Up to now, except for his purring, he has been very silent, but just recently, in the evenings, he has started to teach himself to roar.
They are very quiet, thoughtful sort of roars, as though he is practicing. You have to listen carefully to hear them at all, but they will gradually get louder as soon as he is satisfied with them.
Lion
Of course, he is still a baby, by lion standards, and at times he gambols round his cage and behaves just like a gigantic kitten. He has a great log of wood in his cage, and sometimes he pretends that this is a juicy buffalo, and he stalks it carefully, moving slowly forward, inch by inch so as not to frighten the log into running away. Then, suddenly, he pounces, and wrapping his legs round it rolls over and over on the ground, growling to himself, and biting at the log. Another toy that he has, of which he is very fond, is a big, black rubber bucket. He likes to chase this round the cage, patting it with his big paws, just like a kitten with a ball of wool. One day a lady asked if we had got Leo from a circus, because he was doing such clever tricks. 1 went to see what he was up to, and found that he had succeeded in jamming the bucket on his head, and was walking proudly about the cage, wearing it like a rather curious hat.
Another delightful little animal that, like the lion, lives on meat, is the genet (Jen-et), different species of which are found in Africa and Asia. They are very handsome little creatures, with their long, slender bodies, and their golden fur covered with chocolate colored spots, like a miniature leopard. Genets make very good pets, if you can get a young one and hand-rear it, and they are like a mixture of a dog and a cat in their habits. They will climb very skilfully, and gallop along the ground like a dog when you go for walks. I have seen them in the wilds, and I always admired the way they could rush up the vertical trunk of a tree as though they were running on level ground, and then leap from branch to branch as skilfully as a monkey. The only time I decided that I did not like a genet was one day in the West African forest. There was a special place that I used to go' to near some wild fig trees, and there I would hide myself and watch the various forest animals that came to feed on the figs. The first would be the touracous—beautiful golden green birds with long tails. They would perch'in the branches and peck away at the ripe figs. While they were feeding, they would sometimes be joined by a troupe of monkeys. Well, the touracous and the monkeys between them used to drop as much fruit on the ground as they actually ate, and so as soon as they had left the trees all the little ground-living animals used to come out and feed off the leftovers lying on the ground. In the undergrowth beneath the trees lived some delightful mice. They were a pale fawn color, with rows of white spots running in stripes from nose to tail, and they were about the size of a house mouse. They would come out, their whiskers wiffling, and bite pieces off the fallen figs, and sit up on their hind legs and eat them, uttering little squeaks of pleasure. If danger threatened, they would all leap straight up in the air, as though they were on springs, and then come down and sit quivering until they were sure the danger was past. On this particular morning they were all feeding among the grassroots, when a genet happened to pass by, back from a night’s hunting and on his way to bed. The mice were all busy quarreling over a particularly large and delicious fig, and so they did not notice the genet, and before I could do anything to warn them, he had leapt daintily into the air and landed among them. Of course, they all dropped their bits of fig and ran, but some of them were not quick enough, and the genet continued his way to bed, carrying in his mouth two dead mice. I had grown very fond of those mice, and I was annoyed with the genet. Still, I suppose he was very hungry, and you can hardly blame him.
The mongoose family contains different kinds, some quite small, others the size of a small dog. The black-footed mongoose comes from West Africa, and it is not only one of the largest of the mongooses, but also one of the rarest. We call our black-footed mongoose Ticky, and I got her in a father curious way. I was travelling by truck through the thick West African forest, on my way to my base camp in the mountains. We had been travelling all day in the Genet terrific heat, and I was tired, hungry and hot. I decided that we
would stop at the next village and buy a big bunch of bananas. As usual when you stop at an African village, all the villagers came out of their huts and surrounded our vehicle, and stood watching us, completely fascinated. I bought my bananas and ate them, watched by a silent crowd of about a hundred people. Suddenly I noticed that a girl in the crowd was carrying something in her arms, something white that wriggled. I called her, and she came forward shyly, and there in her arms was a baby black-footed mongoose. I was amazed, for it was such a rare animal and so hard to find in the forest that I had expected to have to search for weeks before I could add one to my collection. She told me that her father had found it in a hollow log when out hunting. After some bargaining I bought the mongoose, which was only about the size of a kitten, and was then faced with a problem. I had nothing to put it in, and I did not like to let it wander about in the front of the truck, in case it got tangled up with the gears or the brake and caused an accident.
Black-footed
Mongoose
There was nothing for it but to button it up inside my shirt. The first half hour Ticky spent wandering round and round my body and sniffing loudly. Then she decided to try to dig a hole in my stomach with her sharp little claws, and this I had to put a stop to. Then I gave her a piece of banana to eat, and she was so excited by this that she forgot her manners and wet all over me. Eventually she went to sleep, lying across my stomach, holding a large bit of my skin in her mouth and sucking it vigorously. I was never so glad to arrive at camp, where I could get Ticky out from inside my sodden
Coatimundi
shirt and put her in a cage. However rare an animal is, when it tries to dig a hole in your stomach, you begin to wonder if it was worth getting.
Another creature which, although tame, did me considerably more damage than Ticky the mongoose, was Mathew the coati (ko- WAT-ee). Coatis are rather charming little creatures found in South America. They lived in great troupes in the forest, shuffling along with their flat-footed, rather bear-like walk, their long rubbery tip- tilted noses wiffling from side to side as they investigate every rotten log or stone, in search of snails, scorpions, birds’ eggs and other delicious tidbits. Mathew, when I got him in Northern Argentina, was quite young. He had been captured in the forest by a native hunter, who had kept him for about two months before selling him to me, and so he was quite tame. I kept him on a collar and a long lead attached to a tree near my camp, and nearby was a big pile of logs. Mathew used to spend the whole day carefully turning over these logs with his paws, uttering excited squeaks and bird-like trillings as he found woodlice or snails. Sometimes I would go into the forest and fetch him a large, really rotten log, and this he loved. He would spend an hour or so carefully picking it to pieces, searching for tree frogs or snails, or centipedes which lived in the rotten interior, and, by the time he had finished, the log would be just a powdery heap of sawdust. When I brought my collection of animals back I had found a young female coati as a wife for Mathew, and we called her Martha. We built a nice cage, introduced Martha to Mathew, and put them in it. They seemed very pleased, not only with the cage but with each other, and after they had spent a day in their new quarters I went in to see how Mathew was getting along. In the old days, when I had called him. Mathew would run towards me. twittering with delight, and let me lift him in my arms, and would then proceed to lick me all round the neck. On this occasion he ran forward as usual, and I started to lift him up. I had got him half-way up to my neck, when he suddenly turned round and sank his teeth into my elbow. I managed to shake him off, but not before he had torn a great hole in my elbow that needed six stitches in it. and that made my arm useless for three weeks. I was very puzzled at Mathew turning on me like this, and the only reason I can think of is that he had a new home and a new wife, and he felt he ought to show- me that this was his territory and that 1 could not just walk in whenever i liked. But whatever the reason, it just goes to show that you cannot be too careful with wild animals, however tame they appear to be.