by J. M. Walker
“One day we’ll put on the greatest show there has ever been,” said Edward, dreamily, lying back on to Doris’s shoulders, closing his eyes to the sky.
“Maybe it’s not just the seagulls we should worry about seeing us?” offered Bear.
None of the others paid him any attention.
“Come on, let’s get to the track,” said Edward.
And with that, the animals followed the hedge, until they found a break in the thicket. Doris pushed on through. The giant anteater followed and they hurriedly trotted through daises and buttercups down to the gate, which was now slapping on its hinges against a wooden post.
Doris wrapped her trunk around the gate, opened it and walked out on to a track wide enough to take an automobile. A milestone stated Bristol was one mile away, and with two arrows a wooden sign pointed the way to Leigh Woods and the Avon Gorge. The anteater’s nose picked up the fox-terrier’s trail, which continued towards the woods and gorge, and the animals followed it.
Soon the track gave way to a bigger path, made of cold crushed stone that even Doris could feel beneath her feet. The hedgerows became clipped and more regular and Edward noticed an oval-shaped red letter box set into the road, bearing gold lettering and a royal insignia. He chuckled at the vivid colour, realising they were heading towards town. Towns had houses and castles, he knew, and Lord Morgan lived in a castle.
Doris sampled some large convolvulus flowers on the verges, popping the white petals from their green cups and into her mouth, and Bessie noticed a bird table up off to the side of the track. She looked about, seeing only friendly wrens and a song thrush. She flew up the track, banking left up a garden path and on to the bird table, tucking into breadcrumbs and some droppings of fat. She had landed in the front garden of a big proud house, its walls painted blue and its window frames white. A golden knocker hung from a shiny black door, the lawns cut short and true. A wisp of smoke drifted up from one of six chimney stacks upon its roof. Before Bessie could fill her belly, Doris rounded the corner, joining her in the garden. Edward scurried down from her back and onto the table alongside Bessie. Then came Bear, still sniffing at the ground.
And then came the voices. At first Edward didn’t hear the boy, crying and moaning. But he heard the sounds of many men, and recognised the anger in their words. He heard them speaking of monkeys, and then he heard them shouting at the boy. Edward had been around enough humans to gauge their mood; when to twirl upon each punter’s knee and when to riffle inside their pockets. When to jump on a lady’s shoulder and when to run. This was a time to run. He screeched a warning to the animals. Doris and Bear responded as they did to the Ring Master. Immediately, Bear began to run in a looping arc around the side of the house. Doris followed, her ears flapping. Edward swung underneath the bird table and hung upside down, pulling in his tail as Bessie chirped away on top as if an English budgerigar was a regular visitor to every suburban garden.
As Doris and Bear peered around the wall, a gang of men walked past the front of the house. Two carried pitchforks, while one drew on a cigarette. The eldest, a greying man wearing a worker’s shirt and braces, pushed at the boy, forcing him up the road, demanding to know the whereabouts of his imaginary elephant. The crowd passed, but Doris could feel her heart beating in her deep chest. She looked at Bear then peered inside a side window of the house. A little girl, with a lace cap upon her head, was playing with a doll’s house. As Doris leaned in, casting a shadow across the room, the little girl turned and saw Doris’s soft yellow eye, surrounded by black eyelashes and a splash of dirt, looking back at her. The little girl smiled, and then went back to her game. She grabbed at a stuffed toy bear and placed it next to her doll’s house. She laughed out loud as she put the stuffed bear’s face to the window. A tear gathered in Doris’s eye, her reverie broken by the feeling of the anteater’s tail brushing between her legs as Bear joined Edward and Bessie on the lawn.
Though none of the animals said it directly, each felt uneasy. All agreed it would be a good idea to find Lord Morgan’s abode by nightfall. The smell of the fox-terrier was getting stronger, said the anteater, suggesting he’d used this road often. It couldn’t be long now.
