This is a book of vivid factual accounts of man-

killing animals on land and sea and of man s

encounters with.them.It exolores the domain

of fear.There are discussions of deadly crea-

tures of the ocean, ranging from sharks to sea

snakes and bizarre highlypoisonous fish that

swim througn coral reefs like mages from a

feverish dream. Early chapters chronicle shark

attacks ana explore legends, of giant squid

Dulling met from ships with their tentacles.

and sea seroents such as the monster seen in

the harbor of Gloucester Massachusetts, by

hundreds of people.

Michael Jenkinson goes on to describe

bloody encounters between grizzly bears and

mountainmen in the American Rockies: the

ways of man-eating tigers and leopards in In-

dia and of lions in Africa the dreaded wolf of

Gevaudan that ravaged the French country-

side in the eighteenth oentury; the horror of

being stalked by a crocodile in the jungles of

central Africa.

The book is about killer bees and the deadly,

crushing coils of the anaconda. It takes one

from the Hopi snake dances of Arizona to fun-

aamentalist rattlesnake sects in Appalachia

and to the sacred cobra cults of India

Here one can read the stones of a man who

actually was swallowed by a Whale. and lived

of the lumbering hippopami that when en-

raged take hundreds of ives in Africa every year: and of the dangerous experiences of the.

author himself, as well as other outdoorsmen,

with giant brown bears in Alaska. "

Within. a framework of carefully researched

zoology, mythology, anthropology, and history,

Michael Jenkinson s primary business is story-

telling.This is a volume of adventures on many

continents and seas,tales that might be told

around a fading campfire after the unexpected

snap of a dry branch out there in the darkness.