Of Lion Paw and Tiger Jaw

Of Lion Paw and Tiger Jaw Review

OF LION PAW AND TIGER JAW--Stories

Humans may not be the only animals who crave freedom.

In these stories, we enter the minds of thirteen wild creatures and the people interacting with them. No anthropomorphizing here--these beasts may be sentient, but they do not think like us. Whether encountering an Alaskan eagle nervous about a photographer stalking its nest or a captive tiger aching to kill a deer, we step through these pages into an alien world.


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The animals in these works do not reason in the same way people do. When a gray whale finds itself stranded on a California beach, it has no frame of reference for the dog that comes to sniff its overheated body. Nor can an orangutan in an Indonesian rehab center understand the origins of the flood threatening its cage.

The interior world of non-humans can only be explored through fiction--fiction based on what scientists have learned both in the laboratory and in the field. Only through story can we understand the perspective of a giraffe struggling through a nasty drought, or what might go through a white shark’s neural bundles when it encounters a sea awash in tuna chum, or the pain an elephant feels from a poacher’s bullet.

People living close to animals best understand how they are different, yet similar to humans. Nature photographers, zookeepers, wildlife biologists, even Central American macaw smugglers, have knowledge of wild creatures urban humans lack. And so within this volume we find a scientist exploring the underwater Antarctic world of a leopard seal, a drunk getting a bit too close to a polar bear in Churchill, Manitoba, and a crocodile expert in Northern Australia with a grudge to settle.

In a world where ever-growing human populations steal more and more ecologic carrying capacity from wildlife, it might behoove us to try to understand the animal mind. To understand a creature is to know it; to know it is to love it; and to love it may help keep it alive.

"These stories are, in both volumes, almost without exception, tight, crisp, and incredibly original. Vanstrum displays an extraordinary facility for this format of prose fiction."

--John A. Murray, author of more than 40 books, including Cinema Southwest and The Sierra Club Nature Writing Handbook.