Columns - 17 August 2009
One thing I couldn’t stomach … being eaten by a wild animal
I have never been eaten by anything and I don’t really want to be. Once, when I was very small my sisters’ horse mistook me for a carrot and tried to swallow me whole, beginning with the thumb that was holding the carrot.
My screams, powered by all the breath my little lungs could expel, scared the horse and he dropped me faster than Jacob has dropped Shabby Shaik. I had a black thumbnail for months afterwards, and was convinced that if you looked carefully, you could see, deep in the bruise, the indent of a horse’s tooth.
Then there was an incident in the surf just beyond the backline in Durban.
I had paddled my surfboard beyond the big swells and turned to wait for a wave to ride back to shore when my foot touched something fishy.
There were no shark nets at that section of the beach. Seconds after my foot touched that fishy skin I was up on my back legs and running across the waves back to shore faster than a “chicken through the corn.” Back on the beach in no time at all, I was very happy to count five whole toes at the end of each foot and prepared to consider that it may have been a dolphin that my foot had touched.
Bill Bryson, in his book, Down Under about Australia tells the story of Howe and his wife Carmel who were nearly eaten by crocodiles.
Howe, much to Carmel’s chagrin, had hired a very small boat to go fishing because it was cheaper than the big boat. They putted off to a deserted inlet and once they had selected their spot, killed the motor. After a few minutes Carmel saw an approaching croc, and more on a riverbank opposite them. Howe leaped to his feet but could not start the motor and when he did the boat was pointing in the wrong direction for an escape. “After crashing into banks and a little affectionate discussion with my wife, about how we were going to die in a minute and its all my fault we turned around,” he said, and managed to get away.
Anyone who has read Hold my Hand I’m Dying by John Gordon Davies will know that being taken by a croc dragged into an underwater cave and being left to rot until you are soft enough to eat, is no prospect at all.
Lots of little things have tried to eat me. Including a solifugit spider in the Rischtersveld, but none have a chance of success in spite of what they say about eating an elephant one bite at a time. Ants, ticks and fleas and mozzies have very small mouths and you can slap them away before they have done too much harm. Friends, lovers and enemies can also bite, but they do not eat.
I am particularly delighted that I have absolutely no idea what its like to be eaten by a grizzly bear.
This is apparently what happened to a 74-year-old woman in Denver Colorado, according to this newspaper, earlier this week. Donna Munson had apparently been told, often, for a number of years in fact, that feeding bears was not a good thing to do. Much like Table Mountain National Park staffers tell visitors to Cape Point not to feed baboons. But people still feed the baboons and Mrs Munson kept feeding the grizzlies.
When her body was found there were apparently scratch and maul marks on it. Later a rogue grizzly, menacing about the place, was shot. An autopsy revealed traces of human flesh.
No one has, to my knowledge, been found inside a baboon at Cape Point. I saw a picture once of a baboon playing with a cell phone that he had stolen from a parked car. That’s not much to worry about. But I’d be very scared indeed if I were a tourist and I saw a baboon with a copy of a Jamie Oliver cookbook. It’s best I think, that we don’t feed wild animals and they don’t eat us.
This column appeared in the Cape Times on 17 August 2009.
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