Gerald Durrell - Menagerie Manor

There are again some creatures, of course, which, when they manage to escape, present you with considerable problems. For instance, there was the night I shall never forget, when Claudius, the South American tapir, contrived to find a way out of his paddock. The person who had been in to give him his night feed had padlocked the gate carefully but without sliding the bolt into position. Claudius, having a nocturnal perambulation round his territory, found to his delight that the gate which he had hitherto presumed to be invulnerable now responded to his gentle nosings. He decided that this was a very suitable night to have a short incursion into the neighbouring countryside. It was a suitable night from Claudius’ point of view, because the skies were as black as pitch and the rain was streaming down in torrents that I have rarely seen equalled outside the tropics. It was about quarter past eleven, and we were all on the point of going to bed, when a rather harassed and extremely wet motorist appeared and beat upon the front door. Above the roar of the rain, he said that he had just seen a big animal in the headlights of his car, which he felt sure must be one of ours. I asked him what it looked like, and he said it looked to him like a misshapen Shetland pony with an elephant’s trunk.

My heart sank, for I knew just how far and how fast Claudius could gallop if given half a chance. I was in my shirtsleeves and only wearing slippers, but there was no time to change into more suitable attire against the weather, for the motorist had spotted Claudius in a field adjoining our property and I wanted to catch up with him before he ventured too far. I rushed round to the cottage and harried all those members of the staff who lived in. In various stages of night attire they tumbled out into the rain, and we headed for the field into which the motorist assured us our tapir had disappeared. This was a large field which belonged to our nearest neighbour, Leonard du Feu. Leonard had proved himself to be the most long-suffering and sympathetic of neighbours, and so I was determined that Claudius was not going to do any damage to his property if we could possibly avoid it. Having made this mental resolve, I remembered to my horror that the field in which Claudius was reputedly lurking had just recently been carefully planted out by Leonard with anemones. I could imagine what Claudius’ four hundred pounds could do to those carefully planted rows of delicate plants, particularly as, owing to his short-sightedness, his sense of direction was never very good at the best of times,

We reached the field, soaked to the skin, and surrounded it. There, sure enough, stood Claudius, obviously having the best evening out he had had in years. The wet, as far as he was concerned, was ideal; there was nothing quite like a heavy downpour of rain to make life worthwhile. He was standing there, looking like a debauched Roman emperor under a shower, meditatively masticating a large bunch of anemones. When he saw us, he uttered his greeting—a ridiculous, high-pitched squeak similar to the noise of a wet finger being rubbed over a balloon. It was quite plain that he was delighted to see us and hoped that we would join him in his nocturnal ramble, but none of was feeling in any mood to do this. We were drenched to the skin and freezing cold, and our one ambition was to get Claudius back into his paddock with as little trouble as possible. Uttering a despairing and rather futile cry of “Don’t step on the plants,” I marshalled my band of tapir catchers and we converged on Claudius in a grim-faced body.

Claudius took one look at us and decided from our manner and bearing that we did not see eye to eye with him on the subject of gamboling about in other people’s fields at half past eleven on a wet night, and so he felt that, albeit reluctantly, he would have to leave us. Pausing only to snatch another mouthful of anemones, he set off across the field at a sharp gallop, leaving a trail of destruction behind him that could have been duplicated only by a runaway bulldozer. In our slippered feet, clotted with mud, we stumbled after him. Our speed was reduced not only by the mud but by the fact that we were trying to run between the rows of flowers instead of on them. I remember making a mental note as I ran that I would ask Leonard in future to plant his rows of flowers wider apart, as this would facilitate the recapture of any animal that escaped. The damage Claudius had done to the flowers was bad enough, but worse was to follow. He suddenly swerved, and instead of running into the next field, as we had hoped (for it was a grazing meadow), he ran straight into Leonard du Feu’s back garden. We pulled up short and stood panting, the rain trickling off us in torrents.

“For God’s sake,” I said to everyone in general, “get that bloody animal out of that garden before he wrecks it!”

The words were hardly out of my mouth when from inside the garden came a series of tinkling crashes which told us too clearly that Claudius, trotting along in his normal myopic fashion, had ploughed his way through all Leonard’s cloches. Before we could do anything sensible, Claudius, having decided that Leonard’s garden was not to his liking, crashed his way through a hedge, leaving a gaping hole in what hitherto had been a nice piece of topiary, and set off into the night at a brisk trot. The direction he was taking presented yet another danger, for he was heading straight for our small lake.

Tapirs in the wild state are very fond of water; they are excellent swimmers and can submerge themselves for a considerable length of time. The thought of having to search for a tapir in a quarter of an acre of dark water on a pitch-black, rainy night made the thought of hunting for a needle in a haystack pale into insignificance. This thought struck the other members of my band at the same moment, and we ran as we had never run before and just succeeded at the very last minute in heading off Claudius. Coming up close to his rotund behind, I launched myself in a flying tackle and, more by luck than judgement, managed to grab him by one leg. In thirty seconds I was wishing that I had not. Claudius kicked out and caught me a glancing blow on the side of the head, which made me see stars, and then revved up to a gallop, dragging me ignominiously through the mud, but by now I was so wet, so cold, so muddy, and so angry that I clung on with the determination of a limpet in a storm. My tenacity was rewarded, for my dragging weight slowed Claudius down sufficiently to allow the others to catch up, and they hurled themselves on various portions of his anatomy. The chief difficulty with a tapir is that there is practically nothing on which to hold; the ears are small and provide a precarious grip, the tail is minute, there is no mane, so really the only parts you can grip with any degree of success are its legs, and Claudius’ legs were fat and slippery with rain. However, we all clung on grimly, while he bucked and kicked and snorted indignantly. As one person loosened his hold, another one would grab on, until eventually Claudius decided he was using the wrong method of discouragement. He stopped pirouetting about, thought to himself for a moment, and then just simply lay down and looked at us.

We stood round him in a sodden, exhausted circle and looked at each other. There were five of us and four hundred pounds of reluctant tapir. It was beyond our powers to carry him, and yet it was obvious that Claudius had no intention of helping us in any way. He lay there with a mulish expression on his face. If we wanted to get him back to the zoo, it implied, we would jolly well have to carry him. We had no more reinforcements to call on, and so it appeared that we had reached an impasse. However, as Claudius was prepared to be stubborn, I was prepared to be equally so. I sent one of my dripping team back to the zoo for a rope. I should, of course, have brought this necessary adjunct of capture with me, but in my innocence I had assumed that Claudius could be chivied back to his paddock with no more trouble than a domestic goat. When the rope arrived, we attached it firmly round Claudius’ neck, making sure that it was not a slip-knot. I thought I heard one drenched member of the staff mutter that a slip-knot would be ideal. Then two of us took hold of the rope, two more took hold of his ears, the fifth took hold of his hind legs, and by the application of considerable exertion we raised him to his feet and wheelbarrowed him all of ten feet before he collapsed again. We had a short pause to regain our breath and started off again. Once more we carted him for about ten feet, in the process of which I lost a slipper and had my hand heavily trodden on by one of the larger and more weightier members of my team. We rested again, sitting dejectedly and panting in the rain, longing for a cigarette and unanimously deciding that tapirs were animals that should never in any circumstances have been invented.