CHAPTER ONE
Penny Arrives
Up to now I had been searching for a venue for my study
but at the moment I had no leopard to rehabilitate. It was on
11 November 1976 that, most unexpectedly, I heard of a cub.
Since 'the Elsa days' Sir Julian and Lady Huxley had been
friends. She was now in Kenya to celebrate the thirtieth
anniversary of UNESCO, which her husband had founded, and I
decided to take her and two friends on a short safari to Lake
Nakuru to see the flamingoes. While observing a spoonbill we
were driving across the treacherous white salt crust which
edges the water when, with a squelch, the car stopped and
sank up to its hubs in the mud.
We stuffed rags and even some of our clothing under the
spinning wheels but this did no good so next we collected dry
grass and brushwood, yet in spite of all our efforts the car
sank still lower. When it began to get dark there was nothing
left to do but to try to find the nearest Ranger's Post. I
had a vague idea that some time ago I had seen a house
standing among trees about four or five miles from the place
where we were stuck and that this was the Post. As Juliette
Huxley was nearing eighty and my leg was still in plaster,
our friends gallantly offered to set out in the dark to get
help. We stayed in the car switching the lights off and on to
guide them. After three hours, to our great relief they
returned accompanied by two Rangers and a Land-Rover which
pulled our car on to firm ground. We all had a drink to
celebrate the rescue and it was while this was going on that
I learned from the Rangers that there was a tiny leopard cub
at the Park's H.Q.
Fortunately I knew the Divisional Game Warden of the area
from the time when I was rehabilitating Pippa in the Meru
Park and he was Assistant Warden there. We were good friends
so I hoped he would help me to get the cub. Next day I
returned and made some enquiries; I learned that the little
leopard was a female who had been found by a hunting party,
after apparently being abandoned by its mother or more likely
orphaned. The men had handed it in to the nearest Ranger and
he had brought it to the Nakuru Park Rangers' H.Q. That was
about a month ago; the age of the cub was now thought to be
around two months. She was beautiful and judging by her size
and dark colouring I thought she must be a forest leopard and
was more likely to be three than two months old. The cub had
been named Jenny and was being looked after by a young Ranger
called Charles. He fed her three times a day on raw liver and
milk into which a teaspoonful of calcium lactate, the same
amount of bonemeal and a drop of Bendex had been added. She
had already been vaccinated twice against Feline enteritis
and was due for a third injection in January. Jenny lived in
an outdoor enclosure next to the Warden's house and was taken
for walks in the mornings and the afternoons. As a result of
all this attention she was in excellent condition.
As she looked inquisitively at me I could hardly believe
my luck. Here was my chance to get exactly what I had wanted
for so long: a female cub, young enough for me to be
imprinted on her and, owing to having lost her mother,
already used to solid food. The Warden knowing that I had
waited for seven years to get just such a cub very kindly
arranged for me to have Jenny on loan from the Government so
that I would be able to study leopard behaviour in the same
way that I had studied lion and cheetah behaviour. He also
offered to let Charles come to Elsamere for a little time to
allow Jenny, while still accompanied by someone familiar, to
get used to her new home and foster-mother.
On 26 November she arrived with 'Nanny' Charles and her
own blanket and feeding bowl. I changed her name to Penny,
which sounded very like Jenny but was easier to project over
a long distance. In doing this I was taking into account the
possibility of one day having to search for her in the bush.
The boma at Elsamere was much bigger than the enclosure
she had been used to and the cub instantly inspected every
part of it; she was far too excited to look at the food we
offered her, much less eat it. We waited till it got dark
then brought more food and this she ate, though only a very
little. At nine o'clock we thought that she must have settled
down and went to visit her. We found her very much awake,
indeed she gave me a good nip in the leg.
Knowing that a predator should eat a complete kill with
the blood and viscera still warm, the next morning I gave her
a freshly killed rabbit. She played with the carcass but did
not know how to open it so we did it for her. Immediately she
tore out the intestines and ate all the viscera before
starting on the solid flesh and the bones. While doing this
she accidentally bit and scratched me with her razor-sharp
teeth and claws. Luckily, as I have an exceptionally thin
skin and only need to bang myself against a hard object to
start bleeding, I always carry sulphanilamide powder in my
pocket, so I was able to disinfect the wounds and stop the
bleeding immediately.
