Fauna

God really ran wild when he created the animal life here in Sumatra.

Take my house, for instance. Inside we have those little , pale white cik-cak lizards that that are always darting around, making that clicking noise. They used to annoy me until Wulan, my wife told me that they eat mosquitos. We get these huge spiders, some of them not much smaller than tarantulas. Wulan told me they are harmless.

Not so harmless are the centipedes, creepy, squishy things that you see crawling out of bathtub and sink drains. I got bit by one and it swelled my foot to a pretty scary size. After a day I was alright.

Under the awnings outside you find reptiles that are a lot bigger than the cik-caks. The expats here call them ‘fuck you lizards’. They have a sack under their throats that swells up as they make burping noises, then when the sack is full to the point of bursting, they expel the air while making sharp noises that sound like someone in a high-pitched voice screaming “fuck you-fuck you-fuck you!”.

On our roof and trees we have musangs — civit cats. They look kind of like skinny raccoons. You don’t see them often, but in mating season you hear them chasing each other on the roof — it sounds like a hail storm.

There’s a retired Brit schoolteacher who drinks in one of my hangouts. He taught biology and he’s always telling me interesting stories about the wildlife here.

It turns out there’s this snake in these parts called the Sumatran spitting cobra. It feeds on small rodents but if it sees a large animal or a human come within fifteen feet or so, it rears up its head and spits an acid-like poison in the

intruder’s face, permanently blinding it.

I had a hard time wrapping my head around that one. It doesn’t sound right, it just seems mean. The Brit went on about natural selection and variation, but the fact that something that creepy exists makes me shudder.

I’m a Philly boy, a big city guy, so pretty late in life all the weird plants and animals around me still seem unreal. It was all interesting stuff, but I never paid too much attention to the natural world here. I know that young people from all over the world to Sumatra for jungle treks and photo safaris. They fly into Kota Kasar from Singapore and they head out after a day. Nobody sticks around here.

The most common word used in the guidebooks to describe this place is noxious.

The locals here aren’t like the people in Java or Bali. If you as someone in Java a direct question, something like why he’s overcharging you for a cab ride or a hotel room, he’ll just blush and smile. A Sumatran to tell you to go to hell and a Batak Sumatran will tell you bad things about your mother. So this town is more or less tourist free. There are no bule (white) neighborhoods like in Jakarta or Bandung, no restaurants catering to Western tastes and no hospitals for foreigners.

When our second child was about to be born, there was no argument on which hospital we were going to use. My wife and our first born were both delivered at St. Elizabeth, the Christian hospital here. It’s a huge old place left over from colonial times, built around a grassy central courtyard full of trees and shrubs. You see cats prowling the halls and birds fly in and out.

There’s a more modern and expensive hospital here, but Wulan said the same doctors use both places and besides, now the place was a family tradition.

You have to understand something about doctors and hospitals here. If you can’t pay, you don’t get treated. Period.

There was a case a few years ago when a young kid around fourteen was surfing the top of a train with his buddies. Pretty dumb, but no dumber than stuff I did at that age. The train jolted and sent the kid flying. He landed between two cars and one of his hands was cut off by a wheel. The kid’s friends threw the hand into a bag and rushed the boy to the nearest hospital.

No dice. The security men took one look at the scruffy mob of screaming kids and turned them away. A lot of people got upset by this case, but nothing changed. People continued to die after getting turned down for treatment.

Wulan told me something else about the system here. The doctors bribe their way through medical school. Nobody without money gets treated and nobody with money flunks out of the medical colleges.

I didn’t know a lot of this stuff when we had our first kid, so I was pretty nervous when her time came again and I got her to St Elizabeth. We checked into a private room and then my poor wife’s ordeal started.

Did you ever read the Hemingway story about the young indian whose wife went into long, painful labor? The poor guy ended up cutting his own throat while the baby was born. I guess Hemingway was saying that being too sensitive is not a virtue, but after a day and a night of Wulan in agony, I could relate to the indian kid. At one point she begged the doctor to cut her open. I had to leave the room from time to time to pull myself together.

Before we left the house I had grabbed a thick, hardback copy of Somerset Maughm’s short stories. Now I sat cross-legged on the floor of the hallway with my back against the wall, facing the open air courtyard. There was a breeze coming in and the moon was bright. I could see bats cutting through the night.

I read a couple of stories. They were about white men lost and bewildered in tropical asia. Great.

Something — a movement or a rustling sound — made me look up.

A huge rat was running down the corridor towards me. I say running, but he was really jumping, with these spastic leaps. His eyes were fixed on me and his mouth was gaping.

I had that eerie feeling you get when you see something you’ve never seen or even imagined before. The Giant Rat of Sumatra. That was the name of a Hardy Boys book I read as a kid and that’s what was about to sink its nasty fangs in my face.

Whap! I backhanded it with my book. The thing shot back, somersaulting a couple times. It landed, got up on its hind feet and glared at me.

Oh Christ, here it comes again.

But now I had time to set up my shot and the rat landed a lot further away. It ran in a circle a few times while chittering then scurried off into the courtyard bushes.

Our second child was born about an hour later.

I was so happy our healthy little girl was finally born and my wife was out of danger that I forgot all about that damned rat.

About a week later I woke up suddenly around two in the morning, Wulan sleeping quietly by my side. I could hear the baby murmuring in her crib. I was sweating and I felt my heart racing.

That fucking rat. What in God’s name happened back there at the hospital?

The next time I ran into the Brit teacher at the bar, I told him the whole story. He seemed pretty startled

“That was certainly unusual behavior. Rats are timid. They know their place in the food chain.”

“Maybe it was rabid?” I said.

He sucked on his pipe a few times.

“Highly unlikely. Rats are one of the least likely animals to acquire rabies. It’s almost unheard of.”

I was now more puzzled than ever and for some reason, I just couldn’t let it go. The whole episode would have stayed one of those unsolved, weird mysteries if I hadn’t been for Wulan’s uncle.

The old man was an interesting guy, a career military man. He fought the Dutch during the struggle here and from what I heard he was a real terror for the white folks back then. He was always friendly with me, though. The second wife, the plump one (he had three!), was always fussing over me, trying to get me to eat more when we visited them.

Anyway, Pak Ali heard my story and asked a couple questions. He stayed quiet for a couple minutes and then sighed. Wulan translated what he said then.

“Ski, you have no idea how fortunate you are. The creature in question was no mere rat, it was an ifrit, a jin that took animal form. It fought you for the soul of your daughter. Alhamdullilah, you drove it off

“But be careful. You made a powerful enemy. It despises you now and may return at any time to seek revenge”

Great. Just what I needed to hear. On top of staring at old age, now I’ve got a pissed-off jin breathing down my neck.