Animal Crackers

Recently a box of goodies arrived on the bush plane that flies in every two weeks with my name on it, sent from a dear friend far away. It was full of goodies from the States, mostly snacks that helped her get through morning sickness a few months prior and that she thought I too might enjoy. Needless to say, they were worth their weight in gold, and I have carried out a delicate dance between hoarding them Gollum-like (my precious) and savoring them with all the restraint of a kid going through her stocking on Christmas morning. And yet, as amazingly crunchy as the honey mini-wheats were for breakfast and the little goldfish crackers were for mid-morning, mid-afternoon and mid-evening snacks, I may have derived the most pleasure from this whole experience by simply inhaling the fragrance of the contents of the cardboard box right after I opened it. It smelled like America. Mmmm....

Last week I took a little baggy of the treasured animal crackers that came in the box with me to our language lesson and munched on a few while conjugating active participles. (I know, only a pregnant lady could have kept her appetite through that.) I absently mindedly shared a few with our language helper and the old man who tends the grounds at the school where we meet. Fairly soon our lesson had digressed from Arabic grammar to a lengthy discussion about the animal crackers.

"What are these?" the older man asked. Proud to know the words for both "animal" and "biscuit" I informed them that they were "animal biscuits" from America.
"These are animals?"
"Yeah. Animals."
He picked up a cookie, held it up to the light and squinted for closer inspection. "Well, what is this one?"
"That one? Let's see...that one is a...um....well, that's a bison."
"A what?"
"It's like a hairy American cow. Nevermind. Let's look at another one."
"Okay, what is this one?"
"This one is....uh...crud. This one is a bear. "
"A what?"
"A bear. It walks on four legs, but can stand up on two. It's really mean."
"Oh, you mean a lion."
"No, no, not a lion. I don't think you have bears here."
"Does it climb trees?"
"Uh, sometimes."
"It's a lion."
"No....not a lion..."
"Does it eat people?"
"Yeeeah...
"It's called a lion. Li-on."
"Well, maybe sorta like an American lion. Let's look at another one."

The subsequent zoological research into the cookies resulted in several bison, a family of bears, a herd of deer, a couple horses, a potential llama and one very North American looking sheep. It was with great excitment that we eventually identified a camel. Eventually the name-that-animal game just turned into some serious snacking. At one point our language helper said with his mouth full of bison, "These are delicious. They don't make biscuits like these here. They make good animal biscuits in America." So at the end of the day I guess it was decided that ethnocentric cookies are pretty good after all.

The mystery animal. Any guesses?