Lord Morgan's Cannon

by J. M. Walker

  “How tall are the walls?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But you’re a leopard. How tall would they need to be?”

  The leopard liked this cat. She had the answers he needed. But then it struck him.

  “Why haven’t you escaped?”

  “I thought about it once. At the start. Soon after they threw me in here, a buyer came for me. He said he liked me. But I heard the keepers tell him something. They said I couldn’t have cubs. I don’t know how they knew that. But they said I couldn’t have cubs. So what is there for me? And besides, where would I go?”

  The loud piercing shriek of a secretary bird broke the cats’ conversation, a raptor’s cry that denoted the presence of a hungry beast. The gorillas roared and a silverback thumped its chest. Something was moving through the zoo, disturbing the animals.

  Suddenly the wire fence enclosing the cats began to shake. The cats broke for cover, leaping up the maple tree, settling into a fork each, trying to blend with the leaves and bark. The humans who had transported the leopard here, cold and wet within a cage upon a trailer, were back. They came whistling and carefree, one eating an apple, the other wiping his hands upon his overalls, a bag of dead mice hanging from his hips as they leaned on to the fence and rattled it.

  Smiling and laughing, they spoke to the cats.

  “Someone’s here for you laddie,” said the fatter man with the mice.

  “Look at them,” said the man with the apple. “A day together and they’re getting along. I expected one of them to be dripping blood by now.”

  “She’s a good girl this one. It’s him I was worried about.”

  The fatter man shook the wire again, straining the metal loops tying it to the posts.

  “Someone’s here for you. Now what have you done in a previous life?”

  “What do we know about him?” said the second man, spitting out a pip that caught in his teeth.

  “The leopard? Not a lot. Brought here in a bag by those farmers. That’s it.”

  “So maybe it’s his owners come to get him?”

  “Could be. They want him for nothing, saying he’s theirs.”

  “Will they get him?” asked the other.

  “Can’t see it, can you? Unless they’ve got the papers, but they don’t look the sort to have papers. And we paid good money to take this one in. He’s not going anywhere unless there’s profit in it.”

  “Well let’s get him in the crate and get this over with.”

  The men disappeared from the cats’ view.

  “This might be your chance,” said the jaguar gently.

  The old boy rose off his lean belly. He proudly stretched on the branch, yawned, and sneezed, clearing his senses. He ran down the trunk and along the grass, smooth and quiet, readying himself.

  The men reappeared pulling the same cage upon the trailer. They spun it around and lined it up with the exit to the rectangular tunnel of wire leading to the enclosure. They worked quickly and when they finished they dragged at two long lines of dirty pink hose that twisted along the path.

  “You ready?” purred the jaguar.

  The leopard winked at her.

  The fat man pulled up the end of one hose, nestling a brass nozzle into his belly. The other turned a standing tap, shouted, then ran and set himself behind the plump keeper, wrapping his arms around the man’s waist.

  Was this it? thought the leopard. Was this all they had?

  For a fleeting moment he saw a column of water leave the nozzle’s end. It looped up and over his head, before falling upon his back. The force of it bruised his bones and nose, water shooting between his teeth, choking him. He turned and they chased him with it, firing water at his hips as he tried to run. They made him dance left then right, before he was forced to bolt for the open gate leading to the tunnel. Hurting and wet, he sprinted down it and into the cage, gagging and spitting. Behind him the men carved a line of mud into the grass until the hose ran dry. Water dripped down every feature in the enclosure.

  The jaguar sniffed at the air, licking a dollop of moisture from her chin. She roared.

  “This is your chance,” she cried.

  As the humans wheeled him away, the leopard shook his coat and walked his cage, taking one pace then turning, warming his muscles.

  They transported the cat back past the secretary bird. The sad stork that shared its cage now looked interested in life, lifting its huge bill away from its feet, staring with deep-set yellow eyes at the cat in transit.

