The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (32 page)

The lizard’s tail was curled up behind while it walked, being uncurled only when angered. It had a flattened head with a lifted-up projection on top, pointed backwards over its body, to give the animal a most fearsome and yet comic aspect. Its comic appearance was added to by its most peculiar eyes. Each eye was fixed deep in a horny cone that protruded out from either side of the head.... This lizard was of course the well-known chameleon....

The smaller one was flattened against the ground, front legs tensed, ready to spring. Its mate circled slowly to the left, keeping its distance, until it was only possible to hold them both in her field of vision by letting her eyes flicker between them. In this way she saw them as a juddering accumulation of disjointed details: the alien black gums, slack black lips rimmed by salt, a thread of saliva breaking, the fissures on a tongue that ran to smoothness along its curling edge, a yellow-red eye and eyeball muck spiking the fur, open sores on a foreleg, and, trapped in the V of an open mouth, deep in the hinge of the jaw, a little foam, to which her gaze kept returning. The dogs had brought with them their own cloud of flies.

There were three kittens at the end of a strange new passageway, three kittens with their blue-gray eyes but a few days open, peering up at him from a mossy, hair-lined nest. Except for the nub of a tiny tail, and the tassels of hair at the tip of each tiny ear, they looked much the same as barn kittens that Henry drowned by the sackful every summer.

On his knees, and with his chin level with the top of the table, Stephen watched the male mantis step cautiously towards the female mantis. She was a fine strapping green specimen, and she stood upright on her four back legs, her front pair dangling devoutly; from time to time a tremor caused her heavy body to oscillate over the thin suspending limbs, and each time the brown male shot back. He advanced lengthways, with his body parallel to the table-top, his long, toothed, predatory front legs stretching out tentatively and his antennae trained forwards: even in this strong light Stephen could see the curious inner glow of his big oval eyes.

Solid black except for a white belly mark between the flippers, the pothead or pilot whale has a globular forehead as round as an antique iron kettle. The sloping dorsal fin, much wider at its base than at the top, has a deeply curved trailing edge.

A popular prototype, the common and justly famous Atlantic blue crab is green on top and whitish below. The female’s claws are tipped with red while the male’s have bright azure highlights. Gender (and in the female, maturity) can also be told by the shape of a structure on the bottom shell called “apron” by diners or “abdomen” by biologists. The male’s resembles the stem of a champagne glass, its foot aligned with the back edge of the shell. In the virginal female or “she-crab” the apron is an isosceles triangle. The sexually mature (and almost invariably pregnant) “sook” wears a semicircular apron with a small triangular point during the last stage of her life.

The cottonmouth (
Agkistrodon piscivorus
) may grow 6 feet long, though the average is about half that size. It is brown with indistinct black bands; its yellow belly may have dark markings as well, and a dark band runs from the eye to the corner of the mouth. It is distinguished from nonpoisonous water snakes by its deep spade-shaped head, light lips and white mouth.

it while foraging in the open. In contrast, the rufous-sided towhee has striking plumage of black, white, and rusty red, and rarely forages in the open, preferring to search for seeds among the dense litter of forest brush or chaparral, where its varicolored coat blends into the dappled light and shade.

Chipmunks, however, are smaller, less plump and have stripes along the sides of their heads, which the ground squirrel lacks. The stripes down the backs of both the golden-mantled ground squirrel and chipmunks serve to camouflage the animals from their numerous predators, blending with the irregular textures and broken patterns of light characteristic of the forest floor.

Black-chinned nectar hunters hovered now before the crimson of a mallow, now before the blue of a morning-glory. One rufous hummingbird perched on the same twig during periods of rest for three days in a row. According to the angle of the light, its tail appeared rufous or cinnamon-hued. Turning in the sun, a female Anna’s hummingbird, larger than a ruby-throat, flashed on and off like the beam of a lighthouse, a dazzling red spot that shone jewellike at its throat. Once Connie pointed out the slightly decurved bill and deeply forked tail of a lucifer hummingbird.

He was a large heavy man. He was bearded. His hair was overgrown and unkempt. His eyes were blue and set in a field of pink that suggested a history of torments and conflicts past ordinary understanding. His weight and size seemed to amplify the act of breathing, which took place through his mouth. His nose looked swollen, a web of fine purple lines ran up his cheeks from the undergrowth, and all the ravage together told of the drinker.

Webb is the oldest man of their regular foursome, fifty and then some—a lean thoughtful gentleman in roofing and siding contracting and supply with a calming gravel voice, his long face broken into longitudinal strips by creases and his hazel eyes almost lost under an amber tangle of eyebrows. He is the steadiest golfer, too. The one unsteady thing about him, he is on his third wife; this is Cindy, a plump brown backed honey still smelling of high school, though they have two little ones, a boy and a girl, ages five and three. Her hair is cut short and lies wet in one direction, as if surfacing from a dive, and when she smiles her teeth look unnaturally even and white in her tan face, with pink spots of peeling on the roundest part of her cheeks; she has an exciting sexually neutral look, though her boobs slosh and shiver in the triangular little hammocks of her bra.

Janice is thickening through the middle at the age of forty-four but her legs are still hard and neat. And brown. She was always dark-complected and with July not even here she has the tan of a savage, legs and arms almost black like some little Polynesian in an old Jon Hall movie. Her lower lip bears a trace of zinc oxide, which is sexy, even though he never loved that stubborn slotlike set her mouth gets. Her still-wet hair pulled back reveals a high forehead somewhat mottled, like brown paper where water has been dropped and dried.