Invisible Beasts.
Tales of the animals that go unseen among us.
Sharona_Muir.
Introducing Invisible Beasts.
I come from a long line of naturalists and scientists going back many generations, and in each generation we have had the gift of discovering hard-to-see phenomena, from a sh.e.l.led amoeba lurking between two sand grains, to the misfolded limb of a protein pointing to a genetic flaw. This book also follows a venerable family tradition, but one never exposed to public view. Perhaps "trait" would be a better word than "tradition." Every so often, that is, every second or third generation, someone is born in our family who sees invisible animals. Our clan accepts the odd-sighted person without quibbles or qualms, in the spirit of generous tolerance and fun that animates the scientific community. In the late twentieth century, the odd-sighted arrival was myself. My induction into the family"s att.i.tude was typical. As a small child, I complained to my granduncle Erasmus-my predecessor, the elder spotter of invisible beasts-that since no one liked to go with me to catch invisible beetles, I wanted to see only what the other kids saw. From a height beclouded with cigar smoke, Granduncle rumbled, not unsympathetically: "And what if Leeuwenhoek had wanted to see only what other people saw?" I retorted that Leeuwenhoek had had his microscope, but I couldn"t make the other kids see what I saw. They didn"t look hard enough. They didn"t try, they didn"t care, they laughed at me, and so forth. I must have sounded quite upset, because-like a monstrous barrier reef looming through brownish waters-the grand-avuncular mustache approached my face and stopped within a few inches, smelling of ashes and leather; I observed Granduncle"s nostril hairs in the defile above his mustache, flying on his breath like pinfeathers.
"It"s not how hard you look, Sophie. It"s the way you see." A tusky yellow smile nailed these words to my mind. Decades later, they have led to this book.
Why have I written a book that could expose me, and my family, to ridicule and imputations of lunacy?
If the animals I saw weren"t invisible, this book would not be unusual; it would be merely another in the current trend of wildlife catalogs. With the rate of species extinction at some four per hour, one hundred per day (according to Richard Leakey), how could we not create such projects as the online ARKive, where you may see and learn about the most imperiled animals? Ma.s.s extinction influenced me to write, especially because, for the first time, the family gift of seeing invisible beasts has not skipped a generation, but has descended directly to my nephew. I should have been Granduncle"s age before meeting my replacement; and I suspect that this acceleration is linked, somehow, to the urgency of biological crisis.
But-you may ask-if these are my concerns, why strain credibility by writing about phantoms? Why not join with other eco-minded citizens and write about saving the animals that we agree exist, because we can all see them?
To this reasonable question, I respond with my granduncle"s words: it"s in the way you see. I believe the time has come to share the way I see. That is, expressed in a nutsh.e.l.l: Human beings are the most invisible beasts, because we do not see ourselves as beasts. If we did, we would think and act differently. Instead of believing ourselves to be above animals, or separate from them, we would understand how every aspect of our lives-spiritual, psychological, social, political-is, also, an aspect of our being animals. As it is, our understanding is superficial: everyone "knows" that he or she is a beast, yet how many of us ponder our animality, our condition of a creature among creatures, as we do our economy? We don"t even have the proper words. Look at how animal and beast are used. Do you think you"re a beast? Not really. Not you. I, however, seeing animals where no one else does, am that much more aware of our human blindness-a blind spot in our collective mind, roughly the size of the planet, that"s turned on every creature including ourselves. Our distorted vision of life will only be corrected when we see the beasts that we don"t see. How can we? For starters, read on.
Some decisions should be explained. I have selected a limited number of invisible beasts out of the many that I have observed, as well as scores of others recorded by my granduncle and the beast spotters before him. A principle of selection was needed, but was hard to find. Entertainment? Any beast is as good as a circus-better, if you loathe circuses. Beauty? Not if the reader can"t expect to see them. Oddity? Show me the animal that isn"t surprising, and I"ll show you a Disney film. Usefulness as pets? Not the Kraken. Finally, I decided to select those animals that taught me things I don"t forget. Broadly put, the beasts you"ll meet here are those who teach a memorable lesson in the meaning of their particular company to the human animal.
Another decision was to include more personal details than usual in a catalog of natural wonders. Without anecdotal touches, I would not be able to explain, for instance, why it"s a misfortune when your Truth Bats desert you, or how I solved the riddle of invisible dogs. My family enters the picture as well. My younger sister, Evie, is a biologist specializing in soil science. Without her expert a.s.sistance, I couldn"t begin to describe the lives of invisible creatures. Evie"s enthusiasm is as helpful as her knowledge; she truly enjoys treating invisible beasts as biological thought experiments. She is a natural part of the book, especially since her son, Leif, is this century"s successor to Granduncle Erasmus and me.
