Beasts in My Belfry

Indulge the loud unseemly jape

And never brush their hair.

Belloc, Bad Child’s Book of Beasts

After I had been working for a couple of months on the lions Phil Bates met me one morning and told me that he wanted me to start on a new section. I was delighted; not that I was not happily ensconced on the lions and working very happily with Jesse and Joe but I had, after all, come to Whipsnade to obtain experience and the more sections I worked on, the more scope it would give me. My new section was known as the bears. It contained, as its name implied, all the large bumbling, biscuit-coloured brown bears in the Whipsnade collection together with a giant paddock full of zebras and herds of gnu and other antelope, ending up with the small fry in the shape of wolves and warthogs.

The section was run by one Harry Rance, a diminutive, stocky individual with a broken nose and a pair of twinkling gentian-blue eyes. I found him sitting in a small room behind the zebra sheds sipping meditatively at a large battered tin mug of cocoa and whittling at a hazel twig.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m glad they’ve shifted me to this section because you’ve got a lot of nice stuff.’

‘Nice enough stuff, boy,’ he said, ‘but you want to watch it. Most of that stuff you’ve been dealing with on the lions you didn’t go in with: with our stuff you’ve gotta go in with it, so you’ll have to watch your step. They can look tame enough but they can catch you bending.’

He jerked his thumb at a stall where a fat, dazzling, black and white zebra stallion was standing placidly chewing at a wisp of hay.

I examined the zebra carefully. He reminded me of nothing more or less than a rather outsized, overweight donkey that someone had got at with a couple of pots of paint. I felt it would be the work of a moment to slip into the stall and saddle him up.

I walked up to the stall and the zebra swung his head round and focused his ears on me. I walked a little closer and his nostrils widened into black velvety pools as he absorbed my scent. I moved still closer and still he made no move.

The moment my eyes had switched away from the stallion he tucked in his backside and, in a sudden spurt, reached the stall door in a vicious machine-gun-like rattle of hooves. He struck at me through the bars with open mouth, showing great, sharp, square yellow teeth. I leapt back so quickly that I fell over a bucket. Harry sat on his chair with his toes twisted round the legs, whittling away at his stick and chuckling silently to himself.

‘See what I mean, boy?’ he said as I picked myself up. ‘Calm as a baby; and a right bastard.’

The first few days, as usual, were spent in learning the routine chores, the feeding times of the different animals and the proportions of food that you gave each one. Probably the hardest work on the section was our weekly mucking-out of the buffalo shed. The herd had a vast acreage of sloping downland to wander in, surrounded by a tall iron fence, but they came up to the great low shed on the crest of the downs to be fed every day. Normally we emptied the food through the fence, making piles of bran, crushed linseed cake, and oats, and then, when the buffalo had finished this, we would pitchfork dozens of mangolds over the fence so that they bounced and rolled, and the buffalo moved with heavy enthusiasm after them, sinking their teeth into the crisp round bulbs with a noise like somebody splitting firewood. The apportioning of the oats and cake had to be done with care so that the older males did not get more than their fair share. The art of this was, I soon learnt, to put out five or six piles – just sufficient in quantity to keep the males fully occupied for four or five minutes – then you could move farther down the fence and make further piles of food which the cows and calves could eat in peace without getting a horn up their rump.

Seen close to, the North American buffalo is, I think, one of the most impressive of all the cloven-hoofed animals. The massive, humped shoulders covered with a thick curly mane of fur, the plus-fours of fur round the stocky front legs, the curly wig on the great skull with the Viking horns curving out of it, give an immense sense of power. For the most part they move slowly and ponderously but they could butt each other suddenly and savagely, swinging the great head like a battering ram. That they could move fast when they cared to I saw one day when a lorry that had been delivering a load of mangolds to the shed backfired as it was leaving. The herd, which had been clustered along the edge of the fence like a great chocolate-coloured cumulus of curls, turned as one animal and thundered away over the green turf of the downs at an incredible speed, kicking up chips of chalk as their hoofs bit deeply into the ground. They looked like some enormous and rather terrifying avalanche tumbling down the green slopes of the downs, and I would have hated to have been in their way.

