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Wayness turned back to Glawen. “Tell us about the battles. .Have you seen them?”

“Twice. When you’re at the lodge they’re hard to ignore.”

“What happens? Are they as bad as Julian fears?”

“They are spectacular, and in some ways rather grim.”

Julian gave an ironic snort. “Please instruct me in the ways that they are other than grim.”

“It’s mostly in the mind of the beholder. The banjees don’t seem to care.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“The battles would be easy to avoid, if they were so inclined.”

Julian brought a booklet from his pocket. “Listen to this article: ‘The banjee battles are extremely dramatic and picturesque events; happily they have been made accessible to the tourist.

“‘Squeamish folk be warned: these battles are horrifying in their frenzy and in the hideous deeds which occur. Shouts and screams rise and fall; the trumpeting cries of victory mingle with the anguished moans of the defeated. Without surcease or pity the warriors wield their mighty instruments of death. They slash and strike, probe and thrust; quarter is neither extended nor expected.

“‘For the Gaean onlooker, the battles are poignant experiences, rife with archetypal symbology. Emotions are aroused to which the contemporary mind cannot even fit a name. No question as to the quality of the spectacle; the encounters reek with color: portentous reds, the black gleam on the bizarre angles of armor and helmets; the alkaline blues and greens of the thoracic cushions.

“‘The air at Mad Mountain is heavy with the sense of majestic force and tragic destiny’ - it goes on in that vein.”

“It is vivid description,” said Glawen. “The official guidebook is put to shame, and in fact barely mentions the battles.”

“Still, are not the facts in order?”

“Not altogether. There are not so many shrieks and moans, but grunts and curses and bubbling sounds. The females and bantlings stand by unconcerned and are not molested. Still, there’s no denying that the warriors tend to hack at each other.”

Wayness asked: “Forgive me my morbid curiosity - but exactly what happens?”

“The battles seem absolutely pointless and could easily be avoided. The migration routes run east-west and north-south, and cross just below Mad Mountain Lodge. When a horde is approaching, the first signal is a low sound: an ominous murmur. Then the horde appears in the distance. A few minutes later the first attack squad comes running along the route - a hundred elite warriors armed with thirty-foot lances, axes, and six-foot spikes. They secure the crossing and stand guard while the horde runs past. If another horde is passing, the approaching horde does not wait until the other one has gone by, as logic would dictate, but instead becomes indignant and attacks.

“The warriors bring down their lances and charge, trying to force open an avenue for their own group to pass. The battle continues until one or the other of the hordes has negotiated the crossing. It’s a disgrace to go last and the defeated horde sets up a great howl of hurt feelings.

“About this time tourists run down for souvenirs, hoping to find an undamaged helmet. They prowl through the corpses pulling and tugging. Sometimes the banjee is still alive and kills the tourist.

“The dead tourist is not ignored by the management. His picture is hung in the gallery as a warning to others. There are hundreds of these pictures, of folk from almost as many worlds, and they are a source of fascination to everyone.”

“I find the whole business disgraceful,” said Julian.

“I think it’s distasteful myself,” said Glawen. “But the banjees won’t stop fighting and the tourists won’t stop coming - so Mad Mountain Lodge stays open.”

“That is a cynical attitude,” said Julian.

“I don’t feel cynical,” said Glawen. “I just don’t feel theoretical.”

“I’m sure that I don’t understand you,” said Julian stiffly.

Milo asked: “So what is  your scheme for the banjees - assuming you were allowed free rein?”

“My first thought was a set of barricades which would hold one horde back while the other passed, but barriers or fences are easily broken down or avoided. At the moment I’m considering ramps and an overpass so that the banjees can go their separate ways without coming into contact with each other.”

“Be reasonable, Julian. You must know that you won’t be allowed any such project. Have you never heard of the Charter?”

“The Charter is as moribund as the Naturalist Society. I don’t mind telling you that the LPF is studying its options.”

“Consider all the options you like. Plan ramps and overpasses to your heart’s content, though how you can call this official business is beyond me. It’s Peefer business and Julian business, at Conservancy expense. There, if you like, is cynicism.”

Slowly Julian turned his head and surveyed Milo under hooded eyelids, and for an instant the curtain of genteel accommodation was torn.

Milo spoke with an unwonted edge in his voice. “More than anything else you want to set a precedent for Peefer meddling in the environment. The next step would be to invite the Yips to lay claim to the land. The Peefers would build grand estates for themselves in the choicest areas of Deucas. Confine all the wild animals behind fences. I assure you, Julian, it won’t work.”

— Araminta Station by Jack Vance (51%)

It had been a complicated case and the town was by no means convinced of her guilt. She had killed a man whom she said had raped her, but the jury judged this a lie because she had fallen pregnant, which cannot occur without the woman taking pleasure in the act. Normally her condition would have spared her the gallows, but she had lost the child and also any defense against the hangman. An unfortunate outcome, which those who believed in her guilt considered divine providence.

Lower assured me his attendance was necessary; a hanging is a detestable sight, but one of his many fascinations was when exactly the moment of death occurs. This related directly to our experiments with the dove in the air pump. Most of those hanged asphyxiate slowly at the end of the rope and it was a matter of some considerable interest to him—and to physick in general—how long it takes for the soul to depart. He was, he assured me, a considerable expert in the matter. For this reason, he positioned himself next to the tree to take notes.

