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The Backyard Zoo
by Daniel Mannix
Chapter One
How the Back-Yard Zoo Began
As my father was a captain in the Navy, he went with the Atlantic fleet in all its travels, up and down North and South America and overand under the world. Sometimes he would be stationed at a Navy Yard for months at a time, and then my mother would pack up and go to stay with him if the yard was not too far away. When this happened — and it happened very frequently before the war — I would go to my grandparents in the country and live on their farm until the fleet returned to Philadelphia. There were no other children in the neighborhood, no motion pictures, no games except those that I could play by myself, and I might have become lonely except for the animals.
But the animals were enough! They were wise but never grown-up like the humans. There was Barry, the big St. Bernard dog, who knew so perfectly how to herd the cows into the barn in the evening and yet would spend the day playing with me in the woods. Prince, the old white horse, was another. He knew his business so thoroughly that he could mow the ten-acre field while the driver dozed on the mower under the warm sun. I could talk to them and they could understand me.
Then there were the mysterious wild animals which came out of the woods and streams and were seen only by accident. I was fond of fairy tales, and to me, and perhaps to the authors of the tales too, the wild animals were the Little People, the hidden, clever, sometimes lovable, sometimes cruel, life that is always around but seldom shows itself.
One hot night in June when it was impossible to sleep, I slipped out of the window and down the drainpipe and went for a walk. Beside the springhouse where the water flows out to join the creek sat a mother raccoon and her three babies, washing their hands in the sweet, cold water. It was a full moon, and I could see their wonderful human-like fingers, hear their soft chuckling conversation, and see the breeze play over their beautiful golden-brown coats. I slipped quietly back to bed, certain that I had seen four brownies, and although I was only six at the time, I still think I was very near the truth.
For weeks I tried desperately to see more of the wild things. I went first to the tame animals, for I knew that they were to be the intermediaries between humans and nature. I knew that the tame ducks living below the millpond were on very intimate terms with the wild ducks who dropped in to visit them in the autumn on their way south. Then when the wild visitors left, the tame white ducks would try to fly too, but they were too fat to rise in the air, and after circling over the pond, crying encouragingly for a while, the wild ducks would form into a great flock and fly away. What wonderful stories they must have told our ducks to make them so eager to leave their comfortable homes and fly away, perhaps to encounter danger and suffering! How clever they were to be able to find their way back and forth across the world each year, and to escape the hunters and the hawks! But they were always afraid of me, and the tame ducks were too stupid to tell the stories they had heard.
Barry knew a great deal about the animals, but like the farmer, he waged a ceaseless war upon them. Sometimes at night I would be awakened by his distant baying, and then I knew that he had gone off into the woods to fight on their own ground. Often, too, he would return limping, with scars that showed where the Wood People had turned on him.
I knew that the Little People who hated humans were usually mischievous and harmful. There were also actually evil ones, for one morning the hired man said that a weasel had gotten into the chicken-house, and when I saw what he had done, I knew that the stories of the cruelty of the Little People were true.
The rats were always a menace to the baby ducks and chickens. The rest of the Wild People were either killed or driven away by men, but the rats lived with us. At night I could hear them running across the floors and between the walls, and sometimes squeaking signals to each other. They would steal eggs from under the hens and food from the icebox. Traps were a joke to them, and they could usually steal the bait even if it were tied on. One day I found a nest of baby rats in an old closet and carried them off to my room for pets, but that night the mother came and took them away with her down a hole into the rat world and I never saw them again.
After that my grandparents decided that if I had to have pets, rabbits would be about the most satisfactory. So on their next trip to the city they brought back a white-coated, pink-eyed pair.
If they had brought me the rainbow to play with, I could not have been more surprised. Of course, I had seen rabbits often. Every day in the wheat-field Barry flushed one or two. I would see them flash away with that swift, bouncing run, ears laid back, head in, and the powerful brown body stretched to its utmost. But they were wild animals, as wild as could be, and to see one penned up was incredible — like being given the sun in a glass bottle.
