The Persian onager

The onager is a wild ass, sandy above and pale below, with a dark stripe down its back and the long legs of an animal that lives by outrunning things. It was once a common sight on the dry plains of Iran. Hunting and the loss of grazing to livestock pushed it into a few protected areas, chiefly Touran in Semnan province and the Bahram-e Gur reserve in Fars. The Persian subspecies is considered Endangered, and a captive population supports its future.

Bahram the hunter

In Persian the onager is gur, or gurkhar. The word fixed itself to a Sasanian king, Bahram V, who reigned in the early fifth century and is remembered as Bahram Gur because of his passion for hunting the animal. In Ferdowsi's Shahnameh (the Book of Kings) he is a dazzling archer; in one episode he rides out with Azadeh, a harp-playing companion, and performs impossible shots at her command, with consequences that are not happy for her. Nezami's Haft Peykar, the Seven Beauties, builds an entire romance around him: seven princesses in seven domed pavilions, each telling him a story on one day of the week.

The grave

Gur also means grave. A quatrain attributed to Omar Khayyam plays on the coincidence: Bahram spent his life catching the gur, and now the gur has caught him. Edward FitzGerald carried a version of the thought into his English Rubáiyát. It is the kind of joke Persian poetry likes best, light on the surface and very cold underneath: a king named for the animal he chased is finally caught by the same word. Meanwhile the real gur goes on, in small, wary herds that bunch and wheel at the sound of an engine and are gone in a fan of dust.