Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [1]
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