There are a handful of books I read when I was young that I now know sowed the early seeds of ideas, hopes and beliefs that have developed and stayed with me all my life. So important were these books to me, then and since, that, for a long while, I had not dared even to attempt to write a story that explored the same worlds, the same themes. It was as if these books were hallowed ground, so well written, so known, so familiar, so beloved that I deliberately steered well clear of them. These great iconic stories were for reading, for enjoying, for remembering, not for echoing in my own writing.
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling was one such book, and Kipling one of my great author heroes. For decades of my writing life, I avoided jungles and wild children, and elephants. And yet, something was beginning over the years to niggle me. I had come to espouse, in my own life and in my writing, the principles and philosophy behind Kipling’s tale. As I grew up, I came to understand that we, the human species, are simply a part of the natural world about us, not superior to it, or separate from it. I am sure the naturalist David Attenborough also played a great part in developing my awareness of all this, and the poet Ted Hughes as well.
We are successful as a species, too successful, it seems to me, for our own good, and certainly too successful for the good of the planet. We are super-intelligent hunter-gatherers, who have come to dominate the world about us, and to feel as if we rule it. In so doing, we have come to look upon our fellow creatures as lesser creatures, to be exploited for food or entertainment, and to be exterminated if necessary, if that is in our interest, whenever they get in our way. We want to be top predator. We are mankind. We want to remake the world as we want it to be. We have the right and we have the power. And the more we assume the right, the more powerful and clever and exploitative we become of the world of nature, the more we come to feel separate from the world about us, rather than an integral part of it.
Our religions often support and confirm this arrogance, this assumption of superiority. God chose us – and he must be right after all – set us apart and above all the other animals. We were his chosen creatures. But The Jungle Book told me a different story; The Elephant’s Child too. In both stories there is a deep love and respect for our fellow creatures. There is an assumption that we are simply one of the beasts, and should be learning to live in harmony with them, and with the wildness of nature too, living close to it, and learning to understand and respect the Earth and all its living creatures and plants. A wild boy could do this in The Jungle Book, had to do this. It was the only way to survive. He was one of the animals, wild as they were, living alongside them, facing their dangers, struggling to survive with them.
In this largely urban world we are ever increasingly removed from our connection with this world of nature. One way of restoring our connection to the wild, to the countryside – and, for most of us, this is all that is left of the wild – is to go there, not just to watch a TV programme about it, not just to look and take a photograph either, but to go away, to stay long enough to have some sense of belonging, to reconnect, to learn that the fish in the river, the herons and the otters, all the creatures that live there, are reliant upon us to keep the river clean for their survival, that the water is theirs as much as ours; that when we grow and harvest our corn and our hay, we should leave space for the ground birds to nest, for rodents and rabbits, for deer. Yes, we glean our food and sustenance from the countryside, but it is a bounty we must not take for granted, and one we must learn to share. To look up and see two buzzards up there floating on a thermal, hunting, feeding their young, is to begin to understand their needs, their struggle to survive. Drink the cows’ milk, eat carrots, dig potatoes, and we understand how the Earth sustains us and how it will only go on doing so for as long as we sustain it. This has largely been the thinking behind Farms for City Children, the charity that Clare and I began forty years ago now. Over 120,000 city children have come to live for a week on the three farms we work on. Every visit for every child reinforces a new sense of belonging to nature, our reliance upon it and our responsibility to live in harmony with it.
Working on this project all these years alongside farmers and country people and teachers and children, I found it became more and more important to the writer in me to try to think of a way not to echo The Jungle Book but to tell my own story, a story now more urgently important and relevant than ever before. We are overcrowding the planet, we are overheating the Earth and its seas, we are overexploiting its resources, decimating the wildlife and plant life whenever it becomes inconvenient, whenever we feel it inhibits our progress. We have become consumed by greed.
I had discovered as I was thinking about all this, before I had ever decided to write it, that there are already a large number of wild-child stories, some legendary, many not fictional at all. There are well-documented stories from ancient and more modern times, from all over the world, about children lost or discarded, living wild with the animals. Most famous, of course, is the legendary story of Romulus and Remus, who were reared in the wild by a she-wolf and who grew up to be founders of Rome. But there really were, not that long ago, children living among wild dogs in the streets of urban Russia, others discovered hiding in the forests of France in the eighteenth century, or deep in the rural heart of India. There is documentary evidence for many of these stories, photographs, even. Of course, invention may have exaggerated the truths behind them, but that is storytelling.