  The leopard smelled the hippo again. But this time the aroma was sweet, a reminder of the wilds. The men joked and jeered as they pushed him along the path, wondering how high his price might go.

  Then, as they moved him inside, into a bare concrete room, the leopard caught the scent of old leather, of a whip. It was the smell he knew best, beyond those of all the animals he wanted to eat, the queens he tracked or the urine left by younger, more foolish males. It was the smell of a whip that had been cracked and used, that had burnt at its tip. A waft of stale whisky passed his nostrils, and another of vegetable oil and sweat. He instantly knew the Ring Master and his strongman were near.

  “There he his. That’s my cat. There’s the boy,” announced the Ring Master.

  He walked in to the room wearing his best, most red jacket. He’d left his hat upon his head and had waxed his beard. He twirled his cane, dressed up for the day. Behind him followed Jim the Strongman, who stood a foot taller than the keepers and another thin, insipid man, clothed in a smart grey suit and white collar, twirling his moustache.

  The Ring Master struggled to make idle conversation with the men from the zoo. There was nothing in the room to speculate about, no prompts for him to work. He asked after their families and took a silver flask from his pocket, offering them a nip. But the keepers remained quiet, deferring to the man in the suit, who didn’t answer.

  The leopard poised himself for the moment they would pass a chain through the cage, looping it around his neck, for when he would be paraded. He adjusted his plan, figuring he’d take one swipe at the Ring Master, for old time’s sake, before he made for the door and the wall of the zoo.

  “So we’ll take our boy. We’ve a big show depending on him tonight,” said the Ring Master.

  He gesticulated to Jim the Strongman, who moved towards the cage.

  “It’s locked,” said the moustached man. “And we hold the key. You say he’s yours. What is your proof?”

  The Ring Master started to blabber. He patted his pockets, talking of documents carrying seals and signatures he’d left at the circus. Just like he sold his shows, he tried to sell himself, exaggerating his credentials. Jim the Strongman flexed his muscles under his shirt.

  But the man in the suit was unmoved. He was a bureaucrat, an administrator of animals. He knew more about how to carbon copy receipts, keep a ledger and apply for import certificates than he did the difference between an old circus leopard and a sterile jaguar. In this cat he saw only money. He knew how many guineas they had paid the farmers and he knew the net profit he would accept in return for selling the leopard on, minus the costs of a day’s labours. It was more money than the circus made in a month, before the animals had gone and the Big Top had burned.

  So the Ring Master tried a different tack. Pretending he was good for it, he invited the zookeepers to release the leopard from the cage, on a chain of course, so he could inspect the animal’s form. He knew and had trained this cat. He would flick his whip and send the cat into frenzy, before commanding it to heel. He would so scare the men from the zoo they would hand the leopard to him. They might even pay him to take it away, this uncontrollable beast.

  The thin suited man nodded and the fat zookeeper tossed a chain into the cage. With a stick the other managed to pull it up and over the cat’
s neck. The old leopard made it easy for them, playing along. They had him lassoed and with one man holding each end of the chain, they unlocked the padlock and lifted the cage door. The leopard carefully walked on to the concrete floor.

  Each man tightened his grip. The man in the suit stepped back, impressed. He thought about raising the price. The Ring Master waited for the right moment. So did the leopard.

  The Ring Master took off his hat. Just as he did in the ring, he began to bellow and twirl, creating the most annoying distraction to the men from the zoo. He started telling his story, how he had travelled across the channel from Paris, France. How he had the biggest and best circus in all west Europe. How he knew a certain Lord Morgan, a man of University College, Bristol, a man of great character, repute, and should anyone need reminding, great influence. And how the cat was the star of his show. He used his whip to land his final point, flicking it out across the room so the end snapped and cracked against the wall.

  The keepers dropped the chain in shock. The leopard felt it go slack. He growled at the man in the suit, waving a clawless paw in the air. The Ring Master commanded him to sit, to be silent. But the leopard had outwitted the Ring Master. Thinking a move ahead, he turned on the man that had for years kept him in a rusting collar.

