The City Jungle by Felix Salten Read Free Book Online Page B

especially among the buffalos and water-bucks, had been born in the zoo, knew no other world beyond this bit of fenced earth and a full manger.
    â€œHappy lives,” thought the curator, “happy sheltered lives.”
    He stood before the cage containing the great birds of prey. The eagle was hulking on the highest tree; carrion-­kites, goshawks, sparrow-hawks, falcons and buzzards were flapping up and down with heavy wingbeats. Several owls, big and little hooters, were perched quietly in their stone nook. The curator recalled the time when eagles used to pass their days in cramped cages chained to low posts. He recalled with what longing the kingly birds would raise their beautiful eyes to the sky, how they would let their splendid wings droop in order to create that tiny illusion of motion, how their firm hard legs, their sharp talons became soft and ­feeble, and how the unhappy eagles dropped at last from the perches to which they could cling no longer, and lying on the ground, perished miserably.
    â€œPillar-saints,” the curator had called the unfortunate creatures, thus compelled to suffer all the tortures of captivity. He had obtained the big cage for the birds of prey, had not rested until it was built. Now he stood before it once more as in the first year after its erection, and was filled with the satisfaction of having constructed a paradise for his captives. Of course, the eagles, the goshawks, the falcons, all the princely fowls of the air, could merely flutter within its meshes. The proud flight, on motionless outspread wings, that marvelous circling high up in the region of the clouds, was denied them. In their wings, in their breasts, in their eyes the burning desire for unimpeded flight lived on. Their nostalgia, itself as boundless as space, was granted this miserable enclosure.
    The curator turned away.
    As he strode slowly between the cages, past the cage which the kangaroos crossed in five or six bounds, past the ostriches that could race around their yard in less than a minute, he made plans, air castles for the animals whom he loved, for whom he would do anything save give them their freedom. He stopped for a moment at the basin where the hippopotamus was standing stupidly in the water, and by the sea-elephant, though the monster never stirred. He watched the seals playing, slithering in sudden short serpentine streaks through the little pool they inhabited.
    â€œToo little room,” he thought, “too little room everywhere.”
    He recalled how he had had to fight for the appropriation for the big bird cage. “Funds,” he thought, “funds.” If only he had unlimited means at his disposal. What a zoological garden he would build! On a vast terrain that would include whole forests, wide meadows, rocks and big lakes. The gazelles, antelopes, gnus and zebras would live as they do on the open veldt. There would be thickets and clearings for the stags and other deer. The clever seals would swim into imaginary distances, and the beasts of prey, the lions, tigers and panthers, would be given every semblance of freedom.
    See them? Oh yes, they would all be seen, that would be taken care of, people would see them as they lived in their natural habitat. And the people would be perfectly safe from them. Some feeble start at such things had been made, at Stellingen, for example. But the curator was dreaming on a fantastic scale.
    The idea that wild creatures should not be captured, that the children of the tropics should never be carried into the raw climate of northern lands, that human beings have perpetrated too much cruelty on animals in the course of thousands of years and that it must one day cease—that idea did not occur to the curator.
    It would have impugned his own reason for existing. And the curator was very far from doing that.

Chapter Six
    Mino Goes Mad
    M INO THE FOX HAD GONE quite mad again.
    He dashed around his little low cage like a fiend,