The animals left the garden and passed five more houses. Unlike the blue house, each was fronted by a locked garden gate, barring the path leading to the entrance. Some were set further back, but each had a newly painted front door, with a porch and windows split into smaller rectangular frames.
Then the anteater paused outside a house that was much larger than all they had passed. It was painted dark grey, and nestled far back off the track, in a manicured garden of rhododendron bushes and clipped conifer trees that stood taller than any since the wood. Around much of the house grew a hedge of hawthorn standing taller than Doris. It blocked out the setting sun, casting rosebushes into the cold. Into the lawn had been hammered a set of metal hoops, high enough for Edward to pass under but not Bear. Three knotted ropes dangled from a smaller apple tree in the grounds. Nailed to the trunk of the apple tree was a white bird-box. It had its own front door and a series of dowels inserted into its side, like a little ladder that led to a roof covered in raisins, nuts, oats and slices of coconut. Compared to the chaos of Whyte and Wingate’s Big Top, the house appeared like a perfectly constructed theme park, adorned with perches, challenges and sweets.
The giant anteater pushed his face into the gate separating the garden from the cobbled track. The gate was black too, and made from iron. A series of vertical bars linked two cross-members, propping up a coat of arms made of a lion and unicorn grappling a shield. Bear pushed his nose through the bars and sniffed at the ground, which stank of fox-terrier. Entranced by the hoops and ropes in the garden, Edward jumped down on to the gate, which was locked by a simple, horizontal latch. Doris leaned her head over the gate, trying not to stand on the anteater. All the animals, Bessie included, were in awe of the gloomy big house and its plump garden.
Right then, Doris felt a snap at her ankle, a jaw trying to extend itself around her Achilles and into her muscle. It felt like the bite of the gharial she had once accidentally stood on in India, toothy and strong but incapable of causing her harm. She kicked her leg and moaned, and as elephants are prone to do, she started walking backwards towards the threat, intending her massive bulk to scare whatever it was away. Before she could turn her head, she saw a dog run under her body and snap again at the anteater’s long bushy tail. Before Bear could extricate his head from between the bars of the garden gate, the dog was leaping up at it, nipping at Edward’s tail, trying to make the monkey fall. It was Lord Morgan’s terrier, who by now had lost himself, fixated on his singular task of defending the entrance to his house, from any and all who tried to enter.
The terrier turned and barked at Doris. He snapped at her front feet and at the anteater, trying to catch his spectacles. He jumped twice, trying to take Bessie from the air as Edward danced along the gate, enjoying the excitement. Then Bear asserted himself. He unfurled his front paw and slapped the dog hard, doing just enough to avoid impaling him upon his talons. He sent the fox-terrier into the gate, winding him. The dog slumped to the floor whimpering.
Bear leaned in, running his nose along the dog’s belly. He opened his long jaw and licked the dog’s fur, by way of an apology. Like the anteater, the terrier had a narrow skull, eyes set high and small ears on a brown head, his muzzle running down to a black buttoned nose dripping a little wet, and white whiskers. The dog blinked at him, raising two fawn eyebrows in surprise at the monkey and elephant peering at his body and the anteater nuzzling his leg. Edward noticed the terrier was better groomed than any dog he’d seen, a carefully coiffured coat of white, tan and black fur, giving the impression of a saddle upon its back, and neatly trimmed feet that made the terrier look like it stood on tiptoe. The only concessions to the dog’s clipped appearance were a few clumps of missing hair revealing a scar healing
on his hip.
The terrier breathed deep and calm and the animals could see the fervour leave its eyes. Within a moment it had become docile in their company.
“Biting is rude,” said Doris, by way of an introduction.
“We saw you in the woods. We saw you in the woods,” said Bessie, cocking her head.
“He chased the vixen down a hole. He was playing a game with her. It was all good sport,” said Edward proudly recalling the day’s events in sequence.
“You were trying to kill the fox. And I saved your life,” said Bear. “So why are you trying to attack us?”
The dog lay there a while, panting, thinking.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
He paused a moment longer.
“It’s what I am trained to do,” he said.
