Books: Impractical Cats

LIVING FREE (161 pp.)—Joy Adamson—Harcourt, Brace & World ($5.95).

Eccentricities are mysteriously but reliably national. Balloonists are French, bomb throwers Bulgars, weeping drinkers Polish or Russian, and anyone who keeps a lioness as a pet is certain to be British. Author Joy Adamson was born in Vienna, but years of marriage to a senior game warden in Kenya were sufficient to infect her with a Briton’s daft fondness for treating animals the way other people treat children.

A few years ago George Adamson shot a lioness in self-defense. In Born Free, a bestseller of 1960, Author Adamson related how she adopted one of the orphaned cubs, named her Elsa, and raised her in the Adamson house at Isiolo, Kenya. When Elsa reached her full growth, Joy Adamson decided that Elsa should be set free, laboriously taught the house-trained animal to behave like a lioness. Almost beyond question, Joy Adamson was the first human being ever to teach a lion to track down and kill an antelope.

Roar from Father. Living Free follows Elsa and her human den mother from the lioness’ mating, at the beginning of September 1959, through the birth of three cubs 108 days later. The Adamsons established a camp in the game reserve where Elsa had been turned loose, and kept a herd of goats to be doled out when the pregnant lioness could not hunt for herself (Joy Adamson is sentimental about all kinds of animals, but she is a realist, and pet lions do not eat canned cat food). Elsa’s life in the bush did not affect her extraordinary trust of Mrs. Adamson; the author tells, for instance, of being allowed to feel the lioness’ abdomen during the pregnancy, and records that Elsa often would stay in camp for a day or two at a time, while her exasperated mate roared for her in the bush.

Author Adamson showed her own astonishing trust; after the cubs were born she tried to follow Elsa to her lair, and relates matter-of-factly that “Elsa walked over to me and knocked me over in a friendly way, but it was very obvious that she was expressing annoyance at finding us so close.” The author’s serenity at such moments is so complete that it is hard to remember that the clout came from one of the world’s deadliest beasts, made even more dangerous by motherhood.

Nibbling a Publisher. Several sheafs of remarkable photographs show the cubs as they develop from wobble-kneed clowns to adult predators. Elsa remains the book’s commanding personality, clubbing her children judiciously when they are too rough for her human friends, using the top of the Adamsons’ Land Rover as a refuge when she is tired of suckling. The reader acquires some useful information—rhinos make “unexpectedly meek sounds” when they mate, lurking crocodiles will show themselves if one says “imn, imn,” before fording a river, and a nursing lioness can retract her teats for convenience while hunting.

Elsa’s British publisher visited the camp and awoke one morning to find himself pinned to his cot by the lioness, who nibbled affectionately at his face. Den Mother Adamson was severe: “I gave her such a beating that she sulkily left the tent.” By this time the reader has become as fond as the author of this literary lion, and it is a sad thing to read, on the last page, that there will be no more books about Elsa. She died of a blood disease early this year (TIME, Feb. 3).