The more I read of these wild children, the more fascinated I became and the more I was tempted to dare to think of writing my own Jungle Book. If Kipling could do it, I could do it! But all these wild-child stories I knew, legendary or otherwise, had come from the past, were cocooned in the comfort of the past. I had to make a break with all that and create a wild child that lives now, not back in the days of Kipling and empire, not in the antique world of Tarzan. I wanted, somehow, to connect my story to the urban world of today. But try as I did, I could not find a way to do this. How in the world of today, with all our sophisticated communication technology, could a child ever become wild, truly out of touch? And how could a child of today ever get lost in a jungle and survive, credibly? The story stayed on hold in my mind, waiting for its moment. The moment came on the wave of the greatest natural disaster and tragedy of my lifetime.
It happened on Boxing Day 2004, when the most powerful tsunami in anyone’s living memory struck the shores of Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Thailand. It left over 300,000 dead. It overwhelmed and destroyed wherever it struck, laying waste entire regions. For weeks and months, the newspapers and television were full of the devastation and grieving. The violence of it, the scale of misery the tsunami caused horrified the world and touched our hearts. Nations and people did not simply agonize, they did what they could to help, to save lives, to provide shelter and food and water, to give and support, wherever it was needed. It was never enough. We all knew that despite all these efforts, the suffering was appalling. And it was the depth of the suffering that made us all feel helpless and hopeless. It was in the midst of all this that I read one day in a newspaper the first positive story to come out of all this suffering. It lifted my spirits, and, ultimately, it was to do more than that. It was this story that enabled me to begin to write my wild-child story, and with an elephant too!
Here is the story I read, in brief. An English family was on holiday in Sri Lanka – if I remember rightly. On Boxing Day 2004, they were on the beach below their hotel, and one of the children, a boy, was going for an elephant ride, something he had been longing to do. He was already some distance from the family, the elephant led by a mahout, the boy riding up in the howdah, loving it all, when the elephant began to become agitated. She had sensed something was wrong. She became wilder and wilder, at last breaking away from the mahout and charging up the beach, away from the sea and into the jungle, the boy clinging on in his howdah. Higher and higher they went, leaving the beach and sea behind them. And by now, the danger the elephant had sensed was growing with every moment, but was still largely unnoticed.
The sea appeared to be retreating into itself. Strangely, weirdly, it was being sucked away, leaving vast expanses of sand covered with thousands of stranded flapping fish. The children, mainly from fishing families, could not believe their luck and rushed out to gather the fish. But then, too late, they looked up and saw the great wave rushing in. Children, tourists, everyone tried to make a run for it, but the speed and the power of the tsunami wave swept all before it away, people, houses, hotels, cars, animals. It tore down entire villages and forests. And all the while, the elephant and the boy on her back were making their way higher and higher, deeper and deeper into the jungle, at every step distancing themselves from the disaster that was engulfing everything and everyone behind them.
The story goes that after it was over, the family, who had survived, went looking for the boy, fearing the worst. After days of searching they heard about an elephant who had emerged from the jungle with an English boy up in the howdah, safe, saved. It was him! Their boy had survived! In gratitude for all the elephant had done, the family provided for her for the rest of her life. The story may be embellished in parts – who knows? It was in a newspaper after all! But there was truth at its heart. For those, like me, who read it, it was a shining light of hope in the midst of this terrible tragedy. And for the writer in me, the door into my wild-child story had opened. Now I knew how my wild child of today would find himself in the depths of the jungle, and with an elephant as a companion! And that jungle really was a place of orang-utans and Sumatran tigers, a jungle under threat, great swathes of the forest being slashed and burnt to make room for palm oil plantations for our toothpaste and our peanut butter. Here my wild child and his elephant had to learn to survive together with the other animals, indeed fight the good fight to save the jungle itself. But I knew I had more to understand, and more dreamtime to do before I could begin. This would be an epic story, and I had to get it right.
