The Zoo Revisited/Chapter 8

N the evening when all the visitors have left the Gardens, or the very latest are loitering gate-wards, the day really commences for a number of animals who during the hours of sunlight lie fast asleep in their boxes or covered up under the straw. They are most of them of small size. The larger beasts, upon whom the popularity of the Gardens depends, have generously consented to fall in with the ways of civilised humanity, and to be in evidence during the day. For one thing their meals are given to them in daylight, and for these they make a point of keeping awake. Besides, it is only between sunrise and sunset that crowds of people with rustling paper bags filled with broken buns, biscuits, and bread pass to and fro feeding everything indiscriminately, and in the hope of a share of these gifts all the bears, the rhinoceroses and elephants, and many others decide to postpone slumber until nightfall, when the bag-bearers will have disappeared and all the fun of the day be over.

It is then that some of the lesser folk climb down yawning from their boxes, and creep with blinking eyes out from under their bedding. Having assured themselves that there is not too much light for them to see by, they perform their toilets, exchange sleepy sunset salutations, and make at once for their evening breakfasts of fruit, nuts, and biscuits. The racoons are out, pretty, gentle-mannered creatures, wearing spectacles, who snuffle in a friendly way as you pass, but there is a white one with queer pale eyes that take the reflection in turn of all the colours of the sunset sky, faint pink and blue, yellow and gray, that snores most unamiably at you. The ratels are trotting up and down their cages one behind the other as serious and purposeful as teachers hurrying to Sunday school, but one of them always spoils the effect by turning a somersault whenever it comes to a certain spot. For an hour at a time it will go backwards and forwards, and regularly, about twice in every minute, it turns head over heels on exactly the same spot. It will wear a bald spot on its head. The red and white flying squirrel, one of the most beautiful little animals imaginable, is awake, or nearly so, looking out with big drowsy eyes that cannot bear the light yet at its tempting tin of food—dates and cherries, pea-nuts and pieces of apple, plaintain [sic], and bread. If it could be only given sufficient space for flight it would be one of the most interesting of our guests in the Zoo, for the little creature sails from tree to tree supported by the membrane which stretches between its legs, launching itself upon the air with such unerring aim that it never fails to make the point it started for, and judging its initial velocity with such a nice precision as never to fall short of or overshoot its mark. The “fat sand-rats”—what a name for a creature!—are all sociably nibbling a carrot, and in the next cage the vizcachas are grumbling as if they had got out on the wrong side of their beds, and making the most ridiculous hee-hawing noises conceivable, just like toy donkeys. The funniest sound I ever heard uttered by an animal was by a “native bear,” as they call the coala in Australia. We had caught one in the bush, and the small creature proceeded to deplore its capture with absurd hee-haws that were mixed up with such indescribably comic groanings that, actually from immoderate laughter, we were unable for some time to carry our captive to the waggon. The chinchillas are all alert and busy breaking their fast, while mice innumerable scuttle around and about them, apparently on the best of terms with the pretty fur-bearers. The hyrax sits whistling in a corner to encourage the kinkajou, who is climbing about his wires hand over hand like a woolly little imitation of a sailor. While the dainty gerbilles, like mice on stilts, hop happily about.

The lynx has just got up and, with its face to the wall, is munching its meat in the corner. A queer beast like a magnified Manx cat, and is, in my opinion, the cleverest sportsman of all the four-footed quadrupeds; as clever, indeed, as even the proverbial cart-load of monkeys. When I was in India I entertained for several days a wandering mendicant, who went about the country begging with a lynx at the end of a string. The lynx was a wonder, for, incredible as the statement may seem, it fed itself almost entirely upon—crows! Now to catch an Indian crow in any way is a distinct exploit, but having caught one, to catch a second would be considered, by those who know the Indian crow best, nothing short of miraculous. Yet this beggar-man's lynx caught crows everyday, sometimes half-a-dozen in a morning, and not always by the same trick. It knew several, and would alternate them very cleverly, filling up the intervals with tomfoolery, just as a professor of sleight-of-hand throws the critical faculty of his audience off its balance, and gets it into good humour with itself, by interpolating nonsense and allowing the lookers-on to “find out how it is done.” Sometimes it would pretend to be asleep and lie motionless by the side of a bone until the patience of the crows was exhausted and one of them ventured within reach, when of course it was all over with it. Or it would hold the end of its string in its mouth, pretending to be tied to the post, and run round and round keeping the string taut. The crows, thinking they knew the animal's exact range and reach, would gradually come nearer and nearer to the circle, but never venturing within it, when the lynx would suddenly fly off at a tangent into the middle of them. Or it would sham lameness and carry the bone about, dropping it at intervals and dragging itself painfully back to pick it up again. Every time it was dropped the crows of course darted at it, but they always did it once too often, for the lynx, magically recovering from its lameness, would pounce on the bird before it could pounce on the bone. To amuse the crows, and apparently for no other object, the lynx between whiles would give exhibitions of the most abandoned and senseless frivolity, tumble about head over heels, dance on its hind legs, stand on its head, roll over and over, do anything in fact just to interest the crows. As a fact these performances used to fascinate and excite the birds in the most extraordinary way, and the lynx never had any difficulty when the spectators were absorbed in his proceedings and all shouting at it together to dash at and capture the nearest one. In all its performances, I ought to add, the lynx kept on hand a half-killed crow, whose miserable outcries so affected its friends that they lost their heads, and thus gave the cool, calculating lynx all the odds in its favour that it wanted. The “beggar,” I may further add, refused to sell his lynx. To return to the Zoo.