The hardest decisions involved organization. How should the animals be named? Greco-Latin taxonomies were out, because those require generations of systematics by people who see what you see. So all names are informal, and I"ve cla.s.sified the creatures according to my best guesses about the kinships between visible and invisible life. The same goes for the categories: common, rare, and imperiled. These are provisional, drawn from long-range observations by me and my predecessors, like population estimates made by a few researchers working in a remote jungle or desert. As with all my conclusions, the categories await scientific verification. I wish to present invisible beasts to the reader without making unwarranted claims; I merely claim my practice to be that of a naturalist, and hope that my descriptions may someday a.s.sist in a more scientific approach to this fascinating subject.
How, then, is the book organized?
My inspiration comes from sunflowers, whose seeds grow in a spiral progression called the Fibonacci series. This book"s chapters take the form of a diminishing Fibonacci series: 8, 5, 3, 2, 1, 1, like the spiral of a sunflower disk (a very young one!) traced inward, taking the reader from a periphery of common invisible beasts, through shrinking circles of imperiled, rare, and others types of beasts, to the central mysteries pondered in the epilogue. Now, the Fibonacci series is one of those mathematical doohickeys, like constants and ratios, that nature seems to carry in her overall pockets and keep handy for routine work. Both scientists and artists use it on occasion, and in its small domain of tasks, the series is not a bad symbol of modest, all-around utility. So let the order of the chapters before you represent my chief wish for this book, modeled after a growing sunflower or paper nautilus: that it be found useful.
Common Invisible Beasts.
1.
We can solve many problems in life by imitating the ways of fellow creatures: this is called "biomimicry." Engineers are biomimics when they study animals, learning from scorpions how to make erosion-proof surfaces, or, from octopi, how to design superior camouflage. Biomimicry is not limited to science, however; we can be biomimics with our imaginations and feelings, too. The Couch Conch teaches as much about love and marriage as it does about durable materials.
The Couch Conch.
A NIGHT OF Pa.s.sION is a hard thing to remember (no pun intended.) The moments blur into a warm blush on your brain, from which it"s hard to extract the details later, if you want to brood over them and confirm just how he did what. So it"s lovely to find a Couch Conch in your bedroom the morning after.
You know when a Couch Conch is spending the night from the atmosphere it diffuses. Your limbs loosen; you have the most marvelous sense of relaxing on some sandy bottom among beds of warm sea gra.s.s in tropical waters. Your lover tastes like fresh oysters and tart wine; his kisses are iridescent, plentiful, while your toes fan apart and wave hungrily. Gravity is suspended for the night as you spiral deeper into spellbound synchrony, warm and wet. His looks are swimming with love, his hand tangles in your hair, his navel is adorable, like a blister pearl, and swells toward your smiling face with each deep breath sounding like the sea, which is the sound of "pink noise" . . . as it"s well-named, since the pink lips of conches waft that same noise to our eardrums.
But, as I said, you find your Couch Conch in the morning after all the delights are past, perched beside the clock radio. And unlike the souvenir sh.e.l.l held to your head in an airport gift shop, the Couch Conch isn"t empty. It is bowing on its foot. You might say h.e.l.lo, or something.
Like its visible kin, a Couch Conch seems the symbol of a perfect union. Its feminine, rosy lip is borne along in eager leaps by its foot, which my dictionary describes as "pointed and h.o.r.n.y," and this hot foot obtrudes from an operculum, which is Latin for "lid." Gazing at your Couch Conch, you hear Nature saying in her peremptory way that every pot has its lid, so get busy and find yours! As if that weren"t enough of a hint, most conches unfurl their gorgeous, pouting lips-so reminiscent of our bodies at s.e.xual maturity-at their s.e.xual maturity.
That"s when a Couch Conch pays its visit to your boudoir. As you gently lift the Couch Conch from your night-stand, careful not to jar its squirming foot-which probes your wrist for plankton, pathetically-you see what makes this creature unique. Its gleaming lip sports ornate and delicate carvings; in the film of pale sh.e.l.l that overlays its radiant pink, there"s an ecstatic face with tousled locks, framed by a pair of hands. In a rondure of magenta, standing nudes, white with pa.s.sion, dig fingers into each other"s rumps. Two lovers are glued in a leggy X, staring at each other. They look like naughty Victorian cameos. In fact the Couch Conch"s cameos, which it acquires at p.u.b.erty, are a natural enhancement to attract mates, much as body piercings or tattoos mark our own debuts. But there"s another surprise in store. Slipping on your gla.s.ses, the better to scrutinize, you bend closer to your kelp-smelling visitor and gasp. You"ve just seen what you look like upside down, in the buff.
Fortunately for your dignity, the Couch Conch is not a camera. The cameos are made by another process, requiring heat rather than light (see below) and possess a personal aura, the je ne sais quoi of a genuine artwork. A camera shows naked bodies that you see: the Couch Conch shows naked moments that you recognize. There"s the moment, stunning, when his finger traced your tense lower lip, which unfairly makes you look thin-lipped because it holds back an avalanche of worries about how you aren"t young enough, thin enough, rich enough, smart enough, and just plain not enough. Your lover saw, laughed, touched, and your poor mouth relaxed. You thought you had been smiling, but only at his magic touch did a smile unfold that you could feel. What a full lip is silhouetted here, in your smile! Now you can put your finger on the memory.
