She was out there in the bushes, prowling in the darkness. He was sure of it. After all that had happened in those awful two years—the 13 mutilated bodies, the riots, the court fights, the fruitless hunts—it had come down to this: a carload of five hunters and a man-eating tigress, alone on a lonely country road deep in central India.

The lead hunter, Asghar Ali Khan, had never killed such an animal. An open-faced 39-year-old, he was in charge this evening only because his father, the legendary hunter known to most in India by his colonial-era title, “the Nawab,” had been called away on a business trip. Asghar did not have his father’s aristocratic swagger, nor his years of experience tracking and killing rogue elephants, man-eating leopards, and wild boars. He did not even have a license to shoot the tigress. But after months of frayed nerves and missed opportunities, this was no time to hesitate.

Now, as the hunters sat in their open-air Suzuki Gypsy, a single mounted searchlight sweeping the night, Asghar saw a sudden movement in the brush. The man on the searchlight yelled that he thought he had seen the tigress cross the road—behind them.

Asghar turned and peered into the night. Nothing. Moments later, headlights swept across a rise in front of them, followed by the screech of brakes, and then screams.

Asghar barked at the driver, and the Gypsy surged forward. A carful of startled villagers were shouting and pointing to their left, into the shadowy trees by the roadside. They had seen the tiger just feet from their fender. As the spotlight again swept the night, Asghar could see nothing. It had been market day in the nearby town of Relegaon, and dozens of villagers, including people on motorcycles and small children, were streaming past them, heading home. Asghar knew he had to do something fast, or someone could be killed. The decisions he would make next would bring him headfirst into a confrontation unlike any in the subcontinent’s long, fraught history with tigers.

For India, that night last November was the climax of a two-month-long national soap opera: a very public tiger hunt, roiled by bureaucratic infighting, courtroom drama, fatal accidents, and global protests. It devolved into a battle between old India and new: On one side were those who wished to save the tiger, led by a passionate young doctor and a dozen or so harried state veterinarians. On the other side were angry villagers and their unlikely champion, Nawab Shafath Ali Khan, India’s last true “white hunter.” The conservationists relied on Twitter and drones and tranquilizer darts. The Nawab, insisting that the tiger was simply too dangerous to be captured, trusted only in his gun.

“These activists and veterinarians, what they are doing was madness,” he tells me two months after the hunt, as he shows me around his regal home in Hyderabad, India’s fourth-largest city. “I knew I am the only person who can solve this problem. God has made me indispensable! There is no one in the country who is doing what I am doing. Out of 1.3 billion people, there is only me.”

For centuries, Indian nabobs and the British elite hunted tigers for sport; an estimated 80,000 tigers were killed between 1875 and 1925 alone. By 1972, when Indira Gandhi outlawed hunting and began setting aside land for tiger sanctuaries, barely 1,800 animals remained in the wild. Since then, India has established 50 sanctuaries and waged a concerted battle against poachers, who supply tiger bones to the Chinese medicine trade. Today there are an estimated 2,200 tigers in India, and the number is on the rise.

More tigers, however, has meant more problems. Tigers, highly territorial animals, need a lot of acreage: an adult male may lay claim to more than 35 square miles, and will attack any rival that contests it. Tigers who lose this game of musical chairs in one of the state preserves are often forced to roam into the countryside, where they attack and eat cattle and, occasionally, humans. Since 2014, tigers have been blamed for 92 deaths—a rise from previous counts, but a fraction of the 1,052 people killed by elephants.

Without enough preserves to keep up with the rising population, tiger management has exposed a deep cultural rift between urban and rural India. Young urban activists want to save every tiger. Rural villagers—unable to work in their fields, and in fear for their lives—just want the tigers gone, dead or alive. Caught in the middle are the hard-pressed Indian bureaucrats tasked with protecting tigers and villagers alike; many have come to detest the “interference” of these new “armchair activists.”

“These activists, it is a fashionable thing,” spits A. K. Misra, the vinegary wildlife official who issued the kill order on the latest tigress. “Almost 100 percent of these people don’t understand the issues. They just want to make a career out of this and generate donations for themselves.”

Misra didn’t name names, but there’s little doubt about which wildlife activist in India is the most despised by villagers and hunters. In many ways, there would have been no controversy over the latest kill order had it not been for Jerryl Banait, an intense young doctor from the dusty city of Nagpur, at India’s geographic center. A polite, poised 25-year-old from a prominent Brahman family, Banait meets me at the Nagpur airport wearing French cuffs and patent-leather loafers. At my hotel, he unpacks several massive binders of his press clippings and explains that his parents, also doctors, were ardent conservationists. From the time he was young, they took him to camp in the countryside, where Banait saved monitor lizards and designed fiberglass water tanks for forest animals to drink from during droughts. But after a high-school year in suburban Chicago, Banait had given up conservationism to focus on earning his medical degree.