So when it came to the job of mucking out their shed I was always filled with a certain misgiving for, as we forked up the straw and dung and piled it into barrows and wheeled it out of the shed, the old bulls of the herd (who never appeared to tire of watching this performance) would come and stand in a massive row in front of the open side of the shed and stare at us with deep interest, occasionally uttering a prolonged, sonorous snort which would make us jump. One day, one of the old bulls suddenly lumbered into the shed amongst us and we dropped our tools and fled incontinently. But we soon saw that his invasion of the shed had not been with vicious intent; he had merely spotted half a mangold which our cleaning efforts had uncovered in his straw. Having munched it up, he lumbered out on to the downs again.

On the southern slopes of their enclosure there was the favourite rolling ground of the herd and here their heavy bodies had worn away the turf and left several great naked patches of chalk, white against the green. To this rolling patch the old bulls would descend in a slow-moving, orderly line. Then they would lower themselves on to the chalk and with massive kicks from their hind legs would tumble their massive bodies on to their backs in a series of convulsive heaves. From a distance they looked as though they were trying to extricate themselves from an invisible net in which they had become entangled. The rough chalk rasped against their hides and removed the loose coat which always seemed to worry them. Presently, sufficiently relieved after half an hour or so of delicious scratching, they would scramble heavily to their feet and a convulsive quiver would travel over the soft brown skin on their flanks and belly, shaking off the loose chalk. Then they would lumber away to browse, with just a few white chips of chalk embedded in the tangled curls of their forequarters.

When they were losing their winter coats the process appeared to drive them mad and everywhere you looked the buffalo would be leaning against the fence or against the gnarled hawthorn trunks, scratching and scratching, their eyes closed in a sort of ecstasy. I discovered that they employed another method to get rid of the loose hair round their heads and shoulders. The tiny, close-growing copses of the blackthorn trees provided excellent posts to scratch an irritating back but their tightly interlaced branches hanging low to the ground were used by the buffalo as a comb, for it provided a way of shearing off the dead winter coat. You would see them taking turns, walking deliberately under the trees so that the branches caught in their thick manes and the thorns and twigs tore loose the dead hair. In the spring the blackthorn trees looked as though they were bearing a crop of some strange fruit with all the tufts and sprigs of soft, fallow-coloured hair hanging from their branches. These handfuls of soft fur would be eagerly sought out by the sparrows and yellow-hammers to use as nest lining.

When the Europeans came to North America the buffalo were almost as numerous as the stars. The great herds numbered in millions and were the biggest conglomeration of land mammals that the world has ever seen. To the Red Indian, the buffalo was everything – a house, food, clothing, even down to providing such mundane objects as needle and thread. But the Indian only killed what he could conveniently use and his depredations had no effect on the countless thousands of these great shaggy animals. But with the coming of the European and his sophisticated weapons the picture changed. The buffalo was hunted murderously and slaughtered by the thousands. To begin with the whole carcass was utilised but then it palled as a source of food. Now they were killed in the same vast quantities but for only two reasons: firstly, so that their tongues could be procured as a delicacy, and, secondly, as a deliberate policy of extermination, for it was felt that since the Indian relied so much on the buffalo, if the buffalo became extinct so would the Indian.

At this time professional buffalo hunters made their money and their reputations – people like Buffalo Bill Cody, whose biggest day’s bag was two hundred and fifty of the great beasts. As the railroad proceeded across the prairie, cutting the buffalo’s migrating roads, the animals were shot from the trains and left to rot. In places, the stench from their rotting carcasses was so great that trains passing through this huge charnel-house had to keep their windows up. With such hideous and profligate slaughter it is small wonder that in 1889 the buffalo, from being the most numerous land mammal ever recorded, dwindled to a scant five hundred specimens. Only then did a small duster of conservation-minded people, horrified at the thought that the buffalo might vanish for ever, take steps to ensure its survival. Now there are several thousand buffalo in existence and the species is safe, but never again will mankind enjoy the awe-inspiring sight of the prairie covered as far as the eye can see in all directions by a black, moving rug of buffalo.

