Rabid

ALSO BY BILL WASIK

And Then There’s This:

How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture

Frontispiece of a book about a plague in Venice, 1657.

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE
WORLD’S MOST DIABOLICAL VIRUS

BILL WASIK
AND

MONICA MURPHY

VIKING

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

For our “creatures”—Emmett and Mia

INTRODUCTION

LOOKING THE DEVIL IN THE EYE

CHAPTER 1

IN THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER 2

THE MIDDLE RAGES

CHAPTER 3

A VIRUS WITH TEETH?

CHAPTER 4

CANICIDE

CHAPTER 5

KING LOUIS

CHAPTER 6

THE ZOONOTIC CENTURY

CHAPTER 7

THE SURVIVORS

CHAPTER 8

ISLAND OF THE MAD DOGS

CONCLUSION

THE DEVIL, LEASHED

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

From a Spanish edition of Dioscorides’
De Materia Medica
, 1566.

INTRODUCTION

O
urs is a domesticated age. As human civilization has spread itself out over the march of millennia, displacing wildlife as we go, we have found it advisable to strip the animal kingdom of its armies, to decommission its officers. Some of these erstwhile adversaries we have hunted to extinction, or nearly so. Others we relegate to zoos, confine in child-friendly safari parks. The balance we shunt to the margins as we clear the land for ourselves—erecting our own sprawling habitats on the ruins of theirs, naming our cul-de-sacs for whatever wilderness we dozed to pave them.

Peer through news reports, though, and one can find pockets of resistance, as if some ancient animal instinct were furtively reasserting itself. Consider the kamikaze bobcat in Cottonwood, Arizona, that set out on a rampage one recent March evening, menacing a worker outside a Pizza Hut and then sauntering into a bar, sending patrons onto the pool table, mauling the one who dared to snap a picture on his phone. Or the frenzied otter in Vero Beach, Florida, at a waterfront golf community called Grand Harbor, that gnawed three residents, one of them while out on the links. Or the enraged beaver in the Loch Raven Reservoir, in the genteel exurban sprawl north of Baltimore, that
cruelly interrupted the summertime reverie of four swimmers; it was deterred from devouring them only when the husband of one victim pulled it from her thigh and smashed it with a large rock.

Typically, such wildlife shuns the society of humans. But in an instant we can find these meek woodland creatures transformed into bewilderingly avid attackers, accosting us as we retrieve our mail or walk our dogs. Sometimes they will even attempt a home invasion, as one young couple in the Adirondack hamlet of Lake George, New York, learned on an April evening just a few years ago. Walking from their car, they were set upon by a gray fox; they managed to rush inside their home and close the door. But nearly a half hour later, when they opened the door again, the fox lay in wait; it sprinted toward the opening. Only quick reflexes allowed the young man to close it just as the devil’s snout broached the threshold. When an animal control officer arrived, the fox attacked his SUV, repeatedly sinking its teeth into the vehicle’s tires. He shot at it multiple times from out his driver’s side window but failed to hit his mark. Later, after the officer had finally run the fox over, he told a reporter that it was the single most aggressive foe he had encountered in nine years on the job. “This was a four- or five-pound animal attacking a 3,000-pound vehicle,” he said.

The sheer tenacity: that is the truly chilling element in all these tales. “What disturbs me,” remarked one Connecticut man to the local news, regarding the raccoon he had lately beaten to death with a hammer, “is I smashed his mouth off, I smashed his teeth in, but he still wanted to continue in the attack mode. I was actually terrified at the resilience of this animal.” In Putnam County, New York, a similarly determined raccoon assaulted one victim at the end of her half-mile-long driveway. She held down the beast while attempting to free her cell phone to call the house; eventually, her husband and son had to club the raccoon repeatedly with a tire iron in order to kill it. (“I felt that nature had betrayed me,” she later told a reporter for the public-radio show
This American Life
.) Then there was the red fox in South Carolina that
pursued a nine-year-old as he walked to the school bus one morning. After an adult neighbor sheltered the boy, the fox latched on to the Good Samaritan’s foot. He flung the animal into his home office, where it flailed against the walls and windows before finally falling asleep on a dog bed.

Nearly any species can be afflicted. Arizona officials were recently called to the scene after a dog was attacked by a mad peccary, a piglike creature whose residence in the Southwest had until that point been considered largely peaceable. In Robbins, North Carolina, it was a skunk that beset the pet Pekingese of David Sanders, who was forced to watch the two creatures battle it out for the better part of an hour. In Decatur County, Georgia, a donkey fell prey to the madness and bit its owner on the hand. In Imperial, Nebraska, the afflicted animal was literally a lamb, part of a child’s 4-H project gone terribly, almost biblically awry. Some primeval force must truly be at work when the lamb can be made into a lion.

The agent of all these acts of possession is, of course, a virus. It is the most fatal virus in the world, a pathogen that kills nearly 100 percent of its hosts in most species, including humans. Fittingly, the rabies virus is shaped like a bullet: a cylindrical shell of glycoproteins and lipids that carries, in its rounded tip, a malevolent payload of helical RNA. On entering a living thing, it eschews the bloodstream, the default route of nearly all viruses but a path heavily guarded by immuno-protective sentries. Instead, like almost no other virus known to science, rabies sets its course through the nervous system, creeping upstream at one to two centimeters per day (on average) through the axoplasm, the transmission lines that conduct electrical impulses to and from the brain. Once inside the brain, the virus works slowly, diligently, fatally to warp the mind, suppressing the rational and stimulating the animal. Aggression rises to fever pitch; inhibitions melt away; salivation increases. The infected creature now has only days to live, and
these he will likely spend on the attack, foaming at the mouth, chasing and lunging and biting in the throes of madness—because the demon that possesses him seeks more hosts.

If this sounds like a horror movie, we should not be surprised, for it is a scenario bound up into our very concept of horror. Rabies is a scourge as old as human civilization, and the terror of its manifestation is a fundamental human fear, because it challenges the boundary of humanity itself. That is, it troubles the line where man ends and animal begins—for the rabid bite is
the
visible symbol of the animal infecting the human, of an illness in a creature metamorphosing demonstrably into that same illness in a person.