— Heatwaves disrupt animal cognition and behavior. A growing body of research shows that heatwaves make animals “slow in the head.” In a South African experiment, female southern pied babblers could navigate around a transparent barrier to reach mealworms in cool weather, but when temperatures rose, they would peck repeatedly at the obstacle, unable to complete the same task. High temperatures also cause birds to forage less, feed their chicks less, and sing less; dogs become more prone to biting; antelope are more likely to fight. As heatwaves grow more frequent, these cognitive and behavioral shifts may affect foraging, predator avoidance, pollination, and juvenile survival, placing vulnerable species under even greater strain.
Mersault felt he was a fly perched on a piece of dog shit. Passersby gave him a wide berth as they walked past. That was the kind of man he was. In his pocket, he carried a gun — for killing any creature, human or dog, that tried to compete with him for that shit.
Mersault walked along the river embankment. The sun made the blood vessels beneath his scalp throb and quiver; beads of sweat curtained his vision completely. The lake’s surface hurled the sunlight back at him, and he felt dizzy. He slid his hand into his pocket and rubbed the metal of the gun, desperate for a trace of coolness. A furnace — he felt he was a smoldering furnace. The only solution was to throw his ribcage open like a pair of great doors and jump into the lake to drown the fire. He kept walking, head lowered. Ants appeared in his line of sight now and then, each oblivious to the others.
A rustling — Mersault saw three dark shapes approaching. He squeezed his eyes shut, forcing the sweat from the corners, and made out three black dogs. They came straight toward him. Mersault stiffened, his hand tightening on the gun. But the three dogs paid him no attention. Tongues out, panting, they veered around Mersault, the way people veer around a piece of dog shit.
Jolted by the dogs, Mersault remembered what he was out here to do. He was going to settle a score with someone…
The sun hammered Mersault’s shadow straight down into the ground. He thought about the man he was going to settle things with — someone who was always mending his fishing nets on the far end of the embankment. The two of them had quarreled last week over some trivial matter he could no longer pin down. The specifics had gone hazy. All he remembered was the other man’s voice driving into his ears, sharp and grating, as irritating as the drone of cicadas. What he was about to do now was put a stop to that droning.
He walked on. The embankment felt as if it were melting the rubber soles of his shoes, sending up a nearly tender, burning ache. Sure enough, there was a figure in the distance, crouched beside the fishing nets, back hunched. Mersault narrowed his eyes. The sunlight scorched the man’s outline into a blur of white light — all features dissolved, leaving only a black shape that moved.
“Hey,” Mersault said. The sound of his own voice struck him as strange, as if the heatwave had altered the speed at which sound traveled through air.
The man looked up, still holding a corner of the net. He said something, but Mersault didn’t catch it. The wind swept the river’s briny scent and the man’s words away together. All Mersault saw was the man’s lips opening and closing — like a fish. The thought almost made him smile, but the impulse crumbled at the corner of his mouth, washed away by the sweat.
The gun in Mersault’s palm had grown warm — so warm it hardly felt like iron anymore. It felt more like a bone that had grown out of his own body. He thought holding it felt more real than holding his own hand. He took two more steps forward. The stones on the riverbank bit sharply into his feet, and for a moment this jolted him into clarity: which exact sentence had brought him here? Or was it just the weather? The heat blurred every boundary — grievance and rage, reason and impulse, human beings and dog shit — all churned together, indistinguishable from one another.
Mersault stood where he was, neither advancing nor retreating. The sun kept bearing down with that same unflinching stare. In the distance, the three black dogs had circled back at some point. They gazed at the dark shape by the water from afar, shook their ears, turned, and trotted off — as though it were nothing more than yet another piece of dog shit, not worth getting close to.