The Silent Scream

Maybe it's the silencing stare of the leopard that explains why none of the five children and two women carried off by big cats around the southern Indian village of Bori Budruk cried out. To look a leopard in the eye is to be rendered mute with primitive, mind-numbing terror. Vilas Dattu Jadhav says his daughter's killer crept across a stubble field to the front of his one-room shack, leapt through the door, lifted Deepali off the floor by her neck and bounded into the sugarcane fields before he noticed. He was standing five meters away. The four-year-old never made a...