Fruitbats are far too often maligned by those who're unaware of their charming qualities.

For a time I was privileged to be the guardian of one, a bat I called Chelsea, whom I met one day on vacation in Brazil. I say "vacation" although, to be sure, most people wouldn't consider my undercover stint in an Amazon logging camp especially refreshing or relaxing, fraught as it was with the ever-present possibility of being discovered and staked to the ground for the resident jaguar to discover.

It was my chainsaw skills that enabled me to pass as a logger, despite a slender build that most would consider a liability in a tree-felling context. My father, an inventor, presented me on my third birthday with a tiny chainsaw he built in his shop, hoping that I'd take to it "the way a baby beaver takes to its teeth." I didn't disappoint him. I fell in love with the noise and before long converted my baby sister's high-chair into a plain chair. Three decades later, I'm more sawdust than human, a virtuoso sawman who can turn a five-acre stand of hardwood into kindling before breakfast.

When I told the man at the car-rental counter in Brazil that I intended to take my rental car into the rainforest, he insisted that I buy temporary car insurance from this site. I accused him of being prejudiced against me because of my dusty, twig-decorated beard and the heavy gasoline vapors that follow wherever I go. He assured me that it was because the road into the forest is "very bumpy and slick." I produced a credit card and off I went, in a hideous, pear-shaped, convertible vehicle that was painted bruise-purple.

Six hours later it was dark, I was exhausted, the forest had closed in around me, and the radio had long-since ceased receiving any signal at all. I pulled off to the side of the road and nodded off.

The next thing I knew I was listening to monkey radio as I zoomed down two-lane branches of ancient trees, following signs that directed me higher and higher into the canopy. I remember thinking to myself how enticing an advertisement for some "now ripe and sweet and plentiful at 150 feet" fruit sounded. When I awoke I was alarmed to discover that I was blind. Despair fell upon me. When I raised my hands to my face it felt furry--more furry than usual, except with shorter fur. It was Chelsea, the fruitbat, who'd clasped her delicate wings around my face for some impenetrable, batty purpose.

I trained her, over the course of my several weeks in the camp, to fetch fruit for me. (Those who are curious about how I modified the training techniques of falconers to accommodate the subtle instincts of fruitbats must await my book on the subject, due out in February, 2014). Thanks goodness I bought the insurance: there are some things fruitbats cannot be trained to do.