The Hunt for the Golden Mole (28 page)

When it comes to the exact object of my quest, however, I am hardly better off than the learned authors of the
British Cyclopaedia.
At least they seem to have had a skin to refer to. For the umpteenth time I turn to Alberto Simonetta's paper of
1968. One of the most interesting things at the time seemed to be that the discovery, in the author's own words, ‘extends by over 750 miles to the East and considerably to the North of the known range of the [golden mole] Family'. Thus it would seem to be either a known species that had gone walkabout or a new one on its own territory.

If it was a known species, then analysis of the ear-bones would swiftly reduce the list of suspects. It hinged on the
malleus
, the small hammer-shaped bone that transmits vibrations from the eardrum to the middle ear. In some golden moles, I learn, this has a ‘hypertrophied ball-shaped head'. Back I go to the
Complete Oxford. Hypertrophy
, I discover, is the increased volume of body tissue resulting from an enlargement of the cells (as opposed to
hyperplasia
, which is an increased
number
of cells). In some other golden moles, too, the head of the malleus is ‘elongated and club-shaped'. As the pellet specimen had neither of these characteristics, it eliminated every species bar those of the genus
Amblysomus.
After that, it all came down to the teeth. I am really struggling now. Most of the
Amblysomus
species apparently have what the professor describes as ‘a more or less well developed talonid' on their molars (dictionary again: a
talonid
is a flattened cusp). The specimen has no talonid at all, thus reducing the possibilities to three. After that, I confess, I am pretty much lost. My comprehension scrabbles like fingernails on rock, then slides gracelessly into the abyss. It is fashionable at the moment to talk about ‘journeys'. They are always being embarked upon in TV cookery contests or reality shows, and imply some kind of glorious ascension from darkness into light. My stubbornly unscientific brain takes me in the opposite direction. I
think
I understand something, then I lose my bearings in a fog of detail. So it is with the teeth. It has been a long journey indeed, from the worldwide sweep of
Animalia
right down to the microscopic
detail of a mole's dentition. Simonetta gives us every conceivable datum – ‘length from tip of lower jaw, teeth excluded, to occipital cordyle', ‘breadth of ascending process', ‘maximum breadth at tip of angular process', ‘length of dental row at alveolar margin', and so on. The dictionary too now rolls over and waves its legs in the air. Simonetta goes on, with ever finer detail, for twenty-eight pages, only a fraction of which I am able to follow. The shape and length of the jaw are somehow different from all previously known species – at the moment that's all I can say. But it is enough for Alberto Simonetta to conclude that the specimen is unique. It is customary in taxonomy to name a species after its discoverer, or after someone the discoverer would like to honour. But here the commemorated hero was to be neither Simonetta himself nor any of his esteemed friends and colleagues. The honour instead would belong to the beneficent deliverer of evidence, the consumer and regurgitator of the new mole's last remains. From the barn owl,
Titus alba
, sprang forth its own dedicated species,
Calcochloris tytonis
.

Thus do I manage to achieve some rudimentary understanding of nomenclature and taxonomy, and of the elephant traps that await anyone with ambitions to demystify the processes of nature. Several of the species mentioned in Simonetta's paper, including
tytonis
itself, have been shifted from one genus to another since its publication in 1968. Right across the tree, branches have been swishing in the storm of new evidence as species have found new relatives among the living and the fossilised dead. It's not something that we read or hear much about – an arcane process that continues unseen in the back offices of natural history museums and makes headlines only in learned journals. I love it, though. I love the suppleness of science, its willingness to change its mind and head off in new directions. That surely is the best and most powerful validation
of objective study, its great and decisive advantage over dogma. It is why Copernicus triumphed over the Church, Darwin over Wilberforce, Huxley over Owen. The more you look, the more you realise how much there is to see. A golden mole opens its mouth, and therein lie all the miracles and mysteries of creation.