It"s wonderful that mollusks, who don"t care about us, can show us what our bodies express. But mollusks are full of lessons. They know all about the balance of hard and soft, rigidity and acceptance, firmness and flexibility, from the way in which they compose their nacre, the iridescent glaze that makes pearls precious and conches beautiful. We don"t think of beauty in terms of incredible toughness, but it so happens that nacre, that angelic gloss, is d.a.m.n near unbreakable. It"s made of hard crystals and gooey, soft protein. If a crack starts running through the rigid crystals, it stops dead in the yielding goo. Isn"t that worth studying if you"re a human couple?
We humans make an inferior commercial copy of nacre, by sintering. I"m guessing you don"t sinter much. It requires temperatures of around 2000 Celsius. Conches make the real article, which we can"t imitate, while lolling in beds of sea gra.s.s with no more heat than p.u.b.erty calls for, and with no more wasted effort than the lilies whose folded white genitals trumped Solomon in all his glory.
Now, as for the naughty cameos, nothing could be simpler. The Couch Conch"s protein goo is heat sensitive, like infrared film. Our body heat impresses itself on this protein, and as the Couch Conch completes its sh.e.l.l lip, the goo "develops" the heat-images of our ecstasies three-dimensionally by contracting and expanding various layers of crystals. This isn"t hard to grasp. It"s exactly as if a 3-D digital modeling program were a marine life-form with a slimy foot that hung out in people"s bedrooms while they canoodled, then mysteriously vanished around nine in the morning, leaving a fishy whiff and a smear of sand, on its way to find a bodacious Strombus gigas and sp.a.w.n some glutinous egg strands.
2.
Can nonhumans be artists? I suppose "art" is a human concept, yet anyone who has heard a mockingbird singing under a spring moon has heard an animal out-riff Bird; it"s hard to believe they do it without some aesthetic sense. Like ours, the works of nonhumans have individuality. I"ve seen many competent webs made by arrow-shaped micrathena spiders, but only one that was perfectly round, with strands spun as evenly as the grooves in an LP, and not by accident-for it was remade many times-but by the mastery of a single spider. The Feral Parfumier Bees show how animals can make a thing of beauty following a procedure well known to human artists.
Feral Parfumier Bees.
ON A COLD SPRING NIGHT in the Pleistocene, in the midst of forests rubbing like bear pelts against the flinty stars, a bolt of lightning locked onto heaven and earth and staggered in its violent light that froze an entire horizon of shadows. Minutes later, a banner of fire unfurled, smoked, and sank under rainy gusts. In its place lay the ruins of a pitch pine, still hissing, alive with crawling sparks. Some chunks of pine had exploded off the burning boughs, showering hot ash, and smacked into the undergrowth like arboreal meteorites. One had rolled into the mouth of a dire-wolf den whose occupants were out hunting. b.u.mping downward, s.m.u.tched with wolf hairs, jiggling from residual steam in its pitch that jetted it first one way, then the other, it sped over claw-marked dirt and fell ten feet, whoosh, down a crack leading from the wolves" den into the true pores of the earth. It landed in a pocket of rock as a pinball lands in its hole, and there, with ma.s.s subsiding and heat sighing away, it rested for twenty-five millennia.
At first, the thread of steamy incense unraveling at the back of the den caused anxious sniffing from the mother of four dire puppies, who all grew up safely but never experienced, in hundreds of miles of travels, a fragrance anything like their home den"s. Eventually, the den lost the incense smell and, forever, the scent of dire wolves. Gray wolves, red wolves, and timber wolves took their place for a span of time equal to the lives of empires; then coyotes, foxes, groundhogs, and skunks (thanks to the spread of a human empire) overran the burrows of the wolves. By this time the innumerable pines that had bristled in the cold spring lightning were mostly flattened into rivers of asphalt. But the ancient, charred chunk-a great artwork waiting for its audience-stayed intact through the eons, slowly hardening. I should say a word about it.
It was unique. Before being coated in molten pitch, it had clung to a pine branch onto which it exuded a shiny ooze meant to repel weaver ants, though there were no weaver ants anywhere around. It didn"t know that. It clung to its spot: a rough sphere that from a short distance gave the impression of fruitlike translucence, varying with the sunbeams from rosy-peach to yellow amber. Up closer-from the perspective of a giant ground sloth-it got strange. The sloth had no concept of "beehive," much less "hexagon," though a golden ball composed of Tiffany-like translucent grids gave him as much pause as could be sustained by a hungry, incurious guy with claws like personal forklifts. One thing the sloth knew: it smelled good. The next thing he knew, he was galloping about on his ma.s.sive knuckles, making the sound (whatever it was) of Eremotherium hara.s.sed by wasps. He felt wasps, he heard wasps, wasps stung his ears, drilled up his snout, stabbed at his bony little eyes-but he didn"t see any wasps. He left in a hurry anyway. And a defensive swarm of invisible honeybees returned to crawl over their comb in four-bee-thick cosiness, though they had no business to be (or bee) in North America. But they didn"t know that.
