Encounters With Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  By this time Sarah had become much more grown up and independent. After her evening feed she would go for a walk round the room by herself. This was a great advance, for up till then she had screamed blue murder if you moved more than a foot or so away from her. After her tour of inspection she liked to have a game. This consisted in walking past us, her nose in the air, her tail trailing temptingly. You were then supposed to grab the end of her tail and pull, whereupon she would swing round on three legs and give you a gentle clout with her paw. When this had been repeated twenty or thirty times she felt satisfied, and then you had to lay her on her back and tickle her tummy for ten minutes or so while she closed her eyes and blew bubbles of ecstasy at you. After this she would go to bed without any fuss. But try to put her to bed without giving her a game and she would kick and struggle and honk, and generally behave in a thoroughly spoilt manner.

  When we eventually got on board ship, Sarah was not at all sure that she approved of sea-voyages. To begin with, the ship smelt queer; then there was a strong wind which nearly blew her over every time she went for a walk on deck; and lastly, which she hated most of all, the deck would not keep still. First it tilted one way, then it tilted another, and Sarah would go staggering about, honking plaintively, banging her nose on bulkheads and hatch-covers. When the weather improved, however, she seemed to enjoy the trip. Sometimes in the afternoon, when I had time, I would take her up to the promenade deck and we would sit in a deck-chair and sunbathe. She even paid a visit to the bridge, by special request of the captain. I thought it was because he had fallen for her charm and personality, but he confessed that it was because (having seen her only from a distance) he wanted to make sure which end of her was the front.

  I must say we felt very proud of Sarah when we arrived in London Docks and she posed for the Press photographers with all the unselfconscious ease of a born celebrity. She even went so far as to lick one of the reporters – a great honour. I hastily tried to point this out to him, while helping to remove a large patch of sticky saliva from his coat. It was not everyone she would lick, I told him. His expression told me that he did not appreciate the point.

  Sarah went straight from the docks to a zoo in Devonshire, and we hated to see her go. However, we were kept informed about her progress and she seemed to be doing well. She had formed a deep attachment to her keeper.

  Some weeks later I was giving a lecture at the Festival Hall, and the organizer thought it would be rather a good idea if I introduced some animal on the stage at the end of my talk. I immediately thought of Sarah. Both the zoo authorities and the Festival Hall Management were willing, but, as it was now winter, I insisted that Sarah must have a dressing-room to wait in.

  I met Sarah and her keeper at Paddington Station. Sarah was in a huge crate, for she had grown as big as a red setter, and she created quite a sensation on the platform. As soon as she heard my voice she flung herself at the bars of her cage and protruded twelve inches of sticky tongue in a moist and affectionate greeting. People standing near the cage leapt back hurriedly, thinking some curious form of snake was escaping and it took a lot of persuasion before we could find a porter brave enough to wheel the cage on a truck.

  When we reached the Festival Hall we found that the rehearsal of a symphony concert had just come to an end. We wheeled Sarah’s big box down long corridors to the dressing-room, and just as we reached the door it was flung open and Sir Thomas Beecham strode out, smoking a large cigar. We wheeled Sarah into the dressing-room he had just vacated.

  While I was on the stage, my wife kept Sarah occupied by running round and round the dressing-room with her, to the consternation and horror of one of the porters, who, hearing the noise, was convinced that Sarah had broken out of her cage and was attacking my wife. Eventually, however, the great moment arrived and amid tumultuous applause Sarah was carried on to the stage. She was very short-sighted, as all anteaters are, so to her the audience was non-existent. She looked round vaguely to see where the noise was coming from, but decided that it was not really worth worrying about. While I extolled her virtues, she wandered about the stage, oblivious, occasionally snuffling loudly in a corner, and repeatedly approaching the microphone and giving it a quick lick, which left it in a very sticky condition for the next performer. Just as I was telling the audience how well-behaved she was, she discovered the table in the middle of the stage, and with an immense sigh of satisfaction proceeded to scratch her bottom against one of the legs. She was a great success.

  After the show, Sarah held court for a few select guests in her dressing-room, and became so skittish that she even galloped up and down outside in the corridor. Then we bundled her up warmly and put her on the night train for Devon with her keeper.

