It's A Matter of Taste

We don’t eat every human that comes to Goon Island.

In fact, we don’t eat most of them. Most we just send back. And a couple we actually like having around for short periods of time.

One of them is an anthropologist. I know I previously lumped anthropologists in with salesmen, European backpackers, poll takers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a few other types that just automatically get invited to join us at the evening cookout, but this gal is different.

Leticia Janowski first came over a few years ago  Here’s how it went.

Dr. Janowski showed up on the ferry one morning with a backpack and a notepad. We knew right off she was a researcher of some kind, and this earned her an automatic invitation to that night’s bar-b-que. She looked like she might go nicely with a honey glaze. She accepted, but she did it with a look in her eye that let us know we weren’t pulling anything she hadn’t expected. In fact, she smiled like we weren’t the only ones with something up our sleeves…although we don’t actually have sleeves. But you know what I mean. We don’t see that look very often, and it raised her notch in our estimation.

Once the ferry left and we knew we had another dish lined up for dinner, we tried to shock her with our morning sex. It’s silly, I know, but humans have the strangest reactions to Goon sex, and it’s often pretty funny. We had her follow us up to the clearing by the caves, which is where our morning sex takes place, and then we fell to.

She wasn’t exactly complacent as she watched us from the sidelines, but what she didn’t do was 1) run away, 2) try to join in, 3) tell us we were all going to Hail (whatever that is), or 4) take pictures or notes.

What she did do was quietly and unobtrusively try to mimic some of the trickier moves, which reminded us of what our kids do when they watch during the year before they’re actually ready to have sex. In fact, some of the kids were doing the same thing right next to her.

It was cute. Up another notch in our estimation.

The rest of the day went pretty much without incident, except Dr. Janowski made herself conspicuous by being inconspicuous. By lunch time, most human bar-b-que invitees are getting pretty nervous about when the ferry is coming back. Either that, or they’re getting really obnoxious trying to fit in by mimicking our walk and talk. The European backpackers never fail to do this, and it’s embarrassing for everybody…except them, of course.

But the doc just kind of hung out, tried her hand and nabbing groats, helped get the grill going for the fish for lunch, etc., without ever really calling much attention to herself, which is hard to do for a fully clothed human woman hanging out with a pack of Goons.

Click…up another notch. We were getting the feeling it was going to be hard to spit this gal, but we were pretty sure she’d do something stupid by the time the coals were ready that evening.

Well, you guessed it. When the time came to prep the eats, we just had to have a little meeting and decide what to do with her. She still hadn’t done anything inane, and although we’d plainly seen that she’d brought her notebook with her, she hadn’t taken one note. And she hadn’t even tried to buy any of our admittedly simple yet functional household items and handicrafts, which almost every human inevitably does at some point.

Nope. She was just sitting by the fire watching things progress. And she had that look in her eye again.

So we had to do it. We gathered around her, and we told her that we’d planned on spitting her up and having her for dinner with a nice honey glaze. We asked her what she thought of that.

Again, she wasn’t exactly complacent, but she didn’t freak. What she did was stand up and say, in a remarkably even voice, “Well, that would be a shame, because I was really looking forward to a little crapkee and groat.”

Twang. A hundred Goon heartstrings zinged all at once. How can you eat someone with poise like that? Even though crapkee makes most humans puke instantaneously and she really didn’t know what she was getting into with the groat.

Then she said, without missing a beat, “Besides, I haven’t gotten a blood sample yet.”

That one threw us.

The coals were almost ready. Everything for dinner except her was prepped. And she’d just asked for blood.

Well, there was nothing for it but to get on with the bar-b-que, not eat her, and find out what she had in mind while we enjoyed a good meal. Evening conversation is precious to Goons, and we were intrigued by the prospect of hearing what this was all about…as she knew we would be.

Over the course of a delightful evening. Dr. Janowski informed us that, in her opinion, humans descended from Goons. According to her observations, Goons have many of the same traits as Bonobo Chimps, which are genetically about as close to humans as you can get without being human. Bonobos use sex as a kind of currency and social lubricant (no pun intended) that effectively short-circuits the need for conflict and displays of anger and dominance.

Well, Goons enjoy sex, and lots of it, and in her estimation, that’s why Goon society is so peaceful and egalitarian. We make love, not war. And that, she said, is a social survival strategy that she believed humans once had but had lost when they separated from Goons, and possibly Bonobos, way back when.

She wanted a Goon blood sample so she could do genetic tests and see if her theory was right.

What a charmer.

What she didn’t know was that we have Bonobos on the Island. It’s a colony that started from a troupe being shipped to a mainland zoo that we “liberated” when we heard them yelling for help as their ship passed the Island. We were going to eat them at first, but darned if the same thing didn’t happen with them that happened with Dr. Janowski. After hanging around with them for the day and hearing their story, we frankly fell in love with them. We told them that the back half of the Island was theirs if they wanted to settle in, and they did. They left for the other side the same day we met them, just before we held a bar-que for the sailors on the Bonobo transport ship.

They may still be over there for all we know, but we respect their need for privacy. Heck, we’re pretty private ourselves.

We never gave Dr. Janowski any blood, of course. But the doc said she was actually all right with that and would respect our need for privacy. She said it with that look in her eye, and by that time we knew that she’d been picking up shed Goon hair on the sly all day and didn’t really need the blood, but we didn’t eat her anyway.

The good doctor wisely passed on the crapkee, sang a few songs around the fire with us, and bid us all a tasteful goodnight before the sex started again. The next day, she caught the ferry back, which raised her a few notches in the estimation of the ferry captain as well, since he never expected to see her again.

She stops by every couple of months, and she never talks about the results of her research, if any, and we don’t ask. She just hangs out and has a good time.

That’s the way we like it.