I am the angel of death. I am the reign of terror, the ten plagues, I am a case of the clap, I am the thing that goes bump in the night, De Shadow, death warmed over. I am the bogeyman with cat eyes waiting until midnight in every kid’s clothes closet, I am leering slinky silent quicksilver baboon terror, I am Beelzebub’s bill collector. Another baboon successfully darted. Euphoria. Today I darted Gums, the last baboon on earth I would have ever thought of getting. Wily old bugger, knew my every trick, had eluded me for months. I was near despair at ever getting a blood sample from him, and today, he screwed up. Surrounded himself in presumed safety in a crowd of females, figured he was safe, figured they would take the fall if there was a rubout, figured I’d never dare shoot into a crowd, but he was wrong! They all had their heads turned, he miscalculated the space between two closely spaced trees, and, fffft, I sent an anesthetic dart sailing from the blowgun into his ass. Unconscious in four minutes. Musk triumph power loins dawn-of-man science. It was all I could do to keep from savaging his soft underbelly with my canines while he was down.
Darting. As I said, the main thing I wanted to learn when I first joined the troop was what a baboon’s social behavior, his social rank, his emotional life, has to do with what diseases he gets, especially stress-related diseases. Why are some bodies, and some psyches, more susceptible to such diseases than others? So you watch the animals like crazy, carefully document the whole soap opera. Then dart them with an anesthetic blowgun and find out how their bodies are working. Theoretically simple. Approach a baboon you typically walk up to twelve times a day while you’re doing behavioral observation, except this time, your walking stick turns out to be a blowgun and you zip a dart into him. The only problem is that you have to dart everyone at the same time of day, to control for daily fluctuation in blood hormones. And you can’t dart someone if he’s sick that day, has had a fight, an injury, mated—because those will throw off the normal values of the hormones. Finally, and here’s the real pisser, you can’t dart someone if he knows it’s coming. If I’m trying to see what stress hormone levels in the bloodstream are like under normal unstressed resting conditions, I have to get the baboons when they are quiet, unsuspecting. I must sneak up on them. No witnesses. To wit, I dart baboons in the back for a living. And then get a first blood sample as fast as possible before normal values are thrown off by the stress of being darted.
What I actually wind up doing for a living is trying to act nonchalant around baboons, get them to turn around, forget about me. Which is a lot trickier than you’d think, even with a college education.
You wake up at five in the morning, tense as hell, get things ready in the dark. Anesthetic, darts, blowgun, syringes, vacutainers, centrifuge, liquid nitrogen tanks, needles, vials, burlap to cover the animal, instant ice bags, cages, scales, emergency medicines if there’s an accident, powerverters to run everything off of the Jeep batteries, pipettes, slides, test tubes, endless crap. Find the baboons by six-thirty, as they come down off their rocks or trees that they slept in. Pick someone, start stalking, start calculating—which way will he run when hit, up a tree? Up the rocks? How do you get him down if he does that so that he doesn’t pass out and fall? What if he attacks someone else, what if he gets attacked-who’s pissed off at him these days and would love to slash his throat while he’s staggering around half-conscious? What if he attacks you? Which direction is the wind going, how much do you have to compensate in the shot, shit, can’t shoot, some weasly kid is looking right at you, go stalk from a different position, he’s not looking, no one else looking, ready for a shot, fabulous, fabulous, this is going to be perfect, get ready, feel absolutely sick to your stomach with tension, realize you’re hyperventilating so much that you can’t blow the blowgun properly—you’ll either accidentally inhale the dart or shoot it two feet because of shallow breath. Shit, shit, he’s moved again, reposition, control your breath, he’s looking straight at you now, act nonchalant, how the hell do you act nonchalant in front of a baboon anyway? He’s in a perfect position now, but turned sideways, too much peripheral vision. Crouch and wait, tense, not moving a muscle, near to cramping, there’s some goddamn bug biting your calf, but you don’t want to move, keep still still still until you realize you just want to scream and run amok and bowl him over, then perfect, a fight breaks out elsewhere, irresistible to baboon voyeurs, he turns around, cranes his neck to look at the action elsewhere, full clear beautiful meaty rear end, zip!, dart in his ass, and he’s off.
Panic, heavy breathing, heart racing: you, not him. He ambles off, thinking he’s only been stung by a bee. After him, trying not to chase him, trying not to lose him in the bush. Minutes, minutes, endless time, three minutes and he gets wobbly, staggers a bit, decides to sit down and take it easy a bit because the drugs are beginning to work and the acacia trees probably have a purple aura and are beginning to spin around, the zebras are all doing some dance number from The Lion King. He’s getting woozier, everything is under control, perfect darting, when some rival bastard comes up to hassle him while he’s hallucinating. Shoo the rival guy away, just in time, because, splot, your guy’s out cold. Run over, throw a burlap bag over him, take a fast, surreptitious blood sample, and adrenaline city, androgenic triumph, you’ve successfully darted a wild baboon—stalked him in the bush and took him out—perfect to shore up your precarious sense of manhood and, best of all, you’re not even doing something appalling like hunting, you’re doing it all in the name of science and conservation. You can wipe out innocent beatific baboons and still be a liberal. Oh, joy.
