by MJ Walker
Immediately the leopard set about the fence. He rubbed his body up against the wire mesh, following its contours, establishing the boundaries that now confined him. The humans at the circus had it wrong. The cat didn’t flow around the edges of his cage, or the wall inside the Big Top, to mark his territory. He did it to define his prison, seeking out the weak areas, planning to one day escape and have them all for it.
And so the leopard wandered the enclosure, passing his nose over the rocks and grass, filtering out the stench of the hippo, smelling the scent of her as she lay up in the tree, still blinking at him. He paced and turned until his back was soaked and water ran down his whiskers. This was better than the circus, he thought. But then he didn’t know what this was.
Eventually, he realised he couldn’t continue. Not with her watching. So he turned for the tree and leaped at it. He made the first branch then the second and he went for her, to see what she would do. As he arrived on her branch, muscles shaking in the wet, cracked teeth showing, she reacted. She pulled her body back on to her haunches, the skin wrinkling behind her neck. She opened her thick jaws, displaying two long smooth ivory coloured canines, and spat. She opened her paws and invited him in, inch-long claws dazzling. She was as big as the old leopard, stockier, younger and more alert. She didn’t like him being there.
She swiped and almost caught the old leopard across the nose. She started to pat at him, sparring. He pulled back and lowered himself on to the branch. He grunted and meowed, and would have scratched his claws down the branch had he any. After a few minutes, both cats settled, staring at each other. Their bodies were still apart from the twitching of their ears and flicking of their tails.
“Where am I?” he finally said.
“With me,” she answered.
“Where are we?”
“In the zoo,” she said.
Her words cut him. A cloud burst above their heads, sending down a torrent of water and his mind back to that wet day on the boat, when all the crated animals learned they were heading for Europe, and would be sold to the highest bidder. The monkeys and apes, clever as they were, worked it out first and shared the news. When they arrived on the steamer at the port, there would be an auction. The wild things would be sold; some to the circus, a few to aristocrats, and the rest, if they weren’t to be experimented on, would go to some place called the zoo. No one knew what a zoo was. But it sounded definite, permanent, hopeless. He wondered if the hippo he could smell was the hippo that had survived all those months next to him in a wooden crate, fed a turgid diet of apples and tulips being exported with the animals. He thought about Doris and imagined her being here too. He even worried for the anteater and cocky little Edward, hoping they had stayed close to the burning Big Top.
“I hope you’re not staying long,” said the female. “I don’t get on with leopards. You’re a difficult breed of cat.”
He shivered. But instead of retreating under a leafy part of the canopy, he rested there, in the rain. What else was there? He blinked as she did, intentionally copying her. Then her words registered.
“But aren’t you a leopard?” he asked, confused.
“Oh you silly cat,” she said, mocking him, knowing she had his measure. “No, I am not a leopard.”
She licked a paw and ran it over her ear, grooming herself.
“I am a jaguar,” she said proudly.
The leopard had heard of jaguars. The Ring Master often spoke of them when he toyed with the idea of replacing the leopard with a black panther.
But jaguars were dangerous, the Ring Master also said. Leopards thought they were cunning, he used to say, but jaguars were schemers. They would take the whip and collar and follow commands. Yet they were always watching, waiting for the mistake. And if you made one you were done for. A jaguar had six ways to kill a man, said the Ring Master. Humans knew of five, but history had proved there was always a sixth. Jaguars were the most dangerous cat on earth, he’d said. They made lions and leopards look like tabby cats.
Yet this girl didn’t look so bad, thought the leopard. She didn’t scare him as much as the surrounding fence.
“So how long are you staying? Are they sending you off to a foreign zoo?”
Now she frightened the leopard. He could take this place if he had to. With time, he’d find a way out and he’d be back across those fields, heading for the moors, free. But he wondered how much time he really had? Would they come for him again? Would he again have to be collared and chained to a box, enduring miles and miles upon a lumbering cart until they reached the sea? Then another boat, the waves and storms, the lack of food and fresh water. The cramps as his legs became paralysed beneath him as he was transported somewhere even worse, somewhere more alien.
