The aardvark thrust her spoony claws into the ground like two anchors, forcing the hunter to enter the tunnel in darkness, groping, swiping termites off his arms, crying out from their bites, sneezing them out of his nose until at last he heard her grunting in pain and somehow grasped her thick tail, and it was hours of pulling the wounded aardvark out from her habitat, a kind of pulling not at all unlike a fisherman working a big fish from the sea, and when the hunter at last succeeded it was not for any talent on his part; the aardvark had lost too much blood. She was weak, her grip on the earth had become loose, untenable, and when the hunter yanked her tail with his full strength and the aardvark finally emerged from the hole in the ground, she was long past afraid and half-conscious.

Overnight, she was carried in a canvas hammocked between two hunters’ shoulders, cradled on her back, her front legs—plantigrade—hanging over the sides, her hind legs—digitigrade—sticking up toward the sky, and though he couldn’t have imagined it then, Downing imagined it now: how the aardvark was presented this way to Ostlet.

He imagined Richard fussing with his glasses, trying in vain to see as much of the aardvark as possible but relying, in the end, on the eyes of his young assistant, a student of his in the Department of Naturalism at Edinburgh who, the following evening, after the aardvark was respectfully slaughtered, her carcass hung, after her bones were boiled and all was wrapped up in a brown paper package and prepared for Titus Downing, rebuffed the advances of a man fifty years old and nearly blind.

Perhaps, Downing guessed, it was regret at his decision not to bring Titus with him after all that Richard, blind and alone, took his own life, and so preoccupied is he with the thought as he completes the aardvark and turns off the gaslight, as he walks upstairs and puts himself to bed, that he does not tend to the strange, dark figure which, in the minutes since, has appeared outside his shopwindow, pacing to and fro underneath the twelve buck heads.

* * *

After you and Toby agreed to bail on dinner, you paid the check, went to your Tahoe, climbed up into the two front seats, and started making out. You both went crazy, groping at each other’s faces, and though you knew reporters would be looking for you, you have no idea how they could have found you so quickly, that they would have been hiding around the corner of the Brown, Lake & Peterson Company, but they are here, a huge buzzing number of newspaper reporters, assorted paparazzi, and when they start shouting, when their lights start flashing, Toby screams and you panic, throw the Tahoe into gear and take off down the street.

“Slow down, you’re just making it look worse,” Toby is yelling, and you’re yelling back, “Shut up, I know what I’m doing. Who’s in the public eye? Who?!”