The rush is over with, and you have to get him out of there. The Jeep is half a kilometer away over a ridge, you have to spirit him away without anyone else in the troop seeing you or else they’ll freak and rip you to shreds. Seventy-pound baboon wrapped in burlap, and you’re tiptoeing through the middle of the troop, arms aching, trying not to run or giggle or collapse from exhaustion. The guy’s snoring and you try to shush him. Get up over the ridge, nearing the Jeep, feel like you’re going to die, but you’re almost there. You begin to plan the rest of the day—what time do you have to take the subsequent blood samples, what other tests will you do on him, what time will he be awake enough to release him back to the troop, which seven baboons are you going to dart flawlessly tomorrow. He’s bouncing along on your shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and suddenly he burps. You are unspeakably charmed by that and thus let your guard down, and ten seconds later he throws up down your back, a thick lava flow.
So goes a darting; there’s nothing I enjoy more in the world. I learned how to dart baboons in a dormitory room in Manhattan. It was on my first break back in the States after I had joined the troop. I was boiling with schemes about the research. The biggest problem was how to dart on foot, to work on foot in general, and not get smeared by some buffalo. There was a guy from Berkeley named Laurence who lived over on the next mountain who studied hyenas. Laurence of the Hyenas had just gotten a donation of an old pair of infrared light-enhancing night-viewing goggles from the military, which allowed him to drive around in pitch darkness and follow his hyenas, all the while with the twenty-pound contraption strapped to his head. I decided I needed a similar high-tech solution; I would get a Flash Gordon jet pack from the army. I knew they existed, and figured if I could lumber around the Serengeti with one, I’d be safe. Buffalo comes at me, and I’d be gone, into the air, a god to the local Masai tribesmen. I called the Pentagon, got shuffled through a dozen of their R & D groups, finally found a colonel who thought the problem was fascinating. He confirmed that the jet packs existed, would check into it for me, generously offered to call back. A week later he had the bad news—he was afraid that I’d have to go to something bigger than the U.S. military for my jet pack—the Disney people had the only working model on earth. I called them, was told by someone far less courteous than the colonel that the jet packs weighed ninety pounds, took a minute to warm up, required asbestos pants, and were not available for loan to some zoologist. End of that idea; instead, I merely had to look out for buffalo and use some common sense in where I wandered in the bush.
Next, I had to figure out what to dart the baboons with. I checked out some long-distance, gas-powered anesthetic rifles, but they all cost a fortune, and had all these moving parts that would gum up in the field, and required replacement gas cylinders, and mostly made too much noise. I checked into lasers, which are guns that shoot an electrode on a wire into the target. Zap the guy, press a button, and some insane number of volts shoots through his body and he goes down like a sack of creamed spinach. Dandy, but apparently prone to giving the subject cardiac arrest, as a number of police forces were apparently discovering. I thought of feeding the animals drugged meat, using drugged snares, spraying a mind-clouding gas over the entire troop, and so on. Finally, I stumbled on a small Southern company that sold anesthetic blowguns to canine control units. Their brochure featured pictures of the executives who were all good ol’ boys with tobacco chaws in their mouths and John Deere caps on, they sold a cheap blowgun that shot out a 1cc syringe with a contact explosive, and it sounded terrific. The package arrived, and I was as excited as I was in second grade when the We-Like-to-Read book club would send the cartons of books with the shiny smell. The gun was a narrow reinforced tube, with little dart syringes, each with a formidable needle and some sort of explosive that I didn’t understand. I set up my Arm and Hammer detergent box across the room, loaded up, fired, and blew detergent all over my bookshelf.
I practiced relentlessly in my room. Angled shots, pointing down, pointing up, fast spinning shots, over the shoulder, in the wind (with the fan turned on). Allan, a stolid graduate school friend with a low center of gravity who had been a standout lineman on his Fredonia, Kansas, high school football squad, consented for me to practice wrestling him as if he were a darted baboon. This was done in the dorm basement next to the Gene Cloners club room.
