Alex MacCormick - The Mammoth Book of Predators

Also available

The Mammoth Book of Arthurian Legends

The Mammoth Book of Battles

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2000

The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 13

The Mammoth Book of Bridge

The Mammoth Book of British Kings & Queens

The Mammoth Book of Cats

The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy

The Mammoth Book of Seriously Comic Fantasy

The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits

The Mammoth Book of Endurance and Adventure

The Mammoth Book of Future Cops

The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots

The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories

The Mammoth Book of Heroes

The Mammoth Book of Heroic and Outrageous Women

The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened Battles

The Mammoth Book of How it Happened in Britain

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened World War II

The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper

The Mammoth Book of Jokes

The Mammoth Book of Legal Thrillers

The Mammoth Book of Life Before the Mast

The Mammoth Book of Literary Anecdotes

The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes

The Mammoth Book of Men OWar

The Mammoth Book of Murder

The Mammoth Book of Murder and Science

The Mammoth Book of On The Road

The Mammoth Book of Oddballs and Eccentrics

The Mammoth Book of Private Lives

The Mammoth Book of Seriously Comic Fantasy

The Mammoth Book of Sex, Drugs & Rock n Roll

The Mammoth Book of Soldiers at War

The Mammoth Book of Sports & Games

The Mammoth Book of Sword & Honour

The Mammoth Book of True Crime (New Edition)

The Mammoth Book of True War Stories

The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

The Mammoth Book of War Correspondents

The Mammoth Book of UFOs

The Mammoth Book of the Worlds Greatest Chess Games

Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2003

Collection and editorial material copyright Alex MacCormick 2003

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-84119-603-7
eISBN 978-1-78033-403-5

Printed and bound in the EU

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Introduction

From aardvarks to zebras, from big cats to sharks, from dingoes to our fellow human beings it sometimes seems that, given half a chance, maneaters of one kind or another are ever ready to sink their teeth into our flesh.

For most of us the fear of being attacked and eaten alive by an unseen monster that appears out of nowhere is a deep-seated one, but we try to dismiss such thoughts as irrational. It couldnt happen to me, we say to ourselves. But, as you will see from the stories in this book, sometimes it does happen to people like us.

When we opened up the croc, we found Olsens legs, intact from the knees up, still joined together at the pelvis. We found his head, crushed into small chunks, a barely recognizable mass of hair and flesh, recalled a witness.

We made eye contact. As the huge mass of white fur, claws and teeth charged, I knew I was seconds from death, said the teacher leading a group of students on a trip to the Arctic.

When I reached Rod, I saw a shark had bitten into his left thigh and was tearing violently at his flesh. Clouds of blood mixed in with the air bubbles. Then a second shark appeared and made a blinding strike, ripping into his calf, recalled the diver working in the Caribbean.

The rhino whipped round in his tracks like a cat and came for me in a beeline, said the badly gored safari tourist.

Paul Templer got a whiff of doom when a 4,000-pound hippo snatched him from a canoe and swallowed his head I went straight down his throat and it smelled like death.

The two fishermen who bled to death after piranha-like fish bit off their penises, the swimmer who suffocated after being paralysed by one of the fifty known species of venomous sea snake, the little girl who never woke up after being left home alone with a giant python, the railway workers devoured by a lion, the surfer who pleaded to be allowed to die after losing an arm to a shark, the little girl dragged from her home by a pack of wolves none of these people expected to die. As a witness to one such horror remarked: They say its like a bullet you never see the one that gets you.

However, that isnt always the case.

Seeking young, well-built male 18-30 years old for slaughtering read an internet advertisement in 2002. Would you have replied to it? Well, several young men did, and one a computer technician by the name of Brandes shared a dish of his own flambed penis with his killer before allowing the Internet Cannibal to eat him alive.

Though less perverted, the outcome was not so very different in the old days for shipwrecked sailors and passengers: all too frequently they faced what became known as the custom of the sea. Take, for example, the seven English sailors who, in the seventeenth century, set out on a voyage planned to last only a few hours but, instead, got blown off course and were lost at sea for seventeen days. When their meagre supplies of food and water ran out, hunger and thirst drove them nearly insane. Out of desperation one of the crew suggested they draw lots to decide which of them should die to feed the rest and who should act as the executioner. By a quirk of fate, the man who came up with this idea drew the short straw: he was killed, his blood drunk and his body eaten.

In the pages which follow you will find hundreds of true, often firsthand accounts of nightmare situations in which men, women and children lose their lives or parts of their bodies to creatures with teeth, fangs, tentacles, claws and beaks. The stories are grouped into five sections by type of location: low-lying areas such as grasslands, islands, and deserts; woods, forests and jungles; rivers, lakes and seas; in and around villages, towns and cities; and, finally, hills and mountains. No matter where in the world you live, there is a maneater not far away.

Some pieces are extracted from books by famous authors, some are by heroic explorers, some are from newspapers and other types of media; they come from all over the world. Many are horrifying to read, some are moving, a few are weird, and a very few are incredibly funny.

This book is, of course, meant to be a good read, but I hope you will also find parts of it enlightening even if you only learn which type of bear you must stand up to, and which type you play dead with. However, this does not pretend to be a Teach Yourself How to Survive an Attack by a Maneater guide, and nor is it an encyclopaedia. What you are about to read, though, is a huge, amazing collection of true accounts of bloodthirsty attacks by maneaters past and present.

Alex MacCormick

We are so far from nature that we have forgotten the sheer viciousness of the animal world. Reducing wildlife to cute domesticity has its dangers, believes Stuart Wavell, who wrote the essay below in 1994.

The polar bear was intent on premeditated murder. Its victim was an adult male walrus basking on an ice-pan sunning area which the Inuit call uglit. Normally, the great white predator of the Arctic would be deterred by the sheer bulk of a walrus more than twice the bears weight and the deadly tusks protruding from its lower jaw, but on this occasion the polar bear possessed the opportunity and the means.