My Family and Other Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  Up in the hills, in the miniature forests of heather and broom, where the sun-warmed rocks were embossed with strange lichens like ancient seals, the tortoises would be emerging from their winter sleep, pushing aside the earth under which they had slept and jerking slowly out into the sun, blinking and gulping. They would rest until the sun had warmed them, and then would move slowly off towards the first meal of clover or dandelion, or maybe a fat, white puff-ball. Like other parts of my territory, I had the tortoise hills well organized; each tortoise possessed a number of distinguishing marks so that I could follow its progress. Each nest of stonechats or black-caps was carefully marked so that I could watch progress, as was each papery mound of mantis eggs, each spider’s web, and each rock under which lurked some beast dear to me.

  But it was the heavy emergence of the tortoises that would really tell me that spring had started, for it was not until winter was truly over that they lumbered forth in search of mates, cumbersome and heavily armoured as any medieval knight in search of a damsel to succour. Having once satisfied their hunger, they became more alert – if such a word can be used to describe a tortoise. The males walked on their toes, their necks stretched out to the fullest extent, and at intervals they would pause and utter an astonishing, loud, and imperative yap. I never heard a female answer this ringing, Pekinese-like cry, but by some means the male would track her down and then, still yapping, do battle with her, crashing his shell against hers, trying to bludgeon her into submission, while she, undeterred, would try to go on feeding in between the bouts of buffeting. So the hills would resound to the yaps and slithering crashes of the mating tortoises and the stonechats’ steady ‘tak tak’ like a miniature quarry at work, the cries of pink-breasted chaffinches like tiny, rhythmic drops of water falling into a pool, and the gay, wheezing song of the goldfinches as they tumbled through the yellow broom like multi-coloured clowns.

  Down below the tortoise hills, below the old olive groves filled with wine-red anemones, asphodels, and pink cyclamen, where the magpies made their nests and the jays would startle you with their sudden harsh, despairing scream, lay the old Venetian salt pans, spread out like a chessboard. Each field, some only the size of a small room, was bounded by wide, shallow, muddy canals of brackish water. It consisted of a little jungle of vines, maize, fig trees, tomatoes as acrid-smelling as stinkbugs, watermelons like the huge green eggs of some mythical bird, trees of cherry, plum, apricot, and loquat, strawberry plants, and sweet potatoes, all forming the larder of the island. On the seaward side, each brackish canal was fringed with cane breaks and reed beds sharply pointed as an army of pikes; but inland, where the streams fell from the olive groves into the canals and the water was sweet, you got lush plant growth and the placid canals were emblazoned with water lilies and fringed with golden king-cups.

  It was here that in the spring the two species of terrapin – one black with gold spots and one pin-striped delicately with grey – would whistle shrilly, almost like birds, as they pursued their mates. The frogs, green and brown, with leopard-patched thighs, looked as though they were freshly varnished. They would clasp each other with passionate, pop-eyed fervour or gurk an endless chorus and lay great cumulus clouds of grey spawn in the water. In places where the canals were bordered by shade-giving cane breaks, fig and other fruit trees, the diminutive tree frogs, vivid green, with skin as soft as a damp chamois leather, would puff up their little yellow throat pouches to the size of walnuts and croak in a monotonous tenor voice. In the water, where the pigtails of weed moved and undulated gently in the baby currents, the tree frogs’ spawn would be laid in yellowish lumps the size of a small plum.

  Along one side of the fields lay a flat grassland area which, with the spring rains, would be inundated and turn into a large shallow lake some four inches deep, lined with grass. Here, in this warm water, the newts would assemble, hazelnut-brown with yellow bellies. A male would take up his station facing the female, tail curved round, and then, with a look of almost laughable concentration on his face, he would wag his tail ferociously, ejaculating sperm and wafting it towards the female. She, in her turn, would place the fertilized egg, white and almost as transparent as the water, yolk black and shining as an ant, onto a leaf and then, with her hind legs, bend the leaf and stick it so that the egg was encased.

