Predators I Have Known by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online Page A

it, eat with it, play with it, swim with it, let your family nuzzle it while they’re watching TV. And then the cat has one bad hair day. If it’s a house cat, you get a scratch. If it’s a dog, you get a nip. If it’s a kid, you get yelled at and maybe cussed out.
    If it’s a big cat, you lose something else. Like maybe the kid. So I put the idea out of my head permanently, if not instantly.
    Those thirty seconds of serious consideration lingered in my mind for an unusually long time.
    Before I left the compound, Felix stood up and stretched. I can tell you that a full-grown male cheetah standing up is a helluva lot more striking than one that is lying down. The attenuated body and the impressively long legs make for one deceptively large animal. Had Felix chosen to stand on his hind legs and put his forelegs on my shoulders, he could easily have looked me in the eye. But we had already done that last bit.
    So there you have it. A fragment of knowledge you won’t find in the guidebooks and one I inadvertently added to the local lore at Mount Etjo. The next male cheetah you meet, don’t try to scratch him between his front legs.
    Not even for the chance of hearing him meow.



IV
THE CUTE LITTLE OCTOPUS AND THE HOMICIDAL SHELL
    East Central Australia, November 1989
    MY WIFE AND I WERE standing on the sweltering tarmac at the little airport in Bundaberg, Queensland, Australia, waiting beside our modest luggage to depart for Lady Elliot Island. I had heard a great deal about the unspoiled beauty of isolated Lady Elliot, usually promoted as the southernmost island on the Great Barrier Reef, and we were both looking forward to a few days’ respite from our planned long drive up the coast from Brisbane to still-distant Cape Tribulation.
    Assuming the well-used aircraft parked in front of us could get us there in one piece, of course.
    I don’t like flying. I’ve had some stunning flights in tiny planes and ghastly flights in big planes and vice versa, but the discomfort and unease in my gut never goes away. The veteran Twin Otter parked before us was already crammed to the gills with supplies for the island’s solitary resort. As the only passengers on this particular flight, we were allowed to seat ourselves wherever we could find space among the stacked crates of biscuits, boxes of canned goods, and cartons of bottled drinks, many of the latter from Bundaberg’s own excellent local brewery.
    “Where’s the rest of the plane?” my wife asked as we prepared to board.
    Fortunately, the air was calm and clear, and the flight itself thankfully devoid of literal ups and downs. Landing on Lady Elliot presented an interesting prospect of its own. There is something unsettling about small island airstrips that extend all the way from one side of your destination to the other. Come in too short, and you end up in the water. Delay touchdown too long or fail to brake in time, and you end up in the water.
    I’ve always been grateful that my love of being in the water tends to cancel out my fear of flying over it.
    We and our minimal baggage were soon settled in our comfortable if basic room, luxuriating in the island’s much-advertised tranquillity, the flitting about of hyperactive sparrow-size yellow-tinged silvereyes twittering in the pisonia trees, and the rhythmic flush of wavelets breaking on the nearby shore. Lady Elliot is not an atoll, but an island with a fringing reef, so at high tide the water rolls all the way in to the island.
    While JoAnn rested, I did an afternoon dive with a small group of fellow visitors and one of the more unpleasant dive masters I’ve ever encountered, but I enjoyed myself anyway. I always do in the water. Whenever I’m diving I’m reminded of Peter O’Toole’s statement while portraying Lawrence of Arabia in the film of the same name. When asked what it is that he, Lawrence, finds so appealing about the desert, O’Toole flatly replies, “It’s clean.” In the context of