“Err…” Jackson looked down at the bundle in his hands. “Sir, it’s a dead—”
“I know what it is, man!” Halder snatched the bundle away from Jackson and began to unwrap it, revealing the stiffened body beneath. “Where… there! Yes. Warbles, most definitely.” He slid a finger into the opening in the slack skin and pulled it open, looking inside.
I took a step back. I know that rabies is transmitted by bites, and that possums rarely carry it in any event, but the sight of Halder’s bare fingers in the bloody flesh was alarming.
Halder’s face screwed up in concentration, then he turned,looking around almost wildly. His eye fell on the lean-to that served as a potting shed, and he rushed to it and swept his arm along the table, knocking trowels, pots, and bits of twine to the ground. The crash of breaking ceramic did not even seem to register with him.
Jackson looked at the mess with resigned dismay. “Sir…?”
I could have told him that it was no use. There was a light in the doctor’s eyes that I knew well, though I had never seen it in Halder before. Scientific curiosity had set its claws in him and nothing short of an anvil to the head was likely to penetrate.
He laid the possum out on the table, wiping his fingers on the burlap. “Miss Wilson,” he said over his shoulder. “Go to my study. There is a leather case by the desk there. Bring it to me at once.”
I did not like the man, but his intensity was infectious. I snatched up my skirts and ran.
The leather case was surprisingly heavy and resembled a doctor’s bag. I lugged it back down the stairs, to where Halder was practically dancing with impatience. He snatched it from me and opened it up.
The kit inside was a cross between a surgeon’s and a butterfly collector’s. He pulled out forceps and metal probes, then a small, sharp scalpel, and set to work.
Jackson edged away, but I found myself at Halder’s elbow, peering down at his work. He cut away the leading flap of the warble and peeled it back, revealing a round hollow in the jaw muscle and the skull beneath. “There,” he murmured, half to himself. “The larva was up against the bone, and—there!”
He grabbed a metal probe and poked it through a small, neat hole, just behind the eye. I swallowed and told myself that I was fascinated.
“Intrusion into the brain,” Halder breathed. “The hole is located where the larva’s head would be, but how could it have penetrated bone?”
He turned the possum, looking for the warble on the back ofthe skull. Rigored as it was, the body did not wish to achieve that angle. “Miss Wilson!” he barked. “Hold the specimen steady!”
Nature, I told myself.This is an act of nature, and I am a naturalist.I picked up the burlap to wrap around my hands—I was not risking my fingers so close to a scalpel, no matter what Halder thought—and took hold. It might as well have been a wooden carving of a possum.
Fully rigored, I thought absently, as the doctor began carving into the warble at the back of the skull.Usually achieved within three hours of death, lasting up to eighteen hours. Of course it would be stiff by now, it beat itself to death last night.
Something itched at my mind, but Halder let out a sudden cry of triumph and snatched up another probe. “Look!” he said. “Look, there! It has burrowed through the bone and deeply into the brain!” He tilted the possum and slid a probe in, far deeper than I would have guessed possible.
“I did not think botflies did that,” I said.
“They don’t!” He beamed at me, his insectile face suddenly transformed. “This has never been recorded before! Never!”
I don’t delude myself that Halder thought I was in any way worthy of sharing this discovery with him. If I hadn’t been there, he would have told Jackson, and if Jackson hadn’t been there, he would have told the cat. This was scientific enthusiasm, pure and simple.
He withdrew the probe, made a note of the depth, and began hastily scrawling down measurements on a pad from the bag. I set the body down with some relief.
“Could this explain its strange behavior?” I asked.
“What? Oh yes, yes. Well… possibly.” He frowned down at the possum. “There are parasites that change the host’s behavior, certainly. The waspAmpulexa sinensisstings a cockroach in the brain and renders it docile. It leads the roach back to the burrow by its antenna, and then lays its eggs in it. And of course that Wallace fellow was terribly excited about hisOphiocordycepsfungus and the ants. Though those are much more directed. This may simply have been pressure on the brain causing strange behavior…” He trailed off, scribbling more notes and muttering to himself.
I suppressed another shudder. I had heard of theOphiocordycepsfungus discovered by the famous Alfred Russel Wallace—there were still fights in nature journals about it now, twenty-five years later—but I had not heard of the wasp. While I had never previously empathized with a cockroach, it was much too easy to imagine oneself being helplessly led around, then lying passively in the dark whilethingshatched inside you and began to gnaw…
“Miss Wilson!” Halder barked, and I looked up, grateful for the interruption, if not his tone. “Are you certain that the warbles were present last night? And that the larvae had not yet evacuated?”
“Completely sure,” I said. “I thought they were tumors.”
“And it did not occur to you to capture the beast?”
I drew myself up. “Dr. Halder, I believed it might be rabid. And when it stopped beating at my door, I assumed that it had left the balcony. I did not realize that it had simply dropped dead a few feet away.”
Halder sighed, much put-upon. “No, of course not. It would be too much to hope. I must show Sanders. He knows his mammals, he will be able to tell me… Jackson, prepare thewagon— No, never mind that. Saddle my horse. I must be in Raleigh at the earliest possible moment, before the body has a chance to decay any further!” He wrapped the bundle back up and made for the house, clutching the dead possum to his chest as if it were an infant.
Jackson gazed after him, glanced at me, and shook his head. “The man’s completely mad,” he said.
