This news would be startling to Henri Le Lay, president of the Association of Fishermen and Yachtsmen at the port of Brézellec in Brittany, who spoke with reporters about “a psychotic dolphin,” nicknamed Jean Floch, that has been going after fishermen in their boats. “He’s like a mad dog,” Le Lay said. “I don’t want to see any widows or orphans. This could end badly.”
Sea lions, too, are going after human beings for the first time. Not accidentally bumping into them but pursuing them through open water. In Alaska one jumped into a boat, knocked a fisherman overboard, and took him down. Sea lions are famous for fleeing any sort of conflict. Expert opinion? “Abnormal behavior.”
Unlikely as it may sound, given the myth, in the history of the European occupation of North America there is but a single recorded fatal attack by a wild but healthy (that is, nonrabid, nonstarving) wolf on a human being. It happened in 2005, in Alaska. The guy went out to take a pee or maybe just to look at the stars. When they found him, he’d already been worked over by scavengers.
In Uganda and Tanzania, chimps “struggling to survive amid the destruction of their forest habitat are snatching and killing human babies.” They’ve taken sixteen in the past seven years and had killed half of those before anyone found them. The eating of babies is “a recent development,” said the article.
Click, click, click—they just kept coming. In Belarus the beavers have been attacking people (“first recorded attack [in that country’s long history] of a beaver on a human”). This has happened again, in Lindesberg, Sweden, quite recently; a woman was hospitalized. The decidedly non-Swedish response of the townspeople, as reported by a city official? “Four of the beavers in the river have been shot, and the rest will be exterminated. Then the beaver house will be blown up to prevent other families from taking it over.” Not comforting is a related report out of Washington, D.C., that states, “Beavers are expanding rapidly into cities.”
For every account that seemed a little far-fetched and made me think a few qualifying facts must have been left out, there’d be another that, while admittedly bizarre, had the instant ring of stuff you wouldn’t make up, like the jogger in southeastern North Carolina who witnesses saw get surrounded on the boardwalk by a squadron of oversize male hermit crabs, which approached him, kung fu–style, with that one bulging claw forward, and appeared to attempt to drive him off a pier. And as always with cases like these, the quote from the zoologist comes around like a mantra: first recorded … not known to have occurred previously … relevant literature was searched but no prior instances retrieved … experts shocked … abnormal … unheard of …
When Livengood came back, I was six inches lower in the chair; I probably looked like a person whose mind had just been destroyed by a satanic video game.
“Still ‘skeptically curious’?” Livengood said. (When we’d first spoken on the telephone, he’d asked me what my “take” was, and I’d replied, “Skeptically curious,” which I’d intended to mean essentially nothing—but oh man, it stuck with him.)
I mumbled something. To which Livengood replied, with a sigh and a fake-bored tone, “Oh yeah. Something’s happening.” Then he bounced for a minute in his black office chair, tapping his fingertips together.
I said, “It’s impossible.”
Then he looked at me and said, as if not having heard me, “Hey! You need to go to Africa with me!”
* * *
We were en route to a dry, formerly nomadic region in the northeast of Kenya, about 350 miles northeast of Nairobi, just before you hit the Somali border, a place called Mandera, although Marc insisted on saying repeatedly that we were “going to ground zero.”
In the year 2000—which Marc, displaying a certain stubborn lack of subtlety that I was beginning to see as not unrelated to his nonexistent status in the academic world, repeatedly referred to as “year zero”—there were two separate incidents within a single month’s time, not far from each other, in villages occupying this area. Marc refers to them as “the battle site” and “the kill site.”
He’d arranged for us to be met by a tall, extraordinarily upright young woman from Dakar named Sila Fall. Her hair was in braids, and she wore all white with a blue bandanna around her neck. She was the UNICEF liaison for this district. She took us down a road to a village; it looked more like a camp. But the people here were healthy. UNICEF was overseeing the digging of a new well. They asked us to sit and watch a sort of play, performed in Kikamba. I could just make out the plot. One man was sick; he was the patient. Another man came, the healer. They spoke to each other—that ancient bond. They danced.
We walked behind Sila Fall, who walked very fast. She showed us all the improvements UNICEF had made—though not so much with pride as with restlessness, as if to say, We’ve at least done this. The clinic. The school. “In 2000 it was not like this,” she said. “In 2000, if it didn’t get thrown from the back of an army truck, we didn’t have it. We were dying.”
“The woman lives here,” she said, pointing but without stopping. “They say she is at her sister’s today.” Seconds later, in front of another, identical hut, we did stop. I saw now that Marc was manifesting excitement through physical agitation, moving from foot to foot and emitting little herm sounds. From the shaded interior of the hut materialized a middle-aged woman in a long skirt and T-shirt. Sila Fall spoke to her in Kikamba, she spoke to Sila Fall in Kikamba, then Sila Fall said to Marc in English, “She says that she welcomes you, she … knows who you are, and she will show you the place that you want to know about.” This, then, was Kakenya Wamboi, or as Marc called her in e-mails to me, “the veteran.”