Another animal we had on this section, which is at the moment undergoing the same fate as the buffalo, was the anoa. These are diminutive black buffalo from the Celebes. They seemed terribly small – about the size of a Shetland pony – to be relatives of the great buffalo. They had long, earnest faces and soulful eyes; their dark fur was harsh to the touch and unevenly distributed over their fat rumps so that the dark, mauvey-pink skin showed through; their hooves were small and neat and their alert ears delicately furred inside; their horns, some eight inches long, were absolutely straight and sharply pointed. The two that we had seemed very inoffensive; they would nuzzle bran from my hands and gaze up into my face with expressions of martyred innocence. It came as quite a surprise, when I read them up, to learn that they could be very dangerous indeed. Their small size, speed of movement, manoeuvrability and sharp horns had made them an animal to be reckoned with. It was because of their ferocity when disturbed that the anoas were left strictly alone by the local people in the Celebes for many years. But then, with the coming of modern weapons – particularly that absolutely indispensable one for every sportsman, the machine-gun – the anoas’ days became numbered and now their outlook is very bleak.

The Chapman zebras, on the whole, I found to be very dull animals. They formed an attractive pattern against the grass of their vast enclosure but appeared to do nothing of interest except graze and occasionally have little bickering fights with each other when, with ears back and teeth bared, they would threaten each other. The stallions, to a man, were determined to try and kill you, and as they could move with ferocious speed you always had to be on your guard.

First thing every morning, Harry and I would climb the fence into the zebra paddock and collect the velvety, dew-drenched crop of mushrooms that had sprouted there in the night. These Harry would cook in butter in a little saucepan and we would devour them for our elevenses. They made a delicious meal, but the hazards involved in mushroom collecting with a couple of murderous zebra stallions in the paddock were extreme to say the least. We worked close together, with a pitchfork handy, and when one was bending down to pick mushrooms the other was watching the zebras. One morning there was a particularly fine crop and we had filled half a bucket and were congratulating ourselves upon the enormous feed we should be able to have at eleven o’clock. I was just bending down to pick an exceptionally succulent mushroom when Hany shouted.

I looked up and the zebra stallion was thundering towards me, his ears back, his lip pulled back over his yellow teeth. Leaving the bucket, I followed Harry’s example and ran like a hare. We scrambled over the fence panting and laughing. The zebra scudded to a halt by the bucket and glared at us, snorting indignantly. Then, to our extreme annoyance, he swivelled round and, with immense accuracy, kicked the bucket in a great swooping parabola through the air, scattering white mushrooms like a comet’s tail. It took us half an hour to collect the mushrooms again.

There was one zebra, however, that I did like. This was a solitary male gravvy. These are the biggest of all the zebra and their body shape is more like a horse; their head is long and elegant, and though it bears a superficial resemblance to a donkey’s head it is really more like that of an Arab stallion with a fine, delicate, velvety muzzle. The stripes are thin and very regular, as though drawn with a ruler, and the ears are enormous, like huge furry Arum lilies. This particular zebra was, as far as I know, the only one of its kind in England and apart from its beauty and gentleness of disposition, its rarity entitled me to give it extra rations of crushed oats which it would take delicately from my hand with lips that were as soft as the mushroom tops that grew in its paddock.

To the north of the section lay a large, green, velvety paddock surrounded by a crisp crinoline of oak trees. Here lived what were undoubtedly the rarest animals in our care, a pair of young Père David deer. To look at, they were not nearly so graceful as, say, the red deer or fallow deer that lived not far away from them. By deer standards one would almost have called them ungainly. They stood some four foot high at the shoulder and they had long, earnest faces with curiously slanted, almond-shaped eyes. Under each eye there was a curious vent; a little pocket of pink skin which could open and close at will, which led nowhere and seemed to fulfil no useful purpose. They had stocky, rather donkey-like bodies; their colour was a peculiar acorn-brown, with white bellies and a heart-shaped patch on their bottoms. The shape and slant of the eyes, the curious body, the long black hooves, and – unique in the deer family – a long tufted tail like a donkey, all went to make them look as though they had wandered out of a rather uncertain Chinese print.

Their movements were clumsy, lacking in the grace that is usually displayed by their family. Occasionally when I passed their paddock my sudden appearance would startle them and they would wheel round to face me, legs spread out, ears pricked; then they would set off in panic-stricken flight to the other end of their domain with a gait reminiscent of a drunken donkey. The legs seemed to be held very stiffly and the abnormal length of the body made the whole deer roll from side to side. When you compared it to the beautiful movements of the other deer you realised just how donkey-like the Père David was. The only part of it that had any of the normal beauty of line and movement of the deer family was the head and neck.

