The Champawat Man-Eater

Easy Reader, 1992. - 47 pages. Черно-белые иллюстрации, постраничный глоссарий, словарик в картинках, вопросы на понимание.Series A (based on a vocabulary of 650 words).In the hill country of Kumaon in Northern India, a man-eating tiger has killed more than two hundred people, Jim Corbett, a railway official, is asked to find and shoot the tiger. Even as he hunts the man-eater, it carries two more people off to their deaths . . .Jim Corbett (1875-1955)
was born in the Kumaon Hills of Northern India
and educated at the English school at Naini Tal. For
twenty years an official of the Indian railways, he
helped to recruit soldiers for the then Indian Army
in the First and Second World Wars. He spent his
last years in Nairobi, Kenya.
In his youth, Jim Corbett made up his mind
never to shoot an animal except for food or if - as
in this story - it had become dangerous to human
beings. In hunting, he was helped by his ability
to imitate the calls of tigers, leopards, monkeys,
birds and deer. Corbett used these calls to illustrate
lectures he gave at schools.
Corbett emphasized the need to conserve the
tiger and other wildlife of the Indian forests. A
tiger, he said, is a large hearted gentleman with
boundless courage, adding that when he is exterminated
- as exterminated he will be unless public
opinion rallies to his support - India will be the
poorer by having lost the finest of her fauna.
The first national park of India, constituted in
1935, was in 1957 re-named the Corbett National
Park. It lies on the River Ramganga in the Kumaon
Hills. There is a Corbett Museum at his house at
Kaladhungi.
The story in this Easy Reader is taken from
Corbett’s book Man-Eaters of Kumaon, which has
been translated into at least fourteen European
languages, eleven Indian languages, Afrikaans and
Japanese.