(An apt contribution from a Tell-Tale Heart: Ray Brandes asks about your formative flame!)
A man-eater is a carnivorous animal that has developed a taste for human flesh. Such animals, usually big cats, sharks or crocodiles, appear suddenly and without warning, creating terror and wrecking havoc upon communities.
In Monster of God, a fascinating book on the subject, David Quammen suggests that humans are fascinated with man-eaters because they raise our “awareness of being meat.” He says great and terrible flesh-eating beasts have been a part of our psyche ever since the days when “every once in a while, a monstrous carnivore emerged like doom from a forest or river to kill someone and feed on the body. It was a familiar sort of disaster — like auto fatalities today — that must have seemed freshly, shockingly gruesome each time, despite the familiarity.”
Some of the beasts are legendary:
- In Burundi, Central Africa, a massive 22-foot-long Nile crocodile named Gustave is the largest crocodile ever seen in Africa. He is rumored to have claimed as many as 300 victims from the banks of the Ruzizi River and the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika. He is known to hunt and leave his victims’ corpses uneaten.
- In 1991, the largest man-eating lion on record, the Man-Eater of Mfuwe, terrorized the residents of Zambia’s Laungwa River Valley. After devouring its sixth known victim, this lion paraded through the streets, roaring and carrying a clothes bag that it had taken from the victim’s home.
- In March 1898 the workers building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in East Africa were terrorized by two large male lions that killed and ate nearly 140 railway workers. The 1996 film “The Ghost and the Darkness” tells the story of the hunt for these lions.
- The worst bear attack in Japanese history occurred over six days in December 1915, in Sankebetsu, when a large brown bear awoke from hibernation hungry and in a bad mood. He proceeded to attack several houses and kill seven settlers.
- In the mid-’80s, a six-pack of Indian wolves killed and ate 17 children in the Sehore district of Madhya Pradesh.
- In perhaps the most unexpected series of attacks, giant goonch catfish that inhabit the Kali river in Northern India and Southern Pakistan killed three people between the years 1998 and 2007. Biologists believe the fish developed a taste for human flesh after feasting upon corpses thrown into the river during funerals.
The term has developed other connotations, of course. The man-eater, or more delicately, the femme fatale, is a familiar archetype in our culture. Hall and Oates’ horrible early-’80s earworm describes her thusly: “The woman is wild, a she-cat tamed by the purr of a jaguar.” If it seems a little bit harsh to compare a human object of desire to a flesh-eating monster, consider that many a teenager has had his world ripped apart by an unrequited admiration for a beautiful beast, his heart crushed by an adolescent crush.
For our purposes, however, the term “man-eater” is more than a little sexist. No one is immune to the insecurities of youth. Men and women are equally prone to pine for the unattainable.
So whom did you admire from afar? Who held the power to render you flat-footed and tongue-tied? Rather than rehash the long-forgotten details of a romance gone wrong (which would certainly bore even the most interested readers among us) here’s a chance to confess your fondness or fancy for the one who slew your heart from a distance. Who was your Underground crush?
— Ray Brandes