Predators I Have Known

Alan Dean Foster

To Gaia

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I. TYGER, TYGER, BURNING BRIGHT...

East Central India, April 2003

II. THINGS YOU NEVER FORGET

South Australia, January 1991

III. FELIX

Mount Etjo, Namibia, November 1993

IV. THE CUTE LITTLE OCTOPUS AND THE HOMICIDAL SHELL

East Central Australia, November 1989

V. JEALOUS ANTS, MILLIONS OF ANTS, AND REALLY, REALLY BIG...ANTS

Southeastern Peru, May 1987

Northeastern Gabon, January 2007

Southeastern Peru, July 1998

VI. SHARKS I HAVEN’T JUMPED

Bismarck Sea, September 1997

West Australia, April 1992

VII. FLAT TIRES, OLD CANVAS, AND BIG CATS

Tanzania, July 1984

South Africa, May 2002

Tanzania, August 1984

Mount Etjo, Namibia, October 1993

VIII. MEANWHILE, SAFELY BACK HOME...

Prescott, Arizona, Anytime

IX. EYES ON THE TRAIL

Central Gabon, January 2007

X. EVER WONDER HOW WE TASTE?

Papua New Guinea, October 1995

Tanzania, July 1984

Southeastern Peru, May 1987: A Sartorial Digression

XI. EATING, YAWNING, AND COITUS INTERRUPTUS

Northern Botswana, October 1993

XII. AIR JAWS

South Africa, June 2002

XIII. DRACULA IS A MUTE

Northern Borneo, September 2010

XIV. TEENAGE KILLER NINJA OTTERS

Southwestern Brazil, May 2000

CONCLUSION

A BIOGRAPHY OF ALAN DEAN FOSTER

Born to water,

Live like fire,

Leave like the wind . . .

INTRODUCTION

OVER THE PAST FORTY YEARS, in the course of visiting six of the seven continents and a good portion of the world’s seas, it has been my privilege to observe and marvel at thousands of different animals in their natural habitats. Every one of them, from leafhoppers to leeches, has been in one way or another fascinating, intriguing, and beautiful.

Still, there is no doubt that of all Earth’s creatures we retain a special admiration for those bold enough, brave enough, and tough enough to contend with us on our own terms. So used are we to making food of every other living thing that when one comes along that is inclined—circumstances permitting—to make a meal of us, we are often struck dumb with admiration at the sheer audacity of it. Are not we humans the masters, the controllers, the lords and overseers of this world?

As civilized and populated as it has become, not always.

Thankfully, I say. Most of us live daily lives far too cosseted. Surrounded by the artifacts of our burgeoning, squalling, sprawling civilization, it is all too easy to lose touch with Nature and all that she proffers.

Sometimes she offers us contacts we would rather not make. When they occur, such moments, such encounters, offer us a charge, an exchange, a taste of something our ancestors knew intimately but we have largely forgotten. It is a good and useful thing to experience again such moments in time. At a suitable distance, of course.

Sometimes, the intervening space contracts, often when we least expect it to do so. Then the adrenaline surges, the pupils expand, the heart pumps a little (occasionally a lot) faster, and we feel more alive than usual. There is inestimable beauty in such encounters. At least, there is as long as you watch where you are stepping, or putting your hand, or focusing your eyes.

I write a fair amount of science fiction. If you think back on the stories you’ve read in that genre, or the films you’ve seen, some of the most powerful images (visual or literary) are those that feature beings that pose a physical threat to our existence. From H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds to Alien and Predator, we savor the frisson of fear that comes with imagining there are things Out There that might find us edible, or at the very least would be pleased to extinguish our existence.

What many readers or moviegoers don’t know is that such experiences are present right here on Earth, if one is willing to step outside the boundaries of the familiar and the comfortable and meet those experiences on their own territory. Often such an encounter, as with white sharks or tigers or poisonous snakes, will lead to straightforward renderings of these creatures in the tales I tell. Other times, they’ll provide inspiration, a carnivorous springboard, to the invention of predators more alien and outré than those that actually live here on our home planet, as in books like Midworld, Sentenced to Prism, and the Journeys of the Catechist trilogy.