The miracles and mysteries of human civilisation, however, remain to be understood. At the end of a rain-sodden week I make another trip to London. Most of the things that can go wrong do, though I am spared a suicide. The railway line crosses the Cambridgeshire Fens, a dead-flat landscape of reclaimed seabed, scored with dykes, that a very few people love and many more find melancholic. For some, the temptation to step in front of a London-bound train is irresistible, and it is a tragically frequent cause of delay. Deliberate self-harm is another peculiarity of my own species that finds no echo in nature, though the myth of mass suicide by lemmings still persists (in reality, their deaths by drowning are the accidental results of over-ambitious sea crossings). My day requires an early start and a missed breakfast. The normally sedate forty-five-minute drive to the station is turned into a mad, heart-pumping dash by a long tailback from roadworks where 200 metres of carriageway have been coned off for the convenience of one man and a shovel. The price of my train ticket is all that you would expect from Europe's most expensive rail network, though at least I get a seat (not a privilege available to those who board at intermediate stations). Insofar as it concerns itself with news, the paper I buy is full of grim stuff about economic crises and the moral elasticity of bankers force-feeding themselves with other people's money. London itself does nothing to lighten my mood. If the managers of the underground system mistreated cattle in the same way as they mistreat commuters, then they would spend the rest of their lives in jail. Despite all this I arrive in
good time for my meeting, but the person I am seeing is half an hour late. This delays my homeward journey until the evening rush hour, but I get to the station in good time to claim a seat on the train. Then I glance up at the platform indicator. The service has been cancelled; there has been a suicide; passengers are advised to find a different route. This means another nose-to-armpit underground crush to a different London station, then a long, roundabout crawl through rural halts that adds another two hours to my journey. For an hour and-a-half of this, I have to stand. When finally I get home, I feel a desperate need for an alcoholic drink.

But there is something else. The red light on the telephone is blinking. A message. Wearily I tap the Play button, and there it is. A bit of fuzz and crackle; the bathroom echo of a bad line over distance. And then the voice. It is a little faint but the words, spoken with a soft Italian lilt, are as mellifluous as birdsong.

‘Hello,' it says. ‘This is Professor Simonetta.'

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Valete Et Salvete

N
ext morning I call the professor back. If he is surprised by my reverential tone – I realise I am actually
bowing
over the telephone – he does not reveal it. But there is a twinkle in his voice that suggests humour. He is in his eighties now but apparently still busy. Better still, he speaks good English. He listens while I pour out my story, which I tell in a confused rush with little sense of order or economy. How can I convince him that I am basing a whole book around his tiny fragment of golden mole? It must surprise him that a layman had even heard of it, let alone turned it into a quest. He chuckles. There is much he could tell me, he says. Many stories. But does he have the Somali golden mole,
Calcochloris tytonis
, the world's rarest known mammal? Ah! Well, of course he doesn't have it
personally
. . . But why don't I come to see him in Florence? Then he can tell me. There are so many stories . . .

It is 9 a.m. on 22 June 2012, a date inked into my diary. We agree to meet in the third week of September. The professor will send me his address. I thank him with near-idiotic profuseness and put some champagne on ice. Florence! Venice alone might beat it as my favourite city, but it would be by only the smallest of margins. If I don't find the mole, then at least there will be Leonardo, Michelangelo, Boticelli and rare Florentine
steak. As it happens, blood, meat and mortality have been weighing heavily on my mind. An old friend has recently died and I have just returned from visiting a slaughterhouse. The two strands of thought have tangled themselves with the mole into an unpickable knot.