It’s known that in the spring of 2000, when the drought conditions were at their worst in this district, there occurred a two-hour pitched battle between monkeys and human beings over access to three newly arrived water tankers. As the four of us walked beyond the narrow outskirts of the village, about two hundred yards down an ovenishly hot road, Kakenya Wamboi, who participated in that event, was speaking through Sila Fall, answering Marc’s extremely precise, prepared-sounding questions, telling Marc and me the story of the fight, how the human beings had rushed to draw water from the tankers, yet within seconds an entire troop of monkeys had appeared. They ranged themselves along the edges of the tankers. Others came from across the road. “They bit us and clawed at us. They threw stones at us from the top of the truck. My husband is dead, but until he died he had a mark on his forehead from where one of the stones cracked his skull. You don’t know how strong they are! They struck ten people. Badly enough that we all ran off. The men went back with axes. The monkeys were drinking all of the water. My husband said that they could work the valves. The drivers were still in the trucks. They were scared. The men went at the monkeys with axes and had to kill eight of them before the rest ran off. The drivers would not stay in this village overnight as they usually do, so we had to draw all the water off in a rush; we didn’t get it all before they started the trucks again. Some of what we got was in bad containers and spoiled, and the monkeys had already taken about a third of it. Of the people that died in that famine, most of them died that spring, and my husband always said the monkeys killed them, that the monkeys won that battle.”
She mimed what I suppose was a monkey swinging an ax in victory.
At some point, Sila Fall interrupted her and said that we needed to go, because to reach the other place Marc wanted to see, we had to drive two hours, and we didn’t want to be on that road after dark; it skirted the Somali border—she made a machine-gun sign—so we needed to say goodbye. Did Marc have any more questions?
“What sort of calls were they doing during the attack? What sounds were they making? Or weren’t they making sounds?”
Kakenya Wamboi said that they were chattering the entire time. Not screaming. More like talking. Then she said something else. Sila Fall said, “She says that she is glad to meet you and help you and that you see that she is very poor, you see her house, and she knows you
are good people, and that she hopes you will help her.” To his credit, Marc looked at me.
* * *
Knowing Marc Livengood a little now, you may appreciate the profundity of the Livengood silence during this car ride with Sila Fall. The man was contemplating some heavy thoughts. Sila Fall drove and talked, mostly about a period of years she spent in the United States. I was dying to ask her if she knew why Livengood was here or what it was that Livengood believed, but could neither do this in front of Marc nor figure a way to get them apart. Finally, the van swerved and slowed and through the seat we could feel the tires meeting the sudden resistance of sand. We got out and started to walk. I asked Sila Fall, “Have you seen this place?”
She nodded. “I grew up here.”
We walked for twenty minutes through a gap in a low sandstone formation. We came to what must have been the remnant of a sinkhole, a cavity in the earth the shape of an upside-down yarn cone. At the bottom was a pool of water. “Healthy water,” Sila Fall said. There was one spot along the rim of the hole where you could slide and clamber down. “I wasn’t here in 2000,” Sila Fall said, “but if it was as dry as they say, there was only a puddle down there. It was probably the only water for miles.”
In late February of that year, a herder named Ali Adam Hussein slid down to that puddle, probably not to slake his own thirst but to gather a little water for his cows. He looked up and saw several monkeys looking down at him. Presumably, he went to go for his weapon. The monkeys responded by lifting several stones and hurling them directly at his head. He died hours later of what a nurse back in Mandera, where we’d just come from, described simply as “severe head injuries.”
Marc did not ask Sila Fall’s permission before he himself skidded down into the deep natural watering hole. Both Sila Fall and I watched him, somewhat stunned. He seemed to have acted on a sudden impulse. At the bottom, however, he immediately displayed purpose. He stood with his hip cocked, his ponytail jutting out through the back of his khaki Centerbrook University cap, grinning up at me through his beard. I said, “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’m standing where he stood, John.” Marc Livengood is a man who likes to say your name at the end of sentences when he talks to you.
“And what does that mean?” I said. (These were not real questions; he just sometimes liked to force me to go through the whole production of baiting him, and I’d adapted to it.)
“What does it mean?” he said. “It means I’m standing where the First Victim stood.” He said the two words in such a way that I feel I have to capitalize the first letter of each. “It means we are all three standing on the site of an incident unknown to the annals of natural science, and it is unstudied. You heard the same stories I heard today; you tell me what that means.” Then he took pictures for forty minutes.
Able at last to converse with Sila Fall somewhat normally, I asked her, “Do you know why he’s here?”
“He’s a scientist,” she said.
“Specifically, I mean? You don’t? Specifically, he believes that the animals are turning on us, that we’re about to experience a war of animals on human beings, and that it’s going to begin here. That it may already have begun here.”
“Do you believe that?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. I didn’t know how to tell her that she didn’t need to be polite with me. She was there in a professional capacity. I suppose I was, too, in some deformed way. Really, it was stupid of me to be accosting her. But I’d been listening to Marc nonstop since we’d left the airport in Nairobi, and she seemed very adjusted.
“Most people would probably think he’s insane,” I said.
Sila Fall shrugged her shoulders. “It’s possible,” she said.
“Possible that he’s insane or that there’s about to be an animal-human war?”