  Apparently, on reaching the zoo again, Sarah was thoroughly spoilt. Her short spell as a celebrity had gone to her head. For three days she refused to be left alone, stamping about her cage and honking wildly, and refusing all food unless she was fed by hand.

  A few months later I wanted Sarah to make an appearance on a television show I was doing, and so once again she tasted the glamour and glitter of show business. She behaved with the utmost decorum during rehearsals, except that she was dying to investigate the camera closely, and had to be restrained by force. When the show was over she resisted going back to her cage, and it took the united efforts of myself, my wife, Sarah’s keeper and the studio manager to get her back into the box – for Sarah was then quite grown up, measuring six feet from nose to tail, standing three feet at the shoulder and with forearms as thick as my thigh.

  We did not see Sarah again until quite recently, when we paid her a visit at her zoo. It had been six months since she had last seen us, and quite frankly I thought she would have forgotten us. Anteater fan though I am, I would be the first to admit that they are not creatures who are overburdened with brains, and six months is a long time. But the moment we called to her she came bounding out of her sleeping den and rushed to the wire to lick us. We even went into the cage and played with her, a sure sign that she really did recognize us, for no one else except her keeper dared enter.

  Eventually we said good-bye to her, rather sadly, and left her sitting in the straw blowing bubbles after us. As my wife said: ‘It was rather as though we were leaving our child at boarding school.’ We are certainly her adopted parents, as far as Sarah is concerned.

  Yesterday we had some good news. We heard that Sarah has got a mate. He is as yet too young to be put in with her, but soon he should be big enough. Who knows, by this time next year we may be grandparents to a fine bouncing baby anteater!

  Portrait of Pavlo

  It is a curious thing, but when you keep animals as pets you tend to look upon them so much as miniature human beings that you generally manage to impress some of your own characteristics on to them. This anthropomorphic attitude is awfully difficult to avoid. If you possess a golden hamster and are always watching the way he sits up and eats a nut, his little pink paws trembling with excitement, his pouches bulging as he saves in his cheeks what cannot be eaten immediately, you might one day come to the conclusion that he looks exactly like your own Uncle Amos sitting, full of port and nuts, in his favourite club. From that moment the damage is done. The hamster continues to behave like a hamster, but you regard him only as a miniature Uncle Amos, clad in a ginger fur-coat, for ever sitting in his club, his cheeks bulging with food. There are very few animals who have characters strong and distinct enough to overcome this treatment, who display such powerful personalities that you are forced to treat them as individuals and not as miniature human beings. Of the many hundreds of animals I have collected for zoos in this country, and of the many I have kept as pets, I can remember at the most about a dozen creatures who had this strength of personality that not only made them completely different from others of their kind, but enabled them to resist all attempts on my part to turn them into something they were not.

  One of the smallest of these animals was Pavlo, a black-
eared marmoset, and his story really started one evening when, on a collecting trip in British Guiana, I sat quietly in the bushes near a clearing, watching a hole in a bank which I had good reason to believe contained an animal of some description. The sun was setting and the sky was a glorious salmon pink, and outlined against it were the massive trees of the forest, their branches so entwined with creepers that each tree looked as though it had been caught in a giant spider’s web. There is nothing quite so soothing as a tropical forest at this time of day. I sat there absorbing sights and colours, my mind in the blank and receptive state that the Buddhists tell us is the first step towards Nirvana. Suddenly my trance was shattered by a shrill and prolonged squeak of such intensity that it felt as though someone had driven a needle into my ear. Peering above me cautiously, I tried to see where the sound had come from: it seemed the wrong sort of note for a tree-frog or an insect, and far too sharp and tuneless to be a bird. There, on a great branch about thirty feet above me, I saw the source of the noise: a diminutive marmoset was trotting along a wide branch as if it were an arterial road, picking his way in and out of the forest of orchids and other parasitic plants that grew in clumps from the bark. As I watched, he stopped, sat up on his hind legs and uttered another of his piercing cries; this time he was answered from some distance away, and within a moment or two other marmosets had joined him. Trilling and squeaking to each other, they moved among the orchids, searching diligently, occasionally uttering shrill squeaks of joy as they unearthed a cockroach or a beetle among the leaves. One of them pursued something through an orchid plant for a long time, parting the leaves and peering between them with an intense expression on his tiny face. Every time he made a grab the leaves got in the way and the insect managed to escape round the other side of the plant. Eventually, more by good luck than skill, he dived his small hands in amongst the leaves and, with a twitter of triumph, emerged with a fat cockroach clutched firmly between his fingers. The insect was a large one and its wriggling was strenuous, so, presumably in case he dropped it, he stuffed the whole thing into his mouth. He sat there munching happily, and when he had swallowed the last morsel, he carefully examined both the palms and backs of his paws to make sure there was none left.

