2003, The Mountaineers Books, Seattle WA, pages 9-24, and 65-70
Don’t Get Eaten is such a good book, and so dear to my heart as an author of cannibal fiction and ancient history, that it deserves to be reviewed in sections.
The first thing I did was look for an animal I knew nothing about, in order to understand the author’s method of informing the reader. The javelina is a nasty thirty pound critter found in the American Southwest [these are all North American animals] which lives in packs, appears as much rodent as pig, and will ram its gnarly little tusks into your shins as it charges in pack formation. Dave Smith debunks myths as he goes and uses fact boxes in the text.
I then looked for the big critter closest to me in the Mid Atlantic region: the black bear. I did not realize that these things actually attacked and ate people!
With the black bear the primary danger seems to be the fact that humans pack so much chow with them and wear stuff that tastes like chow. Unless you want them to be mistaken for honey, don’t smear any Burt’s Bees lip balm on those lips baby. This ‘roadside’ and campsite situation is exasperated by the fact that black bears do not feed their young or share food in any way, so they will fight for whatever they have gotten into. Oh yes, even the largest black bears climb trees faster than a Navy SEAL can climb a rope.
Accidental situations are played down, as is the ‘mamma bear’ myth, as black bears have a 100-power nose enabling them to easily avoid humans. They are almost impossible to ambush…unless you are my Uncle Bernie. I kept thinking of my Uncle Bernie’s bear, that he had shot in the neck in the Appalachians, and had made into a rug with a head, upon which I used to lay and watch cowboys shoot at Indians on TV while he groused about them not shooting the horses out from under the Indians…
Dave Smith provides survival gold when he informs the reader that wild bears [as opposed to roadside bears] have been known to hunt people. He goes on to offer the same advice that that urban survival genius [I forget his name] offers about human predators [who also tend to be black]: if it is approaching stealthily, you are on the menu. The loud attacker is by nature the less lethal.
I cannot wait to get into the rest of this book, which includes combat advice on how exactly to fight ‘hand-to-paw’ just in case you have misplaced your helicopter gunship…
Yes, black bears can be dangerous. In recent years there have even been incidents where black bears dragged sleeping campers out of their tents. masscops.com/threads/black-bear-drags-boy-from-tent-kills-him.32399
bearstudy.org/website/images/stories/Publications/Summer_of_the_Bear_Attacks.pdf
Naturally these types of attacks are considered to be aberrations by the wildlife experts. Indeed, the majority of black bears are shy and unaggressive; they will usually flee when confronted by a human. The trouble is though that one can never determine with complete confidence when a black bear will become provoked or not. Like the mountain man said, a black bear will only attack you when he thinks he's cornered; the trouble is you can never tell when a black bear will think that he's cornered. The best advice is don't try to pet them or feed them out of your hand.
Actually Jeremy,
As a crackpot sci-fi writer who dabbles in theology I was thinking that maybe the sometimes criminality of black bears could be evidence for the transmigration of souls from ghetto gangbangers to wildlife, and therefore such attacks against largely white campers might actually be transmorgrifant acts of race-based revenge from beyond the grave. Although I do have to admit that your summation is more likely to be accurate.
As always, thanks for the encyclopedic sources and links.
Hmmm...Transmigration of souls eh? Now that you mention it I recall reading in one recent article where one wildlife biologist studying the issue said that a peculiarity of black bear attacks was that the black bears tended not to eat the flesh of their human victims, unlike grizzlies and Alaskan brown bears. Now it could be that black bears simply prefer the taste of organically grown free range meat rather than meat filled with chemicals or....Anyway writing a story about predatory black men being transformed into predatory black bears would be very politically incorrect...Go for it!
By the way here's another case for you: m.sltrib.com/sltrib/mobile3/58416593-219/bear-stewart-utah-attack.html.csp
Thanks for the PC green light and the link!
I've already done an African American wino/crack head transmigrating into the body of a displaced squirrel...