She shrugged her shoulders again.
* * *
The story runs into obstacles here, because shortly after we arrived back in the States, Marc Livengood was fired from Centerbrook. Neither he nor anybody at the school will talk about it except to confirm that he’s suing. From someone in the town who shall remain unidentified, I learned that he’s living with his father, a retired engineer, in Dayton, or was as of two months before. The one time I got him to return a phone call and was able to ask him what had happened, he replied, in an almost boastful tone, “John, when the story of this comes out, you … Let’s just say Marc Livengood is not going to be what’s disgraced by this. Okay?” He refused to clarify that and hung up within maybe half a minute, sounding disgusted. A guy in the tech department at the school, whom I’d called in a Hail Mary way, told me he’d heard his boss talking about it on the telephone and that it was all “computer-related.”
Needless to say, it’s been challenging, with Livengood underground, to push the narrative forward. I couldn’t get anybody else in the field to say anything about him, because nobody really knows anything about him; it had always just been an Internet thing. Even his colleagues at the school thought he was involved, as his chair put it to me, in “a kind of curatorial project.” He’d once been the subject of a profile in a magazine called Varmint Masters, published out of Birmingham, Alabama. Once more, I invite you to research this. It’s a real magazine. And these people have radically redefined the definition of the word varmint. They hunt feral moose, things like that. Now and then, some country, say Australia, will have a problem with an out-of-control population of some invasive species, camels in one case, and these varmint masters will travel from the four corners with their bunker-busting rifles and such. As of this writing, I haven’t been able to find a copy of the Livengood issue, even on eBay, and cannot find contact info for the publisher in Birmingham. Is it possible that Livengood felt some sort of bond with a subpopulation of men who are working to become ever more expert hunters of animals not normally thought of as prey? Now there was no one to answer these and other questions. I got one guy, a marine biologist at a university on the East Coast—he asked me to name neither him nor the school—who remembered Livengood from a conference. He said, “I actually thought some of what he was talking about was pretty interesting, but back then it was just about predatory patterns, dietary disturbances. It sounds like maybe he had some kind of breakdown or something. I mean, I’m hearing about it from you.”
I was hearing about it from Livengood. We were all supposed to hear it from him, and may yet. That’s in the future, which, as I think we’ve established, is fairly sketchy terrain to prance out onto without a sure hand to guide you. I present this essay, with its mere sliver of the material Livengood gathered, with its shadow of an approximation of the boldness of thought he would bring to bear on it, as a testament. I think about him every time I see another animal story in the news. The cat at the nursing home in Rhode Island that was able to predict which patients were about to die and would sit on their beds until they’d expired? Marc Livengood has thoughts on that, be assured.
Pet loyalty, in fact, was a recurrent subject of his monologue on our last night together in Nairobi. Which eons of their training would prove genetically more persuasive when, for instance, the dogs were asked by the wolves to choose? Would they turn on us or defend us? Us and them, that’s what it would come down to.
That night we sat at an uncomfortably tiny table at an open-air place about a mile from the airport. He talked. I drank with my left hand, my pencil hand flying. He spoke of how it would go, how it would really begin, stopping after every third or fourth sentence to hold up his hands in a “stop” gesture and say, “Speculation! Speculation!”
He conjured up one of the eeriest Armageddons I’ve ever heard described: existence on a planet that has itself become treacherous. A rapidly approaching period of uncertainty and terror, waves of increased attacks from all over the bio-terrain, creatures coming up from the deep oceans to paralyze shipping, possibly at the sonic command of the dolphins. The forests will no longer be a place to camp. Troops of wildcats
, deer, and moose. Ever seen hikers get stomped by a moose? It’s like watching cans go through a can cruncher.
For a while, everyone will cling to the hope that it’s some kind of phase, and all sorts of comforting theories will be peddled: sunspots, magnetism in the earth’s core, a different explanation every week, but always something to suggest that “the power will come back on,” as Livengood liked to say.
“You have to understand,” he told me, “these are normal biological systems functioning. We are a threat to these animals. They’re just doing what nature has designed them to do. In that sense, there’s nothing revolutionary at all about what I’m arguing. You could even say there’s nothing new about my work. Where it gets interesting is when you remember that we’re a different kind of threat, right? We’re presenting them with the prospect of more or less total global domination by a single species. The lower orders haven’t seen this since the dinosaurs. And keep in mind they were undergoing a period of accelerated evolution then, too. We always make it that the dinosaurs died, then mammals came forward. Why not at least entertain the idea that the mammals played a role?”
“You mean that they took over?”
“Eh…” he said. “Intentionality is tricky with natural selection.”
We were quiet for a minute, sipping our tea.
“And keep in mind,” Marc continued, “that there may be at this moment something like forty dolphins living in the open seas, escapees from marine defense programs. We don’t know what they’re trained to do. Carry explosives? Kill divers? I’m looking for them to emerge in some sort of overt leadership capacity before 2010. It’s the chimps on land, the dolphins in the seas. We can assume they’re working out some kind of mutually intelligible signal system now, most likely on the West African coast.”
Pulphead: Essays Page 29