“Do you know a way out of this place?” he answered.
“You’re an inquisitive one aren’t you?”
The jaguar began to relax. She purred as she looked the leopard up and down, wondering which ravages had been caused by age or the acts he’d been forced to commit.
“Maybe,” she then said.
The Indian elephant and giant anteater were by now sampling the delights of Lord Morgan’s garden, drizzled as it was in a light rain effusing an explosion of odours from the exotic flowers and clipped trees. Doris used her trunk to pull at the blossom on the apple tree, making the petals fall like confetti around her feet. She hoovered up the fruits atop the bird-box, making Bessie hop back and forth, knocking the nuts to the floor. Bear licked them up with his tongue, sampling almonds and hazelnuts for the first time, sucking on the protein and fat.
Tony the terrier found them in full view of anyone who cared to watch from the house.
“He’s taken Edward away,” the terrier said, trying to catch his breath.
Doris didn’t respond, enjoying the garden too much. It was the lushest place she had visited since arriving on these shores. The wet rosebushes and rhododendrons reminded her of India, and she imagined herself back with her sisters and cousins, grazing and frolicking, playfully nudging aside the little elephants that liked to pull at the adults’ tails.
Bear raised his long snout from the grass. Swallowing a whole nut, he pushed his spectacles down over his eyes. He examined the dog and his words.
“Where has he taken Edward?” he asked simply.
Bear had begun to learn how to think, how to reason. Without any further information, he had worked out that Tony was talking about Lord Morgan, and that the great scientist, this maker of this most important cannon, had found the monkey and kidnapped him.
“Where have they gone?”
Tony didn’t reply. He didn’t know how to. Not because he was unaware of Lord Morgan’s destination, but because he was aware that Lord Morgan was his master.
He felt a conflict building; of instinct versus conditioning. He immediately wanted to tell Bear that Lord Morgan was transporting Edward in a locked puzzle box, and he was heading for the city. In the city they would arrive at the college. He wanted to describe Lord Morgan’s office there, and all the machines he had to challenge and test the animals he kept.
But he didn’t say any of these things. He had been trained to be loyal. To serve his human protector, the man who fed and watered him, and who occasionally allowed him to rest on his warm but knobbly knees. The man who had named him Tony and who had watched over him since he was a pup. The man who’d studied him as he worked out how to open the garden gate, and who once gave him a fresh sausage for it.
“Where have they gone?” Bear asked again, as Doris and Bessie discussed whether the rain made the raisins on the bird-box more palatable.
Tony whined, unsure of himself.
So Bear thought some more. He realised he must convince the dog that he was an animal and sometimes it was better for the animals to stick together.
Bear tucked his legs under his hairy bulk, bringing him closer to Tony’s eye-line. He started to tell the dog about their life at the circus. He described how, although the animals wer
e often kept apart, they were actually together. How, even though Edward liked to think of himself as above the other animals, and even as a tiny human, they were all the same. How when they had been whipped or were tired, they could rely on each other to understand, and to cheer each other up. How, when no one else in the world had thought to give him a name, a little insignificant bird, a specially bred ball of blue and white feathers, with black and white barbs for cheeks, had thought to name him Bear, giving him an inner strength he didn’t know he had. How they even missed the old leopard, who was the most ruthless and selfish animal any of them had ever met. And how they now missed Edward and wanted to be with him again.
Tony cocked his head left then right as Bear said these things. He recalled the friends he had made in the pack of fox-hounds and how he wished to be allowed to run with them more often. He looked up at the elephant and at the anteater. Though he didn’t really understand what sort of animals they were, or where they had come from, he had started to like them. Already it had been more fun helping hide these circus creatures than it was opening a gate by himself and running down the lane for no good reason.
