processing, the bats were released alive from the third-floor laboratory window—most of them, anyway. There were some unintended fatalities, as there often are in any capture and handling of wild animals. Tonight, among twenty bats caught, two died. One was a least horseshoe bat, tiny as a shrew, killed instantly in the cave by a blow from the rim of Jian’s butterfly net. If he couldn’t release it, Aleksei decided, he should at least dissect the dead bat, salvaging what data he could.
I watched over his shoulder as he worked with a small scissors, puncturing the skin and then zipping upward across the little bat’s chest. He spread the pelt back with his fingers—a light pull was enough—to reveal huge breast muscles, reddish purple as sirloin. This animal was built like Mighty Mouse. Aleksei cut through those flight muscles and then through the bones beneath, too delicate to give much resistance to his scissors. With a pointy aliquot, he drew some blood directly from the heart. He snipped out the liver and spleen, dropping them into separate tubes. And for these tasks, I noticed, the seatbelt analogy didn’t apply; in addition to his blue gloves, Aleksei donned an N95 mask. Still, it was very undramatic. Only later did I notice the connection between least horseshoe bats and what Wendong Li’s group had discovered. The least horseshoe bat is one of the suspected reservoir hosts of the virus.
Once finished, with the blood and organs preserved, Aleksei dropped the carcass into a Ziploc bag. He added the other bat carcass, after dissection, to the same bag. Where do those go? I asked. He pointed to a biohazardous waste box, specially designed for accepting suspect materials.
“But if they were food,” he added, “they’d go there,” indicating an ordinary trash basket against the wall. It was a shrug back toward our dinner discussions and the tangled matter of categorical lines: edible animals versus sacrosanct animals, safe animals versus infected animals, dangerous offal versus garbage. His point again was that such lines of division, especially in southern China, are arbitrarily and imperfectly drawn.
39
Several days later we traveled down to the city of Lipu, about seventy miles south of Guilin, to visit a rat farm that interested Aleksei. The trip took two hours on a rather luxurious bus—one offering seat belts and bottled water. At the bus station in Lipu, while waiting for our local contact to arrive, I noticed a sign stipulating security restrictions. The sign was in traditional Chinese characters but I could tell from the illustrations what was disallowed on board Lipu–Guilin busses: no bombs, no fireworks, no gasoline, no alcohol, no knives, and no snakes. We weren’t carrying any.
Mr. Wei Shangzheng eventually pulled up in a white van. He was a short, stocky, amiable man who laughed easily and often, especially after his own statements, not because he thought he was funny but from sheer joy at life’s curious sweetness. That’s the impression I took, anyway, as his words came translated by Guangjian and his attitude shone merrily through. We climbed into his van and rode six miles to a village northeast of Lipu, where Mr. Wei turned onto a narrow lane, then through a gate, above which was a line of calligraphy announcing: SMALL HOUSE IN THE FIELD BAMBOO RAT RAISING FARM. Beyond was a courtyard surrounded on three sides by cinderblock buildings. Two wings of the building were filled with low concrete pens. The pens contained silver-gray creatures, small-eyed and blunt-headed, that looked like gigantic guinea pigs: Chinese bamboo rats. Mr. Wei gave us a tour up and down the rows.
The pens were clean and well-drained, each furnished with a water dish and holding one to four animals. The Chinese bamboo rat is native to southern China and thereabouts, and the chewed-upon stalks of bamboo in some cages signaled that its diet is true to its name. The front teeth are beaverlike, well suited for gnawing those stalks, but in disposition a bamboo rat is more comparable to a pussycat. Mr. Wei lifted one by the scruff of its neck, turned it over, and gently poked at its sizable scrotum. Don’t try that with a beaver. The animal barely wriggled. Up and down the line we could see adults, juveniles, one female nursing two mouse-size pups, a mounting in progress. They breed readily, Mr. Wei explained. He kept mostly females, plus a few good studs. Last month he sold two hundred rats, and now he was expanding his operation, building