Talk to the Tail

by Tom Cox

  As the Maasai had got closer to me, I’d realised that the object in his non-spear hand was a boombox. I recognised the tune playing as ‘The Eye of the Tiger’ by Survivor, made famous by the movie Rocky III.

  This was not the right continent for tigers, of course, but I had my hopes of seeing a lion. In retrospect, I hadn’t really thought through how this would transpire. I suppose I imagined I would just happen across one from just the perfect distance: not so close that it would have an instant instinct to bite my chin off, but close enough to get a good view, and a photograph to prove it.

  In truth, Brown had somewhat exaggerated the element of intermingling between rally folk and animals. ‘There are lions and ostriches and rhinos getting out the way of the car and everything! It’s fucking wicked!’ he said. While a car had once heartbreakingly hit a giraffe during a practice run, many years earlier, now a helicopter zoomed ahead of the cars, preventing further similar mishaps. I also found out that the ‘personable’ cheetah that I’d seen posed in photos with members of the Subaru team had actually been sedated for the purposes of the shoot.

  ‘What is the worst experience you’ve had on a rally here?’ I asked Makinen.

  ‘Oh. One time, one of those big birds smashed the windscreen,’ he said.

  ‘What? Gosh. You mean an ostrich?’

  ‘No. Like a chicken. You know.’ He spread his arms as fully as he could. I had never seen a chicken even half that wide, and felt it was imperative that, before I headed home the following day, I made an effort to track one down.

  When my article about my time with the Subaru team was published in Jack, it was accompanied by a photograph of one of the Imprezas skidding through a cloud of dust. Beneath it was another, of a giraffe, strolling innocently along what could potentially be a track carved out through the dirt for rally cars. ‘Danger on the dirt,’ read a caption connecting the two photographs. ‘200km/hour Subaru Impreza shares the same route with pedestrian 1900kg adult male giraffe!’ In actuality, the giraffe in question was nowhere near the rally route at all, but safely sequestered in Nairobi National Park, where the greatest automotive danger it faced was a Renault Espace, being driven by a rotund, jocular Kenyan man called Maurice, who was carefully observing a sign reading ‘Speed Limit 20KPH: Warthogs and Children Have Right of Way’.

  As if to underline the rally stars’ emotionally detached relationship to the wildlife around them, they had been known to eat at The Carnivore, a restaurant specialising in the meat of many of the animals they might potentially run over.

  At The Carnivore, a different waiter was assigned to each different kind of game, which they carried from the grill on large swords. I didn’t know if they got commission on the meat they offloaded, but the system did appear to bring a competitive element to proceedings, making the restaurant a sort of inadvertent afterlife version of the battles the animals in question fought daily on the Serengeti. On my visit there, I was invited to eat an unlimited supply of hartebeest, zebra, crocodile, waterbuck and impala, and reluctantly obliged. I felt particularly sorry for the waiter assigned to waterbuck, who was having some wretched luck.

  The waiter’s sales technique didn’t involve anything more elaborate than saying ‘Waterbuck?’ to each table he approached, but in those three syllables, an ocean of hurt was conveyed. You might think that a man saying ‘Waterbuck?’ is just a man asking if you want some water-buck, but in truth, there are lots of different ways of saying ‘Waterbuck?’: there’s the ‘Waterbuck?’ that says ‘Are you hungry? Would you like some of this?’, the ‘Waterbuck?’ that says ‘I have a wife and four kids to support, and the carburettor has just messed up on my 1981 Mazda’, the ‘Waterbuck?’ that says ‘this is an extremely big sword, and has many other potential uses, besides its function as a meat carrying apparatus’. And then there is the ‘Waterbuck?’ that quite simply says, ‘I am dying inside: rescue me’.

