Maneaters & Marauders - Tapa dura

This is a thrilling chronicle of the author's death-defying pursuits of Africa's most dangerous beasts of a time over forty years ago. Taylor describes his adventures when hunting down man-eaters and marauders, whether they be lions, crocodiles, or elephants. It is the accumulation of all the dangerous adventures Taylor met with during his thirty-five years as an ivory hunter. During that time, while living in Nyasaland and Mozambique, Taylor quite often received an SOS from the natives to dispatch a man-eating cat or a rogue pachyderm. In one instance Taylor dispatched, in the time span of a few weeks, a pride of eleven lions that had terrorized an entire district. Some of these man-eating lions were so frightful that the natives gave them specific names, such as the Benga Man-Eaters, the Maiembi Man-eaters, and the Nsungu Man-eaters. As Taylor himself noted, 'Those who have not lived among the natives of East and Southern Africa can have no conception of how numerous man-eating lions are in some areas'. As if the man-eating cats were not bad enough, there are also stories of bad-actor buffaloes and elephants that raided native crops or trampled a hapless individual or two. John Taylor was a born raconteur, and the colorful descriptions of his hunts of a time long gone will bring you face to face with some of the most ferocious killers of the African bush.