Animals Strike Curious Poses

by Elena Passarello

  The village people called in Officials of the Uganda Wildlife Authority who devised a clever plan to catch the man-eater.

  When Conquering Comprehension was first published in 2006, Osama, though sixty, hadn’t been named Osama for long. The first decade of his bloody run, people had called the crocodile John Major. Before that, he was called goonya, mamba, or temsah, depending on who was pointing at him from the relative safety of the shore. And further back in time, when Herodotus described him as a floating pair of eyes and a spine in the water, he was named “pebble worm” or “pebble dick” or, most alarmingly, “pebble man.”

  They draped the lungs of a dead cow, a tasty morsel, over the branch of a tree near Osama’s lair, and waited a whole week for the crocodile to strike.

  It isn’t difficult to see a name as a kind of factual description. Naming halts kinetic energy, as do the arresting properties of fact. Names sink an unconquerable entity—a hurricane, a rogue virus, a man-eater—with the weight of a fresh, human-made label. And a naming is also a proving—of how we cannot abide the unknown power of natural caprice when it feeds on us. We doubt our ability to get inside the brain of an erratic and inhuman thing-of-the-world, like a monster storm or an epidemic. We cannot wear its ideas as our own in an effort to best it. So we name it, in hopes of yanking it from the chaos-machine in which it naturally thrives.

  And strike he did, leaping out of the water and seizing the bait in his mighty jaws.

  We work together as a like-minded group to rename the thing-of-the-world. And in this way, we convince ourselves that we’ve gained a modicum of control. This makes an act of naming defensive and it forces whatever has jammed our processors into a tighter, more comprehendible space. Perhaps, we think, this will be enough to keep us afloat when that unconquerable, newly named thing approaches us—when it bucks the natural facts of the world on which we float.

  It was a fatal mistake.

  In 1998, when the croc then known as John Major began jumping into the little boats, a new fact spread along the shore: that this beast was too terrible to even belong to nature. A rumor also spread that any surviving fishermen—those still intact season after season—were not alive because of wiliness or simple luck. Some spirit had to be looking out for the un-man-eaten men, whispering to them from under their boats out on the lake. They must be in Faustian cahoots with an unearthly evil, the other fishermen now understood. And in understanding this, they renamed the croc for the devil himself. A few along that stretch of Lake Victoria will still insist the croc’s true name is Satan.

  Concealed within the lungs was a copper snare attached to a long rope.

  And then, in August 1998, bombings in two nearby embassies killed two hundred people and wounded twenty times that. The name of the man behind the bombings became a new fact for the people to bite. This new moniker was a better name than Satan, even, with its extra syllable and its sonic distance from “saint.” By the time the crocodile had taken ten more victims, the new and explosive human name sat square on the beast’s scuted back. It was past Satan, this name of the human stranger who could neither be caught nor comprehended. For nothing could be wilder, nothing more fearsome, than a man who eats men with a big bomb. Osama. The closest you can be to be a devil and still carry the facts of a man.

  The more Osama struggled, the more he became entangled.

  Giving a human’s name to a man-eater is a noteworthy and questionable practice. We aren’t always compelled to do so—see the Beast of Gévaudan, the Leopard of Rudraprayag, the Malawi Terror-Beast. See Jaws. It means something to name a predator not after a region, a synecdoche, or a pebble dick, but with a little first name, just as you would a human baby. Why would we want to bring a skilled man-eater so close to the way we call ourselves?

  Fifty men pulled on the rope attached to the snare and slowly dragged the furious, struggling crocodile out of the water.

  Did we do this because we wanted to plant inside the croc a humanesque scheming? Do we need to give the croc the power to conjure the evil ideas of which our human devils are capable? It could be that it’s just too difficult to truly hate a crocodile, with its flat eyes, cold blood, and heart shaped like a peanut. After it has taken so many, we must find a way to feel the hatred reserved for those of our kind who eat our kin.

  Soon the villagers had Osama bound, gagged and at their mercy.