  He jumped at the Big Top owner, his two feet hitting the lapels of the man’s jacket. He opened his jaws and attacked the Ring Master’s neck, which he’d spent years sizing. The leopard planned to crush his jugular and hold him down till he was sure the life had left him, before bolting from the room and to freedom. But in his age, the cat miscalculated. He forgot to factor in the weight of the chains. He fell short, his salivating mouth and wet nose greasing the Ring Master’s neck, but failing to mark it. As the cat fell upon the human’s body, Jim the Strongman grabbed at one of the flailing chains. He yanked it hard, pulling the cat off. Yet in all the time he had worked with the animals, he had never fought one. And immediately he lost the fight with the leopard, which tore into him with such viciousness that all the strongman could do was bring up his muscled arms and pray to his mother.

  The leopard ran from the room, out into the sunshine. The zookeepers swore while all professional pride left the thin man in the suit; an unconfined animal anathema to him. There was no column in his books to account for an escapee.

  On the leopard ran, back up the path he’d been wheeled down, the long chain unravelling and slipping from his neck. He dashed past the stork, which now appeared to have a huge grin. He roared at the gorillas and saluted the hippo, taunting it, trapped as it was in a pool of water and its own muck. As he ran his memories flashed past him. He remembered the savannah, the thrill of the buffalo hunt, the sunsets and the rain, the lions and hyenas. He felt his ligaments and tendons pulling, his heart straining. He thought of the wall left to leap. And he thought of the jaguar again. How she had treated him well. How she had no one but the birds. How she had nothing.

  And the leopard came to the most remarkable decision. He decided he was running for the last time. That he was all played out. He had shown the Ring Master he was a leopard and how leopards did not change their spots. Not for humans. But in a single day, he realised the jaguar had treated him with more respect and grace than anyone before. And she didn’t deserve to live her life alone. The little he had left to give, he decided to give to her. He sucked in the air and lengthened his stride. He pulled down his tail and balanced himself. And with a roar that frightened the tigers, he leaped at the fence that kept the jaguar captive. He caught it mid height and he leaped again, cutting his pads as he dug into the wire. He drove on, kicking out with his hind feet, finding any purchase. Desperately he scrambled until his paws caught the top of the fence. He summoned all his anger, all his rage and he pulled himself up. For a fleeting moment he stood upon that fence, perfectly poised, nose in the air, until he let his body fall to the other side, landing in a crumpled heap upon the grass. Watching from the tree, the jaguar saw it all. She understood and she cried a tear.

  At this moment, sitting tired and uncertain upon the tall meshed cage in Lord Morgan’s laboratory, staring at his captor, Edward had his first epiphany. He had long been aware that his hearing was not so good for a monkey, and that his left ear lied to him more than his right. And he’d known the problem particularly affected him when listening to a language that was not his own. Though he thought himself a connoisseur of human words and accents, he knew that at times he could not keep up. He struggled when humans kept changing their words, bending and inflecting them. How they liked to use two words for the same thing, such as dinner and supper, and how they used the same word for different things.

  He sat there, tail entwined in the wire upon which he rested, and thought about Lord Morgan’s words. How the professor spoke of a cannon that was broken. But Lord Morgan did not speak of cannonballs and gunpowder, of flashes and bangs. He talked of a cannon that judged things. A cannon that was the same as a law, as a principle. A cannon that could be applied to a monkey.

  And Edward realised that his ears had been failing him. How the stories he’d heard of a giant cannon were not true. How could they be? Lord Morgan was a professor, a scientist. He wasn’t a blacksmith, a forger, an engineer. He had clean hands, palms tough enough to throttle a monkey but not to work metal. Lord Morgan was working on a canon, Edward realised. But the canon he was making existed somehow in his book. Within this Introduction to comparative psychology, second edition.