“Can’t you think for yourself?” chirped Bessie.
The terrier didn’t answer. He looked sad.
The old leopard had spent the best part of the day patrolling the perimeter of the fields, staying close to the hedges, occasionally venturing into the open to look for livestock. He wasn’t yet hungry so he counted the sheep, the plentiful Blackfaces and occasional Longwool, knowing that, if necessary, a newborn lamb would see him through the week. Stretching his body, he noted a field of Cotswolds that appeared unguarded, full of ewes without horns and with wool covering their eyes. But he wanted to find a cow to kill, preferably one of those black and white ones with fat udders that meant so much to the humans. He would take the tongue and perhaps the kidneys, leaving the rest to rot.
However, as the day turned, the leopard began to walk more lightly. In his cage, life had never been quiet. He was forever being poked or collared, or thrown a chicken wing to eat, as if that was a challenge. He’d looked up and seen the land as it passed, being driven on the back of a rattling wagon, but all he’d noticed were the roads and the tracks and the humans cutting the hedges, the draughtsman and their horses working the soil, the audiences watching him perform while wearing their own silly clothes.
Now he was free, in the open air, he realised how similar the countryside could be to his homeland. It was a place of grass and trees, of gently rolling hills and plodding animals with their heads down browsing.
He began to recall his first life, spent on another continent. As he slinked along the huge rectangles of green, he watched the sun catch his body, casting a shadow, and remembered how to use the longer grass to break it up. He started to use his nose again and his tongue to lick at the ground, to discover who or what had trampled it before. He even took time just to be still, to lie down every so often and let his tail flick away the flies, closing his eyes as the sun warmed his jowls. He dreamed of going home, of racing a cheetah and running from a pack of hungry hyenas, taunting them, knowing he would always outsmart his enemies. He thought of the giraffes and glow-worms at night and the little dung beetles that would roll past his nose. He almost missed the mosquitoes that would nibble at his rump.
He considered his life and his mood changed again. He felt proud as he remembered his youthful self, bounding away from the Masai and their elongated spears. He rolled his shoulders, feeling the strength that had now left him, and dwelt on how as a two-year-old cat he had climbed his way to the top of the tallest tree in his territory and surveyed the plains. Then he relived the moment it had all changed.
The Masai had come for him, but this time in numbers. They had changed the rules of the fight, bringing men on horses and guns and nets. And they had clearly been watching him, as he liked to watch them. They had tied out a goat and waited for him to take it. He’d been clever, piercing the tethered prey’s throat at night and he’d severed the rope too, taking the body off into the grass. He’d been strong enough to carry the goat the extra mile and he’d then dragged it up into his tall tree, out of reach of the lions and jackals. But he hadn’t realised the Masai has been watching him, waiting for his belly to fill, and for him to fall asleep in the branches.
They had come for him at first light, surrounding the tree, throwing stones at his body until he could take it no more. He tried to descend the tree and dash between two warriors with spears and shields, but he now knew that was exactly where they had wanted him to run. Behind the men were others on horseback, stretching a net across the grass. The net caught at his face and ears and the men fired their guns into the air to disorientate him some more. And that was the last time he ran across the land of his birth.
All these years on, he couldn’t shake it. He felt a fool, for succumbing so. He then growled at nothing in particular and roared as the anger took him. Anger at being stuffed into a crate, and being sick at the motion of the boat that had carried him up the great Nile river and across the Mediterranean to Marseilles.
Anger at the way he’d been sold for a bundle of notes into a French circus, and anger at how the Ring Master had made the leopard his own, taking him on another voyage across the English Channel to Hastings and then Margate, to London and beyond.
The old leopard started to run. He didn’t care who might see him. He wanted to run, to extend his gait, to stretch his body as far as his ligaments would allow. He jumped a brook at the end of a field and sprinted into a chalky plain, unbounded and never ploughed. His paws thudded into the soil, which sprung back, and he raised his tail, hitting top speed. He ran until he could feel the oxygen leaving his muscles and he strained against the fatigue, feeling like a two-year-old again. He didn’t notice the party of humans watching him in disbelief from atop a small cliff in front.