  I wanted to help, but I was already feeling a bit queasy. That night, in my hotel room, suffering from the Meat Sweats, I felt the ache of the traitor coming from deep in my abdomen. I was not a vegetarian, and the meat I had eaten could hardly have been more free range, but by eating it, I had gone over to the side of the enemy, betrayed the animals I had tentatively aligned myself with. If I had actually enjoyed it, it might not have been so bad. The zebra had been dry, and tasted suspiciously what I imagined horse might taste like, the hartebeest left no lasting impression in my mind and, while I would never have admitted it to its face, the crocodile had only been passable. As for the water-buck, the less said about that the better. I could only assume that, before its unfortunate demise, it had been an unusually sedentary kind of antelope.

  With Maurice’s help, I did see my lions in the end: two females, basking in the morning sun a matter of four or five yards away in the road in front of the Espace. Standing up with my head and shoulders sticking out of the sunroof, I was an easy target. A couple of relatively languid movements of their powerful limbs, and they would have had a hearty corduroy-flavoured breakfast. This was a National Park, a controlled environment, not the ‘real’ wilderness surrounding the rally track, but it was still a brave move, by my standards. You could say the same about my bumpy, skidding attempt to traverse the same rally route that the Subarus did, in a Range Rover, in record time, or the moment later that day when, following an engine failure, I was left to guard the abandoned spotter helicopter alone, putting my arm protectively around its chrome tail as thirty intrigued Maasai encroached, and appeasing them by handing out water and fruit that I’d found in the cockpit. I had my mind on bigger things. Specifically, one significantly bigger thing that, by some sort of Satanic magic that I neither understood nor wished to understand, would be transporting me back to the UK later that evening.

  Since then, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to get on planes, and have turned every one of them down. Required to go to Spain or the south of France for two days of work, I have opted to spend the same amount of time travelling there and back on a sleeper train, cramped in airless compartments with wittering, text message-happy lovebird students, in preference to two flights each lasting not much longer than a particularly indulgent bath. In all honesty, it does not bother me unduly that I have never ticked the travelling boxes of the conventionally worldly person. I am happy to read others’ experiences of rain forests, pyramids and hanging gardens. What does concern me more is the animal life I am missing out on. Because of my flying phobia, I might never get the chance to feed an ice cream to a capybara or have my hat stolen by lemur, and that, quite honestly, rankles.

  ‘I want you to go to Tasmania and track the Tasmanian devil!’ enthused Brown a few weeks after my return from Kenya. I considered the offer for a day or two, and did a bit of research about Tasmanian devils, learning that they were the world’s biggest carnivorous marsupial, ‘characterised by their black fur, pungent odour when stressed, extremely loud and disturbing screech and ferocity while feeding’, and were teetering close to the endangered list due to the horrific-sounding ‘devil face tumour disease’. I was very taken with the photographs of them – or at least those that didn’t showcase devil face tumours – but then I realised the flying time from London to Tasmania was twenty-four hours and thirty-five minutes, and thought back to a montage of images from my flight home from Kenya: me sitting in the departure lounge, overdoing the valium slightly again and phoning Dee with another tearful farewell-forever speech, the plane shooting up, up, up into the night sky for so long I worried that the pilot had forgotten to follow the curve of the globe and decided to head straight for the ice planet Hoth instead . . . me searching for any sort of remedy for calm, and only finding it in vague form in the sound of Neil Young’s ‘Harvest’ on the in-flight headphones. I knew that, if I probed, and committed, somewhere deep within I might find the gonzo travel writer Brown was grooming me to be, and that it was all about the power of self-belief: whatever a person chose to most believe about himself, more than likely was what he
would be. That was all very well, but unfortunately what I most believed about myself was that I was a big landlocked chicken whose bowels could turn to concrete at the mere sight of a duty-free shop.

  I found some solace in the knowledge that, had I gone to Tasmania, it was highly unlikely I would have been able to engage with a Tasmanian devil in a meaningful way. Also, it wasn’t exactly as if I struggled to find other animals that were characterised by their black fur, pungent odour when stressed, extremely loud and disturbing screech and ferocity while feeding in my nearby vicinity. If I squinted when I looked at The Bear while he was yawning, I could even pretend I was in Tasmania, facing down the devil himself.