The story of the discovery and subsequent survival of this odd-looking deer is as curious as any in the annals of natural history. In the middle 1800s Père David, a Franciscan missionary, worked and travelled in China and, like so many men of the Church in those days, took a deep interest in natural history. I suspect, in fact, that the number of unique natural history specimens he obtained greatly outnumbered the souls he saved during his sojourn in China. It was he, in fact, who first obtained specimens of the new and famous giant panda. While in Peking he heard a rumour to the effect that in the Royal Gardens of the Emperor’s Palace there existed a herd of deer – a type of deer, it was said, unknown anywhere else in China. This naturally intrigued Father David, but the problem was how to get a chance of seeing these animals. They were in a walled garden carefully guarded by Tartars. At that time, of course, foreigners were scarcely tolerated in China so Père David had to move with great caution. It shows the depth of the interest that the man had in natural history that he was prepared to take risks that could well have led to imprisonment or even death. His first step was to bribe a Tartar guard on the gate of the Royal Palace to allow him to climb up on top of the wall and survey the garden. From this vantage point he could see eventually a herd of deer feeding among the trees. It must have been a thrilling moment for him as he found himself looking at a herd of deer grazing about a hundred yards away, and realised that he was seeing a new and particularly unusual species.

He at once wrote home to Paris, to Professor Milne-Edwards at the Museum of Natural History, describing his discovery:

‘Three miles to the south of Peking there is a vast Imperial Park about thirty-six miles perhaps all round. There it is that since time immemorial deer and antelopes have lived in peace. No European can get into this park, but this spring, from the top of the surrounding wall, I had the good fortune to see, rather far off, a herd of more than a hundred of these animals, which looked to me like elks. Unfortunately, they had no antlers at this time: what characterises the animal that I saw is the length of the tail, which struck me as being comparatively as long as the tail of the donkey, a feature not to be found in any of the cervides that I know. It is also smaller than the northern elk. I have made fruitless attempts to get the skin of this species. It is quite impossible to have even portions and the French Legation feel incapable of managing to procure this curious animal by unofficial approaches to the Chinese Government. Luckily I know some Tartar soldiers who are going to do guard duty in this park and I am sure, by means of a bribe, that I shall get hold of a few skins which I shall hasten to send you. The Chinese give to this animal the name of Mi-Lou, which means the four odd features, because they consider that this deer takes after the stag by its antler, the cow by its hooves, the camel by its neck and the mule or even the donkey by its tail.’

Père David was now determined to obtain specimens, but this was not so easily done. He knew that, in spite of the penalty for such an action being death, sometimes the Tartar guards fed on poached venison, so with the aid of more bribes he succeeded in getting them to agree to save for him the skins and the skulls of the next ones they ate. In due course this was done and Père David shipped the skins and skulls back to the Museum of Natural History in Paris where it was discovered that they were indeed a species new to science. In recognition of Father David’s great contribution to oriental natural history they were named Elaphurus davidianus in his honour.

Naturally, zoological gardens and private collections in Europe wanted to obtain specimens of this rare deer and, indeed, if any deer could be called rare, Père David’s could, for the only known living herd was in the Imperial Palace Gardens, and there is still a certain amount of doubt as to where they came from in the first place. It is almost as though they had evolved within the grounds of the Emperor’s summer palace. As a wild animal, it is now believed to have been extinct two or three thousand years ago. Semi-fossill remains show that before this time it apparently roamed wild about the Honan district of China. The Chinese authorities, however, were not anxious for any of their national treasures to be exported, but at length, after prolonged negotiations, several pairs of the deer were sent to various zoos in Europe and a pair was sent to the then Duke of Bedford’s extraordinary private menagerie at Woburn.

Not long after this the Yangtze River flooded its banks and the flood waters breached the wall round the Emperor’s Palace Gardens in several places. Most of the deer escaped into the surrounding countryside where of course they were immediately slaughtered by the starving peasantry. There still remained a tiny nucleus in the gardens; but it seemed that the Père David deer was dogged by bad luck for next came the Boxer Rebellion and during this time the Tartar guards seized the opportunity of eating the remaining deer. So now the species was extinct in its home of origin and the total world population consisted of animals scattered about Europe.

