My Family and Other Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  Eventually it apparently dawned on Margo that she had better start for home before the sirocco got any worse, and we saw her come down through the trees to where the Bootle-Bumtrinket bobbed and jerked at her moorings. But Margo’s progress was slow and, to say the least, curious; first she fell down twice, then she ended up on the shore about fifty yards away from the boat, and wandered about in circles for some time, apparently looking for it. Eventually, attracted by barks from Roger, she stumbled along the shore and found the boat. Then she had great difficulty in persuading Widdle and Puke to get into it. They did not mind boating when the weather was calm, but they had never been in a rough sea and they had no intention of starting now. As soon as Widdle was safely installed in the boat she would turn to catch Puke, and by the time she had caught him Widdle had leaped ashore again. This went on for some time. At last she managed to get them both in together, leaped in after them, and rowed strenuously for some time before realizing that she had not untied the boat.

  Mother watched her progress across the bay with bated breath. The Bootle-Bumtrinket, being low in the water, was not always visible, and whenever it disappeared behind a particularly large wave Mother would stiffen anxiously, convinced that the boat had foundered with all hands. Then the brave orange-and-white blob would appear once more on the crest of a wave and Mother would breathe again. The course Margo steered was peculiar, for the Bootle-Bumtrinket tacked to and fro across the bay in a haphazard fashion, occasionally even reappearing above the waves with her nose pointing towards Albania. Once or twice Margo rose unsteadily to her feet and peered around the horizon, shading her eyes with her hand; then she would sit down and start rowing once more. Eventually, when the boat had, more by accident than design, drifted within hailing distance, we all went down to the jetty and yelled instructions above the hiss and splash of the waves and the roar of the wind. Guided by our shouts Margo pulled valiantly for the shore, hitting the jetty with such violence that she almost knocked Mother off into the sea. The dogs scrambled out and fled up the hill, obviously scared that we might make them undertake another trip with the same captain. When we had helped Margo ashore we discovered the reason for her unorthodox navigation. Having reached the island, she had draped herself out in the sun and fallen into a deep sleep, to be woken by the noise of the wind. Having slept for the better part of three hours in the fierce sun, she found her eyes so puffy and swollen that she could hardly see out of them. The wind and spray had made them worse, and by the time she reached the jetty she could hardly see at all. She was red and raw with sunburn and her eyelids so puffed out that she looked like a particularly malevolent Mongolian pirate.

  ‘Really, Margo, I sometimes wonder if you’re quite right,’ said Mother, as she bathed Margo’s eyes with cold tea; ‘you do the most stupid things.’

  ‘Oh, rubbish, Mother. You do fuss,’ said Margo. ‘It could have happened to anyone.’

  But this incident seemed to cure her broken heart, for she no longer took solitary walks, nor did she venture out in the boat again; she behaved once more as normally as it was possible for her to do.

  Winter came to the island gently as a rule. The sky was still clear, the sea blue and calm, and the sun warm. But there would be an uncertainty in the air. The gold and scarlet leaves that littered the countryside in great drifts whispered and chuckled among themselves, or took experimental runs from place to place, rolling like coloured hoops among the trees. It was as if they were practising something, preparing for something, and they would discuss it excitedly in rustly voices as they crowded round the tree-trunks. The birds, too, congregated in little groups, puffing out their feathers, twittering thoughtfully. The whole air was one of expectancy, like a vast audience waiting for the curtain to go up. Then one morning you threw back the shutters and looked down over the olive trees, across the blue bay to the russet mountains of the mainland, and became aware that winter had arrived, for each mountain peak would be wearing a tattered skull-cap of snow. Now the air of expectancy grew almost hourly.

