Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ ways that we understand animals and their social uses. Wolves can be depredators of livestock or icons of pristine wilderness; spotted owls can be intrinsically important inhabitants of old-growth forests or nuisances that inhibit logging and livelihoods. These creatures become stand-ins for our own battles over social and economic resources.

      When animals become so rare that their impact on humans is negligible, their ability to generate new meanings lessens, and it is then that they come to stand for another human notion: our moral failings in our relationship to the natural world. The world has lost half its wildlife in my own lifetime. Climate change, habitat loss, pollution, pesticides and persecution have meant that vertebrate species are dying out over a hundred times as fast as they would in a world without humans. The single boar appearing from behind the trees felt like a token of hope; it made me wonder if our damage to the natural world might not be irreversible, that creatures that are endangered or locally extinct might one day reappear.

      So many things were affecting about this encounter: not just the calling-forth of an animal icon into flesh, but the realisation that there is a particular form of intelligence in the world that is boar-intelligence, boar-sentience. And being considered by a mind that is not human forces you to reconsider the limits of your own. As the boar looked up at me, it was obvious that my knowledge of boars was limited, and only now, face to snout with a real one, its eyes fixed on mine, did I wonder what a boar really was and, oddly, what it thought of me. I had fitted the boar into my medievalist memories, but my friend, who was once a boxer, admired its physique. Talked of its cutlass-curved, razor-sharp tusks. Its small legs and hindquarters that work to steer the huge muscular bulk of the front end. Its manifest, frightening power.

      As he spoke, the boar pressed itself up against the fence and sniffed loudly through its wet nostrils. Rashly, I moved my hand towards it. It looked up, flat-faced, with red boar eyes considering, and sniffed again. I drew my hand away. Then, after a while, I lowered it again. The boar stood. It allowed me to push my fingers gently into its arched black back. It felt like a hairbrush with too many bristles and backed with thick muscle, not wood. There was wool underneath the hair. ‘He’ll be getting his winter coat soon,’ said the boy. ‘Six-inch guard hairs.’ I scratched the beast’s broad hump and felt, as the seconds passed, that some tiny skein of aggression in his heart was starting to thrum. I have learned not to distrust intuitions like this. Suddenly we both decided that this was enough, my heart skipping, he grunting and feinting.

      Wandering off, he sank on to his knees, nose to the ground, then, with infinite luxury, sat and rolled on to his side. Ripples ran down his hide. I was entranced. For all my interest in this creature, the boar had become bored with me and simply walked away.

Inspector Calls

      I’ve a territorial, defensive soul. There’s nothing like a visit from the landlord to put me on the back foot and then some. After most of the night cleaning the house I was spilling with contagious rage. I’d even considered burning the bastard building to the ground. It seemed a logical means of preventing any complaints about coffee rings on the Ercol dining table.

      By eleven, things are calmer. I’m upstairs marking essays at my desk. The air is soothing, the window open upon cool grey. A red Ford draws up outside and a man and woman get out. The prospective tenants have an eight-year-old son, and he is autistic, my landlord told me. There’s no sign of him. But these are parents; they’re moving with the almost imperceptible restraint of manner born of care so he must be in the back of the car. Yes. And as he climbs out my heart folds and falls, not because he is wearing a stripy red and orange jumper but because he is grasping in each hand a model sea lion.

      Downstairs the grown-ups are talking, and the boy is bouncing about in the semi-darkness of the hall. He is totally bored. I look down at his hands. Each of the sea lions has chips of missing paint about its nose where it has interacted with the other, or with something hard, and I ask him if he wants to see my parrot. His eyebrows rise and he waits. A brief, wordless OK from his parents, and we ascend the stairs. He counts each step out loud. And we stop in front of the cage. The bird and the boy stare at each other.

      They love each other. The bird loves the boy because he is entirely full of joyous, manifest amazement. The boy just loves the bird. And the bird does that chops-fluffed-little-flirting twitch of the head, and the boy does it back. And soon the bird and the boy are both swaying sideways, backwards and forwards, dancing at each other, although the boy has to shift his grip on the plastic sea lions to cover both ears with his palms, because the bird is so delighted he’s screeching at the top of his lungs.

      ‘It is loud!’ says the boy.

      ‘That’s because he is happy,’ I say. ‘He likes dancing with you.’

      And then, after a few moments, I tell him that I like his sea lions very much.

      He frowns as if he’s assuming upon himself the responsibility of my being one of the elect.

      ‘Lots of people think they are . . .’ he pauses contemptuously, ‘seals.’

      ‘But of course they are sea lions!’ I say.

      ‘Yes,’ he says.

      We glory in the importance of accurate classification.

      His parents come into the room. They have decided the house is too small for them and their son. So much for my week of cleaning purgatory.

      His mother looks anxious. ‘Come on, Antek! We are going now.’

      There is, suddenly, one of the most beautiful moments of human–animal interaction I have ever seen. Antek nods his head gravely at the parrot, and the parrot makes a deep, courteous bow in return.

      A minute later I hear the front door open, and just before they cross the threshold, I can hear clicking that I suspect might be the collision of sea lions’ noses, and then Antek makes an announcement. ‘I am going to sleep in the room with the parrot, when we live here,’ he says. Such hard words to hear, uttered with such certainty, in the hall.

Field Guides

      From a high lookout near a spectacular three-tiered waterfall in Australia’s Blue Mountains National Park, the peaks in the far distance reflect sunshine scattered through a haze of aromatic eucalyptus terpenes; the light has turned them a bleached and dusty blue. At my feet the land falls away into a virgin forest of graceful, pale-barked trees that stretches as far as the eye can see. Further up the slope are leggy shrubs with flowers resembling bright plastic hair curlers: banksias, I think. When a small bird appears in the foliage below I fix it in my binoculars. White, black and acid yellow with eyes like tiny silver coins, it’s wiping its down-curved beak on a branch of a shrub with strappy leaves. I don’t know what the shrub is, and I’m not sure what the bird is, either. I think it’s a honeyeater, but I don’t know what anything is, not precisely. Not here. The air smells faintly of old paper and something a little like jet fuel. I feel lost and very far from home.

      I grew up in a house full of natural-history field guides, everything from Locket and Millidge’s 1951 two-volume guide to British spiders, with its hairy, many-eyed line drawings, to illustrated books on trees, fungi, orchids, fishes and snails. These books were the unquestioned authorities of my childhood. I marvelled at the names entomologists had given to moths – the figure of eighty, the dingy mocha, the dentated pug – and tried to match their descriptions to the drab living specimens I found on the walls of the porch on cool summer mornings. The process of working out what things were often felt like trying to solve a recalcitrant crossword puzzle, СКАЧАТЬ