So he relented. He told the giant anteater that Lord Morgan was travelling by horse and carriage to the next hill, where the college looked down upon the city folk in their blackened houses and the port with its dirty ships. That he was carrying Edward, and that Edward didn’t know how to get out of a padlocked cage.
“Can you take us there?” asked Bear.
Tony nodded and wagged his tail. He’d never travelled to the college without his master, he explained. But he often marked the telegraph poles and gates en route, and was sure he could find the way.
The animals gathered themselves and moved past the apple tree to the gate. Bessie tiptoed through the wet, behind her Tony the terrier. Behind him stood the anteater, two feet taller, and behind the giant anteater Doris, who at that time was the largest animal in southwest England.
Bessie heard the front door opening first, her ears attuned to sounds arriving from front and back. Then Bear smelled an aroma of garden strawberry, a sweeter scent than the coastal strawberries of his home. Doris felt the vibrations through her feet and finally Tony realised that Lord Morgan’s maid was leaving the house, her morning work done.
The woman, an old lady of sixty plus years, carefully closed the heavy door and turned a large iron key to lock it. She put the key in a linen bag and rubbed a little more strawberry cream in to her hands to mask the smell of cleaning fluid. She touched up her hair, looked to the gate and stared straight at a giant grey bottom, two huge thighs split by a tasselled tail waving away midges dancing in the wet air.
She stood impassive. Then Bessie flapped and Tony turned, causing Bear to back into Doris, who retreated a step, pushed her tongue into the roof of her mouth, raised her trunk and blew a geyser of saliva and rain. The maid dropped her bag. Doris felt the wind on her tail. She blew an enormous fart that scared them all. Everyone started to scatter. Bessie flew up into the rain while Tony ran off the path on to the grass. Bear turned and faced the maid, who now screamed an old lady’s scream, weak and shrill but using all her lungs and stomach. The old lady collapsed in shock. Doris approached her, lowering her big head over the old lady’s, who feared she was about to die. Doris extended her trunk and lipped the maid’s hair, trying to reassure her that she was a gentle and friendly elephant, one used to people.
Tony gathered himself. He ran to the maid. Placing his forepaws on her chest, he licked her face. As Doris retreated, he then spun himself, barking with the excitement.
Bessie was the first to realise their predicament. She had been listening to the terrier all along.
“We have to hide. We have to hide,” she pleaded from ten feet up in the air. “She’ll tell the humans and they’ll come for us. They’ll take us like they took Edward.”
“She’s right,” said Bear. “We can’t use the gate. We have to find another way.”
“Where can we go?” asked Doris.
She wanted to stay and pick up the old maid in her trunk, to hold and comfort her.
“There’s a way out through the back of the garden,” said Tony.
He left the maid and scampered across the lawn, round the side of the house and towards the maze. Bear followed and Bessie, braver than she’d been since the herring gull attacked, flew up and over the house, buoyed by the warm air rising from a stack of chimney pots. Doris took one last look at the maid’s ashen face, her crumpled wrinkles and her wide eyes. The elephant thundered across the grass, slipping as she went, until she reached Tony standing next to a hole in the hedge.
“Through here,” he said, tail wagging.
The hole was no wider than Tony’s shoulders, just big enough for a dog or badger. Doris didn’t stop. She charged the hedge, breaking its bones, splitting decades old hawthorn as if it was straw. She took some branches with her and a line of rusting barbed wire too, which spiked her skin, causing little drops of blood to run down her chest. Bear and Tony jumped through the breach. As Bessie soared over the hedge, a brown rabbit appeared. It hopped along and through the gap, pleased to have a way to pass between the garden and neighbouring field.
Doris found herself running through a meadow. She trampled the dark green grass, as taller stalks, with bushy heads, waved themselves aside. Bear followed in the channel created by Doris’s footsteps and Tony skipped along the flattened blades showing their light undersides to the sky.