Up on the rocks, the small boy shouted to his elders.
“I told you!” he said, pointing down at the cat. “I told you!”
An older man with grey hair clipped the boy around the ear, silencing him.
“That’s no elephant,” he drawled, pulling at his braces, spitting on the ground.
He turned to two men standing behind him carrying pitchforks.
“Well what do you make of that?” he said, grinning.
“That’ll be worth a least a guinea, I reckon,” answered a short, bald man through a tired white beard and wrinkled skin.
“We better get more lads,” said the other, a tall, young farmhand with strong arms and straight back.
The man wearing the braces encouraged them all to withdraw slowly down the hill.
After an hour, the leopard had run himself ragged. Panting, heaving, he started to plod, mistiming his strides. He had become thirsty, for blood or water. He thought about retracing his steps, but the field of Cotswold ewes seemed distant now. He took the easy path and followed the contour of the land as it gently sloped, not realising he was walking downhill towards the outskirts of the city. Had he lifted his head, he would have noticed a gleaming new tower standing tall across the other side of a large gash in the land, a giant gorge that separated the farmhouses and mansions from the factories, workhouses and portside shacks and houses. But nose to the floor, nostrils wide, drawing in the heavy scents of the buttercups and bluebells, the leopard lolloped on. He started to examine the ground, the snails and slugs and little spiders that jumped out of the way. He gave himself to the closing of the day, the reddening light, cooler air and its fresh little creatures, the knobbly toads and newts and the dragonflies that buzzed low across the grass covering the cat’s ankles.
The leopard, new to this habitat, had travelled in a broad half circle. Having escaped Whyte and Wingate’s Big Top, he now passed through a cabbage field. His spots darkened, his whiskers hardening. He paused to rest in a divot where a ripening cabbage had grown earlier, before it was ripped from its roots. He sniffed at the ground, recognising the smell left by Doris’s feet. He closed his eyes, resting his mind, calming his heart and lungs as he dropped his shoulders just below the height of the cabbage leaves. And then he fell asleep out in the open, a mistake only made by old and tir
ed cats, or those that had ceased to care.
He was woken by a familiar sound. Back home in the Masai, the humans struck their spears into shields covered with buffalo fur. Now he could hear pitchforks striking wooden crates and metal dustbin lids. He raised his head, knowing hiding would be futile. He turned to see seven men and a boy marching across the field towards him, shouting and cursing as they tried to appear more than their number.
He sized up the boy, figuring he could take him, but a man stood behind the child, blocking the escape route. And each human carried a pitchfork or machete. The leopard calculated again, seeing a wooden gate ahead at the edge of the field. He rose and ran for it. He knew this was what the men wanted. He knew he was being flushed out and this wouldn’t be the end of it. But he had no choice. He extended his stride and drove his legs into the soft earth, kicking up clumps of dirt. He accelerated all the way to the gate, which he leaped with a single bound, his belly grazing the strut. He landed and turned sharply, and set a solid pace down the track, passing a big blue house with a black door set back in a garden. He saw a little girl standing on the grass, playing with her stuffed toy bear. He jogged on and spotted another two men in front of him, holding a big net. He stopped and turned and made circles on the path, trapped by hedgerows. He snarled at the men and hissed, his spittle hitting the stones. He lowered his body and raised a paw showing the stumps of his claws. He drew it up and down, bluffing, hoping to scare the men into thinking he would cut them open if they didn’t move out of his way.
Bessie heard the commotion first. She broke away from the sad-looking terrier and braved the air, flying upwards as if caught by a tiny cyclone. She popped out of the top, some twenty feet high, to see seven men running down the track, jockeying with each other, encouraging themselves forward. Closer to the animals were two more men, holding a net in outstretched arms like a dirty bed-sheet that had been thrown to them by their wives. And between them all prowled the leopard, the first Bessie had seen of him since the fire in the Big Top.