Time went by and I improved. I could have darted a baboon anywhere in my room, in or out of Groucho Marx’s pajamas. Two fantasies dominated my darting then. I wanted to dart Fritz Lipmann. Lipmann was an incredibly famous biochemist, got the Nobel Prize decades ago, and now was an august octogenarian who would spend his day shuffling around the campus in his running shoes, endlessly passing my first-floor dorm window. I would get him in my blowgun sights from behind my biochemistry textbooks (which were half about him), choose between his rear end and shoulders, try to calculate his body weight for a proper dosage. I refrained from darting, however. The other fantasy was to sneak into Central Park and dart some random people. While they were down, I would quickly Magic Marker some Mayan hieroglyphic on their bellies and leave them to wake up soon thereafter underneath the Alice in Wonderland statue. I figured three such cases and the newspapers would be screaming, TV pundits would lecture on Mayan rituals of sacrifice, Jimmy Breslin would beg for me to give myself up, frenzied angry crowds would form around police stations in which jobless PhD archaeologists would try to come up with feeble alibis about how they weren’t the Mayan Darter.
The months passed and it was time to return to the field. I spent the entire night before my first darting awake and tossing, feeling queasy. By dawn, I was sick to my stomach, convinced I was about to pass out, all an excuse to get out of it. Finally, I headed out. And within a few minutes, I walked up to dear Isaac, who was watching some giraffe walk past, controlled my desire to scream a warning to him, and darted him. And he passed out. And none of the other baboons saw. I was so excited that I kissed him on the forehead, and then spent the rest of the day fretting with guilty concern every time he groaned or shifted or farted—heart attack, allergic reaction, darting-induced flatulence? We both recovered from the darting just fine.
And I darted more and more baboons, thought like a baboon, had baboon on my breath, was soon up to my ears in baboon blood samples and fecal smears and dental casts and all sorts of neat things. Then, expectedly, the process got harder and harder. The darting itself turned out to be trivial, the process of pointing a blowgun at someone’s rear and causing the dart to reach there. It was getting to the point of darting. The baboons just got more and more wily. I could no longer just walk up to someone and dart him. Instead, I had to become increasingly surreptitious, so that the baboons didn’t know it was coming, didn’t have an anticipatory stress response. The baboons began to differentiate between a blowgun and a walking stick. They could tell if I was inhaling to dart or to sneeze, and hit the dirt for the former. I started to have to dart from behind bushes. They would start doubling back on me, we’d circle around a tree, the target one step ahead. They figured out my darting range, knew it was shorter in the wind. They could probably tell if I had a chest cold and was taking shallower breaths. It was uncanny.
Things got increasingly complicated. I took to darting from vehicles. I would have to switch vehicles when they learned one. Soon, I would have friends drive the Jeep, while I hid in the back. Decoys, extra vehicles. Southern-sheriff sunglasses to keep the baboon from seeing where you’re looking, trying to look out the side of your head. Ski masks, a plastic Halloween mask that made it nearly impossible to use the blowgun. Complex schemes, hiding behind tourist cars, stakeouts hours in advance, hoping the baboons would pass by me before nightfall. On one memorable day’s darting, I came up to Joshua, sitting behind a bush on top of a mound. I rolled the Jeep to the front of the bush, he moved to the back end. I moved the Jeep to the back, he shifted to the front. This went on for a while. Finally an inspiration—rolled the Jeep to the back, he moved front. Put the Jeep in neutral, slithered out the far side, went to the back, and pushed. The Jeep rolled forward down the mound, he moved backward straight into my trap. One baboon darted, one Jeep hood dented from rolling into a tree.
A peculiar thing happens under these sorts of circumstances. You find yourself, a reasonably well educated human with a variety of interests, spending hours and hours each day and night obsessing on how to outmaneuver these beasts, how to think like them, how to think better than them. Usually unsuccessfully. Your mind runs wild with unlikely schemes, using hang gliders, hot air balloons, mannequins, being wheeled through the forest hidden in a perambulator. During those difficult times, at least I could take pride in what I consider to be one of my greatest points of professionalism in this venture: I have yet to take out an innocent bystander—I’ve never darted the wrong baboon. People get their money’s worth when they hire me for a contract.
Oddly, people started hiring me to do just that—come to their research site, collaborate in their studies by darting their baboons. Suddenly, a whole new pressure—assembly-line darting. Instead of having an entire season to lollygag around with the baboons and pick them off in between days of just collecting behavioral data, you show up at some new research site, don’t know a baboon there or the terrain, and have to get twelve in the next week. Big complex productions involving teams of people from the new research site. In one place, we would follow the baboons off cliffs where they slept down to the plains where they foraged each day—the researchers at that site whom I had trained to dart and I going after baboons on the plain, spotters up on the cliffs, waving flags to indicate where in the bush the darted animals had gone. Walkie-talkies, semaphores, great fun.
So I was on my way to honing my life’s vocation. And it was right around that time that I had my most disastrous darting ever.