Then, in June 2017, he read of a shoot-to-kill order issued against a tigress known as T-27, who had killed two men near the city of Bramhapuri. The hunting of “problem” tigers, Banait knew, is governed by strict regulations. For a kill order to be issued, the animal must first be declared a “man-eater.” To do so, the government must form a committee to investigate and amass evidence, lots of it: swabs of the tiger’s DNA in a human’s wounds, human DNA in its scat, and a continuing pattern of attacks on humans. To his dismay, Banait realized that the government had done none of this.

“I was shocked and amazed,” he recalls. “How can you label a tigress a man-eater when there are just two chance encounters with humans?” There and then, Banait decided, “I had to do something. I had to stop this. I had no idea how. So I called a lawyer and asked to discuss it.”

With hunters already stalking the tigress, Banait was in a race against time. He and his lawyer decided to sue to stop the hunt. Neither had ever tried such a thing. As far as they knew, no one ever had. They drafted the papers in two days and filed them in Nagpur’s high court. To generate media attention, Banait hatched the idea of naming the tiger. He dubbed her “Kismet.” To his amazement, the judge quashed the kill order, ruling that the government had insufficient evidence to declare the tiger a man-eater.

Kismet was spared, but her odyssey was just beginning. A month later, after the Nawab subdued her with a tranquilizer dart to her neck, she was released into the Bor Wildlife Sanctuary. But, unable to establish her own territory there, she again roamed into the countryside. “She was looking for a new prey base,” says Banait. “She traveled 550 kilometers in 25 days. She had two more chance encounters with humans. I say ‘chance encounters’ because she didn’t eat their flesh.’’

Wait. “Chance encounters?” I ask. “You mean she killed more people?” In fact, the tiger had attacked three people, killing a farmer and an elderly woman who was relieving herself in a field. I ask Banait how he feels about that. Had he not saved the tiger, those people might still be alive.

He pushes his glasses up his nose. “I was heartbroken,” he replies, his tone formal and a bit bloodless. “When there is a family member who, out of poverty and desperation, has to enter the forest to gather food, and gets unfortunately killed? As a doctor, I am more attached to human beings. But that doesn’t mean you kill the tiger. There is a solution, which is not killing.”

Another kill order was issued. Again Banait sued. But this time, with two more deaths, he lost. Gathering his papers, he booked a flight to Delhi to file an appeal at the Indian supreme court. At the airport, his phone rang. Kismet had been found dead, electrocuted on a farmer’s fence. Banait was stricken. He decided to devote his life, or at least the next part of it, to saving tigers.

“I want to explain to people that we can save wildlife by involving ourselves,” he says. “A common citizen can fight for the rights of the wild animal. I will be the voice of the voiceless. So I started delivering lectures, workshops. I gave a TED Talk. It was all very cool.”

Even then, Banait had an eye on his next crusade, saving a five-year-old tigress that had killed nine villagers in a rugged area three hours south of Nagpur. The government called her T-1. Banait named her Avni. I’ll call her the Tigress.

Lying just west of the modern interstate highway linking Nagpur to Hyderabad in the south, the area where the Tigress roamed encompasses some 30 square miles of rolling hills and patchy forest, home to roughly 10,000 people who live in two dozen villages connected by a web of paved roads. Cotton fields line the country lanes, but beyond them the terrain grows difficult: tall and impenetrable lantana bushes, crisscrossed by deep ravines.

At the epicenter lies Borati, a village of some 300 members of the Pardhi tribe. It’s a study in contrasts. The people of Borati are poor, their shanties often lined with burlap bags. But the main paths, like those of many villages, are now made of concrete. Oxen stand roped to solar-powered streetlights. Even the poorest homes sport satellite dishes. “These people,” my guide murmurs, “they love HBO.”

The fear came to Borati in the spring of 2016, when a cow was found half-eaten. Tigers were unknown to the area, but from the claw marks on the carcass it was clear one had arrived. Then, one morning that June, an elderly woman named Sonabai Ghosale walked into the fields to collect the remains of her cotton crop.

“It was around seven,” her daughter, Alka Pawar, tells me. “No one went with her. By noon we were a little concerned she had not returned. At that point her husband started asking around. No one had seen her. So I went to the field. I saw a pugmark”—the Hindi word for a large animal’s footprint. “It was a tiger. I followed the pugmarks and I saw drops of blood. I followed the blood and I found the body. It was my mother. There were claw marks all over her back. And teeth marks on her neck. She had been killed, but not eaten.”

