Menagerie Manor

by Gerald Durrell

  Now, a complete change came over Topsy. As long as she was clinging to her teddy-bear with arms, legs and tail, she lost her fear of human beings. We just simply lifted the bear out of the cage with Topsy stuck to it, like a limpet, and she would allow us to do what we liked. We were thus able to inject her and clean up her matted fur, and within a few days she was well on the road to recovery, and looked a different monkey. But then came another problem: as the days passed, the teddy-bear became more and more unhygienic, until finally we decided he would have to be removed from Topsy’s cage to be washed and disinfected. So, to Topsy’s extreme annoyance, we removed the bear. Immediately she threw a screaming fit. Of all the monkey family, the woolly monkeys have the most powerful and excruciating scream you have ever heard, a scream that goes through you and makes your blood run cold, like the screech of a knife on a plate, magnified a million times. We blocked our ears, and consoled ourselves with the thought that she would stop in about ten minutes when she realised that she was not going to have her bear back, but Topsy did not stop. She screamed solidly all morning, and by lunchtime our nerves were in shreds. There was only one thing to do: we took the van and rushed down into the town and, after visiting several toy shops, managed to buy a teddy-bear closely resembling Topsy’s original one. Then we hurried back to the Zoo and stuffed it hastily into Topsy’s cage. She stopped in mid-scream, gave a loud squeak of joy and flung herself on to the new teddy-bear, wrapped her arms, legs and tail tightly round it, and immediately fell into a deep and exhausted sleep. After that, the teddy-bears took it in turn: while one was being washed, the other took over the duties of foster mother, and this arrangement Topsy found eminently satisfactory.

  At last Topsy had grown so big that she was bigger than her teddy-bears, and we decided that we would have to wean her off them, as it were, for eventually she would have to go into a big cage with other woolly monkeys, and she could not take her bears with her. It was time, we felt, that she grew used to the idea of having a companion in the cage with her, and so we chose a large ginger guinea-pig of placid disposition and no brain. He was introduced into Topsy’s cage, and at first she ignored him, except when he went too near to her precious bear, whereupon she would clout him. It was not long, however, before Topsy discovered that the guinea-pig had one great advantage over the bear as a sleeping companion, and that was it had built-in central heating. The guinea-pig – whom we now called Harold for convenient reference – took, I think, a rather dim view of all this. To begin with, if he possessed a thought in his head at all, that thought was food. Harold’s life-work was to test the edibility of everything into which he came in contact, and he did not like having his life’s work mucked about by a domineering woolly monkey. Topsy, on the other hand, had very strict ideas about the correct time to get up, go to bed, play, and so on, and she did not see why she should have to change these to fit in with Harold’s feeding habits. It seemed to Harold that no sooner had he found a respectable piece of carrot, or something, than Topsy would decide it was bedtime, and he was seized by the hind leg and hauled off to their box of straw, in the most undignified manner. Here, to add insult to injury, Topsy would climb on to his back, wrap her arms, legs and tail tightly round him to prevent his escape, and sink into a deep sleep, looking like an outsize jockey on a small and very rotund ginger horse.

  Another thing that Harold found rather disquieting was Topsy’s firm conviction that, if given the opportunity, he would be able to leap about in the branches with the same agility that she herself displayed. She was sure that, if only she could get him up into the branches, he would turn out to be a splendid climber, but the job was to lift Harold off the ground. She could only spare one hand to hold him with, and he was fat, heavy and uncooperative. She would, after considerable effort, tuck him under one arm, and then start to climb, but before she was more than a few inches up the wire Harold would slip out from under her arm and plop back to the floor of the cage. Poor Harold, I think he suffered a great deal at Topsy’s hands, but he served our purpose, for very soon Topsy had forgotten all about her teddy-bears, and was able to take her place in the big cage with the rest of the woolly monkeys. Harold was returned to the guinea-pig pen where he spends all day up to his knees in vegetables, champing his way through them with grim determination.

