My Natural History

by Simon Barnes

  Meanwhile, I was having one of the great times of my life. Denis’s voice would wake me at 5.30 and I would wait until I had recognised ten birds on call before stirring: a process that normally took about 30 seconds. Then up for a walk: maybe with elephants and lions, maybe with antelopes and birds. Breakfast on return was followed by a shower and a nap. Then I would write up my notes. I had found some ancient staff-backed foolscap notebooks when I tidied my mother’s study after the funeral, so I took them to Africa. I thought it was appropriate. They are filled with my italic scrawl: the unoriginal thought that Böhm’s spine-tail looks more bat than bird; a mention of the duet of striped kingfishers, together with thoughts about why the valley has so many duettists; the urge, on seeing a pride of lion in affectionate corporate slumbers, to fling myself in among them and snuggle up. “To my surprise, everyone else in the vehicle chorused an agreement,” I wrote of this incontinent confession. After lunch, I would sit by myself in the ebony glade till it was time to swallow a mug of tea and set off for the afternoon drive. We would stop, always at some appropriately beautiful place, for sundowners, for me always a bottle of Mosi, the local beer. After that we would drive through the night with the spotlight, looking for the night shift, quite different from the day shift: white-tailed mongoose and genet and honey badger. But always, we were seriously hunting for hunting leopards. Luangwa is the world capital for leopards. Find a leopard and we sent home happy clients: and most of the clients we sent home were pretty happy.

  There was one evening when we had no clients at all. Manny proposed that we took the backroom staff out for a drive: there was enthusiastic agreement. So off we went, Manny at the wheel, Jess and I crammed tightly together – no hardship, at least not for me – in the front, and seven of the backroom boys wedged hip to hip in the back, not ideal for anyone except Fackson, whose build made for comfort in most circumstances. And so, with a great deal of giggling and shi-yiking, we set off. “Attenzione alla testa,” Manny called as we passed beneath a low branch.

  At once the game was on. Fackson began it, of course, a man with a huge appreciation for a jape. “Perché?” he called. “Che terribile! Bloody bad driver!”

  At a stroke, they all decided to be querulous Italian clients. Troppo veloce! Troppo lento! No me piace – voglio un leopardo! Manny gave as good as he got. Zitto! Zitto, eh! Maladetti italiani! Magari se avessi dei clienti simpatici africani! We rolled on through the bush in holiday humour making a mighty din and laughing at the tops of our voices. But as soon as we reached Manny’s favourite ebony glade there was an instant and perfect silence.

  Leopard.

  Is there anything more beautiful? Doubly beautiful in the dark picked out by the spotlight, the beam from our spot making him glow as if the light came from within. The perfect honey colour, with the immaculate maculations, the black rosettes. The long tail carried in a graceful arc, like an italic swash to complete this perfectly calligraphed beast. But the way he moved most of all: as if beneath the skin a gallon of oil lubricated every joint, making each movement preternaturally smooth, almost obscenely graceful. I never saw a pride of lions without wanting to join them: I never saw a leopard without wanting to be one.

  And a leopard on business has his beauty tinged with the fizz of danger, with the fascination of narrative. What happens next? You have to find out, you must turn the page. The leopard flattened himself belly down, moving with sinuous wiggles towards the group of impala we could see resting up in the glade. Many of them: the more there are, the less likely it is to be you that gets eaten. There is safety in numbers all right: for all except one.

  We stopped. Manny switched the engine off to create a voluptuous silence. We shone the light obliquely now, so that we didn’t give away the leopard’s position and spoil his hunt, so that we didn’t dazzle the impala and make the hunt unfairly easy. We sat in a long silence, watching the dance of life and death take place before us: the endlessly patient stalk, the restlessness of the crowd of impala, who knew that something was amiss, but didn’t know precisely what or where. They also knew that to break ranks and stand out from the crowd was suicide. Hold tight, then: and hope it’s someone else that gets eaten tonight.

