Consider the alligator of the bayou, how he waits: he is neither a social animal nor one given to deep concerns; and yet I say to you that even Methusaleh at the end of his life had not lived so long as this crocodilian monster.

Have you heard, has it been told to you, of the healing properties of his tears? Perhaps you have not, and it has not. You have heard of the death roll, surely, the violent thrashing that tears prey into manageable chunks of sustenance? You have heard that capturing his tail will deprive him of this instinctual response to the culmination of his predatory urges; you have heard that his jaw muscles are only for closing, never for opening, and so even our feeble arms can pen in his gnashing teeth?

Ah, you say, the expression is “crocodile tears”? Does this not mean tears that are false? False not in the feeble human sense, false in that they are the less puissant cousins of alligator tears. Listen, then, to the tale of a quest for the sorrow at the heart of a living fossil.