Davestuff

IVOR LARSSEN: TENNIS PRO             Smash!  Grunt!  “30-Love!” calls the umpire.  Ivor takes a couple new balls from the ball girl, Linda, he thinks her name is.  He tries to learn all their names, but with over 30 tournaments in a normal season, and half-a-dozen or more matches in a good tournament, it’s hard.  Bounce, bounce, toss…Whack!  Damn.  Let.  The crowd whistles with the Cyclops and the umpire calls for silence.  OK, still first serve.  Bounce, bounce, bounce, toss…Whack!  That one feels good from the moment he reaches up, a high kicker at the corner.  But Joseba “Joe” Zulaika, the Basque great currently ranked in the top 30 in the world, has read Ivor’s motion and is ready with a backhand down the line.  Ivor comes up to the net following his serve and cuts it off, slicing it hard to the other side.  “40-Love!” call the umpire.   S...

As bad as the morning had been for Sam Bonner, for one gibbon, it was going to be worse. It started unremarkably. Cozily ensconced a hundred feet up in a leafy bower, he awoke to find an immensely long arm heaving him over the edge of his nest. For an intolerable moment, half asleep, he imagined branches slapping him in the face as he flailed his way to an eager forest floor. Flopping to a stop at the end of his tether, he started from his morbid reverie, dangling helplessly below as the apes gleefully pillaged his meager possessions. Spinning gently in the rain of debris, he saw one brown-furred face leering down at him with an expression and fistful of feces that said unmistakably, “This was my idea, human.” Only one problem: Sam knew that face. Hours later, trotting through the undergrowth in his walrus-hide leggings and hard-won Juleleloh spear—the one on him while he slept, the other flung to the ground by the gibbons—Sam headed for the fig he knew was part of many trib...