I should have been warned by this episode, but I was not, so it was not long afterwards that Babs caught me bending. The space between the barrier rail and the bars of the polar bear cage used to get littered with sweet papers, cigarette packets, paper bags and other debris that the thoughtful public would drop there, and it was our job to clean this up. I went one afternoon to perform this duty and found Babs asleep at one end of the enclosure. I chose the end farthest from her, climbed over the barrier rail, and started to clean up. I became so absorbed in my task that I quite forgot to keep an eye on the bears. I was just bending down to pick up a piece of paper when there was a thud and a hiss behind me, and the next moment something caught my bottom a terrific clout. I was propelled forward like a hawking swallow and landed flat on my face in the rank grass. Rolling over I found Babs sitting on her hind legs, leering at me in triumph. What amazed me was the fact that the bars of the cage were close together and so the only part of her paw that Babs could get through was her toes and long nails; yet, even so, she had managed to put enough force into the blow to knock me down. As I massaged myself tenderly I wondered what it would be like to be clouted by Babs if there were no bars between us. From the look in her eye I could tell that she would be only too willing to demonstrate this if I would let her.
Every other day or so, Jesse would be moved to deliver a short lecture on natural history to some member of the public. These never varied but were repeated over and over again, word for word, with monotonous regularity. They were repeated so often, in fact, that one or two of them had achieved a fame in the park that was almost legendary. Perhaps the best known of these was his discourse on polar bears, which nearly the entire keeper-staff could repeat word for word. Sam had a habit – not uncommon in bears – which is called weaving. This consisted of standing in one spot, sometimes for as much as an hour, swaying his head and neck to and fro like a pendulum, his eyes fixed unseeingly on the distant horizon. The sight of this great white beast performing this strange action would provoke cries of delight and astonishment from the onlookers and eventually one more misguided than the rest would look round for a keeper to explain the phenomenon. Jesse would appear at the knowledge-seeker’s elbow with a suddenness that was startling. Recovering from their surprise at his abrupt appearance, which had an almost telepathic quality about it, the members of the public would ask why the bear was swaying thus, to and fro.
‘Well,’ Jesse would start, fixing them with an earnest eye, ‘it’s a long story, and even then I don’t know if I’m right or not . . .’
Here a pause; even with this modest phrasing he managed to convey the impression that he was never wrong. The public would produce cigarettes and Jesse would lean on the barrier rail puffing slowly.
‘It’s what they calls weaving,’ he would continue meditatively; ‘you gets it a lot in elephants. No one knows what they does it for though some say this and some say that. I think the reason is this . . .’
Here he would take a deep breath and suck his teeth musically, prolonging the suspense.
‘Polar bears, as I ’spect you know, comes from the South Pole where it’s all ice and snow and such. These bears feed on seals, and I believe they catch ’em with this weaving. They starts to weave on the edge of the ice, see? Along comes a seal and sees ’em and gets interested, see? He pokes his head up to have a look. And then . . . WHAM! . . . the bear’s got him. I think it’s a sort of hypnotism, myself. Sort of fascinates the seal, d’you see?’
The curious thing about this is that during the many hundreds of times I heard Jesse deliver this lecture I never once heard a member of the public ask him if elephants weaved to catch seals also. Neither did they question the statement that polar bears come from the South Pole. But Jesse was always richer by a shilling at the end of his lecture.
Babs and Sam were an amusing and interesting pair of animals, and in watching their habits and characters I grew quite fond of them. Perhaps the most amusing episode that the polar bears participated in was the occasion when Babs was supposed to have a cub. It was, however, one of those periods which are only considered funny afterwards, and not at the time.
The day’s work being over, I was sitting in ‘The Haven’ making myself a piece of toast on the fire when Joe, who had been walking round the section, appeared in the doorway looking very worried.
‘Here,’ he said, with great mysteriousness, ‘come and look at this.’
Reluctantly, I left my toast-making and followed him down to the polar bear cage. As far as I could see everything looked normal. ‘What’s the matter, Joe?’ I inquired.
‘Can’t you see?’
I looked round the cage again.
