will, but she was dead so what will did she have, what right do the dead have to a will, they are dead after all, they are not present except in bone form, in a glass case, for people to stare at. Like the Thylacine bones, the ones that were stared at for years, the ones they raided for the DNA to make the Thylacine clone.
Crowds visited. A documentary was made. Prizes were awarded. Then what happened? The Thylacine disappeared. It vanished. One day it was there, in solitude, in singleness, in its cage, or rather its large tastefully landscaped compound, running round and around as if looking for something, and then it was gone. It didn’t die of solitude, however. It was sold. A bent scientist retired to Bermuda on the proceeds. A very rich person with refined tastes ate the Thylacine. He ate it in the form of a ragout. He had a yen for the unique, he wanted to be the only person ever to eat a Thylacine. It did not taste very good, despite the care taken in the preparation of it—well, there were no recipes—but it tasted very expensive, and the man who ate it wrote in his secret diary that it was good enough value for the money.
THE ANIMALS REJECT THEIR NAMES AND THINGS RETURN TO THEIR ORIGINS
I. It was the bear who began it. Said, I’m getting out from under. I am not Bear, l’Ours, Ursus, Bar or any other syllables you’ve pinned on me. Forget the chateau tapestries in which I’m led in embroidered chains. and the scarlet glories of the hunt that was only glorious for you, you with your clubs and bludgeons. Forget the fairy tales, in which I was your shaggy puppet, prince in hairshirt, surrogate for human demons. I’m not your coat, rug, glass-eyed trophy head, plush bedtime toy, and that’s not me in outer space with my spangled cub. I’m not your totem; I refuse to dance in your circuses; you cannot carve my soul in stone. I renounce metaphor: I am not child-stealer, shape-changer, old garbage-eater, and you can stuff simile also: unpeeled, I am not like a man. I take back what you have stolen, and in your languages I announce I am now nameless. My true name is a growl. (Come to think of it, I am not a British headdress either: I do not signify bravery. I want to go back to eating salmon without all this military responsibility.) I follow suit, said the lion, vacating his coats of arms and movie logos; and the eagle said, Get me off this flag. II. At this the dictionaries began to untwist, and time stalled and reversed; the sweaters wound back into their balls of wool, which rolled bleating out into the meadows; the perfumes returned to France and old men there fell sweetly dead from a surfeit of aroma. Priests gave their dresses up again to the women, and the women ditched their alligator shoes in a hurry before their former owners turned up to claim them. The violins of the East Coast shores took flight from the fingers of their players, sucking in waltzes, laments, and reels, landed in Scotland, fell apart with wailing into their own wood and sinew and vanished into the trees and into the guts and howls of long-dead cats and the tails of knackered horses. Songs crammed themselves back down the throats of their singers, and a billion computers blew apart and homed in chip by chip on the brains of the inventors. Squashed mice were shot backwards out of traps, 
