One highlight of my subadult years in the troop was becoming friends with Richard and Hudson. Another was my finally connecting with Laurence of the Hyenas. As a general rule, field biologists tend toward the unwashed and unhousebroken; Laurence was the most feral example of these trends that I’d ever seen. Laurence of the Hyenas spent his childhood amid the lizards and snakes in the California deserts. He spent years alone studying foxes in the Aleutians, and then a stretch chasing after some kind of bird across the wastelands of northern Scotland before coming to Kenya to be Laurence of the Hyenas. My first year with the baboons, I had given him a wide berth, as I was terrified of him. He was a large hulking man with a tendency to sequester himself in his tent at length to bellow hideous stark Scottish folk dirges. Even more unsettling, when perturbed or irritated, he had the unconscious habit of thrusting his chin and heavy dark beard at bothersome males in a manner that any primatologist instantly recognizes as a very legit dominance display.
That first year, he chin-thrusted at me frequently. The next year, we each moved down to the plains below, and we slowly got to know each other. I think the real turning point was a day when Laurence made an important discovery. It was a stifling hot day in the middle of the wildebeest migration during the reign of Saul. I was sitting in camp, staring at my toes, shaking the flies off my face, surrounded by a zillion snorting, noisy wildebeests, snuffling about and crapping all over the place, probably the thousandth day of being surrounded by snorting, snuffling, crapping wildebeests. Suddenly, Laurence’s Land Rover barreled into camp. He emerged, strode up to me purposefully. “Hey,” he said. “Did you realize that ‘gnu dung’ is a palindrome?” In fact, I had not. The ice was broken. In the twenty years since, he has taught me to bellow Scottish folk songs, made futile attempts to chip away at my ignorance about car engines, tended me during times of malarial attacks and failed experiments and homesickness. He’s the nearest thing I have to a big brother, and he’s been damn good at it.
In addition to all of this, Laurence has taught me to be very fond of hyenas. Laurence passionately loves these beasts, which is good, since they need all the supporters they can get.
Hyenas are neither canines nor felines and have doleful beautiful eyes, wet noses, and jaws that can snap off your arm in a second. They also have gotten an utterly bum rap in the media. We know all about hyenas: it’s dawn on the savanna, there’s something big and dead with a lion feeding on it, and Marlin Perkins is up to his elbows in the gore, filming the scene. You know the score. Ol’ Marlin is waxing poetic about the noble lion and his predatory skills, said king of the jungle, covered with his usual array of flies, is munching away at somebody’s innards, and the camera will occasionally tear itself away from this tableau of carnivory to pan the edges. And there they are: skulky, cowardly, dirty, snively, skeevy, no-account hyenas lurking at the periphery, trying to grab a piece of the vittles. Marlin practically invites us to heap our contempt on the hyenas: scavengers. Now, it’s not entirely clear to me why we laud the predators so much and so disdain the scavengers, since most of us are hardening our arteries wolfing down carcasses that someone else killed, but that is our bias. Lions get lionized, while hyenas never get to vocalize at the beginning of MGM movies.
Oh, but a revolution occurred in carnivorology a while back. As part of our national defense, it is vital to be able to shoot people at any time of day or night, so the military developed all these nifty night-viewing goggles, with photon enhancers and infrared viewing scopes. The army was up to their umpteenth-generation model and decided to unload some of their old ones on zoologists, and suddenly, a revolution!—people could watch animals at night.
Redemption of the hyenas. It turns out that they are fabulous hunters, working cooperatively, taking down beasties ten times their size. They have one of the highest percentages of successful hunts of any big carnivore. And you know who has one of the worst? Lions. They’re big, conspicuous, relatively slow. It’s much easier for them just to key in on cheetahs and hyenas and rip them off. That’s why all those hyenas are lurking around at dawn, looking mealy and unphotogenic—they just spent the whole night hunting the damn thing and who’s eating breakfast now?