  In a few days small white clouds started their winter parade, trooping across the sky, soft and chubby, long, languorous, and unkempt, or small and crisp as feathers, and driving them before it, like an ill-assorted flock of sheep, would come the wind. This was warm at first, and came in gentle gusts, rubbing through the olive groves so that the leaves trembled and turned silver with excitement, rocking the cypresses so that they undulated gently, and stirring the dead leaves into gay, swirling little dances that died as suddenly as they began. Playfully it ruffled the feathers on the sparrows’ backs, so that they shuddered and fluffed themselves; and it leaped without warning at the gulls, so that they were stopped in mid-air and had to curve their white wings against it. Shutters started to bang and doors chattered suddenly in their frames. But still the sun shone, the sea remained placid, and the mountains sat complacently, summer-bronzed, wearing their splintered snow hats.

  For a week or so the wind played with the island, patting it, stroking it, humming to itself among the bare branches. Then there was a lull, a few days’ strange calm; suddenly, when you least expected it, the wind would be back. But it was a changed wind, a mad, hooting, bellowing wind that leaped down on the island and tried to blow it into the sea. The blue sky vanished as a cloak of fine grey cloud was thrown over the island. The sea turned a deep blue, almost black, and became crusted with foam. The cypress trees were whipped like dark pendulums against the sky, and the olives (so fossilized all summer, so still and witchlike) were infected with the madness of the wind and swayed creaking on their misshapen, sinewy trunks, their leaves hissing as they turned, like mother of pearl, from green to silver. This is what the dead leaves had whispered about, this is what they had practised for; exultantly they rose in the air and danced, whirli-gigging about, dipping, swooping, falling exhausted when the wind tired of them and passed on. Rain followed the wind, but it was a warm rain that you could walk in and enjoy, great fat drops that rattled on the shutters, tapped on the vine leaves like drums, and gurgled musically in the gutters. The rivers up in the Albanian mountains became swollen and showed white teeth in a snarl as they rushed down to the sea, tearing at their banks, grabbing the summer debris of sticks, logs, grass tussocks, and other things and disgorging them into the bay, so that the dark-blue waters became patterned with great coiling veins of mud and other flotsam. Gradually all these veins burst, and the sea changed from blue to yellow-brown; then the wind tore at the surface, piling the water into ponderous waves, like great tawny lions with white manes that stalked and leaped upon the shore.

  This was the shooting season; on the mainland the great lake of Butrinto had a fringe of tinkling ice round its rim, and its surface was patterned with flocks of wild duck. On the brown hills, damp and crumbling with rain, the hares, roe deer, and wild boar gathered in the thickets to stamp and gnaw at the frozen ground, unearthing the bulbs and roots beneath. On the island the swamps and pools had their wisps of snipe, probing the mushy earth with their long rubbery beaks, humming like arrows as they flipped up from under your feet. In the olive groves, among the myrtles, the woodcock lurked, fat and ungainly, leaping away when disturbed with a tremendous purring of wings, looking like bundles of wind-blown autumn leaves.

  Leslie, of course, was in his element at this time. With a band of fellow enthusiasts he made trips over to the mainland once a fortnight, returning with the great bristly carcass of wild boar, cloaks of bloodstained hares, and huge baskets brimming over with the iridescent carcasses of ducks. Dirty, unshaven, smelling strongly of gun-oil and blood, Leslie would give us the details of the hunt, his eyes gleaming as he strode about the room demonstrating where and how he had stood, where and how the boar had broken cover, the crash of the gun rolling and bouncing among the bare mountains, the thud of the bullet, and the skidding somersault that the boar took into the heather. He described it so vividly that we felt we had been present at the hunt. Now he was the boar, testing the wind, shifting uneasily in the
cane thicket, glaring under its bristling eyebrows, listening to the sound of the beaters and dogs; now he was one of the beaters, moving cautiously through waist-high undergrowth, looking from side to side, making the curious bubbling cry to drive the game from cover; now, as the boar broke cover and started down the hill, snorting, he flung the imaginary gun to his shoulder and fired, the gun kicked realistically, and in the corner of the room the boar somersaulted and rolled to his death.

  Mother thought little about Leslie’s hunting trips until he brought the first wild boar back. Having surveyed the ponderous, muscular body and the sharp tusks that lifted the upper lip in a snarl, she gasped faintly.

