The Golden Mole
To my uncle Chris, who taught me a great deal about the living world.
‘The world will never starve for want of wonders;
but only for want of wonder.’
G. K. Chesterton
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
The Wombat
The Greenland Shark
The Giraffe
The Swift
The Lemur
The Hermit Crab
The Seal
The Bear
The Narwhal
The Crow
The Hare
The Wolf
The Hedgehog
The Elephant
The Seahorse
The Pangolin
The Stork
The Spider
The Bat
The Tuna
The Golden Mole
The Human
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Further Reading
About the author
By the same author
Copyright
Acommon swift, in its lifetime, flies about two million kilometres; enough to fly to the moon and back twice over, and then once more to the moon. For at least ten months of every year, it never ceases flying; sky-washed, sleeping on the wing, it has no need to land.
The American wood frog gets through winter by allowing itself to freeze solid. Its heart slows, then stops altogether: the water around its organs turns to ice. Come spring, it thaws, and the heart kick-starts itself spontaneously into life. We still don’t understand how the heart knows to start beating.
At sea, dolphins whistle to their young in the womb; for months before the birth, and for two weeks afterwards, the mother sings the same signature whistle over and over. The other dolphins are quieter than usual for those weeks, in a bid not to confuse the unborn calf as it learns its mother’s call.
These things – everlasting flight, a self-galvanising heart, a baby who learns names in the womb – sound like fables we tell children. But it’s only that the real world is so startling that our capacity for wonder, huge as it is, can barely skim the edges of the truth.
The book is made in part of moments where we have collided with living things, in both joy and destruction, delight and grandeur and folly. They are histories that reveal us to ourselves, and which find us at our most enthralled and unhinged: at our strangest. The stories of such encounters are plentiful enough to fill many thousand books: that, for instance, St Cuthbert, a seventh-century monk from Lindisfarne, was said to have enlisted the help of sea otters when he got wet in the ocean: they warmed his feet with their breath, and dried them with their fur. That a beautiful young woman told Alexandre Dumas that she would gladly go to bed with him, but only if he would first give her as a love-offering a mongoose and an anteater. That a blind farmer in Suriname once rescued a baby capybara and trained it to be his seeing eye. It was noted in the Guinness Book of Records: guided by what is essentially a vast guinea pig, a man once stepped bravely out into the darkness of the world, and was led home.
History does not relate whether Dumas was able to follow through on the deal: it seems unlikely. The mongoose would have been easy enough to buy in nineteenth-century Paris, but the anteater far less so. What’s not difficult to know, though, is why the young woman wanted the elegant rat-cat and the wormtongue mammal in the first place: we have had such hunger for the living creatures with which we share the world.
This book is, too, a litany of the many wild guesses and misunderstandings, the vivid mistakes upon which our knowledge has been painstakingly built. For example: because we used to hunt beavers for their testicles on the grounds that they were a delicious aphrodisiac, we theorised for hundreds of years that if chased, the animal would bite off their own genitals in order to forestall the pursuit. They would ‘throw them in [their pursuers’] path’, a Roman text from the year 200 CE claimed, ‘as a prudent man who, falling into the hands of robbers, sacrifices all that he is carrying, to save his life, and forfeits his possessions by way of ransom.’ Medieval bestiaries were therefore populated with images of furious beavers castrating themselves with their incisors. Similarly, the medieval conviction that ostriches could digest iron meant that Arabic and European manuscripts were scattered with drawings of the bird with a horseshoe or a sword clamped hungrily in its beak. The theory was tested and recorded by the great ninth-century Iraqi naturalist al-Jahiz, who reported that the ostrich happily ate burning pieces of metal, but on devouring a pair of scissors, sliced itself open from the inside. We also believed that ostriches could hatch their eggs merely by glaring at them with great and unswerving intensity.
