The Hunt for the Golden Mole by Richard Girling

discovered.’ Only the first sentence and the last can be verified from the time-worn specimen whose picture now adorns my mobile phone.
    I enjoy the diversion, but we are not quite done with Hagenbeck yet. An incident in the 1880s, after a rogue elephant nearly killed a keeper at his zoo, laid bare all the moral duplicities of the soi-disant naturalist. There was no place for sentiment. ‘At any moment a fatal accident might occur; there was no help for it, the monster must be executed,’ he writes. Beings akin to ourselves? Well, not as akin as all that. It is difficult to imagine a modern zookeeper coming to such an unhappy conclusion; and even harder to imagine one colluding in what happened next. If unsentimentality was one side of the pragmatist’s coin, then opportunism was the other. Some people might see an elephant’s death as tragedy. Not many would join Hagenbeck in seeing it as just another opportunity to turn blood into money. The chance came during a trip to England, when he mentioned the condemned elephant to the taxidermist Rowland Ward, who then came up with ‘a most original proposition’.
    â€˜If the elephant were to be had cheap, he said he would willingly buy him from me, for he believed he could easily find a “sportsman” to whom it would be worth fifty pounds to be able to say that he had once shot an elephant!’ Sure enough, hot-foot to Germany came ‘a certain Mr W . . . for the purpose ofshooting big game in my Zoological Garden’. The elephant was driven into the yard and tethered to the wall for the hunter to bag his trophy.
    All was in readiness, but the hero of the story did not appear. What could have happened? We waited for an hour, and then, as the sportsman still did not arrive, I hastened into the town to remind him of his engagement. I found him and brought him back to the hunting-ground, and at twelve o’clock we gathered around to see the hunter slay his game. The gentleman had brought along his arsenal, but now that he was in sight of the victim the sporting ardour seemed to have unaccountably left him. He fingered his murderous weapons, but did not fire the fatal shot. Presently one of my travellers, who happened to be present, offered to fire the shot, but this the owner of the elephant refused to allow.
    The story ends with a cynicism so extreme it becomes bleakly comical. The elephant is ushered back into its stable, a noose is placed around its neck, and six men haul on a rope to hang it from a beam. As an epitaph to an era in which knowledge played hide-and-seek with understanding, it is unimprovable.
    But there is something else about Hagenbeck that connects more appealingly to the present. Even now, as more and more species are being hustled to the brink, zoologists still cling to the optimism of their boyhoods. Somewhere, species not seen for decades, even centuries, must be living out their secret lives. Somewhere – in the depths of a Highland loch, in the high passes of the Himalayas, at the sodden heart of a Madagascan jungle – creatures yet unimagined may wait to be discovered.For all his hard-headedness, Hagenbeck never lost sight of the dream.
    Independent reports from reliable witnesses, supported by cave paintings, convinced him that the swamps of Rhodesia contained ‘an immense and wholly unknown animal . . . half elephant, half dragon. . . . From what I have heard of the animal, it seems to me that it can only be some kind of dinosaur, seemingly akin to the brontosaurus. As the stories come from so many different sources, and all tend to substantiate each other, I am almost convinced that some such reptile must still be in existence.’ An expedition sent to find it was inconvenienced by fever, vast areas of swampland and ‘bloodthirsty savages’. It returned empty-handed, but the boy in Hagenbeck would not be quiet.
    Notwithstanding this failure, I have not relinquished the hope of being