Fauna and Family. Gerald Durrell

The Elements of Spring

      An habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.

      ISAIAH 34:13

      SPRING, IN ITS SEASON, came like a fever; it was as though the island shifted and turned uneasily in the warm, wet bed of winter and then, suddenly and vibrantly, was fully awake, stirring with life under a sky as blue as a hyacinth bud into which a sun would rise, wrapped in mist as fragile and as delicately yellow as a silkworm’s newly completed cocoon. For me, spring was one of the best times, for all the animal life of the island was astir and the air was full of hope. Maybe today I would catch the biggest terrapin I had ever seen or fathom the mystery of how a baby tortoise, emerging from its egg as crushed and wrinkled as a walnut, would, within an hour, have swelled to twice its size and have smoothed out most of its wrinkles in consequence. The whole island was a-bustle and ringing with sound. I would awake early, breakfast hurriedly under the tangerine trees already fragrant with the warmth of the early sun, gather my nets and collecting boxes, whistle for Roger, Widdle and Puke, and set off to explore my kingdom.

      Up in the hills, in the miniature forests of heather and broom, where the sun-warmed rocks were embossed with strange lichens like ancient seals, the tortoises would be emerging from their winter sleep, pushing aside the earth that they had slept under and jerking slowly out into the sun, blinking and gulping. They would rest until the sun had warmed them, and then they would move slowly off towards the first meal of clover or dandelion, or maybe a fat, white puffball. Like other parts of my territory, I had the tortoise hills well organized; each tortoise possessed a number of distinguishing marks, so I could follow its progress. Each nest of stone chats or blackcaps was carefully marked so that I could watch progress, as was each papery mound of mantis eggs, each spider’s web and each rock under which lurked some beast dear to me.

      But it was the heavy emergence of the tortoises that would really tell me that spring had started, for it was not until winter was truly over that they lumbered forth in search of mates, cumbersome and heavily armored as any medieval knight in search of a damsel to succor. Having once satisfied their hunger, they became more alert – if such a word can be used to describe a tortoise. The males walked on their toes, their necks stretched out to the fullest extent, and at intervals they would pause and utter an astonishing, loud and imperative yap. I never heard a female answer this ringing, Pekinese-like cry, but by some means the male would track her down and then, still yapping, do battle with her, crashing his shell against hers, trying to bludgeon her into submission, while she, undeterred, would try to go on feeding in between the bouts of buffeting. So the hills would resound to the yaps and slithering crashes of the mating tortoises and the stone-chats’ steady tak tak like a miniature quarry at work, the cries of pink-breasted chaffinches like tiny, rhythmic drops of water falling into a pool, and the gay, wheezing song of the goldfinches as they tumbled through the yellow broom like multicolored clowns.

      Down below the tortoise hills, below the old olive groves filled with wine-red anemones, asphodels and pink cyclamen, where the magpies made their nests and where the jays would startle you with their sudden harsh, despairing scream, lay the old Venetian salt pans, spread out like a chessboard. Each field, some only the size of a small room, was bounded by wide, shallow, muddy canals of brackish water. Each field was a little jungle of vines, maize, fig trees, tomatoes as acrid-smelling as stinkbugs, watermelons like the huge green eggs of some mythical bird, trees of cherry, plum, apricot, and loquat, strawberry plants and sweet potatoes, all forming the larder of the island. On the seaward side, each brackish canal was fringed with canebrakes and reed beds sharply pointed as an army of pikes; but inland, where the streams fell from the olive groves into the canals and the water was sweet, you got lush plant growth and the placid canals were emblazoned with water lilies and fringed with golden kingcups.

      It was here that in the spring the two species of terrapin – one black with gold spots and one pin-striped delicately with grey – would whistle shrilly, almost like birds, as they pursued their mates. The frogs, green and brown, with leopard-patched thighs, looked as though they were freshly varnished. They would clasp each other with passionate, pop-eyed fervor or gurk an endless chorus and lay great cumulous clouds of grey spawn in the water. In places where the canals were bordered by shade-giving canebrakes and fig and other fruit trees, the diminutive tree frogs, vivid green, with skin as soft as a damp chamois leather, would puff up their little yellow throat pouches to the size of walnuts and croak in a monotonous tenor voice. In the water, where the pigtails of weed moved and undulated gently in the baby currents, the tree frogs’ spawn would be laid in yellowish lumps the size of a small plum.

      Along one side of the fields lay a flat grassland area which, with the spring rains, would be inundated and turn into a large shallow lake some four inches deep, lined with grass. Here, in this warm water, the newts would assemble, hazelnut-brown with yellow bellies. A male would take up his station facing the female, tail curved round, and then, with a look of almost laughable concentration on his face, he would wag his tail ferociously, ejaculating sperm and wafting it towards the female. She, in her turn, would place each fertilized egg, white and almost as transparent as the water, yolk black and shining as an ant, onto a leaf and then, with her hind legs, bend the leaf and stick it so that the egg was encased.

      In spring the herds of strange cattle would appear to graze on this drowned lake. Huge, chocolate-colored animals with massive, backward-slanting horns as white as mushrooms, they looked like the Ankole cattle from the center of Africa, but they must have been brought from somewhere nearer, Persia or Egypt perhaps. They were tended by strange, wild, Gypsy-like bands, who in long, low, horse-drawn wagons would camp by the grazing area; the savage-looking men, dusky as crows, and the handsome women and girls with velvety black eyes and hair like moleskin would sit gossiping or making baskets around the fire, speaking a language I could not understand, while the raggedly dressed boys, thin and brown, jay-shrill and jackal-suspicious, would act as herdsmen. The great beasts’ horns would clack and rattle together like musketry as they barged each other out of the way in their eagerness to feed. The sweet cattle smell of their brown coats lingered in the warm air after them like the scent of flowers. One day the grazing area would be empty; the next day, as if they had always been there, there would be the jumbled encampment caught in a perpetual spider’s web of smoke from its pink, glittering fires and the herds of cattle moving slowly through the shallow water, their probing, tearing mouths and splashing hoofs frightening the newts and sending the frogs and baby terrapins off in panic-stricken flight at this mammoth invasion.

      I greatly coveted one of these huge, brown cattle, but I knew that my family would not under any circumstances allow me to have anything so large and so fierce-looking, no matter how much I pleaded that they were so tame that they were herded by boys of six or seven, mere toddlers. The nearest I got to possessing one of these animals was quite close enough as far as the family was concerned. I had been down in the fields just after the Gypsies had killed a bull; the still bloody hide was stretched out and a group of girls were scraping it with knives and rubbing wood ash into it. Nearby was piled its gory, dismembered carcass, already shining and humming with flies, and next to it was the massive head, the fringed ears lying back, the eyes half closed as if musing, a trickle of blood coming from one nostril. The sweeping white horns were some four feet long and as thick as my thigh, and I gazed at them longingly, as covetous as any early big-game hunter.

      It