These bees were naive newcomers. Their comb, scarcely secreted into place, came there by sheer accident. Natural selection can magnify an accident into a new variation on the theme of life, or let it dwindle into extinction. For all our bees" sloth-banishing activity, they had little defense against dangers like bears-those Pleistocene bears tall enough to have ambled into your house and scratched their chins on top of your Christmas tree. And they had no defense against a North American winter. They were running out of time.
Invisible, or Parfumier, Bees are natives of Asia, where they likely sprang from the oldest lineage of honeybees, the red-bellied dwarf honeybee, Mic.r.a.pis florea. Though n.o.ble in their antiquity, Mic.r.a.pis have never been the brightest bees on the planet-they never learned to waggle-dance, for example. Our invisible Mic.r.a.pis, marooned on a cold, alien continent, never considered sheltering in a cave or hollow tree. Dim aristocrats that they were, they built on a pitch-pine limb the same fragile pavilion that suited their queen in the home lat.i.tudes of cinnamon, vetiver, and pepper. They danced their same, waggle-less, straitlaced beeline, pointing to nectar sources of which they knew absolutely nothing. Out and back they flew, and one can only imagine the discomfort of this genteel sisterhood on finding their honeys and jellies altered beyond repair. Everyone performed her duty: the foragers danced, the cleaners swept and garnished, the porters ported, the nurses nursed, and the queen"s attendants licked her constantly and sped her commands to the colony. Yet nothing smelled right. Their beautiful comb, that sweet home epitomizing the best of vigorous feminine care, reeked of poor levulose levels and unpleasant ratios of copper to manganese. Social insects all agree that life bows to a well-executed plan, so the Parfumiers, confronted with seeping evil, continued to do what they did best, with emphasis. They ranged farther; gathered more data; memorized new landmarks. They pioneered! Veteran foragers-bees of experience, whose antennae alerted to the slightest trace of sugar, who could sniff the very hour at which a flower had unfolded-these exquisitely discriminating Parfumiers got their tongues trapped in heavy-duty, spring-loaded sepals meant for the oversize jabs of hummingbirds. They hauled the icy-tasting pollens of the temperate zone. They scaled saber-toothed roses, mandibular violets, gra.s.ses that could saw through a glacier"s toes. They were as brave as brides.
Yet despite exceptional industry, the honey of the stranded Parfumiers smelled more and more odd. It nourished them, roughly, but somewhere in its aromatic heart lurked an indigestible dissonance, where the chemistries of received wisdom wrestled with the nectars of circ.u.mstance. And their time was running out, though they didn"t know that.
They knew the supreme truth of bees: honey is collaboration. The taste of honey is the taste of sisterhood. Everybody involved in making honey has to agree about such technical matters as the quality standard, when to stop regurgitating the refined product, how long to fan off the excess water, and so on, with many other decisions we"re not aware of as we pour the stuff all over our granola. Unlike us, bees have a sound ma.s.s mind, so good at collective decisions that they don"t even need to be conscious of them. It is also a mind capable of abstract thought. Bees know the concepts of sameness and difference, and the Parfumiers, in their rude spring of exile, had brought home a string of unknown ingredients, one after another, trying to make their honey the same as it used to be. Their approximations tasted like approximations, but each was slightly different from the one before. Then something extraordinary happened, simply because it had to. A point came when the Parfumiers" honey wasn"t a failed version of the same one they used to make, but a whole new thing. I couldn"t say if the Parfumiers" ma.s.s mind consciously read out a royal proclamation to the effect of "Our honey is not the same-then let it be different." But anyone, even a social insect, who tries to realize a plan through successive approximations is eventually bound to realize not the plan itself, but the sum of the differences between plan and reality. That is the procedure of artists, and the invisible bees, working with unknown materials, had produced a great artwork of the olfactory senses. No one could have identified its resemblances to a flower, or even a potpourri of several flowers. Nothing in nature had smelled like it before. Imagine, however, some unlucky person who would die without ever having encountered a flower, a person whose footfalls regularly met cement, whose raised eyes b.u.mped off a dead layer of clouds, whose hopes consisted of daily crusts, and whose fears were so familiar they couldn"t be bothered to wear faces. Smelling the Parfumiers" honey, that sad soul would know precisely what a flower was and what it meant-the heart of change that makes hope possible. Our bees had become like the invisible sisterhood of the Muses: their honey was pure poetry.
BEWARE GREATNESS! Like all art of the highest order, the Parfumiers" unmasked, gently but implacably, our human imperfection. It happened this way: Twenty-five millennia after a pitch-coated honeycomb fell into a hole under a dire-wolf den, I was enjoying a bright spring morning. I was b.u.t.tering toast. Patches of sunlight danced on the kitchen counter, where a smudge of raspberry jam drew a bee through the open window-she flew past my ear, grazing it with her hot hum. My other ear pressed to the cell phone, I listened to my sister Evie. Most people"s voices saw up and down when they"re excited, but Evie"s voice separates into identically-sized syllables all simmering at the same high, maximally efficient pitch, like water heated in a warm pan until convection bubbles, those exactly hexagonal bubbles, cover the surface and simmer according to the same laws of physics that command hexagonal cells in a beehive. I think it"s nice for a biologist"s voice to exhibit one of nature"s fundamental patterns. My sister was telling me about a honeycomb, miraculously preserved from the Pleistocene, complete with the bodies of an unknown, primitive species of Mic.r.a.pis.
