The Ogre of Khondvalasa

A story by Jacob P. Rayapati
Illustrated by John J. Edwin

This is a story set in India. To learn more about India, click here. To see a map of India, highlighting the geographical area where the story takes place, click here.

To meet the author and find out how he came to write this story, click here.

To find out more about the interesting and unusual objects, settings, and events
described in this story, click here.

After an hour's conversation, Brad gathered the gist of the situation. Every other night a full-grown goat had been disappearing from the village pen. This had happened for two months now. There were no tracks of a tiger and no blood trail. Redturban, the chief of the Khonds, said that they had scoured the surrounding jungle for remains of killed goats, but did not find either hoofs or horns. Nor had the scavenging greybearded vultures led them to a kill. They watched the pen at night, but the goats never became restless.

The Khonds were convinced that an ogre had been devouring their goats--flesh, bone, and hoof. This was exactly how the ogres of their myths behaved. An ogre materialized out of thin air, swallowed a goat whole, and vanished. That's why the Khond men were unable to find any tracks, or a blood spoor, or the hidden kill. Surely, this ogre would devour all their goats, and then turn on the villagers themselves.

According to Chief Redturban, this ogre was created by Skullnecklace, the notorious witchdoctor of the Savara tribe. After all, was not his reputation threatened by Dokteru Smeeth's modern medicine? Skullnecklace was going to punish the Khonds for being friendly with an outlandish doctor. Since Dokteru Smeeth, as the tribal people fondly called Uncle Adam Smith, was known to be immune to black magic, wouldn't he please come and rid the village of this unseen menace?

In his uncle's absence, Brad didn't want to see the Khonds disappointed. Though he was only fourteen years old, he volunteered to go with Redturban and investigate. This was the time when he could apply all the techniques of jungle deduction that he had learned from his uncle. He would identify the ogre. Upon his return from the westerly Savara encampments, Uncle Adam would use Brad's evidence and put an end to the ogre.

When Brad and his friends arrived at Khondvalasa, the sun was setting. He looked around. Khondvalasa was situated on a hill about three thousand feet above the sea level. The village had fifteen huts made of mud and bamboo walls. The roofs were made of meticulously arranged toddy-palm leaves. The huts stood in an oval ring. The goatpen was on the eastern end of the oval.

On all sides of the village, the hill sloped to a sixty degree incline. At intervals, the slope flattened to narrow ledgelike terraces on which the Khonds raised millet and sorghum. In some fields they raised ginger and turmeric. Here and there were exposed rock formations. The slopes continued for a thousand feet, and then the land stretched out into a valley of dense green jungle which spread over the outer mountains that rose to seven thousand feet. It was quite probable that there were a dozen tigers in this jungle. If the ogre turned out to be a tiger, Brad would be hard put to determine the sole culprit.

There wasn't a single dog in the village. Brad thought that that was unusual. Did the ogre devour all the village dogs before it turned on the goats?

He walked to the goatpen. It was built in eight sections of five-by-eight-foot frames. This fence was clearly meant to keep the goats in, rather than to keep any marauder out. The inside frame facing Redturban's hut was used as a gate. As the sun went down, the goats were herded into the pen and the gate was latched with a loop of wattle bark.

Five feet from the northern section of the pen was an ancient banyan tree. The main trunk was about sixteen feet in girth. It had four main branches going in opposite directions from the main trunk. Each branch shot back three to five aerial roots down into the ground. The aerial roots in their turn became secondary trunks. One of these secondary trunks was in the dead center of the pen. The crown of the tree spread out like a flat canopy over a hundred square yards in area.

Redturban and his aides chose this tree for building a machaan in which Brad wanted to spend the night. The men brought in a charpoy and lashed it in the branches ten feet above ground. The charpoy, and the olive green blanket on it, were camouflaged by banyan twigs bunched around the machaan.

As Brad crawled into the machaan, his digital watch announced seven o'clock in the evening. Even his watch wouldn't make a ticking noise. Brad could remain very quiet. He brought a five-cell flashlight for company.