State forestry officials, it turned out, had been tracking the Tigress since 2014. No one is sure where she came from, though most believe she wandered out of the Tipeshwar Wildlife Sanctuary, about 44 miles south. At five years old, she was in her prime. Roughly 250 pounds, she measured eight feet long from her nose to the tip of her tail. Her colorings were striking: the fur on her face and forelegs a deep burnt orange, the rest of her a bright white and dusky brown with an overlay of vertical black stripes. She lived mostly on deer, boar, water buffalo, and the occasional monkey, and would return to feast on a large kill for as much as a week. Traveling with a male tiger dubbed T-2, she eventually gave birth to two cubs. And with more mouths to feed, she needed more food than ever.

Over the following year, seven more villagers in the area were found dead. After each kill, a wildlife warden would arrive to gather DNA evidence; angry villagers threw stones at him and set fire to his vehicle. Finally, one day in January 2018, an elderly couple, Ramaji and Kalabai Shendre, were working in their field outside the village of Loni. Kalabai was picking cotton when she heard a noise. She turned and, to her horror, saw a tiger emerge from the bushes and pounce on her husband. Ramaji was dead within seconds. Two days later, forestry officials issued orders to kill the Tigress.

Jerryl Banait and another activist, a Mumbai dentist named Sarita Subramaniam, persuaded a court to rescind the kill order, alleging that the conditions for declaring the Tigress a man-eater hadn’t been met. But for the next six months, state veterinarians were unable to tranquilize her. “We saw her several times, but every time we failed,” says Chetan Patond, a 27-year-old vet who was one of the Tigress’s most determined pursuers. “I wanted to capture one of the cubs and get a radio collar on them. But what if the mother rejected them? They would die. It was decided we couldn’t do that.”

Last August, after six months without an attack, three more people were killed. In one village, locals went looking for a missing shepherd. “We started searching for my uncle,” says Kapil, a thin young man with a rattail and an orange bindi between his eyes. “Someone found footprints. We followed them into the forest. That’s when we saw the body.” It was in pieces. Crouched atop the remains, snarling, was the Tigress. When the villagers shouted at her, she retreated, only to return moments later. “She came back, in front of 200 people,” says Kapil, his eyes widening at the memory. “That shows how ferocious she was.” Then once more she retreated, disappearing into the trees.

The villagers marched on the local forestry office, demanding something be done. Under intense public pressure, officials again issued a kill order on the Tigress. Banait filed to block it the next day. This time, though, there was enough DNA evidence to prove the Tigress was responsible. The court in Nagpur upheld the order, and on September 13 the supreme court refused to overturn it. “It was devastating,” says Banait. “That’s when I realized the only thing left was a lobbying effort.”

That day, even as he began contacting conservation groups across India, Banait read the news he feared the most. The government had decided to call in the country’s most revered and reviled hunter, a man notorious among activists as a kind of wildlife assassin. There was no one like him in India. They were bringing in the Nawab.

Nawab, which means viceroy, is a Hindustani title dating from the Middle Ages. The man himself, who turns out to be a trim, elegant 61-year-old with a crushing handshake and no shortage of self-confidence, greets me at the gates of his home. He and his son, Asghar, wear gold-rimmed aviator glasses, pressed khakis, and camouflage shirts. They lead me into a grand salon dotted with worn divans, the walls lined with sepia-toned photos and framed articles documenting the Nawab’s many kills.

“My grandfather built this home in 1933,” the Nawab says with a sweep of his arm. “He was an adviser to Britain on animal issues, here and in Africa. When the British had problems, they called him. I grew up on my grandfather’s tales. What I’ve done for years, yes, is controversial. But in England or the U.S., I would be known as a sportsman. What Ernest Hemingway did, or James Corbett, I do today in India.”

For years the Nawab, who shot his first rifle at the age of 6 and was a national shooting champion at 12, has worked with a number of Indian states, killing or tranquilizing their rogue elephants and man-eating tigers while training their foresters. “When hunting came to an end in the 70s, there was a vacuum of sportsmen who could read the forest,” he says. “The nobility who enjoyed hunting hung up their weapons. A new generation of forestry officers didn’t have that background. They were strangers to the forest. When man-animal conflict surfaced, they were at a loss. That’s why we get called in.”

Though he frequently works alongside the forestry officials charged with managing India’s wildlife, the Nawab has little but contempt for them. He is often called in on massive, state-sanctioned culls of wild boars, which have overrun the country’s farmland. “The government requests us to go and shoot 200 animals here, or 500 animals there, and we do it painlessly,” he says with a smile. “We use the proper weapon and the proper bullet, which they don’t know how to do. I have seen the police put 40 bullets in a tiger, then throw down their guns and run. A lot of times the forestry officers sent with me, they have accidents in their pants. They don’t know how to face an animal, or even shoot!”

