Beasts in my Belfry by Gerald Durrell

Author:Gerald Durrell [Durrell, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447214090
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

6. A Bumble of Bears

He licketh and sucketh his own feet . . .

Bartholomew (Berthelet),

Bartholomeus de Proprietatibus Rerum

At one end of the section a large area of land had been thickly planted with larch trees and in this gloomy woodland, resembling a portion of some North American or Russian forest, lived our pack of wolves. There were fourteen of them and they were not the most prepossessing animals to look at; I could quite see how they had over the years achieved a rather evil reputation. Their pale golden eyes against their ash-grey fur seemed slightly slanted and cunning; this impression was enhanced by their strange gait, for they slouched rather than walked, with their heads down and ears back. For such large and powerful animals they moved with extraordinary grace; they seemed to float among the shadows of the larch trees.

The wolf, I discovered, was a much maligned animal. Contrary to its reputation, it does not and never did spend its entire life hunting down human beings, although, of course, the fact that wolves on occasion have eaten men is undeniable. A Swiss naturalist describes with ghoulish relish how, when the German, French and Russian troops had been fighting bloody battles in the mountains of Switzerland in 1799, the dead were never buried but left for the wolves to finish. Apparently the packs glutted themselves on this uniformed windfall and reputedly came to prefer human flesh to all others.

To my relief, our pack had not acquired this refinement of taste but it was nevertheless slightly unnerving to open the gate into the wolf wood and push the wheelbarrow full of gory joints through the larch woods, tossing them out at intervals while the pack circled round and round you at a safe distance, snarling and yarring at each other and then rushing in in order of precedence to snap up the meat.

Wolves in the wild state mate for life and are the most devoted of parents. The average pack generally consists of the parent wolves and the youngsters of that year, so it is a family rather than a pack. However, in exceptionally hard winters several families can combine together for hunting purposes and on these occasions the packs can be quite large. The distance covered while hunting can be enormous; one pack was accurately tracked in Alaska and in six weeks the wolves covered seven hundred miles within an area of about a hundred miles by fifty.

The wolf, of course, has always been one of the favourite animals in primitive religions as far apart as North America and Mongolia and it fills a well-known place in witchcraft. At one time in Europe when wolves were considerably more common than they are today, lycanthropy was not only believed in but practised. One of the most popular stories of werewolves was told by Johan Weyer, who thought it was merely a delusion brought about by prolonged torture of the victim. The story was repeated, however, to prove the existence of lycanthropy.

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