B. H. Hodgson's shooters and the "wild man" of the Kachár

Brian Houghton Hodgson was an East India Company civil servant. He lived in Nepal from 1820 to 1843 and later became British Resident at the court of King Rajendra of Nepal. He was also a tireless naturalist. He wrote more than 70 papers and described 39 mammal species new to science. To fill his collections he hired local hunters. He called them his "shooters."

In 1832 he published "On the Mammalia of Nepal" in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. He divided the country into "the lower, central, and northern hilly regions." One passage dealt with monkeys. Religion had introduced the Bandar monkey into the central region, he wrote, where it flourished half domesticated in the neighbourhood of temples. Then comes a footnote.

The shooters had been working in the Kachár. It was Hodgson's own name for a zone of Nepal, the Tibetan frontier of the country. No date is given. The text says only "once." Somewhere out there they were "alarmed in the Kachár by the apparition of a 'wild man'." They did not shoot. "They mistook the creature for a càcodemon or rakshas (demons) and fled from it instead of shooting it."

Their description was brief and exact. "It moved, they said, erectly, was covered with long dark hair, and had no tail." That is all. No size. No sound. No names for the men who saw it.

Hodgson was not there. He passed the story on with a naturalist's hedge. The creature was "possibly an ourang," he wrote, "but I doubt their accuracy." Orangutans do not live in the Himalaya. No hair, track or specimen ever came back, because the shooters had fled. There was no official investigation. Hodgson's doubt was the only verdict.

Retellings changed the footnote. In later versions, including Wikipedia's, the creature becomes "tall" and "bipedal," and it is the creature that seems to flee in fear, not the hunters. Hodgson's careful doubt hardens into a firm conclusion that it was an orangutan. The shooters become "local guides." Hodgson becomes a "trekker."

Other explanations came from the long debate over Himalayan wild men. Bears were blamed for many reports, among them the "great yellow snow-bear" named by one 19th-century source. None was applied to this case specifically. The shooters' own word matters too. They saw a rakshas, a demon. PBS Monstrum places the report within the Tibetan and Buddhist folklore that later fed the image of the "abominable snowman."

Charles Darwin read and abstracted the same paper. His notes record the Kachár as the only region where the Tibetan dog can live. They say nothing about the wild man.

Yet the footnote outlived its author's doubts. Yeti scholars place the first sighting here. It heads a chain that runs through L. A. Waddell's footprints in Sikkim in 1889, the 1921 Everest reconnaissance, N. A. Tombazi's upright figure near Zemu Glacier in 1925 and Eric Shipton's footprint photographs in 1951. Hodgson's years in Nepal and Darjeeling are still studied today. His shooters remain nameless. What they ran from was never identified.