  The silence was perfect and stayed perfect. No whispered conversations, no urgent requests, no shifting of positions despite our buttock-to-buttock seating arrangements. No real clients had ever held a comparable silence. And almost as imperceptibly as the growing of a plant, the leopard moved in: a process of terrible subtlety. It seemed as if this balance, this silence, this tension, would endure for ever.

  And then the killing.

  A silent charge, the explosion of alarm, the barks of horror, the crashing of undergrowth as a hundred impala fled, while one stayed behind, locked in the leopard’s death-grip. The leopard’s perfection was now marred by terrible panting: an explosion of effort such as this costs the leopard everything it has. The impala’s perfection was for ever gone: its own grace a fading memory.

  For most of our Italian clients, an animal is not an animal until it has been accorded an Italian adjective. Anything small or young: ché carino, how sweeeeet. A leopard: always ché bello, how beautiful. And a hyena was always ugly: ché brutto!

  It was a hyena that now took over the drama, busting from the shadows of our vehicle – it must have been using us for cover – and cantering with a Halloween grin down to the hapless impala and the almost equally hapless leopard. The leopard fled at once: what else could he do? Fighting made no sense at all. A leopard must be perfect if he is to hunt, for a leopard hunts alone. An injured leopard is a hungry leopard, perhaps a dead one. His strategy is – must always be – to avoid confrontation. His strategy is perfection: and so he spun on his perfect haunches and vanished into the bush.

  “Noooooo!” Manny roared out his fury: the boys behind him shouted with the rage of disappointment. There was no joking now: Bastard! Bastard! And we charged him. Against all the rules of the park, we charged, bucketing downhill, everyone holding on with desperation, bashing and bruising each other, and the hyena looked up at this roaring, hollering, brightly lit dragon bearing down on him. He made the only possible decision. He fled too.

  But not at once. Before doing so, he made a snatch at the impala with those nightmare jaws and ran off with something dangling from them. It was an unborn impala. The impala ewe was pregnant, and the hyena performed this lightning embryectomy to ensure that his evening had not been wasted. And then he too vanished.

  Manny was awfully contrite afterwards. He knew the leopard would not come back and claim his own: he knew that the hyena, once we left, would be the one who came back and finished the lot. He knew that an anthropomorphic reading of natural events helps no one; after all, he had read a lot of books. He knew that the ecosystem operates in a way that works for hyenas and leopards and for that matter, impalas, and it will continue to work without our interference. But the horrible unfairness of the morality play of the bush had overwhelmed him as it had overwhelmed us all. We came back to the camp with a million contradictions in every mind.

  I learned many things from my two months in the bush, not least that two months in the bush is as good a way of dealing with grief as exists anywhere on earth. I also learned, though perhaps I knew already, that wildlife, or indeed any kind of life, is not what you want it to be. Your own vision, your own hopes, are very inadequate instruments for understanding what is before you. Life is what it is, and it will carry on whether you agree with its principles or not. The meaning of life is life. Thus the hyena and the leopard and the impalas continued their interwoven lives, while I went back home, saddened and overjoyed.

  Manny went on to become the most popular and successful guide in the valley. He travelled to England and the United States and elsewhere. He married an Englishwoman, and he now lives with her in Kent, returning to Africa periodically to manage his African affairs and get back to the wild. He has an MSc in tourism and conservation and he lectures in ecology, conservation,
biodiversity and wildlife management. He and his wife Cheryl also run the High Five Club, a charity which operates poverty alleviation projects in Africa. Jess now manages Flat Dogs Camp in the valley with her husband Ade. Aubrey now works as a guide for another camp. Perry died of an AIDS-related illness. Bob runs Birding With Bob, specialising in avian adventures in Africa. Mchenja Camp still exists, though it has lost three metres of river frontage because of the relentless action of the Luangwa. It is very much smarter these days; the time of the long-drop has long passed. It is as beautiful as ever, and is run by Norman Carr Safaris.

