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stuffed dragon was attacking our chickens. It had one of them in its mouth and was shaking it, but as soon as it saw us and others closing in, it scurried rapidly around the corner of the building and off across the clearing behind in a cloud of dust, dragging the other distraughtchickens tumbling along in the dust behind it, still tethered together with the string and screeching.
    After the dragon put about thirty yards between it and us, it paused, and with a vicious jerk of its head bit through the string, releasing the other three chickens, which scrambled off toward the trees, shrieking and screaming and running in ever-decreasing circles as park guards careered after them trying to round them up. The dragon, relieved of its excess chickens, galloped off into thick undergrowth.
    With a lot of “After you,” “No, after you,” we ran carefully toward where it had disappeared and arrived breathless and a little nervous. We peered in.
    The undergrowth covered a large bank, and the dragon had crawled up the bank and stopped. The thick vegetation prevented us from getting closer than a yard to the thing, but then, we weren’t trying terribly hard.
    It lay there quite still. Protruding from between its jaws was the back end of the chicken, its scrawny legs quietly working the air. The dragon lizard watched us unconcernedly with the one eye that was turned toward us, a round, dark brown eye.
    There is something profoundly disturbing about watching an eye that is watching you, particularly when the eye that is watching you is almost the same size as your eye, and the thing it is watching you out of is a lizard. The lizard’s blink was also disturbing. It wasn’t the normal rapid reflex movement that you expect from a lizard, but a slow, considered blink which made you feel that it was thinking about what it was doing.
    The back end of the chicken struggled feebly for a moment, and the dragon chomped its jaw a little to let the chicken’s struggles push it farther down its throat. This happened a couple more times, until there was only one scrawny chicken foot still sticking ridiculously out of the creature’s mouth. Otherwise it did not move. It simply watched us. Inthe end it was us who slunk away trembling with an inexplicable cold horror.
    Why? we wondered as we sat in the terrace cafeteria and tried to calm ourselves with 7UP. The three of us were sitting ashen-faced as if we had just witnessed a foul and malignant murder. At least if we had been watching a murder, the murderer wouldn’t have been looking us impassively in the eye as he did it. Maybe it was the feeling of cold, unflinching arrogance that so disturbed us. But whatever malign emotions we tried to pin onto the lizard, we knew that they weren’t the lizard’s emotions at all, only ours. The lizard was simply going about its lizardly business in a simple, straightforward lizardly way. It didn’t know anything about the horror, the guilt, the shame, the ugliness that we, uniquely guilty and ashamed animals, were trying to foist on it. So we got it all straight back at us, as if reflected in the mirror of its single unwavering and disinterested eye.
    Subdued with the thought that we had somehow been horrified by our own reflection, we sat quietly and waited for lunch.
    Lunch.
    In view of all the events of the day so far, lunch suddenly seemed to be a very complicated thing to contemplate.
    Lunch, as it turned out, was not a chicken. It wasn’t a chicken because the dragon had eaten it. How the kitchen was able to determine that the chicken the dragon had eaten was the precise one that they were otherwise going to do for lunch was not clear to us, but apparently that was the reason we were having plain noodles, and we were grateful for it.
    We talked about how easy it was to make the mistake of anthropomorphising animals, and projecting our own feelings and perceptions onto them, where they were inappropriate and didn’t fit. We simply had no idea what