It was truly a very grand Bengal tiger, with fur the color of fire, and Downing has spent most of the past forty-eight hours bent-backed and lost in a dreamy, nigh-spiritual state, feeling tall grasses blow upon his gigantic wet nose, his heavy paws dropping on tundra, the ancient taste of blood in his mouth, and he nearly owns now the beast’s natural pace, all its breath-pauses, and most importantly, its ceaseless, inviolable hunger, the motivation for its whole inviolable animus, when there’s a knock on the door—

“Tits!” shouts the taxidermist, his eyeglasses slipping to the end of his nose.

He grabs what is left of the hair on his head and stomps to the front door of his shop, which opens with a jingle of sleigh bells.

“What is it!” he demands.

It is not a what but a who, a delivery boy, just skin and bones really, and with no mental capacity for taxidermy. The delivery boy, terrified of Mr. Downing and his weird shop brimming with stuffed beasts, struggles to hold the very large brown paper package which he carries, corpse-like, in his arms.

“Sign for it, sir,” he says, and Downing, eyeing the package that has been marked Karoo, Orycteropus afer: “The Aardvark” by the hand of his good friend Sir Richard Ostlet, Britain’s finest zoological sportsman, signs for it.

He closes the door.

Downing carries the package back into his shop, holds it high in the light like an offering, and then returns to his back room and lays it gently down upon the unoccupied workbench. He unwraps the package and unfolds a death mask. Here, two rabbity ears. A rubber snout. The low mouth is shaped like a biscuit. Here, a thick and broad yellow-pink hide with four brown and furry hoof-claws. Here, an unassembled skeleton of blanched ribs and blanched feet, two fat bone-blades of shoulders, one long, pointed skull, and beneath it all a stack of accompanying notes and coal-sketches of a creature the likes of which no one in Warwickshire has ever seen.

* * *

No one knows that you suck Greg Tampico’s cock. And certainly no one knows that Greg Tampico sucks your cock, or that occasionally you will just lie in bed next to each other and stroke (or not stroke) each other’s cocks.

You know that you are Not Gay, and Greg Tampico is Not Gay: you are simply both straight guys who occasionally like other straight guys who like to suck or stroke cocks—and no one yet knows that you met Greg Tampico eight months ago at a fundraising dinner for Namibian children with some horrible disfiguring disease that you had to promptly forget about, or even that Greg Tampico contacted you to come support his cause at the dinner a year ago because you were enjoying a 64% Favorability Rating then and were bringing with you, like, seriously great press!

No one saw how you gazed admiringly at each other across the ballroom, across the tables all adorned with English bone china, across the glittering chandeliers and candles as lukewarm chicken piccata and some kind of scampi were served, and no one could have noticed how quickly you discerned that the beautiful young woman in the seat next to yours was a complete idiot, or how you moved your seat a few inches back from hers to keep Greg Tampico, bright blond in his tuxedo, within your line of sight throughout dinner, after which you and Greg Tampico found yourselves in an alley off the kitchen (it was raining), leaning your backs against cold brick as he snapped a Zippo, or how you huddled together under the roofline, sharing a cigarette before making plans to go back to his place in Alexandria—Alexander in Alexandria, he said with a smile—or how you drove to his place on King Street, parked and made your way to his walk-up, where Greg Tampico was waiting to greet you, tie-loosened, in the foyer before he pulled you inside, led you upstairs, right into the bedroom and, laughing like a child at play, said Who’s gonna be your lawyer, son, as he reached for your belt buckle.