‘No . . . what is it?’
‘She’s bleeding!’ said Joe in a hoarse stage whisper, looking round furtively to see that we were not overheard.
‘Who is?’
‘Babs, of course. Who d’you think?’
I watched Babs, who was patrolling the bars, and at last made out a faint smudge of dried blood on her hind leg.
‘Oh yes, I can see it. On her hind leg.’
‘Shhh!’ said Joe frantically. ‘D’you want everyone to hear?’
There was no one within two hundred yards of us but Joe, as I mentioned before, was inclined to be hypersensitive about these matters.
‘What do you think it is?’ I asked. ‘Has she cut herself?’
‘Come with me,’ Joe replied.
He led the way back to ‘The Haven’ and we held a council of war behind closed doors.
‘I think she’s in cub,’ said Joe firmly.
‘But Joe, she isn’t any bigger than she was,’ I protested.
‘You can’t tell with all that hair,’ said Joe darkly, as though Babs had concealed some disreputable secret from him.
‘Well, what are we going to do? If she has a cub in there old Sam will eat it, sure as anything.’
‘We must get her into the traps,’ said Joe napoleonically.
This was not so easily accomplished, for Babs had already been in the traps once that day and did not see why she should be locked up again. Sam, however, thinking there might be some food in it for him, came and sat in the traps hopefully and we had quite a job getting him out. At last Joe had to go to the other side of the cage and keep Sam there by feeding him bits of fat while I tried to tempt his wife into the traps. After half an hour we were successful and Babs was safely locked up, while her husband sat outside the traps on his huge behind looking vastly interested in the whole business.
‘Now,’ said Joe, ‘we must give her some bedding.’
‘Straw?’ I suggested.
‘Yes, let’s get a bale from the pit.’
When I returned with the straw Joe was looking worried again. ‘She’s thirsty,’ he said. ‘It’s too damned hot for her here. She gets no shade. We can’t leave her like this.’
‘Let’s cover the top of the trap with something,’ I suggested.
A search round ‘The Haven’ produced an old door, and with considerable effort we hoisted this on top of the traps. This gave Babs some shade, but our actions had made her even more angry and she hissed and growled vigorously. Sam just sat there and watched us with rapt attention, clutching his tummy with huge paws.
‘There!’ said Joe, wiping the sweat from his face. ‘Now for the straw.’
It was at this point that Sam began to take an active interest in the proceedings. As fast as we pushed the straw through the bars at one side of the trap he hooked it out through the bars at the other side, examining each bundle carefully, though whether for food or progeny we could not decide. We tried every way we could to stop him; we roared at him, rattled spades on the bars, threw lumps of fat at him, but it was no use.
‘The damned old fool!’ said Joe.
We were both hot and tired. Sam was sitting on a huge pile of straw, while his wife had only a few sprigs left in the traps.
‘It’s no good, Joe, he won’t leave it alone. She’ll ju
st have to have the cub on the concrete, that’s all.’
‘Yes,’ said Joe miserably, ‘I suppose she will.’
So we left Sam shuffling in the straw and Babs looking very angry in the traps. That evening when the park closed Babs showed no signs of giving birth so we left her shut up and went home.
Late that night I was wondering how Babs was getting on when it suddenly struck me that there was a perfectly natural explanation of the whole affair; Babs was in season. This sudden thought made me almost hysterical.
One look at Joe’s face in the morning told me that he had thought of the same thing.
‘Why the hell didn’t we think of it?’ he inquired bitterly. ‘What a pair of bloody fools, ay?’
Soon, however, he saw the funny side of it and we were still laughing uproariously when we reached the polar bear cage. Joe stopped laughing abruptly.
‘Where’s all the straw gone?’ he asked in amazement
A few sprigs adhered to Sam’s shaggy coat, but that was all. The concrete was strawless, as though it had been swept.
‘OOOooo!’ wailed Joe suddenly, in awful anguish. ‘Just look at the pool . . . oh, the dirty old swine . . .’
