The Things Out There
On the hunt with Dr Seuss and Gerald Durrell
And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super! and The Cat's Quizzer by Dr Seuss; and Three Singles to Adventure by Gerald Durrell
Dr Seuss, in these brilliant and sadly now-banned books, wrote a good deal of comic verse with the intention of teaching the children about nature and the wider world. How there are interesting and funny things everywhere, not only in the imagination. And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street is a witty look at how children lie and conjure incidents from nothing. If I Ran the Zoo and McElligot’s Pool, and On Beyond Zebra!, are each about how there must be fascinating things out there, in the world, that ordinary life and the day-to-day do not capture. And Scrambled Eggs Super! is about going on the hunt for exotic eggs from inconceivable and fickle fowls.
When Gerald Durrell travelled — and he, unlike the Cat in the Hat, travelled in real life — he travelled to Adventure. In this case, that’s a place in Guiana, where Durrell and his companions went hunting for animals. Some of them — the animals, at least — were cooperative. A few wanted to be caught.
One, bird named Cuthbert, adored people so much that — in addition to making a happy chirping nose which sounded like ‘peet’ whenever he saw one, he would also do his best to find their feet and fall contentedly asleep on their shoes. In so doing, he tripped up many a collector on a careful hunt, or in the middle of a bid to prevent the escape of a dangerous specimen with murder as well as absconding on its mind.
Other animals were funny. Durrell is particularly taken with some miniature monkeys called sakiwinkis (squirrel monkeys) who are charming and active and have little hands. He grows to admire the comic timing of the tree porcupine, too, whose antics, he writes, put him in mind of some of the most talented comedians of his youth. The sad, hangdog defeatedness of the porcupine is almost Chaplinesque. Occasionally it would juggle a fruit seed and almost drop it, but never quite do so. And when angered, the porcupine would put up its fists like a heavyweight boxer of a generation previous, looking furious but never quite throwing the first right.
Animals like this seem charming beyond belief.
Some are not so charming, although they are wanted by zoos and collections foreign and domestic just the same. An anteater leads Durrell and his friends on a terrible merry dance, with the animal endlessly slipping out of the lassoes throw artfully about its neck and shoulders by pursuers — and causing such a spitting ruckus that no horse would carry it. Eventually, the anteater, subdued and fighting mad inside a sack, is carried to its new home on a draught bull, although it managed to escape before while it was being transported.
One cannot but see the anteater’s point. There are some advantages to escaping captivity.
Another animal, this one a capybara, having been captured, contrives on its own time. It schemes to keep Durrell and his companions up by raising merry hell from inside its box. The rodent first throws itself about to rouse the neighbourhood and then, when the danger appears to have passed and everyone has returned to bed, it starts striking the wires around its cage like hitting a tuning fork, producing a concerto of its very own. In Durrell’s view, the capybara does this simply because it likes the sound and is content to keep playing, and serenading all efforts to move its cage to a place where fewer people are trying to sleep. This goes on almost all night.
Other specimen are not charming per se, but they are so fascinating that they arouse sympathy and even admiration in their doggedness.
The pancake-flat and ugly pipa toad mother, for instance — which does her best to look not only dead but half-decayed while she sits slovenly in captivity — looks after her young in little pockets on her back. When they are ready to be born, they emerge from these pockets very slowly. First, a wildly-waving arm or leg is sighted. Then haltingly, the whole animal, small as anything, as weak and impermanent as a sculpture made of cigarette ash, pushes its way out and into a shallow pool. Durrell describes the miracle of this little series of births and tells, convincingly, how they transfixed not only him, but also many of the crew of the trans-oceanic ship he was on at the time, and how proud these tough maritime men seemed to be about the minute toads they had watched taking their first steps and breaths in the outside world.
Durrell is, as usual, very good at describing the natural world in Guiana. The rivers where the bitterns and the gorgeously-coloured birds would stay stock still even as the humans approached in their canoes, the birds trusting to their flamboyant camouflage. The piranhas — reports of whose exaggerated danger Durrell appears to have heard from old hands. The caymans (reptilian like crocodiles), who are violent and serious and don’t much like anyone trying to take them prisoner and put them in a zoo, if it’s all the same.
Here, Durrell’s efforts to capture a cayman are perhaps the most concerning of the whole book, when he decides to brace himself against a rope securing one of them, only to be told — correctly — that if the rope were to break, he and his companion would not be stronger than the beast and would be pulled into the water to be bitten up and lashed about by the animal’s tail. He wisely lets go upon hearing the case for restraint so effectively put.
As usual, some of Durrell’s best stories are about the monkeys, and just as usual, he appears sincerely to have fallen in love with the landscape and fauna of Guiana — his parting a mournful one, the place having have taken on great resonance in its beautiful silent waterways and thick forestry admitting gaps only where animals have crashed through the greenery in pursuit of quarry or shelter from prying eyes.
No wonder the place got under his skin.