But after the hired man had quickly knocked together a rough pen, and the cardboard box with two holes punched in the lid that had served as the rabbits' traveling compartment was open, I had even a greater shock. It was not that these rabbits were white instead of brown or had pink eyes instead of black — it was that they were tame. They hopped calmly about the pen; they came up and smelled my hand with trembling noses; they started in at once on the carrots and lettuce the cook had donated. They were as tame as the pigs or the cows. I almost doubted whether they were rabbits at all.
But they really were. I watched them investigate their runs in long, leisurely hops, dig for a moment in the soft earth, and then sit up and wash their faces like cats. I saw that they were really tame wild animals.
Never had I thought such a thing possible. It was one thing to believe in goblins and pixies and quite another thing to have a tame goblin in a cage. And such a helpless goblin! It was hard to believe that a rabbit that could outwit a hound by doubling on his trail could be as stupid as these were! They never played; they never talked to each other that I could see; they did not even have sense enough to go into the burrow I had made for them when Barry barked through the wire, but ran about helplessly.
Still, I was very fond of them. I built additions to their pen until it could have housed fifty rabbits. When the lawn grass was cut, I raked up armfuls for their beds, and in the early morning when the clover patches were covered with dew, I would let them out, under careful chaperonage, to play about on the cool, damp earth.
One evening the cows strayed very far afield, so far that Barry's bark sounded fainter and fainter until it was lost. I went with the hired man, and we discovered that the bull had broken the fence-bars and had let the cows into the woods. Long after dark we reached home, and I begged off bedtime long enough to feed the rabbits.
It was a clean, warm night with everything shining soft and silver instead of bright and golden as it does in the day. I followed the line of the hedge until I came suddenly upon the rabbit-pen. There were the two rabbits with their noses against the wire, and there on the outside were two wild rabbits talking to them!
When they saw me the wild ones took one great leap — or rather two great leaps — into the bushes and vanished while my tame ones put their front feet against the wire and wagged their ears for supper. My grandparents had gotten two females because they did not want the farm to be full of baby rabbits, and the man at the pet store had told them that two males would fight. The wild rabbits were males who, for some reason, preferred blondes to their own brown ladies.
Since then I have often wondered at the courage those two wild creatures showed in courting their white ladies in the shadow of death. To come into the farmyard must have been a terrible risk, and yet they came night after night and at last began to dig into the pen.
The tame rabbits had often made feeble little attempts to burrow out, but never had they gone deeper than a few inches. In one night the wild ones dug their way in.
I have often tried to guess what happened at that meeting. Did the wild rabbits try to persuade the tame ladies to go away with them, or were they themselves content to stay and wait for the carrots and lettuce I brought down in the morning? Stay they did, either because of the pleadings of the ladies or because of the food and safety that a pen offers.
So they were trapped, and in a few weeks they became tame, although for a while I thought that they would kill themselves rushing against the wire when anyone came near. I filled in the burrow, but they never tried to dig out as they could easily have done.
Now I really had wild animals to talk to as friends. They were different from domestic ones. They were more sure of themselves, more independent, and far more clever. One day when all four were out on the lawn, a strange dog appeared around the corner of the chicken house and rushed at them. Barry had long grown accustomed to pet rabbits and they to him so that all five used to play together. The two stupid white ones hopped toward the dog without fear. Not so the wild rabbits. In a moment they were racing for the briar patch behind the pond, and after a puzzled moment, the ladies followed and escaped.
It was through the rabbits that I began to see the wild animals. Some came to the pen as friends, some to eat the rabbits. The slow-moving opossum came for the remains of the apples the rabbits left! The raccoon and fox had more sinister motives. The squirrels and the chipmunks came after the grain and the woodchucks apparently for company. But it was not until after the war when my father retired and he and mother came home to live, that I got the idea of making pets of the other wild animals as I had of the rabbits.
But this was not as easy a task as it had been with the wild rabbits. The animals were too clever for me to trap, and although they came every night for the food, they never grew tame. Unless I hid behind the hedge until late in the evening, I never saw them at all.
Still, the rabbits remained and they were really the beginning of my zoo. Old farmers who had always believed that it was impossible to tame wild rabbits or keep them in a cage, came and wondered. Also the tale went around that I had pet skunks.
This was untrue at the time. As on all the farms, skunks came around to our garbage cans at night after scraps and as we did nothing to discourage them, we had more than most of the others. Someone started a story that I had a large herd of tame skunks who lived with the rabbits and everybody believed it. But the skunks only came for a few minutes in the evening and then vanished again, and by strict order of the family, I never had anything to do with them.