The old errors are fantastical and fantastic, and revealing of human hopes and anxieties; our terrors, our desires for greater digestive health and sexual prowess, our quest for magical solutions to relentlessly human problems. And there is no reason to believe that we haven’t got just as much wrong today as we have done in every generation up till now. It would be worth our holding that knowledge, tight and urgent, as we go; our learning, though vast, is an infinitesimally small fraction of what exists.
There is still so much to discover about the dirt on which we stand, and that which rises from it. And our desire to get close to the world’s wild creatures has often done them very little good. Every species in this book is endangered or contains a subspecies that is endangered, because there is almost no creature in the world, now, for which that is not the case. It is the global West that has contributed most to the destruction of the world’s ecosystems; but the impact will be felt by everything on Earth. Time is running short.
This book is offered to you in the guise of a circus ringmaster, with top hat and whip and painted-on moustache. He is not himself very remarkable, but his job is to point at that which is, and his job is to say: dear friends, would you look, only look, at what is here, and would you agree to astonishment, and to love? For love, allied to attention, will be urgently needed in the years to come.
‘The Wombat’, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote in 1869, ‘is a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness!’ The painter’s house at 16 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea had a large garden, which, shortly after he was widowed, he began to stock with wild animals. He acquired, among other beasts, wallabies, kangaroos, a raccoon and a zebu. He looked into the possibility of keeping an African elephant but concluded that at £400 it was unreasonably priced. He bought a toucan, which, it was rumoured, he trained to ride a llama. But, above all, he loved wombats.
He had two, one named Top after William Morris, whose nickname ‘Topsy’ came from his head of tight curls. In September 1869, Rossetti wrote in a letter that the wombat had successfully interrupted a seemingly uninterruptable monologue by John Ruskin by burrowing its nose between the critic’s waistcoat and jacket. Rossetti drew the wombats repeatedly; he sketched his mistress – William Morris’s wife, Jane – walking one on a leash. In the image, both Jane and the wombat look irate. Both wear halos.
It isn’t difficult to understand Rossetti’s devotion. Wombats are deceptive; they are swifter than they look, braver than they look, tougher than they look. Outwardly, they are sweet-faced and rotund. The earliest recorded description of the wombat came from a settler, John Price, in 1798, on a visit to New South Wales. Price wrote that it was ‘an animal about twenty inches high, with short legs and a thick body with a large head, round ears, and very small eyes; is very fat, and has much the appearance of a badger.’ The description implies only limited familiarity with badgers; in fact, a wombat looks somewhere between a capybara, a koala and a bear cub. And though most are a serviceable brown, a small number of southern hairy-nosed wombat
s are born with a rare genetic mutation which makes their fur gold; the rich blonde of Marilyn Monroe.
Despite the fact that they do not look streamlined, a wombat can run at up to forty kilometres an hour, and maintain that speed for ninety seconds. The fastest recorded human footspeed was Usain Bolt’s hundred-metre sprint in 2009, in which he hit a speed of 44.7 kph but maintained it for just 1.61 seconds, suggesting that a wombat could readily outrun him. They can also fell a grown man, and have the capacity to attack backwards, crushing predators against the walls of their dens with the bone-hard cartilage of their rumps. The shattered skulls of foxes have been found in wombat burrows.
Wombats are careful and protective mothers, giving birth once a year in the spring. Like all marsupials, they produce tiny embryonic young, born after only thirty days in utero, which then take refuge in the mother’s pouch for eight months and develop further. The wombat’s pouch is positioned upside down, so the joey’s head looks out between the mother’s hind legs, in order to allow her to dig without filling the pouch with mud. It’s an extraordinary bit of animal adaptation that also makes it seem as though the mother wombat is in a state of constant, eight-month labour, which explains why it was a kangaroo who got to be in Winnie the Pooh.