"aMy c.r.a.p is"?"
"Apis, bee, micro, small, Sophie! Anyway, my graduate student has been running this mummified honeycomb through batteries of tests," Evie continued, her tone implying that I was intellectually limp though still good enough for her news. She and her student had built models of the dead bees through digital simulation, and, finally, had synthesized a replica of the ancient honey, based on melissopalynological and paleobiochemical a.n.a.lysis. Typically, Evie p.r.o.nounced these terms without lessening the rate and pitch of her speech. She invited me to visit her lab.
"It"s super-incredible. Wait till you smell it."
"Smell what?"
"You won"t believe your nose."
POSTERS OF BRIGHTLY DYED microorganisms, like creepy crawly clerestory windows, decorated the door to Evie"s lab. My baby sister was perched on her swivel chair, at her sprawling bench. Her bangs flipped joyfully at the ends of her sentences. Before I got to see her digitally simulated bee, she insisted that I take a sniff of the reconstructed Pleistocene honey.
"This isn"t a prank? It"s not some kind of drug?"
"I would never give an already crazy person a drug. Come on," she coaxed, handing me a sealed Pyrex retort, its interior coated in small brown beads.
I put my nostril, as instructed, to a tube hanging from the retort, pressed a tiny plastic catch, inhaled, and let out a long whistle. I pressed the catch again, and again, eyes closed, drawing the fragrance into my memory as hard as I could. "That"s enough," Evie warned. "We have to limit its exposure. Sorry-I know it"s tempting."
"Don"t you think . . . it smells a bit like . . . Joy?" I asked.
"Smells like freakin" paradise."
I explained that Joy is a perfume, and Evie shrugged.
"How would I know about French perfumes, with the gorilla I"m married to? Let me show you this bee . . ." She brushed the computer keys. On the monitor, the bee"s foot-long image was reddish and furry. Magnified again, her fur resembled tangles of raspberry cane. "The branched hairs mean she was a good sticky pollen collector. But what was she doing here, Sophie? Honeybees didn"t arrive on this continent till the Pilgrims brought them, and they sure didn"t bring Mic.r.a.pis. That"s an Asian bee."
I looked at the bee, then at my sister, temporarily unable to speak. Scientists are animals too, and if you trigger their instincts, you have only yourself to blame. Images flew past on the monitor; Evie was scouting for a scent.
I was thinking of the Keen-Ears. They are a thriving species of invisible humans, and some of their clans live in caves in my woods. The Keen-Ears tolerate me as a harmless snoop; they don"t understand why I"ve posted signs on their perimeter and check it daily, with my dog, for evidence of trespa.s.s. They have no idea how I"ve fought on zoning boards to keep their habitat untouched, and their existence unsuspected. Unworried, they go about their invisible business, tending their red, furry bees that made the dangerous trek with them-preceding h.o.m.o sapiens by some twelve millennia-out of Asia, across the frigid marshes of Beringia, and down into a land of giant bears and sloths, a lonesome immensity where (as their mournful ballads recount) a beating human heart sounded as loud as thunder and lightning.
The Keen-Ears would not know what I did now. I was making a decision.
Evie lacked one clue to solve her mystery, and it was this: when they die, invisible beasts become visible. (Their bodies go unnoticed, blending into the endless ranks of unknown species.) With that clue, Evie would realize what her Asian bee was, and how it had come to America in the bee-baskets of the primordial Keen-Ears. One word from me, and science could open the vaults of invisible life.
But what would happen to animals impossible to see until they died? The outlook was not good. Humans are not like bees; we did not evolve from predatory wasps into dancing, vegetarian beings whose honey tastes of sisterhood. Humanity"s first reaction to the news would be to go out and kill-kill what we couldn"t see and didn"t understand. Before my mind"s eye rolled a vision of Keen-Ear bodies flung in heaps, tied to truck fenders, stuffed and mounted as trophies. I imagined the TV talk shows and the shrieking Web. I imagined the Keen-Ear survivors, sad toys of defense research, dragging on their lives in sunless laboratories. As for their Parfumier Bees . . . as colonies of visible honeybees went on collapsing, some entrepreneur would doubtless try to farm the invisibles, G.o.d help them. Or they might go feral again, in a world ridding itself of wild bees. These horrors were the likeliest result of giving Evie the clue she lacked.
Yet I owed my sister. She had never belittled my invisible beasts; no, she had always helped me to understand them. She was a cherished guide on the obscure track I pursued in life. And I owed science a debt, too, for giving me, since childhood, my inspiration and a standard of truth.
That is what I imagined, and pondered, while Evie knitted her brows and gazed at her computer screen.
