The Extinction Club

by Robert Twigger

  From a distance, the bulk of a young Pere David’s antlers would appear as one, the rear tine blending in against the thick neck, perhaps.

  Milu was described as having the head of a deer, the hooves of a cow, the tail of a mule, and the neck of a camel.

  In fact, the hooves are distinguished by the clicking noise they make. Only reindeer make the same noise with their hooves. Milu’s feet are well splayed and good for keeping a footing in a marsh.

  From a second-century A.D. wooden carving of a unicorn excavated at Wu-wei in Kansu province, it is possible to note the prominent hooves, erect tail, and heavy shoulders. The single horn has the sweep of a straightened and lengthened bull’s horn. The inspiration seems half bovine, half ungulate. The flesh of Milu is supposed to taste similar to beef and venison.

  The appearance of unicorns in the empire was a good portent, deserving an immediate report to the emperor. The bearer of such news could expect a reward in “shoes”—ingots of silver and gold.

  The scarcity, if not actual extinction, of Milu in the wild over the last thousand or more years parallels the elusiveness of the unicorn.

  Ch’i’lin was also used metaphorically to mean a great genius, a symbol of success in the scholar-official’s career.

  There is no provable connection between the Chinese and the Western heraldic unicorn.

  CALF DEATH

  MY INVITATION arrived from Woburn in an expensive-looking cream envelope. I was invited for a day and a night in order to reconnoiter the place and to meet the librarian, the archivist, and Callum the deerkeeper.

  I wondered if I might by chance meet the world’s expert on Milu, Maja Boyd, at Woburn. She hadn’t replied to the letter I’d sent to her in China, so perhaps she had left that country and was visiting England.

  Lord H’s family had been very kind to Maja Boyd, even providing her with a free apartment to live in on the estate whenever she wanted to view her beloved Pere Davids. If, and I knew this was fairly unlikely, I was offered a free apartment, I made up my mind definitely to take it.

  Callum was a Scot. I met him at the estate office as soon as I arrived at Woburn. He drove me in his Land Rover to see the Pere David herd. This was my first in-the-flesh viewing of Pere Davids, and given that I had been building up to this moment for six months, I was glad not to be disappointed. I was happy that each part of the deer really did look mismatched: the neck is thick and shaggy as a camel neck is, the tail does swish like a horse’s tail, and the feet have a hoofiness that is definitely more bovine than ungulate. The deer really had the four characteristics that do not match—and when you see them alongside other deer, the backward-pointing antlers shout at you to be twisted forward.

  The older males grazed separately from the younger males and the females, who were coming to the end of the calving season. Callum pointed out that the females ran a crèche system, two being assigned at any one time to guard the eighty or so new calves.

  Scanning the herd with the Zeiss 8×30s (definitely the business as far as deer management goes; I resolved to get some as soon as I got a big enough advance against royalties), Callum noticed something wrong. “That female over there,” he pointed. “Looks like she’s in pain.”

  We rumbled slowly forward in the Land Rover. The rule with deerkeeping is: Don’t walk when you can drive. And though the deer must have known that the vehicle contained humans, they were more wary of us when we got out than when we were inching forward in crawler gear.

  The female was staggering. “Can you see that hanging out of her behind?” said Callum. I could. The tips of a calf’s hooves. Callum explained that the calf would now be dead; lying in the wrong position in the womb, it had failed to be born. “The mother will be in agony,” he said, “and will die in a day or two.”

  He picked up the crackly walkie-talkie from the dashboard. “Bring your gun,” he advised his assistant.

  Things were going a bit fast for my liking. Id only just been introduced to the herd and we were about to take a pop at them. Id thought the killing would come much later, if at all.

  Callum explained that the herd are kept in semiwild conditions. They aren’t interfered with in any way, except to receive extra feed if it’s a hard winter. The vet isn’t called, because the Pere Davids either get fatal diseases or they recover on their own. The deer certainly aren’t mollycoddled with antibiotics and other man-made products.

  “Their meat must taste really good, being pure and everything,” I said.