  Lord Morgan’s canon was a law, a law that could be applied to a monkey. It was a law that described how Edward thought, how he reasoned. A law that set down how clever animals could be.

  Edward chuckled. He watched the professor laughing and laughed with him. He opened his little mouth and bared his short, sharp canines. He leaned forward and rested on his elbows, chirping as Lord Morgan wrote. Edward examined the movement of the professor’s pencil. He wondered how it worked. He thought again, and decided to commit this law to memory.

  Lord Morgan’s Canon.

  A general law, rule or principle, or criterion by which something is judged. To be a canon, it must hold across all examples. And it did not apply to Edward. The monkey was too clever. He had a higher psychical faculty. He was capable of reasoned thought. And in the words of Lord Morgan, he might end up changing everything.

  These thoughts so intrigued Edward, he forgot about the animals he had left behind. For a moment he put aside his ambition of escape and decided to study the man who was studying him. He watched as Lord Morgan poured himself a cup of tea from a lukewarm pot. He listened intensely to the words that Lord Morgan spoke, trying to ensure the accuracy of his ears, deriving meaning where he could as the human mumbled to himself, sometimes exclaiming things, occasionally muttering under his breath as he walked the room, fiddling with the braces holding up his trousers.

  The monkey then thought to test the man who had been testing him. Edward skipped over to the jar next to the rabbit’s cage and took out a piece of carrot. He chewed it, relishing the taste. Then, for the sake of it, he pushed at the lever atop the rabbit’s cage and pulled the door open. The rabbit woke with a start. Edward smiled at the rabbit and gave it a pat on its bottom. The rabbit hopped gratefully on to the bench and stretched its hind legs out, long and true, one after the other.

  Lord Morgan didn’t notice until the rabbit jumped upon his dissecting kit, almost cutting his feet on a scalpel. The professor dashed across the room, biscuit crumbs falling from his shirt, and scooped the white rabbit off the instruments. He held it to his face and rubbed noses as the rabbit’s pink eyes opened wide, feet kicking in the air. Lord Morgan went to put the rabbit back in its cage. But then he paused. He examined the door. He set the rabbit down on the floor and sent it on its way, telling Charles to go explore, to have some fun.

  “You did that, didn’t you?” he said to Edward.

  The professor smiled. He paused, a
s if waiting for Edward to reply.

  “I like your waistcoat,” he then said. “Maybe I should get one. Black does get a bit dull.”

  He offered up his last biscuit to the monkey, but Edward refused it, shaking his head and running across the laboratory. The monkey climbed the curtains and sat upon the curtain pole, peering down at the professor. Edward realised he could detect the aroma of chickens in the room. He noticed a wooden pen tucked under the foot of the drape. In it was a yellow chick, lying motionless on its side, its tongue out of its beak. Edward reasoned that the chick had been left in the pen to find its way out, and it could not.

  As the evening drew on, and the light faded, Lord Morgan lit an electric lamp.

  “This lamp,” he said to Edward. “This is progress. We must keep moving forward, we must press on. Oh I have ambitions for our understanding of your kind,” he told the monkey. “I have ambitions for this place,” he said, surveying his room. “For this college.”

  The professor went to a drawer in his desk and took out a small bottle of port. He uncorked the top. Edward smelled the grapes and alcohol and watched as Lord Morgan pursed his lips, taking a nip. Lord Morgan drank some more. Edward wondered why men with beards liked to drink this way, and promised himself to try it one day. He then listened hard as Lord Morgan became melancholy and ranging with his words.

  “We must develop a university culture. Indeed, we must become a proper university! And to become that, we need to be touched by a royal hand.”

  Edward watched the human become drunk, just as he’d regularly watched the Ring Master imbibe in his circus wagon. The Ring Master always started by talking at Edward. As his words became slower, he’d progress to talking down to the monkey. When he found it difficult to complete his sentences he evolved into delivering tales of grandeur.