The Chacma Baboon (Papio ursinus) is one of the best-known of the dog-faced monkeys. Baboons are intelligent, formidable and brutal. They live in packs, preferring open, rocky country.

The photo accompanying this caption is of a baboon—a cowering baboon. This baboon has assumed exactly the same posture that a shy five-year-old boy would assume, if you forced that boy to sit in an open, rocky countryside and then surrounded him by a pack of formidable, brutal, dog-faced monkeys. You look at this photo, and you feel bad for the baboon. But listen to this:

The Chacma Baboon … feeds on reptiles, scorpions and insects, but will eat roots at a pinch, and kills new-born lambs to drink the milk in their stomachs. (Larousse, p. 509.)

I mean:

The Chacma Baboon … kills new-born lambs to drink the milk in their stomachs.

This is a bad-ass monkey!

Everyone has their favorite candidate for which species will rule the earth when we humans have finally baked ourselves out of existence. The dolphins have their partisans, the bees have their partisans, the cockroaches have their partisans. Me, I’m placing my money on the baboons. Because it’s hard to imagine dolphins hunting sperm whale just so they can light their dolphin lamps; or bees chopping down the redwoods, just so they can build their apiarian railroad; or roaches doing much of anything. If a species wants to rule the earth, it needs to be ruthless. So, we salute you, you Chacma Baboons! Another species with the proper human spirit of dominion.

How to describe my feelings? I knew, when I set up a website for Maynard and Jennica, that I would receive unexpected emails. And I knew (because Donald Rumsfeld told me so), that there would be the unexpected emails that I expected, and the unexpected emails that I didn’t expect.

So I expected, sooner or later, an unexpected email from A Girl Who Once Had Spurned Me. (That email, when it came, was a singular pleasure.) I expected, sooner or later, an unexpected email from Someone Named Jennica, or Someone Names Maynard, Who Wanted To Know About The Book. (That email, when it came, was a source of some anxiety. What if the real-life Jennica hates the fictional one? What if Zooey hated J.D. Salinger, and Zelig hated Woody Allen?) Last night, however, I received an email with a link to this:

http://h5l5n5.blogspot.com/2007/06/blog-post_638.html

Oh unexpecteds of unexpecteds! You can learn a fair bit about the artist by scrolling down through the (slow-loading but quite worthwhile) photos at …

http://h5l5n5.blogspot.com/

… not least that H5L5N5 is an employee of the Waterstone’ s in Edinburgh, Scotland. And how does it make me feel that an artist in Edinburgh, a seller of books, has taken the time to … to paint a detailed and precise model of the interior of a redbird subway car on the Lexington Line in Manhattan in the 1990s …. and to sculpt, within the confines of the palette provided by the Fimo Clay Company, Ltd., the outfits actually worn by Maynard and Jennica in that scene (with the authorial caveat, of course, that Jennica would never wear Tevas) … and to cut, from construction paper, not only the briefcase that the hero holds but a historically accurate recreation of the overhead bars in the redbirds?

It makes me feel like I ought to have written a better book, is how it makes me feel. I mean, Americans occasionally complain about not being permitted to win the Booker Prize. Me, I don’t want a Booker Prize. (Do you hear me, Man? Do you hear me? Keep your damn prize!) I just want to keep winning the H5L5N5 Fimo Prize. And, twenty-five years from now, I want to win The Fimo of Fimos. I want to be the Salman Rushdie of sculpey clay.

I trap birds, birds of all species, for the Queen of the Night and her ladies. Every day they give me, in exchange, food and drink.

And what kinds of food and drink, Papageno, do they give you for your birds?

Wine, sugar bread, and figs.

A good living. The opera never makes clear why the Queen of the Night needs a constant supply of live birds (something to do with those four high notes in her first aria?), nor where she gets the wine and figs from, but it’s nice to know that Papageno is a productive part of the Queen’s economy.

