Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [78]
We had one more breach on the decoy that morning. I had deliberately set my camera aside, wanting to experience, to remember this remarkable sight without viewing it through a lens. The shark came at the decoy from an angle more shallow than its predecessors, snapped it up in its mouth, and for an instant was also completely out of the water, its belly and underside perfectly parallel to the surface and its snout pointed toward our stern. It looked as if we were being pursued by some lethal low-flying aircraft. When the shark splashed back down with the decoy, its visit became the third close breach of the day, including that astounding 360-degree leap. As a coda, on the way back to Simon’s Town, we came upon a pod of romping minke whales.
That particular day, by any standard, had turned out to be something much more than ordinary.
XIII
DRACULA IS A MUTE
Northern Borneo, September 2010
AN EFFICIENT VAMPIRE NEVER WAKES its victim, never unsettles their sleep, never alerts them to its bloodsucking presence, for the very good reason that the meal in question might object to serving as someone else’s dinner. Whether the fabled count himself injected anesthetic into his quarry in the course of his nocturnal imbibitions is a subject that never seems to merit discussion in the innumerable films in which he has starred. Similarly, the matter of whether or not his saliva included a useful dose of anticoagulant to keep the blood flowing freely is also glossed over. The producers of such entertainments would rather focus on cleavage than coagulants.
In real life, those that thrive by drinking the blood of another usually, but not always, possess both weapons to facilitate their dining. Being subject to the attentions of one in particular turned out to be an oddly neutral experience. Not that it’s one I’d care to repeat, even for demonstration purposes. Still, I couldn’t escape the feeling afterward that the simple yet supremely efficient animal that had partaken uninvited of my bodily fluids was somehow apologetic regarding the entire incident.
I’ve mentioned my brief encounter with a single leech in Papua New Guinea. It was small and so was its appetite. The tiger leech is another matter entirely: one that I unwillingly encountered in the Danum Valley of northern Borneo.
The Danum is protected primary rain forest. Having never been cut, it’s still densely populated with exotic creatures such as pangolins, binturongs, flying frogs and squirrels, five feline species, including the rarely seen clouded leopard, the even rarer Sumatran rhino, pygmy elephants, many primate species besides the iconic orangutan, insects that look as if they were designed by Fabergé, and leeches. Millions and millions of leeches. No matter how hard you try to avoid them, they . . . will . . . find . . . you.
While the common brown leech of Borneo (length less than two inches) tends to hug the rain-forest floor, the much larger tiger leech prefers to hang out on the ends of branches and leaves waiting for potential hosts to amble by. Able to sense its prey by both movement and heat, it will extend itself to its full length from the very tips of leaves in hopes of latching on to a passing meal. Once on board, it will efficiently and with surprising speed seek out bare flesh, attach its mouthparts, and begin to feed.
I got struck twice, and both times if was my fault. The first occasion can be attributed to hubris, the second to oversight.
My choice of jungle gear is a pair of long pants and a long-sleeved shirt made by the now sadly vanished firm of Willis & Geiger. W & G was bought by a much larger firm that, in the daffy pseudo-prescient manner of such companies, decided the market for such specialized gear did not justify the cost of producing it. In all the years I’ve worn this carefully preserved