Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters Read Free Page B

side-slipped through the clearings. Fishing bats gaffed pickerel and ate them in flight.
    I didn’t go far. I entertained dim memories of thickets of stinging insects, poisonous snakes and spiders, and the yellow-eyed gleams of jaguars. Away from the water, all trees looked the same and there were no clues to help with orientation. Everything considered me with a diffident neutrality: the bushmaster in the leaf litter, the army ants in the hollow tree, the millipede spiraled into its defensive position. I chewed leguminous beans and certain fungi for the visions their hallucinogens provided. The visions stood in for insights.
    One afternoon after 470 million years of quiet a boat chugged-chugged into the lagoon. Old rubber tires hung over its side. It leaked black oil and something more pungent that spread small rainbows over the water. It made a lot of unnecessary and fish-scaring noise. Once it settled into quiet, I fingered its bottom from below with a talon, scraping lines in the soft slime.
    Later, across the lagoon, I hovered in the black water, invisible in the sun’s glare. The figures on the boat had my shape. Naturally, I was curious.
    They spoke over one another in headlong squabbles and seemed to have divided their tasks in obscure ways. Just what they were doing was something I could not untangle. Had I found Companions? Was I no longer completely alone? Had the universe singled me out for good fortune? My heart boomed terror.
    I had not one single illusion about this group. Spears were unpacked. Nets. Other ominous-looking instruments. Nothing about any of this suggested diffident neutrality.
    A smaller boat steadily brought minor hills of junk ashore. A canvas tent went up. Floating off by myself, savoring that moment of illusory coolness when I’d rise from the water in the early, early morning, I watched a bare-chested native lead a hurrying scientist in a Panama hat to an exposed bank of rock. They arrived to confront a conspicuous claw waving menacingly from the shale .
    I paddled over for a listen.
    What was it, Doctor ? the native asked.
    The Doctor admitted he didn’t know. He was fumbling with a cumbersome flash camera. He said he’d never seen anything like it before.
    Was it important? the native wondered.
    The Doctor took pictures, his flash redundant in the sunlight. He said he thought it was. Very important. He set the camera aside and pickaxed the fossil arm right out of the rock. So much for the preciousness of the find.
    He announced he was going to take it to the Institute. Luis and his friend were to wait here for his return.
    First, he said, he had to make some Measurements. Then he fussed about for days.
    There were four men: a figure with a hat who remained on the boat, and Luis, Andujar, and the Doctor on the shore, their sagging tent beside that still water cul-de-sac with the swarm of parasitic worms.
    The foreclaw that they kept in the center of the tent in a box had some sentimental value for me. In the middle of the night at times I stood beside the open tent flaps, dripping, ruminating on whether or not to go in for it. The Doctor’s breathing was clogged and he sounded like a marine toad.
    In the morning they made their waste down the end of a trail leading to a stand of young palms that turned from orange to green as they matured.
    One day the foreclaw was gone; I could feel it. The Doctor was gone with it. The boat was gone.
    Luis and Andujar sang as they worked. They didn’t work often. They played a game with a sharp knife they used to hack down plants.
    I watched them and learned their idiosyncrasies. I learned about camp stools, and toilet paper. I learned about rifles. They enjoyed disassembling and oiling rifles. The procedure for loading rifles and killing animals with rifles was patiently walked through every morning, as though for the benefit of those creatures like myself watching interestedly from the bush. I was impressed with the rifles.
    That night beside their