The Animal Catchers by Colin Willock

Vintage; Book Club Edition; hardcover with dustjacket. Published in 1964. Original owner’s name written inside.

Synopsis: Ted Maxwell's profession is animal catching. His task, when this story opens, is to catch and deliver a herd of white rhinos to the national parks of a central African state. His outfit consists of some oddly assorted vehicles and some even more oddly assorted people. The people exist in a state of precarious antagonism, held together simply by the fact that for them no other way of life is thinkable.

This applies equally to Nancy, Maxwell's wife who was crippled in an earlier catching adventure; to Webb, the young man with a genius for internal combustion engines and not much else; to Ryan, the Irish monkey-catcher roped in to save the safari from dis-aster; and to Maxwell's ward - some say daughter — with whom all three men are physically, if not emotionally, involved. And as though personal tensions were not enough to imperil the venture, the newly independent state in which they are working suddenly explodes into tribal warfare.

Colin Willock went to Uganda for Survival in 1961 to take part in an exciting attempt to rescue a rare herd of white rhinos and move them to the National Park at Murchison Falls. As he says himself: "The trip was one of those sudden jolts of direction that writers need every now and again.

Africa hit me between the eyes like a 404 bullet. I haven't been able to keep away since and have been very lucky because Survival took me back to Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika in 1962 and again in 1963 to finish the research for a book on the Murchison Falls National Park."

Colin Willock is the author of a number of books about hunting and fishing including Kenzie, The Wild Goose Man; Come Fishing With Me; The Angler's Encyclopaedia; and Look at African Wildlife.