Colonel Bingham had not been able to ascertain what made this leopard
take early to humanity. A guess that many favoured was suggested by
its life-long preference for women. The guess was that its mother had
given her little ones some girls to flesh their baby fangs upon. There
had been some horrible cases of that sort. One shudders to think of
girls in the maws of leopards, like the little mice a tabby brings to
her kittens. But, after all, many a girl meets a worse fate in a
European town. The human beast of prey is crueller than any cat.
Whatever the explanation, the fact, at which the Central Provinces of
India soon were shuddering, was that this great leopard grew into a
man-eater, that seemed to combine the strength and stomach of the
tiger and the wily familiarity of the leopard. He took girls for
choice. Of two women returning with water from the well, the one was
taken and the other was left, that is to say, ran screaming home. So
marked was his preference for their sex, that whenever he was supposed
to be near a village, the women all became like purdanishin ladies,
and would not go out of doors.
I believe it was a police-officer, but it may have been a "man in the
forests," who told Bingham of being bothered by a nasty smell in a
mango grove in which he had pitched his tent. They searched far and
near for the cause of it a long time, and at last discovered the
putrid half of a woman's body, hidden in the foliage, in a fork of a
mango tree. The villagers said they knew by what was left that it was
the remains of the leopard's meal, for it had an Homeric appreciation
of entrails. The head was wanting, and the arms too; but the legs were
little more than nibbled. About half the corpse had been put aside for
further recourse, if needed. It had not been needed. The leopard must
have found another. Indeed, they said that it seldom needed to dine
upon cold meat.
It would often have had to do so, of course, if it had limited itself
to women; but it no more thought of that than an epicure thinks of
restricting himself to turtle. The women were its tit-bits; but they
were so shy that it might often have starved if it had taken nothing
else.
Its taste for them has often been discussed, but none of the theories
propounded were more than guesses. The most interesting incident
mentioned in these discussions concerned a leopard in the Shan States
of Burma. It ordinarily lived on dogs and game and cattle, like other
leopards, but once it killed a man and a woman. The magistrate who
went to seek the corpses told me that, in following the trail,
ornaments the woman had been wearing were found in bits on the ground,
and then the two corpses--the man's untasted, the woman's more than
half-eaten.