  Another creature that gave us a certain amount of trouble during his settling-in period was Fred, a patas monkey from West Africa. He was a fully adult male, one of the largest patas I have ever seen, and he had been the personal pet of some people in England. How they managed to keep him up to that size without being severely bitten was a mystery, for Fred’s canines were a good two inches long and as sharp as razors. Apparently, right up to the time that Fred came to us, he used to go into the house each evening and watch television.

  But the really awful thing about Fred was his clothing. Patas monkeys are covered with thick, bright ginger-coloured fur, and Fred arrived wearing a knitted jumper in a startling shade of pillar-box red. This combination of colours made even the most un-sartorial members of the staff blench. The trouble was that Fred missed his television and his rides in the car, and decided that we were in some way responsible for depriving him of these, and so he loathed us all from the very start with complete impartiality. If anyone went near his cage he would leap at the wire and shake it vigorously, baring all his teeth in a ferocious grimace. Until, if ever, he showed any signs of trusting and liking us, we could do nothing about removing his terrible jacket. Fred just sat among the branches in his cage, wearing his scarlet jacket and showing no signs of forgiving us. The trouble was that, as the days passed, the jumper grew more and more grubby and dishevelled until he looked as though he had just emerged from some poverty-stricken slum. We tried every method to rid him of this insanitary garment, but without success. Fred seemed rather proud of it, and would become very annoyed if we tried to take it off him. We began to wonder how long it would take the wool to disintegrate naturally and fall off, but whoever had knitted the jumper had chosen really tough wool, and it was obvious that it would be several years before it fell to pieces. Then fate played into our hands. We had a heat-wave, and the temperature in the Mammal House where Fred lived soared up. At first, he enjoyed it, but soon it became too much even for him, and we noticed that he was pulling meditatively at his jumper. The next morning we found the offending garment hanging neatly over a branch in Fred’s cage, and managed to hook it out with the aid of a long stick. From that day onwards, Fred grew increasingly placid; he will never be really trustworthy, but at least he is now less inclined to treat human beings as his enemies.

  Still another creature that gave us a certain amount of trouble in the early stages was Millicent, the Malabar squirrel. Malabars are the largest members of the squirrel family, and hail from India. They measure about two feet in length, with sturdy bodies and long, very bushy tails. Their undersides are saffron yellow, their upper parts a rich mahogany red, and they have very large ear-tufts that are like a couple of black sporrans perched on their heads. They are, like all squirrels, very alert, quick moving and inquisitive, but, unlike most squirrels, they do not have that nervous desire to gnaw everything with which they come into contact. The exception to this was, of course, Millicent. Her view was that nature had provided her with a pair of very prominent, bright orange teeth for the sole purpose of demolishing any cage in which she was confined. This was not from any desire to escape, because having gnawed a large hole in one side of the cage she would then move over to the other side and start all over again. She cost us a small fortune in repairs until we had a cage specially lined with sheet metal, and thus put a stop to her activities. However, feeling that she would miss her occupational therapy, we gave her large logs of wood, and she proceeded to gnaw her way through these, like a buzz saw.

  At first, Millicent was anything but tame, and would not hesitate to bury her teeth in your finger, should you be foolish enough to give her the chance. No amount of bribery on our part, wi
th the aid of such things as mushrooms and acorns, would make her any the less savage, and we came to the conclusion that she was just one of those animals which never become tame. But then a peculiar thing happened: Millicent was found one day lying in the bottom of her cage in a state of collapse. She had no obvious symptoms, and it was a little difficult to tell exactly what was wrong with her. When I find an animal suffering from some mysterious complaint like this, I do two things: I give it an antibiotic and keep it very warm. So Millicent had an injection and was moved down to the Reptile House, for this is the only place where the heat is kept on throughout the summer months.