"This bee of yours," I said, steadying my voice, "it"s extinct, of course."
"Well, look at it-it"s practically a wasp. It"s not far from its wasp progenitors, and it"s very, very far from a modern bee. I can"t imagine it"s still around. But," Evie said, nailing me with a look, "nature is usually about what we can"t imagine."
3.
Here (with apologies to Evie) I describe the Keen-Ears, an invisible human subspecies with unusual gifts, whose clans I am privileged to shelter in my woods. The most memorable lesson I"ve learned from them concerns an ancient problem that our species share, and that they approach by emulating ants-no, it"s not about hard work or planning ahead . . .
The Keen-Ears.
WE HUMANS ARE NOT ALONE. A few subspecies of our kind survive in the dangerous company of h.o.m.o sapiens by being invisible. The Keen-Ears live in woodlands east of the Rockies and cultivate the edible tree fungus Laetiporus, or chicken-of-the-woods, which causes wood rot but is considered a delicacy by both visible and invisible humans. The Keen-Ears are master fungus breeders; they create many invisible strains of Laetiporus, puzzling some foresters, who can see that a log is rotting, all right, but cannot see why. Visible Laetiporus looks like an orange brain. In the invisible varieties, the Keen-Ears have bred a palette of colors-teal, mauve, scarlet, ice pink, purple-in concentric, paisley, striped, and marbled designs. Wisely, the Keen-Ears have tampered with visible Laetiporus to keep it from breeding with its glamorous invisible cousins. They don"t want any episodes of h.o.m.o sapiens stumbling onto a psychedelic fungus protruding from a tree trunk, finding out why, then killing or enslaving all the Keen-Ears. With some remorse-because they"re serious about bioethics and believe in sharing the benefits of science-the Keen-Ears think they are justified in keeping their fungus farming secrets from us. They think we mostly prefer mushrooms, anyway.
The Keen-Ears are short, slight, furred, and have large ears that make them look like Hermes in his winged helmet. Their fur is gray and weather-resistant, so they go naked, with a double pelt in winter. Their ears are so keen that they can hear blood coursing through the body"s vessels. Not even the Great Horned Owl can float by them unnoticed; they hear its pulse beating over the treetops as it readies the mouse-sized cage of its claws. This special gift has countless ramifications, most of them enviable.
Among the Keen-Ears, you never see two people trying to move out of each other"s way, apologizing as they both step right or left at the same time. The Keen-Ears can detect the sound of muscles tensing for a movement-like dogs, they can tell when you"re about to get up, or leave the room. At mealtimes, eerily, they share a salt dip without a word or glance from the person offering or accepting. What"s more, each person has a blood-signature which sounds as unique to them as a voice to us. A Keen-Ear lying with eyes closed under a feather blanket knows exactly which child is creeping barefoot to the fried fungus jar. They also hear the turbulence that anger causes, and know the combinations of blood-sound and body language for a wide range of feelings. Living as they do in small clans, their minds are nearly as naked as their bodies. (This makes fistfights challenging, though feasible.) They sometimes talk on algae-powered telephones, but such bloodless communication is called "corpse talk" and viewed as an unseemly necessity.
They have epic songs about the dangers awaiting small, isolated genetic groups like their own clans. The verses they intone, while doing ch.o.r.es in their caves, tell of beasts who selected themselves into an evolutionary cul-de-sac, or outgrew their niches. The Keen-Ears don"t particularly enjoy these mournful lays, but insist that their daily performance is vital to "good health." They call us "Flu-huggers," and say that we have poor bodily health because we don"t sing the tales of the species gone from our habitats. Curiously, the Keen-Ears" songs really do help them prevent disease. The ancient melodies were composed to harmonize with the bloodstream-with the boom of stretched atria or the arpeggios of squeezed capillaries-and the Keen-Ears "play" their blood pressure like an instrument, through biofeedback, while singing. This is very good for their hearts. They also diagnose vascular illness with astonishing precision. From eavesdropping on their gossip, for instance, I learned about my illness long before a doctor noticed anything-"that old snoop with arterial plaque," they called me. (Admittedly, I see the Keen-Ears more often than doctors.) The sheer physical harmony of the Keen-Ears" lives seems to limit antagonism. When five of them sit on a twisted oak-root to peruse a map of fungus stands, they sink onto it as one, gracefully. n.o.body has to scoot over or scrunch in. It"s not surprising that they dance like angels and make love with the ease of the elements. But for all that, the Keen-Ears are human, and for them as for us, love is complication.
