*
Confidential field journal of Dr. B. Zimmerman.
Lake Martin, Louisiana.
Day 1 of observation, 5/20/07
I set a trap for my swamp friend three days ago, and as of 7am this morning, he is at the mercy of my detainment. It was nothing severe, since hurting him would be counterproductive on my part. He swam into my underwater web of a net at top speed and had no idea how to untangle himself before I came along and pulled him into the motorboat.
My first discovery was that yes, he is a he. The oddest thing happened as he lay tangled up on the boat while I steered it back to the cabin: his patches of greenish scales (which remind me of alligator skin) started to fade away until he was covered in normal human skin, as far as I could tell, from head to toe. I started to fear he would rip through the net the more he struggled, so I gave him a shot of sedative, into his neck. I dragged him into the mud room and locked him in - the door is deadlocked and I barred the only window last week, so it should hold him for now.
His appearance is remarkable. It seems to change according to whether or not he's submerged in water, as if his body knows when to adjust to the environment, like a kind of super speed evolution. When wet, his dark green scales cover broad patches of his body, mostly down his back, chest, abdomen, the tops of his arms (as though instead of hair on his arms, he has scales), and all down his legs. His sides, armpits, neck, face, rib cage, hands, and feet all lack rough scales, and are instead simply covered in slick, greenish skin that's a little rubbery to the touch. His palms and the soles of his feet are sticky, as though they have grips for climbing. When he's in this form, his yellowy-green eyes are covered in a thin, protective film, and his pupils are slit like a crocodile's. His form is still remarkably human, especially his face and hands. His feet are a little large and webbed, and I imagine he would make a loud sort of flip-flapping if he were upright and walking around in his swamp creature form.
My swamp friend's dry form is completely different; the only parts of his wet form that remain are his gills (which are large and stretch along the side of his rib cage) and the color of his eyes. His pupils become round and human and the film over his eyes retracts. Suddenly I can see that he does have eyelashes. His ears look normal in both forms, though I suspect they are deceiving and have some sort of mechanism to protect him from swimmer's ear or water log. His dry skin is exactly like human skin, though he's somewhat pale. Surprisingly, he even has some leg and arm hair when his scales disappear. The hair on his head is always present, though only when he's dry can I tell that it's brown.
His face and head are what change the least between the two forms. What changes the most is probably the condition of his genitals, oddly enough. In his wet form, rough scales cover his entire pubis and he appears to have no reproductive organs at all. I haven't worked up the courage to discover how reproduction is supposed to occur in that condition. But when he's dry, he appears as any completely naked man would. He seemed to be uncomfortable with this fact back on the motorboat, when he was trying to escape the net while simultaneously covering himself with parts of it. I assume he isn't used to being so exposed.
My friend will remain in the mud room until I decide whether he's safe enough for communication. He's still unconscious for the time being. If it turns out he can speak, it will make my research much easier, and much more interesting.
Day 2 of observation, 5/21/07
Today has been one of the most frightening and most exciting days of my life all at once. I woke up at 5am this morning (without my alarm clock; it must have been nerves) and went right to the mud room to check on my swamp friend. I tried to see him through the square I had cut in the door and covered with screen, but all I saw was the room. In retrospect, I let my panic overcome my good sense. Afraid he had somehow broken out, I unlocked the door and went right in to search for how he had done it. As soon as I was through the doorway, his hands were around my throat - it didn't matter that I had tied them while he was unconscious, because he seemed to have broken that constraint with relative ease.
He slammed me back against the wall behind which he'd been hiding, and stared me full in the face with those disorienting eyes. I wasn't sure then why he waited rather than ending me right at that moment. I started to plead with him not to choke the life out of me, trying to express that I didn't want to hurt him or remove him from his home. It was then that I made my first discovery about his mind and behavior: he wasn't killing me because he was waiting to find out from me why I had done this.
It was in that moment that he spoke to me. It wasn't as jarring as it might have been had he not looked so much like a normal human in his dry state. He hesitated before snarling at me in a perfectly human, medium-timbre voice with a surprisingly pronounced Cajun accent. He was hard to understand, and what he said, expressed colloquially, would look somewhat like this: "You tol' me why you wen' go tie me up in dis room. You tol' me NOW!"
By this point, I was not only shaking all over from fear, but I was flabbergasted by his speech, thinking of all the time his species must have spent observing the Louisiana Cajuns in order to pick up their dialect so perfectly. I was also thinking of all the extra effort I would have to exert in order to understand his use of typical Cajun tense-confusion ("tol'" or "told" instead of "tell"). He got impatient with me and yelled in my face, demanding to know, from what I could make out, what I had done to him and where I had come from.
Eventually I pacified him by telling him that I was a scientist and just wanted to know things about him. I also falsely promised to release him immediately, at which point he let me go, though he didn't stop eyeing me suspiciously. I tried not to stare at him, since he was still completely naked and obviously uncomfortable.
