Beastcatcher

WILD CARGO--Frank Buck and Edward Anthony--Simon & Schuster ($3).

Wrhen Frank Buck was a boy near Dallas, Tex., he used to spend most of his time in the woods making friends with birds and bullfrogs. Later he went to South America to collect rare birds for his own amusement, but he was offered so much money for his collection that he decided to make a business of animal-catching. Now, after five trips around the world, 40 Pacific crossings, after knocking out an orangutan in a fist fight, collecting hundreds of wild beasts in his own depot at Singapore and a number of scars on his person, he is famed as one of the world's leading animal catchers. He has supplied many a U. S. zoo with first specimens, stocked the Dallas zoo in its entirety. Two years ago he collected 18 of his most hair-raising adventures into a book, Bring 'Em Back Alive (TIME, Oct. 6, 1930). Wild Cargo contains 18 more hair-raisers. Items:

In Malaya Beastcatcher Buck trapped three black leopards for Dr. Raymond Lee Ditmars of the New York Zoological Park. Black leopards are sports, are constantly being produced by Malaya's spotted leopards. They, too, have spots--under the fur. A Buck theory: that all the leopards in the Malay Peninsula will be black in a few hundred years. One of his captives he named Spitfire II because of its likeness to another black leopard that had once removed a piece of the Buck thumb. Spitfire was caged on the deck of a Chinese-manned boat bound for Singapore. Nearby sat a Chinese butcher sharpening a knife. The butcher plunged his knife into a pig's throat, Spitfire smelled blood, burst from his cage, leapt over the side. Beastcatcher Buck felt his hair-roots tingle as a shark's fin cut the water near the swimming leopard. The shark struck, threw the leopard clear of the water, holding to his hindquarters.

"Spitfire's muscles used that jaw as a fulcrum to throw his teeth and claws into action, anywhere, against this strange enemy. Somehow the leopard swung himself around the shark's head . . . quickly discovering two vulnerable resting places for his terrible claws--one under the shark's right eye, which Spitfire ripped out--the other in an opening in the gills, which he clawed through with a single gouging sweep. . . ." The shark let go, but before Spitfire could escape another shark got him, and the last Mr. Buck saw of him they were tearing him to pieces.

An anoa (pygmy water buffalo) weighing 200 Ib. attacked and killed a 350-lb. nilgai. Animalcatcher Buck named him Little Tough Guy, but a few days later he found him cringing in a corner of his cage. Nearby was a 7-lb. porcupine.

In the jungles near Singapore three man-eating tigers staged a man-eating contest. Winner was one known as the Killer of Kuali, with 35 deaths. Mr. Buck wanted one of his victims used to bait a trap, but that was against the law. "To hell with that law!" said Buck, and whispered his secret to a Tamil shooter. A few days later the Tamil posed a dead Malay as bait, shot the killer.

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