Versed in fungus genetics and animal genealogies, the Keen-Ears have long ago mastered the art of breeding themselves; but unlike us, who try such things under the spur of creepy racism, the Keen-Ears enjoy a personal and s.e.xual freedom we can scarcely imagine, coupled with social stability. Their folkways, though unsuitable for our own rambunctious, high-strung species, are yet worthwhile to contemplate. They live in clans separated by gender. Between men"s and women"s caves there is plenty of traffic, and all relationships are possible-business, cultural collaborations of all kinds, professional a.s.sociations, friendships, love affairs, even hauntingly coordinated orgies. But when it comes to making babies, each women"s clan hosts one male guest, who is the exclusive father of any infants born during his stay. After about three years, he rejoins his old clan and the women choose a new man. Genealogies are closely tracked. To prevent inbreeding, a clan father is never invited twice, and incestuous ties are taboo. Sons go to live with their father"s clan in late childhood, but both sons and daughters remain in close touch with their biological parents and siblings. Careful family planning, and tight family and clan ties, mean that no one in the Keen-Ear caves is born unwanted, or dies untended, or lives in poverty-and everybody babysits. How many times I"ve lurked outside a warmly lit Keen-Ear cave, wistfully eavesdropping on conversations in which these precious safeguards are taken for granted.
The marriage rite of the Keen-Ears is the most exotic part of their family arrangements. To choose clan fathers, they have adapted a process of decision-making found among ants and bees.
"It"s time you learned about the ants and the bees," Keen-Ear parents tell their children, clearing their throats. Particularly ants. The lesson sends little Keen-Ear girls scurrying to find anthills, spending hours in rapturous observation, as our own small daughters play at becoming brides. The naughtiest Keen-Ear girls even kick apart anthills for the secret thrill of watching the great event happen. Called "quorum sensing," the process helps ants and bees choose new nesting sites without having to rely on an authority-a judge, boss, or chief-to make the final decision. It begins with scouts; in the case of ants, each scout goes off separately to find a new possible nest site, then scurries back to the colony, delivers a report, and recruits other ants to visit the potential site. Timing is the key to the final decision: ants reporting an inferior site take a little longer, as if mastering some embarra.s.sment, and the delay ultimately counts, as we will see. Though trickles of hurried ants running in and out of rocky crevices may not sound romantic, nothing could be more breathlessly fascinating than the marriage rite of the Keen-Ears, those wise apes of the ants!
IN SPRING, WHEN THE MOON shining through translucent leaves suspends the black trees in a jelly of light, and flowering crabapples perfume the night, the Keen-Ear women dust their bodies with colored powders, hang strings of oak-pollen ta.s.sels from their ears to their glimmering shoulders, and fasten filigree capes, made of leaf-skeletons, from their necks to their ankles. In this ceremonial dress, all the women-from old, bent clan mothers clinging to a youngster"s elbow, to young would-be mothers standing very straight with excitement-visit the candidates for clan fatherhood, who have spent months preparing for the events of this evening, called Niche Night.
It"s not a tryst, n.o.body is going to bed-at least, that"s the official version. This meeting is supposed to be a formal interview, taking place in a rocky niche reserved for the event. The candidate has to show that he can get along with all those eager, fussy females, young and old, who want his genes, his affection, his company, and his help around the cave. His aim is to attract as many of the women as possible to his niche, because the number of visitors will, in the end, decide the outcome of his candidacy.
For a first-time candidate, preparing for Niche Night is a grueling rite of pa.s.sage. Once he has fathered and helped to rear babies, he will have established himself as a Keen-Ear parent, and may be invited, during his life, to several women"s caves. But he has to be picked that crucial first time. The stress is on. He spends weeks researching the clans whose women are likely to visit: their environs, personalities, problems, projects. If he has a girlfriend in the clan, he begs for advice till her ears are ringing. He pumps his female relatives and friends for gossip-do these women like pets? Should he offer a nest of phoebes for their cave ledge? Will it bug them if he cracks his knuckles? He asks his father what made him successful. His father shrugs, and pats him on the back. His mother says, Be Yourself. His sisters laugh. His brothers are all pretending that they know where the best niches are, the ones with waterfall views, but maybe they"ll tell him and maybe they won"t. For days, he has practiced serving up fermented acorn liqueur with a suave flourish. He has memorized compliments, jokes, soulful sayings, earnest plat.i.tudes, and poetry. He has placed his great-great-grandfather"s Pluricorn horn armlet, a priceless icebreaker, where it cannot escape notice.
Quorum sensing begins, as I"ve said, with scouts. Ants send scouts to look at nest sites; the Keen-Ear women send scouts to interview the male candidates. What really happens between the scouts and the candidates is the subject of many jokes and folktales. After all, the Keen-Ears are only human. And though they go naked, a Keen-Ear lady wearing nothing but a netted cape and earrings is not naked, she is fetchingly nude, while a well-set-up Keen-Ear man wearing nothing but warm intentions and yesterday"s love-bites is a force to be reckoned with. The oldest joke about the unofficial aspect of Niche Night goes: "If two women walk into your cave, which one is the scout?"
"The one walking bowlegged." There are the Three Honored Scouts, a famous trio in song and s.m.u.t: the drunk scout, the bowlegged scout, and the scout who is old, drunk, and bowlegged, and always gets the punch line. But at least in public, Keen-Ears don"t admit to hanky-panky on Niche Night.