  In spring the herds of strange cattle would appear to graze on this drowned lake. Huge, chocolate-coloured animals with massive, backward-slanting horns as white as mushrooms, they looked like the Ankole cattle from the centre of Africa but they must have been brought from somewhere nearer, Persia or Egypt perhaps. They were tended by strange, wild, gypsy-like bands who in long, low, horse-drawn wagons would camp by the grazing area: the savage-looking men, dusky as crows, and the handsome women and girls with velvet black eyes and hair like mole-skin would sit gossiping or basket-making round the fire, speaking a language I could not understand, while the raggedly dressed boys, thin and brown, jay-shrill and jackal suspicious, would act as herdsmen. The great beasts’ horns would clack and rattle together like musketry as they barged each other out of the way in their eagerness to feed. The sweet cattle-smell of their brown coats lingered in the warm air after them like the scent of flowers. One day the grazing area would be empty; the next day, as if they had always been there, there would be the jumbled encampment caught in a perpetual spider’s web of smoke from its pink, glittering fires and the herds of cattle moving slowly through the shallow water, their probing, tearing mouths and splashing hooves frightening the newts and sending the frogs and baby terrapins off in panic-stricken flight at this mammoth invasion.

  I greatly coveted one of these huge, brown cattle, but I knew that my family would not under any circumstances allow me to have anything so large and fierce looking, no matter how much I pleaded that they were so tame that they were herded by mere toddlers of six or seven. The nearest I got to possessing one of these animals was quite close enough so far as the family was concerned. I had been down in the fields just after the gypsies had killed a bull; the still-bloody hide was stretched out and a group of girls were scraping it with knives and rubbing wood ash into it. Nearby was piled its gory, dismembered carcass already shining and humming with flies and next to it was the massive head, the fringed ears lying back, the eyes half-closed as if musing, a trickle of blood from one nostril. The sweeping white horns were some four feet long and as thick as my thigh and I gazed at them longingly, as covetous as any early big game hunter.

  It would be impractical, I decided, to buy the whole head; even though I was convinced of my mastery of the art of taxidermy the family did not share this belief. Besides, there had recently been a bit of unpleasantness over a dead turtle I had unthinkingly dissected on the veranda and so everyone was inclined to view my interest in anatomy with a jaundiced eye. It was a pity, really, for the bull’s head, carefully mounted, would have looked magnificent over the door of my bedroom and have been the pièce de résistance of my collection, surpassing even my stuffed flying fish and my almost complete goat skeleton. However, knowing how implacable my family could be, I decided reluctantly I would have to settle for the horns. After a spirited piece of bargaining – the gypsies knew enough Greek for that – I purchased the horns for ten drachmas and my shirt. The absence of the shirt I explained to Mother by saying I had ripped it so badly falling out of a tree that the remnants were not worth bringing back. Then, triumphantly, I carried the massive horns up to my room and spent the morning polishing them, nailing them to a plaque of wood, and then hanging the whole thing with great care on a hook over my door.

  I stood back to admire the effect and at that moment heard Leslie’s voice raised in anger.

  ‘Gerry!’ he shouted. ‘Gerry! Where are you?’

  I remembered that I had borrowed a tin of gun oil from his room to polish the horns with, meaning to restore it before he noticed. But before I could do anything the door burst open and he appeared belligerently.

  ‘Gerry! Have you got my blo
ody gun oil?’ he inquired.

  The door, returning on the impetus of his entrance, swung back and slammed. My magnificent pair of horns leaped off the wall as if propelled by the ghost of the bull that had possessed them and landed on top of Leslie’s head, felling him as though he had been pole-axed.

  My first fear was that my beautiful horns might be broken; my second, that my brother might be dead. Both proved to be erroneous. My horns were intact and my brother, his eyes still glazed, hoisted himself into a sitting position and stared at me.

  ‘Christ! My head!’ he moaned, clasping his temples and rocking to and fro. ‘Bloody hell!’

  As much as to dilute his wrath as anything, I went in search of Mother. I found her in her bedroom brooding over the bed, which was covered with what appeared to be a library of knitting patterns. I explained that Leslie had been, as it were, accidentally gored by my horns. As usual, Mother looked upon the gloomy side and was convinced that I had secreted a bull in my room which had disembowelled Leslie. Her relief at finding him sitting on the floor apparently intact was considerable but tinged with annoyance.

  ‘Leslie, dear, what have you been doing?’ she asked.

