Predators I Have Known
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: 1531816541
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
An adrenaline-fueled travel memoir of life in the wild among the planet’s most ferocious and fascinating predators.
Over the last forty years, bestselling science-fiction writer Alan Dean Foster has journeyed around the globe to encounter nature’s most fearsome creatures. His travels have taken him into the heart of the Amazon rain forest on the trail of deadly tangarana ants, on an elephant ride across the sweeping green plains of central India in search of the elusive Bengal tiger, and into the waters of the Australian coast to come face-to-face with great white sharks.
Packed with pulse-pounding adventure and spiked with rapier wit, Predators I Have Known is a thrilling look at life and death in the wild.
this singular trophy? Bending, I unzipped one bootie and slid the tooth inside, then zipped the neoprene back up. I could feel the tooth pressing against my ankle, hard and unyielding and still sharp. Outside, several hundred similar teeth are cruising back and forth, still in firm possession of their owners. Mine will not be missed. I resumed shooting. Back on board, my fellow divers expressed envy and delight at the sight of the tooth. It looked smaller on the boat and in the daylight, but
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
Tolkienesque Lofoten Islands of Norway, Venezuela’s otherworldly Canaima National Park, the untouched underwater marvels of West Papua, and my number-one choice, the incomparable Iguazú Falls on the border between Argentina and Brazil. But for an all-around, utterly fascinating, highly diverse step back in time, the prize goes hands-down to Papua New Guinea. This is a land replete with spectacular sights both above and below the water. Vibrant with amazing human cultures that have survived
the annual tuna celebration that’s held there every year: a sort of rural piscine Mardi Gras. The bucolic little town of some 12,000 souls is located an hour’s flight west of Adelaide on the opposite side of the vast Spencer Gulf. Beyond Port Lincoln lie only towns barely large enough to rate a mention on a map, and the vast Nullarbor Plain—a perfectly flat, virtually featureless section of the globe that makes the American Great Plains look like Switzerland. The Nullarbor runs all the way across
be working on a story or a novel and a situation will arise involving a dramatic, perhaps potentially life-threatening confrontation. Often I’ll produce the resulting scenario out of whole cloth, but sometimes—sometimes I’ll think back to a situation from real life. Drawing on that will produce fiction that cannot help but be more realistic because the source of it has actually been experienced. Oh, sure, you say. Like Air Jaws. Flying great white sharks. That’ll prove useful in a story some