Invisible Beasts (5 page)

It's not a tryst, nobody 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 passage. 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 platitudes, 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 smut: 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 muffled snare drums. This raises smiles, but
also questions: so, what was not to like? She is badgered for details, analysis—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 crass. 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

A
nyone 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 nobody 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

T
HE DRIVER OF A
F
ORD PICKUP
spotted something antler-shaped in the breakdown lane. He pulled over, expecting a tasty hoard 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 leafage, 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 massive rack cast a grotesque, thorny 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 analyzed the details afterward.

Chinese water deer have tusks, though fewer than the Pluricorn. Most of his equipment looks like antler tissue
gone berserk, but his leg spurs look like naked bone protruding from under his skin. That has to hurt. Pathologies come to mind, galloping bone cancers . . . Such airy speculation embarrasses me, though, since without proper scientific study, I have no proof that the Pluricorn is a deer at all. Marco Polo once wrote a fine description of a unicorn that he'd actually seen, which happened to be a rhinoceros. For all I know, the Pluricorn is a very unusual crab. Science alone can settle this question. Tempting as it is to throw up one's hands, however, I cannot leave the subject without an educated guess. I would guess that the Pluricorn is struggling down a rough evolutionary road, having taken an unlucky turn a long time ago. Here is a plausible scenario.

Imagine an autumn day in the Pleistocene epoch, steamy with thunderstorms. Male
Cervidae
are in a mood to spar and mate. In sight of the does, two lusty young Pluricorns square off. They paw, snort, and charge each other like jousting knights. The does' ears flicker like the sleeves of medieval ladies-in-waiting. Some time elapses. After a while the does trot delicately into a circle around the males. The two champions are lying on the ground completely tangled up, heaving and trying to snort, tusks Velcroed to tusks, antlers locked, leg spurs enmeshed, and barbs, well, just adding to the mess. Some hours pass like this. Lightning crackles, rain sluices down, the males glare pitifully from their mutual fetters. Meanwhile, the houri-eyed does stand about in the rising mists of the afternoon,
nostrils aquiver, absorbing a message from their genes. It says that these rutting males are not the only rutting males in the Pleistocene. And away trip the does, to interbreed with strangers and dilute their gene pool. The few who don't, pass on to their offspring a gift for quiet desperation—the trait I now observe in poor hungry males among the hawthorns.

Some concrete evidence for this scenario comes from Pleistocene cave art, made by the Keen-Ears. In these paintings, herds of thorny-looking quadrupeds slant across the limestone. Following them are hominid hunters, leaning on their spears in a peculiarly pensive manner, which no one, who has seen and pitied the Pluricorn, can possibly mistake.

5

W
hen people in my part of the world think of Truth, with a capital T, it conjures images of hands on Bibles, mathematical equations, or a pure unearthly light that pierces through all lies and obscurities. Truth is close in our imaginations to God, so we don't associate it with anything that creeps, flies, swims, or walks the earth in animal form. But personally, I wouldn't bother with the Bible if I could swear on a vampire bat
.