The Nawab had actually scouted the T-1 search area in December 2017, when officials were considering the first kill order. At the time, the Tigress was traveling with her male consort. The Nawab and his son picked up their trail near Loni. “We went into a nullah,” or dry creek bed, he recalls. “Suddenly, a tiger came charging out at us. He was 10 meters from us. He stopped, and in a flash I knew it was not T-1. It was the male. He skidded to a halt. He stood there for three seconds. Those three seconds were like three days for us. And then it turned and left. Ninety percent of the time, the tiger withdraws without attacking, because it senses this is something entirely new.”

The hunt’s nerve center was a ramshackle base camp, typically spread across a roadside clearing, that moved every week or so as hunters tracked the Tigress. Yellow and green tarpaulins stretched between tree limbs were its only cover. Beneath them, state veterinarians and forestry guards hunched over laptops and maps that were spread across folding tables. Cars and jeeps lined the perimeter. Dozens of local men stood idly by, waiting to be sent into the field or on errands. Out in the countryside, the vets set up 90 camera “traps,” which snap photos when a motion sensor is triggered.

The area’s rocky hills, impassable lantana bushes, and fields of tall cotton, the Nawab informed the forestry ministry, made spotting a tiger difficult. Worse, it made the use of tranquilizer guns problematic. The guns, which are most effective in open fields, shoot low-velocity darts that are easily deflected by tree limbs and brush. In such terrain, the Nawab judged, the chances of tranquilizing the tiger were “very difficult.” Privately, he advised that the animal would likely need to be killed. “If the government had listened to me then,” he says, “four more innocent people would still be alive.” The subsequent failure of state veterinarians to capture the Tigress, he adds, only made things worse. Their futility, in effect, trained the animal to avoid trackers, making it all the more dangerous.

The biggest challenge, in fact, turned out to be the rivalry between the Nawab and the veterinarians. From the start, everyone knew the two sides were in a race to find the animal first. “The hunters, they wanted to kill it,” sighs Chetan Patond, the young vet. “We wanted to tranquilize. It was a battle.”

The vets, however, faced severe limitations. They had few weapons and no professional trackers. Tigers are nocturnal, but the vets thought it too dangerous to venture out at night. They finished their work each day at six sharp, no matter the conditions. “The animal can see much better than we can,” Patond tells me. “So it is not safe. We need to catch it in the open. She can be right there in that bush”—he points to one behind me—“and I couldn’t shoot it. The dart will not go through a bush. Several times we knew she was in the lantana. She used to growl loudly, and we would back out of the area.”

Under government orders, the Nawab’s men cooperated with the vets during their daytime patrols. But the real work was done at night, when the Nawab himself, armed with rifles and searchlights, went out in his Suzuki Gypsy. “Moving the wheel of lethargy, getting the government to move, getting the job the way I wanted it was the most difficult thing,” he says. “At base camp, they work nine to six. The tiger comes out at six! As their people are going home! This is madness!”

The problems began immediately. On September 13, two days after the supreme court ruled against Banait, the Nawab and a five-man team, having just arrived in the search area, responded to a report of a freshly killed cow near the village of Kishanpur. It had been dragged up a creek bed. Setting out on foot, the Nawab followed the drag marks for an hour or so until he found two sets of pugmarks, which he judged to have been made by the Tigress and one of her cubs. Another mile in, they found evidence that they were closing in. Water inside one set of pugmarks was still brown; the sediment had yet to settle. “We knew then she was just a few heartbeats ahead of us,” the Nawab says. At twilight, pushing through deep brush, they came upon the half-eaten carcass of the cow.

They paused, listening. Asghar nudged his father, indicating he could hear a soft growling somewhere nearby. Then the Nawab heard it too. “I heard a huff huff sound, a cough-like growling,” he says. “Then the pitch changed, louder and lower. In a few seconds we felt the ground shake before our feet as she broke into a charge. She came out of the lantana at an angle, then stopped and ran back into the jungle. We had no chance to shoot her. It was so surprising—it was one of the most terrifying charges in my 40 years of hunting.”

As darkness fell, they withdrew, reporting the incident to forestry officials. But when they returned the next morning, they were surprised to find a guard barring their way. The vets knew that the only hope they had of tranquilizing the Tigress was to keep the Nawab from getting a shot in first, so they had decided to block him from the search area.

The Nawab realized it was time to teach the bureaucrats a lesson. He called A. K. Misra, the ministry’s wildlife chief, and explained what had happened. “I am leaving,” he announced. “I don’t want to be associated with this operation.” Then he hung up. For the rest of the day, he ignored the calls lighting up his phone.