  Or perhaps it’s just that nothing is more incomprehensible than a beast capable of blood sport. We comprehend the animal that strikes human attackers, or strikes to protect its cubs. A poisonous bite or slash to the thorax is the understandable, ham-fisted work of nature, and Lord knows we humans have done little to inspire the rest of the kingdom’s trust. But the unconquerable man-eaters’ attacks are not in retaliation, and thus humans, to them, are probably still nothing more than lumps of digestible parts. Though it hurts us to admit it, the components that make us invent, travel, or even blow up crowded embassies are still no more difficult to swallow than the legs of a wildebeest or the heart of a stupid gazelle.

  Imagine their surprise when they were told by the Wildlife Authority that they were not allowed to finish him off.

  The man’s name that was given to this beast actually holds another man-eater at its roots. In Arabic, the name Osama means “feline predator” or “lion” or “mark of the lion.” It is one of dozens of Arabic first names with leonine associations, and there are similar men’s names in Yiddish, French, Gaelic, Hebrew, Turkish, Vietnamese. So many of us fancy naming our human babies—especially male ones—after lions, perhaps because it brands them with grace and force. Osama-as-lion is the name of a tawny king and his mighty heart. Osama-as-lion is a powerful man, relaxed in his status, and perhaps self-assured enough to see order in his own incomprehensible hunger.

  Even Osama, it seemed, had his rights.

  “Lion” is also what we called the two man-eaters that stalked railroad workers in 1898, as the men built the tracks that connect the Indian Ocean to Osama’s very lake. An exact century before the man-Osama bombed the embassies and the croc-Osama was rechristened, two unnamed lions dragged 135 railroad men from their flimsy lakeside tents—nearly one per night. The foreman would awake each morning to find “the ground all round covered with blood and morsels of flesh and bones.” The bald-faced lions—the beasts had no manes—would lick the skin off their victims immediately, so rampant was their taste for fresh human blood.

  In the end, the villagers took their revenge in another way:

  The foreman finally shot them, of course, and the remaining men went back to the railroad. When the crew finished building, the foreman took the lions’ skins as rugs for his study, where he wrote The Man-Eaters of Tsavo—an international bestseller. He later bequeathed the lion skins to a museum in Chicago. And there the man-eaters stay, renamed FMNH 239-69 and FMNH 239-70.

  Osama was to spend the rest of his days in a concrete enclosure at a crocodile farm, becoming the father of little crocodiles who would be made into crocodile handbags and shoes.

  We are now beyond predation; that is the myth of humans. It’s a lonely understanding, if you think on it: the easiest predator to know is the predator within us, and the only creatures we give the right to devour us are creatures just like ourselves. No tiger hiding in the darkness, no white whale. Only an embassy bomber with a soft skull, no claws, and dull teeth, although he is named after a lion.

  His diet would be limited to dead chickens.

  Or only another soft human, this one named after a day of feasting, born in the 1920s at the top of Osama’s lake. When the crocodile was about thirty, this man had renamed himself His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor, Idi Amin Dada, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas. When he dumped thousands of his countrymen into Lake Victoria, a rumor circulated among the people that he was feeding the lake’s crocodiles and perhaps heightening their taste for human meat. But others spread an alternate rumor—still held by some as
fact—that he had taken to eating the men when it suited him to do so. When pressed about this scandalous detail, he looked away with his famous protruding eyes and said, “I don’t like human flesh. It’s too salty for me.”

  It was an inglorious end for the mighty beast, although many would argue that he got off lightly.

  Four years after this man fled from his palace to a comfortable exile in Libya, a crocodile from Lake Victoria began making a name for himself.

  WORD AND PHRASE MEANING

  *What other words fit into the word family that contains horrifying and fiendish?

  terrifying fearsome modest fearful

  ghastly gentle kindly grisly

  frightening shocking horrific repugnant

  appalling horrendous naughty

  Which brings us back to “A Crocodile Called Osama,” the revenge text for Aussie eleven-year-olds that focuses more on the facts of a name than the facts of any beast. Young readers pass over the name Osama eight times in three hundred words, incanted like a hex, paired with a litany of angry verbs. They read the name as it is “bound,” “gagged,” “struggling,” and “at the mercy” of its captors. They see the name begrudgingly afforded “rights,” then forced into a concrete cell for eternity.