  18. Rabbit

  Oryctolagus cuniculus

  He couldn’t walk, but he could trundle all right. Never a great one for crawling, he got the hang of the trundler as soon as he could stand, the trundler being the usual sort of brick-barrow, with a handle that was shoulder high, at least for him. He could lean on that and step out precariously across the carpet. Naturally, there were a few falls – and it’s a nasty thing to fall on – but he was soon more upright than not. And the weather was beginning to get better, and every now and then he would essay a trundle about the garden, so of course, our thoughts turned to adventure.

  Joe was coming up to one, and was a great adventure in himself. Rum thing, parenthood: you spend all those months worrying about it – and that moment when you go home with a baby for the first time is the single most terrifying thing that ever happens to anybody – but once your bluff has been called, it’s as if it’s always been like that: as if you’d always been three and not two.

  Many of my friends declared that having children wouldn’t change their lives. They more or less instantly discovered that you might as well say that death won’t change your life. Everything is changed. I remember the first evening when Cind and I dared to leave Joe in the hands of Cind’s mother for a couple of hours: we went to Pizza Express and talked about Joe. Well, what else was relevant?

  He got bigger, as they tend to. He stopped lying about and started rolling. After that, he did marine iguana impersonations: holding himself up on two straight arms. Then he stood against chairs and tables, and soon, he began to crawl and then almost instantly, to trundle. So Joe and I went on an adventure, not our last: and this particular adventure became a daily ritual for what seems like an age. It can only have been a few weeks.

  We trundled out of the garden, through the back gate that opened onto the little wood, and along the broad path. Then we turned left, on the path that led along the railway track to the station; as I have said, our house was built on the roof of a railway tunnel. We went as far as the place where the view opened out, a considerable distance to trundle, especially for someone who couldn’t actually walk: a couple of hundred yards. But it was worth doing, because it was a place of enchantment.

  We could look down and see wonders. We could see trains; we could see rabbits. The trains went past every few minutes: expresses from King’s Cross going to Yorkshire and Newcastle and Scotland; suburban trains to Stevenage and Cambridge; the local ones that went as far as Welwyn Garden City. We waved to the trains, identifying each of the three species as they passed. And we also watched the rabbits.

  The path was at the top of the cutting that led to the southern entrance of the tunnel, and the rabbits lived on the slope of the cutting. The precipitous sward was kept short by their constant grazing, and at that time of day, for it was always early evening when we trundled, the rabbits were at their best: grazing contentedly, and going hoppity-hop with a nonchalance that suggested they’d never seen a fox in their lives. Behind their fence, on that slope, they were even safe from most dogs. These were rabbits of privilege. They positively flaunted themselves for our pleasure, while the trains rattled and gave out their wails in a minor third. Frseeeeeeeefronnng! That was Molly Bloom’s train whistle, but it’ll do for the cries of trains entering and leaving our tunnel, with the bunnies never cocking an ear nor twitching a hind leg nor flashing a scut.

  Was it the trains that gave Joe such delight, or the bunnies? Or the journey itself? It was all three, of course, and both of us swept up in the extraordinary business of journeys and life and experience: me, and the small me that wasn’t me at all.

  Bunnies and birdies and choochoo trains: they’re all part of growing up. The way we first come to terms with our own life is by contemplating other lives. The realisation that there are non-human creatures in the world – like us, but not us – is not just a pretty decoration in the child’s book: it is the portal of understanding and the beginning of language. A child may not be able to talk: but ask what a cow says and a sheep says and a doggy says and a cat says, and speech has begun. Moooo! In the Babel of the farmyards and jungles of the nursery we learn speech and we learn about life’s possibilities: with baa and woof and meow and quack our consciousness is formed. Non-human life fascinates: enthrals: non-human life is the great adventure of childhood.

  We would turn and go back home. Joe, now righteously tired from his exertions and from the wildness of the adventure, would sit in the trundler with his knees up round his ears, and I would trundle us back up the railway path through the wood, through the back gate, across the garden and back into the kitchen.

