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the other hand, both Tommy and I had noticed that the cliffs stretched into northern Iraq.
    So we bid good-bye to Colonel Eshrem, then rode with Saim and Mr. Security to the town of Sirnac, where we parted in an orgy of embraces and kissed cheeks. Saim refused to take any money, despite the contract we’d signed. He was a man of great honor, and high emotion, and he wouldn’t take our money “for the sake of the tiger.” He said: “You have done a wonderful thing.”
    We rented a car and driver in Sirnac, then made a run for the border. There would be no problem getting into the Kurdish-held territory: Tommy had worked with several aid agencies, helping Kurdish refugees when Saddam Hussein rolled his tanks on his own people after the Gulf War. He still had friends among the IraqiKurds, and, in fact, the Kurdish cap he wore, the one I always thought of as a yarmulke, was a treasured gift from one of those folks.
    At the border, however, a Turkish official refused to stamp us out of the country. We spent two days there while Tommy worked the public phones calling his friends in Ankara in an effort to, in his words, “find someone who’ll squash this little prick for me.”
    For two days, I sat against a wall while Tommy stood at the phone, talking Tommy talk as only Tommy can talk. “Look,” he was saying to some English-speaking Turkish official in the capital, “we’re not actually going into the mountains.” (Not unless we could get into Iraq, he failed to say.) “We’re just doing what we did in Turkey. We talk to the police and to the military and to the people in the villages. We raise people’s consciousness, get them thinking about what it means if this animal still exists.”
    Day two at the border was now slipping into day three. “All we really want to do is make people aware of this magnificent creature,” Tommy was saying.
    Sitting there, listening to all this, it occurred to me that maybe that was enough. For now. Maybe, as Saim said, we had actually done something wonderful. People should be made aware. Because, in my almost expert opinion, the tiger is out there.

Bug Scream
    T he bug scream is a distinctive human sound. It is not characterized by volume, or intensity, or duration, but by the very sound itself: a kind of high-pitched, astonished loathing that combines the “eeewww” of disgust with the “waaah” of abject terror. Eeewaah. Every human has produced a bug scream at one time or another and every human has heard someone else generate such a sound. Here is the First Rule of Vermin Shrieking: When a human being not oneself bug screams, the sound is, by instinctual definition, funny. Cahill’s Corollary to the First Rule is: Bug screams screamed by individual human beings
are not funny
to the individuals screaming.
    Not that I consider myself squeamish. Quite the contrary. I’ve actually eaten bugs. More frequently, bugs have eaten me.
    Not too long ago, for instance, I was walking across the Congo Basin in company with an American scientist, a filmmaker from
National Geographic
, three Bantu villagers, and sixteen pygmies. It was hot, and the forest contained what I imagined to be the better part of all the noxious bugs that have ever existed upon the face of the earth, including bees and wasps, which I found particularly annoying, because all the creatures with stingers tended to congregate on me to the exclusion of my expeditionary colleagues.
    Why me?
    The scientist Michael Fay, of Wildlife Conservation International, said, in effect, “Because you’re a big fat sweaty guy.” Heexplained that all living organisms need salt, and that one of the factors limiting the abundance of life in the swampy forest was the lack of salt. The fact is, I was taller than Michael by several inches, over a foot taller than the biggest pygmy, and I outweighed everyone by fifty to one hundred pounds. Also I sweat a lot. I was, in effect, a walking salt dispenser, an ambulatory fountain of