The Duke of Bedford, one of the earliest and most intelligent conservationists, decided that he must add to his tiny herd at Woburn if the species was to be saved, so he negotiated with the zoological gardens that had specimens of the deer and eventually managed to establish a herd of eighteen. This was the total world population. Gradually, living under ideal conditions at Woburn, the animals increased in number until, at the time I was at Whipsnade, the Woburn herd numbered nearly five hundred. Now, the duke felt, was the time when the animals should be distributed because to have every living representative of the species congregated in one spot was risky in the extreme. An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, for example, could have exterminated the Père David very successfully. Therefore, the duke started by giving a pair to Whipsnade as the nucleus of a breeding herd.

While I was on the bear section came the news that the duke was going to let several other zoos have pairs of this deer and was going to donate yet another pair to Whipsnade. We were going to have the task of collecting all the baby animals as soon as they were born at Woburn and hand-rearing them until they were of a suitable age to be transported to their new homes. The reason for this rather laborious method was the extreme nervousness of the deer. They would quite easily, if frightened – and they seemed more apt to be frightened by practically anything than any other animal I have met – display a stupidity that was unbelievable, such as charging a stone wall time and time again in an effort to break through. It was felt that if the baby deer were hand-reared by us they would at least be used to human beings, in which case perhaps unusual sights and sounds would not panic them to the same extent as if they had been caught as semi-adults.

When I discovered that I and another boy, called Bill, had been chosen to assist Phil Bates in the task of hand-rearing these deer I was overwhelmed. The babies were to be kept in two big stables and as they had to be fed during the night as well as very early in the morning Bill and I would take turns to sleep in the small shed up in the woods near the stables so that we could be on hand to help Phil both at night and during the day. The great day came and we went over to Woburn in the lorry.

The parkland at Woburn was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen. This, of course, was in the days before merry-go-rounds and enormous parties of sightseers had turned the place into a sort of three-ring circus. The massive and beautifully spaced trees, rolling green sward, and the gently moving herds of deer made a picture that was unforgettable, one that would have made Edward Landseer burst into tears of frustration. The babies, all wide-eyed and startled-looking, were each inside a sack with only their heads poking out. This was a precautionary measure so that they could not stand up or try to run and break a leg while travelling in the lorry. We loaded them on to a thick layer of straw and surrounded them with bales of straw as a cushioning. Then Bill and I took up our stations in the back amongst this forest of tiny heads and the lorry proceeded to Whipsnade at a gentle thirty miles an hour while we watched the babies closely to see what effect the journey was having on them. When the lorry first started to move, one or two of them kicked and bucked a bit inside their sacks but they soon settled down, and by the time we reached Whipsnade several of them had fallen asleep with the bored expression of professional railway travellers.

We carried them into the stables and cut away the sacking, then, in that incredibly wobbly and pathetic manner of young deer, they all staggered inebriatedly to their feet and weaved about the stable. It was only at this point that they seemed to realise that something was missing and so they started revolving in circles, bleating like goats – an astonishingly long, harsh ‘baaaa’. Hastily, Bill and I milked the herd of goats that had been carefully installed against the babies’ arrival, poured the still-warm, frothing milk into bottles, added the necessary vitamin drops and cod liver oil, and then, holding a bottle apiece, we entered the stable. Père David deer are just as stupid when babies as any other form of life and at that first feed I think Bill and Phil and I got more goat’s milk in our trouser turn-ups, in our pockets, and squirted into our eyes and ears than the babies consumed. They very soon got the hang of the idea that they should suck on the teat and thus obtain milk, but the coordination between their mouths and their brains left a lot to be desired and we had to be constantly on the alert, for they would mumble the teat around in their mouths until eventually the end was poking out of the side of their mouths, then, scrunching it between their teeth they would send a jet of goat’s milk straight into your eye. However, within two days they had mastered this and had decided that Phil, Bill and I constituted a joint mother-figure. There were eight of them and so we divided them up and put four in each stable, but as they grew bigger it became more and more difficult, for their exuberance at mealtimes was such that the moment they saw us they would deafen us with their harsh bleats and as soon as the stable door was open there would be a cascade of deer. On several occasions both Bill and I were knocked down by the fawns and we had to roll quickly out of their way, for they would stamp all over us with complete lack of discrimination and their very long hooves were exceedingly sharp.