The goats gathered in a huddle in the center of the pen around the aerial banyan trunk. Eight huge billy goats positioned themselves on the outer ring facing the fence. No doubt these goats were acting instinctively as lookouts. Brad could depend on them to announce the approach of any carnivorous creature. The night fell quickly in this tropical valley.

As the Khonds barred the entrances to their huts and settled down, Brad's memories stirred. He remembered his uncle saying, "Read the jungle and you will know." So Brad was merely going to lie in the machaan and listen for jungle sounds. He remembered his uncle telling him another time, "If you keep your eyes and ears open, you will learn the meaning of every sound and movement. Then you would never be at a loss for an explanation." Brad was determined that he was going to find an explanation for the ogre of Khondvalasa.

To Brad's dismay, the darkness around him was intensifying on this moonless night. Starlight would have helped him, but the sky was crowded with black clouds. He felt as though he was sealed in a pitch-dark bowl. It reminded him of the disorienting darkness of Carlsbad Caverns. In that kind of darkness, the left hand didn't know where the right hand was. He gripped the flashlight. It was still there in his right hand. He would use it only if his ears warned him of any approaching danger.

His fear of the unseen and the unknown awakened all his senses, and made them keener. "Fear makes you careful," he remembered his uncle's words. Somehow, thinking of his uncle helped him overcome his loneliness.

The wind picked up. The outer branches of the banyan tree started swinging. Rain came pouring down. Rain drops hit the thick banyan leaves and made a pelting noise like hail on a tin roof. Brad was not able to hear any jungle sounds. He felt defeated. Since there was nothing else to do, he would simply sit out in the rain.

When his watch flashed nine o'clock at night, it felt like he had been in the tree for an eternity. He didn't expect the ogre to steal another goat that very night. It killed one only the night before. The rain dwindled to a drizzle. Lightning flashed and lit up the ground and the jungle. The next flash was brighter. It lingered like the blinking light from a loosely fitted electric bulb. Brad didn't find anything unusual on the ground. The goats were ruminating lazily. There was nothing unusual on the outer edges of the crown of the banyan tree.

He turned his face slightly to the right. The main fork of the tree came into the periphery of his vision. He noticed a two-foot rope dangling from the fork. The lightning stopped. He was sure he didn't use any rope to climb up the tree. If there was a short aerial root growing out of the fork, he would have noticed it as he climbed up.

Lightning flashed again. He saw an irregular circle of blackness, like the mouth of a cave, right where the four big banyan branches forked out of the main trunk. He pressed the button, and flashed his light momentarily. The flash resembled lightning. For sure, the dangling rope belonged to the mass of blackness in the fork! Brad flashed his light and held the beam steadily on the fork. The ball of blackness rose to its feet. Two bright eyes, the size of ping-pong balls, looked at Brad. A mouth opened slightly, baring four white feline teeth. Its little ears flattened backwards. The tail tensed, curved upwards behind the blackness, and started swaying from left to right. The black thing suddenly turned about as though it had changed its mind and ran along the branch opposite to Brad and was gone.

So that's what it is, thought Brad. A huge black animal of the cat family. Could it be the ogre in the form of a hundred-and-fifty pound black cat? He had heard about the black jaguars of South America. He had heard about the black panthers of Africa. He read about Kipling's black panther Bhageera; but that was in northern India. He had never heard about black leopards in southern India's jungles.

How could he be sure that this was the beast that was guilty of goat stealing? After all, he had not found this black beast with a goat in his mouth. He needed more proof. How stupid he was, he thought, to sit in a machaan on this broad branch which the black beast perhaps used for its approach to the center of the goatpen. Did the beast stop at the main fork because its approach to the goats was cut off? How long did it sit there and watch him?

Leopards, he knew, hunted early at night, while tigers got active by midnight. Was this animal really a black leopard? Leopards, according to his uncle, were very fond of dog meat. Had this beast stolen all the village dogs, and then turned to the goats? Would the black beast come back to watch him for the rest of the night? More questions raced through his mind.