  READING BETWEEN THE LINES—Inferential Meaning

  *What do you think of the plan to catch Osama? (That is, was it clever, well thought out, requiring patience?)

  *What surprised the villagers when Osama was captured?

  *Do you think they should’ve been surprised?

  *What do you think should have been done with Osama? Do you think he “got off lightly”?

  *Why do you think that?

  The book’s target market are children that live seven thousand miles away from the crocodile when they read about him. At the end of the passage, the critical follow-up questions don’t so much test what they understand about crocodiles, but rather what they know of a human’s wishful thinking. Perhaps such wishful thoughts are the most predatory facts of all.

  *What does gagged mean?

  There is no record of the death of the crocodile called Osama. His human counterpart was conquered in 2011, and it’s doubtful the croc lasted those six years as brood stock. By the time these two Osamas were no longer facts of the earth, Osama the ten-foot-tall Asiatic elephant had trampled over a dozen men and women in Assam, and Osama the lion had eaten at least fifty unsuspecting Tanzanians.

  MORE ACTION

  *Find Lake Victoria in Uganda, using your atlas.

  *Find out about “Sweetheart,” a large and terrifying crocodile that lived in the Northern Territory of Australia.

  In 2001, twin jaguar cubs were born at a Bolivian animal center, and one was nicknamed Osama “because he was the bad one of the two.” Though cranky and uncontrollable, he never killed anyone; he never even made it out of the animal center, but his twin brother did. That cub, once it reached adulthood, became famous for stalking and devouring a handler at the Denver Zoo in 2007. Back in Bolivia, his first handlers had named that killer twin jaguar after George W. Bush.

  SIR: There is a need for a word in taxonomy, and in medical, genealogical, scientific, biological, and other literature, that does not occur in the English or any other language. We need a word to designate the last person, animal, or other species in his/her/its lineage.

  Letter to the editor of Nature, April 1996

  THE LAST WOOLLY mammoths died on an island now called Wrangel, which broke from the mainland twelve thousand years ago. They inhabited it for at least eight millennia, slowly inbreeding themselves into extinction. Even as humans developed their civilizations, the mammoths remained, isolated but relatively safe. While the Akkadian king conquered Mesopotamia and the first settlements began at Troy, the final mammoth was still here on Earth, wandering an Arctic island alone.

  The last female aurochs died of old age in the Jaktorów Forest in 1627. When the final male perished the year before, its horn was hollowed, capped in gold, and used as a hunting bugle by the king of Poland.

  The last pair of great auks had hidden themselves on a huge rock in the northern Atlantic. In 1844, a trio of Icelandic bounty hunters found them in a crag, incubating an egg. Two of the hunters strangled the adults to get to the egg, and the third accidentally crushed its shell under his boot.

  Martha, the last known passenger pigeon, was pushing thirty when she died. She’d suffered a stroke a few years earlier, and visitors to her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo complained the bird never moved. It must have been strange for the older patrons to see her there on display like some exotic, since fifty years before, there were enough of her kind to eclipse the Ohio sun when they migrated past.

  Incas, the final Carolina parakeet, died in the same Cincinnati cage that Martha did, four years after her. Because his long-term mate, Lady Jane, had died the year before, it was said the species fell extinct thanks to Incas’s broken heart.

  When Booming Ben, the last heath hen, died on Martha’s Vineyard, they said he’d spent his last days crying out for a female that never came to him. The Vineyard Gazette dedicated an entire issue to his memory: “There is no survivor, there is no future, there is no life to be recreated in this form again. We are looking upon the uttermost finality which can be written, glimpsing the darkness which will not know another ray of light.”

  Benjamin, the last thylacine—or Tasmanian tiger—perished in a cold snap in 1936. His handlers at the Beaumaris Zoo had forgotten to let him inside for the night and the striped marsupial froze to death.

  The gastric brooding frog—which incubates eggs in its belly and then vomits its offspring into existence—was both discovered and declared extinct within the twelve years that actor Roger Moore played James Bond.

