Kamla Devi

This shit is like the National Geographic version of a fucking SAS sniper in a ghille suit taking down his target in the middle of a 100-meter-dash by flying side-kicking it in the fucking face and then bodyflipping it with his teeth.  In the dark, hellish nightmare landscape of popular culture where the Discovery Channel of all fucking places has turned Shark Week coverage of the goddamned Megalodon into something the Ancient Aliens dude would jerk off to, it’s good to remember every once in a while that fucking nature kicks ass without the help of supernatural vampire zombie alien shit, and that many biological organisms in your own backyard can utterly destroy a miserable soft human body in a number of horrific and tragically-awesome-looking ways. 

Kamla Devi found this shit out for herself the hard way on Sunday.  When this 54-year-old single mother from the rural northern part of India was carrying a bucket of water to irrigate her fields, she suddenly found herself face-to-tooth with a six-foot man-eating leopard that outweighed her by twenty pounds and had a mad desire to literally claw her fucking face off and devour her insides.

Here’s another video for you.

It’s a clip of a leopard completely freaking out, losing its shit, and attacking like a hundred people at the same time because it’s pissed off and awesome.  These creatures are fast, agile, and way bigger than you’d think, and you sure as shit don’t want to be on the receiving end of its mutant housecat fury – even though half the guys in this video are trained professionals trying to tranq and relocate the creature they’re still shitting bricks when it looks like this claw-laden beast is about to painfully disembowel them.

Being a single mother in a dirt-poor region of rural India isn’t exactly a fucking picnic, but Kamla Devi never complains about that shit.  She gets things done.  This is a woman who supported herself and her son by starting up her own farm in Uttarakhand, just along the India-Tibet border, and she sustains her family by working the fields for hours every day, doing whatever she has to do to stay alive and provide for her child.

Around 10am on Sunday, August 24th, Kamla was carrying a couple buckets out to the field to irrigate her crops when suddenly she heard a rustle and caught the ever-so-short glimpse of spotted death lunging for her throat. 

Man-eating leopards aren’t that weird of an occurrence in India, with a little over a thousand people dying from leopard attacks in the last hundred or so years, but I’d still probably guess that the last fucking thing you’d expect to see on Sunday morning is a man-sized cat trying to eat your head.  With lightning-quick (you might say “cat-like”) agility, the leopard appeared from its hiding place, charged forward in an instant, and lunged for the 54-year-old mother’s throat.  Kamla Devi got her arms up to defend herself, grabbing at her attacker, but the leopard bit hard down on her hand, shattering it in two places, then swiped at her with its claws, cutting a gaping wound across her face that immediately started gushing blood. 

Kamla Devi was momentarily frozen with shock and pain and terror.  Then she got mad.  This woman was a survivor, and she wasn’t going down without a fight.

She clenched her other hand around the farming tool she just happened to be carrying with her at the time:  A big fucking scary-looking iron sickle.

The next time Mister Whiskers accidentally scrapes your thumb while pawing at a piece of string and you go running to the medicine cabinet in a quest for hydrogen peroxide and neon band-aids, clutching your hand and complaining to your family about how “he got me really good, this is a bad one” and shit, try and picture this scenario for a second.  Take Mister Whiskers, make him roughly the size of a professional soccer player, and then have him crack you across the nose with a fist full of razor-sharp claws and tell me if you’re capable of doing anything other than drowning in a two-inch-deep puddle of your own blood and failure.

Kamla Devi is not a large woman.  I don’t know her size, but from the pictures I’ve seen she looks quite small.  Yet here she is, face-to-face with an angry man-eating leopard, bleeding profusely with a broken hand in a field that’s miles away from anyone who could possibly help you. 

Well this chick didn’t give up.  She grabbed that sickle, threw the leopard off her, and began an epic showdown that lasted nearly thirty minutes.

Multiple times the leopard charged into her, swatting and biting.  Every time she fought it back, swinging with her sickle and battering it with her shattered hand.  Its claws drove into her legs and torso, gashing huge wounds that soaked her clothing in blood.  Still, Kamla Devi fought on, grabbing the leopard’s ear, punching at its mouth, and swinging savagely with a farming tool that was now being used as a weapon of mass destruction.  She blocked a paw strike with her good arm, but the force of the blow broke that arm as well.  Still, with a broken arm and two broken hand bones on the other arm, Devi grabbed, wrestled, and swung for her life, rolling on the ground with the leopard, rolling, fiercely fighting and stabbing.

Devi cites the life-or-death hand-to-hand combat as proceeding for “almost a half hour”, much of which involved the two being locked in a grapple.  If this is true, it’s like going six 5-minute MMA rounds with a fucking man-eating carnivore at the top of the evolutionary food chain.  Which is truly insane.

However long it lasted, the cloud dust eventually settled on the battlefield, leaving two warriors lying in a heap on the dirt and grass.  One of them was dead.  Kamla Devi was alive.

She then proceeded to limp her way over a mile back to her village with a gushing head wound, three broken bones, and cuts across her entire body, nearly passing out from pain, exhaustion, and blood loss all the way.

She made it to her village, collapsing in the arms of her friends and family.  It would take another two hours before she could get to the nearest hospital.

It took three hours of surgery and fifty stiches to get Kamla Devi into stable condition at the hospital.  The doctors who worked on her told CNN they had no idea how the fuck she made it out of there alive, let alone walked back to her town.

But you shoulda seen the other guy.

The head of Kamla Devi’s villiage submitted her for a bravery award with the Indian government saying that “her story will inspire the hill women not to give up fight come what may.”

I’d add that it’s not just the hill people who are gonna be inspired by the story of a badass dirt-poor 50-year-old single mother with a rusty sickle refusing to die, kicking the shit out of a 6-foot leopard in hand-to-hand combat Liam Neeson wolf-puncher style, and walking home to tell the tale.

Links:

Telegraph.uk

Daily Mail

The Guardian

CNN

WWF website