The hunt had already become a media circus; reporters hovered around base camp all day, and swarmed the Nawab’s hotel in the highway town of Pandharkaoda at night. That evening, he was surprised to hear a soft knock on his door. It was the woman who oversaw the hunt, a wildlife staffer named K. M. Abharna. She apologized for the “miscommunication” and begged him to stay. Eager for scandal, the next day’s papers expressed outrage that a married woman had been sent alone to the Nawab’s room. “It’s a very Indian thing,” one journalist told me with a sigh. “It’s something we don’t do.”

The Nawab agreed to stay on, but the infighting was just beginning. His main rival was a noted veterinarian named Akhilesh Mishra, a tall, animated man who had captured more than 70 tigers in the neighboring state of Madhya Pradesh. Mishra uses elephants to stalk tigers: They can tromp through bush humans can’t, and a dart fired from atop an elephant faces fewer obstacles than one fired from low to the ground. Like many vets, Mishra views the Nawab as an egotistical relic of another time. “He doesn’t know anything,” Mishra scoffs, “yet he has created this aura. We always tried to ignore him.”

It took only days for the tension between Mishra and the Nawab to boil over. On September 18, four cows were killed near Borati. Arriving at the area with his towering elephants, Mishra kept an eye on one of the kills until nightfall. Then he spotted one of the Tigress’s cubs, presumably intending to feed. Some of the vets argued for capturing it, but Mishra waved them off. “No, let her go eat,” he told them. “When she gets full, she will be easier to catch. And when you capture a cub, the mother is going nowhere.”

Mishra suggested they get some sleep and return before dawn. He gave orders to forestry guards not to allow anyone into the area. With luck, they would spot and tranquilize the mother and her sated cubs in the morning.

But the Nawab cared nothing for Mishra’s carefully laid plans. That night, he drove into the cordoned-off area. In a clump of woods, he managed to find the day’s fourth kill. In the silence, he and his men followed their routine: They listened to the forest, straining to hear the animals known to emit warning cries when a tiger nears. Peacocks. Spotted deer. Monkeys. But this time, they heard something surprising: human voices.

It was two in the morning. Directing his driver to mount an adjacent hill, the Nawab was startled to discover a crowd of some 40 villagers coming toward him. He knew what they intended to do—exactly what villagers had done to tigers for years: poison it. Tigers typically return several times over a period of days to feed on a kill. By sprinkling the kill with poison—usually pesticide—villagers give the tiger a long, painful death. It’s the same method used by poachers of both tigers and African lions.

The Nawab called the police, and spent the rest of the night helping them clear the forest of people. He didn’t especially care that he had spoiled Mishra’s plan. “That night,” he says, “those tigers would’ve been poisoned if not for me.”

Returning to the cordoned area before dawn, Mishra was shocked to learn that the Nawab had spent all night inside. He grows animated just telling me about it. “He came back! He came back and drove all over! And scared her off! I couldn’t believe it! He was there all night, driving around.” Enraged, Mishra called wildlife officials and told them he was finished. “I quit,” he said. “You can’t control that idiot, so I’m going home.”

The Nawab had succeeded at driving away his chief rival. But his victory sparked a backlash. The abrupt departure of Mishra and his elephants coincided with a surge in public interest in the hunt, triggered by a protest that Jerryl Banait led in Nagpur. Fifty activists, several with tiger stripes painted on their faces, marched on the forestry ministry and demanded the Nawab’s removal, as did Maneka Gandhi, a government minister and the widow of Indira Gandhi’s son. Stung by the unprecedented publicity, forestry officials convened an emergency meeting in Mumbai. The Nawab, they announced, was being sidelined to give the veterinarians a chance to tranquilize the Tigress. For the next two weeks, the vets would have the search area to themselves.

A new team of vets, along with five elephants, was dispatched to base camp. This time, they added a 21st-century touch, deploying a thermal drone to pinpoint the whereabouts of the Tigress. Unfortunately, the drone’s sensors proved unable to penetrate the deep brush. The rocky terrain, meanwhile, retained the day’s heat, preventing the drone’s sensors from differentiating between a warm tiger and a warm boulder.

Then, on October 3, disaster struck. One of the elephants, apparently a female in heat, escaped its tether during the night and rumbled 12 miles to the village of Chahand, where it charged a 30-year-old woman collecting cow dung beside her shanty. The elephant picked her up in its trunk and threw her into a cotton field, killing her instantly. That night, forestry officials decided to get rid of the elephants and bring back the Nawab.