  Within a few days Millicent was recovering satisfactorily, but was still languid. The extraordinary fact was the change in her character. From being acutely anti-human, she had suddenly become so pro-Homo sapiens that it was almost embarrassing. You had only to open her cage door and she would rush out into your arms, nibbling your fingers gently and peering earnestly into your face, her long whiskers quivering with emotion. She liked nothing better than to lie along your arm, as though it were the branch of a tree, and in this position doze for hours if you let her. Since she was now such a reformed character, she was allowed out of her cage first thing each morning, to potter round the Reptile House. Millicent very soon discovered that the tortoise pen provided her with everything a self-respecting Malabar could want: there was an infra-red lamp that cast a pleasant, concentrated heat; there were the backs of the giant tortoises which made ideal perches; and there was an abundance of fruit and vegetables. So the giant tortoises would move ponderously round their pen, while Millicent perched on their shells. Occasionally, when one of them found a succulent piece of fruit and was just stretching out his neck to engulf it, she would hop down from his back, pick up the fruit, and jump back on to the shell again before the tortoise really knew what was happening. When the time came that Millicent was well enough to return to the Small Mammal House, I think the giant tortoises were glad to see the back of her, for not only had she been an additional weight on their shells, but the constant disappearance of titbits from under their very noses was having a distressing effect on their nerves.

  It is amazing how wild-caught animals (as opposed to hand-reared ones) differ in settling down in captivity. Some take a considerable time to adjust themselves, while others from the moment of arrival, carry on as if they had been born in the Zoo. A dealer sent us a pair of brown woolly monkeys which he had just received direct from Brazil. We found that the male was a magnificent specimen, fully adult, and must have been about twelve or fourteen years old. We were not very pleased with this, for an adult monkey of that age would we felt, take a long time to adjust itself to captivity, and might even pine and die. We released him into his cage with his mate, and went and fetched them some fruit and milk As soon as he saw these, he became very excited, and when the door of the cage was opened, to our complete astonishment he came straight down and ate and drank while we were still holding the dishes, as if he had been with us for years instead of a matter of minutes. Right from the start he was perfectly tame, and ate well and seemed to thoroughly enjoy his new life.

  There are many creatures which, on being settled in, make the most determined attempts to escape from their cages not, because they want their freedom but simply because they miss their old territory: the travelling crate to which they have grown used and which they look upon as their home. I have known an animal that was removed from its tiny, travelling crate and placed in a spacious, well-appointed cage spend three days endeavouring to break out, and when it was finally successful it made a bee-line to its old travelling box and was found sitting inside it. The only answer to this problem was to place the travelling crate inside the new cage. This we did, and the animal used it thereafter as its bedroom and settled down quite happily.

  There are again some creatures, of course, which, when they manage to escape, present you with considerable problems. For instance, there was the night I shall never forget, when Claudius, the South American tapir, contrived to find a way out of his paddock. The person who had been in to give him his night feed had padlocked the gate carefully but without sliding, the bolt into position. Claudius, having a nocturnal perambulation round his territory, found to his delight that the gate which he had hitherto presumed to be invulnerable now responded to his gentle nosings. He decided that this was a very suitable night to have a short incursion into the neighbouring countryside. It was a suitable night from Claudius’s point of view, because the skies were as black as pitch and the rain was streaming down in torrents that I have rarely seen equalled outside the tropics.

  It was about quarter past 11, and we were all on the point of going to bed, when a rather harassed and extremely wet motorist appeared and beat upon the front door. Above the roar of the rain, he said that he had just seen a big animal in the headlights of his car, which he felt sure must be one of ours. I asked him what it looked like, and he said it looked to him like a misshapen Shetland pony with an elephant’s trunk. My heart sank, for I knew just how far and how fast Claudius could gallop if given half a chance. I was in my shirt-sleeves and only wearing slippers, but there was no time to change into more suitable attire against the weather, for the motorist had spotted Claudius in a field adjoining our property and I wanted to catch up with him before he ventured too far afield. I rushed round to the cottage and harried all those members of the staff who lived in. In various stages of night attire they all tumbled out into the rain and we headed for the field into which the motorist assured us our tapir had disappeared. This was quite a large field and belonged to our nearest neighbour, Leonard du Feu. Leonard had proved himself to be the most long suffering and sympathetic of neighbours, and so I was determined that Claudius was not going to do any damage to his property if we could possibly avoid it. Having made this mental resolve, I then remembered to my horror that the field in which Claudius was reputedly lurking had just recently been carefully planted out by Leonard with anemones. I could imagine what Claudius’s four hundredweight could do to those carefully planted rows of delicate plants, particularly as, owing to his short-sightedness, his sense of direction was never too good at the best of times.