Step outside the boundaries of the familiar, I urge. Herewith some of the steps I have taken over the years; all memorable, all engraved permanently in my mind, all capable of reiterating that special charge of which I have written. None of them has resulted in any of the creatures described making a meal of all or part of me.

Yet.

Alan Dean Foster

Prescott, Arizona

I

TYGER, TYGER, BURNING BRIGHT...

East Central India, April 2003

THEN THE TIGER SAW ME, and everything changed.

The world looks different from the back of an elephant. Riding on a bench seat slung over the spine of an ambling elephant is akin to being on a very small but very stable ship in the midst of a choppy sea. There is more pitching than rolling, complicated by the fact that another rider is seated in close proximity to you on the other side of the perambulating pachyderm while the guiding mahout straddles the animal’s neck sans saddle or any other tack. I thought it would be like riding a horse. It’s not. Horses jolt and jounce you; elephants don’t. Horses have style. Elephants have . . . mass.

We were patrolling the vast, hilly, uninhabited forest of Kanha National Park. Located in the eastern state of Madhya Pradesh, the nearly 800-square-mile Kanha has a reputation as the best-managed national park in India and forms the core of the Kanha Tiger Reserve. Here, in these rambling, rolling woods, Rudyard Kipling found his inspiration for the Jungle Book tales of the boy-cub Mowgli and of Baloo, Bagheera, and his other animal friends and enemies.

Far from the tourist-saturated haunts of Agra and Jaipur, not easy to reach from the great cities of Mumbai and Kolkata, the reserve’s remoteness and lack of accessing infrastructure (i.e., terrible roads) ensures that it is one of the least visited national parks in the country. Bad for tour buses. Very good for tigers. And also for those who fervently desire to see one of the great cats outside the confines of a zoo or wild animal park and in its natural surroundings.

A tiger in a zoo is like a bucket of bright red paint dumped on an asphalt road. How, one wonders while marveling at the resplendent amalgam of orange body, black stripes, and white highlights, can it possibly sneak up on prey? Surely, such a boldly demarcated predator must stick out in the wild as plainly as it does in front of our moat-and-railing shielded selves? What more blatant a four-legged banner, what more sharply defined a feline body from whiskers to tail, exists on the planet? Why, it’s impossible to avoid seeing it!

But put it in its thick native forests of sal and bamboo, in the depths of the surroundings for which it has evolved, and the tiger vanishes. Hundreds of pounds of carnivorous cat become as difficult to see as a dispersing wisp of orange smoke. The tiger does not dwell in the dark steaming greenhouse of cheap jungle films. It thrives in dry woods of brown and yellow, of broken patterns and shattered shade where tree blends into bush, bush into rock, and rock into shadow. You can gaze directly at one of the great meat eaters from a short distance away and still not see it.

The tiger is patient. The tiger knows how to wait. Nature does not make mistakes when she is handing out camouflage.

It had been a fine, lazy morning, replete with sightings of creatures as common as the crow and as rare as the jungle cat. Foraging chitals and sambars roam the hills and plains of Kanha. Wild boars snuffle unseen in its capillary network of narrow gullies. Blue-bellied rollers and green barbets flash between trees like strips of metallic foil riding the wind. Gaurs, a kind of wild cattle, loll near small streams or in mud wallows. The distinctive call of the muntjac, or barking deer, crackles through the forest.

Most impressively, Kanha is where the barasinghas have made their last stand. From a single surviving group of sixty-six, the Kanha herd of these striking swamp deer now numbers in the hundreds—a rare success story in a world of declining species and shrinking habitat.