There was so much straw in the pool you could hardly see the water. Sam must have spent an exciting and interesting night placing it there out of harm’s way. Of course, the waste pipe was thoroughly clogged; there is nothing quite like a bale of wet straw for blocking a waste pipe. It took us two days to clear the pool and pipe of straw and during that time the weather was gloriously hot, which was a great help.
‘Cubs!’ was Joe’s only comment. ‘Next time she wants cubs she can bloody well have them in the den, like any other bear.’
After I had been working on the section for several weeks, Jesse one morning, to my surprise, promoted me. We were sitting in ‘The Haven’, having completed our breakfast, and Jesse had carefully and slowly lighted his pipe. When it was squeaking and gurgling to his satisfaction, he fixed me with a basilisk stare.
‘You’re doing all right, son,’ he said. ‘You’re working quite well.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, in some surprise.
‘Tell you what I’ll do, son,’ said Jesse, stabbing his pipe stem at me. ‘I’ll give you the upper half of the section. They can be your responsibility, see?’
I was both flattered and delighted. To look after animals in conjunction with other people was interesting, but to be given full charge of a group of animals was a much more exciting prospect.
As soon as I could, I made my way up to the top end of the section and surveyed my domain. There was the modest-sized chalk pit in which lived Peter the wombat. Although I dutifully left bread, carrots and other titbits in this enclosure every day, I had never actually met Peter, for he had constructed a series of burrows for himself in the bone-white chalk face and seemed to be an anti-social animal. I decided I would have to get on intimate terms with him as soon as possible. Not far away, in a cage that was thoroughly over-grown with elder bushes, lived the group of five Arctic foxes. Here again, I had not been able to do any more than dump the food in their cage and leave them to it. They were nervous creatures and required time and attention spent on winning their friendship. In the next enclosure, equally overgrown, lived the racoon-like dogs, curious, shaggy animals with fox-like faces, tails and bodies covered with a thick pelt of bear-like fur, and their short little bow-legs which gave them the rolling gait of a drunken sailor.
I surveyed my new territory very carefully to see how I could improve things. The first thing I decided was that the cages of both the Arctic fox and the racoon-like dog were so overgrown that the animals were scarcely visible, so with the aid of a saw and a bill-hook I spent a happy and strenuous couple of hours cutting down the nettles and pruning the elder bushes. By the time I had finished, the enclosures really looked quite respectable. The animals could now be seen but they still had plenty of undergrowth left to hide in should they want to.
Then I tried to find out to what particular food each of these three species was especially attracted. I discovered, for example, that the Arctic foxes doted on eggs. I found this out quite by accident, for I had come across a blackbird’s egg which had fallen from the nest and was hardly cracked. I put it in the bucket I was carrying, meaning to give it to Sam to see if he would eat it, but as I passed the foxes’ cage they were flitting round the door, having heard the clank of the bucket, and I threw the egg over the wire to them. It fell and split open, the yolk remaining unbroken but the white spattering over the ground. One of the foxes approached it carefully, sniffing through a maze of quivering whispers; another joined it and then another. In a second they had all got the scent and a vigorous fight broke out, more impressive because it was fought in complete silence. The fox who was busy lapping at the yolk was bitten in the hind leg and he turned with bared teeth and floored his antagonist. Two more circled round the egg-bespattered earth, snapping and paw-lifting at each other. Another of them had got the whole thing down to a fine art and he kept darting into the fight, snapping and licking almost in the same movement, then he would sit down and lick his lips carefully before rushing in again. Soon every patch of dampness had been licked up and they all fell to licking their lips and sniffing each other’s noses hopefully. As I moved on down the path they followed me with eager chrysanthemum-brown eyes, hoping for another egg to appear from the pail. After that, I used to go to a hedge that bordered a farm I knew of and pinch chickens’ eggs for my foxes. In consequence of this they soon became quite tame and no longer did their hysterical silent circling of the outer perimeter of the cage when I was cleaning up inside.