  We reached the field, soaked to the skin, and surrounded it. There, sure enough, stood Claudius obviously having the best evening out he had had in years. The wet as far as he was concerned was ideal: there was nothing quite like a heavy down-pour of rain to make life worth while. He was standing there, looking like a debauched Roman emperor under a shower, meditatively masticating a large bunch of anemones. When he saw us, he uttered his greeting – a ridiculous, high-pitched squeak similar to the noise of a wet finger being rubbed over a balloon. It was quite plain that he was delighted to see us and hoped that we would join him in his nocturnal ramble, but none of us was feeling in any mood to do this. We were drenched to the skin and freezing cold, and our one ambition was to get Claudius back into his paddock with as little trouble as possible. Uttering a despairing and rather futile cry of ‘don’t tread on the plants’, I marshalled my band of tapir-catchers and we converged on Claudius in a grim-faced body. Claudius took one look at us and decided from our manner and bearing that we did not see eye to eye with him on the subject of gambolling about in other people’s fields at half past 11 on a wet night, and so he felt that, albeit reluctantly, he would have to leave us. Pausing only to snatch another mouthful of anemones, he set off across the field at a sharp gallop, leaving a trail of destruction behind him that could only have been emulated by a runaway bulldozer. In our slippered feet, clotted with mud, we stumbled after him. Our speed was reduced not only by the mud but by the fact that we were trying to run between the rows of flowers instead of on them. I remember making a mental note as I ran that I would ask Leonard in future to plant his rows of flowers wider apart, as this would facilitate the recapture of any animal that escaped. The damage Claudius had done to the flowers was bad enough, but worse was to follow. He suddenly swerved, and instead of running
into the next field, as we had hoped (for it was a grazing meadow), he ran straight into Leonard du Feu’s back-garden. We pulled up short and stood panting, the rain trickling off us in torrents.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said to everyone in general, ‘get that bloody animal out of that garden before he wrecks it.’ The words were hardly out of my mouth when from inside the garden came a series of tinkling crashes which told us too clearly that Claudius, trotting along in his normal myopic fashion, had ploughed his way through all Leonard’s cloches. Before we could do anything sensible, Claudius having decided that Leonard’s garden was not to his liking, crashed his way through a hedge, leaving a gaping hole in what hitherto had been a nice piece of topiary, and set off into the night at a brisk trot. The direction he was taking presented yet another danger, for he was heading straight for our small lake. Tapirs in the wild state are very fond of water and they are excellent swimmers and can submerge themselves for a considerable length of time. The thought of having to search for a tapir in a quarter of an acre of dark water on a pitch black, rainy night made the thought of hunting for a needle in a haystack pale into insignificance. This thought struck the others members of my band at the same moment, and we ran as we had never run before and just succeeded at the very last minute in heading off Claudius. Coming up close to his rotund behind, I launched myself in a flying tackle and, more by luck than judgement, managed to grab him by one hind leg. In thirty seconds I was wishing that I had not. Claudius kicked out and caught me a glancing blow on the side of the head, which made me see stars, and then revved up to a gallop, dragging me ignominously through the mud, but by now I was so wet, so cold, so muddy and so angry that I clung on with the determination of a limpet in a storm. My tenacity was rewarded, for my dragging weight slowed Claudius down sufficiently to allow the others to catch up, and they hurled themselves on various portions of his anatomy. The chief difficulty with a tapir is that there is practically nothing on which to hold: the ears are small and provide a precarious grip, the tail is minute, there is no mane, so really the only part you can grip with any degree of success are its legs, and Claudius’ legs were fat and slippery with rain. However, we all clung on grimly, while he bucked and kicked and snorted indignantly. As one person loosened his hold, another one would grab on until eventually Claudius decided he was using the wrong method of discouragement. He stopped pirouetting about, thought to himself for a moment and then just simply lay down and looked at us.