Grace under fire

To reach Sir Christopher Ondaatje’s Glenthorne estate you have to drive down a three-mile track which drops 1,000 feet to the only piece of flat land between Porlock and Lynmouth. Here, in 1831, the Reverend Walter S. Halliday built a substantial house, hemmed in behind by the towering Devon cliffs but enjoying an uninterrupted view over the Bristol Channel to the Welsh mountains.

Halliday plays an important role in The Glenthorne Cat. Working in his library one wintry evening, Ondaatje looked up to find the reverend gentleman sitting in a nearby chair wrapped in scarf and nightgown. The ensuing conversation, as reported by Ondaatje, provides as plausible an explanation for the regularly reported appearances in those parts of the leopard-like Beast of Exmoor as any other that we are likely to hear.

Fact or fiction? Either way, this story serves as an ideal springboard for an engaging and eclectic collection of tales about leopards. Ondaatje includes some of the classic human-leopard encounters in India, in Sri Lanka, where he grew up, and in various parts of Africa. Many of these, such as Jim Corbett’s account of ‘The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag’, have a predictable rhythm. Leopard seizes hapless villager. Hunter, summoned by telegram, arrives on next train. Leopard eats tethered goat. Hunter shoots leopard, enjoys cup of well-earned tea with grateful village. Catches train back to Delhi, Lucknow, Pantnagar or wherever.

Carl Akeley’s account of how, in British Somaliland in 1896, he killed a leopard with his bare hands, provides a variation on the theme, which may prove a little too macho for all but the most avid readers of the Boy’s Own Paper.

I still held her and continued to shove my hand down her throat so hard she could not close her mouth and with the other I gripped her throat in a stranglehold. The authors of these early (pre-1950) tales do not make much effort to see things from the leopard’s point of view. They do not go out of their way to point out that people, on the whole, are a far greater threat to leopards than the other way round. Happily, Ondaatje himself redresses the balance by including some of his own ‘leopardoptera’ — personal accounts of his encounters with these extraordinarily powerful and graceful animals.

‘The Riddle of Lewa Downs’ describes Ondaatje’s long-standing search for that most mysterious of all creatures, the black leopard, ‘the melanistic black panther, one of the rarest animals in the world’. One day, he receives word that such an animal has been seen in the northern foothills of Mount Kenya. He gets on a plane at Heathrow, hires vehicles and trackers, climbs up and down mountains and finally, unbelievably, spots his prey. Through the long-distance sight, he zeros in on the animal, as it stands magnificently silhouetted in the dawn light on a rocky outcrop. He holds his breath; his aim is unerring. This is a man who once trekked over 6,000 miles in the hot and humid heart of Africa in his quest for the ‘true’ source of the Nile. He doesn’t make a hash of things. The resulting shot of the Black Leopard of Lewa Downs is one of the most magical and evocative photographs I have ever seen.

Carl Akeley has a walk-on part in Robin Brown’s Blood Ivory: The Massacre of the African Elephant. Together with Rider Haggard, he is invited to lunch at the White House with Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 as the latter prepares for his famous East African Safari. In the event, neither Haggard nor Akeley accompany the President on that journey but the most famous Great White Hunter of them all, Frederick Courteney Selous, does. Over a period of several months, the safari proceeds with a veritable orgy of killing. In one day alone, Roosevelt kills nine white rhinos, including four cows and a calf, and wounds two other calves. One of the rhinos apparently was asleep when the President shot it.

Roosevelt’s safari marked the gory climax of an era when men (and occasionally women) blazed away at Africa’s wildlife until the barrels of their rifles were red-hot. When horses, because of the tsetse fly, could go no further, super-hardy chaps like Selous continued the implacable slaughter on foot.

Brown’s masterly account of the massacre of the African elephant digs deep into the past. He demonstrates how for centuries the slave trade was inextricably linked with the export of ivory from Africa’s interior. The poor devils who carried the tusks to the coast were sold as well once their usefulness as porters was over.

If the ivory trade over the years has been the single most important factor in the decline of the African elephant, Brown rightly identifies the sheer pressure of population growth in Africa, and associated human demands, as the major problem for the future. There are more tigers in game-parks in Texas today than there are in India. It is an unconscionable thought that a few decades from now, the same may be true of the African elephant. On the evidence of this book, there is no sign that the massacre is over.

✆ £6.39 (plus £2.45 p&p)

, £20, pp. 235, ISBN ✆ £16(plus £2.45 p&p)