  ‘Goodness! I never realized they were so big,’ she said. ‘I do hope you’ll be careful, dear.’

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Leslie, ‘unless they break cover right at your feet; then it’s a bit of a job, because if you miss they’re on you.’

  ‘Most dangerous,’ said Mother. ‘I never realized they were so big… you might easily be injured or killed by one of those brutes, dear.’

  ‘No, no, Mother; it’s perfectly safe unless they break right under your feet.’

  ‘I don’t see why it should be dangerous even then,’ said Larry.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Leslie.

  ‘Well, if they charge you, and you miss, why not just jump over them?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Leslie, grinning. ‘The damn’ things stand about three feet at the shoulder, and they’re hellish fast. You haven’t got time to jump over them.’

  ‘I really don’t see why not,’ said Larry; ‘after all, it would be no more difficult than jumping over a chair. Anyway, if you couldn’t jump over them, why not vault over them?’

  ‘You do talk nonsense, Larry; you’ve never seen these things move. It would be impossible to vault or jump.’

  ‘The trouble with you hunting blokes is lack of imagination,’ said Larry critically. ‘I supply magnificent ideas – all you have to do is to try them out. But no, you condemn them out of hand.’

  ‘Well, you come on the next trip and demonstrate how to do it,’ suggested Leslie.

  ‘I don’t profess to being a hairy-chested man of action,’ said Larry austerely. ‘My place is in the realm of ideas – the brainwork, as it were. I put my brain at your disposal for the formation of schemes and stratagems, and then you, the muscular ones, carry them out.’

  ‘Yes; well, I’m not carrying that one out,’ said Leslie with conviction.

  ‘It sounds most foolhardy,’ said Mother. ‘Don’t you do anything silly, dear. And, Larry, stop putting dangerous ideas into his head.’

  Larry was always full of ideas about things of which he had no experience. He advised me on the best way to study nature, Margo on clothes, Mother on how to manage the family and pay up her overdraft, and Leslie on shooting. He was perfectly safe, for he knew that none of us could retaliate by telling him the best way to write. Invariably, if any member of the family had a problem, Larry knew the best way to solve it; if anyone boasted of an achievement, Larry could never see what the fuss was about – the thing was perfectly easy to do, providing one used one’s brain. It was due to this attitude of pomposity that he set the villa on fire.

  Leslie had returned from a trip to the mainland, loaded with game, and puffed up with pride. He had, he explained to us, pulled off his first left-and-a-right. He had to explain in detail, however, before we grasped the full glory of his action. Apparently a left-and-a-right in hunting parlance meant to shoot and kill two birds or animals in quick succession, first with your left barrel and then with your right. Standing in the great stone-flagged kitchen, lit by the red glow of the charcoal fires, he explained how the flock of ducks had come over in the wintry dawn, spread out across the sky. With a shrill whistle of wings they had swept overhead and Leslie had picked out the leader, fired, turned his gun onto the second bird, and fired again with terrific speed, so that when he lowered his smoking barrels the two ducks splashed into the lake almost as one. Gathered in the kitchen, the family listened spellbound to his graphic description. The broad wooden table was piled high with game, Mother and Margo were plucking a brace of ducks for dinner, I was examining the various species and making notes on them in my diary (which was rapidly becoming more bloodstained and feather-covered), and Larry was sitting on a chair, a neat, dead mallard in his lap, stroking its crisp wings and watching as Leslie, up to the waist in an imaginary swamp, for the third time showed us how he achieved his left-and-a-right.

  ‘Very good, dear,’ said Mother, when Leslie had described the scene for the fourth time. ‘It must have been very difficult.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Larry.

  Leslie, who was just about to describe the whole thing over again, broke off and glared at him. ‘Oh, you don’t?’ he asked belligerently. ‘And what d’you know about it? You couldn’t hit an olive tree at three paces, let alone a flying bird.’

  ‘My dear fellow, I’m not belittling you,’ said Larry in his most irritating and unctuous voice. ‘I just don’t see why it is considered so difficult to perform what seems to me a simple task.’