  Turgi, the last Polynesian tree snail, died in a London zoo in 1996. According to the Los Angeles Times, “It moved at a rate of less than two feet a year, so it took a while for curators … to be sure it had stopped moving forever.”

  The same year, two administrators of a Georgia convalescent center wrote the editor of the journal Nature, soliciting a name for an organism that marks the last of its kind. Among the suggestions were “terminarch,” “ender,” “relict,” “yatim,” and “lastline,” but the new word that stuck was “endling.” Of all the proposed names, it is the most diminutive (like “duckling” or “fingerling”) and perhaps the most storied (like “End Times”). The little sound of it jingles like a newborn rattle, which makes it doubly sad.

  While Nature’s readers were debating vocabulary, a research team in Spain was counting bucardos. A huge mountain ibex, the bucardo was once abundant in the Pyrenees. The eleventh Count of Foix wrote that more of his peasants wore bucardo hides than they did woven cloth; one winter, the count saw five hundred bucardos running down the frozen outcrops near his castle. The bucardo grew shyer over the centuries—which made trophy hunters adore it—and soon disappeared into the treacherous slopes for which it was so well designed.

  Though a naturalist declared it hunted from existence at the turn of the twentieth century, a few dozen were spotted deep in the Ordesa Valley in the 1980s. Scientists set cage traps, which caught hundreds of smaller, nonendangered chamois. It was frustrating work, and bucardo numbers dwindled further as the humans searched on. By 1989, they’d trapped only one male and three females. In 1991, the male died and eight years later, the taxon’s endling, Celia, walked right into the researchers’ trap.

  She was twelve when they shot her with a blow dart and tied white rags over her eyes to keep her calm. They fit her with a tracking collar and a pulse monitor and biopsied two sections of skin: at the left ear and the flank. Then Celia was released back into the wild to live out the rest of her days. Of the next ten months we know nothing; science cannot report what life was like for Earth’s final bucardo. But the Capra pyrenaica before her had, probably since the late Pleistocene, moved through the seasons in sex-sorted packs. In the female groups, a bucarda of Celia’s age would serve
as leader. When they grazed in vulnerable spaces, she’d herd her sisters up the tricky mountain shelves at the first sign of danger, up and up until the group stood on cliffs that were practically vertical. Celia, however, climbed to protect only herself that final winter—and for at least three winters before that, if not for most winters in her rocky life.

  It is dangerous to assume that an endling is conscious of its singular status. Wondering if she felt guilty, or felt the universe owed her something—that isn’t just silly; it’s harmful. As is imagining a bucardo standing alone on a vertical cliff, suppressing thoughts of suicide. As is assuming her thoughts turned to whatever the mountain ungulate’s version of prayer might be. Or hoping that, in her life, she felt a fearlessness impossible for those of us that must care for others.

  The safe thought is that Celia lived the life she’d been given without any sense of finality. She climbed high up Monte Perdido to graze alone each summer, and hobbled down into the valley by herself before the winters grew too frigid. She ate and groomed and slept, walked deep into the woods, and endured her useless estrus just as she was programmed to do—nothing further.

  But then again, a worker ant forever isolated from its colony will walk ceaselessly, refusing to digest food, and a starling will suffer cell death when it has no fellow creature to keep it company. A dying cross spider builds a nest for her offspring even though she’ll never meet them, and a pea aphid will explode itself in the face of a predator, saving its kin. An English-speaking gray parrot once considered his life enough to ask what color he was, and a gorilla used his hands to tell humans the story of how he became an orphan. Not to mention the countless jellyfish that, while floating in the warm seas, have looked to the heavens for guidance.

  Though problematic, it’s still easy to call these things representative of what unifies our kingdom: we are all hardwired to live for the future. Breeding, dancing, nesting, the night watch—it’s all in service to what comes later. On a cellular level, we seem programmed to work for a future which doesn’t concern us exactly, but that rather involves something that resembles us. We all walk through the woods, our bodies rushing at the atomic level toward the idea that something is next. But is there space in a creature’s DNA to consider the prospect of no next? That one day, nothing that’s us—beyond ourselves—will exist, despite the world that still spins all around us?