And so, on October 7, the Nawab was given what he wanted: full control over the hunt. The veterinarians, who still believed they could save the Tigress from his guns, were allowed to stay. But even if they managed to spot her, they were ordered to do nothing until the Nawab appeared on the scene. “Five elephants, veterinarians from all over the country, drones—it had all achieved zero,” he tells me. “Less than zero, actually, because their efforts had taught the Tigress new skills. Now, after all this, it was finally up to me alone.”

In those first few days, the Nawab faced a more pressing problem than recalcitrant vets: the Tigress had vanished. For a solid week there was no sign of her or the cubs. Nothing on the camera traps, no scat, no kills, no pugmarks, nothing. The Nawab brought in a motorized hang glider and began flying sorties across the search area; a video of one of its crashes soon went viral. He tried a pair of Italian cane corso tracking dogs and hired a friend, a professional golfer, to lead them. Growing desperate, he had his men trap wild piglets, which he staked as bait. The Tigress ignored them.

Finally, on October 18, a shepherd outside the village of Sarati spotted the Tigress dragging a cow’s carcass toward a tree line. As panic spread, the Nawab dispatched three veteran trackers. They had barely entered the woods when they spied the Tigress hunched over her kill. She charged. The three men sprinted for a tree and climbed it. As the Tigress paced below, they radioed for help. By the time Asghar and a team from base camp arrived, however, the Tigress had once again melted into the forest.

Back in Nagpur, a desperate Jerryl Banait knew the Nawab was closing in. The stress was getting to him. He had received death threats. Villagers had burned him in effigy. He was convinced he was being followed and his phones tapped. He was ready to try anything. He reopened his legal fight, asking the court to stop the hunt. This time, his attorneys packed the filing with every conceivable objection. The hang glider was illegal. The tracking dogs were dangerous. The use of piglets as bait was inhumane. But on October 22, Nagpur’s high court refused to intervene. The hunt would continue.

Back at base camp, the veterinarians were starting to feel desperate. Most tigers are captured in a week or two; this hunt was entering its second month. “Our resources were exhausted, people were exhausted,” recalls Chetan Patond. “This needed to be over.”

Perhaps the strangest thing the vets tried involved luring the Tigress with samples of cologne: specifically, Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men. Obsession contains synthetic civetone, a compound derived from the scent glands of the civet, a tropical mammal resembling an otter. When it’s sprayed in the wild, tigers have been seen taking deep whiffs and rolling around playfully. “I sprayed that perfume on a towel, twice, and tied it to posts near our cameras,” sighs Patond. “Nothing happened.”

On October 27, a new veterinarian, Sunil Bawaskar, appeared at base camp. A peppery 43-year-old who runs the zoo in Nagpur, Bawaskar had another idea for luring the Tigress: tiger urine. In the wild, tigers use urine to mark their territories. When sprayed from a container, Bawaskar believed, the urine—which smells like buttered popcorn—would arouse the curiosity of the Tigress and draw her in.

From the moment he arrived, Bawaskar, like the Nawab, made clear things would run his way. “I never listen to anybody,” he tells me as we chat in his office, outside of which a tiger paces its enclosure. For years, he boasts, forestry officials have refused to invite him on hunts because he is “unmanageable.” Now, at base camp, he found morale among the vets nearing a low point. “Everyone was telling me they could have gotten this tigress,” he says. “But whenever they got signals and rushed to the spot, they were asked to step back and wait for the Nawab. But he sleeps all day and works at night. He took two hours to come when a spotting was made. So all attempts were failing.”

To capture the Tigress, Bawaskar began spraying tiger urine on trees and bushes in remote areas, hoping to draw her away from places the Nawab could reach by car. Day after day, Bawaskar and his fellow vets waited in their blinds, known as machans, with tranquilizer guns readied. Then, on November 2—a day after the Nawab had left the search area on a business trip—the vets were having breakfast at base camp when they heard the news: a camera trap had snapped a photo of the Tigress near Borati. Racing to a spot not far from the village, they sprayed the bushes and trees with liberal amounts of urine. Then they took their tranquilizer guns and climbed into their machans. With the Nawab away, this was their chance.

The Nawab may have left the search area, but his son, Asghar, remained behind with a full team of guides and trackers. When I spoke with Asghar at the family home in Hyderabad, he seemed less the wild-eyed killer of some Indian press accounts and more an earnest, guileless young man who clearly worships his father.

As Asghar tells it, his team of six reached the area where the Tigress had been seen around 1:30 on the afternoon of November 2. Striking out on foot, his little column pushed through heavy brush for 90 minutes before finding a pugmark. “We knew where she was heading,” Asghar recalls. “To the agricultural lands around Borati. Up there, there were people out in the fields, 360 degrees, people everywhere. It was a dangerous situation.”

At one point, as they emerged from the brush into a tall cotton field, the tracker at the rear snapped his fingers. When Asghar looked back, the man pointed toward a bush-covered hillock on their left. With his eyes, he made clear: the Tigress was there.