Brad was excited. He had at least one visual clue. But how did this beast take the goats without leaving tracks or disturbing the other goats? He was glad that the black beast did not decide to molest him that night.

The drizzling rain stopped. The rest of the night proved uneventful. Two hours after midnight, he heard a far off "honk dhank" alarm call of a sambhur stag. Did a tiger pounce on its doe? In the jungle, the price of carelessness is death. A nightjar took to flight nearby with its "cuck-cuck-cooiee." An hour later the red jungle cocks started crowing. At four in the morning, the peacocks screamed their greetings to the jungle. By five, the dawn light made the surroundings visible.

The rednecked parrots came out of their tree turrets and sang their matins in discordant screams. There was enough light now to see clearly. Brad was getting ready to crawl out of the machaan when he noticed a movement. A streak of the branch two feet ahead of him came to life and was moving. He froze and pulled the flashlight to his side. The movement stopped and a part of the streak raised itself and was examining the entrance of a turret. Brad recognized it now; it was a brown cobra. It was apparently looking for a morning mouthful. Its favorite meal was a parrot chick in a turret nest.

Brad tapped on the branch. Instantly the cobra flattened its neck and whipped around to face him. It hissed loudly and raised its head about two feet in the air. With his long five-cell flashlight, Brad knocked the snake off the branch. The cobra landed with a thud, and twitched slowly. The wind was knocked out of the creature. Brad watched the writhing cobra regain its senses and disappear into the bushes.

Brad got out of the machaan, climbed down from the tree, and hailed Redturban. After a quick wash, he ate six boiled eggs and drank two cups of honeyed goat milk. The eggs were diminutive because they were laid by bantam-sized domesticated jungle fowl. By then, Brad was ready for sleep.

Brad woke up at noon in Redturban's hut. He was thoroughly rested. Telling his hosts that he would be back by nightfall, he slung a machete on his belt, and returned to the banyan tree. On the eastern end of the tree's sprawling crown, an aerial trunk planted itself on the side of an igneous rock formation. The roots spread through the cracks in the rock like molasses on muffins. The nightbeast disappeared in this direction. No wonder it left no footprints. It traversed the tree on the broad branches, and let itself down on this stretch of rock. Then it jumped from rock to rock along the outcropping that was visible all the way from the village to the nullah in the valley below.

The water level in this nullah was only a foot high. It flowed over solid rock where the nightbeast would have forded it. On the far side was a vein of continuous limestone that was about fifty yards long. It ended in a solid rock wall that was about thirty feet high. This rock wall was soapstone, which resembles marble. In this rock wall, Brad noticed a black blotch that looked like the entrance to an unlighted cave. Above this rock wall were huge boulders in a pile.

If Brad followed a direct path, he would be easily seen by the beast if it were hiding in the cave. So he took a game path that went a hundred yards north of the vein of limestone. He selected a tall mango tree and climbed to its top. From there, he noticed that the northern bank of the nullah had a narrow muddy shore. Where the nightbeast would have forded, there would be some tracks about fifteen hours old. He climbed down the mango tree, and returned to the rocky ford in the nullah.

When he reached the muddy bank, he found fresh pug marks of a leopard. The pad prints were round and firm. This told him that the beast was a male. He noticed a few creases in the pug marks. These were caused by cracks in the callous pads. The animal was old, guessed Brad.

As he was wondering if these were the pug marks of the nightbeast or of some other leopard, he heard a noise like the rustling of power-charged nylon curtains. He rushed behind a thick bamboo bush along the bank and froze.

He saw a pair of porcupines approaching the stream. They were nibbling some tidbits. Their quills made multiple clicking noises. They carried on a dialogue of grunts. Not having many enemies, these animals have never learned to walk silently on the jungle floor.

