Captured by the Law of the Jungle : Nature: Sy Montgomery has devoted years of her life to the study of the imperiled man-eating tigers.

When the waitress mentions that one of the day’s specials is shark, Sy Montgomery laughs. “What a delightful irony,” she says. “To be eating a top predator while we’re talking about tigers.”

Montgomery, a 37-year-old journalist and author, has been talking a lot about tigers lately. Touring up and down California to promote her acclaimed new book, “Spell of the Tiger” (Houghton Mifflin), she’s been telling wide-eyed audiences about what it’s like to live among some of the most dangerous predators in the world. (The New York Times has called the book moving and fascinating.)

Her tigers are the legendary man-eaters of Sundarbans, a cyclone- and flood-prone area of mangrove swamps--the largest in the world--between India and Bangladesh on the Bay of Bengal just north of Calcutta.

Most tigers in India and elsewhere tend to be shy, nocturnal creatures. They’ll eat people occasionally, if they encounter them, because, as Montgomery explains, “we’re meat to them, 100 pounds or more of food.” Still, they won’t go out of their way to pursue humans.

But the tigers of Sundarbans (pronounced SHUN-der-bun) are a different sort of cat, to say the least. “They don’t obey the same rules as tigers elsewhere,” she says. Indifferent to day or night, land or water, they’re deliberate, determined man-eaters.

“And I’m not being chauvinist when I call them man-eaters,” she explains. “They kill only men, not because they consider female flesh any less of a meal, but because women stay behind in the villages, out of their way, while the men are always invading the tigers’ territory--fishing, cutting trees and collecting honey in the mangroves. So when the men show up, it’s like a pizza delivery for the tigers.”

Although there are no accurate statistics, Sundarbans’ tigers are believed to kill about 300 people a year, a figure all the more astonishing considering there are probably no more than 300 of them left.

No one knows why the tigers are so aggressive, Montgomery says. One scientist has speculated that the mangrove’s salty water damages their kidneys, making them bad-tempered. Another possibility is that the tigers acquired their taste for humans while scavenging on incompletely cremated bodies in the Ganges River. Probably, humans are just an easy meal.

Indeed, Montgomery explains, the people of Sundarbans accept the killings with an incredible stoicism. There are no calls to hunt down the tigers, as there have been in the United States against far less ferocious predators; nor is there any bitterness against the tigers for the killings. There is only fear and awe.

“In Sundarbans, the tiger is a god, to be appeased and honored, not killed,” she says.

Montgomery knows that chasing tigers in an obscure corner of the world isn’t everybody’s idea of fun. Even some of the people of Sundarbans, although hospitable, wondered what this Western woman was doing off the usual tourist routes. But Montgomery, who has made three journeys to Sundarbans--living with the people in their thatched huts and going out in their small fishing boats--considers these pilgrimages her dharma , or destiny.

*

A self-described Army brat, the only child of a tough-minded brigadier general named Austin James Montgomery, she has been interested in animals as long as she can remember. In Frankfurt, West Germany, where she was born, she took a prescient visit to the local zoo as a toddler (“I’m told I was fascinated by the tigers,” she says).

Today, at her home in rural Hancock, N.H., where she lives with her writer-husband, Howard Mansfield, she keeps a menagerie of beasts, including a cockatiel and a lovebird, a border collie, assorted free-ranging chickens and a 600-pound pig named Christopher Hogwood. (“He’s safe because I’m a vegetarian and my husband’s kosher,” she deadpans.)

After studying biology, English and journalism at Syracuse University, she took a job as a business reporter at the Buffalo (N.Y.) News, but business wasn’t what she wanted to write about. When a smaller newspaper in Bridgewater, N.J., beckoned with an offer to cover science, medicine and the environment, she jumped at the chance. “It gave me the autonomy to write about what I love--the natural world, which had always fascinated me,” she says.

With characteristic verve, she indulged this interest in a very direct way, by joining an Earth Watch expedition to southern Australia to study a rare, burrowing marsupial called the southern hairy-mouthed wombat. Apart from giving her a test of the joys and hardships of field research, the trip stirred a new interest: the lives and careers of three largely self-taught scientists, Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall and Birute Galdikas, who went off into the wild to study humankind’s closest kin--gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans, respectively.

“They became my three heroines, my passion,” she says. Forsaking newspapering for the perils of free-lance writing, she began writing their biography. The result was “Walking in the Shadow of the Great Apes” (Houghton Mifflin), a book not only welcomed by feminists as overdue recognition of the important contributions of women to science, but also praised by critics generally. It was a finalist in the science category for the 1991 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and named as one of that year’s notable books by the New York Times.

*

Montgomery--she refuses to reveal the full form of her first name (“my husband hates my real name”)--got interested in tigers because they’re the most fearsome land predator.

“Alongside a full-grown 800-pound Bengal tiger, a large male lion looks almost puny,” she explains. Understandably, almost everywhere the tiger roams, people endow it with powers beyond those expected of other animals. “It evokes a reverence, dread and wonder accorded no other creature.”

Yet for all its powers, real or imagined, the tiger is deeply imperiled. Only about 7,000 tigers--less than half in India--remain in the wild. They’re not only being squeezed out of their ancient habitats by a growing population, but also threatened by poachers eager to satisfy a thriving international market for tiger parts--whiskers, sinews, bones and penises--used as elixirs and aphrodisiacs. Many experts predict tigers may be gone in 10 years.

In Sundarbans, Montgomery found the relationship between people and tigers especially complex. “The tiger’s presence permeates life there. You’re always watching for the tiger, always aware it’s out there,” she says, her voice lowering to a breathy whisper.

“Some villages have lost so many of their men to tigers they’re called vidhaba pallis --tiger widow villages. But the tiger isn’t just an object of fear. It gives life to legends and prayers,” she says. “People worship Daksin Ray--the tiger god. The tiger shapes the area’s history. It preserves the forests and its resources through the fear it evokes and thereby, ironically, the people’s way of life.”

Montgomery sensed the presence of tigers on all her visits to Sundarbans--and saw tiger paw prints everywhere. Yet in spite of numerous forays into the forest, she caught only the briefest glimpse of one of the big cats. She spotted it just as it emerged from the water and disappeared into the forest after it had apparently paddled silently near her boat, possibly in hopes of snatching a meal. Even so, she adds, “I’m sure plenty of tigers saw us.”