Crocodile Teeth
His sense of self began to change when a crocodile twisted off his arm. His girlfriend had floated the idea of inviting the guide, a stoic but energetic weasel, into their bedroom after dinner and the considerations distracted him as the three stalked into a tight-knit grove near a wide bend in the river. His primary insurance disputed the disbursements with his secondary policy (a union perk), a conflict that required he contact the Congolese hospital, which was not his job, which his girlfriend pointed out, which sealed a concern that he “seemed to wilt like any rose” as the guide noted in the aftermath’s destabilization. His chief concern, when the administrative hassles concluded and his new life with one arm and no girlfriend set sail for acceptance, was that friends, having heard the story, might call him Captain Hook.
This was an irrational fantasy seeded by the advanced chemistry of survival. People of theater-going British-influenced heritage would make the connection, of course, eventually, but no one would consider such a cheap reference when hearing of the guide pinching his brachial artery or gurneys swinging from decommissioned military helicopters. Things descended to lunacy after he quipped: “Maybe I’ll go back and shoot Tick-Tock,” and a close friend laughed-without-hesitation. It was a nervous laugh; the friend was reacting to a searching tone; he could have said anything; the immediacy indicated a rush of support. But the possibilities mutated, prompted a move to the outskirts of La Crosse, Wisconsin and six months after that, a pilgrimage to Nepal where he was attacked by a falcon.
Attacked would be his word. In reality the bird screamed in low flight above his head. It never touched him. But in the aftermath, in an effort to understand the natural conspiracy he sensed developing against him, he learned falcons kill with their beaks not their claws. They have a specialized tooth. That sets them apart from hawks and eagles, which kill with their claws not their beaks, according to Wikipedia posts he cross-referenced but still enough data to motivate a lengthy missive to (essentially) his address book (including ex / guide) about never taking a moment for granted. This was the first anyone but his nuclear family and a few (new) friends had heard from him in almost a year. His cousin, a hunter, replied acknowledging his string of misfortune and that while his points about the lurking jaws of life — beneath a log, cruising scree fields, at a bus stop, etc. — were extremely valid, of course, that the picture of the offending bird he’d snapped was in fact a hawk, not a falcon, and if he showed “pretty much any naturalist, they’ll recognize that off the bat. Again, not trying to be clever, just fyi.”
He couldn’t think of anyone he’d remotely describe as a naturalist — why would he show one? He still agonized for a week. Should he send a correction? Until he received an email from a college roommate saying someone had shared his letter “in my feed….” That was the end of the email. The ellipses. No signature. He clicked on the link. He found himself at an anonymous blog with a post titled “Profound Missive And Mystery of Inspiration.” All 3,217 words: [Control+C] / [Control+V]. The blog author had maintained the formatting when he used bold and italics; the post had 2,304 shares and 130 comments, many from foreign countries; another arrived as he read through them. “Absolutely made my day! So, who wrote this?” Most showered the note with far stronger plaudits. A few said it was banal, sanctimonious or dumb. One comment, under an anonymous handle, claimed he was the original author. The blog author hadn’t replied. The blog author had used his picture of the river bend as the header image. He kept his caption: “Tick-Tock’s lair”. But he edited out his shot of the bird.
