be rendered mute with primitive, mind-numbing terror. Vilas Dattu Jadhav says his daughter's killer crept across a stubble field to the front of his one-room shack, leapt through the door, lifted Deepali off the floor by her neck and bounded into the sugarcane fields before he noticed. He was standing five meters away. The four-year-old never made a sound. Vilas says the silence is contagious. "My six-year-old, Rahul, he never leaves the house now. The only time he speaks is when he screams in his sleep."

Deepali was the first victim, killed on July 26. Eight more deaths followed: a nine-year-old, a five-year-old and a 35-year-old woman in August, a six-year-old, a 13-year-old and a 22-year-old in September and a seven-year-old and a five-year-old in November. Four others survived maulings. The number and frequency of the attacks left experts at a loss. While India is used to the occasional man-killer, until now such incidents were largely explained by human trespass on an animal's hunting ground or ferociously bad luck. Leopards are the Greta Garbos of the big cat world. The 7,500 that remain in India are independent hunters that prefer never to cross paths with man, let alone taste him. Until now, they have wanted to be alone.

Their solitude, however, has been disturbed by human encroachment as the land around Bori Budruk—a lush succession of green canyons known as the Western Ghats that stretches from Bombay to Kerala—has followed the sad but familiar tale of modern development. In the last decade man drowned many of the forests behind vast new dams, cut down what timber remained and hunted to extinction the wild deer, boar and sheep that are the leopards' preferred prey. In the time it took to fill a reservoir, the leopards of the Ghats found themselves in the open, homeless and hungry. You'd expect a few attacks from these desperate creatures. Then you'd expect them to disappear.

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Some did. Of the 13 leopards found dead around Bori Budruk since January 2000, postmortems showed all died of starvation. But this summer things took a savage and unforeseen turn. The animals adapted. In the tamed landscape in which they found themselves—neat rows of tomatoes and cornflowers and chrysanthemums for export to Europe—leopards came across man-made forests of towering sugarcane. Far from being just a make-do home, says forestry chief Ashokkumar N. Khadse, the cane fields proved to be an ideal leopard habitat. The animals flourished in the impenetrable thickets, producing two litters a year of which all six cubs would survive. From negligible numbers 20 years ago, there are now 100 resident adult leopards in an area half the size of Hong Kong; there are 35 in Bori Budruk alone. With food supplies limited to rats, stray dogs and livestock, leopards found the switch from goats to humans all too easy to stomach. Nature bites back.

There may be no more compelling argument against wildlife conservation than a devoured child. You'd expect the villagers to be howling. And a few of the men of Bori Budruk, including Vilas, do want the leopards dead. They angrily accuse forest officer Dashrat Sabaj Wayal, who visits the villages armed only with the principles of conservation, of doing nothing. This isn't true. Wayal has helped trap and release 58 leopards since January 2000, and in February played tug-of-war with an animal that had a man locked in its jaws for 15 minutes until it gave up.

But mostly, the lush land that gave the villagers of Bori Budruk their wealth seems to have sown in them a rare equanimity. They see the cats not as parasites that need eradicating, but as part of the cherished natural order. "A human life is more important than that of a leopard," says Madhu Jadhav, whose 10-year-old niece Shradha survived being dragged from his porch by a leopard in August. "But the leopard does need to be saved." Most villagers agree with Wayal, the forest officer, that relocating the animals to a sanctuary, however long it takes, is the only conscionable solution. This surprising generosity explains why, despite two-and-a-half years in which 42 people were attacked, no one has ever shot a leopard in Bori Budruk.

Throughout most of the world, man has nature by the throat. Occasionally in Bori Budruk, it's the other way around. By letting the leopards live, the villagers hold on to their past, preserving within themselves the trace memory of that which was once wild, fierce and free.