Last week I read NO BEAST SO FIERCE: THE TERRIFYING TRUE STORY OF THE CHAMPAWAT TIGER, THE DEADLIEST MAN-EATER IN HISTORY. It’s appropriate the title of Dane Hucklebridge’s book is a mouthful, as it details the story of the Champawat Tiger, a beast that is said to have killed and eaten over 400 people as it prowled the foothills of the Himalayas for almost a decade.
With wonderfully punchy prose and a flair for the dramatic, Hucklebridge’s book offers engrossing parallel stories of both the Bengal tiger that turned a handful of remote villages into its personal all-you-can-eat buffet and Jim Corbett - the legendary hunter turned conservationist - who pursued the man-eater.
NO BEAST SO FIERCE is like a real-life JAWS if, you know, Bruce the shark actually had some professional ambition. Stop slacking, sharks! This tiger was eating a person a week for nearly a decade.
Besides being entertained, reading NO BEAST SO FIERCE had another particular side-effect - I’m now deathly afraid of tigers. Did you know that tigers can imitate their prey to lure them out into the open? Or that they can leap into the air and bite the hands off of people riding elephants? Or that they’ll sometimes swim out into a lake and hunt animals that were taking a dip? Really trying to put sharks out of business, aren’t you tigers?
Hucklebridge’s book - with its vivid descriptions of the hunting and killing skills of tigers - has left me in awe of these mighty beasts. I will probably never actually be in the presence of a tiger - but what about mountain lions? They are basically just smaller tigers and those suckers live in my backyard. Well, kinda. And my own cat is practically a micro-tiger! What if she bulks up and learns to strike for the neck when she’s playing with me instead of my toes?
A few years ago I read about a haunted house in which you have to apply in order to walk through it. During the application process, you are expected to list the various things you’re afraid of so that the haunted house can create a bespoke experience tailored to your personal phobias. This actually is a really interesting idea because I would love to visit a haunted house that focuses on the very specific list of things I’m afraid of:
Strangers being able to read my thoughts
Not amounting to anything in my life
Dying alone
Being forgotten
Losing my mind to psychosis or degeneration
Cockroaches
Dying in my apartment and not being discovered until my body starts to smell and my cat has eaten part of my face
Being perceived as a bad person
Heights
Accidently driving off the edge of the roof of a parking garage because I was playing with my cell phone
Being arrested (and cops, in general)
Making bad decisions that I’ll spend the rest of my life regretting
Dying too young
Dying too old
Tigers