Read Online Hold the Enlightenment by Tim Cahill - Free Book Online

little elbows on the rim of the enclosure and stare at him sitting at his desk. It’s hard to get work done, he told me, when a platypus wants to party.
    I had decided that, in Australia, the platypus would be my totem animal partially because of our mutual tendency to spend most of the day sleeping and most of the night frolicking about and eating. More to the point, there was something quintessentially “high school” about the creature, something endearing and adolescent and immediately accessible. Who didn’t feel like a platypus in sophomore English: so strange, so different from the rest, so inherently dorky as to be unclassifiable by science. Platypus boys and platypus girls confined to Platypus High, mammals all, and some of us filled with venom.
    So the platypus hunt was a personal exploration into what I’d been and what I’d become. To that end, I had scouted the Yea River during the day, looking for likely platypus habitat. The river flowed through a forest of mountain ash eucalyptus, the tallest hardwood trees in the world. Some were well over three hundred feet high, and the leaves were concentrated at the tops of the trees, so that a good deal of light fell on the forest floor, which was consequently covered with chest-high grasses and prehistoric-looking tree ferns.
    The Yea was only five feet across and four feet deep where it burbled through its narrows. As it wound through the forest, it created cut banks five and six feet high, and these were places where a platypus might dig a burrow, which can be one hundred feet long.
    Fallen trees, in various stages of mossy disintegration, spanned the Yea, and the river was a muddy golden color, its waters essentially a strong tea made of eucalyptus leaves. Shafts of sunlight fellon the water, and in those places the Yea looked like a golden mirror. Caddis flies were hatching out of the sun-dappled river.
    These were the places I marked in my mind’s map, the places I’d spotlight well after full dark.
    And so, in the Hour of the Platypus, and for reasons that seemed obscure even at the time, I chose to drop to my belly and crawl through the night toward the river. No lights. At one of my intended observation sites, just off the trail that paralleled the river, a newly fallen tree formed a bridge across the Yea. I knew I was in the right spot when I found myself entangled in the exposed root system. Crawling through a big muddy root ball in the dark is an annoying and time-consuming task. It took fifteen minutes to find a position on the trunk, over the river. I took a deep breath, held it, and hit the trigger on my spot.
    And, by God, there he was. The very first time I spotted the river: a platypus! Or at least something furry, swimming. A dark swirl and it was gone. The creature might have been a water rat, I suppose, but water rats don’t sport beaverlike tails. At another site only two hours later, I saw another platypus.
    The great dark wing has flapped once again, and here’s the wily Platypus Hunter returning from the river, yet another year older and perhaps one quest wiser. Suns have not precisely collided in an explosion of white-hot light. In point of fact, the rechargeable spotlight carried by the Hunter is rapidly running out of juice. Its beam has become feeble and yellow, totally inadequate for the task at hand. Presently the damn thing simply sputters weakly and dies.
    This makes walking difficult, and the tallest hardwood trees on earth assault the Hunter at every step. Stringy bark snakes litter his path.
    He resolves that, in the future, he will carry two sources of light into the forest at night. And that’s it, he thinks. That’s the extent of the evening’s epiphany, Lesson Number One out of Platypus High: Anyone who aspires to see into the Very Core of the Universe is advised to bring along two sources of light.

Fire and Ice and Everything Nice
    I read the sentence a total of, oh, maybe twenty times the night before it was to be