The owls are now thinking of food and society, and though they will not be in full song until later, they are already attuning their voices. Now, too, the cranes lift up their trumpet-throats and cry to each other from paddock to paddock. And as you stand on the terrace there come from the Western Aviary strange voices, the imperative call of quails, the long-drawn and sweetly melancholy plaint of the sun-bittern, the rollicking, riotous laughter of the laughing jackass, and the melodious notes of the Australian “magpie.” From the vultures' cages you can hear the clamour of the “vociferous” sea-eagles, and, in befitting antiphony, the harsh screams of the cariamas in concert in the Eastern Aviary. Down below you the brown bears are moaning their hearts out, and away in the distance the lions, disturbed by some belated workman who is hurrying through, are roaring in their angriest mood. I never hear the lions roar so finely as in the late evening. Perhaps it is some lingering relic of wild-life days, the inherited memory of old habits, when on waking up from the day's sleep the lions come out and roar, just to let the world know that they are up. But if this be so, how illogical it is of lions in the Zoo to behave “hereditarily.” They keep awake most of the day and sleep most of the night, reversing the natural order of their lives to suit the times of their meals, and when they roar in the evenings now it is really their “good-night” to each other, instead of, as it used to be with their fathers, their “good-day.” In some cases the captives in the Gardens have not given up their former hours of meals, and let the meat be put in when it may they do not touch it until twilight falls.

The monkeys are all going to bed. They know there will be no more nuts or biscuits to-day, and they are making their arrangements for the night with commendable amiability, big and little cuddling together on their perches. Here and there some vicious old macaque or rhesus is dozing in solitary slumber; but as a rule the House has laid aside for the night all provocations to quarrel, and postponed its altercations till the morrow. But the lemur's eyes are open to their widest and the ghostly little creatures are all moving about—beautiful animals all of them but with eerie, uncanny looks and ways—so stealthily that you might think they were doing wrong, and knew it; so silent that it seems as if there were abroad some criminal conspiracy of secrecy.

But in the Parrot House there is a prodigious tumult. In their wild state they always made going to bed a particularly noisy function, and they keep up in captivity the good old customs of their forefathers. For one thing the macaws are of a clamorous kind, and they are still awake; and until the macaws go to sleep there is not much chance of repose for the rest. If you listen you will hear the keas cry, quite distinct from all the others, a keen, cruel cry befitting the dreadful bird that makes them. For this is the fowl that eats the kidney-fat out of living sheep. It digs its way with the long terrible beak through the skin and flesh right to the kidneys, tears out and eats, while perched on the wretched animal's back, all the fat that surrounds them, and then letting its victim go attacks another. In this way whole flocks of sheep that are pastured under the hills where the keas haunted have been lost and the pastures abandoned.

Where the porcupines and swine dwell there is much activity, the creatures trotting in and out and snorting as if in restless expectation of release. This idea of escape appears to be very prevalent among the animals of the twilight, and as you go round there seems to be a widespread understanding that this night or never they are to be free. Of course it is the same every night. The porcupines are gnawing away for dear life at the iron bars and one of them, who has lost a paw and apparently quite forgotten the fact, sits biting doggedly at a bar and regularly every few seconds lifting up its maimed leg and going through the motion of clawing at the place although the limb does not reach by several inches as far as its owner thinks it does. The coypus are just as busy, filing away at the railings and tugging at the wire netting, and next door the copybara is hard at work trying to remove the brick-work of its house. It is the same at the “little mammals'” house where, in spite of most careful morning repairing of the damages of overnight, marmot and vizcachas and ratel occasionally find their way out, but are always recaptured when hungrily, disconsolately reconnoitring from the outside the habitations they had been so thoughtlessly anxious to leave. The otters, too, have a secret for escaping, for once one was “found missing,” and after an exciting hunt was captured in the drain that leads into the Canal.

So an hour passes. The workmen's bell has rung and the Gardens are now empty, the lions are quiet, the bears asleep, all the big animals are at rest. The jackals are still barking, and with the beavers it is high noon, but nothing larger is afoot. And as you go out it is all so still that you can hear the splash of the little dam-builders at work and the dream-broken coo of the Barbary dove in its nest among the Virginia creepers.