  ‘ Simple? If you’d had any experience of shooting you wouldn’t call it simple.’

  ‘I don’t see that it’s necessary to have had shooting experience. It seems to me to be merely a matter of keeping a cool head and aiming reasonably straight.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Leslie disgustedly. ‘You always think the things other people do are simple.’

  ‘It’s the penalty of being versatile,’ sighed Larry. ‘Generally they turn out to be ridiculously simple when I try them. That’s why I can’t see what you’re making a fuss for, over a perfectly ordinary piece of marksmanship.’

  ‘Ridiculously simple when you try them?’ repeated Leslie incredulously. ‘I’ve never seen you carry out one of your suggestions yet.’

  ‘A gross slander,’ said Larry, nettled. ‘I’m always ready to prove my ideas are right.’

  ‘All right, let’s see you pull off a left-and-a-right, then.’

  ‘Certainly. You supply the gun and the victims and I’ll show you that it requires no ability whatsoever; it’s a question of a mercurial mind that can weigh up the mathematics of the problem.’

  ‘Right. We’ll go after snipe down in the marsh tomorrow. You can get your mercurial mind to work on those.’

  ‘It gives me no pleasure to slaughter birds that have every appearance of having been stunted from birth,’ said Larry, ‘but, since my honour is at stake, I suppose they must be sacrificed.’

  ‘If you get one you’ll be lucky,’ said Leslie with satisfaction.

  ‘Really, you children do argue about the stupidest things,’ said Mother philosophically, wiping the feathers off her glasses.

  ‘I agree with Les,’ said Margo unexpectedly; ‘Larry’s too fond of telling people how to do things, and doing nothing himself. It’ll do him good to be taught a lesson. I think it was jolly clever of Les to kill two birds with one stone, or whatever it’s called.’

  Leslie, under the impression that Margo had misunderstood his feat, started on a new and more detailed recital of the episode.

  It had rained all night, so early next morning, when we set off to see Larry perform his feat, the ground was moist and squelchy underfoot, and smelled as rich and fragrant as plum-cake. To honour the occasion Larry had placed a large turkey feather in his tweed hat, and he looked like a small, portly, and immensely dignified Robin Hood. He complained vigorously all the way down to the swamp in the valley where the snipe congregated. It was cold, it was extremely slippery, he didn’t see why Leslie couldn’t take his word for it without this ridiculous farce, his gun was heavy, there probably wouldn’t be any game at all, for he couldn’t see anything except a mentally defective penguin being out on a day like this. Coldly and relentlessly we urged him down to the swamp, turning a deaf ear to all his arguments and protests.

  The swamp was really the leve
l floor of a small valley, some ten acres of flat land which were cultivated during the spring and summer months. In the winter it was allowed to run wild, and it became a forest of bamboos and grass, intersected by the brimming irrigation ditches. These ditches that criss-crossed about the swamp made hunting difficult, for most of them were too wide to jump, and you could not wade them, since they consisted of about six feet of liquid mud and four feet of dirty water. They were spanned, here and there, by narrow plank bridges, most of which were rickety and decayed, but which were the only means of getting about the swamp. Your time during a hunt was divided between looking for game and looking for the next bridge.

  We had hardly crossed the first little bridge when three snipe purred up from under our feet and zoomed away, swinging from side to side as they flew. Larry flung the gun to his shoulder and pulled the triggers excitedly. The hammers fell, but there was no sound.

  ‘It would be an idea to load it,’ said Leslie with a certain quiet triumph.

  ‘I thought you’d done that,’ Larry said bitterly; ‘you’re acting as the blasted gunbearer, after all. I’d have got that pair if it hadn’t been for your inefficiency.’

  He loaded the gun and we moved slowly on through the bamboos. Ahead we could hear a pair of magpies cackling fiendishly whenever we moved. Larry muttered threats and curses on them for warning the game. They kept flying ahead of us, cackling loudly, until Larry was thoroughly exasperated. He stopped at the head of a tiny bridge that sagged over a wide expanse of placid water.