I think it was at this time that I suddenly realised the full meaning of the term ‘rare’. Hitherto, when people talked of a rare animal, I had always been under the impression that this simply meant that it was rare in museum collections or in zoological gardens, but actual rarity in numbers had not really impinged on me. This, I think, was because people tended to say an animal was rare rather as though this were an accolade, as though it were something the animal should be proud of. But with the advent of the Père David deer and working so closely with them, it suddenly occurred to me that an astonishing number of animals were rare in quite a different sense. I started my researches on the subject and kept a massive file of the results. I did not know it at the time but I was producing a rather shaky and amateurish version of the Red Data Book now published by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The results of my researches horrified me: figures like ‘total population of Indian rhinos left – 250; Sumatran rhinos – 150; Bomean rhinos – 20; world population of Flightless Rail – 72 pairs; Arabian Oryx shot and machine-gunned to a possible total population of 30,’ and so on. The list, it seemed, was unending. It was then that I realised what the true function of a zoological garden should be; for, while trying to protect these animals in the wild state, it was obviously of urgent necessity that breeding groups should be set up in captivity as widely spread all over the world as possible. It was then that I conceived the idea that, should I ever acquire a zoo of my own, its main function would be this one work: to act as a reservoir and sanctuary for those harried creatures.

When it was my turn on duty with the deer I gave a lot of thought to these problems. At midnight, with the deer’s great, liquid eyes glittering in the light of the storm lantern as they butted and sucked greedily at the bottles of warm milk, it seemed to me that by any standards these animals had as much right to existence as I did. Getting up at five in the morning to give them their bottle feed was no penance. The oak woods in the first pale spears of sunlight would be as gold-green as a quetzal’s tail, leaves blurred with a gossamer coating of dew, and as one walked through the great trunks towards the stable where the deer were kept the birdsong was like an enormous chorus of thanksgiving in a green cathedral. Then one would open the stable door and be knocked down by one’s loving charges and they would nuzzle, bleating at one, slapping one with their long, wet, warm tongues. Though the precarious state of so many animal species all over the world still filled me with despondency, at least by helping to rear Père David deer I felt I was doing something concrete, however infinitesimal the gesture was.

By far the most entrancing animals on the section were our small herd of white-tailed gnus. All the gnus are pretty unbelievable antelopes to look at but the white-tailed has a particularly heraldic and mythical look about it. The head is blunt and the muzzle broad; the horns, curved like hunting horns, sweep down low over the eyes before curling upwards into sharp points so the animal is forced to peer under them in a myopic manner; a white beard juts out under the chin and another tuft of bristles decorates the top of the muzzle; the white mane is thick – a forest of uncombed tufts and sprigs; and a great sporran of hair grows between the forelegs. The long, sweeping, silky white tail is their best feature and they use it with all the elegance of an oriental dancer with a scarf. Combined with this extraordinary appearance (which makes them look as though they have been made up out of bits of several different animals) are the gnus’ extraordinary movements and the posturing they indulge in at the slightest provocation. To watch these idiotic creatures prancing, gyrating and snorting, their tails curling up over their backs, was one of the funniest sights I have seen.

Their movements were so complex that it was difficult to fit them into a category. It could really only be described as something like an acute attack of St Vitus’s Dance. Some of it resembled folk-dancing of sorts but it seemed a little vigorous. The only folk dances I have ever witnessed were danced by elderly, aesthetic ladies with fringes and strings of beads and they were nothing like the gnus’ wild jitterbugging. Certainly there was a suggestion of ballet about it – of the more energetic and sweat-provoking sort – but the movements were too unorthodox for even the most frantically modern ballerina. This dance – or disease – is well worth watching. When the curtain rises, as it were, the gnus are facing you, bunched together, frowning through a forest of tufts and sprigs of hair. One member of the troop assumes the leadership and he (or she) starts the dance by giving a purring snort of astonishing loudness, a sort of preliminary ‘now girls, all together’. Then the whole lot minces a few steps on slender legs; they stand again, legs quivering, tails twitching almost in unison; then the leader gives another snort which invariably has the effect of making the whole troop lose their heads. Forgotten is the grouping and precision which delights the eye in ballet. With stamping, polished hooves, away they go, tails curled, bucking, kicking legs thrown out at ridiculous and completely unanatomical angles. The leader keeps up a barrage of frantic snorts – order which no one obeys. Then, quite suddenly, they all stop and stare at you from under their horns in horrified disapproval at your unmannerly laughter.