  Leslie gazed up at her, his face slowly taking on the colour of a sun-mellowed plum. He had some difficulty in finding his voice.

  ‘That bloody boy,’ he said at last, in a sort of muted roar. ‘He tried to brain me… hit me with a pair of sodding great deer horns!’

  ‘Language, dear,’ said Mother automatically. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to.’

  I said, no, I had intended no harm, but in the interests of accuracy I would point out that they were not deer horns, which were a different shape, but the horns of a species of bull which I had not as yet identified.

  ‘I don’t care what bleeding species it is,’ snarled Leslie, ‘I don’t care whether it’s a bloody bastard brontosaurus horn!’

  ‘Leslie, dear,’ said Mother, ‘it’s quite unnecessary to swear so much.’

  ‘It is necessary,’ shouted Leslie. ‘And if you’d been hit on the head by something like a whale’s ribcage you’d swear too.’

  I started to explain that a whale’s ribcage did not, in fact, resemble my horns in the least but I was quelled by a terrible look from Leslie and my anatomical lecture dried in my throat.

  ‘Well, dear, you can’t keep them over the door,’ said Mother, ‘it’s a most dangerous place. You might have hit Larry.’

  My blood ran cold at the thought of Larry felled by the horns of my bull.

  ‘You’ll have to hang them somewhere else,’ Mother continued.

  ‘No,’ said Leslie. ‘If he must keep the bloody things, he’s not to hang them up. Put them in a cupboard or somewhere.’

  Reluctantly, I accepted this restriction, and so my horns reposed on the window-sill, doing no further damage than to fall regularly on to our maid Lugaretzia’s foot every evening when she closed the shutters, but as she was a professional hypochondriac of no mean abilities she enjoyed the bruises she sustained. But this incident put a blight on my relationship with Leslie for some time, which was the direct cause of my unwittingly arousing Larry’s ire.

  Early in the spring I had heard echoing and booming from the reed beds around the salt pans the strange roaring of a bittern. I was wildly excited about this for I had never seen one of these birds and I was hopeful that they would nest, but pinpointing the exact area in which the birds were operating was difficult for the reed beds were extensive. However, by spending some considerable time perched in the higher branches of an olive tree on a hill commanding the reeds, I succeeded in narrowing down the field of search to an acre or two. Soon the bitterns stopped calling and I felt sure they were nesting. I set off early one morning leaving the dogs behind. I soon reached the fields and plunged into the reed beds, moving to and fro like a questing hound, refusing to be tempted away from my objective by the sudden ripple of a water snake, the clop of a jumping frog, or the tantalizing dance of a newly hatched butterfly. Soon I was in the heart of the cool, rustling reeds, and I then found, to my consternation, that the area was so extensive and the reeds so high that I was completely lost. On every side I was surrounded by a fence of reeds and their leaves made a flickering green canopy above me through which I could see the vivid blue sky. Being lost did not worry me, for I knew, if I walked long enough in any direction, I would hit the sea or the road; but what did worry me was that I could not be sure if I were searching the right area. I found some almonds in my pocket and sat down to eat them while I considered the problem.

  I had just eaten the last one and decided that my best course was to go back to the olive trees and re-establish my bearings when I discovered that without knowing it I had been sitting within eight feet of a bittern for the last five minutes. He was standing there, stiff as a guardsman, his neck stretched up straight, his long, greenish-brown beak pointing skywards, while from each side of his narrow skull his dark, protuberant eyes gazed at me with a fierce watchfulness. His body, pale fawn, mottled with dark brown, merged into the shimmering shadow-flecked reeds perfectly, and to add to the illusion that he was part of the moving background, the bird swayed from side to side. I was enchanted and sat watching him, hardly daring to breathe. Then there was a sudden commotion among the reeds and the bittern abruptly stopped looking like a reed and launched himself heavily into the air as Roger, with lolling tongue and eyes beaming with bonhomie, came crashing into view.

