Bat Country, Part 1 of 2

The Book of Deadly Animals hits the UK in ten days. To celebrate, I'm running here an expanded version of a tale I told in the book. In the clip above, James Addison Conrad reads a snatch about bats from the book to get you in the mood. The expanded story begins below.


My first one: I was six years old. The thing clung to a cinderblock wall in my father's shop. It seemed feeble, rocking its head to dodge the light, tentative as a shivering newborn kitten. Its was nothing like the image I'd taken from vampire movies on TV. Its blunt face terminated in a nose made of hideous convolutions of flesh. On TV the wings could have been cut from black velvet. The real ones were naked and veined, their gray hide suggesting both the delicacy of a child's skin and the desiccation of an old man's.


I wanted to catch it, but my father told me not to touch it, not even to approach. Months later two older boys at school brought a similar specimen in an aquarium. They brought it to all the classrooms, and we gazed at the creature from some other realm. When it died soon after, the two boys who'd handled it had to be vaccinated. The doctors stabbed long needles into their bellies.


It is a myth, of course, to say they're all rabid. Less than one percent of them are. It's truer to say one too slow and earthbound to stay out of human hands is dangerous--near death, and a possible vector of death.





Instead of This Journey
from Gilgamesh
Eat berries verging on overripe;let their liquor stain your beard. Dance, though your steps be clumsy;let the motion make you new.  Sing, though half the words you knowhave sunk into the mud of memory. Bathe in hot water—its steam the ghostsof snakes casting their skins in air,a viperous migration of your caresinto nothing. Dress in clean silk;let the hot wind whip your hair dry. Let the child take your hand—his small hand holding two fingers of yours.At night make love to your wife.In the morning lie luxurious in the scent of it.



Having followed the directions in a press kit, I found myself standing in a landscape of eroded hills and red earth. This rugged country had risen abruptly as I drove the plains of northern Oklahoma. An old couple met me as soon as I peeled myself out of the car. The man had a concavity of eyelid where his left eye had been, and the stump of his left forearm was encased in a leather sheathe and held against his body by one of his suspenders. He said he was a farmer. The woman, who was dressed in yellow polyester and seemed impervious to the heat, asked brightly if I was a volunteer too. I said no, I've only come to watch.


Soon we were piled, with a dozen others, into pickup trucks and driven down a set of dirt roads crusted with caliche. We had vowed not to reveal the route to anyone else. The secrecy was meant to protect the biological treasure we'd come to see. We reached a valley of red cedar and tamarisk, yucca and sand plum, where a hot wind harried the black dragonflies. I gazed into the thin, deep creek that crawled the valley floor and saw a peculiar abundance: minnows swimming in place against the current, sluggish catfish groping in the mud with their tentacled faces. If I hadn't already known about the hidden life of this valley, the richness of fish might have been my first clue. The water trickles through gypsum caves before it gathers into the creek, and in the caves it becomes rich with the leavings of one million nocturnal predators.



High in the mountains, a river's bed is lined with sharp andfaceted stones. Farther down the stones are smaller and smoother. The rivershrinks them. The progress continues, from coarse gravel to finer, from that tocoarse sand and then finer. Where it joins the sea it is turbid with sand andgravel. The sand settles on the shores, cast by the waves. It is nearly as fineas water itself. The sand originated in rotten leaves and other light things.

--Leonardoda Vinci


I'd come here with wildlife professionals and conservation volunteers to witness the emergence of these predators, which would reveal themselves at dusk. Meanwhile it was an arid ninety-five degrees and a fleshy cloud to the south was kneading itself into a tense knot as it approached, as if fretting that it had nothing to give us. We walked the trail, and the professionals stopped us at metal markers to comment. Rena, the lead biologist, struck me as surprisingly pale for someone who worked outdoors. "This appears to be a red cedar tree, but it is really two red cedar trees," she said. You could tell, she pointed out, because one side bore blue juniper berries and the other didn't. If you peered deep into the needled foliage you could see two distinct trunks at the core.


High in the male half of the tree rested a peculiar brown growth. It looked like a furry golf ball with tentacles.


"When it rains, that thing will open up. It'll be like a slimy hand," Rena said.


