ZARA’S TALES(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　From adventurer, explorer, photographer, writer, pied piper
Peter Beard—eleven irresistible tales, told to his daughter in his
tented encampment at Hog Ranch, Kenya, about life, about living,
about Africa.
　　He writes of the East African hills he came to know so well over
four decades, where time slows to infinity in a great bottomless,
bottle green underwater world . . . about Nairobi in the 1950s,
still a quaint, eccentric pioneer town, full of characters of all
stripes and tribes, where rhinoceros roamed the streets and local
residents went to the movies in pajamas.
　　He writes of the camp he built twelve miles outside of Nairobi so
that he would never be off safari, a forty-acre patch of bush
called Hog Ranch (abutting Karen Blixen’s plantation), named for
the families of warthogs who wandered into camp, a camp populated
with waterbuck, suni, dik-diks, leopard, giraffe, and occasionally
lion and buffalo.
　　In “Big Pig at Hog Ranch,” Beard tells the story of Thaka
(translation from the Kikuyu: “handsome stud”), Hog Ranch’s
number-one, fearsome, 300-pound warthog, who came into camp and
dropped to the ground happy for a vigorous tummy rub, and who one
night, “lying in his favorite position, munching on corn and
barbeque chicken,” was encroached upon by a bristly haired,
wild-looking boar hog. All three hundred pounds of Thaka exploded
straight at the hairy intruder, the two brutish, bony heads
crashing together thundering through the camp and Peter witnessed
the unleashed power—the bullish strength—of the wild pig . .
.
　　In “Roping Rhino,” Beard tells of his first job in Africa,
rounding up and relocating rhinos for the Kenya Game Department
with his cohort and neighbor, a weather-beaten native of Old Kenya
who thrived on danger and refused to bathe—and of the enormous
silver-backed rhino bull that became their Moby Dick . . .
　　He writes of his quest to photograph overpopulated and
habitat-destroying elephants for Life magazine on the eve of
Kenya’s independence . . . of his close encounter with the
legendary man-eating lions of “Starvo” (descendants of the famed
beasts rumored to be immune to bullets, who in the late nineteenth
century halted the construction of the Mombasa railroad, devouring
railroad workers and snatching sleeping passengers from their
Pullman berths in the dead of night to make a meal of them), who
charged the author, “coming in slow motion, like a bullet train
erupting out of a tunnel, soundless, like an ancient force.”
　　He tells of his round-the-clock adventure tracking and studying
crocodiles with a game warden–biologist at Lake Rudolf, a tale that
begins with one crewmember being grabbed from behind by a ten-foot
crocodile and another doing battle with an almost prehistoric
monster fish—a 200-pound Great Nile perch! . . . and he writes of
the final wildlife encounter that ended his safari days, an
incident that proved Karen Blixen’s motto: “Be bold, be bold . . .
be not too bold.”
　　Zara’s Tales confirms to our constant surprise and delight that
“nothing out of the ordinary happens. It’s just Africa, after
all.”