‘Home? You mean back to London?’
‘That’s right,’ said Charlie. ‘You pleased, then?’
‘Of course I’m pleased,’ said Mrs Bailey. ‘But what’s going to become of the boy?’
‘You’re to go into the bothy. They’re opening that up,’ said Charlie to me.
The bothy was a huge, institution-like building which had been constructed to house single-members of the keeper-staff and had never, to the best of my knowledge, been used for this purpose.
‘That great barn of a place!’ exclaimed Mrs Bailey. ‘Why, with winter coming on he’ll freeze to death.’
‘Oh, they’ve got fires and such,’ said Charlie.
‘But what about food? Who’s going to look after him?’
‘Well, they said there’s several people moving in,’ said Charlie. ‘Joe from the works staff and a new boy, and they’re putting old Fred and his missis in charge to cook and such-like.’
‘Never!’ cried Mrs Bailey unbelievingly. ‘Not old Fred!’
Mrs Bailey had had a long-standing feud with old Fred Austin which dated from the time when Fred had delivered some firewood to the cottage and Mrs Bailey had been complaining about her chilblains.
‘You know what you wants to do for them, Ma?’ said Fred.
‘No,’ said Mrs Bailey, who did not like being called Ma but was always anxious to find a remedy for her chilblains. ‘What do you do?’
‘Stick your feet in the pot first thing in the morning,’ old Fred advised. ‘A drop of pee does ’em a world of good.’
Needless to say, Charlie and I had become hysterical when told this story, but Mrs Bailey had not found it a bit funny.
Now she said, ‘Well, I don’t envy anyone being looked after by them. Here, Gerry, you better have some more pie. Eat up while you can. Gracious knows what those two will give you to eat, poor soul.’
I must say I shared her view. The thought of leaving the Baileys’ comfortable cottage for the great barn of the bothy and exchanging Mrs Bailey’s lavish home cooking for God knows what concoction thought up by Fred and his wife was appalling, but I could do nothing about it.
6. A Bumble of Bears
He licketh and sucketh his own feet . . .
Bartholomew (Berthelet),
Bartholomeus de Proprietatibus Rerum
At one end of the section a large area of land had been thickly planted with larch trees and in this gloomy woodland, resembling a portion of some North American or Russian forest, lived our pack of wolves. There were fourteen of them and they were not the most prepossessing animals to look at; I could quite see how they had over the years achieved a rather evil reputation. Their pale golden eyes against their ash-grey fur seemed slightly slanted and cunning; this impression was enhanced by their strange gait, for they slouched rather than walked, with their heads down and ears back. For such large and powerful animals they moved with extraordinary grace; they seemed to float among the shadows of the larch trees.
The wolf, I discovered, was a much maligned animal. Contrary to its reputation, it does not and never did spend its entire life hunting down human beings, although, of course, the fact that wolves on occasion have eaten men is undeniable. A Swiss naturalist describes with ghoulish relish how, when the German, French and Russian troops had been fighting bloody battles in the mountains of Switzerland in 1799, the dead were never buried but left for the wolves to finish. Apparently the packs glutted themselves on this uniformed windfall and reputedly came to prefer human flesh to all others.
To my relief, our pack had not acquired this refinement of taste but it was nevertheless slightly unnerving to open the gate into the wolf wood and push the wheelbarrow full of gory joints through the larch woods, tossing them out at intervals while the pack circled round and round you at a safe distance, snarling and yarring at each other and then rushing in in order of precedence to snap up the meat.
Wolves in the wild state mate for life and are the most devoted of parents. The average pack generally consists of the parent wolves and the youngsters of that year, so it is a family rather than a pack. However, in exceptionally hard winters several families can combine together for hunting purposes and on these occasions the packs can be quite large. The distance covered while hunting can be enormous; one pack was accurately tracked in Alaska and in six weeks the wolves covered seven hundred miles within an area of about a hundred miles by fifty.
