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their lions. In Kenya she demanded that the colonial authorities give
her 30,000 acres of land belonging to native people so that her pets
could use it. When she was eventually murdered by a former servant,
the investigation was delayed by a surfeit of possible culprits. Cass
notes that 'Few people were surprised that Joy may have been killed by
an African. The general opinion was that Joy got what she deserved,
treating them so appallingly, forgetting to pay their wages and dismiss-
ing them with extreme rudeness and little regard for their welfare.' 33
The Nazis' interest in re-creating what they considered to be the nat-
ural order was not confined to predators. They wanted to restore the
entire ecology of the primeval forests. A reinvented urwald , they
believed, required an urox .
The last giant aurochs died in Poland in 1627. The date is recent
enough for the animal still to haunt Polish culture and language. Men of
impressive physique, for example, are not 'built like a brick shithouse',
as they are in Britain, but 'built like an aurochs'. It is a good simile.
A quarter of a century ago I was taken by the archaeologists who
had just discovered it to a swallowhole in the Mendip Hills which had
been used by Bronze Age people as a rubbish dump. Above the ground,
the hole was almost invisible, a crack in the rocks screened by bracken
and brambles. I squirmed backwards into the cleft. My feet found the
wire ladder the archaeologists had hung from the lip. When I reached
the bottom and planted my boots among the limestone boulders, I
turned and scanned the chamber with my head torch.
The cavern was high enough to stand in. The walls and floor and
everything that lay on it were encrusted with calcite crystals that glit-
tered in the torchlight. Beneath the mineral frost I could make out shapes
in the heap of treasure spilling down the ground that sloped away into
the darkness: broken pots, skulls, bones of many shapes and sizes. The
air was cool and damp, but not musty. It smelt only of rock and water.
One of the archaeologists bent down and picked something up. He
passed it to me. 'What's this?' he asked. It was a flattish, winged bone,
about the length of my palm, pierced by a large hole.
'Atlas vertebra.'
'Of course. But what of?'
'Er, red deer?'
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