印度“食人虎”出没，村民惶恐不安

印度“食人虎”出没，村民惶恐不安

NEW DELHI — No one has lived long enough to describe the tiger in detail, but some things about her are known. She traverses great stretches of land in a day and is comfortable wandering deep into human territory. After killing her first three or four people, she began to eat her victims — starting rump-first, one expert said, as she would a deer.

新德里——有关那只雌虎的详细情况，没有人活着回来告诉大家。不过，有些事情还是清楚的。它每天活动范围很大，不怕深入到人类领地的深处。起初咬死了三四个人之后，它已经开始吃人。一名专家表示，就像吃鹿一样，它先从人的臀部下口。

Though it is impossible to say with certainty whether the same tiger is at fault, last weekend brought the 10th death in six weeks widely attributed to the “man-eater,” as Indian newspapers have called her.

尽管无法确切地知道元凶是否为同一只老虎，但是截止上周末，六周里发生的10起命案被广泛归咎于这只“食人虎”，这是印度报章给它起的绰号。

Conflicts with humans are arising precisely in the handful of places where the endangered Bengal tiger population has rebounded thanks to careful conservation efforts, said Ullas Karanth, a wildlife biologist who runs the India program of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

野生生物保护学会(Wildlife Conservation Society)的印度项目负责人、野生生物学家乌拉斯·卡兰斯(Ullas Karanth)表示，得益于精心的保护行动，濒危的孟加拉虎种群数量在一些地方有所恢复，而与人类冲突加剧的地方正好在其中几片区域。

“These conflicts are the price of conservation success,” he said.

“这些冲突是成功保护的代价，”他说。

But where conservation efforts have helped shore up tiger populations, the hulking, half-ton cats encroach on settlements that are unaccustomed to them. In the wake of each attack, the tigers are met with a noisy furor, instead of the subdued, systematic dragnet used by earlier generations long used to living near tigers to guide them back into the forest.

然而，就在保护行动帮助增加了老虎种群数量的地区，这种体型硕大、重达半吨的猫科动物也在侵犯那些不知如何与之共存的人类的聚居区。每次攻击发生之后，老虎都会面临巨大的公愤，而惯于同老虎比邻而居的早几代人以前会冷静地使用系统性的搜索方法，将老虎引回森林中去。

“What works, in my opinion, are like surgical operations, you need a small team of trained people on elephants to quietly allow the tiger to stay in the area,” Mr. Karanth said in a telephone interview. “Instead, mobs come, then there is a military campaign, they keep pushing the animal and make it harder and harder to catch.”

“在我看来，有效的办法应该是干净利落的行动，需要一小队骑在象背上的受训人员，安静地让老虎待在这一地区，”卡兰斯通过电话接受采访称。“结果，暴民来了，然后是军事进攻，他们不停地逼迫老虎，搞得越来越难以抓到它。”

Anxiety has mounted gradually since Dec. 29, when the first victim, a farmer, was found mauled in a sugarcane field in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Around a week later, 20 miles to the north, a young man told a television crew that he was standing with his sister when a tiger “caught her by the neck and took her away, into the sugarcane.” A string of attacks continued, tracing a 90-mile journey north toward the Jim Corbett National Park, across the state border in Uttarakhand, a nature preserve that claims one of the world’s densest tiger populations and is named for a tiger hunter and conservationist.

自12月29日首次出现受害者以来，焦虑情绪与日俱增。当时，人们发现北方邦的一名务农者被咬死在甘蔗地里。大约一周后，该地以北20英里(约合30公里)处，一名男青年在电视上说，他和姐妹站在一起，一只老虎“突然咬住她的脖子，把她拖进了甘蔗地。”此后又连续发生了几起攻击事件，延伸到往北90英里远的吉姆·科比特国家公园(Jim Corbett National Park)。这所公园在临近的北安恰尔邦，是一座自然保护区，拥有世界上最密集的老虎种群，以一位猎虎人转型的生态保护学家命名。

On Sunday morning, a 45-year-old worker named Ram Charan got out of a car to relieve himself on a roadside in the Jim Corbett National Park. When his companions ran toward his screams, they found him some 60 feet into the forest, the flesh torn off his thighs. After he died, angry villagers surrounded a forestry service outpost, trapping personnel inside for some time, said Shiv Shankar Singh, the top bureaucrat from the neighboring district of Moradabad, in a telephone interview.

