The man-eater and the last of the great white hunters

It had killed 126 Himalayan villagers - until a lone Briton came stalking it

One of the most remarkable confrontations ever between man and beast is the subject of the first television drama from the BBC's natural history unit.

The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, on air next month, is set in the summer of 1926, when the hunter Jim Corbett set out to track and kill a rogue leopard that was to eat 126 people. His legendary jungle guile and ultimate success made him a hero in India to this day.

The saga has its origins in the flu pandemic that swept the world in the wake of the first world war. When the outbreak reached the North Indian Himalaya region of Gharwal, a 500-square mile area of rocky gorges, low-lying jungle and mountain villages, corpses were consigned to plague pits. It is believed that feeding on these gave the leopard a taste for human flesh.

The first report of a villager missing from Rudra-prayag, an ancient town in the foothills of the Himalayas, was in 1918. What proved to be an eight-year reign of terror had begun, the leopard getting bolder with every passing year. For the last three years the victims were taken from inside their homes. The man-eater learned to silently push down bamboo doors and climb through windows before escaping into the night.

A bounty of 10,000 rupees, more than £1,000, a great deal of money at that time, was offered, and hunters flocked in, but all attempts to kill the animal failed. Questions were asked in Parliament. The area was in a state of terror.

When Corbett arrived in Rudraprayag he was already a hunter with a hard-won reputation for physical bravery, skill and marksmanship. The son of a postmaster, he was born at the hill station of Nainital in the Kumaon hills of North India in 1875. Of British descent, he was educated locally and was, to all intents and purposes, Indian. He hunted from the age of eight and spent summers alone in the jungle, where he trained his hearing and eyesight, learned to move silently and developed the "jungle sense" that warned him of predators. His imitations of jungle animals were so convincing, they would draw predators and other hunters.

Corbett always refused money for killing man-eaters, and made no exception at Rudraprayag. Although he had risked his life many times tracking rogue animals, he felt only pity for his prey; many tigers and leopards had turned man-eater because they had been wounded but not finished off by trophy-hunters. Corbett's only stipulation was that all other hunters left the area.

Hetracked the leopard for months, but it pulled the bait out of traps and ate without any ill-effect the corpses that Corbett and poisoned with cyanide. The animal had a sixth sense as uncanny as the man hunting it, and would avoid eating goats left as bait if he sensed the hunter's presence. Corbett once waited for three weeks in a tower that overlooked a wooden bridge normally favoured by the leopard. The day after he gave up, the man-eater crossed the bridge again and killed villagers. Corbett began to feel that he was now the prey, finding paw prints that showed the animal had been tracking him.

The leopard became more cunning still, once silently taking a man in the time it took his friend to stoop for a dropped pipe.

The months-long battle of wits came to an end when Corbett camped for 10 nights in a mango tree. The hunter heard a terrified goat's bell jangling, shone his torch and saw the leopard. The torch failed immediately but the split second of illumination was enough: Corbett shot it dead. He felt no elation, he later wrote; the leopard had committed crimes "not against the laws of nature, but against the laws of man."

By the time of his death in 1957, Corbett dispatched 12 big catswho had killed at least 1,500 people. In 1959, a national park was dedicated to him, and in 1968, one of five subspecies of tigers was dubbed panthera tigris corbetti in his honour.