Invisible Beasts

by Sharona Muir

  The sheer physical harmony of the Keen-Ears’ lives seems to limit antagonism. When five of them sit on a twisted oak-root to peruse a map of fungus stands, they sink onto it as one, gracefully. Nobody has to scoot over or scrunch in. It’s not surprising that they dance like angels and make love with the ease of the elements. But for all that, the Keen-Ears are human, and for them as for us, love is complication.

  Versed in fungus genetics and animal genealogies, the Keen-Ears have long ago mastered the art of breeding themselves; but unlike us, who try such things under the spur of creepy racism, the Keen-Ears enjoy a personal and sexual freedom we can scarcely imagine, coupled with social stability. Their folkways, though unsuitable for our own rambunctious, high-strung species, are yet worthwhile to contemplate. They live in clans separated by gender. Between men’s and women’s caves there is plenty of traffic, and all relationships are possible—business, cultural collaborations of all kinds, professional associations, friendships, love affairs, even hauntingly coordinated orgies. But when it comes to making babies, each women’s clan hosts one male guest, who is the exclusive father of any infants born during his stay. After about three years, he rejoins his old clan and the women choose a new man. Genealogies are closely tracked. To prevent inbreeding, a clan father is never invited twice, and incestuous ties are taboo. Sons go to live with their father’s clan in late childhood, but both sons and daughters remain in close touch with their biological parents and siblings. Careful family planning, and tight family and clan ties, mean that no one in the Keen-Ear caves is born unwanted, or dies untended, or lives in poverty—and everybody babysits. How many times I’ve lurked outside a warmly lit Keen-Ear cave, wistfully eavesdropping on conversations in which these precious safeguards are taken for granted.

  The marriage rite of the Keen-Ears is the most exotic part of their family arrangements. To choose clan fathers, they have adapted a process of decision-making found among ants and bees.

  “It’s time you learned about the ants and the bees,” Keen-Ear parents tell their children, clearing their throats. Particularly ants. The lesson sends little Keen-Ear girls scurrying to find anthills, spending hours in rapturous observation, as our own small daughters play at becoming brides. The naughtiest Keen-Ear girls even kick apart anthills for the secret thrill of watching the great event happen. Called “quorum sensing,” the process helps ants and bees choose new nesting sites without having to rely on an authority—a judge, boss, or chief—to make the final decision. It begins with scouts; in the case of ants, each scout goes off separately to find a new possible nest site, then scurries back to the colony, delivers a report, and recruits other ants to visit the potential site. Timing is the key to the final decision: ants reporting an inferior site take a little longer, as if mastering some embarrassment, and the delay ultimately counts, as we will see. Though trickles of hurried ants running in and out of rocky crevices may not sound romantic, nothing could be more breathlessly fascinating than the marriage rite of the Keen-Ears, those wise apes of the ants!

  IN SPRING, WHEN THE MOON shining through translucent leaves suspends the black trees in a jelly of light, and flowering crabapples perfume the night, the Keen-Ear women dust their bodies with colored powders, hang strings of oak-pollen tassels from their ears to their glimmering shoulders, and fasten filigree capes, made of leaf-skeletons, from their necks to their ankles. In this ceremonial dress, all the women—from old, bent clan mothers clinging to a youngster’s elbow, to young would-be mothers standing very straight with excitement—visit the candidates for clan fatherhood, who have spent months preparing for the events of this evening, called Niche Night.

  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 m
e—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

  Anyone 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

  THE DRIVER OF A FORD 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

  When 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.

  Truth Bats

  PEOPLE RARELY DISCUSS how one’s voice changes after telling a lie, because no one wants to admit to falsehood. I will confess, however, that I once told my sister a premeditated, consequential lie. My voice changed instantly: my small-talk became robotic, my heartfelt words sounded plagiarized, and even phrases muttered to myself had a disingenuous tone. Like everyone whose voice is deserted by the “ring of truth,” I had lost my bats. We owe the ring of truth in the human voice to Truth Bats, an invisible subspecies of vampire bat, and thereby hangs (upside down) the tale of how I was inspired to write this book.

  Vampire bats are a superior species, surpassing humans in their altruism and their ability to tell truth from lies. Consider: a vampire bat must feed every couple of days, or die. When a bat’s hunting goes badly, though, it doesn’t worry—it can turn to the luckier bats hanging with it, upside down, from a roost. The hungry bat visits each, emitting a begging call, and the others disgorge a donation of blood so their friend won’t starve. But since the savvy bats also recognize voices, they know who is begging, and if a hungry bat has not helped other bats in the past, it is unlikely to receive charity. This is the Golden Rule, with teeth. Who wants to regurgitate hard-earned blood to someone who’ll ignore you the next time you’re in need? And if a callous, greedy bat should die of hunger, those genes are no loss to the species, which as a whole benefits from generosity. Even more impressively, when a bat lies—when it goes begging despite a full belly—by various means, the other bats know the difference. For Truth Bats, the key is in the voice.

  It’s a pity that Truth Bats are invisible, because they’re so cute—like furry
plum pits with mouse ears, three-inch wingspans, and expressions of pipsqueak ferocity. They live in small clusters, lap the blood of nocturnal moths, and roost, by day, on the bodies of large mammals. They are clean, easy guests, dining and digesting elsewhere, bringing only their need to sleep safely, and a tendency to chatter among themselves. Like our eyelash follicle mites, they go unnoticed. But when it comes to humans, Truth Bats are picky: they will only adorn the hair or clothes of a truthful person. How do they know?

  When we tell a lie, our larynx muscles contract, producing an inaudible signal sometimes used in lie detection. Truth Bats hear this signal and fear it; their small, tight-knit society really cannot afford bloodsucking liars in its midst, so the lie signal is a strong negative stimulus. When it emanates from their own roost—everywhere in their house!—they leave in a hurry. Their departure has consequences. Truth Bats chatter as they hang together, and their continuous piping makes a background to our speech that we don’t hear, but feel—something like the tingling echo of a waterfall just before your ears catch it. This is the “ring of truth.” When your bats depart, scattering into the air as you trot out some whopper of a lie, your voice loses its reassuring background, and people feel that. You have more trouble persuading them; you have trouble persuading yourself. Until your Truth Bats return, you feel forlorn, lonesome, awkward, and unreal. Of course, there are liars who revel in their mendacity and don’t miss the bats one bit; it’s a kind of deficiency. But forlorn, lonesome, awkward, and unreal was how I felt on the day I went to visit my cousin Helen, because of a lie I had told.