Lulled into a semi-somnamublistic state by the heat and the steady, monotonous plodding of our patient elephant, I didn’t see the tiger until our excited mahout quietly pointed it out, and then I had to look twice. The powerful, muscular two-year-old male was relaxing on his belly to the left of a tree, as inconspicuous and hard to pick out as one of its roots. He was not trying to hide. He didn’t have to try. Nature took care of that for him. Had it not been for the sharp and experienced eyes of the mahout, we would have ambled right past without detecting him.

Now that I knew where to look, however, I could see it clearly. How could I possibly have missed it before? The cat was huge, between 300 and 400 pounds of pure predatory power at rest. Stripes blending into coat. Coat seeping into trees and bush and rocks. I immediately found myself mesmerized by two particular components of this magnificent representative of the order Felidae. It was not so much that I wanted to focus on them. They compelled me to do so. I found myself inexorably drawn to them.

They were the eyes and the teeth.

At the moment, the eyes were inclined upward. Tracking the arc of a bird, perhaps, or checking some suggestive rustling in the branches overhead. The deceptively soft mouth was open as the tiger, panting, sought relief from the midday heat. The exposed canines—they were longer than my middle finger—bright and gleaming and perfectly white, as if their owner had just had them cleaned by a local dentist. Reposing in the cooling shade as if fully aware of his own inescapable majesty, thick tongue flopping, massive body heaving slightly, he was just as I might have imagined him: all barely contained brawn and quiet magnificence. Then, almost absently, he lowered his eyes and looked straight at me. We locked. This is what his eyes said, accentuated with mild interest and palpable speculation.

I can kill you if I want.

In that instant, my tiger looked something other than magnificent. A connection had been made as piercingly and effectively as if I had stuck a finger into a wall socket. It was not the first time a glance from a carnivore had made me feel like meat, but it was the first time I had sensed genuine contemplation behind the look: calculation in addition to evaluation.

I can kill you if I want.

That stare shrank the distance between us as effectively as a fold in space-time. Though I had been told that the tiger would consider me as part of the elephant atop which I fortunately was riding, I no longer felt completely at ease. My belly was calm and relaxed, but mentally the relationship between the cat and I had undergone a radical change. I knew what that gaze meant. Knew instinctively. Remembered it from thousands of years of my forebears having been torn apart and consumed by long-dead relatives of what had instantly morphed into something far more immediate and visceral than a singular tourist attraction.

Having silently and effortlessly made his point, the tiger casually returned his attention to whatever had drawn his gaze into the tree’s upper branches. We lingered and watched for a while; taking pictures, searing the sight into memory, and then moved on.

That was it, I thought as I remembered to breathe again. I’d had my tiger sighting. What I had come all this way over thousands of miles and along horrific roads in order to hopefully encounter had, at last, thankfully and admirably, if somewhat unsettlingly, presented itself to my captivated eyes. The elephant moved on, and I counted myself fortunate.

The mahout angled us downward into a steep-sided dry gully barely two elephants wide. Fringed with dense forest on both banks, it offered an easy, unobstructed path back to camp for our patient, bamboo-munching mount. I had put away my video camera and was contemplating imminent relief from the increasing heat and humidity when my Indian friend Negi suddenly cried out, He’s coming out! The tiger is coming out!

In the clammy, cloying sweat that coated my face, my body, my head, and trickled unstoppably into my burning eyes, I found myself confused. What did that mean: He’s coming out!? My slightly addled, humidity-sodden mind confused contemporary urban concerns with actual immediacies. Was the tiger gay? Coming out of what? Out of where?

It finally struck me. The tiger was coming out of the forest. But we were traveling below surface level along the bottom of the desiccated wash. So that must mean . . .

There is not much room to maneuver on the sloping back of an elephant; less so for someone unaccustomed to that ancient but eclectic mode of transport. Seating consists of a pair of simple, open wooden benches slung like saddlebags over the elephant’s back. One person sits on one side, a second on the other, with the mahout straddling the elephant’s neck.