  I was so entranced by this glimpse into the private life of the marmoset that it was not until the little party had moved off into the now-gloomy forest that I realized I had an acute crick in my neck and that one of my legs had gone to sleep.

  A considerable time later my attention was once again drawn to marmosets. I went down to an animal dealer’s shop in London, to inquire about something quite different, and the first thing I saw on entering the shop was a cage full of marmosets, a pathetic, scruffy group of ten, crouched in a dirty cage on a perch so small that they were continually having to jostle and squabble for a place to sit. Most of them were adults, but there was one youngster who seemed to be getting rather a rough time of it. He was thin and unkempt, so small that whenever there was a reshuffling of positions on the perch he was always the one to get knocked off. As I watched this pathetic, shivering little group, I remembered the little family party I had seen in Guiana, grubbing happily for their dinner among the orchids, and I felt that I could not leave the shop without rescuing at least one of the tiny animals. So within five minutes I had paid the price of liberation, and the smallest occupant of the cage was dragged out, screaming with alarm, and bundled into a cardboard box.

  When I got him home I christened him Pavlo and introduced him to the family, who viewed him with suspicion. However, as soon as Pavlo had settled down he set about the task of winning their confidence, and in a very short time he had all of us under his minute thumb. In spite of his size (he fitted comfortably into a large teacup), he had a terrific personality, a Napoleonic air about him which was difficult to resist. His head was only the size of a large walnut, but it soon became apparent that it contained a brain of considerable power and intelligence. At first we kept him in a large cage in the drawing-room, where he would have plenty of company, but he was so obviously miserable when confined that we started letting him out for an hour or two every day. This was our undoing. Very soon Pavlo had convinced us that the cage was unnecessary, so it was consigned to the rubbish-heap, and he had the run of the house all day and every day. He became accepted as a diminutive member of the family, and he treated the house as though he owned it and we were his guests.

  At first sight Pavlo resembled a curious kind of squirrel, until you noticed his very human face and his bright, shrewd, brown eyes. His fur was soft, and presented a brindled appearance because the individual hairs were banded with orange, black and grey, in that order; his tail, however, was ringed with black and white. The fur on his head and neck was chocolate brown, and hung round his shoulders and chest in a tattered fringe. His large ears were hidden by long ear-tufts of the same chocolate colour. Across his forehead, above his eyes and the aristocratic bridge of his tiny nose, was a broad white patch.

  Everyone who saw him, and who had any knowledge of animals, assured me that I would not keep him long: marmosets, they said, coming from the warm tropical forests of South America, never lived more than a year in this climate. It seemed that their cheerful prophecies were right when, after six months, Pavlo developed a form of paralysis and from the waist downwards lost all power of movement. We fought hard to save his life while those who had predicted this trouble said he ought to be destroyed. But he seemed in no pain, so we persevered. Four times a day we massaged his tiny legs, his back and tail with warm cod-liver oil, and he had more cod-liver oil in his special diet, which included such delicacies as grapes and pears. He lay pathetically on a cushion, wrapped in cotton-wool for warmth, while the family took it in turn to minister to his wants. Sunshine was what he needed most, and plenty of it, but the English climate provided precious little. So the neighbours were treated to the sight of us carrying our Lilliputian invalid round the garden, carefully placing his cushion in every patch of sunlight that appeared. This went on for a month, and at the end of it Pavlo could move his feet slightly and twitch his tail; two weeks later he was hobbling round the house, almost his old self again. We were delighted, even though the house did reek of cod-liver oil for months afterwards.