周日上午，名为拉姆·查兰(Ram Charan)的45岁工人下了车，在吉姆·科比特国家公园内的路边小便。当同伴听到他的尖叫声跑过去的时候，发现他被拖进了林子里大约60英尺(约合20米)远的地方，大腿皮开肉绽。附近的莫拉达巴德县的县长希夫·尚卡尔·辛格(Shiv Shankar Singh)接受电话采访称，查兰死后，愤怒的村民包围了一处林业岗哨，把里面的人员围困了一段时间。

“They say, ‘Give us guns, and we will kill the tigress,’ ” Mr. Singh said in a telephone interview. “They say, ‘If your family members were getting killed, you would realize what kind of pain we are in.’ They are angry and afraid, so their tempers are running high.”

“他们喊，‘给我们枪，我们要打死那只母老虎，’”辛格在电话中说。“他们喊，‘如果你们的家人被杀了，你们就能理解我们现在这种痛苦了。’他们又气又怕，所以情绪很激动。”

Trackers have gradually pieced together a portrait: The paw print, roughly five inches wide, suggests a female — a breeding one, since her canines are intact, said Belinda Wright, executive director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India. One paw does not lay flat on the ground, suggesting the tiger is injured, Ms. Wright said. The nature of the tiger’s attacks on humans seemed to change noticeably after the first three or four attacks, Ms. Wright said, when “she realized how easy it is to kill people and that they’re actually quite tasty.”

动物追踪人士慢慢拼出了事情的全貌：爪印大约有五英寸宽，表明是只雌虎。印度野生生物保护协会(Wildlife Protection Society of India)的总干事贝琳达·怀特(Belinda Wright)称，由于犬齿完好，这只老虎具备繁殖能力;它的一只爪子落地不平，说明受了伤。怀特还表示，它攻击了人类三四次后，性质似乎发生了显著的转变，那时“它意识到，咬死人很容易，而且人肉还挺好吃。”

Tigers who have become “man-eaters” must be killed, she said, but they are extraordinarily difficult to capture. “They just become like ghosts,” Ms. Wright said. “She can appear anywhere at any time in that district and take out another victim, and no one will ever see her. People might be standing next to her and she will just be a shocking blur.”

她表示，必须打死那些“食人虎”，但很难抓到它们。“它们变得像鬼魂一样，” 怀特说。“它能够随时出现在那片区域的任何地方，拖走另一名受害者，没人能看得见它。人们可能就在它身旁，它却会突然消失不见，留下模糊的影子。”

So it was for Mr. Charan, a father of four, inside the Corbett Park on Sunday. Yogesh Kumar, 37, was ferrying him from one dam to another “in a normal, jovial mood,” and when he stopped the car to wait for some colleagues, Mr. Charan jumped out to urinate. Mr. Kumar was waiting in the car when he heard Mr. Charan screaming, “Save me, save me,” and “I am killed, I am killed.”

周日，查兰在科比特公园就遇到了这种情况。查兰是四个孩子的父亲。当时，37岁的约格希·库马尔(ogesh Kumar)载着他从一座水坝到另一座水坝，他们“情绪稳定，非常开心”。当他停下车等同事时，查兰跳下车小便。库马尔在车中等待时，听到查兰大喊，“救命，救命”，“我要死了，我要死了。”

Four hundred people and two elephants have been combing the forest since then, working in expanding concentric circles, “working to establish the identity of the individual” who attacked Mr. Charan, said Samir Sinha, field director of Corbett National Park.

负责科比特国家公园野外工作的主管萨米尔·辛哈(Samir Sinha)表示，此后，他们安排了400人和两头大象在森林中进行搜查，不断扩大搜索半径，“努力确认袭击查兰的凶手”。

Across the state border in Uttar Pradesh, gunmen have been summoned and given license to kill. Sanjay Singh, a registered sharpshooter, was summoned by the forestry service after the seventh fatal attack, and has spent three weeks in the area. He said he believed she has moved to an area so densely forested that it is impossible to ride on elephants, as tiger trackers prefer, and he and a dozen trackers are patrolling on foot, combing the forest from morning until sunset.

在北方邦边界的另一边，相关机构已经召集枪手，给予他们猎杀许可。在出现第七起致命袭击事件之后，林业部门请来了登记在册的神枪手桑贾伊·辛格(Sanjay Singh)，他在那里已经待了三周。桑贾伊·辛格表示，他认为这只老虎已经转移到了一片茂密的森林里。在那里，追踪者不可能像自己喜欢的那样，骑着大象寻找。他和十几名追踪者徒步巡逻，从早晨到日落，一直在森林中搜寻。

“Now there is no alternative except to kill her,” he said. “Otherwise she will keep on killing people. It is a very dicey game, which is very dangerous, and thrilling, as well.”

“除了打死它，我们现在别无选择，”他说。“否则，它会继续害人。这是一个非常冒险、危险，但令人兴奋的行动。”