It was, in fact, the white-tailed gnus’ habit of dancing and its insatiable curiosity, that led it to the brink of extermination. In the early days, during the colonisation of South Africa, the white-tailed gnu was found in thousands and the early Dutch settlers killed it relentlessly, first because its meat, dried into biltong, could be used as food instead of slaughtering valuable cattle and sheep, and, secondly, the quicker it was out of the way, they thought, the more grazing room there would be for domestic stock. So in a very short time what had been the most numerous of the African antelopes became one of the rarest. Its engaging curiosity, which would make a herd stand there peering at the hunters while they were shot down, was partially the cause of their downfall and also the endearing fact that they loved to perform their dances and would prance and waltz round wagons bristling with guns, thus forming one of the easiest of targets. Now the white-tailed gnu is no longer a truly wild animal. Just over two thousand are left in small parks and on private farms and a scant hundred specimens in the zoos of the world.

As I watched our gnus posturing, rampant on a field of green grass, I thought how dull the African scene must be now without these gay, frenetic dancers of the veld. It seems that always progress destroys the happy and original, making everything banal, replacing these joyous prancing creatures with the dull, cud-chewing, utilitarian cow.

As well as the white-tailed gnu, we had a solitary brindled gnu, an animal much the same in shape though a bit thicker set and with a gingery fawn coat with chocolate brindles and a black mane and tail. If anything, this animal was even more mentally defective than the white-tailed gnu; his gyrations were even more wildly extravagant and his deep, belching roars of alarm rattled from deep in his chest like machine-gun fire. He was an incredibly nervous beast – more than liable, if you frightened him, to break a leg or do himself some other injury – so it was with feelings of acute apprehension that Harry and I received the news that Brinny had to be caught up and transported to London Zoo where they had acquired a mate for him.

‘’Fraid so, boy,’ said Harry, stirring our breakfast of mushrooms which was sizzling in the pan.

‘What are we going to put him in?’ I inquired. ‘We haven’t got anything big enough, surely?’

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘They’re sending a crate down on the lorry, Thursday. Then we crate ’im up and back ’e goes on the lorry.’

Thursday dawned and the lorry arrived with a tall, narrow crate into which we had to try and cajole an exceedingly nervous, high-spirited and agile gnu. We had let Brinny out into his paddock for a brief airing that morning; I had then enticed him back into the double stable by bribing him with oats, and now we had him safely locked up in one of the loose boxes. Next we had to manhandle the massive crate off the back of the lorry and get it into position facing the door of the empty loose box, then to raise the sliding door on the end of the crate. This took us some time and we were forced, not unnaturally, to make a fair bit of noise over it, which Brinny took grave exception to. He belched and snorted and reared and several times attempted to kick the side of the stable out. Once having got the crate in position, we went away for half an hour to discuss strategy and to let Brinny calm down a bit.

‘Now, boy,’ said Harry, ‘this is what we’ll do, see. I’ll be atop the crate and ’andle the slide, but once I’ve got that slide up I can’t see when ’e goes into the crate so you’ll ’ave to tell me when to drop the slide, see? Now, I want you to take the ladder into the stable next door, then you take this bit of two-be-two, lean over the dividing wall and when ’e gets near the crate just give ’im a tap on the nimp – only a tap, mind – that’s all ’e’ll need, just enough to make ’im run into the crate. Then, when ’e’s in, you give a yell and I’ll drop the slide, see?’

We trooped back to the stable, where Brinny was still gurking fiercely, and I manoeuvred the ladder into the stable next door, took my piece of wood and climbed up and peered over the partition. Brinny stared up at me, horror-stricken that I should do such a dastardly thing as to take him in the rear. His mane and beard looked wild and uncombed and gave him the air of having just arisen, dishevelled, from his bed. His eyes rolled, his nostrils grew wide with every snort and his curved black horn glinted like knives as he pranced and gyrated within the confines of the stable.