  I suppose I’m lucky in this way: I don’t necessarily find so-called ‘mundane’ animals any less interesting than wild or endangered ones. I certainly enjoy seeing the cheetahs and maned wolves at my local zoo, but they just don’t have the same potential for interaction as you get with The People Sheep and the unruly local gang of pot-bellied pygmy goats6 who like to put their hooves up on my chest and bully me for nuts. Nine times out of ten, I will opt for stroking the velvety muzzle of a donkey over admiring a Bactrian camel from afar or getting into a staring contest with a supercilious elf owl. Obviously, the buzz that comes from the danger of being in close quarters to a larger, more aggressive animal is a favourable factor, but if I need my big-cat fix, I can always use my imagination and press my head really low to the ground while Shipley is padding across the living room carpet, or stare at a puncture wound Ralph has given me on my finger in one of his more overzealous moments and pretend the digit in question is a tiny, limbless person called Edward. That said, when, in early 2009, my cat behaviourist friend Vicky asked me if I wanted to go to Kent and put my hand inside a tiger’s mouth, I did not prevaricate before saying yes.

  It was probably a measure of how long it had been since I’d been close to big cats, and how little I knew about the way a person must act around them, that when Vicky invited me to come with her to the Wildlife Heritage Foundation, near Ashford, I assumed that I’d be behind the bars with them, possibly having a little cuddle as I fed them. Looking back, I’m surprised by how calm I was about this prospect, especially as Vicky had told me that the tiger she was working with, Ronja, had been rescued from an Eastern European circus, where her leg had been injured, and was bad-tempered and stressed as a result. I suppose it might be put down to the significant existential turning point I had come to at the time. The major relationship of my life was ending, and I was viewing my situation philosophically. I’d been on the planet for thirty-three years, been lucky enough to spend eight and a half of them with an intelligent, beautiful woman, fulfilled a lot of my working goals, and I could think of far more dismal, less apt ways to exit this mortal coil than by being crushed between giant, feline jaws.

  Vicky told no word of a lie: I think I did put my hand in a tiger’s mouth, for about 0.3 of a second, but there were metal bars offering a certain amount of protection, and I can’t say for sure exactly where hand, mouth and proffered chicken drumstick intersected. The tiger concerned was not Ronja, who refused to come near me, but a smaller female called Indy. This could be viewed as a cop-out, but would no doubt come in useful as an anecdote to wheel out the next time someone mocked me for being nervous about feeding apples to horses. Five minutes earlier, I’d done something similar with a snow leopard: a magnificent, draught excluder-tailed creature who put my frequent boasting to friends about the size of Ralph’s paws sharply into perspective.

  Next, it was on to the Pallas cats, which were a far more manageable size. In fact, with the exception of their unusual pointy ears and round pupils, they looked not entirely unlike domestic tabbies. That said, they would clearly be more than happy to mess you up, given half the opportunity. Seeing one blink at me, I automatically reverted to the high-low whistle I used to get my cats to come to me, then checked no manly keepers were around, before punctuating it with a small, ineffectual kissy noise.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Vicky.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It just seemed right.’

  ‘Somehow I don’t think that’s a language it will understand.’

  I could see her point, and I could see the male Pallas cat’s point too. Who did I think I was, after all, bringing my soppy white middle-class cat owner ways into this virtual jungle, whose residents would sooner tear up a Cosipet Cat Igloo with their teeth than curl up in one? I knew what the Pallas was driving at, but it didn’t need to be quite so damning with its scowl. Sure, it was very easy on the eye, but it had its defects, too. There was the hair, for a start, which was positively crying out for a bit of product. I’m not the kind of individual who likes to bathe and groom his cats, but I had to admit I would have relished five minutes on a pelt like this with a V05 hot oil treatment and a bottle of Kiehl’s Silk Groom.

