other Asian countries with similar expectations and you’ll see the difference.
Before the bat catching could begin, though, we had to do some daytime groundwork. We climbed a long rickety bamboo ladder to the flat roof of a disused warehouse, just beside the karoi trees, and from that rooftop Gofur and Pitu kept climbing. They went high into one of the trees, nimble as sailors going to the crow’s nest, and lashed a bamboo mast into place so that it towered out vertically above an uppermost limb. Atop that mast was a simple homemade pulley. They did the same in another tree, near the far side of the warehouse, and when their clambering and their rigging were done, they could raise and lower a huge mist net between the two trees.
Their intrusion into a roost tree, of course, disrupted the bats. Hundreds of animals stirred, woke, took flight, and circled out over the river, then back around, and then out again, like flotsam adrift on a great eddy of air. They looked big as geese against the daylight sky, soaring easily on thermals or flapping in slow rhythm. When they came over us, passing low, their features were visible—the auburn fur of their bodies, the big umber wings almost translucent, the pointy snouts. Although they didn’t like being waked, there was no sign of panic. They were magnificent. I had seen fruit bats in Asia before, but never so many in motion so close. I must have been gawking like a fool because Epstein gently advised, “Keep your mouth closed when you look up.” They shed Nipah virus in their urine, he reminded me.
At the hotel, we set our alarms for half past midnight and then roused for the real work. As we rode to the storage depot through slumbering Khulna, Epstein gave us what he called The Safety Briefing. Goggles and leather welder’s gloves for the bat handlers, he said. Medical gloves underneath. Keep your hat on, keep your long sleeves down. When you take hold of such a large bat, you want to grasp it firmly around the back of its head, your fingers and thumb beneath its mandible so it can’t bite you. Avoid being bitten. Avoid being scratched. If a bat hooks a claw into your arm, raise that hand high, over your head; the animal’s instinct is to climb upward, and you don’t want it to climb across your face. Pitu and Gofur will untangle captured bats from the net and then place them into your grasp. Take the head with one hand, get its limbs with the other, clamping each of its strong little ankles and wrists in the gaps between your fingers—one, two, three, four—and your thumb. Four pinch slots, just enough. Trust Pitu and Gofur, they’ll help. That’s how you control a flying fox so that nobody gets hurt. Drop each bat into its pillowcase—which Arif will be holding open—then knot the pillowcase, hang it from a limb, and come back for another bat. If you get scratched or bitten, we treat that as an exposure—possibly to Nipah, possibly also to rabies. We wash the wound for five minutes with soap and then douse it with benzalkonium chloride, a potent antiviral. Immediately after that, jab, you get a rabies booster. Are you vaccinated for rabies, David? (Yes.) When was your last booster, how are your titers? (Um, don’t know.) As for Nipah exposure, never mind, because there’s no vaccine, no treatment, no cure. (What a relief.) Have I said, Don’t get bit? Our first principles are, one, safety for us; two, safety for the bats. Let’s do take good care of the bats, Epstein said. (He’s a veterinarian and a conservationist, before all.) Any questions?
Most of this, thank goodness, was for Jim Desmond’s benefit, not mine. Arif and Pitu and Gofur were seasoned pros; they didn’t need another briefing. Desmond was the real trainee, and I was along to watch. I didn’t intend to let anyone hand me a Nipah-dripping bat if I could reasonably avoid it.
Just outside the compound wall, in another empty building, Epstein had established his field lab. There, in the early wee hours, he and his crew readied their equipment for later tasks: anaesthetizing captured bats, taking blood samples and urine swabs from each animal, centrifuging the blood tubes to allow aliquoting off the serum, and freezing all the samples in a liquid-nitrogen shipper tank. This room had a concrete floor, barred windows, a wooden table now covered with