The best operatic profession that I know of, however, comes from Der Mond, by Carl Orff. As the opera opens, four wandering students see a glowing object in the night sky. They ask a farmer what it is, and he answers:

That’s the moon. Our mayor bought it for three Talers and hung it from that oak tree. He has to pour oil into it every day so that it keeps shining brightly. In exchange we pay him one Taler, once a week.

What a racket! I mean, be conservative, say that each week the moon burns seven-tenths of a Taler worth of oil. And assume that the mayor has to pay two-tenths of Taler to offset the moon’s weekly carbon emissions. That’s still one Taler in profit for the mayor every ten weeks, or about five Talers a year, if you figure upkeep. After two years, the mayor will have paid off his initial investment and will have made enough profit to buy two more moons. Within five years, he owns every natural satellite from here to Jupiter. Then he switches to solar power, and he makes an even bigger killing, because the weekly overhead on a solar-powered moon is, like, zero.

Anyway, it’s every writer’s professional dream; the dream of ceaseless royalties; something to get us off this diet of figs and wine.

I had thought that the adorable, nubby pads that caterpillars pulse around upon were the stubs that stretched—under the pull of metamorphic hormones, in the snug cave of pupal adolescence—into the six spindly legs of the butterfly. Well, apparently not, because at least a few pairs of the caterpillar’s larval limbs are unaccounted for in the frame of the adult butterfly. Quoth The Larousse Encyclopedia of Animal Life, page 118:

The transformation of a caterpillar to the chrysalis and then to the butterfly indicates the magnitude of the changes involved [in holometabolous metamorphosis]. In extreme cases most of the larval tissues die and undergo breakdown or histolysis while a new set of adult organs develops from special persistently embryonic zones of tissue, the so-called imaginal discs or histoblasts.

Really—am I the only one who didn’t learn this in kindergarten? Am I the only one who didn’t learn that the caterpillar does not grow, inside its weird, homespun womb, into the prettily plumed adult? Am I the only one who didn’t learn that the caterpillar digests itself, turns itself into one big yolk to feed a whole new life-form, which grows from the “so-called” histoblasts? Because, according to Larousse, a caterpillar is not analogous to an embryo; it is not a young, half-formed butterfly; rather, it merely contains the seed of the butterfly, carries that seed around, provides that seed with a food store, and then dies so that the butterfly can grow in its corpse—grow just like the larval of a horrible predacious wasp, planted inside the caterpillar’s paralyzed gut.

The eyes of the caterpillar do not become the eyes of the butterfly; its legs and skin do not became its legs and skin. They are all dissolved into a brew to feed an alien infant. The butterfly’s brain has no memory of being a caterpillar, any more than does the brain of the predacious wasp. Butterfly, wasp: they are both made from the protein of a caterpillar, reshuffled.

Still! What splendid DNA, the DNA that caterpillars and butterflies share! It contains enough information to build not one animal, but two: a many-legged worm, a sexless factory for fat; and a bright-winged fly, an engine of sex. And, not just that, but a third creature as well, a stranger one: a stew-like creature, an amoeba who lives in a pupal shell, whose life is inchoate and soft. A whirlwind creature whose birth and death are the blending up caterpillars and the pouring of butterfly shakes.

Mankind is such a poor prince of animals. How unremarkable our genes are. They give us only one body—and a body that lasts wretchedly past its youthful prime. We get old, our guts rebel, and we regret (at least as adults) how we (at least as children) ate so impurely.

The Boa Constrictor is easily reared in captivity and can be fed on rabbits, rats and pigeons. Cannibalism has been reported on a number of occasions: for instance, if two boas are in a cage together one of them will stifle the prey, but sometimes both will seize it, one at each end. In swallowing the prey they move toward each other, since their recurved teeth do not allow them to let go of the prey easily. When the two snouts touch, the larger snake is bound to swallow the other.

When do you suppose the confusion sets in? And the panic? Surely confusion and panic are reptilian enough as emotions, and the boa is a clever enough as a creature, that a boa can be confused, can begin to panic.

