First Love, Last Rites

"Not the watching kind, I was never a watcher, I had no interest in spotting and tracking and classifying, all that would have beyond me, and would had bored me, besides; no, I could hardly distinguish one species from another, and knew little and cared less about their history or habits. I could find their nests, though, that was my specialty. It was a matter of patience, alertness, quickness of eye, and something else, a capacity to be at one with the tiny creatures I was tracking to their lairs. A savant whose name for the moment I forget has posited as a refutation of something or another the assertion that it is impossible for a human being to imagine fully what it would be like to be a bat. I take this point in general, but I believe I could have given him a fair account of such creaturehood when a I was young and still part animal myself.

I was not cruel, I would not kill a bird or steal its eggs, certainly not. What drove me was curiosity, the simple passion to know something of the secrets of other, alien lives."