Now there is something about skunks that catches the imagination as well as the nose. They are a sort of self-advertising agency. Occasionally Barry or my sister's pet mongrel, Rags, would run into one by mistake, and everyone for a radius of two miles or even three on a warm night with a good breeze blowing, knew that skunks were being disturbed.
The farmers who had almost superstitious respect for the wood-pussies never got over my being able to keep them as pets. Although they would not have expressed it in just that way, they also thought of skunks as semisupernatural wood spirits, rather on the order of goblins or gnomes, not actually wicked but decidedly better when left alone and having strange and abnormal powers. They began to send me, as a recognized expert on pets, animals caught in traps and in the act of robbing hen roosts. Unfortunately most of these were too crippled to live or I was unable to feed them. Miserably unhappy, I saw one after another of my wild pets pass from strange, fascinating beings to motionless, grotesque piles of stinking flesh and rotten fur. In those months when I fought helplessly and ignorantly against the great enemy of all pet owners — Death — I developed a hatred of him as a personal foe. Never afterwards was I able to sympathize with the hunter who devotes himself to helping Death make the terrible change.
That fall the old farmhouse on the hill that overlooked the cow pasture and stream had a tenant. I knew that house very well although I had never been inside. I had played on its broad porch and peeked through its windows into the cold, dark rooms and cheerless fireplaces. When late August sent a touch of chill into the nights, I had eaten the grapes that grew wild in the deserted greenhouse, whose vines sent delicate grasping tendrils stretching up through the broken panes. That vacant house had become an inherent part of my life so much so that I saw with anger and fear that people would soon be living there.
One afternoon shortly after I had gladly seen the last of the herd of carpenters, bricklayers and gardeners who had been preparing the house, putting new glass in the greenhouse, trampling down the grass and making the wild garden where I had played cut its hair and reluctantly become civilized, the new tenants moved in.
That evening Miss Davis, a very nice but gossipy old maid, came to call on father and mother and for once I became interested in grown-up talk.
"Charming people, but very retiring," Miss Davis was saying. "I'm sure they'll fit in here perfectly. They have an only child, a real little gentleman." (Here I pricked up my ears rather obviously.) "Yes, Dan, now you'll have a playmate! Won't that be nice!" (I growled to myself. I disliked other children; my animals were quite enough without the dull series of playmates my parents forced on me as if duty-bound — playmates whom I hated and who despised me.) "And he likes animals too!" (Yes, to hunt with a twenty-two rifle, I thought!) "You must run up and see him. I'm sure you'll become pals."
The next morning before the sun was up, while a soft yellow light flooded the world from the golden east, I slipped out of bed, whistled up Rags, the little mongrel puppy, and started off.
My old retreat out the window and down the trellis had been rendered unsafe since the return of father and mother, for my sub-debutante sister who had been traveling with them now slept in the room below. However, there was always the kitchen window, and in a few minutes I was off to take an Indian survey of what the new tenants had done to my old farmhouse.
For years I had played in the tangled garden and the old bramble bushes until I knew just what rabbit path would best take me to the loose boards beneath the porch. As stealthily as an Indian I crawled up under the shadow of the sleeping house, now occupied by the enemy, and lifting the loose board, I silently crawled under the house, regardless of the spider webs and the mixture of splintery boards and broken glass that always seem to collect under porches.
Rags was just ahead of me, and he crept around the angle of the house. I was about to follow and knew where there was a cellar window which perhaps these people had opened, when Rags suddenly exploded.
There is something about the sharp yap of a small dog that carries, and Rags outdid himself. He barked. He growled. He howled. He wailed. In the confined space he made a terrible racket, and in the stillness of early morning it must have sickened everyone in the house. No, Rags was certainly not the dog for an Indian scout calling on enemy neighbors. But something must have started him off. Determined at least to take back with me this little knowledge about the new arrivals, I wriggled across the musty earth striped with yellow bars of light that shone down through the porch, and peered around the corner. There on his stomach lay the new boy looking at me.
