The flavortext indicates two important things about this meta:
- The "hyperactive Gray Fox" and "sluggish Wild Dog" hint the "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" pangram, and thus the concept of pangrams.
- This is also hinted by the fact that in the puzzle text, every letter is used once.
- The "types of animals" hints that we're looking for... types of animals.
Either by looking up animals or by looking at some of the more suspicious descriptors like "(desert/indigenous people)" or "(autonomous prefecture)", we eventually notice that each line describes a type of one of the answers in the meta (e.g., MOJAVE is a desert/indigenous people and "Mojave rattlesnake" is an animal), whose length matches the number of letters/numbers before it (e.g., "K[3]V[4]SP" has six letters/numbers and MOJAVE has six letters):
| Letters/numbers | Descriptor | Animal type | Animal (answer) |
|---|---|---|---|
| W[1]QN[2] | animal/coloration descriptor | ZEBRA | FINCH |
| K[3]V[4]SP | desert/indigenous people | MOJAVE | RATTLESNAKE |
| [5]EMZG[6]F | headgear descriptor | CASQUED | OROPENDOLA |
| X[8][7]RIJB | skin texture | PRICKLY | ANGLERFISH |
| [10]D[9]UATLH | autonomous prefecture | CHUXIONG | FIRE-BELLIED NEWT |
| [12]O[11]YC | rate-of-movement descriptor | SWIFT | PARROT |
One thing that helps in confirming these, and is useful in the meta, is that if we match up the letters/numbers to the animal type (so, W with Z, [1] with E, Q with B, etc.), then each animal type letter from A-Z matches up with exactly one letter/number letter. (Other occurrences of that letter in animal types match up with a letter/number number; for example, [1], P, and [6] match with E.) In other words, the animal types form a pangram and the letter/number lines give us a substitution cipher based on that pangram.
| Letters/numbers | W | [1] | Q | N | [2] |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Animal type | Z | E | B | R | A |
| Letters/numbers | K | [3] | V | [4] | S | P |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Animal type | M | O | J | A | V | E |
| Letters/numbers | [5] | E | M | Z | G | [6] | F |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Animal type | C | A | S | Q | U | E | D |
| Letters/numbers | X | [8] | [7] | R | I | J | B |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Animal type | P | R | I | C | K | L | Y |
| Letters/numbers | [10] | D | [9] | U | A | T | L | H |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Animal type | C | H | U | X | I | O | N | G |
We can look at what letter/number letter each of [1]/[12] "should" be based on this substitution:
| Number | Animal type | Corresponding letter |
|---|---|---|
| [1] | E | P |
| [2] | A | E |
| [3] | O | T |
| [4] | A | E |
| [5] | C | R |
| [6] | E | P |
| [7] | I | A |
| [8] | R | N |
| [9] | U | G |
| [10] | C | R |
| [11] | I | A |
| [12] | S | M |
This gives us the answer, PETER PANGRAM.
Authors' Notes
Dan: The idea, general animal theming (including the fox and dog), and final answer of PETER PANGRAM are entirely from Darren. The only thing I really added is the answers being, rather than words in the pangram, animals with specific types of them in the pangram. I would say I came up with the extraction, but "extra letters" is a natural pangram extraction, and I had seen other puzzles in the past that did it: in particular, Azelf from SPH 3 and Everything and More from GPH 2018. This is in some sense the inverse extraction compared to last year's Huntinality 2 puzzle Random Anagramming.
The construction of this wasn't too bad. There aren't that many animals, so some animals are basically forced just for having good letters. Once you have a pangram with the correct frequency distribution, it's possible to shuffle stuff around and choose letter/number strings to get the substitution giving the desired answer.
The answer "oropendola" is unfortunately somewhat obscure. Also, the casqued oropendola is probably actually the casqued cacique (not that "cacique" is much more common), as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casqued_oropendola admits. But we went with Wikipedia, and Wikipedia hasn't changed its actual casqued oropendola page yet. Every day I get more and more worried that the title of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casqued_oropendola will change, though. (Not wanting to disturb the situation is also a reason we didn't add more text to this wikipedia page.) The existence of a crested oropendola is a bit unfortunate, but eventually solvers who try using it will hopefully realize they need a Q from somewhere.
Darren: I am very grateful that I was able to very vaguely describe a hallucination of a meta idea to Dan, and have it be magically implemented for me. Dan is truly a puzzle writing machine.
I hope solvers enjoyed learning about the (new) animals. I love animals, and am glad I got a chance to insert them into the hunt as an entire round, under the justification that no fairytale or fable is complete without some storybook critters. :)