With Penny's arrival the four Colobus monkeys who lived at
Elsamere, and are so tame they take carrots and tit-bits from
my hand, disappeared for a few days as did the eagle-owls who
used to come in the evening to eat chicken heads which I got
for them from a nearby farm. Indeed I now had a sense of a
hush surrounding Elsamere. It seemed that amongst the
wildlife the word had got about, 'There is a leopard around
and a leopard is a leopard and should be avoided'. Penny
loved her new home and spent most of her time on one of the
wooden platforms I had rigged up for her in each corner of
the boma as a substitute for the trees on which in natural
conditions she would rest.
She loved going for walks on the three-acre lawn that
surrounds the house. A few trees grow there while the rest of
Elsamere consists of a wooded plain and a natural forest that
has become the refuge of bushbuck, reedbuck, duiker, dik-dik,
marsh mongoose, genet and white tai led mongoose, all of
which have found food, shelter and safety from snares and
hunting dogs there. The forest was a great temptation to
Penny. She would have loved to hide in its thick undergrowth
but if she had done so we should never have found her. I had
therefore to train her to walk on a lead.
I expected her to struggle, as puppies do before accepting
such control, but to my amazement she quickly accepted the
harness and the lead and moreover never got entangled in it.
Most of the day she spent under a shady tree on the lawn,
sleeping close to Charles or playing. To vary her diet the
gardener caught mole- rats for her which she loved and ate
whole, rejecting only their sharp teeth. With the onset of
the rains fierce safari ants made their appearance. Charles
poured engine oil over them. This suffocates them instantly
but he had not counted on Penny's reaction. She always
carefully avoided live ants but now she delighted in rolling
in the sticky mess and it took us many days to rid her pelt
of the oil even though she cooperated by turning herself
round so that we could rub each side of her coat with grass
and rags.
I was interested to observe that when feeding, Penny used
a position similar to that of cheetah: both crouch low with
their elbows tucked in whereas lion hold their food with
their forepaws.
After Penny had been a week at Elsamere she threw a fit
which lasted for five minutes, white foam dribbling from her
mouth. Alarmed, I called Dr Paul Sayer at the Kabete
Laboratories, Nairobi. For many years he has been our friend
as well as our vet. He thought she was probably suffering
from hookworm and told us to give her one-and-a-half tablets
of Cannex in the morning and the same dose in the afternoon.
Penny seemed to know that we were trying to help her and
never bit or scratched us when we were dosing her, indeed she
was unusually gentle. That she was off colour and lethargic
during the following days we attributed to the treatment but
when after six days she threw another fit and her tummy was
tight as a drum Paul Sayer told us to stop feeding her liver
and pulped rabbit bones and give her the maximum of calcium.
He now thought it possible that a sharp bone might have
lacerated her stomach.
In spite of this change of diet Penny's coat became duller
and duller, and although I gave her liquid paraffin daily she
was constipated. During all this time she was touchingly
affectionate and even after dark when she would normally have
been too boisterous for me to play with her she responded to
my caresses with a gentle pawing and allowed me to use her
shoulder as a pillow when I rested close to her. A week later
she had a third fit and by then her condition had plainly
deteriorated. An examination of her blood showed that she had
an infection of haemobartonella, a very vicious parasite. To
treat her we needed to administer four one-gram capsules of
Tetracycline every twenty-four hours for fourteen days.
During this anxious time Penny's only amusement was
watching the Colobus monkeys. Having seen me playing with her
they must have realised that 'the Terror of Africa' would be
harmless to them so long as they were separated by wire.
Gradually they came nearer to the boma, hopped on to its
posts and finally on to the roof. Penny for her part made
frantic efforts to reach them and excelled herself in
acrobatics particularly in mid-air twists. The monkeys
learned exactly how to time their teasing leaps, even so they
were lucky not to lose some hair out of their long tails.
Soon the game became a daily ritual which both sides enjoyed.
I was glad that it provided Penny with a break in her
monotonous routine while confined within the boma. When she
was able to go for walks we had to be very careful to see if
the monkeys were around, for she was extremely keen on
getting at them and had by now become very strong. Indeed by
now with my one functioning hand I found it difficult to
control her, also my broken ankle was only mending slowly.
In the circumstances I asked if Charles could stay on at
Elsamere until I could find an assistant. Penny liked him and
he was good with her; my only criticism was that when he
wanted her to move he jumped and danced in front of her with
such gusto that she, in imitation, jumped at him and at me so
vigorously that we needed always to be on the alert and could
not ever afford to be off guard in case she landed on us.