I mean … imagine you are the snake. Living in a heated glass cage, roaming a beloved log and a beloved rock, curling around a beloved mate. You’ve been there for years, your life is constricted, but still, it’s an idyll. And sometimes, in the late afternoon, you pick up the scent of a pigeon.

The pleasure of getting your lips around the tail of a delicious pigeon!

It’s a quick hunt, you’re just beginning to relish the dry, rich scent of bird in your wide-stretched lips, when you realize that something is wrong. Your eyes are weak, you can’t quite see—and it’s only when you’ve swallowed the pigeon’s rump that your mate comes clearly into view. Dread and disorientation! Staring back at you, down the length of the pigeon’s smooth and feathersome back, are your mate’s eyes, dim with the snaky pleasure of feeding. You want to let go, you want to regurgitate—but damn those recurved teeth! You swallow the pigeon’s feet (those alien things, feet). Your mouth can stretch no wider—it barely can manage the downy belly—your lips ache—. Until you feel your mate’s gums press into your nose. Your lover forces your mouth shut with his mouth.

What do you suppose your cause of death is? Do you die when your heart and brain are compromised by the merciless acids in your mate’s stomach? Or do you suffocate, squeezed into unconsciousness by your mate’s narrow throat? For how long before you die do you continue to savor your last meal, your freshly dead pigeon?

Or, imagine that you are the larger snake. Imagine, over the course of a day, swallowing your lover. The loneliness of seeing her tail finally vanish into your lips when you done. Or, imagine that you are the owner of a pet store, watching hundreds of dollars of inventory devour each other alive. Or, imagine that you are the living pigeon, and that it’s late in the afternoon when you are placed, by warm, human hands (those alien things, hands!) into a cage that smells, doubly, of snake.

And, they mean well, but it’s a question that I don’t know how to answer. (Because: What if the book contains two ideas? Or, like, fourteen ideas? It’s three hundred pages long, and it’s supposed to contain one idea?) Anyway, sometimes I avoid the question altogether by offering a dippy analogy — to birds and how they construct their nests — so I decided to look in The Larousse Encyclopedia of Animal Life, just to make sure of my analogy. And Larousse says, on page 350:

It is often claimed that birds adapt themselves to circumstances and use whatever nest building materials are near at hand …

(Hands? Birds?)

… but little is known of the reasons why unusual materials are selected by birds when those more normal for the species could be used.

Well, that makes the analogy even dippier than I thought. But then, lower down on the same page I discovered the following:

The Wren … chooses strange places to nest. One nested … in the pocket of a jacket hung up daily in a yard. The nest was not interfered with and the brood successfully reared.

The jacket was un-hung and re-hung … daily? Who was this gardener, and how is it that she never learned to dress appropriately while gardening?

Every day she put on the same wool jacket. And every day she worked in her bee-loud glade, excavating (with a spade) her nine bean rows, amputating (with a trowel) the woody roots that invaded from the grape trellises, waging (with manure) a counterinsurgency against the weeds that blew in from the creek. And every day, wearing the wool jacket, she got hot. So she would take the jacket off and hang it from the same corner of the grape trellis. Daily she did this! Until one afternoon she noticed (from under her sweaty eyebrows, from under the brim of her wilted gardening hat), a wren, with a twig in its beak, sitting on the pocket of her wool jacket, over there under the trellis. And the gardener thought: “Well, if the wrens need my coat, let the wrens have my coat.”

Or, or. Did the gardener continue to take the jacket in and out daily, even after the nest was begun? Did the wrens, asleep in their nest, overnight inside the gardener’s home? Were the birds so confident in this spry, wry old lady, that they were willing to sleep in her closet, certain that she would return them to the trellis in the morning? All without interfering with their brood? Larousse does not say.

What Larousse does say is that the scientific name for the wren is Troglodytes troglodytes, the cave-dwelling cave-dweller. This is an attractive twig of information for me, because at present I’m working on a book about a troll. So if my troll book includes a nest of wrens, you’ll know why. And so there it is, my analogy, returning to its dippy nest. The avian nature of my writing: I brood in what pockets I find.