In my story-making, nothing is more important than my dreamtime. I know I have to be patient, to allow time for ideas or dreams (call them what you will) to weave themselves together in and around research, and to give time for happenstance to help a story on its way. I have learnt never to face the empty page until I am ready to tell my dream down onto it, and then to tell it as if I am confiding to my best, most trusted friend in the world, and to tell it as I see it, hear it and feel it. So with Running Wild, I told myself, learn about orang-utans, who might well be extinct in ten years, learn about Sumatran tigers, who will not last even that long, learn about the decimation of our tropical forests, learn about elephants, their unique intelligence, their supreme sensitivity – they too are threatened with exploitation and extinction. Throw off any cloak of “civilization”, learn to be wild. Becoming wild was the hardest thing to do. But over the years, I have found my own way of making such leaps of imagination. I have become horse in War Horse, dog in Born to Run, and young again in almost all the stories I tell. Now I would be young and wild. To do it, I would have to know this whole new world of the jungle as my wild boy does, discover it with him, hope and fear with him in his struggle to survive. I would become wild boy. I would run wild.
In a strange way I actually found myself missing the tiger. I kept hoping I would see him again. More than that, I was even longing for it. As I lay there one night in my sleeping nest, I kept remembering the tiger poster on the wall of the classroom back at school. I could see it so clearly, lit by the afternoon sun slanting in through the classroom window. That tiger used to gaze down at me with the very same look in his eyes as the tiger Oona and I had encountered on the jungle trail that day. There was a poem underneath the picture. We’d all had to learn it by heart for homework, but I could only ever manage to recite the first verse before drying up. I couldn’t remember even that much now, but the first couple of lines did come back to me, and I spoke them out loud again and again, because I thought it sounded so much how the tiger had looked to me, as if the poet had been there and seen him with me. And anyway, I thought Oona would like to hear it.
‘“Tyger Tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night.
What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”’
I got a deep rumble of appreciation from down below, and I knew she’d be smiling away down there in the darkness. I wished now that I had learned it better so that I could have recited the rest of it for her. As I went to sleep that night, I tried to see the words again as they were printed on the poster, but all I could visualize were snatches of lines, bits and pieces. However, the harder I tried, the more I was remembering. I hoped it was all there somewhere, deep in my memory, lost for the moment, but not entirely forgotten.
When we did see the tiger again, it turned out to be in no sense a repetition of the earlier stand-off. There was no hissing this time, no trumpeting. This time he came wandering on to the track in front of us, and looked back at us over his shoulder, as if to say: “Are you going my way? That’s fine by me.” I was tingling with apprehension and excitement, and I could feel that Oona remained wary too. She did not show it though. As she walked on she never broke the rhythm of her stride. We followed the tiger through the jungle for most of that morning.
After a while, I began to relax, more and more sure all the time that the tiger was not doing this because he wanted to eat me. It was simply because he liked the company. There could be no other explanation. He had the whole forest to wander in, and yet he had chosen to wander along with us. When Oona paused to eat from time to time, the tiger would lie down in the shadow of the trees nearby and clean himself, then yawn, stretch out and wait until Oona was ready to go on again.
So at ease did I become that day with our new travelling companion that I felt I might even try to talk to him. But then I didn’t seem to know what I should say. I mean, what do you say to a tiger? It was so important to say the right thing, but I couldn’t find the right words. So I decided in the end to recite the poem for him – the bits I could remember anyway – because I felt the words were full of wonder and respect, and I hoped he might pick up on that. Somehow – and to be honest, I have no idea how – when I began to recite the poem this time, every line, then every verse, all of it, just flowed from my memory, almost as if the poet was inside my head and speaking it out for me, maybe because he too knew this was the right moment for his poem to be heard, that this listener was the one he’d written it for, the listener who mattered to him more than any other. I remembered his name then, suddenly. Blake, William Blake. It said so on the poster, right at the bottom.
“Tyger Tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night.
What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
As I spoke it, I so wanted the tiger to listen to me. I was encouraged by his ears, that were turning constantly, backwards, forwards, this way and that. I recited the poem again, projecting my voice this time, so that the tiger should be in no doubt that the poem had been written just for him, and that I was reciting it just for him too. I was so pleased with myself for remembering it. I recited the poem over and over again, to prove to myself that I really could do it, and to drum it into my brain so that I would never be able to forget it.
