temples and rocking to and fro. “Bloody hell!”
As much to dilute his wrath as anything, I went in search of Mother. I found her in her bedroom brooding over the bed, which was covered with what appeared to be a library of knitting patterns. I explained that Leslie had been, as it were, accidentally gored by my horns. As usual, Mother looked upon the gloomy side and was convinced that I had secreted a bull in my room, which had disemboweled Leslie. Her relief at finding him sitting on the floor but apparently intact was considerable but tinged with annoyance.
“Leslie, dear, what have you been doing?” she asked.
Leslie gazed up at her, his face slowly taking on the color of a sun-mellowed plum. He had some difficulty in finding his voice.
“That bloody boy,” he said at last, in a sort of muted roar. “He tried to brain me … hit me with a pair of sodding great deer horns!”
“Language, dear,” said Mother automatically. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to.”
I said no, I had intended no harm, but in the interests of accuracy I would point out that they were not deer horns, which were a different shape, but the horns of a species of bull which I had not as yet identified.
“I don’t care what bleeding species it is,” snarled Leslie. “I don’t care whether it’s a bloody bastard brontosaurus horn!”
“Leslie, dear,” said Mother, “it’s quite unnecessary to swear so much.”
“It is necessary,” shouted Les, “and if you’d been hit on the head by something like a whale’s rib cage, you’d swear too.”
I started to explain that a whale’s rib cage did not, in fact, resemble my horns in the least, but I was quelled by a terrible look from Leslie, and my anatomical lecture dried in my throat.
“Well, dear, you can’t keep them over the door,” said Mother, “it’s a most dangerous place. You might have hit Larry.”
My blood ran cold at the thought of Larry felled by the horns of my bull.
“You’ll have to hang them somewhere else,” Mother continued.
“No,” said Leslie. “If he must keep the bloody things, he’s not to hang them up. Put them in a cupboard or somewhere.”
Reluctantly I accepted this stricture, and so my horns reposed onto the windowsill, doing no further damage than to fall regularly onto our maid Lugaretzia’s foot every evening when she closed the shutters, but as she was a professional hypochondriac of no mean abilities, she enjoyed the bruises she sustained. But this incident put a blight on my relationship with Leslie for some time, which was the direct cause of my unwittingly arousing Larry’s ire.
Early in the spring I had heard echoing and booming from the reed beds around the salt pans the strange roaring of a bittern. I was wildly excited about this for I had never seen one of these birds and I was hopeful that they would nest, but pinpointing the exact area in which the birds were operating was difficult for the reed beds were extensive. However, by spending some considerable time perched in the higher branches of an olive tree on a hill commanding the reeds, I succeeded in narrowing down the field of search considerably. Soon the bitterns stopped calling, and I felt sure they were nesting. Having narrowed the area down to an acre or two, I set off early one morning, leaving the dogs behind. I soon reached the fields and plunged into the reed beds, moving to and fro like a questing hound, refusing to be tempted away from my objective by the sudden ripple of a water snake, the clop of a jumping frog or the tantalizing dance of a newly hatched butterfly. Soon I was in the heart of the cool, rustling reeds, and I then found, to my consternation, that the area was so extensive and the reeds were so high that I was completely lost. On every side I was surrounded by a fence of reeds, and their leaves made a flickering green canopy above me through which I could see the vivid blue sky. Being lost did not worry me, for I knew, if I walked long enough in any direction, I would hit the sea or the road; but what did worry me was that I could not be sure if I were searching the right area. I found some almonds in my pocket and sat down to eat them while I considered the problem.
I had just eaten the last one and decided that my best course was to go back to the olive trees and reestablish my bearings when I discovered that I had been sitting within eight feet of a bittern for the last five minutes without knowing it. He was standing there, stiff as a guardsman, his neck stretched up straight, his long, greenish-brown beak pointing skywards, while from each side of his narrow skull his dark, protuberant eyes gazed at me with a fierce watchfulness. His body, pale fawn mottled with dark brown, merged into the shimmering shadow-flecked reeds perfectly, and to add to the illusion that he was part of the moving background, the bird swayed from side to side. I was enchanted and sat watching him, hardly daring to breathe. Then there was a sudden commotion among the reeds, and the bittern abruptly stopped looking like a reed and launched himself heavily into the air as Roger, with lolling tongue and eyes beaming with bonhomie, came crashing into view.
I was torn between remonstrating with Roger for having frightened the bittern and praising him for his undoubted feat of having tracked me down by scent over a difficult route of about a mile and a half. However, Roger was obviously so delighted with his own achievement that I had not the heart to scold him; I found two almonds I had overlooked in my pocket and gave them to him as a reward. Then we set to work to search for the bitterns’ nest. We soon found it, a neat pad of reeds with the first greenish egg lying in the cup. I was delighted and determined to keep a close watch on the nest to note the progress of the young; then, carefully bending the reeds to mark the trail, I followed Roger’s stumpy tail. He obviously had a much better sense of direction than I had, for within a hundred yards we had reached the road and he was shaking the water off his woolly coat and rolling in the fine, dry, white dust.
As we left the road and made our way up the hillside through the olive groves sparkling with light and shade, colored with a hundred wild flowers, I stopped to pick some anemones for Mother, and while I gathered the wine-colored flowers I brooded on the problem of the bitterns. When the hen bird had reared her brood to the stage where they were fully feathered, I would dearly have liked to kidnap two and add them to my not inconsiderable menagerie of pets. The trouble was, the fish bill for my present creatures – a blackbacked gull, twenty-four terrapins, and eight water snakes – was considerable, and I felt that Mother would view the addition of 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