  Instead of making him more delicate, his illness seemed to make him tougher, and at times he appeared almost indestructible. We never pampered him, and the only concession we made was to give him a hot-water bottle in his bed during the winter. He liked this so much that he would refuse to go to bed without it, even in mid-summer. His bedroom was a drawer in a tall-boy in my mother’s room, and his bed consisted of an old dressing-gown and a piece of fur-coat. Putting Pavlo to bed was quite a ritual: first the dressing-gown had to be spread in the drawer and the bottle wrapped in it so that he did not burn himself. Then the piece of fur-coat had to be made into a sort of furry cave, into which Pavlo would crawl, curl up into a ball and close his eyes blissfully. At first we used to push the drawer closed, except for a crack to allow for air, as this prevented Pavlo from getting up too early in the morning. But he very soon learned that by pushing his head into the crack he could widen it and escape.

  About six in the morning he would wake up to find that his bottle had gone cold, so he would sally forth in search of alternative warmth. He would scuttle across the floor and up the leg of my mother’s bed, landing on the eiderdown. Then he would make his way up the bed, uttering squeaks of welcome, and burrow under the pillow where he would stay, cosy and warm, until it was time for her to get up. When she eventually got out of bed and left him, Pavlo would be furious, and would stand on the pillow chattering and screaming with rage. When he saw, however, that she had no intention of getting back to bed to keep him warm, he would scuttle down the passage to my room and crawl in with me. Here he would remain, stretched luxuriously on my chest, until it was time for me to get up, and then he would stand on my pillow and abuse me, screwing his tiny face up into a ferocious and most human scowl. Having told me w
hat he thought of me, he would dash off and get into bed with my brother, and when he was turned out of there would go and join my sister for a quick nap before breakfast. This migration from bed to bed was a regular morning performance.

  Downstairs he had plenty of heating at his disposal. There was a tall standard-lamp in the drawing-room which belonged to him: in the winter he would crawl inside the shade and sit next to the bulb, basking in the heat. He also had a stool and a cushion by the fire, but he preferred the lamp, and so it had to be kept on all day for his benefit, and our electricity bill went up by leaps and bounds. In the first warm days of spring Pavlo would venture out into the garden, where his favourite haunt was the fence; he would sit in the sun, or potter up and down catching spiders and other delicacies for himself. Half-way along this fence was a sort of rustic arbour made out of poles thickly overgrown with creepers, and it was into this net of creepers that Pavlo would dash if danger threatened. For many years he carried on a feud with the big white cat from next door, for this beast was obviously under the impression that Pavlo was a strange type of rat which it was her duty to kill. She would spend many painful hours stalking him, but since she was as inconspicuous as a snowball against the green leaves she never managed to catch Pavlo unawares. He would wait until she was quite close, her yellow eye glaring, her tongue flicking her lips, and then he would trot off along the fence and dive in among the creepers. Sitting there in safety, he would scream and chitter like an urchin from between the flowers, while the frustrated cat prowled about trying to find a hole among the creepers big enough for her portly body to squeeze through.

  Growing by the fence, between the house and Pavlo’s creeper-covered hideout, were two young fig-trees, and round the base of their trunks we had dug deep trenches which we kept full of water during the hot weather. Pavlo was pottering along the fence one day, chattering to himself and catching spiders, when he looked up and discovered that his arch-enemy the cat, huge and white, was sitting on the fence between him and his creeper-covered arbour. His only chance of escape was to go back along the fence and into the house, so Pavlo turned and bolted, squeaking for help as he ran. The fat white cat was not such an expert tight-rope walker as Pavlo, so her progress along the fence top was slow, but even so she was catching up on him. She was uncomfortably close behind him when he reached the fig-trees, and he became so nervous that he missed his footing and with a frantic scream of fright fell off the fence and straight into the water-filled trench below. He rose to the surface, spluttering and screaming, and splashing around in circles, while the cat watched him in amazement: she had obviously never seen an aquatic marmoset before. Luckily, before she had recovered from her astonishment and hooked him out of the water, I arrived on the scene and she fled. I rescued Pavlo, gibbering with rage, and he spent the rest of the afternoon in front of the fire, wrapped in a piece of blanket, muttering darkly to himself. This episode had a bad effect on his nerves, and for a whole week he refused to go out on the fence, and if he caught so much as a glimpse of the white cat he would scream until someone put him on their shoulder and comforted him.