I received “When Man is the Prey” from my friend Linda after telling her the story of how I came across a bear while hiking in 2008.  I was following Granite Creek (near the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River in Washington) when I started up a series of switchbacks to a lookout.  I came around a corner and found a bear crossing the trail about 30 feet ahead of me.  He stopped, sized me up, then decided to continue going directly downhill.  Clearly this was a “friendly” black bear.  In retrospect there had been plenty of bear indicators along the trail.  Large areas of grass mashed down and lots of berries that had been “processed” by bears.  I was able to remain calm using a technique I call, “Slow reaction time”.

“When Man Is The Prey” is a collection of stories assembled by Mr Tougias, and arranged by animal type.  While the book includes several varieties, basically its bears and sharks eating Americans, and lions and crocodiles eating Africans.  It opens with bears, usually grizzlies, going after hunters in Alaska.  Not surprisingly, bears follow the same convenient trails as other animals, so hunters run into them.  I remember being told that certain kinds of bears can’t climb trees.  I forget which of black, brown, or grizzly bears that was supposed to be.  After reading the book, never assume a bear won’t follow you right up that trunk.  Basic rules seem to be 1) grizzlies are nasty, 2) other bears generally leave you alone, but won’t if they are having other troubles. 3) bears are way tougher than humans, only someone else is going to rescue you.  I used to be ambivalent about “restoring grizzly populations”.   Now it seems like a bad idea to grow things that eat humans.

Another urban myth is that you can punch a shark in the nose and get it to leave you alone.  While some people have in fact fought off sharks that way, the simple fact is that a shark is more likely to bite you from the side than straight on, and once its sunk its teeth into your side, getting off a punch becomes impractical.

The stories of crocodile attacks in Africa seem to concentrate on saltwater crocodiles, which live in water “near” the ocean.  These are also the largest variety.  Writers about crocodile attacks noted that the Africans seem to accept getting eating as part of life.  There wasn’t much effort to track down attackers. The problem with fighting off a crocodile is that every part of it is tougher than you are, and once its grabbed onto your body, it drags you below the surface.  At least they don’t climb trees.

Danger aside, I still want to resuming hiking alone in the forest.  Bears and mountain lions are the biggest threat.  Wearing bells should be enough for the first, at least until the hippies pack the forests with grizzlies.  Mountain Lions tend to attack from above, so I’ll look up once and a while.

“When Man Is The Prey” addresses several other kinds of attackers: tigers, hippos, and feral pigs for example.  The tone varies wildly from story to story, but it gives you things to think about.  People who survive attacks pre-planned some kind of defense.  No one escaped a bear by running back to camp for a knife in the middle of the attack.