It was a perfect darting of Uriah, shortly before he laid siege to Solomon. He was snoozing in the forest, back to me, long good shot, had the gun away before he could turn around. He jumped up, ran about ten steps, and sat down again. Everything going fine. Then, suddenly, twenty feet to the right, Joshua knocked over an impala, a small one, grazing in the forest. Impalas are usually too big for a single death bite to the neck. Instead, the typical game plan is to just knock them down and hold them while you eat them alive, everyone else all over you for a piece, so you’d better be more concerned about your compatriots than bothering to kill the impala; it’s not going anywhere. Joshua brings down the impala and Uriah is up in a shot, wrestles Joshua, and comes up with the impala. Shit, disaster. He’s off and running into the forest with four big guys after him. They all wrestle, I’m praying that he loses it so the pressure is off him, he can just go and get stupid on the anesthetic quietly. Instead, he holds on to the impala—I’m panicked, the minute he starts weakening from the anesthetic, he’s going to get ripped apart; males are unbelievably aggressive fighting over a kill. He wrestles, runs with it, and barrels into this tiny corner of the riverbed, into a thick clump of thorn bushes that has only a single entrance—effectively, a small enclosed cave with one opening, a bunch of branches with about a one-foot clearance on the bottom. He holes up in there, you can hear the impala screaming bloody hell inside, and any of the males who go near the entrance get Uriah flinging himself at them. They have to squeeze through on their bellies into the cave, which puts them at a major disadvantage; Uriah’d be on them before they’d even get up.
So here’s the problem: I have to get Uriah out of his little bush cave soon, because if the other males can get at him, they’re going to rip him apart if he’s half-conscious. But if I go into that cave when he’s more than half-conscious, he’s going to rip me apart, as he’s in an aggressive frenzy himself. Everyone is standing around outside, agitated, threatening me as I go near the entrance. The impala is still screaming, so I finally decide if it’s yelling so healthfully, Uriah must be asleep in there, hasn’t killed it yet. I jump up and down, yelling and gesticulating, to scare away everyone else. Clutching my syringes and catheters for blood sampling, I psych up and slowly slide into the cave on my back, waiting to be attacked. Get inside the tiny space, about three feet high, and find that Uriah is sound asleep, slumped down on the thoroughly alive impala, whose stomach has been ripped open.
Now that I’m inside, safe and sound with the snoozing Uriah, it occurs to me that there is no way either of us is coming out safely unless the impala goes out the sole exit to the waiting dinner crowd first. I ponder the moral implications of my being a central actor in that particular drama for a while as the male tumult begins to build up outside again. The shaft of light coming into the cave is occluded—someone is beginning to crawl in. I hoot loudly once and the shadow disappears. This seems likely to be only a temporary respite; I’d better do something. In the middle of all these worries, I suddenly become concerned about saving my stupid experiment on Uriah, i.e., getting a blood sample from him before it is too late to use the data. With assured and calm movements, I roll Uriah over for a sample, completely forgetting something critical—the impala. It’s up in a shot, kicking, flailing, sharp goddamn hooves. It kicks me in the forehead, knocking me back, opening up a big gash. I can’t believe it—I’d forgotten about the impala. Here I am, figuring out a way to avoid all this craziness with these mad aggressive male baboons and I’m about to be killed by Bambi. The impala is bellowing, all the males immediately outside start screaming bloody hell, I give up my composure and start yelling my head off also. The impala is trying to bash through the other side of the thorn bush, no luck, kicking again at my face. Finally, I freak out, convinced it’s about to kill me, which is not out of the question in that small a space. I jump on it and I believe I actually strangle it. I was so frantic I was definitely flailing it around, bashing its head on the ground. Then a profoundly chilling moment: I had to get the impala out of there. Start pushing it on the ground, now a dead weight, under the branches through the opening. Heavy, lots of friction, as it moves along the thorny ground, and suddenly, as I am slowly, slowly pushing it out—the sensation of its heavy body moving forward faster than I am pushing it—there is a primate hand on the impala’s shoulder, pulling on it. The carcass flies away, is gone. Wild fighting and screaming outside as four males converge on it, playing steal the bacon. I’m terrified someone is going to try to hide in here with the carcass, but they all seem to remember that something strange is happening in this bush cave and they tear around outside instead. I huddle inside in terror, get my wits about me, and take blood from Uriah. Thirty minutes of tumult and yelling and snarling outside, shadows blowing past; hunker down there with the contentedly snoring Uriah until the carcass is done and everyone moves off Uriah and I go and take a nap in the Jeep.
So went my worst darting ever. Kind of a silly way to spend one’s time. But writing nearly two decades later, darting remains in my blood. The other night, I was at the movies and watched some matron amble down the aisle past me, and my first thoughts were “85-90 kilos, .9 cc’s of anesthetic. Go for her rump, lots of meat. Her husband will probably defend her when she goes down, but he has small canines.” I am still delighted to be doing this for a living.