Mum and I arrived as the new owners of DartmoorWildlife Park in Devon for the first time at around six o’clockon the evening of 20 October 2006, and stepped out of thecar to the sound of wolves howling in the misty darkness.
My brother Duncan had turned on every light in the house towelcome us, and each window beamed the message intothe fog as he emerged from the front door to give me abone-crushing bear hug. He was more gentle with Mum.
We had been delayed for an extra day in Leicester with thelawyers, as some last-minute paperwork failed to arrive intime and had to be sent up the M1 on a motorbike. Duncanhad masterminded the movement of all Mum’s furniturefrom Surrey in three vans, with eight men who had anotherjob to go to the next day. The delay had meant a fraughtstandoff in the entryway to the park, with the previousowner’s lawyer eventually conceding that Duncan couldunload the vans, but only into two rooms (one of them thefetid front kitchen) until the paperwork was completed.
So the three of us picked our way in wondermentbetween teetering towers of boxes and into the flagstonedkitchen, which was relatively uncluttered and, we thought,could make a good center of operations. A huge old trestletable I had been hoarding in my parents’ garage for twentyyears finally came into its own, and was erected in a roomsuited to its size. It’s still there as our dining-room table, buton this first night its symbolic value was immense. Someboxes and carpets Duncan had managed to store in theback pantry had just been flooded, so while he unblockedthe drain outside I drove to a Chinese takeout I’d spottedon the way from Route A38, and we sat down to our firstmeal together in our new home. Our spirits were slightlyshaky but elated, and we laughed a lot in this cold, dark,chaotic house on that first night, and took inordinatecomfort from the fact that at least we lived near a goodChinese place.
That night, with Mum safely in bed, Duncan and I steppedout into the misty park to try to get a grip on what we’ddone. Everywhere the flashlight shone, eyes of differentsizes blinked back at us, and without a clear idea of thelayout of the park at this stage, the mystery of exactly whatanimals lurked behind them added greatly to theatmosphere. We knew where the tigers were, however, andmade our way over to one of the enclosures that had beenearmarked for replacement posts to get a close look atwhat sort of deterioration we were up against. With notigers in sight, we climbed over the stand-off barrier andbegan peering by flashlight at the base of the structuralwooden posts holding up the chain-link fence. We squatteddown and became engrossed, prodding and scraping atthe surface layers of rotted wood to find the harder core, inthis instance reassuringly near the surface. We decided itwasn’t so bad, but as we stood up were startled to see thatall three tigers in the enclosure were now only a couple offeet away from where we were standing, ready to spring,staring intently at us. Like we were dinner.
It was fantastic. All three beasts—and they were suchglorious beasts—had maneuvered to within pawingdistance of us without either of us noticing. Each animalwas bigger than both of us put together, yet they’d movedsilently. If this had been the jungle or, more accurately in thiscase, the Siberian tundra, the first thing we’d have knownabout it would have been a large mouth around our necks.
Tigers have special sensors along the front of their two-inchcanines that can detect the pulse in your aorta. The first biteis to grab, then they take your pulse with their teeth,reposition them, and sink them in.
As they held us in their icy glares, we were impressed.
Eventually, one of these vast, muscular cats—acknowledging that due to circumstances beyond theircontrol (i.e., the fence between us), this had been a meredress rehearsal—yawned, flashed those curved daggercanines, and looked away. We remained impressed.
We started back toward the house. The wolves begantheir eery night chorus, accompanied by the sounds of owls—there were about fifteen on site—the odd screech of aneagle, and the nocturnal danger call of the vervet monkeysas we walked past their cage. This was what it was allabout, we felt. All we had to do now was work out what todo next.
It had been an incredible journey to get there. A newbeginning, it also marked the end of a long and tortuousroad, involving our whole family. My own part of the storystarts in France.