Just as I began it for the umpteenth time, the tiger stopped in his tracks, and turned to look up at me. At that moment I had no doubt whatsoever that he had been listening, no doubt that he knew these words were about him, and for him. His eyes burned into mine, just for a moment, and I felt there was no hunger there any more.
It wasn’t mere curiosity either. It was a meeting of minds. Shortly after this, the tiger lifted one of his front paws, shook it as if he’d just stood on a thorn, then sprang lightly away into the shadows of the trees, and vanished.
The tsunami on 26 December 2004 was one of the world’s worst natural disasters. It affected five million people in fourteen countries, with 230,000 dying in the immediate flooding, and many succumbing to disease afterwards. One and a half million lost their homes. Indonesia was the worst hit, with waves travelling up to two kilometres inland.
A tsunami (from the Japanese word for “harbour wave”) is a series of waves created when a large volume of water is rapidly displaced. They can be caused by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or landslides. But they can also be caused by humans, through the detonation of a nuclear device at sea, for example. Because of the immense volumes of water and energy involved, tsunamis can be devastating, and it is not possible to prevent them. Early warning is rare, but it is the only protection. At least twenty-five tsunamis were recorded in the last century, many in the Asia-Pacific region.
Some believe that animals have a sixth sense, providing advance warning of such natural disasters. Sri Lankan media sources claimed that elephants moved inland when the tsunami struck in 2004, away from the approaching noise. At the Yala National Park three elephants were seen running away from the beach. On India’s Cuddalore coast, where thousands of people perished, it was reported on the radio that buffaloes, goats and dogs were found unharmed. Flamingos had flown to higher ground beforehand. However, the consensus of scientific opinion is that no “sixth sense” is involved. For instance, Whit Gibbons, an ecologist at the University of Georgia, argues that “Many animals detect certain natural signals, such as the early tremblings of an earthquake, long before humans. This means they have opportunity to react before we can… As far as running inland to get away from a tsunami, I think any fast animal would probably do so because that’s where the forests are… The woods [and higher ground] are the safest place for most animals. Completely natural and not at all mystical.”
Sadly, animals in the area affected by the 2004 tsunami are at greater risk from humans than they are from natural disasters. Indonesia is home to many famous endangered animals – elephants, orang-utans and rhinos. Less well-known endangered species also living there are the clouded leopard, the sun bear and the Bornean gibbon. Now forests all over the region are being logged, burnt and cleared in order to make way for agricultural land. Half the world’s tropical timber, used for paper and furniture manufacture, comes from this area.
Orang-utans are closely related to humans, sharing 97 per cent of our DNA, and are very intelligent. The word “orang-utan” is derived from the Malay words meaning “person of the forest”. They are natives of Indonesia and Malaysia, and are currently found only in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra. “Great apes” as opposed to monkeys (monkeys usually have tails), they are arboreal, which means that they spend nearly all their time in the trees (where they build nests) and hardly ever come to the ground, unlike other apes such as chimpanzees, gorillas and humans. They have longer arms than other apes and their hair is reddish brown. Again, unlike gorillas and chimpanzees, orang-utans are not true knuckle-walkers and travel over the ground by shuffling on their palms with their fingers curved inwards. They are more solitary than other apes, with males and females only coming together to mate. Although orang-utans are generally passive towards humans, aggression towards other orang-utans is very common and they can be fiercely territorial.
Mothers stay with their babies until they reach the age of six or seven. But many baby orang-utans are taken from their mothers to be sold as pets, and the adults are hunted for meat. Females give birth to just one infant at a time every eight or nine years, making their populations very susceptible to even very low levels of hunting. The mother orang-utan is almost always killed to capture her infant. For every orang-utan orphan that is sold, six to eight orang-utans die in the process of capture and transport.
Over the last hundred years, numbers of orang-utans in the wild are thought to have dropped from over 300,000 to less than 6,600 in Sumatra, and 54,000 in Borneo. Unless dramatic action is taken, it is likely that the Sumatran orang-utans will be the first of the great apes to become extinct.