The wolf, of course, has always been one of the favourite animals in primitive religions as far apart as North America and Mongolia and it fills a well-known place in witchcraft. At one time in Europe when wolves were considerably more common than they are today, lycanthropy was not only believed in but practised. One of the most popular stories of werewolves was told by Johan Weyer, who thought it was merely a delusion brought about by prolonged torture of the victim. The story was repeated, however, to prove the existence of lycanthropy.
Pierre Bourgot (Big Peter), Michel Verdung (or Udon), and Philibert Mentot, [were] tried in December, 1521, by the Inquisitor General of Besancon, the Dominican friar, Jean Boin (or Bomm). Suspicion fell on these men when a traveller, passing through the Poligyn district, was attacked by a wolf; he wounded the animal and followed its trail to a hut, where he found the wife bathing Verdung’s wounds. In his confession, Michel Verdung told how he had kept Pierre faithful to the Devil.
Then Pierre Bourgot confessed. In 1502, a terrible storm scattered his flocks. While searching for them, he met three black horsemen to whom he told his sorrows. One of the horsemen (whose name was later revealed as Moyset) promised Pierre relief and help if he would serve him as lord and master, and Pierre agreed to bind the bargain within the week. Very soon, he found his sheep. At the second meeting, Pierre, learning that the kind stranger was a servant of the Devil, denied Christianity and swore fealty by kissing the horseman’s left hand, which was black and cold as ice. After two years, Pierre began to drift back to Christianity. At this point Michel Verdung, another servant of the Devil, was instructed to make Pierre toe the Devil’s line. Encouraged by promises of satanic gold, Pierre attended a sabbat, where everyone carried a green taper burning with a blue flame. Then Verdung told him to strip and apply a magic salve; Pierre found himself a wolf. After two hours, Verdung applied another ointment, and Pierre regained his human form. As a werewolf, Pierre confessed (under torture) to various assaults. He attacked a seven-year-old but the lad screamed so that Pierre had to put on his clothes and become a man again to avoid detection. He confessed he ate a four-year-old-girl and found her flesh delicious; he broke the neck of a nine-year old girl and ate her. As a wolf, he mated with real wolves, and, reported Boguet, all three men said ‘they had as much pleasure in the act as if they had copulated with their wives’.
The three men were, of course, burned.
Quite apart from men turning themselves into wolves (and here one shares the attitude of an early disbeliever in witchcraft who said that he had silenced many witches by asking: ‘If you can turn a woman into a cat, can you now turn a cat into a woman?’), the wolf itself has had any number of magical powers attributed to it. T. H. White, in his delightful translation of a twelfth century bestiary,1 quotes Ulysses Aldrovandi:
Rhasis was being frivolous when he reported concerning wolves’ hair: ‘If the eyebrows are anointed with the same, mixed with rose-water, the anointed one will be adored by the beholder.’ And really I think it even more ridiculous and merry when it is said that backward men and women can be brought to lust by the tie of a wolf’s pizzle (dried in an oven). This is like the statement about a wolf-skin pouch, which, if worn with a dove’s heart tied up inside it, saves one from falling into the snaves of Venus. Rather of the same sort is the story of Rhasis, who cites ten disciples of Democritus, people who certainly escaped safely from the enemy by carrying the scrotum of a wolf on their lances. In the same way, Sextus tells us about the Traveller who made his journey safely by carrying with him the end bit of a wolf’s tail. Also, a
ccording to Vuecherius, if one hangs up the brush or the pelt or the head of a wolf over the stall, the beasts will not eat unless it is taken away. With the same tail, so Albertus Magnus says, if it is tied above the mangers of sheep and cattle, the wolf itself can be frightened off: and that is why people bury them in farms, to keep these brutes away.
With all this remarkable publicity, it is scarcely to be wondered at that the wolf, in fact, can hardly match up to the popular conception of him.
Our female wolves came into oestrus once a year and generally gave birth to their young in May. During the time the females were in season there was, of course, an immense amount of fighting amongst the dogs in the pack. Although these fights sounded and looked savage, with much clopping of jaws, baring of teeth, accompanied by yarring snarls and whines, they never appeared actually to draw blood. When the time drew near for the bitch to have her cubs, she and the dominant dog would excavate a complicated burrow under the roots of a larch. Here she would give birth to her cubs, generally three or five in number. When we went in with the wheelbarrow to feed them, we had to be cautious and avoid these nurseries; otherwise, the female would get panicky and start carrying her cubs all over the wood in an endeavour to guard them against us. As soon as the cubs were old enough to be weaned, both parents would regurgitate semi-digested meat for the young – a sort of wolf equivalent to tinned baby food.