Tony trotted, paced then broke into a canter to pass Bear. He started the gallop to catch the elephant, who had stubbornly refused to slow. He got ahead of her and veered to his right, guiding her like a pilot fish. The terrier didn’t know how to reach the college this way, but he knew the meadows stretched out to Leigh Woods, and the woods met the gorge. And he knew that across the gorge was the city with its tanning factories and cider presses, its gas lamps and electric trams, its smells of sewage and human urine dried upon its old stone walls. And somewhere within the city, up on a hill, was the college and Lord Morgan’s laboratory, where he liked to experiment on his animals.
Bessie by now had learned to fly low and true. She had put aside her twirls and twists and let her heritage take over, the one that told all parrots to fly straight and to think about where they were flying to. As she settled above the shoulders of the running dog, skimming the heads of grass, she noticed a flock of black-headed gulls had alighted in the far corner of the meadow. They had come for the flies and were making short, fast parabolic sorties, twisting their necks and snapping their beaks as they grazed on the insects in mid-air. Bessie decided to be brave. She took a hoverfly and gulped it down, then proudly banked to snatch a midge. She flew on, like a swallow in summer, ignoring the gulls as her wings flicked off the rain as quick as it could soak her feathers.
As the terrier and bird led the elephant, they didn’t notice the giant anteater falling further behind. Bear didn’t have the size of Doris or the stamina of Tony. When forced to run for too long, he became envious of those who had the right tendons and ligaments, who had their muscles arranged in such a way that they could maintain the same pace for minutes on end.
He began to slow and pushed out his tongue, to catch some water to cool his throat. He was grateful for the wet grass, feeling it between the pads of his feet. His spectacles steamed up and he finally stopped, to push them higher up his head. He watched as his friends cut a path through the meadow and into the next, heading for a line of trees that he hoped marked the boundary to somewhere safe.
He felt tired again. But unlike his last day in the circus, he wasn’t tired of life. He was tired because he hadn’t yet learned how to eat in the wild. He had rekindled his taste for insects, but he couldn’t find enough to satiate his stomach. He needed to dine a thousand times a day, digesting tiny meal after tiny meal. And all he could see about him were the midges and flies, which he knew he’d struggle to catch with his thin jaws and toothless gums.
He let the others go
and lowered his head. He put his nose to the ground and determined to once again learn how to hunt. He used his snout to part the grass and he sniffed at the soil. He searched left and right and scratched at the dirt. He moved on and repeated himself until his motion became natural. He dropped his tail and arched his back and his long black hair fell straight in the rain, waiting for his nose to remember. For it to recall the unmistakable molecules and chemistry shed by a colony of ants. Their pheromones and stink that told a million others which way was home. For his nose and brain to register once more that he was an anteater, a giant one, and that eating ants was what he was born to do.
He flicked his tongue more than a foot ahead. His little eyes opened wide as his tongue danced. He’d found them! They were red rather than black ants, smaller and scrawnier than he’d have liked for his first true meal in years. But he sighed as he began to eat up a convoy, plucking them one by one from their labours, swallowing them whole. They tasted exquisite. He experimented, sucking some ants straight down, letting others dissolve on his acidic tongue. He compared three single ants to three ants eaten at once and intentionally sucked up an earwig running with the ants, to see if it tasted nuttier. He then watched as the ants scattered from their line, having collectively decided to run for their lives. His paws picked up tremors, which vibrated up his thick forearms, resonating within his long skull. His tiny ears then heard a rumbling. A deep, bass-like sound, building and building.
He lifted his head out of the wet grass and saw a chestnut thoroughbred horse running straight at him. Upon the horse’s back stood a young human, a lithe male with empty cheeks wearing a shirt that had turned black in the rain. The man’s tight trousers rubbed the horse’s shoulders as his black boots sat upon silver stirrups that dug into the horse’s belly as it lunged forward with each gallop.
