I was now in a quandary: in twenty-four hours I was due to leave for France. There I had organized and stirred up a bees’ nest of helpers and advisers. The BBC were also under the impression that the trip was a foregone conclusion. If I put it off at this juncture, I would have put a tremendous amount of people to a lot of trouble for nothing, and yet I felt I could not leave N’Pongo unless I was satisfied that he was either on the mend or beyond salvation. Then, the day before I was due to leave, he suddenly turned the corner. He started drinking his Complan—a highly concentrated form of dried milk—and eating a variety of fruits. By the evening of that day he showed considerable signs of improvement and had eaten quite a bit of food. The next morning I went down very early to look at him, for I was due to catch my plane to Dinard at eight-thirty. He was sitting up on the shelf, and although he still looked emaciated and unwell his eyes had a sparkle that had been lacking for the past few days. He ate quite well and drank his Complan, and I felt that he was at last on the road to recovery. I drove down to the airport and caught the plane to Dinard, and we motored down to the south of France. It cost a small fortune in long-distance calls to Jersey to keep myself appraised of N’Pongo’s progress, but every time I telephoned the reports got better, and when Jeremy informed me that N’Pongo had drunk one pint of Complan and eaten three slices of watermelon, two bananas, one apricot, three apples, and the whites of eight eggs, I knew there was no further cause for alarm.
By the time I returned from France, N’Pongo had put on all the weight he had lost, and when I went into the mammal house there he was to greet me, his old self—massive, black, and rotund, his eyes glittering mischievously as he tried to inveigle me close enough to the wire so that he could pull the buttons off my coat. I reflected, as I watched him rolling on his back and clapping his hands in an effort to attract my attention, that, though it was delightful to have creatures like this—and of vital importance that they should be kept and bred in captivity—it was a two-edged sword, for the anxiety you suffered when they became ill made you wonder why you started the whole thing in the first place.
8
ANIMALS IN TRUST
Dear Mr Durrell,
You will probably be astonished to receive a letter from a complete stranger…
The zoo has now been in existence for five years. During that time we have worked steadily towards our aim of building up our collection of those animals which are threatened with extinction in the wild state. Examples of these are our chimpanzees and a pair of South American tapirs, but the pair of gorillas are perhaps one of the most important of our acquisitions, and one of which we are extremely proud. Apart from these, we have over the past year obtained a number of valuable creatures. It is not always possible to buy or collect these animals, so recently we exchanged an ostrich for a binturong, a strange, small bear-like animal with a long prehensile tail, which comes from the Far East; and a spectacled bear, whom we have christened Pedro.
Spectacled bears are the only member of the family to be found in South America, inhabiting a fairly restricted range high in the Andes. They are a blackish brown colour with fawn or cinnamon spectacle markings round the eyes and short waistcoats of a similar colour. They grow to be as large as the ordinary black bear, but Pedro, when he arrived, was still quite a baby and only about the size of a large retriever. We soon found that he was ridiculously tame and liked nothing better than to have his paws held through the bars while he munched chocolate in vast quantities. He is an incredible pansy in many ways, and several of the attitudes he adopts—one foot on a log, for example, while he leans languidly against the bars of his cage, with his front paws dangling limply—remind one irresistibly of the more vapid and elegant young men one can see at cocktail parties. He very soon discovered that if he did certain tricks the flow of chocolates and other sweets increased a hundredfold, and so he taught himself to do a little dance. This consisted of standing on his hind legs and bending over backwards as far as he could, without actually falling, and then revolving slowly—a sort of backward waltz. This never failed to enchant his audience. To give him something with which to amuse himself, we hung a large empty barrel from the ceiling of his cage, having knocked both ends out of it: this formed a sort of circular swing and gave Pedro a lot of pleasure. He would gallop round the barrel and then dive head first into it, so that it swung to and fro vigorously. Occasionally he would dive a bit too strenuously, come shooting out of the other end of the barrel, and land on the ground. At other times, when he was feeling in a more soulful mood, he would climb into his barrel and just lie there, sucking his paws and humming to himself, an astonishly loud, vibrant hum as though the barrel contained quite a large dynamo.
Pedro was at first in temporary quarters, but, as we hoped to get him a mate eventually, we had to build him a new cage. During the period while his old quarters were being demolished and his new one being erected, he was confined in a large crate to which, at first, he took grave exception. However, when we moved it next to one of the animal kitchens and the fruit store, he decided that life was not so bad after all. The staff were constantly in view, and nobody passed his crate without pushing a titbit to him through the bars. Then, two days before he was due to be moved into his new home, it happened. Jacquie and I were up in the flat, having a quiet cup of tea with a friend, when the inter-communication crackled and Catha’s voice, as imperturbable as if she was announcing the arrival of the postman, said, “Mr Durrell, I though you would like to know Pedro is out.”
Now, although Pedro had been small when he arrived, he had grown with surprising rapidity and was now quite a large animal. Also, although he appeared ridiculously tame, bears, I am afraid, are among the few creatures in this world which you cannot trust in any circumstance. So, to say that I was alarmed by this news would be putting it mildly.
I fled downstairs and out of the back door. Here, where the animal kitchen and fruit store form an annex with a flat roof, I saw Pedro. He was galloping up and down on the roof, obviously having the time of his life. The unfortunate thing was that one of the main windows of the flat overlooked this roof, and if he went through that he could cause a considerable amount of havoc in our living quarters. Pedro was plainly unfamiliar with the substance called glass, and as I watched he bounded up to the window, reared up on his hind legs, and hurled himself hopefully forward. Luckily it was an old-fashioned sash window with small panes of glass, and this withstood his onslaught. If it had been one big sheet of glass, he would have gone straight through it and probably cut himself badly. But with a slightly astonished expression on his face he rebounded from it; what appeared to be a perfectly good means of getting into the flat was barred by some invisible substance. I rushed round to where the crate was, in an endeavour to lift up the sliding door, which, as always happens in moments of this sort of crisis, stuck fast. Pedro came and peered at me over the edge of the roof and obviously thought that he should come down to my assistance, but the long drop made him hesitate. I was still struggling with the door of the cage when Shep appeared with a ladder.
“We’ll never get him down without this,” he said. “He’s frightened to jump.”
He placed the ladder against the wall, while I continued my struggles with the door of the crate. Then Stephan came on the scene and was coming to my aid when Pedro suddenly discovered the ladder. With a little whoop of joy, he slid down it like a circus acrobat and landed in an untidy heap at Stephan’s feet.