Mutual admiration: spotted hyena Phoenix, whom Drea hand-raised, gives her a nuzzle bonding with hyenas photo: Kathy Moorhouse

he searing ocean wind whistles into the desert ghost town, blasting through the empty buildings, lofting a stream of salty grit that over decades has eaten away their bricks to a pockmarked ruin. The empty buildings surrounding the abandoned African diamond mines once held rowdy crowds of miners. But now their dark windows reflect only a lone, hulking, brown hyena picking her way along the street, oblivious to the capricious winds ruffling her thick fur. Only days ago, she loped across the Namibian seashore to crush efficiently in her jaws the skulls of five seals, choosing one to drag away for a feast. But today she is hungry, and she sniffs the windstream for another hint of the meat-odor that has lured her.

When she spies the chunk of meat tucked into a hole at the end of the narrow alley, she anticipates an easy and welcome meal. She steps gingerly to avoid a twig, then a rock, then a board, not suspecting that they had been strategically placed to guide her passage. She reaches out to take the meat when her paw lands on a buried metal plate, and then there's the sharp snap of a mechanism that snares her leg in a thick wire loop. Startled, she leaps to yank herself free; a shock-absorbing spring yields just enough to prevent injury, yet still hold her firmly. She struggles for a few more minutes, but quickly settles down into a puzzled wait in the windswept alley, chewing the meat as a consolation.

Soon three humans appear and, as they approach, the hyena remains calm but attempts one last struggle against the steadfast hold of the snare. One human extends a stick toward her and she clamps down on it with a crunch of her vise-like jaws. A loop of rope encircles her neck to hold her head and she feels the firm, practiced grasp of human hands wrestling her down before a needle-sting in her rump sends a wave of calm coursing through her body.

In contrast to the tranquilized animal, the capture has brought a spark of eager anticipation for Duke biologist Christine Drea and her colleagues, a graduate student and an American trapper. The blood sample they will draw, the body measurements they will make, and the thick leather radio collar they will fasten around the animal's neck provide data that will bring them another step closer to understanding the biology of these exotic, mysterious animals.

For Drea, an assistant professor of biological anthropology and anatomy, the brown hyena and its cousin, the spotted hyena, have become fascinating scientific quarry. The creatures that send shivers down the spines of most people have inspired in Drea a compelling scientific itch to answer the wealth of biological questions they pose. Why do spotted hyenas hunt in well-organized packs, while brown hyenas live the life of a lone hunter/scavenger, killing only such easy prey as lolling seals? Do brown hyena males really feed cooperatively, offering meat to any cub in their clan? And how does a natural flood of male hormones, called androgens, trigger the female spotted hyena to grow into a massive animal that dominates the male, while the same hormones fail to trigger such masculinization in the brown hyena?

Such questions have led Drea into numerous adventures, from rigorous expeditions into the wilds of the Namibian desert to friendly roughhousing with a captive male hyena named Phoenix. In the encounters with the worshipful Phoenix, whom she had hand-raised, Drea enjoyed adoring nuzzling vigorous enough to topple her to the ground, and intense facial grooming with the hyena's sandpaper tongue, "bringing new meaning to the term 'exfoliation,'" she recalls. Her experiences in years of study at the University of California at Berkeley and now at Duke have brought her to know hyenas as they really are--complex, intelligent creatures, both fierce and gentle. And while hyenas are somewhat doglike in appearance and behaviors, they are not canines, but are more closely related to mongooses and meerkats. Drea says studies of the spotted hyenas have led her and her colleagues to realize that hyenas are highly social animals.

True, says Drea, in some ways hyenas do live up--or down--to their fierce reputations. With powerful jaws and gobble-anything digestion, a few dozen snarling, fighting hyenas can devour a zebra--skeleton and all--in thirty minutes. Spotted hyenas are even born fighting, sometimes causing wounds that may lead to death only hours after birth.

Such antisocial behavior aside, says Drea, hyenas form a social system every bit as complex that of many primates, closely resembling some monkeys. Hyena cubs depend heavily on their mothers and on nurturing from the rest of the group members, and the animals live in a highly social multigenerational "clans," which feature with such practices as elaborate greeting ceremonies.

The animals even show emotion, as Drea recounts in a chapter she contributed to the book The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable Accounts of Animal Emotions (Random House/Discovery): "I've witnessed various hyenas behave in ways that might suggest affection, spite, or even jealousy," she wrote. In particular, she recalled when Phoenix, after an attack by a dominant female, sought solace with her, whining pitifully: "He met me at the fence, falling to his carpals and continuing with his cacophony, as though recounting the morning's ordeal. His body posture epitomized hyena submissiveness--bared teeth in an open-mouthed appeasement grin, ears plastered to his head, the look of defeat in his stance. As I entered his pen, he glued himself to me. His hindquarters turned to jelly, he sank to the floor, and like any frightened creature, he relieved himself all over my boots."

Such experiences have convinced Drea to extend her studies beyond the obvious. "Certainly, when you watch spotted hyenas, one of the most notable things is how aggressive they can be," says Drea. "So, for example, the fighting among neonatal siblings that is sometimes deadly was receiving a lot of attention. But I believed that aggression couldn't possibly be the whole story with these animals. Their behavior had to be more complicated." Thus, she launched her first foray into hyena studies in 1993, in collaboration with Steve Glickman, UC-Berkeley psychology professor and director of the Berkeley Hyena Project. Drea and Glickman began detailed observations of the newborn animals to determine what followed this initial round of newborn fighting.

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