The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

Softcover, 346 pages. In 1898 John H. Patterson arrived in East Africa with a mission to build a railway bridge over the Tsavo River. Over the course of several weeks Patterson and his mostly Indian workforce were systematically hunted by two man-eating lions. In all, 100 workers were killed, and the entire bridge-building project was delayed. As well as being stalked by lions, Patterson had to guard his back against his own increasingly hostile and mutinous workers as he set out to track and kill the man-eaters. Patterson's account of the lions' reign of terror and his own attempts to kill them is the stuff of great adventure. Consider this description of the aftermath of an attack by the lions: "...we at once set out to follow the brutes, Mr. Dalgairns feeling confident that he had wounded one of them, as there was a trail on the sand like that of the toes of a broken limb.... we saw in the gloom what we at first took to be a lion cub; closer inspection, however, showed it to be the