  I was torn between remonstrating with Roger for having frightened the bittern and praising him for his undoubted feat of having tracked me down by scent over a difficult route of about a mile and a half. However, Roger was obviously so delighted with his own achievement that I had not the heart to scold him. I found two almonds I had overlooked in my pocket and gave them to him as a reward. Then we set to work to search for the bitterns’ nest. We soon found it, a neat pad of reeds with the first greenish egg lying in the cup. I was delighted and determined to keep a close watch on the nest to note the progress of the young; then, carefully bending the reeds to mark the trail, I followed Roger’s stumpy tail. He obviously had a much better sense of direction than I had, for within a hundred yards we had reached the road and Roger was shaking the water off his woolly coat and rolling in the fine, dry, white dust.

  As we left the road and made our way up the hillside through the olive groves sparkling with light and shade, coloured with a hundred wild flowers, I stopped to pick some anemones for Mother. While I gathered the wine-coloured flowers I brooded on the problem of the bitterns. When the hen bird had reared her brood to the stage where they were fully feathered, I would dearly have liked to kidnap two and add them to my not inconsiderable menagerie. The trouble was, the fish bill for my present creatures – a black-backed gull, twenty-four terrapins, and eight water snakes – was considerable and I felt that Mother would view the addition of two hungry young bitterns with mixed feelings, to say the least. Pondering this problem, it was some time before I became aware that someone was piping an urgent, beckoning call on a flute.

  I glanced down at the road below and there was the Rose-Beetle Man. He was a strange, itinerant pedlar I frequently met on my expeditions through the olive groves. Slender, foxy-faced, and dumb, he wore the most astonishing garb – a huge, floppy hat to which were pinned many strings tied to glittering gold-green rose beetles, his clothes mended with many multi-coloured bits of cloth so that it looked almost as though he were wearing a patch-work quilt. A great, bright blue cravat completed his ensemble. On his back were bags and boxes, cages full of pigeons, and from his pockets he could produce anything from wooden flutes, carved animals or combs, to bits of the sacred robe of St Spiridion.

  One of his chief charms as far as I was concerned was that, being dumb, he had to rely on a remarkable ability for mimicry. He used his flute as his tongue. When he saw that he had caught my attention he took the flute from his mouth and beckoned. I hurried down the hill, for I knew that the Rose-Beetle Man sometimes had th
ings of great interest. It was he, for example, who had got me the biggest clam shell in my collection and, moreover, with the two tiny parasitic pea-crabs still inside.

  I stopped by him and said ‘good morning’. He smiled, showing discoloured teeth, and doffing his floppy hat with an exaggerated bow, setting all the beetles that were tied to it buzzing sleepily on the end of their strings like a flock of captive emeralds. Presently, after inquiring after my health by leaning forward and peering questioningly and anxiously, wide-eyed, into my face, he told me that he was well by playing a rapid, gay, rippling tune on his flute and then drawing in great lungfuls of warm spring air and exhaling them, his eyes closed in ecstasy. Thus having disposed of the courtesies, we got down to business.

  What, I inquired, did he want of me? He raised his flute to his lips, gave a plaintive, quavering hoot, prolonged and mournful, and then, taking the flute from his lips, opened his eyes wide and hissed, swaying from side to side and occasionally snapping his teeth together. As an imitation of an angry owl it was so perfect that I almost expected the Rose-Beetle Man to fly away. My heart beat with excitement, for I had long wanted a mate for my scops owl, Ulysses, who spent his days sitting like a carved totem of olive wood above my bedroom window and his nights decimating the mouse population around the villa. But when I asked him the Rose-Beetle Man laughed to scorn my idea of anything so common as a scops owl. He removed a large cloth bag from the many bundles with which he was encumbered, opened it, and carefully tipped the contents at my feet.

  To say that I was struck speechless was putting it mildly, for there in the white dust tumbled three huge owlets, hissing and swaying and beak-cracking in what seemed to be a parody of the Rose-Beetle Man, their tangerine-golden eyes enormous with a mixture of rage and fear. They were baby eagle owls and, as such, so rare as to be a prize almost beyond the dreams of avarice. I knew that I must have them. The fact that the acquisition of the three fat and voracious owls would send the meat bill up in the same way as the addition of the bitterns to my collection would have affected the fish bill was neither here nor there. Bitterns were things of the future, which might or might not materialize, but the owls, like large, greyish-white snowballs, beak-clicking and rumba-ing in the dust, were solid fact.