Last Chance to See

dragon’s digestive system.
    We made our excuses and left.
    The first of our three remaining chickens made its appearance at lunch, but our mood wasn’t right for it. We pushed the scrawny bits of it listlessly around our plates and could find little to say.
    In the afternoon we took the boat to Komodo village,where we met a woman who was the only known survivor of a dragon attack. A giant lizard had gone for her while she was out working in the fields, and by the time her screams had brought her neighbours and their dogs to rescue her and beat the creature away, her leg was in tatters. Intensive surgery in Bali saved her from having it amputated and, miraculously, she fought off the infection and lived, though her leg was still a mangled ruin. On the neighbouring island of Rinca, we were told, a four-year-old boy had been snatched by a dragon as he lay playing on the steps of his home. The living build their houses on stilts, but on these islands not even the dead are safe, and they are buried with sharp rocks piled high on their graves.
    For all my rational Western intellect and education, I was for the moment overwhelmed by a primitive sense of living in a world ordered by a malign and perverted god, and it coloured my view of everything that afternoon—even the coconuts. The villagers sold us some and split them open for us. They are almost perfectly designed. You first make a hole and drink the milk, then you split open the nut with a machete and slice off a segment of the shell, which forms a perfect implement for scooping out the coconut flesh inside. What makes you wonder about the nature of this god character is that he creates something that is so perfectly designed to be of benefit to human beings and then hangs it twenty feet above their heads on a tree with no branches.
    Here’s a good trick, let’s see how they cope with this. Oh, look! They’ve managed to find a way of climbing the tree. I didn’t think they’d be able to do that. All right, let’s see them get the thing open. Hmm, so they’ve found out how to temper steel now, have they? Okay, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Next time they go up that tree, I’ll have a dragon waiting for them at the bottom
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    I can only think that the business with the apple must have upset him more than I realised.
    I went and sat on the beach by a mangrove tree and gazedout at the quiet ripples of the sea. Some fish were jumping up the beach and into the tree, which struck me as an odd thing for a fish to do, but I tried not to be judgmental about it. I was feeling pretty raw about my own species, and not much inclined to raise a quizzical eyebrow at others. The fish could play about in trees as much as they liked if it gave them pleasure, so long as they didn’t try to justify themselves or tell one another it was a malign god who made them want to play in trees.
    I was feeling pretty raw about my own species because we presume to draw a distinction between what we call good and what we call evil. We find our images of what we call evil in things outside ourselves, in creatures that know nothing of such matters, so that we can feel revolted by them, and, by contrast, good about ourselves. And if they won’t be revolting enough of their own accord, we stoke them up with a goat. They don’t want the goat, they don’t need it. If they wanted one, they’d find it themselves. The only truly revolting thing that happens to the goat is in fact done by us.
    So why didn’t we say something? Like “Don’t kill the goat”?
    Well, there are a number of possible reasons:
    —If the goat hadn’t been killed for us, it would have been killed for someone else—for the party of American tourists, for instance.
    —We didn’t really realise what was going to happen till it was too late to stop it.
    —The goat didn’t lead a particularly nice life, anyway. Particularly not today.
    —Another dragon would probably have got it later.
    —If it hadn’t been the goat, the dragons would have got something else, like a deer or something.
    —We were reporting the incident for this book and for the BBC. It was important that we went through the wholeexperience so that people would know about it in detail. That’s well worth a goat.
    —We felt too polite to say, “Please don’t kill the goat on our account.”
    —We were a bunch of lily-livered rationalising turds.
    The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we