To early settlers in Australia, wombats were pests. Although wombat hams, like kangaroo steaks, could supplement the scant settler diet, they were primarily regarded as a potential threat to crops, and were slaughtered en masse. (Their spoor is easy to track, for their droppings take the form of almost perfect cubes.) In Victoria in 1906, wombats were classed as vermin; in 1925, a bounty was introduced, and hunters could make ten shillings per wombat scalp. The bounty incentivised hunting; in one year, more than a thousand wombat scalps were traded in by a single landowner. Now, despite its name, the common wombat is no longer common. Overgrazing and the destruction of their natural habitat has caused a sharp drop in their numbers; all species of wombat are now protected, and the northern hairy-nosed wombat is critically endangered. It has sleeker, softer fur than the common variety, and poor eyesight, relying on its large silky nose to guide it to food in the dark. As its habitat has slowly been cut away, it has become one of the rarest land mammals in the world. A census in 1982 put the surviving number at thirty; the most recent found that 251 wombats had evaded the clumsy destructions of humankind.
Other wombats have died more directly at human hands. In 1803, Nicolas Baudin, the famed explorer, returned from a journey to New Holland (now Australia) with an ark of animals for Napoleon’s wife, Josephine. The voyage was bleak, with a high death count among its company and cargo: more than half the crew had to abandon ship owing to illness, ten kangaroos died of exposure, and the botanist had his room dismantled to make an indoor space for the remaining animals. The sick emus were fed sugar and wine and grew sicker, and Baudin himself began spitting blood. Two wombats died, but at least one other was delivered into the arms of the Empress Josephine.
Wombats have offered solace where little other solace could be found. The German philosopher Theodor Adorno was a frequent visitor to Frankfurt Zoo after the Second World War. He wrote to the director in 1965: ‘Would it not be nice’ – or beautiful: ‘wäre es nicht schön’ – ‘if Frankfurt Zoo could acquire a pair of wombats? … From my childhood I remember great feelings of identification with these friendly rotund animals, and would be filled with delight to see them again.’
It is not always enough to be loved. Rossetti’s wombats did not thrive in captivity. His last wombat sketch is of himself, his handkerchief covering his face, weeping over the dead body of a wombat. Below he wrote a mournful quatrain:
I never reared a young Wombat
To glad me with his pin-hole eye
But when he most was sweet and fat
And tail-less; he was sure to die!
In 1606 a devastating pestilence swept through London; the dying were boarded up in their homes with their families, and a decree went out that the theatres, the bear-baiting and the brothels be closed. It was then that Shakespeare wrote one of his very few references to the plague, catching at our precarity:
The dead man’s knell
Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps
Dying or ere they sicken.
As he wrote the words, a Greenland shark who is still alive today swam untroubled through the waters of the northern seas. It was, at the time, perhaps a hundred years old, still some way off its sexual maturity: its parents would have been old enough to have lived alongside Boccaccio: its great-great-grandparents alongside Julius Caesar. For thousands of years Greenland sharks have swum in silence, as above ground the world has burned, rebuilt, burned again.
The Greenland shark is the planet’s oldest vertebrate, but it was only recently that scientists were able to ascertain exactly how old. A Danish physicist, Jan Heinemeier, discovered a way to test lens crystallines, proteins found in the eye, for carbon-14. The amount of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope, found naturally on Earth varies from year to year; there were huge spikes during the sixties, when mankind was at its most enthusiastic about nuclear weapons, but every period has its own carbon-14 signature. By testing the crystallines in the sharks’ eyes, it was possible to determine, very roughly, their date of birth: of twenty-eight tested, the largest, a five-metre female, was reckoned to be somewhere between 272 and 512 years old. Size is thought a relatively good indicator of age, and there are records of Greenland sharks reaching seven metres long; so it’s very possible that there are in the water today sharks who are well into their sixth century.