Everyone froze. Minutes ticked by with no movement from the bushes. Finally, sensing that the tiger had left, they crept up the hillock. In the dirt they found the outline of where she had been lying. She appeared to be approaching the area where the veterinarians were waiting in their machans. “She is heading your way,” Asghar radioed the vets. “Be ready.”

As Asghar and his men returned to base camp, anticipation rose among the vets. But after an hour the sun began to set with no sign of the Tigress. It was, like the 50 before it, a wasted day. As the vets gathered at the roadside, preparing to leave, Chetan Patond wondered whether, with the Nawab away, it might be safe to spray urine along the blacktop. They suspected the tiger was prowling the roads at night, but they hadn’t sprayed them, knowing the Nawab also used the roads.

“I was so frustrated, we were all exhausted, so we did it,” Bawaskar recalls. “We said we can come back and tranquilize her in the morning. The Nawab is gone. It will be fine. We assumed the animal was safe that night. At least until the Nawab returned.”

Later that evening, back at base camp, Asghar began getting frantic calls. As night fell, scores of villagers from Borati were returning from market day in the town of Ralegaon. Now, many on the road reported seeing a tiger in the brush. “We were not aware urine had been sprayed on that road,” Asghar later tells me. “We had no clue. And villagers were driving right into it.” The Nawab, as ever, was less diplomatic. “They were trying to draw a man-eater right beside a village!” he exclaims. “This is a great way to get these poor people killed.”

Asghar says he was instructed to return to the village by A. K. Misra, the wildlife chief. “Misra urged us to get people off the roads and out of the fields and back into the houses,” says Asghar. “No more human kills: that was the most important thing.” (Misra denies having this conversation.) A little after six, with darkness falling, Asghar and his team piled into their Gypsy and drove to the first nullah on the road west of Borati. For two tense hours they slowly patrolled the road, their spotlight sweeping the gloom. Cars and motorcycles packed with laughing villagers—more than a few of them inebriated from market-day festivities—streamed past, heading home to Borati. Twice they heard screaming, and raced forward to find a carload of terrified villagers shouting and pointing into the darkness. But the hunters could find no sign of the Tigress. It was like chasing a ghost.

Around 8:30, as the traffic began thinning, Asghar and his men headed back to base camp for dinner. They had just begun eating when their cell phones suddenly lit up with calls, all from villagers on the road southwest of Borati. “There was call after call, SOS’s, all sightings on the road,” Asghar says. The veterinarians, who were midway through their own dinner, debated whether to return to the search area, but concluded they couldn’t track the tiger in the darkness. “It would be suicide,” Patond says.

Asghar and his team returned to the village, stopping to check the road along the way. At the first creek bed, the darkness was still. They swept the searchlight all around but saw nothing. Driving to the second nullah, they again swept the searchlight through the darkness. Nothing. They listened to the night. Silence.

It was 10:30. They cruised forward a few hundred yards, rounded a lazy curve, and coasted downhill to the low-water crossing spanning the third nullah, where they stopped, the Gypsy’s engine running. White posts lined the aging road, its asphalt crumbling away to reveal cement beneath. Overhead stretched the limbs of an azan tree. Again, the searchlight cut through the inky night. To the left and right nothing moved among the worn stones of the nullah. Ahead, up a rise from the creek bed, dense brush lined the right side of the road.

Suddenly, one of the trackers motioned forward, toward the brush. “Something moved,” he said.

The car began to ease forward, inching up the rise. They trained the searchlight on the right side of the road.

And then she was there, 50 feet in front of the Gypsy, stepping from an unseen trail in the bushes onto the road: the Tigress, T-1, Avni.

She began walking slowly across the pavement.

Two of the team’s trackers had memorized the tiger’s markings. “It’s the man-eater!” one yelled.

“It’s T-1!” shouted the other.

At that point, everything happened in a matter of seconds. “She was in the headlights,” says Asghar, who sat on the left side of the front seat, cradling his rifle. “The forestry guard behind me, he instantly fired the tranquilizer gun. By this time she had crossed half the road. He hit her.”

According to an official report, the Tigress was struck in the left thigh at a distance of 42 feet. She snarled but continued crossing the road. Crucially, the Gypsy, now moving along the pavement’s right shoulder, continued moving up the road, toward the Tigress. In seconds it drew even with the animal, which paused, just off the left shoulder, 19 feet across the asphalt.

Asghar was nearest her. He could see her teeth. “In a second, she turned toward the vehicle,” he says. “By the time we realized what was happening, there was almost no time to react. She was right beside my window. We had no protection. We were totally exposed. The important thing was the safety of my team. I was expecting she would leap into the vehicle in a fraction of a second. If I didn’t shoot, we would’ve lost control of the situation. It would have gotten out of our hands. She was that close.”