While the scouts interview the candidates, the other Keen-Ear ladies lounge around the cave, biting their lips, telling stories, playing cards, yawning. The middle-aged women who run everything and everybody confer in low tones, broken by bawdy cackles. The oldest ladies look at each other with rueful nostalgia and quaver, "I hope those boys have a feather roll for my feet." Time elapses, and the lapsed time is the key to the whole process.
As the scouts report back, the wisdom of ants becomes apparent. A Keen-Ear girl reappears in the cave entrance and immediately, the sound of her blood thunders like a snowmelt cataract in everyone"s ears and they cheer, gathering round to hug the scout as she weeps happy tears, speaking the lucky candidate"s name. Another scout returns on the first one"s heels, her blood thrumming pleasantly like m.u.f.fled snare drums. This raises smiles, but also questions: so, what was not to like? She is badgered for details, a.n.a.lysis-a full report, in time-consuming words. Meanwhile, a third scout rushes in, her blood roaring like a forest on fire, her ears flapping with haste, and the clan breaks into applause. By the time the second scout has persuaded a couple of women to visit the nice-but-not-perfect fellow, many others are on their way to or from the first and third scouts" fabulous men-it"s only natural, enthusiasm is infectious. More scouts come in, and the ones whose blood does not speak volumes instantly, who have to give verbal answers, take longer to report and recruit fewer ladies to visit their candidates. As the night wears on, the number of women trekking to and from a particular candidate"s niche reveals who the best choice must be. It is obvious to everyone. No need for an authority to dictate anything. The Keen-Ear women vote with their hearts, their sharp ears, and their feet.
These customs look outlandish to visible humans like you and me-cold-blooded, conformist, full of potential disasters, dystopian, and rather cra.s.s. But suppose we imagine them a little differently? Suppose the male candidates were all the different aspects of one person, and the visiting women were all the different aspects of another person? Quorum sensing is very much like the way we instinctively select the aspects of our mates that suit us best. Over time, as we get to know each other, some aspects will draw us again and again by well-trodden paths, while others will be less visited. Our wives and husbands, partners and lovers, the very people closest to us, are crowded with unknown personalities. But our time together is limited, so we cannot learn them all. We scarcely have time to know ourselves. We stick to a little circle of familiar faces, and are surprised when a new acquaintance speaks up from the pillow, or a stranger offers a cool nod. Now does Niche Night seem more familiar? The Keen-Ears and the "Flu-huggers" share an ancient human problem: love is too big a task for our allotted time.
4.
Anyone can see an invisible beast once it"s dead. Usually, though, the opportunity arises on the roadways after the invisible animal has been squashed flat, and n.o.body stops to inspect it. Biologists sometimes notice the odd corpse, but take it for a specimen of yet another unknown (visible) species; after all, according to the National Geographic, some 86 percent of living species have yet to be described. Viewed in this light, the discovery described here was serendipitous.
The Pluricorn.
THE DRIVER OF A FORD PICKUP spotted something antler-shaped in the breakdown lane. He pulled over, expecting a tasty h.o.a.rd of venison. What he found instead, he photographed and posted on the Web with the caption "Dead Dinosaur Deer." The posting drew comments from the scurrilous to the reflective from hunters, bone hunters, and information gatherers.
"Faking a giant rack is just one of those things a real man doesn"t do," quipped a hunter. A paleontologist posted an earnest plea not to spread dinosaur hoaxes, as they bolstered antiscientific prejudice in the American public. Evie sent me the link with a note: "Pluricorn?"
The photo did resemble a Pluricorn. They live in my woods, and I know no other animal whose males are so patently designed for misery. The best sketch I"ve made of a specimen was typical-a young male, nibbling hawthorn leaves. He was especially pitiable in May, when other species are showing off their renewed beauty and spirits. As I strolled on one of my trails, illumined by new green mists in the boughs of the oaks and ash trees, I saw signs of creaturely grace everywhere. Two red fox pups who lived in a rockpile were sunning and stretching, rumps raised, heads low, tails flourished like new ferns, and on the other end, pink tongues outfurled like petals. A mother Cooper"s hawk, meat in her beak, flew toward her nest through tangled branches as if they melted before her. The very ground lost its dullness where grape hyacinths and violets spread like gaps of sky. And from the throats of toads who resembled clods, issued a sweet trilling chorus that swelled like woodwinds, sank, swelled again, and never ceased.
Into this charming scene came the wretched Pluricorn. The moment I spotted him-a movement of sun-dapples cohering, the way it does, into an animal shape-I knew the reason for certain bizarre rub marks on the hawthorns that earlier had puzzled me. This beast was too hungry to care about my lurking presence. Craning into the leaf.a.ge, he sported a barbed brow horn, a fringe of curly tusks, a horn projecting from his chest, and big spurs, like ivory artichokes, on his rather knock-kneed legs. Over his head, a ma.s.sive rack cast a grotesque, th.o.r.n.y shadow. Poor beast, he kept bashing himself on the hawthorn trunk, or tipping too far to one side and pawing rapidly to adjust. My stomach hurt to see him; how was he going to feed all four of his? Sketching him quickly on my notepad, I a.n.a.lyzed the details afterward.