December 16, 2006

Speaking of Peter Byrne

Veteren Bigfooter Larry Lund tipped me off to the following story from the January 2007 issue of Reader’s Digest. Although there is nothing cryptozoological about this story, it is about another veteran Bigfooter, Peter Byrne.

Eye of the Tiger
A hunter’s change of heart.
By Derek Burnett
From Reader’s Digest
January 2007

Few Things Are So Awe-Inspiring

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.

The Day That Changed Everything

Byrne didn’t know it then, but his hunting days were numbered. He’d been hearing more and more about animal conservation, and always had a deep respect for nature’s wild things. The tiger, for instance. Try to imagine a more refined killing machine. Or the boar, ugly and ungainly, but with an unmatched courage. Even the birds won his admiration.

When he thought about it, he was tired of seeing animals killed by wealthy people trying to impress their friends.

Before light, Byrne and his gun bearer, Pasang, set out for the clearing where the tiger had been shot. It was still misty and cold, the first pale sun teasing at the edge of the sky. They tracked the blood trail to a grassy patch, where Byrne saw a faint white puff. It was the tiger’s breath. He could make out the animal’s form, lying flat on the cold earth. He leveled his gun and fired, shooting the tiger through the neck.

Then, with his weapon ready, he edged his way closer. Pasang followed. Byrne lowered the barrel to the animal’s spine. The tiger had stopped breathing. He moved the gun up along the body to its head.

"It’s alive!" Pasang hissed.

Byrne wasn’t so sure. He decided to check by brushing the tiger’s eyes with the gun barrel. And then he saw what Pasang was hissing about: The tiger’s eyes were a pair of jewels, more shimmering and colorful than anything Byrne had seen before. The lovely morning sunshine played at the tiger’s face, increasing the primordial brilliance of the two incredible orbs, a gift of nature that stopped the hunter’s breath.

But before he could register their beauty, the eyes began to change. The brilliance began to fade, driven out by a dull, milky haze.

In that moment, Byrne knew he had seen what he’d managed to avoid in 16 years of killing. He’d watched life disappear, displaced by the awful, muted tones of death.

That was the day that Byrne witnessed the reality of his life’s work up close. Sickened by the revelation, he decided to put away his guns and devote himself to conservation. He converted the park where he had hunted into an animal preserve that today is more than three times its original size. He also started a small nonprofit organization called the International Wildlife Conservation Society, which keeps Byrne’s park functioning and free of poachers. And in the 1970s, with urging from Byrne, the government of Nepal placed serious restrictions on hunting.

Today, Byrne, 80, divides his time between the preserve in Nepal and his summer home in Los Angeles. His latest project is building a conservation center to accommodate scientists and tourists.

Recently, he had lunch with the safari agent who used to send him clients. "Do you even have hunters anymore?" Byrne asked.

He was not surprised that the agent’s answer was no. Byrne sat back in his chair and thought about how far things had come — it is now no longer humans but rather the tigers of Nepal, he realized, who are the land’s great hunters.

Filed under Bigfoot Report, Cryptozoologists, Cryptozoology