On moonlit nights, especially if there was a touch of frost in the air, our wolves would hold great operatic parties. The wood would be silver-striped with moonlight and you could just see the black outline of the animals as they flitted from one patch of shadow to the next; then, suddenly, they would all merge together and, throwing back their heads, would utter their wild and plaintive howls that, amongst the tree trunks, had an echoing quality, as though they were singing in a cave. Their eyes would glint where the moonlight caught them and their throats would swell as they got more and more excited and threw themselves with ever-greater enthusiasm into the song. Watching them like this, you were tempted to believe all the things that have ever been written about wolves. Wolf-song is one of the most beautiful animal noises, so I was not altogether surprised to discover that wolves apparently share my mixed feelings regarding the bagpipes. In 1624, when wolves were a commonplace in England and Ireland, Sir Thomas Fairfax related the story of a soldier in Ireland who got his passport to go to England:
As he passed through the wood with his knapsack upon his back, being weary he sat down under a tree, where he opened his knapsack, and fell to some victuals he had; but on a sudden he was surprised with two or three wolves, who coming towards him, he threw them scraps of bread and cheese, till all was gone; then the wolves making a nearer approach to him he knew not what shift to make, but by taking a pair of bagpipes which he had, and as soon as he began to play upon them, the wolves ran all away as if they had been scared out of their wits: whereupon the soldier said, ‘A pox take you all, if I had known you had loved music so well, you should have had it before dinner.’
These wolves must have been pretty hungry to devour bread and cheese; our wolves were extremely particular and dainty about their food.
I remember one day when a little old lady watched me with bated breath as I wheeled my barrow with its gory load through the Wolf Wood, tossing out the joints. As I came out of the wood and locked the gate behind me, she approached me.
‘Excuse me, young man,’ she said, ‘but what sort of meat is that?’ I was feeling in a particularly facetious mood and so, putting on my best poker face, I replied,
‘Keepers, madam. It’s an economy measure. When the keepers get too old to work we feed them to the wolves.’
Just for a slight second a look of incredulous horror spread over her face before she realised she was having her leg pulled.
But on a moonlight night, lying safely curled up in bed, you could listen to the flute-like cries of the wolves and it gave a night a certain magical charm.
Compared to the wolves, the bears we looked after were a very mixed lot. They looked as though their ancestry combined European, Asiatic and North American species in a sort of pot pourri. The largest was the male, who had been christened in that flash of genius that overcomes quite ordinary people when naming animals – Teddy, and he was a great, rolling gingerbread-coloured fool, with the tiny, rather frantic pleading eyes of a village idiot, a large, pink, retroussé nose, and exceptionally long, curved, tortoiseshell-coloured claws which he spent a lot of time manicuring by sucking them. Teddy had a shambling, rather pansy walk that made his claws click together like castanets when he moved and caused consternation among the public.
‘’Ere, Bill . . . ’ere’s a bear tap-dancing.’
‘Don’t be silly, mate, ’e’s a clockwork bear. That’s the motor wot you can ’ear. ’Spect the keeper winds ’im up every morning.’