  “Oh, it does,” said Callum. “Somewhere between steak and venison—delicious.” Part of the reason, no doubt, that the Emperor of China had hogged them all for himself.

  The assistant rolled over the parkland toward us in his Hi-Lux pickup—the alternative vehicle for the committed country lad. Not that I’m into vehicles, but in the country it seems that you’re either a Hi-Lux man or a Land Rover man. Ray Mears, the survival expert, had a Land Rover like Callum. Land Rovers are definitely less showy and more patriotic—real Land Rovers, I’m talking here, not office-girl Discoveries or that new one that looks like an orthopedic boot.

  I could see the rifle poking out of the Hi-Lux side window. Callum told me it was a Sako .243; a top professional rifle, he said.

  The gunshot sent a shockwave of noise through everything. The deer was down instantly. We roared up in our vehicles. She kicked and shuddered and died. It was a clean head shot. The hooves of the dead calf protruded from her wet-haired hindquarters. Some blood, not buckets. The carcass was damn heavy, I could see, but I did not help as the others hauled it by the legs onto the low-loading trailer behind the pickup.

  SUNRISE

  LATER THAT day I drove up to the abbey, the big house in the Woburn grounds, ready for my first taste of country-house living. There were no Rolls-Royces and Mercedes parked outside, just ordinary cars, and mine did not look out of place. Maybe they were the servants’ cars.

  I was reminded of Herbrand Russell, the IIth Duke, and his original reason for having two cars—a brown one for the country and a black one for London. He did not like to separate man and wife overnight; consequently the brown-car chauffeur would meet the black-car chauffeur in Hendon and the IIth Duke would switch from country car to town car whenever he went to London.

  That must be one of the big differences since the I Ith Duke’s time—now just about anyone on a salary could afford a black car and a brown car, though very few could afford a driver, let alone two drivers. In the days of the IIth Duke, Woburn had sixty to seventy indoor staff; they were now down to fewer than ten. When I entered the house, I got the impression that most of the living happened in one familiar area, with everywhere else unlit and rarely visited.

  In the car park, as I waited for Lord Howland to arrive, a security-guard type came over and didn’t exactly grill me but took my name, that kind of thing. Couldn’t he tell I was a gent, friend of the lord? Obviously not. Just doing his job.

  Lord H appeared in his Audi Quattro. He gave the security guard curt instructions, overriding some lame chat the man came out with. That’s the boss speaking, I thought. But still, imagine having to be masterful like that on a Sunday, or when you’re not feeling very well. It’s not that easy being a lord, I could see.

  Part of Lord H’s time was spent running the various enterprises that spring forth from Woburn Abbey and the estate, and part of it was spent buying and selling horses. I got the impression that the horse trading appealed to him more than estate management. But he wasn’t about to give up the estate. For the whole family, ever since the safari park was set up, survival of the ancestral seat has been paramount. Lord H carries on this tradition, inspired partly by the knowledge, which he never expresses, that nothing that could replace the Bedford dynasty would be any better for the people and land of Woburn. Imagine a company with anonymous directors running the safari park. Imagine the housing developments that would be sneaked through if the estate were broken up and sold to developers. After only half an hour inside the
lordly environs of Woburn Abbey, I was a fervent forelock-tugging aristocrophile.

  The first and strongest reason for this was the sheer beauty of Woburn. The ancient planted trees have a huge grandeur. The manicured parkland and even beauty of the grassland, with all the herds of different deer walking about (there are red deer, Manchurian sika, Rusa, axis, fallow, muntjac, Chinese water deer, and barasingh as well as Pere Davids), give the place the feel of Eden.

  The following morning I awoke early and heard the clicking of hooves outside my window. The sun was heliograph bright as it broke the horizon, laying long dawn shadows from the big Pere David stags gathered there, tails flicking. As the sun climbed higher, it lit up the orange of their early summer coats. Eden.

