Three and a Half Short Stories with Animals In

Llamas. Llamas are horrible creatures, ornery, and a little violent. One day, my mother was standing near the llama pens at Rice Road Greenhouses, having a blether with her friends, when didn't some gatecrashing llama butt in? There she was, chatting away happily, and the llama came sneaking up behind her. Tiptoeing, sort of thing. Closer and closer it came, inch by inch, till it was looming directly over her. It biffed her on the head, ganked her hat, and spat right in her hair. (Why none of her friends sounded the alarm, I'll never know.)

Another animal story: yesterday afternoon, I noticed Rat A sleeping in a particularly sprawly position, with her tail dangling down and her mouth wide open. She looked a bit on the dead side, so I gave the cage a shake. She shook along with it, boneless and limp. "Ah, she has died," I thought--"what a shame. Let me just get a bag for the corpse...." And I went in the kitchen to root through the bag-drawer. It took me a little longer than I'd expected, since the first few bags had holes in them, and the next one would only fit half a rat. At any rate, there was a lot of rustling and crackling, and when I turned around, Rat A was begging for treats. She has come to associate the crinkling of bags with honey drops. Maybe she had died, and the promise of treats brought her back. I'll have to remember that trick.

Before the llama, and long before Rat A, I was bitten by a cassowary*. A cassowary is a sort of large and obstreperous bird. Its horrid disposition probably has something to do with its appearance: it looks a lot like a pheasant might do, if that pheasant had a kingfisher attached to its throat. Hideous thing, really. The Gorgon of birds. At any rate, the Edinburgh Zoo** had a cassowary, which was allowed a great deal of latitude. Wandering about all wild and rampant, he was. I made the mistake of sharing my lunch with this bird, and he began to follow me about. At first, I liked the attention, and scratched his ugly head. He preened and puffed, hoping for more handouts. We were the best of friends till my sandwich was gone. I thought he left me, then, but he only hid. I sat on a bench to watch the lemurs***, and that was when he struck. He jammed his beak up between the slats of the bench, and pinched me right on the bum. Nasty, ungrateful thing!

* Or something that looked like a cassowary.

** Or maybe the London Zoo, or Birdland, or the Royal Botanical Gardens.

*** Or marmosets, or spider-monkeys, or finches. That is to say, I was bitten by something, somewhere, while looking at something else. It happened long, long ago. My memory's gone all squint-eyed.

Mother went down by the water with her camera, meaning to photograph a swan and her cygnets. I was dragged along, in my capacity as handbag-holder. The swan wasn't too pleased, having us horning in on her cygnets, so she surged up and bit--no, not the looming menace with the camera! Bloody thing bit me!*

* Thus establishing the precedent for a lifetime of animal bites. Dogs, rats, birds, moles, mosquitoes--you name it, it's had its teeth/beak/bloodsucking proboscis in me.