Trackers have gradually pieced together a portrait: The paw print, roughly five inches wide, suggests a female — a breeding one, since her canines are intact, said Belinda Wright, executive director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India. One paw does not lay flat on the ground, suggesting that the tiger is injured, Ms. Wright said. The nature of the tiger’s attacks on humans seemed to change noticeably after the first three or four attacks, Ms. Wright said, when “she realized how easy it is to kill people and that they’re actually quite tasty.”

Tigers who have become “man-eaters” must be killed, she said, but they are extraordinarily difficult to capture. “They just become like ghosts,” Ms. Wright said. “She can appear anywhere at any time in that district and take out another victim, and no one will ever see her. People might be standing next to her and she will just be a shocking blur.”

So it was for Mr. Charan, a father of four, inside Corbett National Park on Sunday. Yogesh Kumar, 37, was ferrying him from one dam to another “in a normal, jovial mood,” and when he stopped the car to wait for some colleagues, Mr. Charan jumped out to urinate. Mr. Kumar was waiting in the car when he heard Mr. Charan screaming, “Save me, save me,” and “I am killed, I am killed.”

Four hundred people and two elephants have been combing the forest since then, working in expanding concentric circles, “working to establish the identity of the individual” who attacked Mr. Charan, said Samir Sinha, field director of Corbett National Park.

He said he understood the anguish of villagers who surrounded the forestry outpost on Sunday, after Mr. Charan was mauled, but said it was too early to assume that the “man-eater” had entered the park.