Spotted Hyena
Erco "Boela" Janse van Rensburg woke up at 04:30 in his tent at the Crocodile Bridge Camp to find a hyena's jaws around his head.
After biting Erco's face, the hyena dragged the 15-year-old by the collar of his pyjama top before sitting on him, Netwerk24 reported.
The boy's grandfather, Basie Smalberger, told Netwerk24 that Erco described the harrowing sound like "chips breaking in a packet."
When he was found, a nurse applied first aid at the camp, before his parents rushed him to a hospital in Nelspruit. He was then transported by helicopter to Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg where he underwent plastic and reconstructive surgery to his mouth and jaw.
Comment: The North American Craton, an unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent, experiences an ongoing squeeze play from a) Pacific Plate and N. American Plate subduction activities steadily pushing eastward, and b) the Mid Atlantic Ridge spreading westward. In the middle is the New Madrid Fault Zone. Its last big earthquake was felt from the Rockies to the Atlantic coast, and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. Though the spacing history between eruptions suggests it is not due, given the rapidly increasing PAC-RIM earth changes of late, concern is not unfounded.