The almost complete silence of these foxes was something which puzzled me considerably. I say almost complete silence for it was only once that I heard them make any sound and this was so curious and beautiful that I wish I could have heard it again – a thing one cannot say about all animal noises. One morning I approached the pine wood which sheltered the foxes’ enclosure and I was attracted by a strange sound, shrill and whewling, like a flock of seagulls. There were no birds in the trees above and I did not think that the noise emanated from the racoon-like dogs whose cage I had just passed. The sound continued, rising and falling, sometimes seeming near at hand and then as though it were a distant echo brought by the wind. To my surprise, when I reached the foxes’ enclosure I found that they were the authors of this strange song. They stood in a circle about the door, fragile legs straddled, golden eyes expressionless, heads thrown back with open mouths, and this extraordinary noise was being brought forth in little gusts, wild and bird-like. They showed no more than their normal interest in the food and I could never work out what had brought on this sudden beautiful chorus.
After reading that an Arctic expedition in 1875 had discovered that Arctic foxes laid up stores of dead lemmings hidden in crannies in the rocks as a provision for the long Arctic nights during which they would obtain little, if any, food, I was anxious to find out if my foxes did the same. Up till then they had shown no signs of hoarding their meat. This I knew as I had searched diligently among the twisted elder roots and under the dead leaves. But then, when the cold weather came upon us, one morning I discovered a chunk of meat half hidden beneath a drift of dead leaves. It was quite fresh but a further search revealed no less than five slices of meat, some purple with rot, hidden cunningly in various parts of the cage. I was forced to remove them for purely hygienic reasons but the foxes continued to build up little stores so long as the cold weather lasted.
The racoon-like dogs I managed to make friends with more quickly since they were all gluttons by profession. The older female, though she got to the point of taking food from my hand, would never allow me to take liberties with her, but her daughter, I discovered, was bubbling over with love for the human being, providing he had some food with which to fill the permanently aching void in her stomach. Her name, a corruption of goodness knows what, was Wops and very soon I had only to go to the wire and sho
ut for her and she would come waddling out of the bushes, her eyes bright in her alert little face. It was a little annoying to realise that it was for the meat in my hand that she came running and not for the purpose of a convivial chat. However, in case I should think she were ungracious, she always stopped a minute when the meat was gone.
At first glance, she was very badger-like, with her black and white face markings and the same rolling waddle, but she was much larger and her bushy tail was almost the size of her body. On her face, as I say, the fur was marked with black and white but on her body, legs and tail there was a brindle mixture of deep brown, reddish and grey hairs. These hairs were long and silky and in Japan, where the racoon-like dogs are found in the wilds, the skins are apparently much sought after for clothing. The meat is also considered a delicacy but I felt that Wops was far too charming to skin and eat.
In the wild state this animal is chiefly nocturnal, and this was certainly true of Wops’s parents. They could only be tempted out during the daytime with heavy bribes of food, but Wops would always be ready, waddling round through the bushes hoping that somebody would happen along with something to eat. It could be safely said of her that she lived to eat rather than she ate to live. This was a good thing from my point of view, for if she had not had this obsession about food I could not have had such long conversations with her or watched her so closely. These gastronomic tributes she considered her due and gave them gladly while contemplating her appetite with grave misgivings, for her girth almost exceeded her length.
Only once did Wops turn on the hand that fed her. That the hand – or, rather, the leg – belonged to me was unfortunate but entirely my own fault. I had taken a small group of people down to her cage in order to show her off to them. After feeding her through the wire for some time I thought that I would add some variety by going in and picking her up for closer inspection. The fact that my audience included a remarkably pretty girl, I still maintain, had nothing to do with my action. As I entered, Wops regarded me with suspicion for she knew that I joined her in the cage in order to clean out every morning. That I should join her in captivity twice in one day was too much to ask even of her. Quickly accepting the last bit of meat from my hand, she started towards me with a preoccupied air. Finding that I would not move from her path in order that she might attain the peace and quiet of her hut, she walked up to me and with a sideways chop of her jaws left a neat visiting card of teethmarks on my shin. Cries of horror came from the audience outside the cage. Wops stood at my feet and looked up into my face belligerently. She was not being vicious, that I knew. It was just that I would not get out of her way and she was telling me as plainly as possible that she wanted to pass. It was her cage, she implied, and by God she was going to show me who the owner was.