his right shoulder. The target is the hardest kind: head-on and airborne, an
arcing blur of fire and ice, black and ocher haloed in glittering snow.
Andrei’s finger on the trigger, squeezing—tighter now—Yopt! The
bowel-loosening realization that the magic has failed. Polny pizdets.
Nothing exists now but the tiger, filling his field of vision like a bad
accident, like the end of the world: a pair of blazing yellow lanterns over
a temple door framed with ivory columns.
For most of our history, we have been occupied with the cracking of
codes—from deciphering patterns in the weather, the water, the land, and
the stars, to parsing the nuanced behaviors of friend and foe, predator and
prey. Furthermore, we are compelled to share our discoveries in the form
of stories. Much is made of the fact that ours is the only species that does
this, that the essence of who and what we understand ourselves to be was
first borne orally and aurally: from mouth to ear to memory. This is so,
but before we learned to tell stories, we learned to read them. In other
words, we learned to track. The first letter of the first word of the first
recorded story was written—“printed”—not by us, but by an animal.
These signs and symbols left in mud, sand, leaves, and snow represent
proto-alphabets. Often smeared, fragmented, and confused by weather,
time, and other animals, these cryptograms were life-and-death exercises
in abstract thinking. This skill, the reading of tracks in order to procure
food, or identify the presence of a dangerous animal, may in fact be “the
oldest profession.”
Like our own texts, these “early works” are linear and continuous with
their own punctuation and grammar. Plot, tense, gender, age, health,
relationships, and emotional states can all be determined from these
durable records. In this sense, The Jungle Book is our story, too: just as
Mowgli was schooled by wild animals, so in many ways were we. The
notion that it was animals who taught us to read may seem
counterintuitive, but listening to skilled hunters analyze tiger sign is not