It was a trying moment. I had a strong feeling that this was my place and that he was a trespasser, but at the same time I realized that his parents having bought the farmhouse, he might disagree.
At last he said, "We smelled your skunks last night. How are they?"
"Fine!" I answered savagely. "How's all your family?"
"All right," he replied wistfully, "but I wish I had your skunks."
My anger began to die and my heart warmed towards this intelligent fellow. Perhaps I had misjudged him and he was not a little gentleman or a playmate at all.
"Do you like skunks?" I asked.
"Yes, very much. I want to see if their musk is phosphorescent in ultraviolet light," was the remarkable answer.
The good impression the first part of his reply had made was considerably cooled by this. Not that I had any objection to his finding out whether the musk was phosphorescent or not, but I didn't like his approach to a skunk. They were wonderful, wild creatures, and his remark was a little indelicate.
"What do you want to know that for?" I asked.
" 'Cause when I grow up I'm going to be a famous scientist."
"What's that?"
"That's someone who knows what goes on inside of animals."
"Oh!" I exclaimed, suddenly deeply interested. "So you can cure them when they're sick?"
"Yes. I can do that some now, but I want to know all about them and how they act and why."
"What!" I yelled, bumping my head on the porch as I sat up. "You can cure sick animals?"
"Yes, if they're not too sick. Do you want to see my animal hospital?"
Did I? It is greatly to my credit that I ripped my shirt only twice getting out, considering that I was in a hurry. The animal hospital was the restored greenhouse, and the patients were mainly dogs and cats from the S.P.C.A. pound. I began to feel, as he explained the use of the cabinets of medicine and the very neat and efficient little operating table, that he and I would get along together. So did he, for like all scientists, even embryo ones, he was always eager to explore new fields.
So I met Alexander Leighton. As our friendship hardened and cemented over months and years, we slowly began to know each other better, perhaps, than our parents knew us. He was always the scientist; as the child, as the high school boy, and now as the college student. He continually demanded the why of the universe. And if the universe did not answer, he proceeded to drag the information out of it. He respected me as an emotional lover of animals who made a religion out of nature, and he had also for me the polite contempt of the scientist for the practical keeper of pets. It got so that I was afraid to feed my animals without his permission, and I would not have submitted to it had not the animals become healthier under his careful diet; the mangy look of their fur vanished and the sores they occasionally had disappeared. Alex Leighton's interest in the back-yard zoo never lessened. He is still one of the best friends my animals have.
When the animals' food bills got to be two and three dollars a week, my mother suggested that either I sell some of the babies or else write stories about the zoo to help defray restaurant expenses. As the only people who would buy North American animals were fur farmers, I decided to write.
Right then I began to learn something about the publishing business and my publishers began to learn something about photographing animals. A telegram arrived: 'Will publish your book this fall. Please send immediately as many photographs as possible of all animals.' After considerable rummaging, mother at last found two badly out-of-focus snapshots of baby skunks and hopefully we sent them off. The next day another telegram arrived saying: 'Babies undoubtedly darling but impossible to tell what are babies and what background. Please try again and rush.' It was no use to try again, so we hired a professional photographer, and went to work.
For a while it did not seem as if it would be possible to get the pictures at all, let alone in the short time allowed me. The photographer did not like the animals and the animals did not think much of the photographer. My pets are not (the family would say unfortunately not) kept in cages and they come and go as they please. In summer they mostly go. Nearly all are nocturnal and call on us only in the evening. Some had grown quite wild and although they allowed themselves to be scratched on the head and condescended to eat out of my hand at times, they did not like to be picked up or to pose. We discovered wonderful things about protective coloration and the way fur blends into a dark background, but — the telegrams grew more and more bloodthirsty.
Finally the photographer said he could do nothing more unless he worked in his studio. Now getting an indignant skunk who has been away for two months and has acquired a wild wife and six wild children, and who came expecting a large meal and his old box, to pose in a studio before enormous and suspicious-looking cameras and a flashlight that goes off at intervals, was plainly impossible. We had to give up. But all was not lost. In despair, we appealed to the New York Zoo, who came to the rescue. So because we wanted to give our readers an idea of what the animals really look like, we gladly accepted a few of the Zoo's photographs to help ours along. All was saved — but one suit of clothes and the photographer's temper.