"Would you like some clothes?" I asked him. He looked puzzled. I convinced him to stay put for a moment (though it was probably his curiosity that truly convinced him) and went to grab him some of the only clothes I had in the cabin, which were mine. I came back with an outfit for him, which he received with more confusion. He seemed to understand that humans wear clothes and that I wanted him to try wearing them, but he didn't know how to get them onto his body. I offered to help, an offer that was met with a sort of guttural hiss of a growl that wasn't similar to any other noise I've ever heard. He retreated to the other end of the room for something like twenty minutes, a time he spent inspecting the clothes and experimenting with different methods of getting them on. He figured out the trousers fairly quickly, but the shirt gave him a little more trouble, and he completely discarded the boxers. After all that trouble, he came back over to me somewhat dressed and still uncomfortable.
"Let me go," he ordered, hiking up the trousers since he is a bit slimmer than I am.
I waylaid him by asking about his name and his family. He begrudgingly told me his name was Lafayette, like the town "on da other side of da bayou". I suppose he has no family, or else wants to keep them a secret from his human captor; I can't really blame him.
I spent the next hour delaying him further by telling him of the wild idea that had occurred to me once I saw his humanoid form: what if he could be taught to live as a member of human society? He looks normal enough, and can obviously speak and learn. I offered to teach him to be a human so he would no longer have to fear being hunted and exterminated. My main theory is that his carnivorous digestive system, which mostly demands to be fed human meat, can be altered if it is done carefully. A human digestive system can alter to accept whatever sort of diet it is given, within certain parameters. If some people can become able to ingest poisonous fish and survive, it is my belief that a man-eater with so many human traits would be able to adapt to a different sort of diet and survive. I like to compare it in my mind to the human decision of becoming a vegan.
Lafayette was not so sure of my ideas; he might not have fully understood me, just as I couldn't fully understand him. Once I finished my explanation, he stripped off my clothes and headed out to the dock outside the cabin. By the time I followed him outside, he had disappeared into the swamp water. I'm still not sure of his direction, much less his whereabouts. Despite the fact that he's nowhere to be seen for now (I am still hoping he'll return), something monumental was achieved: he didn't eat me. This means his species has much more self-control and human-esque reasoning than I previously suspected. I continue to keep watch for any sign of him.
Day 3 of observation, 6/4/07
First off, though I’ll leave this entry as “day 3” for the sake of simplicity (and the fact that it is technically only the third day I’ve gotten to actually observe my swamp friend), it has been exactly two weeks since my last report. After Lafayette left the cabin, I patrolled the area in the motorboat, looking for signs of a dwelling place or some kind of haven. To my dismay, every mile of this place looks roughly the same. I stayed within a three-mile radius of the cabin, so I assumed that Lafayette had fled further out than this, despite my earlier deductions that led me to draw the tentative perimeters of his habitat. I spent a few good months deciding where to build the cabin, and where to place the nets. Though I was confident that my idea of his general living area was correct, by the time I’d been out on the motorboat patrolling this area for a number of hours each day, I was ready to give in and admit I had grossly underestimated his familiarity with Lake Martin.
After five days of searching my marked off area in vain, I reluctantly widened my scope. My search area overlapped dangerously with the territory of alligator hunters (or “hallimagator” hunters, as they’re called by the Cajun residents) and therefore with that of alligators (“hallimagators”). At the time, I didn’t let this deter me, although I’m admittedly very respectfully cautious of the creatures. Maybe it’s poetically ironic that I’m more scared of them than I am of man-eating swamp monsters. Thoughts on hallimagators aside, I set out southeast of the cabin and continued to search a six-mile radius in that direction for the next two days. After every two days, I shifted northwest, counterclockwise. I calculated it would take me a good while to cover everything, and I couldn’t even bet on Lafayette staying put long enough for me to run across him.
Today was day eleven into my search, and it was significantly more eventful than the preceding ten. I was thick into alligator territory by about 6:40am this morning, and after a few consecutive days of early mornings and long nights, coffee wasn’t doing much to keep me upright. Either because of exhaustion, bad eyesight, or stupidity, I ran the motorboat across what I think now must have been a large section of a broken off tree trunk that jutted up near the middle of the water. It was stuck firmly enough in the muck below the surface that potential energy won out over kinetic, and the whole boat was jostled so much that it flung me over the side. I didn’t even think of the alligators until I stopped flapping around long enough to notice one slipping into the water from where it had been sunning itself on the swamp bank.
I was panicking, but I tried to keep as still as I could; this didn’t exactly work since remaining totally still would have left me to sink. The motor boat had drifted a good twenty feet or so away from me, even without me to give it power. I was stuck as hallimagator bait. I managed not to scream until something caught me around the middle and pulled me under the water. I was so sure I was going to die that I barely noticed that the whatever-it-was wasn’t sinking any teeth into me, but was pulling me along under the water at what felt like incredible speed for an alligator to be traveling anyway. Eventually the thing and I hit the opposite bank and I was literally thrown onto dry ground (dry by swamp standards), landing a good six feet from the edge of the water.
