Fauna and Family. Gerald Durrell

two hungry young bitterns with mixed feelings, to say the least. Pondering this problem, it was some time before I became aware that someone was piping an urgent, beckoning call on a flute.

      I glanced down at the road below and there was the rose-beetle man. He was a strange, itinerant peddler I frequently met on my expeditions through the olive groves. Slender, foxy-faced and dumb, he wore the most astonishing garb – a huge, floppy hat to which were pinned many strings tied to glittering goldy-green rose beetles, clothes mended with so many multicolored bits of cloth that it looked almost as though he were wearing a patchwork quilt, and a great, bright blue cravat to complete his ensemble. On his back were bags and boxes, cages full of pigeons, and from his pockets he could produce anything from wooden flutes, carved animals and combs to bits of the sacred robe of St. Spiridion. One of his chief charms as far as I was concerned was that, being dumb, he had to rely on his remarkable ability for mimicry, and he used his flute as his tongue. When he saw that he had caught my attention, he took the flute from his mouth and beckoned. I hurried down the hill for I knew that the rose-beetle man sometimes had things of great interest. It was he, for example, who had got me the biggest clam shell in my collection, and, moreover, with the two tiny parasitic pea-crabs still inside.

      I stopped by him and said good morning. He smiled, showing discolored teeth, and doffed his floppy hat with an exaggerated bow, setting all the beetles that were tied to it buzzing sleepily on the ends of their strings like a flock of captive emeralds. Presently, after inquiring after my health by leaning forward and peering questioningly and anxiously, wide-eyed, into my face, he told me that he was well by playing a rapid, gay, rippling tune on his flute and then drawing in great lungfuls of warm spring air and exhaling them, his eyes closed in ecstasy. Thus having disposed of the courtesies, we got down to business.

      What, I inquired, did he want of me? He raised his flute to his lips and gave a plaintive, quavering hoot, prolonged and mournful, and then, taking the flute from his lips, opened his eyes wide and hissed, swaying from side to side and occasionally snapping his teeth together. As an imitation of an angry owl it was so perfect that I almost expected the rose-beetle man to fly away. My heart beat with excitement, for I had long wanted a mate for my scops owl, Ulysses, who spent his days sitting like a carved totem of olive wood above my bedroom window and his nights decimating the mouse population around the villa. But the rose-beetle man laughed to scorn my idea of anything so common as a scops owl when I asked him. He removed a large cloth bag from the many bundles with which he was encumbered, opened it, and carefully tipped the contents out at my feet.

      To say that I was struck speechless would be putting it mildly, for there in the white dust tumbled three huge owlets, hissing and swaying and beak-cracking in what seemed to be a parody of the rose-beetle man, their tangerine-golden eyes enormous with a mixture of rage and fear. They were baby eagle-owls, so rare as to be a prize almost beyond the dreams of avarice, and I knew that I must have them. The fact that the acquisition of the three fat and voracious owls would send the meat bill up in the same way that the addition of bitterns to my collection would affect the fish bill was neither here nor there. Bitterns were things of the future, which might or might not materialize, but the owls, like large, greyish-white snowballs, beak-clicking and rumbaing in the dust, were solid fact. I squatted down by the owlets, and as I stroked them into a state of semisomnolence, I bargained with the rose-beetle man. He was a good bargainer, which made the whole thing much more interesting, but it was also very peaceful bargaining with him for it was done in complete silence. We sat opposite one another like two great art connoisseurs at Christie’s, say, bargaining over a trio of Rembrandts. The lift of a chin, the minutest inclination or half-shake of the head was sufficient, and there were long pauses during which the rose-beetle man tried to undermine my determination with the aid of music and some indigestible nougat which he had in his pocket. But it was a buyer’s market and he knew it; who else in the length and breadth of the island would be mad enough to buy, not one, but three baby eagle-owls? Eventually the bargain was struck.

      As I was temporarily embarrassed financially, I explained to the rose-beetle man that he would have to wait for payment until the beginning of the next month, when my pocket money was due. The rose-beetle man had frequently been in this predicament himself, so he understood the situation perfectly. I would, I explained, leave the money with our mutual friend Yani at the cafe on the crossroads, where the rosebeetle man could pick it up during one of his peregrinations across the countryside. Thus having dealt with the sordid, commercial side of the transaction, we shared a stone bottle of ginger beer from the rose-beetle man’s capacious pack and then I placed my precious owls carefully in their bag and continued on my way home, leaving the rose-beetle man lying in the ditch among his wares and the spring flowers, playing on his flute.

      It was the lusty cries that the owlets gave on the way back to the villa that suddenly brought home to me the culinary implications of my new acquisitions. It was obvious that the rose-beetle man had not fed his charges, and I did not know how long he had had them, but judging from the noise they were making, they were extremely hungry. It was a pity, I reflected, that my relations with Leslie were still slightly strained, for otherwise I could have persuaded him to shoot some sparrows or perhaps a rat or two for my new babies. As it was, I could see I would have to rely on my mother’s unfailing kindness of heart.

      I found her ensconced in the kitchen, stirring frantically at a huge, aromatical, bubbling cauldron, frowning at a cookbook in one hand, her spectacles misty, her lips moving silently as she read. I produced my owls with the air of one who is conferring a gift of inestimable value. My mother straightened her spectacles and glanced at the three hissing, swaying balls of down.

      “Very nice, dear,” she said in an absentminded tone of voice, “very nice. Put them somewhere safe, won’t you?”

      I said they would be incarcerated in my room and that nobody would know that I had got them.

      “That’s right,” said Mother, glancing nervously at the owls. “You know how Larry feels about more pets.”

      I did indeed, and I intended to keep their arrival a secret from him at all costs. There was just one minor problem, I explained, and that was that the owls were hungry – were, in fact, starving to death.

      “Poor little things,” said Mother, her sympathies immediately aroused. “Give them some bread and milk.”

      I explained that owls ate meat and that I had used up the last of my meat supply. Had Mother perhaps a fragment of meat she could lend me so that the owls would not die?