I eased my piece of wood over the partition and made sure of my foothold on the ladder.

Brinny, who had been staring up at me with the expression of a spinster who had at last actually found a man under her bed, naturally waltzed round to face the door and watch as the slide on the crate was slowly raised. He snorted like a volcano and minced from side to side nervously As he was not watching me I manoeuvred my piece of wood into position. I grasped it firmly with one hand and cupped my other hand over the end. I could not have chosen a more unfortunate grasp.

I carefully lowered my piece of wood towards Brinny’s rotund and quivering backside. As the end of my stick touched his glossy hide it was as though I had touched a match to a short fuse on a barrel of T.N.T. Everything seemed to happen at once. Feeling the stick, Brinny wasted no time, he leapt straight into the air and tried to kick his heels over his horns. He caught my piece of wood and shot it skywards like a rocket so that it crashed against the roof of the stable. My hand, which was cupped round the end of it, was therefore crushed against the ceiling as though caught by a pile-driver. The pain was so excruciating that I dropped the wood and tried to struggle back over the partition which I was half lying on. I could feel the ladder swaying under me. At that moment Brinny uttered a particularly prodigious snort, put his head down and rushed into the crate.

‘Slide, Harry, slide!’ I yelled desperately just as the ladder gave under me and I fell into the stable. The slide crashed into position and we had Brinny imprisoned – but only just, for he had galloped into the crate and hit the end of it with his horns, making the whole structure sway like a ship in a hurricane. Then he attacked the end of the crate with short jabs of his horns and splintered wood began to fly in all directions. People started running about in pursuit of hammer and nails to repair the damage before Brinny could force his way out. Harry, perched precariously on the swaying crate, peered down at me.

I got up a trifle shakily; my hand felt as though it had been trodden on by an elephant and was already beginning to swell. ‘I’m okay, but I think I’ve bust my hand,’ I said.

This proved to be correct, for when I had been taken down to the hospital and X-rayed, they found that I had cracked three of the bones in the palm of my hand. I was lucky, really, not to have had them splintered and crushed through the flesh for my hand had been sandwiched between wood and wood with considerable force. I was given pain-killers which did everything but kill pain – and told to stay off work for forty-eight hours to allow the bones to settle, as the doctor put it.

This was my first honourable wound in the course of duty, as it were, and so I was gratified that Mrs Bailey treated me with the concern and respect for one who, if he had not actually won the V.C., had come very close to it.

That evening I was sitting by the fire nursing my aching hand when Charlie came home.

‘Heard just now from the office,’ said Charlie, wiggling his slippered feet appreciatively in front of the fire. ‘We’re to go home at the end of the week.’

‘Of course I’m pleased,’ said Mrs Bailey. ‘But what’s going to become of the boy?’

‘You’re to go into the bothy. They’re opening that up,’ said Charlie to me.

The bothy was a huge, institution-like building which had been constructed to house single-members of the keeper-staff and had never, to the best of my knowledge, been used for this purpose.

‘That great barn of a place!’ exclaimed Mrs Bailey. ‘Why, with winter coming on he’ll freeze to death.’

‘Well, they said there’s several people moving in,’ said Charlie. ‘Joe from the works staff and a new boy, and they’re putting old Fred and his missis in charge to cook and such-like.’

Mrs Bailey had had a long-standing feud with old Fred Austin which dated from the time when Fred had delivered some firewood to the cottage and Mrs Bailey had been complaining about her chilblains.

‘No,’ said Mrs Bailey, who did not like being called Ma but was always anxious to find a remedy for her chilblains. ‘What do you do?’

‘Stick your feet in the pot first thing in the morning,’ old Fred advised. ‘A drop of pee does ’em a world of good.’

Needless to say, Charlie and I had become hysterical when told this story, but Mrs Bailey had not found it a bit funny.

Now she said, ‘Well, I don’t envy anyone being looked after by them. Here, Gerry, you better have some more pie. Eat up while you can. Gracious knows what those two will give you to eat, poor soul.’

I must say I shared her view. The thought of leaving the Baileys’ comfortable cottage for the great barn of the bothy and exchanging Mrs Bailey’s lavish home cooking for God knows what concoction thought up by Fred and his wife was appalling, but I could do nothing about it.

5. A Gallivant of Gnus