When I stopped coughing water out of my lungs, I got up and turned to see my swamp friend’s head and shoulders sticking out of the swamp, his slit pupils watching me. I was so ecstatic to finally see him that I merely exclaimed and forgot to consider thanking him for saving my life. He stayed in the water while I told him excitedly how long I’d been looking for him, and how I wished he would come back to the cabin with me.
Not much to my surprise, Lafayette didn’t say a word. After I was through, he sank back into the water, and I watched a trail of ripples as he quickly swam away. Upset, defeated, and completely soaked through with water and swamp slime, I walked along the bank until I reached the spot where the motorboat had drifted into a mound of grass and stayed put. I was able to climb back in and push off from the bank without getting wet again, and I set out for the cabin before there could be another catastrophe. I resolved to look for Lafayette again on a better day.
Upon my return to the cabin, I saw that a continued search would be unnecessary. My swamp friend was there, standing on the little dock-porch awaiting my arrival. He was even dressed, in the same clothes I had offered him before. I practically jumped up and down in the boat and immediately thought of fifty different ways to ask why he had returned.
In the end, when I approached him and saw how wild and grimy he still looked, I decided to save the questioning and offer him a shower. He was silent, what I now know to be his favorite method of expressing confusion. I steered him through the cabin to the bathroom, which he inspected curiously for a good ten minutes before I could get his attention to describe to him the purpose and execution of a shower. I had to go over it twice before he seemed to understand, including covering the functions of a towel; I hypothesize that he isn’t this way about so many things because he’s unintelligent, since he’s undoubtedly very clever and picks up on things quickly, but because there are simply many things with which he’s completely unfamiliar.
After about an hour, Lafayette emerged, clothed and with a towel hanging around his neck. He looked so amazingly normal and domestic, taking an end of the towel every so often and rubbing at the side of his wet head with it. I could tell he was doing it to humor me a little, since a swamp creature most likely doesn’t see the importance of drying off. I was fascinated with him, and I must have been staring, because he started to stare back uncertainly.
(I’ll write his speech colloquially again for future reference as I document the progress I intend to make concerning his grammar and communication.) “I tought,” he began hesitantly, “I tought I will stay hea fo a while. You ask about mon family...mon family is wen gone. Lonely out dea.”
The rest of this afternoon and evening has consisted of learning that Lafayette once had a mother, father (swamp creatures seem to practice the same monogamous mating unions that humans and wolves alike find most acceptable), twelve brothers, and seven sisters (these nineteen siblings were the only ones to survive out of approximately fifty eggs). I asked what became of them, and from the somewhat ambiguous answer I was given, I decided that they had all either been killed by mistaken alligator hunters, or had squabbles among themselves that ended in violence.
I also learned, perhaps most notably, that my swamp friend actually prefers to be called “Loffie” rather than Lafayette. I agreed to address him as such, and told him he’s welcome to call me “Doc” if something with five syllables is too uncomfortable. The idea of being on a nickname basis with Loffie is monumental progress in discovering more about the inner workings of his social nature.
What to do about his sleeping arrangement was a little more tricky to decide, since part of me is still reasonably afraid that he’ll get up with a midnight craving and devour me in my sleep. The majority of my mind now says that, given what I’ve experienced of him thus far, this is highly unlikely – but there’s still a chance that he may be deceiving me, only staying so he can gain my trust and easily catch me off guard. Loffie seemed to sense my distress over the matter, and suggested on his own that he could sleep in the mud room, locked in again until I let him out in the morning. I originally rejected the idea, but given no safer option, I agreed after he helped me move the sleeper sofa from the living room to the mud room. He was confused about this as well, and told me that his kind generally sleep in some sort of underwater dwelling. I explained that humans are apparently pickier, and that we like cushiony things.
As I type this, Loffie is locked into “his” room with clean clothes for the morning and some water. I’ll probably have to give in and go shopping for some clothes that he can keep if he ends up staying “fo a while”. If he turns out to be as reasonable and safe as he seems, I might even be able to take him along with me, which would be an incredible chance to observe him in a public setting. Still, I’m prepared for this to prove too risky. All I can suppose about Loffie’s restraint from eating me is that it’s a bit like being handed a ham sandwich: if you aren’t hungry, it isn’t going to hold much temptation for you – maybe a bit if it’s a particularly good-looking ham sandwich. As you go longer and longer without eating, however, it shouldn’t take much at all for that sandwich to become the most tempting thing you’ve ever endured. I know I’ll have to find something to feed Loffie in the morning before he decides to feed on me.
No comments:
Post a Comment