  In the movement of the cats Vicky introduced me to, I could frequently see the swagger of my own moggies writ large. Tigers, leopards and lions didn’t meow, and Mark, the head keeper at the foundation, said that tigers were actually quite doglike in many ways, but each of these animals made a noise the keepers called ‘chuffling’, not unlike a purr. When Sarah, the keeper responsible for showing us around, called to the one resident cheetah, Mephisto, he made a chirruping sound not dissimilar to the one Ralph and Shipley’s late brother Brewer used to make at mealtimes. These cats had the gender preferences so common to household felines, too. Ronja, just like Bootsy, was more drawn to women, and had even taken against a keeper called Fraser when he had cut off his long, girlish blond hair. Ronja, in her playful moments, had a Shipley-like habit of ripping up books, except her particular taste ran less to John Irving novels and more to telephone directories.

  Perhaps most amazingly, in the work she had been doing for the WHF, Vicky had been plying Ronja with extra-strength catnip and seeing impressively playful results. When Vicky starts talking about catnip, it seems somehow wrong that she’s walking about in broad daylight with no protective goons around her, and not mooching about in a sinister fashion in a silk dressing gown, in some fiercely secretive underground lair, with her own very expensive set of personalised scales. She knows her stuff. She’d recommended a couple of incredibly potent brands to me in the past, one of which sent Bootsy and Pablo into such a state of free-love rapture, I felt sure one of them was about to stagger blearily over to the shelves where I kept my LPs and roll some of the substance in question up on the sleeve of Cream’s Disraeli Gears album, and another which, at the height of its potency, had convinced Ralph that he could lay waste to a four-foot-high antique chest of drawers. But Vicky assured me that the uncut stuff she was using on her biggest client was something else entirely: the kind of thing that, after one whiff, could take the head clean off a normal house cat.

  Around the time of my visit to the Wildlife Heritage Foundation, a video had been doing the rounds on the Internet featuring Christian, a lion cub purchased by two well-spoken hippies, John Rendall and Ace Berg, from the famous Knightsbridge store Harrods in 1969, and raised in their London flat. The main clip, which I’d receive a link in my inbox to around three times a day on average at the time, showed an emotional reunion between John, Ace and a fully grown Christian in the African wilderness, a year after they’d released him. By that point, Christian had become head of his own pride, and John and Ace had been assured he would not remember them. The unalloyed delight on their faces as he ran across the scrubby land and into their arms was real, icy-tingle-down-the-spine stuff, the kind of thing you’d have to be made out of reinforced steel not to be moved by. No matter what rousing musical crescendo it was set to on YouTube, it had the same power, and provoked astonished questions from millions of animal lovers, chief among them being, ‘How can a wild animal love its guardians so deeply?’ and, ‘No sodding way! You actually used to be able to buy lions in Harrods?’

  Over the ensuing weeks, more images of Christian had been heavily circulated. Christian in the
grounds of a London church, where a vicar had kindly allowed John and Ace to exercise him; Christian on the sofa with John and Ace; Christian with his paws up on an old black-and-white television and a ‘Who? Me? What? I didn’t do nuffin’!’ look on his face. As someone who spent much of his time living in his own unrealistically edited version of 1969, I found it an enormously appealing fantasy, and, heading back to a house hosting only cats, I wondered if, at this somewhat pivotal moment in my life, it could be The Answer. Me and another side-burned, corduroy-wearing friend, taking up together in easygoing bachelordom, raising our own big cat; our reputation for kindness, iconoclasm and daring growing bigger with each week; the inevitable legendary parties and Elle Decoration magazine cover shoot that would follow.

  But then I thought back to the lions at WHF. As Sarah the keeper had told me, there was currently a problem with them urinating in their drinking trough. My next-door neighbours Deborah and David had recently worked hard to dig out a new pond in their garden, so I could see some potential issues there. I suppose I could rule out tigers, for similar reasons, having witnessed the power of their spraying at fairly close quarters. I also thought of that one grumpy-looking male lion who Sarah had told me had had a fight with a rival, and suffered a claw through the testicle, only just avoiding castration. I’d witnessed some raw scenes in my vet’s waiting room, but I wondered if this would be a step too far.

  A Pallas cat was more manageable, but would I really fancy trying to get one into a cat basket? Perhaps most enticing of all was Artem, the snow leopard I’d fed, who would without question look great on Ralph’s favourite sheepskin rug. By adopting one of his future cubs, I could avoid being accused of plagiarising Ace and John.