After four days of the new treatment Penny's blood smears
showed that she was free of the parasite. From then onwards
we fed her in the mornings on as much raw meat as she would
eat; into it we mixed bonemeal, calcium phosphate, Farex and
a little salt, while in the evenings we gave her two chickens
which had died of respiratory trouble at a nearby farm, but
were otherwise perfectly healthy. With each meal we gave her
milk into which four drops of Abidec were added twice weekly.
Three times a week she had a freshly killed and skinned
rabbit. Like a wild leopard she carried the carcass, not to a
tree since there were none in her boma, but to one of the
platforms. Obviously she did this to protect her kill from
predators. It was interesting that this instinct to store
food had developed in her before she had learned to kill;
lion and cheetah are taught to do this by their mothers who
only begin to teach their cubs to kill when they have grown
their permanent teeth. In the case of lion this is when they
are 17 months old (after that they of course take some months
before they become efficient killers). Cheetah start to teach
their offspring, to kill at 14 months but the cubs remain
dependent on their mother till they are 17+ months old.
From little Taga I had learned that a leopard's deciduous
teeth are fully developed at 6 weeks and now from Penny ~
learned that it is when they are 5 months old that their
permanent teeth make their appearance. At this age her
instinct for killing had still not developed, but from the
first she knew how to protect her food. She demonstrated this
by straddling her blanket with her front legs when she wanted
to move it, and covering it with her body in the way that
later she would move a kill.
Knowing that all cats need roughage, in the form of skin
and feathers, I tried to feed Penny rabbit skins and chicken
feathers, but she would not touch either. Indeed she
carefully plucked the chickens with the result that the
ground inside the boma looked like a snowfield. When there
was a wind she greatly enjoyed chasing the feathers around.
She also had fun running after tennis balls brought her by
a five-year old boy who often came to play with her. I am
sure that all animals are aware of our feelings towards them
and respond accordingly. Thus a child who has not been told
that certain animals are dangerous and who, consequently, is
not afraid of them, and regards all animals as friends, will
find that the animals respond in a friendly way. In this case
the boy's parents did not wish him to enter the boma, so he
and Penny ran up and down with the wire between them till
both were out of breath.
Like all young animals, Penny fretted when she was alone.
Her most active times were early in the morning and after
sunset. We took her for a walk between 7 and 9 a.m., by which
time it had become very hot and she did not want to move, so
to coax her back to her boma and her morning meal we had to
wriggle a rabbit skin tied to a string in front of her. Once
home and fed she dozed off close to Charles. At tea time we
again took her for a walk, but on this second expedition she
never showed as much energy as in the morning, and often only
wished to climb a tree or to play with the water sprinkler on
the lawn.
Penny was a very good tree climber, and we encouraged this
sport by hiding the rabbit skin in some branches. She was
very proud when she found and retrieved it, and used to
parade it in front of us until we patted her, then she would
drop it and seem to ask for the game to be repeated. The cub
was very affectionate and never scratched me except by
accident; then it usually happened when she was nibbling me
playfully, as she would have nibbled at her mother's thick
skin. If I checked her with a firm 'NO' she would instantly
put her two paws into her mouth and nibble at them as though
to say: 'Nibble I must, but I'll bite my own paws rather than
make you cross'. This sight always disarmed me. Penny often
embraced me with her claws well tucked in, but unfortunately
I could never rely on their being retracted; Charles, who had
a thicker skin n&ver got scratched, and certainly Penny
never intended to draw blood.
For stretching her tendons and sharpening her claws she
had a daily ritual; she stood on her hind legs, close to a
certain tree which had rough bark and stretched herself as
high as she could along the trunk, then drew her paws slowly
downwards; afterwards the marks of her claws could be seen on
the bark. Gradually our walks became longer, no more did we
keep to the neighbourhood of the house, but went into the
bush-covered plain.
Luckily Elsamere had fifty acres which was of no
agricultural use; it consisted of an obsidian lava flow which
had emanated from a distant volcano. Because it could only
support grazing for three cows this area had been for sale
when we bought the property. Since' what we wanted was a home
and privacy, and had no intention of running a farm, we
bought the land. It proved to be an ideal playground for
Penny; here she could get plenty of exercise, climb trees,
ambush us from behind bushes, observe birds and small
antelope, and all this at an altitude and in a climate
similar to that of her birthplace.
As an interim playground it was perfect, but she needed a
permanent home, and I knew I must hurry to look for one.