  HOTEL

  MY ROOM in Woburn Abbey was hotel-like in its accessories: free toothbrush and lots of towels. I wondered whether hotels copied country houses, or country houses copied hotels. The room was full of old furniture and paintings that were worth looking at, with cracked glaze and skillful brushwork, a room fit for a human being, though I remember the central heating was devilishly hot.

  Breakfast was in the comfortable, semimodernized part of the big house, the part where most of the living went on. The staff appeared and disappeared into dark hallways. I met a range of servants from the head of the estate to the butler and the maid. They were polite and helpful, but I wasn’t imperious enough, or at ease enough, to be the perfect guest. Lord H’s father was at breakfast and he was unaffectedly kind and polite. When he heard how the deer had been shot the day before, he was upset and did not hide his feelings, though his wife reminded him that it had to be done.

  Outside the abbey, Tiger Moth biplanes took off and landed. They were part of a local festival. Lord H’s. great-great-grandmother, known as the Flying Duchess, flew a Tiger Moth; she made her first flight from Croydon to Woburn in 1928 at the age of sixty-one and gained several long-distance flying records before her death, aged seventy-two, in 1937.

  I spent the morning in the estate office going through the old deer record books. It felt good to be doing real history again, connecting to the people who had saved Milu from extinction, reading their difficult handwriting.

  DUKE

  IN SOME circles, the IIth Duke is a villain. He is widely believed to have introduced the gray squirrel to England. He did import some to Woburn in 1894, but gray squirrels had been released in Macclesfield in 1876, and the spread of the gray squirrel did not start until its introduction into English town parks. The squirrels were an attraction for urban Victorians, who missed the comfortable sight of wild animals. Guilt, in this case, lies with every town council in England for deciding to release the aggressive American tree rodent. Even his responsibility for the muntjac invasion is now being questioned, since Whipsnade and Tring Park also released this deer into the English countryside.

  But if he wasn’t a bad guy, the I Ith Duke was certainly eccentric, that English variety of eccentric who considers himself completely normal. While he ate breakfast, he fed his pet owl at the table because it made sense to use that time efficiently. Besides, he liked the company of owls. Intelligent birds.

  He believed that the eland antelope would be a useful low-cost addition to the sheep and cows grazing the English countryside. Accordingly he had several bull calves castrated and reared for the table. This excursion into the exotic-meat market foundered when the tasting panel of his friends concluded that fresh eland had “neither the specific merits of venison nor the succulence of beef.”

  For health purposes, Russell liked to eat fried deer velvet taken from the antlers of culled stags. It made a tasty addition to breakfast. Full of nutrients.

  Born in 1858, Russell was educated at home and then at Bal-liol College, Oxford. Not having suffered the conformist pressures of a public school, Russell’s individuality reached its full potential, one feels.

  In 1879 he joined the Grenadier Guards and fought in the 1882 Egyptian campaign. He was a brave man. AtTel-el-Kebir he was the last officer to carry regimental colors into battle, for which he received the Medal with Clasp and Khedive Star.

  He long held the view that the main threat to world peace came from the Prussians, “an arrogant and truculent race of men.”

  In 1893 he assumed the title I Ith Duke of Bedford from his brother, the 10th Duke. His civilian duties were extensive and he took them seriously. He was, among other things, president of the Zoological Society, mayor of Holborn, and president of the Cremation Society.

  He was not a financial wizard. In 1895 his estates were running a joint loss of seven thousand pounds per annum. In 1914, on professional advice, he invested a hundred thousand pounds in Moscow City bonds, worth nothing three years later. He also sold Covent Garden market, the Royal Opera House, Drury Lane, the Strand, and Aldwych theaters, the Waldorf Hotel, and Bow Street Police Court: in all, nineteen acres of London’s top real estate. Unfortunately, he sold them at a loss when the market was in recession. Had he kept those nineteen acres, there might have been no need to turn Woburn into the highly commercial venture it is today.

  Unlike many aristocrats desperate to reverse the shift from country to urban wealth, Russell never sold the family library. The Spencers did just that in 1892, selling forty thousand volumes for £210,000. It was rumored to be the finest private library in the world, but was now no longer thought worth keeping. The sale of artworks and books by aristocrats is always a sign of decline.

