382 EURAMERICA modern pantheism and his own private fantasy of being a beloved boy-king of all he surveyed. Exploring the same ground that the ancient Greeks had already populated with gods, which his elder brother Lawrence alludes to in his writings, Gerald, like a true “primitive” found god in every creature and each godlike in its own way. With the onset of war in 1939, the Durrell family returned to England, where despite the vastly different environment, the outdoors was still his home and houses were merely dormitories for his collections. Durrell was an autodidact naturalist coming from a long tradition of British amateur naturalists, receiving an informal and eclectic education from various tutors, but unlike Buck, he showed early talents for concrete and vivid writing and sketching. His biographer Douglas Botting (2000: 94) mentions that while Durrell was apprenticing at the Whipsnade Zoo, he began composing his own list of endangered animals. He was alarmed by the fate of the dodo, but inspired by the recovery of the nearly extinct Pere David’s deer that were present at the zoo. At what might have been a pivotal moment of commitment— like Buck’s epiphany at the London Zoo—Durrell describes his night time feedings of these baby deer: Then came the exquisite moment when the teat was pushed into their mouths and they sucked frantically at the warm milk, their eyes staring . . . . I was very conscious of the fact they were the last of their kind, animal refugees living a precarious existence on the edge of extermination, dependent on their existence on the charity of a handful of human beings. (Botting, 2000: 94) Durrell creates a bizarre, but moving, Madonna-and-Child portrait, of himself as a young man feeding and protecting a species that would possibly not survive. He takes on the burden of becoming their savior, of capturing members of an endangered species in order to save them and preserve the natural world as he knew and loved it.
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