The Shark and the Jellyfish: More Stories in Natural History

The Essence of Survival

9 The Essence of Survival A myriad of scents are borne to the rabbit—the spices of the foliage and perfumes of the blooms, the musks of the animals, the ferments of the soil. They describe the landscape in detail more intimate than is available through any of his other senses. Those aromas fade and evolve while they travel on the air. Their characteristic flavors depend on their concentrations , so as they diffuse and thin out, each successive dilution smells different —they change as the distance from the sources grows. These essences fade the same way at their sources—with time. The redolence of the flowers, the scat, or the scent marks of passing animals change as the reservoirs of their aromas gradually evaporate away. The rabbit had paid close attention to all these cues through the years. He confirmed the details again every day while he made his rounds under the cover of the low scrub. By now he could recognize the distance to—and the age of—every airborne evocation of plant or animal life that floated his way, miles in any direction. Accumulated, unchanging scents told him he was becalmed—under a windbreak, or under a windless sky. His sense of smell told him about the weather. His nose was as critical to his quest for food and shelter as his tall ears were to his safety. As he moved through his territory, his meticulous attention to the world passing beneath his feet showed no hint of his quickness and potential burst of speed. He was calm and measured as he checked the objects protruding into his path. Most of them carried his most reassuring fragrance —they smelled like him. He scent marked them all as he passed. His own scent was a distinct mixture of substances with different volatilities. It aged predictably—when it was fresh, its essence was dominated by the molecules that evaporated most rapidly; when it was old, the most volatile molecules were gone, leaving faint remainders dominated by different, less volatile components. He knew when he was passing beyond the usual borders of his territory because his scent marks smelled older. He stopped and bit into a leaf, ignoring the bitter taste while he tested the scents that floated from the crushed sample into his nose. He gnawed through a dead twig—a compulsive habit that wore down his teeth and 10 prevented them from growing out too far. Then he marked the freshly exposed wood by rubbing it with the scent glands under his chin. No thicket was so impenetrable that the rabbit could not tell what happened within and beyond it. Airborne clues filtered to him through the maze of branches. The incense of indole hung in a tangle of chamise stems—an indication that the primrose was coming into bloom nearby. The aroma of freshly turned earth beside the path was mixed with a trace of musk, a sign that some insectivorous animal—a weasel, maybe a skunk— was visiting his territory. Farther on he recognized a jot of quinone at the base of a dead shrub— a black beetle had assumed its defensive handstand here just today. Head down, tail held high, it had sprayed its repellent mace at this spot. The effect was still sharp and bitter—too strong to get a nose close to. But already the rabbit could sense it changing, altering its flavor with the passage of the hours. The aromatic galaxy surrounded him with a sense of normality and a measure of the seasonality that circumscribed his life. Nonetheless, most of those cues were of only secondary interest. He stopped abruptly and backtracked one step, brought his face down to a whisker’s length above the ground, and sniffed a little round bump embedded in the earth. It turned out to be just an old rabbit pellet, and not from a different rabbit, but his own. His interest in the possibility that another of his kind might have visited the area passed, and he resumed his rounds through the brush. What he sought most avidly was the scent of a female rabbit. That was the rarest of discoveries—he had not found one since the coyotes had come to the area long months ago. The pair of coyotes could tell from the scent of the earth that this was still active rabbit territory—even though they had long since hunted out most of the rabbit here. They were as perceptive of the signs...