He’s coming out. He’s coming out! Negi’s voice was rising with his excitement.

My gear. Where the hell was my gear? I groped for the video camera, then for the battery. Fumbling to put them together was like trying to forcibly mate a pair of reluctant spiders. I could not see what was behind me. If I turned too fast and dropped the camera, it would shatter. (It is a surprisingly long way from the top of an elephant to the ground.) If I dropped the battery, the camera would be useless in my hands. If I was too careless or too hasty in my efforts, I might lose my balance and fall off myself. Then the tiger would no longer see me as part of the elephant, and something Really Bad might happen. In the bumbling confusion and frantic rush to get the camera working, I chanced a complete twist of my upper body in order to snatch a hasty look behind me. The young male had indeed come out of the forest and was once more looking at us.

Down at us.

The tiger was standing on the edge of the gully’s right bank. Framed by trees and sky, he presented as glorious an image as one could possibly imagine. Edgar Rice Burroughs could not have positioned him better. Now out of the shade and standing in full sunlight, he gleamed beneath the baking Indian sun like living, breathing sculpture: pure untrammeled ferocity held barely in check. It was as if he had decided, in the course of his casual inspection of the strange multiheaded creature ambling along just ahead of and below him, to strike a deliberately dominating pose.

Camera—battery—clumsy human digits uncoordinated. As I tried to work faster, it occurred to me.

The tiger was looking down at me. That meant he was higher than the back of an elephant. Higher, and very, very near. He would not even have to exert himself. Half a pounce and he would be on top of the elephant. On top of . . . me. As this realization struck home, an odd heaviness passed through my gut, as if I had ingested a chunk of cold iron.

The moment passed. Deciding he had better things to do, the tiger turned and sauntered nonchalantly back into the shadowy dry forest, his swaying backside essaying a tango, his tail switching back and forth like the taunting lure at the end of a fishing pole. Ready at last, I aimed the camera—and proceeded to acquire some excellent video of disturbed twigs and rustling leaves.

Sometimes, in the dark of night, when I lie in bed at home with the television off and my wife calm and asleep beside me, I close my eyes just a little, and I can experience once again that moment of predator-and-prey eye contact as precise and clear as when it occurred in the baking forest of Kanha. So beautiful. So unique. And not a little soul-shivering.

I can kill you if I want.

II

THINGS YOU NEVER FORGET

South Australia, January 1991

THERE ARE SOME THINGS IN life that never escape your memory no matter how much your other reminiscences fade. Your first date. Your first love. If you are an artist or musician or writer, your first sale. Your first home of your own.

Your first great white shark.

Tellers of tall tales have been inventing inimical creatures since before Frankenstein. Rocs and griffins. Dragons and centaurs. In the course of forty years of writing, I’ve concocted one or two myself. While researching the impossible for your fiction, you inevitably come across the most extreme examples of what our own planet has actually produced. In today’s increasingly civilized, urbanized, Internet-connected world, there are not many creatures that we fear might actually eat us—the fear of being eaten alive being among humankind’s oldest terrors. Among these more ominous representatives of the animal kingdom, Carcharodon carcharias occupies a place very close to the ultimate.

Carcharodon is not the largest predator in the sea. That honor belongs to the sperm whale, Physeter macrocephalus. Next in size comes the orca, or killer whale. But save for rutting bulls, sperm whales are easygoing leviathans whose principal interest lies in consuming large, soft squid rather than tiny, bony humans. Meanwhile, show business has Shamu-ed the orca into a cuddly giant squeaky toy not dissimilar from an oversize black-and-white seagoing puppy.

Furthermore, there are no confirmed records of a sperm whale or an orca deliberately attacking and killing a human being in order to eat it, whereas Carcharodon has been known, however mistakenly, to make a meal out of the occasional human swimmer, surfer, or spearfisher. The great white generates an atavistic fear in humans no dozen whales come close to matching.