  CANOE

  IN THE later part of the nineteenth century, the Rob Roy canoe became a symbol of healthy living and self-reliant muscular Christianity. Herbrand Russell and his wife, the Duchess Mary Russell, were both keen paddlers, spending part of each year afloat on the Tamar in Cornwall.

  The Rob Roy was a one- or two-man canoe, built out of cedar on oak frames and popularized by the boxer, patent lawyer, amateur soldier, and preacher John MacGregor. MacGregor saw the canoe as a metaphor for the evangelizing spirit of Christianity—it could get anywhere without running aground, on account of its needing only three inches of water to float in.

  MacGregor s talks about his canoe exploits made thousands of pounds—all of which he donated to working boys’ clubs. His book A Thousand Miles in a Rob Roy Canoe was a Victorian bestseller. MacGregor formed the Canoe Club, “for business and bivouac, for paddling and sailing, and for racing and chasing in canoes over land and water.” Herbrand Russell was a hearty supporter.

  Russell naturally sympathized with MacGregor’s hardy brand of English Christianity, his distaste for popery, his concern for the ordinary working man, and of course his love of canoeing. Canoeing enabled one to explore on one’s own, without having to give orders, without being bothered by others. Both Russell and his wife preferred action to words. Both were taciturn to an unusual degree, preferring the natural solitude of the canoe to the forced banter of the drawingroom. Years later, when the duchess took up flying solo in a Tiger Moth, she would feel that same sense of exultant solitude, above and connected to the world but never overwhelmed by it.

  In Russell’s Rob Roy were all the boy-scout accessories necessary for enjoyable canoeing: An odd-shaped spoon-fork, fork prongs at one end, tablespoon at the other, which tapered ingeniously to a point—this was to allow both the cracking and eating of a soft-boiled egg. The cooker was a brass primus stove of minute proportions, and the medicine chest was a matchbox containing sticking plaster and a little quinine.

  We can imagine him alone, or perhaps paddling silently with Lady Russell, contemplating his various pastimes and enterprises, his duties and his plans. The blades of the paddles dipping into the wide, smooth river, he must have considered the fortunes of all his animals. It was 1900. From what Salisbury had said, China was suddenly more of a concern than Russia. There would be no more deer from there.

  That he thought this through is extraordinary in itself, since no one else was doing anything remotely like it. Men had been mounting, stuffing, and classifying beasts for centuries, since
Greek times. No one had thought to preserve them except as food. To preserve them from possible extinction was revolutionary.

  It is all the more extraordinary because the Duke of Bedford was known to be an old-fashioned man. He preferred to wear stockings and long coats rather than the more modern suit with a jacket. He deplored noisy modern machines and only agreed to use cars because of the convenience it afforded others. He hated airplanes, and when his wife took up flying at sixty-one, he tolerated it but did not condone or even understand it.

  For the first time in human history, the fogey, the old-fashioned, the regressive, and the reactionary was actually at the forefront of important developments.

  The terrific slaughter of the American bison was a working model for Russell. It was a highly visible demonstration of what happened when modern hunting techniques were applied with scientific care. Nostalgia for the old Wild West led for calls to save the bison. The methods were rudimentary—simply allow the bison to roam in parks where they would not be hunted.

  Bison conservation had been a homegrown American operation. Russell’s idea of genius was to apply this model to saving any species from any country. Concern for foreign animals was a bit like concern for foreign nationals—an unusual eccentricity. But Russell’s eccentricity was Milu’s saving.

  Not only was the idea a new one, but it depended on such technological innovations as the Suez Canal, which shortened the journey home from China, and steamboats and railways, which allowed the animals to be distributed to zoos and circuses in Europe. Without this rapid, large-scale distribution system, any attempt at saving a species as far away from home as Milu would have been inconceivable.

  Technology had caused the breakup of China and, indirectly, the extinction of Milu in its own country. But paradoxically, technology had allowed Milu to survive.