Brad didn't come here to watch porcupines. He was about to leave his hideout when the porcupines abruptly stopped grunting. Instead, in unison, they grunted short muffled sounds of caution. Had he been that clumsy? Did they notice his presence? No. They were not looking in his direction; they were looking in the direction of the cave. A racket-tailed drongo from a nearby silkcotton tree mimicked the alarm whistle of a spotted deer and flew away. The porcupines bristled. They looked a foot larger all around. They started squealing in protest and fear.

A huge black leopard came into view and crouched with its belly flat on the ground. The quilly creatures turned their backs on the leopard and reversed rapidly. The leopard pressed its belly flat on the ground and crawled towards the porcupines. One of the porcupines suddenly rushed at the leopard who jumped aside and whipped sideways at the rushing porcupine. The leopard neatly clamped his mouth on the head of the porcupine. Brad remembered that his uncle had said that a porcupine's head is its "Achilles' heel."

The other porcupine lunged backwards into the leopard's face. Chaos reigned. The leopard roared in pain. He dropped his victim, jumped five feet up, and landed on all fours, gripping the ground with drawn-out nails. The quills of the second porcupine were lodged in the soft upper lip and right eye of the leopard. In uncontrolled anger, the leopard then did what no animal in its right mind would do. He raised his left paw, extended his nails, making a claw, and slapped the porcupine. His paw came down with such force that the quills drove into the paw through the callous pads. They hit the bones, turned sideways, and broke into fragments like a dum-dum bullet. The porcupine stood its ground. It made another rush. The leopard growled and did a backwards somersault. Growling and roaring in pain and anger, he crawled backwards with an eye on the porcupine. Then he turned tail and hobbled his way to the cave. Brad heard its groans and growls fade into the area of the rock wall.

The leopard made a bloody trail on the white limestone. The quills did a good job. They went into the leopard's face and left- paw as pins would go into a cushion. The beast was in excruciating pain, Brad knew.

The victorious porcupine circled its dead mate and grunted his way out of Brad's earshot along the nullah-bank downstream.

Brad left his hideout. He examined the battle scene. In the midst of the bloody pugmarks and porcupine footprints, he found two half-nibbled goat horns. He now had no doubt that the nightbeast and this leopard were the same ogre that the Khonds dreaded.

Brad returned to his high perch in the mango tree. He thought the leopard would recover, but slowly slowly. The flesh and skin would grow over the embedded quills. He would limp and hobble. He would be totally blind in his right eye. These were the classic symptoms of a man-eater in the making.

Brad left the mango tree and, like a shadow, stalked up to the pile of boulders on top of the rockwall. He heard low throaty groans emanating from the cave thirty feet below. The sand on the ledge in front of the cave was still wet from the previous night's light rain. On this wet sand, in addition to the leopard's pug marks, Brad found two sets of porcupine tracks going in and out of the cave. What the vultures could not find, the porcupines did. They had gone into the cave while the leopard was out, and feasted on the remains of the goat. When the leopard discovered the thievery, he followed the tell-tale tracks to punish the thieves. Like a wrestler, he knew the correct hold for a porcupine -- the head. But he acted impulsively and hurt himself. He also underestimated the loyalty of the second porcupine. He was totally surprised when it rammed into his face.

The boulders above the cave looked like part of a suspended rockslide. They stood on tiptoe, like a pyramid of ballerinas. They were dependent upon each other for support. Brad unslung the machete, and slipped it between the topmost boulder and its host rock. He pulled the handle towards himself. The boulder yielded grudgingly. Its delicate balance was tilted. It fell and rolled down the slope towards the cave's mouth. On its downward plunge it loosened other rocks in the pile. The pile rushed down with a shattering noise and resettled on the ledge in front of the cave.

When the dust cleared, Brad rejoiced that the cave was sealed with tons of rock. The cave had no escape tunnels. The leopard's secret retreat had become its permanent grave.

Back in Khondvalasa, Brad told Redturban and his men that the ogre would never trouble them again.

"Dhanyavad," said Redturban.

"You're welcome," answered Brad.