Vampire Bats (At the Zoo)

All asleep in the corner where the wall of the cage meets the ceiling. Some half-hearted stucco detail suggests “cave” but it’s a cage. The animals are prisoners. Some, like the seemingly friendly toucans, are less put out than others. The toucans sit on the wooden railing that crosses the duck put, right at chest height so you could pet them, if you were an idiot. The two toucans sit side by side and occasionally one of them clacks its great loud beak over the other’s. Their eyes, within their little neon rings, are like little rave-hipsters’ eyes. The eyes are incongruous next to the giant protuberance of beak.

But the vampire bats huddle together upside-down like stressed mice. They make shivering movements, tiny yawns with needle teeth, twitch their oversized delicate ears. They’re living dustbunnies hungry for blood. How are they fed? For the bats there can’t be much pleasure in the process, whatever it is.

Maned Wolf (At the Zoo)

A scary animal from South America. From the age of the strange South American mammals. The last representative of its category of animals, it lopes across its fake pampas. It looks like a wolf in a nightmare: lean, shaggy, with sway back and snaggleteeth. A monster wolf running laps around an unmowed lawn.

When I used to have dreams about animals, I considered them important. I wrote them down, under the heading: ANIMAL DREAMS. I can remember being the person who considered these meaningful enough to record, but I can’t remember how that person felt about the list, or about the self-assigned task. The meaning of this documentation has been lost. Lost and now given over to a weird private archaeological investigation. Like lots of junk, lots of stuff I’ve either found or remember doing but can’t find or don’t care about finding.

Prairie Dog (At the Zoo)

A special habitat I wanted to investigate because of “My Antonia,” in which observation of the surface life of prairie dogs – an exotic species that must be somewhat new to the world – underlines the great mystery of these animals’ underground cities, called “towns”, about which I guess nothing was known. Now we know all about them, for all the good it does us and them, and we can walk around these “towns” and stick our heads up, or our childrens’ heads up, in the Plexiglas bubbles and pretend we are part of the exhibit. (I didn’t capitalize Plexiglas: the machine does.)

 

            The prairie dogs rear up and stand erect and dramatically alert, like tuning forks, each one pointing in a different direction. There are the “spotters”, a very high proportion of the total population, and then there are the others, who mill around, feed, and then pop up suddenly and become still, spotters. Are they less likely to attract predators if they stand there like that? They are precise little machines, the way they rear up and hold the pose. Modern dance. Could some hawk actually swoop down and pick them off? The concrete tunnel under their enclosure makes you feel like a child, confined in a magic world with blind turns. Then you’re out of there before you know it. What are you supposed to learn by standing up in the Plexiglas tube, inside a ring of alert prairie dogs? Can you scan the horizon with them?