Bring ’em Back Alive 385 I felt as I looked at that leopard that this was a wonderful life—fine and thrilling. I felt that the world was mine. I loved the jungle, I loved the people, I loved the wild creatures. Had I died then and there, beside that first leopard trap in Johore, I would have been content. I felt that I had seen life in its fullest. (107) In this moment of capture, he feels the greatest euphoria as if he had conquered the world, a fulfilment of his intimation at the London Zoo. Durrell recounts his first experience with a serval, a leopardlike, but smaller, cat in Cameroon in a tone that is characteristic of Durrellian storytelling—humorous understatement and surprisingly pertinent comparison: nearly every book that has been written about the forest assures one that if you catch a glimpse of a great cat once in fifty years you are doing fine. So I was filled with a mixture of apprehension and pleasure on finding the Serval (sic) there when I awoke. It stood quite still, regarding me thoughtfully and the tip of its tail moved very gently among the grass stalks. I had seen domestic cats looking like this at sparrows . . . . Also, I was stark naked, and I have found that in moments of crisis to have no clothes on gives one a terribly unprotected feeling. (2001: 154) Buck’s jubilation over capturing the live panther that he casts as the embodiment of nature “red in tooth and claw” could not provide a greater contrast to Durrell comparing himself to a diminutive sparrow, potentially prey, made pathetically comic by the vulnerability of human nakedness. He reverses the capture narrative to view his own endeavors through the eyes of the resident cat. Another such disparity occurs when they encounter famously lethal serpents—pythons, cobras and anacondas. Well-practiced in capturing poisonous snakes as a boy, Buck proudly proclaims that his first captured animal in the Malayan jungle was a 28-foot python. As he approached it “the python reared around instantly, thrashing
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