"It's a parasite that needs two hosts at different stages of its life cycle," added Davis, a biologist with a small face engulfed in an extravagant beard. "It needs an apple tree and a red cedar." Lacking either host, it can't survive. The apple tree, which hosts the ball of rot in its infancy, may be twenty miles distant or more.


We moved on, discussing plant life or the occasional reptile that revealed itself by rustling in its shaded bed of fallen cedar needles. The volunteers were to learn the ecosystem which lay before us, a cryptic web of relations connecting everything from the trees to the insects to the rabbits whose round pellets of scat revealed their existence. The volunteers would have to answer questions from the tourists who would soon scuffle the trails of this park, each busload having first taken the vow of secrecy.


One of those black dragonflies buzzed into someone's face, prompting the woman to windmill ineffectually. Up close, each of the creature's wings seemed branded with blue thumbprints. The biologists reminisced about a monster insect of uncertain order that had terrorized them all for ten seconds at the last dusk. The volunteers offered helpful suggestions about what it might have been, all of which the professionals dismissed. It was, they said, an utter mystery.


A thorny tamarisk stood at an elbow of the path. "Supposedly their roots go a hundred feet deep," said Davis. That's why this imported species can thrive among the dry valleys and buttes of northern Oklahoma. The twisted elms that tossed their heads in the wind were of the Siberian variety, another species imported for its deep-drilling roots.


At a turn of the path, everyone stopped. An unpleasant substance lay in the middle of the trail, its odor announcing its freshness. The professionals poked at the stuff with twigs and examined the pugmarks. A spirited debate erupted, one faction of biologists arguing that the substance was scat, another favoring vomitus. Because the prints showed no evidence of claw marks, Rena ruled out coyote. Members of the canine clan can't retract their claws. This was the work of a cat. Since the smelly matter wasn't buried, it was probably vomitus rather than scat. Or else we had startled the cat away before it meant to leave.


"A neighbor of mine saw a mountain lion standing in the middle of the highway the other morning," said the farmer. This remark touched off a round of stories about recent sightings. I followed the track off into the grass, where it disappeared. The pugmarks were small, surely the work of a bobcat rather than a mountain lion. I crouched to look along the path he might have taken. At that level I could see tunnels between the clumps of grass, roofed by the overarching stalks. These tunnels, Davis told me, are runways for killdeer and mice, paths for cottontail and roadrunner. And bobcat.





Unable to resist my eager desire and wantingto see the great variety of strange shapes made by formative nature, and havingwandered some distance among gloomy rocks, I came to the entrance of a greatcavern, in front of which I stood some time, astonished and unaware of such athing. Bending my back into an arch I rested my left hand on my knee and heldmy right hand over my down-cast and contracted eye brows: often bending firstone way and then the other, to see whether I could discover anything inside,and this being forbidden by the deep darkness within, and after having remainedthere some time, two contrary emotions arose in me, fear and desire—fear of thethreatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvellous thingwithin it.

--Leonardo da Vinci




One of the volunteers mapped caves for a living. As we walked he told me about bat caves.


"You don't want to go into a cave that houses a big colony. You could die from it."


The problem is a fungus that grows in the feces. A large group of bats drops enormous quantities of guano, creating a heavy concentration of airborne histoplasm spores. The spores can infect human lungs, causing dense, fibrous knots of tissue to form there. On an x-ray, a victim's lungs look as if he's inhaled a handful of dimes. The infection can spread to other organs.


"The ironic thing," the caver added, "is that doctors used to think it was tuberculosis, and they'd send people into caverns to live in the cool and damp."


I asked what it looks like in the cave.


"The guano is waist deep. It's black and shiny, exactly like tar. I didn't take my mask off in there, of course, but before we went in we could smell the stink, like ammonia." The odor is another effect of a concentrated bat population. Bat guano doesn't smell much until it's digested by a species of beetle that eats nothing else and thrives only where the deposits are deep.


Wine, the divine juice of the grape, findingitself in a golden and richly wrought cup, on the table of Mahomet, was puffedup with pride at so much honour; when suddenly it was struck by a contraryreflection, saying to itself: "What am I about, that I should rejoice, andnot perceive that I am now near to my death and shall leave my golden abode inthis cup to enter into the foul and fetid caverns of the human body?"
--Leonardo da Vinci


(To be concluded next time. This story originally appeared in Granta.)