The Greenland shark is not obviously beautiful. Its face is blunt, its fins stunted, and its eyes attract a long worm-like crustacean, Ommatokoita elongata. These attach themselves to the shark’s corneas, fluttering from its eyeballs like paper streamers, rendering it both almost blind and more disgusting than seems fair. It smells, too. Its body has high concentrations of urea; a necessity, to ensure its body has the same salt concentration as the ocean, preventing it from losing or gaining water through osmosis, but it is a necessity that means it smells of pee – so much so that in Inuit legend, the shark is said to have arisen from the urine pot of Sedna, goddess of the sea. The urea is also what makes it poisonous to humans when eaten fresh. If raw and untreated, the toxins in the flesh can render you ‘shark drunk’; giddy, staggering, slurring, vomiting. It becomes safe only if the meat is buried for several months and left to ferment, then hung out to dry for months more. Served in small chunks, and known as hákarl, it is considered, by some, a delicacy, and by others an abomination. Apparently it tastes like a very ripe cheese, left for a week in high summer in a teenage boy’s car.
The Greenland shark is slow, as befits a fish so venerable. At full speed and with strenuous effort, it moves somewhere between 2.75 and 3.5 kph. Although one of the two largest flesh-eating creatures in the sea, it has an astonishingly slow metabolism; in order to survive, a two-hundred-kilogram shark would have to consume the calorific equivalent of one and a half chocolate digestives per day. They are hungrier in the womb than in their waking lives: the strongest foetus develops sharp teeth, eats its siblings, and emerges into the water alone. Once born, they’re both hunters and scavengers; they have been thought to hunt seals, perhaps inhaling them as they sleep on the surface of the water, but largely they eat whatever falls off the ice: reindeer, polar bears. The leg of a man was found in one shark’s stomach, although none of the rest of him. And it is slow even in the process of its dying. Henry Dewhurst, a ship’s surgeon writing in 1834, saw a shark caught and killed:
When hoisted upon deck, it beats so violently with its tail, that it is dangerous to be near it, and the seamen generally dispatch it, without much loss of time. The pieces that are cut off exhibit a contraction of their muscular fibres for some time after life is extinct. It is, therefore, extremely difficult to kill, and unsafe to trust the hand within its mouth, even when the head is cut off
… This motion is to be observed three days after, if the part is trod on or struck.
They live deep-down and secret lives. Although they have been seen at the water’s surface, they prefer to be close to the bottom of the ocean, where it’s dark and cold: they’ve been found as far down as 2200 metres: six Eiffel Towers deep. Nobody has ever seen one give birth; we have never seen them mate. Their invisibility to us also means that we do not know how far they are endangered: they’re currently listed as ‘near threatened’, but they could be the most common sharks in the world, or urgently at risk. We do know that for some time they were over-fished in large numbers – thirty thousand a year in the 1900s – in order to extract oil from their bodies. It was said that there were places in the Norwegian archipelago where houses, decorated in the paint made from the shark’s liver oil fifty years ago, still shone bright: a paint like no other. We know, too, that because it takes 150 years for a female to be ready to breed, they replenish slowly. They were also believed to be excellent parents: the second-century Greek poet Oppian averred that, when threatened with danger, a parent shark would open her cavernous mouth and conceal her young ones within. As this is very much, alas, not likely to be true, we will need to take care of them ourselves.
Because they live so far beyond our ships and divers, we do not know where they swim. They come to the surface only in the places where it is cold enough for them, in the Arctic, around Greenland and Iceland, but they have been found in the depths near France, Portugal, Scotland. Scientists say they may be everywhere where the ocean goes deep enough and cold enough: they could be far closer to us than we think.
I am glad not to be a Greenland shark; I don’t have enough thoughts to fill five hundred years. But I find the very idea of them hopeful. They will see us pass through whichever spinning chaos we may currently be living through, and the crash that will come after it, and they will live through the currently unimagined things that will come after that: the transformations, revelations, the possible liberations. That is their beauty, and it’s breathtaking: they go on. These slow, odorous, half-blind creatures are perhaps the closest thing to eternal this planet has to offer.