Something Was Wrong. My Nightgown Was in Flames

In “Hyena,” an essay published in The New Yorker in 1996, the chimpanzee researcher Joanna Greenfield describes having been bitten by a hyena in Israel. People attacked by hyenas, like people whose cotton nightgowns ignite, often die. They’re eaten alive. But Greenfield made it. When she first rinsed her considerable wounds, she felt “no pain, […]