The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (29 page)

Averaging perhaps twenty pounds, the wildcat seems to be a miniature cross between a tiger and a leopard, with a bit of mountain lion thrown in. Its rust-brown coat shows spots and flecks above and a suggestion of dark stripes below, blending into a white belly. Heavy lines on its wide-flaring cheek fur break up the outline of its face so it can see without being seen. A little tuft of hair on each ear serves as an antenna which is sensitive to sounds or air currents. Its whiskers, bedded in delicate nerves, may lie back—or reach out to determine if a certain opening will admit its body.

The bulky body of the Muskrat is about a foot long and is covered with two kinds of hair: a short beautiful undercoat of soft and silky brown fur and a long coat of coarser hair. Its stout naked tail—almost as long as its body—is vertically flattened to aid in propulsion and steering when the animal is swimming. Its hind feet are partially webbed as another aid to progress in the water.

My first mountain beaver had gone head-first into a trap set at its burrow mouth by my cousin, Mary V., on her parents’ ranch above the Oregon coast. It was a grayish, unprepossessing-looking creature about a foot long, weighing two to five pounds. The appearance, to my five-year-old eyes, was grotesque: squinched slits where the eyes should be; crinkly, bare ears; no tail worthy of the name; toes splayed out exactly like those in illustrations of dinosaurs (but otherwise no similarity to the giant reptiles); four curving teeth stained as if from eons of conscientious tobacco chewing.

Among these insectivores it is possible to distinguish various standard forms. Thus the “shrew” type comprises animals that are usually small, with a long muzzle, short, five-toed feet and a fairly long tail. Most are plantigrades, scurrying through the dense undergrowth and feeding on tiny invertebrates.

Despite being arboreal the gibbons of the subfamily Hylobatinae are the only monkeys that spontaneously adopt the bipedal stance when on the ground. Their walk is, however, rather odd and clumsy. The gibbons are also note- worthy for their exceptionally long arms and legs, especially the former, and for the absence of a tail.

The diet of tree-shrews is largely insectivorous and partly frugivorous, but in fact they are omnivorous and will eat anything that is digestible.

The muskox has a single living relative, the takin of northern Tibet, a calflike animal of ponderous build with a bulging snout like a saiga antelope‘s, short, stout legs, and small, swept-back horns, showing the same montane sheep/goat ancestry in its conformation and movements as the modern muskox.

Where the brown bear is broad-shouldered and dish-faced, the polar bear is narrow shouldered and Roman-nosed. His neck is longer, his head smaller. He stands taller than the brown bear but is less robust in the chest and generally of lighter build. The polar bear’s feet are larger and thickly furred between the pads. The toes are partially webbed, the blackish-brown claws sharper and smaller than the brown bear’s. It lacks the brown bear’s shoulder hump and more expressive face, with its prehensile lips, well suited to stripping bushes of their berries.

The havtagai which, like domestic camels, have long lashes to shade their eyes from the sun’s glare, nostrils that can be closed against wind-driven sand, and two toes linked by pads that spread their weight over the shifting sand, differ from them in being uniformly sandy-colored, whereas domestic camels may also be dark brown, black, or even white. They differ also in their longer though fine-boned legs (lacking callosities) and small feet and pads that leave a footprint about half the size of a domestic camel‘s, in the thinner texture of their coats and the absence of mane and beard, and in their humps, which are small pointed cones and invariably firm, in contrast to those of domestic camels, which vary in size and condition according to their owner’s health.

Go to the meatmarket of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw?

The snub-nosed (or golden) monkey is related to the lan- gurs, but separated from them by an absence of cheek pouches and other anatomical differences. The species is distinguished by the thick-set body and sturdy limbs, with arms only a little shorter than the legs. The most distinctive external features are the long golden coat, which becomes denser and more brightly coloured with advancing age, and the bizarre snub-nose, which in adult males is so preposterously upturned that its tip reaches almost to the forehead.

The monkey-eating eagle of the Philippines has a striking appearance with a superb “mane” of long tapering feathers covering its head and the nape of its neck, which it bushes out or raises at will and which, when excited, it wears like a warlike head-dress. Its bluish eyes and enormous curved beak, flattened on the sides, gives it an expression of extreme ferocity. The two sexes are alike, clad in dark brown plumage, striped with paler edges and whitish on the upper part.

The Asiatic and African elephants are easily distinguishable. The Asiatic species is the smaller; the curvature of its back is convex; its skin is smooth and marked with white or pink depigmentation spots, which become more numerous with age; its ears are small and triangular-shaped; its forehead is prominently domed; its trunk is tipped with only a single finger-like protuberance; the female is tuskless, or more accurately, the tusks are so small that they do not protrude beyond the lips—and tuskless males are common.

The snow leopard, or ounce, is slightly smaller than the common leopard, and among the most attractive of all the great cats. In winter coat the fur [sic], particularly on the lower parts, is unusually long, with thick woolly under-fur. This, in conjunction with the short muzzle, has the effect of making the head appear disproportionately small. The general ground colour is pale charcoal, faintly tinged with cream: the under parts up to the chin are milk white. The black rosettes are large, irregularly shaped, and randomly distributed. The markings on the head, along the spine, and on the upper part of the tail are well defined, but where the fur is long they are somewhat blurred: the pattern is more distinct in summer coat. The tail is long and densely furred, with large rosettes on the upper surface, white beneath, and black-tipped.