He also got his corpse, once he had tipped the officials and paid a pound to the family. He had it carried to an apothecary of his acquaintance and, after he prayed in his fashion and I in mine, we began work. Some anatomization we performed there—I took the heart while he cracked open the skull and drew some delightful sketches of the brain—then we jointed the rest and placed the portions in several large vats of spirit which the apothecary undertook to deliver to Crosse's shop. He also wrote a letter to Boyle telling them the vats were on their way and should on no account be opened.

"I don't know that he will be so very pleased," he said, once he had washed his hands and we had retired to the inn for food and drink. "But where else could I send them? My college refuses to have corpses on the premises for any length of time, and if I sent it to anyone else they might well practice on it before I returned. Some people have no shame in these matters.”

As for the rest of our trip, there is little point in going into details. The patients came in thick and fast once we had established ourselves in the various inns on our route and I returned ten days later sixty-five shillings the richer. The average fee was four pence, nobody ever paid more than one and sixpence, and when I was paid in kind I had to sell the various geese and ducks and hens at a discount to local traders (we ate one goose, but I could hardly return to Oxford with a farmyard menagerie trailing behind me). All this should give an idea of how many patients I treated.

That morning I extracted four teeth, drained several gallons of blood (fancy notions about therapeutic efficacy get you nowhere in the country; they wanted their blood let and that was what they were determined to have), bound wounds, tasted piss, applied salves and took in seven shillings. A brief pause for lunch and then we were off again; lancing sores, wiping pus, setting joints and taking in eleven shillings and eight pence. Throughout, all of Lower's grand theories about the new medicine were abandoned. The patients were not interested in the benefits of iatrochemical potions and were disdainful of innovation. So, instead of prescribing careful concoctions of mercury and antimony, we rebalanced humors like the most hidebound of Galenists, and consulted the stars with a fervor worthy of Paracelsus himself. Anything which might work, for we had not the leisure to consider novel approaches, nor the reputation to apply them.

— An instance of the fingerpost by Iain Pears (21%)

I suspect that the way in which the Ashura festival was maintained was cyclical in nature and varied across shrines. Conceivably, a shrine where hyenas came to eat porridge was going to increase in popularity. Harar is a small town, and word can travel fast. Harar also has TV, radio, print, and social media to amplify the gossip factor. So, without controls, you could expect increasing numbers of people to go to any particular shrine that was successful in the hyena feeding. But once the numbers became too high, the hyenas would inevitably withdraw their participa- tion, and after a few years of this, the number of people attending would decline to just a few. At that point, the hyenas would return and start eating the porridge again. Hence the murids of the various shrines were in a position where they had to maintain the celebrations and yet try to ensure that the number of people didn’t prevent the hyenas from coming to feed. When the hyenas abstained, it was the murids who had to deal with the failure.

But what kind of failure are we talking about here? When the hyena emerged from the shrubs and began to eat the porridge at Aw Nugus, the potential for the ritual to fail was massive. This was specifically due to the actions of two people: the journalist with the flashlight and the girl with the digital camera. The hyena was extremely nervous about the flashlight, and this was exacerbated by the inter- mittent flashes from the camera. The journalist and girl either failed to recognize or disregarded the mindset of the hyena—that she was scared and about to scar- per—and continued with the flashlight and the camera until she ran off without finishing the porridge. This undermined what the murid was trying to do: make the place as unthreatening as possible to the hyenas so that they’d come and finish the porridge. Unlike the journalist and the girl, the murid was attending to the subjectivities of the hyenas, and this was going to be key to the ongoing success of the Ashura celebration at Aw Nugus. The hyenas dictated the terms under which they would come and eat porridge, and it was up to the humans to understand those terms and accommodate the hyenas. The failure of the ritual in this case was a failure to attend to the subjectivities of the hyenas. If the hyenas declined to eat, then the implications for the coming year were ominous and obvious to all.

— Among the Bone Eaters by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Marcus Baynes-Rock (Page 71 - 72)

Whereas I’d previously seen myself as a hack anthropologist doing hack research on semidomesticated hack hyenas, I began to see my project in a different light. In the first place, the hyenas in Harar were not a bunch of second-rate, garbage-munching inferiors to their free-ranging predatory cousins in the Mara. Both groups lived in the shadow of humans and survived by dint of human indulgence—or human indifference. If anything, it was the Harar hyenas who deserved attention, because they represented the future. On a continent experiencing enormous population growth, unfettered develop- ment, and massive habitat destruction, it was the hyenas like those in Harar who stood a chance of persisting beyond the boundaries of protected areas and zoos. I also came to feel good about my own practices. Whereas the Mara project was taking a top-down approach—collecting data to test hypotheses formed out of evolutionary theory—I was working from the bottom up. Rather than control- ling for variables, I was exploring the limits of the variable in Harar, dissecting the interests and agendas of the various players in an urban human/hyena mixing bowl, and asking open-ended questions. What’s important to a hyena person in a maze of narrow lanes? What’s important to a human person encountering that hyena? What’s it like to navigate lanes at night where you might encounter hu- mans at every turn? I was exploring the possibilities that arise when hyenas have to coexist with the old evolutionary enemy, examining socially, politically, ecologi- cally complex relations and how these two and other species operated to mutually shape human/hyena coexistence in a town of a hundred thousand people and two hundred hyenas. This is why it was so crucial for me to be crawling through hyena holes and following hyenas in the middle of the night. I needed to be there when the hyenas did things that expanded the realms of possibility. Epistemologically prepackaged, limited in presence, but unlimited in scope, I was on the ground, in the dark, and subjective as all hell.

— Among the Bone Eaters by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Marcus Baynes-Rock (Page 158)