Downing returns to his workbench. He closes his eyes and tries to quiet himself back into the life of the Bengal tiger, but it is impossible, the tiger’s moment has passed, it will likely take days to find it again, and his mind is traveling helplessly back to the aardvark until at last he gives up and goes to it, realizing with growing excitement that Ostlet has offered him not a joke but a challenge: how to re-create the jiva of a beast as ugly as this one? A creature about which no civilized man knows anything?

The notes and sketches which Ostlet has sent him now appear to Downing to be almost deliberately sparse:

Nocturnal. Sleeps in underground tunnels.

Social, entomological eater. Has cheek teeth.

Throws snout into ground to smell deeply.

Digs with front feet. Kicks dirt with back feet.

Bark is high pitched, such as a wanting dog.

Exit the tiger, enter the aardvark. Downing’s bony fingers cross the pelage. The skin is first pink and then yellow, the fur an inexplicable mixture of wire and silk, and it’s brown at the hind limbs, which are plantigrade at the front, digitigrade at the back, and Ostlet’s hunters always do a very fine job, he thinks as his hands touch the beast’s rear feet, which take up half the leg. Then it’s the heavy claws, each digit wide as a spoon, and what strength in the tail, Downing thinks, how it glides right up the back, which is round as a tortoise, and he closes his eyes and imagines the aardvark using the tail muscle for balance in her underground tunnels, to avoid bumping her wide body into narrow walls, and Downing can now clearly see the aardvark lumbering on her large legs past huge termite mounds—they look like sand castles built by ambitious, imbecilic children—and there’s the great hulk of shoulder gliding beneath the skin, the fat swing of belly, and Downing now knows her weight and pesanteur, her erratic mood, and when she runs, she rises surprisingly up onto her tippy toes so much so she fairly prances, her conical head aloft with donkey ears that flick upward at any rustle of subterranean insect activity, and he can almost feel the scrabble of the loose soil as she thrusts her spoons into the earth to begin burrowing, the dirt smells of sugar, he can almost taste the nectar of termites now on his own sticky tongue until morning arrives and enter the bark, the soft piggy squeal: don’t wake me in daylight!

Enter the fatigue, bones burning after a night ambling on these bizarre haunches, and when she sleeps, she curls her fat body into a comma, and Downing can feel the light purr of the beast’s slimy lips during slumber, her nostrils shuttering open then closed, and there goes the slip of the serpentine tongue in and out from her small mouth as she dreams about her own hunger, and it is now, because Downing can see into the dreams of the ugly, vulgar, exhausted aardvark that he begins to understand that despite its appalling morphology, beauty is possible.