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Tigers can't count. This is key to the baiting method of hunting them: Several people walk through the cat's territory leading a buffalo, then stop in a clearing. When they depart, they leave the buffalo tethered to a tree. What the tiger doesn't know is that two of the hunters have stayed behind and are hiding on a tree platform, guns ready. The big cat lunges for its easy meal and -- boom! -- becomes a target. Peter Byrne stayed behind on the platform with his client, a nobleman's mistress from Denmark. The two huddled against the Nepalese winter evening, waiting for any sign of motion. Byrne whispered one last time, "Don't shoot until I tell you."It was 1968, and for 16 years Byrne had been the only professional hunter in Nepal. He'd left his job on a tea plantation in India and walked 350 miles to Nepal, where he secured the country's first-ever hunting concession on a beautiful 60,000-acre park called the White Grass Plains.
He was young, strong and determined. He brought down his first big-game animal -- a wild boar that had been terrorizing a village -- not with a shotgun but with an ax. There is no room in a hunter for squeamishness. Yet despite his bravery, Byrne had a soft spot in his heart waiting to reveal itself.
Few things are so awe-inspiring as a tiger in the act of killing. It happens with greater ferocity than anyone might imagine. The tiger is an imperceptible blur as it seizes the throat of its prey -- which is why Byrne told his client not to fire too soon.
But the gun was fired. The tiger roared, sprang back into the grass and vanished. Byrne descended the tree platform with a flashlight. He held his gun out in front of him, loaded, with the safety off, and walked toward where the tiger had disappeared.
He shone his light on the grass and saw frothy blood. A lung shot. The tiger was injured and at large. Byrne walked back to the platform.
"You've wounded it," Byrne said.
"Are we going to track it?" his client asked.
"Not tonight. You never track a wounded animal in the dark. We'll go back to camp, and I'll come after it in the morning."
He hated to think of the tiger suffering out there with a bullet in its lung. A tiger didn't deserve to die that way.
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