  I remember reading a book review in, I think, the Spectator, in which the reviewer comes across a passage in a biography or memoir, in which the author or subject says with vague regret that he had never “seen” his son “being bathed”. The reviewer added that on reading this, he realised for the first time that he had never “witnessed that ceremony” himself. It was one of those moments when you feel profoundly thankful that you live in the age that you do: when you can, for once, praise modernity and advancement and change rather than regret the errors of past generations. For a modern father, the idea of “witnessing”, still less not witnessing the ceremony, are almost equally unthinkable. A modern father conducts the ceremony: plays splashing games, persecutes with the Demon Boy Squirter, sinks the ducks and the boats, and does the stuff afterwards with towels and nappies and sleep-suits. It is required behaviour for us all and everyone involved – mother, father, child – is the richer because of it.

  I don’t want to overstate my claims for hands-on parenting, not least because Cind will read these words at some stage. But I did my bit, or some of it. So on some nights I would put Joe to bed and read him a story. And yes, it generally had animals in it, not because I had chosen it but because he had.

  David Attenborough is often asked how he got his love of animals. His response is to ask: “How did you ever lose yours?” Every child loves and is fascinated by animals. I did, I was. The difference is that many people lose that fascination: I can speak here with immense authority, because I did myself. I was lucky: it was there under the surface all along, bubbling away, crying out for release.

  In teenage years we seek symbols and badges of maturity: clothes, haircuts, records, cigarettes, beers. We reject things that might make us seem immature: public displays of parental affection, religion, the things we liked when we were younger. One of the things we reject is the wild world: God forbid that anyone should think us soppy about furry animals. Oddly, we don’t reject childhood games. Football, a child’s game frequently loved by children, seamlessly becomes a passion in youth and maturity. But the wild world – not childish at all – is regarded as a childish thing and to be put aside as quickly as possible.

  Picasso said that it took him four years to paint like Raphael and a lifetime to paint like a child. My loss of the wild world was one of the great errors of my life: the slow regaining of that love and the beginning of an understanding – the realisation that this is not a childish thing at all – has been one of the great joys of my life. All the same, I don’t think it is true that to find something you must first lose it. Every child finds the wild world, at least by means of the imagination. I don’t think that losing it makes you understand its value still more, either: I know many people, starting with Attenborough, whose love has never wavered, still less we
akened.

  I didn’t want Joe to lose it either. But what can a parent do? You want so many things for a child. I wanted Joe to become a kind of super-me: perhaps a great ethologist and writer, the Konrad Lorenz of the new millennium. But one of the wonders of those very first few months is the realisation that you have a complete personality already there: that everything that happens is consistent with what happened before. This understanding comes to a parent long before crawling and walking is an option. I’d find it hard to say what that personality was – hard enough to find the right words even for a fully made personality – but it’s one of the things that strikes every parent with wonder and yet, at the same time, is quite blindingly obvious.

  It is a universal experience of parenthood: there is a part of you that wants to make a mark, to shape and forge and mould, but you realise almost from the beginning that you can do nothing of the kind. Part of me wanted, and wants to make sure that Joe is long-haired, word-drunk, with addictive reading habits, a great naturalist, finding when the time is ripe a taste for cold beer and malt whisky, heterosexual, monogamous, a person who loves to discuss wildlife and sport and Ulysses, a horseman, a person with a taste for abstract ideas, and first and most importantly, a writer. But Joe isn’t going to turn into a super-me, and never looked like doing so. All a parent can do is open doors and be there with any kind of assistance and support and encouragement that may be necessary: or, to be brief and economical with my words, to be utterly and brutally frank, offer love, uncritical and unconditional. I had failed to be an international lawyer: Joe is not going to be any of the things that I might have planned for him. That is parenthood almost from the beginning: it means that you might as well stop making plans. This third person is not you. It is not even half you, as an elementary reading of genetics would suggest. He is completely and hermetically himself: he may have half his genes from each of his parents, but the mixture is unique, and the way he develops and comes to understand the world is beyond all control.