I saw her with her parents at Blythe Academy once, surrounded by the controlled chaos that is the start of the spring semester. A spray of sudden greenery from the trees, the clatter of shoes on walkways and stairs as students—nervous and excited—tried to find their classes. As I passed by on my way to visit Duncan, one family caught my eye by their very stillness. They stood in the center of the courtyard and also at the center of a kind of calm. The girl stood, legs slightly apart, staring down at the ground, schoolbooks held carelessly in one hand, a pensive look on her face. Her parents stood like towers to either side of her, the space between them containing a daughter not quite belonging to the same world.

Their unlined, unremarkable faces expressed no great joy or sorrow, or none that I could discern, and yet I could feel a tension there; the presence of some overwhelming emotion. I almost felt as if I were a witness to some kind of ritual or ceremony. Was the girl’s head bowed in prayer? As I walked away, I turned to watch them, and it seemed as if they were receding from me at a glacially slow pace.

That must have been Mary’s first year at the Academy, and I find it interesting that even then I noticed her, before Duncan ever pointed her out to me, before I even knew who she was.

When I read Sabon’s biographical note in her various books, what I envision when I come across the sentence beginning “Her early interest in nature studies…” arises not from her gallery visit, but from that first glimpse: of twinned parents standing guard on either side of a daughter whose face is tilted toward the ground. Something about their wary stance still worries me now, even after my research has made of them more than silent statues.

In fact, my research has somehow lessened their pull on my imagination, for the facts do not particularly impress. (They impressed me!)

Given that David Sabon’s most important contribution to natural history consists of helping to edit a revised edition of Xaver Daffed’s classic A History of Animals, perhaps it would be best to simply note his presence and move on. However, his peculiar (dangerous!) attitude toward the gray caps, delivered in the form of speeches to many a meeting of the Ambergrisian Historical Society (smoky, jaundiced events punctuated by coughs, grunts, and unintelligible murmurings from octogenarian senilitians), should be documented somewhere. Where better than an afterword?

David Sabon preached a strain of Nativism (otherwise known as “a good way to get yourself killed”), although not quite the same one later popularized by Mary. David Sabon not only believed that gray caps possessed “no more natural intelligence than a cow, pig, or chicken” but that they should be treated “much as we treat other animals.” As the transcript for one memorable speech reads, “Gray caps should be used to support our labors, for our entertainment, and for meat.”