Grace under fire

To reach Sir Christopher Ondaatje’s Glenthorne estate you have to drive down a three-mile track which drops 1,000 feet to the only piece of flat land between Porlock and Lynmouth. Here, in 1831, the Reverend Walter S. Halliday built a substantial house, hemmed in behind by the towering Devon cliffs but enjoying an uninterrupted view over the Bristol Channel to the Welsh mountains.

Halliday plays an important role in The Glenthorne Cat. Working in his library one wintry evening, Ondaatje looked up to find the reverend gentleman sitting in a nearby chair wrapped in scarf and nightgown. The ensuing conversation, as reported by Ondaatje, provides as plausible an explanation for the regularly reported appearances in those parts of the leopard-like Beast of Exmoor as any other that we are likely to hear.

Fact or fiction? Either way, this story serves as an ideal springboard for an engaging and eclectic collection of tales about leopards. Ondaatje includes some of the classic human-leopard encounters in India, in Sri Lanka, where he grew up, and in various parts of Africa. Many of these, such as Jim Corbett’s account of ‘The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag’, have a predictable rhythm. Leopard seizes hapless villager. Hunter, summoned by telegram, arrives on next train. Leopard eats tethered goat. Hunter shoots leopard, enjoys cup of well-earned tea with grateful village. Catches train back to Delhi, Lucknow, Pantnagar or wherever.

Carl Akeley’s account of how, in British Somaliland in 1896, he killed a leopard with his bare hands, provides a variation on the theme, which may prove a little too macho for all but the most avid readers of the Boy’s Own Paper.

I still held her and continued to shove my hand down her throat so hard she could not close her mouth and with the other I gripped her throat in a stranglehold.