So Laurence was in the thick of this revisionism concerning hyena public relations. It was no doubt all this hubbub about the suddenly much-vaunted hunting skills of these beasts that led to an unlikely phone call to Laurence one day during a trip back to the States. It was from the U.S. Army. A colonel wanted him to come to a conference and talk about his work. Are you kidding, I watch hyenas mate, he replied. We know, we know, the colonel replied, we know all about you, and proved it to Laurence. Come on, come to our conference, all your carnivore biologist friends are going to be there and it’ll be great and we’ll pay you, it’s all courtesy of the U.S. Army. Puzzled, Laurence finally agreed.
The day came, and as promised, Laurence found himself at a plush hotel with a confused collection of America’s carnivore biologists. Lion people, wolf people, wild-dog people, hyena people, the works. Plus some silent army guys in shades. The biologists initially fell into their reflexive behavior at conferences—giving their formal talks about their work, bragging about their animals or study sites, pumping each other for unpublished information. All the while the army guys sat silently in the back taking notes, and the biologists finally got the willies. They conferred together at the bar that night and resolved to demand to know why the army was interested in them. They presented a unified front after breakfast the next day, and the colonel relented. He would explain what was up.
You fellas have all seen the Star Wars movies, haven’t you? Nearly everyone. Well, remember in that second installment, there are those Imperial Walker things? Those big transporters that kinda looked like elephants and went walking through the snow and over everything and stomped down on the rebels? Sure, everyone has probably played with their nephew’s toy version of one. Well, the U.S. Army is designing something like an Imperial Walker. We’ve spent a bundle on a prototype, working like crazy on it, and it still has problems.
It seemed that the best the army had could walk only a few miles an hour, and only on really smooth surfaces, and still it fell over all the time. So they needed help, and someone had the bright idea of getting the carnivore biologists—after all, carnivores run after things while they’re hunting, why not consult with them on how to design things that move? And, gentlemen, the colonel concluded, ignoring the ladies present, that’s why you are here—tell us about how your animals move when they do things like hunting. He smiled sunnily.
Field biologists are a fairly unruly lot They spend most of their time living alone, and they wind up pretty ill-mannered. They take on a lot of the traits of their animals. They’re reflexively suspicious of guys in uniforms, since they pass a lot of their time being lied to by park wardens. And, given the fairly narrow age window during which field biologists are actually active, most of the current generation came of age in the ’60s and definitely retain some opinions about things. The colonel smiled sunnily again, and everyone smelled a rat.
Bullshit, pal, they said collectively. No, really, said the colonel, we just want to hear about how your animals run around when they are hunting.
No one was buying that. You want to learn about locomotion, you buy yourself some locomotion experts. There are people out there who design prosthetic devices and build robotic limbs. If you really want to find out how animals do it, you get bioengineers and biophysicists. There are lunatics out there who make X-ray films of animals running to see how they locomote. You hire them, not social behavior experts. Bullshit, Colonel Scheisskopf, something is not right here. The biologists caucused and announced they weren’t talking anymore. They were ready to start chanting about Ho Chi Minh and the NLF.
Everything broke up. The colonel sequestered himself with a telephone, talking to his superiors. The army guys descended on the trays of little croissant sandwiches. The biologists converged on the bar in thirsty, self-righteous excitement. This was turning out to be fun after all, instead of being just some dumb scientific meeting.
Finally, later in the day, Scheisskopf returned. Gentlemen, he said, I have good news for you. I’ve been given special permission to let you in on the whole scoop, since you’re all my special pals.
It turned out there was a hidden agenda after all. The army had been building some new tank for years. It was grotesquely expensive—one carburetor cost more than America’s entire ecology budget. It had had endless cost overruns, and some poor sacrificial general would be tossed up to Congress annually to explain the obscene costs in order for Congress to dutifully approve more bucks down the sink for it. And the army loved it, because it was the best tank ever! The colonel glowed with pleasure in the telling. Getaloadathis. It could withstand direct missile hits. There were no exposed windows or portals on it—instead, it had video cameras mounted on the body, transmitting to the death-troll soldiers crammed inside. It was insanely maneuverable—it could tear along at 60 miles an hour and still fire a missile with pinpoint accuracy while bouncing in midair—it was one big gyroscope. Best feature of all, it came with these gas Chromatograph air samplers that would let you know when you could safely open the top and breathe your postnuclear air. The perfect family car for the end of the world.