It was I who discovered what should have been obvious from his ponderous walk, his portly form, and the habit he had of sitting on his hind legs with one paw on his heart, that Teddy was really an operatic tenor in disguise. I was cycling past the bear’s enclosure one day when I heard the most extraordinary noise – the high-pitched buzzing of a mosquito, with deeper overtones, and an occasional falsetto squeak like the expiring cry of a fairy soprano. Puzzled as to what could possibly be producing this un-bear-like sound, I got off my bicycle and investigated. There, sitting on his ample ginger bottom behind a blackberry bush, was Teddy, one paw clasped across his chest and the claws of his other paw stuffed into his mouth, singing to himself. It seemed incredible that such a massive beast – he must have weighed all of twenty-five stone – should produce such an oddly feminine sound. His tiny boot-button eyes were half closed and he swayed slightly as he sang. I watched him for a while and then I called to him. He opened his eyes with a start, removed his claws from his mouth, and gazed at me in what looked very like embarrassment. I called him over to the bars and gave him some blackberries I had found. He sat in front of me like a great ginger Buddha, taking the glittering black fruit from my hand very delicately with his prehensile lips. When he had finished I took a deep breath, arranged my vocal chords to cope as well as possible with the imitation and gave Teddy a chorus from ‘White Horse Inn’.
He looked at me, startled, for a moment, and then, to my delight, laid one fat paw across his chest, stuck the claws of the other into his mouth, closed his eyes and joined me in song. It was an inspired rendering and we were both, I think, sorry when lack of breath – on my part – brought it to a halt. After this I frequently used to have musical half-hours with him, and when I was cleaning up paper and other debris inside the barrier rail the monotony of the task was greatly relieved by Teddy, who would follow me round singing lustily. One day we were leaning against the bars gazing into each other’s eyes and getting some pretty good harmonisation on ‘You May Not Be an Angel’ when I happened to glance round and there were three nuns standing riveted on the path watching us. As I looked they gathered their robes about them and moved on; not by a flicker of an eyelid did they give the impression that they had been witnessing anything unusual, but the situation greatly embarrassed Teddy and me.
Teddy was a bear of such charm that I was almost inclined to believe the story of the lady-killing bear that I found in Topsell.
Phillipus Coffeus of Constance, did most confidently tell me, that in the Mountains of Savoy, a Bear carryed a young maid into his den by violence, where in venereous manner he had the carnal use of her body, and while he kept her in his den, he daily went forth and brought her home the best Apples and other fruits he could get, presenting them unto her for her meat in very amorous sort; but always when he went to forrage, he rouled a huge great stone upon the mouth of his den, that the Virgin should not escape away: at length her parents with long search, found their little Daughter in the Bear’s den, who delivered her from that savage and beastual captivity.
It is curious that the so-called hairy Ainu, a primitive people who are found on the Japane
se island of Yesso, tend to revere the bear and have a very similar type of story. The legend, however, is of a woman who had a son by a bear and apparently many of the Ainu who live in the mountains pride themselves on being descended from a bear. They are called Descendants of the Bear and they say of themselves: ‘as for me, I am a child of the God of the Mountains. I am descended from the divine one who rules in the mountains.’ However, the fact that they consider the bear a sacred animal is a somewhat mixed blessing as far as the bear is concerned, for they have every year a Bear Festival.
A bear cub is captured and brought to the village and, if it is very tiny, it is suckled by one of the village women or fed by hand or mouth to mouth. As it grows it plays about in the hut with the children and is treated with great affection as a pet, but when it becomes a bit too big for this treatment it is shut up in a wooden cage where it stays for two or three years, being fattened up, as it were. Then, in September or October, the festival takes place.
The villagers begin by apologising to their gods, saying they have kept the bear as long as they possibly could with their meagre resources, but now they were forced to kill him. If the village is a small one the entire community takes part in the festival. When everybody is assembled in front of the cage the village orator speaks to the bear and tells it that it is about to be sent to its ancestors. He asks its pardon and hopes that it won’t be angry with them. Oddly in contradiction to this propitiation, the bear is then tied up with ropes and let out of the cage and showers of blunt arrows are fired into it to infuriate it. When it has exhausted itself struggling to get free from the ropes it is tied up to a stake, gagged and then strangled, its neck being placed between two poles which are pressed together. Everyone in the village shows great eagerness in helping with this operation. Then an arrow is shot into the bear’s heart, but very carefully so as not to shed any blood. The men sometimes drink the warm blood of the bear in order to gain the courage and other virtues that the animal possessed and they smear it on themselves in order to ensure success in hunting. When the bear is dead it is skinned, its head is cut off and set up in the east window of the house with a piece of its own body, a cup of its own meat