Between two and five seconds after the tranquilizer dart had been shot—and long before its chemical agents might have sedated the tiger—Asghar raised his rifle and fired a single bullet. It struck the Tigress behind the left shoulder, pierced her heart, and stopped beside her right shoulder. “The moment the bullet hit her, she went down,” Asghar says. “She made no noise. She didn’t even move her tail. She just went down.”

The Gypsy kept moving as the tiger fell, coming to a stop a hundred yards up the road. The hunters trained the searchlight on the motionless animal for a long minute or two. When she didn’t stir, they returned to find that she was dead.

The hunters radioed base camp with the news. In the time it took the vets and others to reach the site, Asghar stood staring at the lifeless body, so still and majestic. He insists he was saddened. “I didn’t want to shoot her,” he tells me. “I didn’t. We tried to tranquilize her to the end. We were all disappointed. There was no way we could’ve saved her. There wasn’t. One of us would’ve gotten killed.”

When Sunil Bawaskar arrived, he took one look at the motionless corpse and walked away in disgust. Back in Nagpur, Jerryl Banait, having just returned from a meeting in Mumbai, took the call at his parents’ home. “I was devastated,” he says. “I was so close to her. I had named her. I was in tears. I didn’t sleep that night. There was anger, frustration, sadness. And I felt like a failure. After everything we had done, I lost. Whatever I did, they had done whatever they wanted to do. I was furious.”

The tiger’s two cubs were eventually captured and taken to a sanctuary. But reaction to the killing, both in India and around the world, was visceral. Maneka Gandhi called it a “ghastly murder” and “patently illegal.” PETA India called it a “wildlife crime.” Protests, many of them initiated by Banait and his new allies in 168 conservation groups worldwide, broke out in 33 cities across 11 countries. Hundreds took to the streets in Mumbai and Delhi, and candlelight vigils were held in cities across India. The country had never seen anything like it in the long history of tigers and man on the subcontinent.

The public debate revolved around whether the killing of the Tigress was, in effect, murder or justifiable homicide. As critics have pointed out, there was no overwhelming need for Asghar to pull the trigger. Simply pressing the Gypsy’s accelerator and moving the car ahead would have put the team safely out of the tiger’s reach. A month after the killing, a report by the National Tiger Conservation Authority cast doubt on Asghar’s version of events. It found numerous violations in the actions of his team, from using an expired tranquilizer dart to failing to bring along a wildlife biologist. An autopsy, meanwhile, found no evidence that the dart penetrated the tiger’s muscle, suggesting, at least to activists, that it had been applied only after her death in an effort to cover up its circumstances. Whatever the case, Asghar, the report concluded, was unauthorized to kill the tiger—a finding disputed by A. K. Misra, the wildlife chief. “I authorized him,” Misra tells me. “To criticize what Asghar did, it is hairsplitting.”

In the end, however, such finger-pointing may miss a deeper and more complicated truth. Perhaps Asghar was neither a cold-blooded murderer nor justified in his actions. Unlike his famous father, he had never killed a tiger. The report, in fact, concluded that Asghar was a “totally inexperienced person.” Perhaps, in that fatal moment, he did what most of us would do in the face of danger. Perhaps he simply panicked.

Sad as the Tigress’s death may be, there is hope in India that some good may come from the publicity surrounding her plight. Some call it the country’s “Cecil” moment, an allusion to the elderly lion in Zimbabwe that was killed by an American dentist with a bow and arrow in 2015. “The one thing both incidents did was to grab attention globally of people who may have otherwise never cared, resulting in public mourning and public shaming,” says Sumanth Bindumadhav, the wildlife campaign manager of India’s Humane Society. “One can only hope that the sacrifice these animals made will result in public-policy changes, as opposed to a one-time outrage.”

But publicity alone, however well-intended, won’t save India’s tigers. Only more land and more money can do that. The real threat to tigers isn’t hunters like the Nawab, or even the poachers who profit from selling their body parts. The real threat is humanity itself. Every time a tiger is killed, it’s a reminder that humans have overrun the creatures’ habitat, leaving them without the space and prey they need to survive. Tigers attack people out of the desperation people have caused them.

Knowing this, wildlife officials in India have resigned themselves to the almost daily loss of the animals they are charged with protecting. The Tigress may be gone, but there are others still to save. “There are many tigers—this is just one,” says Chetan Poland, the veterinarian. “In our park, poachers have killed four tigers in four days. This is a cycle, you know. Her death is sad. But at the end of the day, it’s O.K. She lived six years. She had a good life.”

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