The colonel was pulling out all the stops now for his biology buddies. They brought in a film, a training demonstrator for the tank, filmed from the inside, outside, underneath as it blasted over you. Everyone got to wear daddy-o 3-D glasses and clutched their stomachs queasily as the film tank did some full gainer into a computer-simulated Grand Canyon and still was able to shell the refugee camp accurately. It was fabulous.
So this is our tank, and we’re damn proud of it, the colonel said—he came just shy of passing around baby pictures of it. But there were these problems. Apparently, in traditional tank warfare with traditional tanks, the strategy is to use the unstoppable force of the tank to bash to the top of the highest thing around, sit there, and shoot anything that moves. Now, with this new tank, tank crews would be able to dart all over the landscape with this mad-assassin abandon. The trouble was, whenever they put their best tank crews in them, the guys would bash to the top of the highest thing around and just sit there, waiting to shoot whatever moved. And another problem—the tank was planned for use in fighting Russkies on the “Central Front” (the area that the rest of us sentimentalists typically call Europe). All indications were that the Central Front Armageddon was not only going to involve this miasma of nerve gas and radiation but tons of electronic jamming as well, and no one would be able to communicate with one another. Thus, the difficulty: nobody knew how to use the tank properly, no one was thinking in this mobile predatory way, or knew how to do it while out of touch with the other tanks. And some bright lad in the Pentagon had had this idea of calling the carnivore biologists, and here we are, gentlemen, and, well, teach us to think like predators. How do your hyenas figure out in a high-speed chase who is going to cut the corners on the prey, how do wolves communicate once they get going, what do they do if they lose each other? Teach our tank crews to hunt like your animals.
Jeezus, thought America’s carnivore biologists. No one had bargained for this. It wasn’t clear if all this was a measure of how godawful stupid the army was, spending zillions on a weapon no one could use, or a measure of how terrifyingly smart they were to try to get their tank crews trained to act like predators. Suddenly ol’ Colonel Scheisskopf seemed more like a mix between Darth Vader and Machiavelli.
The biologists tried to stall. These are very difficult questions, very difficult, these will take some time to answer, they intoned. All right, gentlemen, said the colonel, seeing through their ploy, we are more than willing to fund your research. Now there was some moral reckoning to do.
One bunch decided they wanted nothing to do with this kind of thing and left the conference. Another bunch decided to screw this hippie stance and sell out but big; soon they were falling over themselves to sign on the dotted line with Beelzebub and teach tank crews.
Laurence spearheaded the middle-of-the-road pragmatists. They reasoned that these people are going to build their tanks regardless. Anything we have to tell them they can just look up in our papers anyway. This may divert a trickle of money that could help conservation. And besides, these colonels are greatly misinformed about cooperative hunting species—there are actually very few of them, most of the hunts are just uncoordinated free-for-alls, and we could happily do research on their bucks for years before telling them, sorry, they’re not very good hunters after all. Yeah, help conservation research and work undercover to drain dollars from the war machine, leave the Pentagon too destitute to afford to paint racing stripes on their tanks. Where do we sign up?
So the remaining biologists settled on down and resumed their meeting. More croissants were brought in, talks went on, everyone had their usual fine time arguing over minutiae concerning optimal foraging strategies or reproductive fitness equations, remembering to bow and scrape in the direction of the army guys now and then, citing some facile connection between what they were talking about and hunting techniques. The colonel turned out to be named Chuck, and soon he was drinking at the bar with them, and he turned out to be a good storyteller and a damn good guy, but really. Everyone had a swell time, posed for a group picture at the end. The army sent them their checks for coming to the meeting, and everyone dashed off their army grant proposals to cash in on the action. Laurence wrote for some new night-viewing goggles, and some walkie-talkies, and a good field computer with solar panels, and, well, as long as he was at it, seven research assistants and a flame thrower and a satellite and some death-ray guns and a million zillion dollars. Everyone wrote in, no one got a cent, no one even heard from Colonel Chuck or anyone in the army again. And to this day, whenever the carnivore biologists get together, they shake their hoary heads and ask suspiciously, What did those guys really manage to find out from us?*