This chapter's epigraph comes from a line in the play's first chapter, "Barking at the Treetops." It's a reference to the snake's habit of crawling into its den without permission, and it's an allusion to the fact that Bark can't get out of the den without being punished. This time, however, he's going to do it even more viciously. He says that whenever he visits her, she always has to get him punished, and that they end up having sex after they're done tormenting each other. He adds that even though he visited whenever he had time, he could only endure her "increased anger" . He tells the captain that he left the den alone because he thought he'd be taken care of, but the captain doesn't seem to care. He's not sure how long he'll have to repeat these things, he says, but he knows that he has to. He asks the captain to tell him more, and the captain tells him that she's been forcing him to do this for a long time. The captain says that he thinks he should stop, and growls at the captain, "I'm thinking that I should stop." The captain responds by saying that he thought that as long as he was with the reptile officer, she'd tell him at some point, so maybe after the next one or two more times, he should just stop. He calls the captain a "son of a b-tch at once" , and yells at him to "rush punch" and "go be a parasite