We are not clever about death. In the developed world we are living longer than at any time in our species' history. But the very remoteness of death, and the tidy packaging of it by morticians, means that – also unlike any people in history – we keep it out of sight. Many people will die without ever having seen a dead specimen of their own kind, or even having applied the word ‘death' to another human. We speak rather of ‘passing away'. The sensitivity extends to pets, which may be posthumously anthropomorphised at special crematoria or cemeteries. But many other animals, of equal or greater intelligence, will have no memorial beyond the thickening arteries of those who have cooked and eaten them. At the slaughterhouse I have spent a morning watching lambs die. They are stunned by electrodes placed across their heads, then have their throats cut. A mechanised conveyor delivers them in a nose-to-tail stream to the slaughterman, who kills them at the rate of one every nine seconds. I follow the whole process from the delivery of live lambs at the lairage gate to the dispatch of dressed carcasses from the refrigerator. Placing logic before emotion, I remind myself that squeamishness is not morality. I belong to a meat-eating society whose gods granted it dominion over all other species – gods, indeed, to whom animals were ritually sacrificed. We kill and we eat. It's been that way for millions of years, though for all but the last small fraction of that time people were far closer to the bloody realities of what they ate. The act of slaughter was visible and common to every community, not hidden away like it is now. In no century earlier than the twentieth would a
writer have experienced as much difficulty as I did in persuading a slaughterhouse to let him through the door.

It made me think about the value judgements implicit in the theme of this book. If someone were to find and kill a living example of
Calcochloris tytonis
, my anger would burn holes in the page. And yet I accept the deaths of lambs without qualm. What, then, is my moral position? Do I have one? Another awkward question: is it worse to kill a rare animal than it is to kill a common one? Moral philosophers – those who talk about animal rights – would say no. A life is a life, and it is not for us to judge the value of one over another. Indeed, on the utilitarian principle of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number', they might argue that numerical supremacy and moral value marched in lockstep – a dangerous principle in the wrong hands. As I said in
Chapter Nine
, ‘speciesism' – the notion that individuals should be favoured or disfavoured purely on the basis of their position on the phylogenetic tree – is abhorrent to them. This plainly rules out any idea of animals as property, which means goodbye to pets as well as to meat on the plate. It means also a moral dilemma wherever the interests of people are in opposition to other species'. Pre-linguistic infants, senile and insensible humans are routinely invoked as proof of our inconsistency. If animals have similar or superior abilities to these, then why do they not enjoy the same moral rights?

It is a neat but ultimately unsaleable argument, best left to the debating society. Perhaps I should be capable of a more enlightened outlook, but I am not. As a leather-shod meat-eater kept clean and healthy by products tested on animals, I have no moral high horse to ride upon. But I don't believe this should commit me to the outer darkness. Moral precepts are not immune to circumstance. Like everything else in a changing world, they answer to market forces. In the middle of the nineteenth century,
when the supply of wildlife seemed inexhaustible, it might have been no more unreasonable for Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming to roof his bivouack with an elephant's ear than for me to grill a cutlet. Adventurers then had a concept of novelty, but no appreciation of rarity or endangerment. How could they? For us, who must wrestle with the consequences of all that humankind has done, these are wholly new ingredients in the moral mix. So I repeat the question: is it worse to kill a rare animal than a common one? Answer: yes. It might not please the anti-speciesists, but most people of uncomplicated view would think it worse to extinguish a species than to snuff out an individual. Like it or not, this imposes a progressive scale of values. Bio-ethics is not immune to the laws of supply and demand. I frankly admit that I would have no interest in Professor Simonetta's owl pellet if its contents were commonplace.

Saving the savable is the very lodestone of wildlife conservation. What to preserve, how and where to preserve it, are questions that are easier to ask than to answer. It is easy to say what is desirable; much harder to know what is possible. The number of variables – population, fertility, habitat, food supply, climate – make conservation an issue of high risk and complex calculation. It is here that phylogenetic trees might be useful. Like climate models they can tell us something about where we are going as well as where we have been. I have at my elbow a grey slab of academic text bearing the names of eleven distinguished authors from scientific institutions in three continents. ‘Phylogenetic trees and the future of mammalian biodiversity' has lain on my desk for a month or more, and I can put it off no longer. Today is a rare phenomenon, a day of searing heat in the weird British summer of 2012, when northern Europe played chicken with the jet stream. Out I go into the sunshine to park myself under a maple tree with a notebook, a pink
highlighter and a jug of iced elderflower cordial. Outdoor reading has its rituals and its distractions. On a morning such as this, even a largely denatured England seems frighteningly alive. It is one of those days that recalibrates the eye and makes you look afresh at the over-familiar view. There are shades of green here that would have confounded Cézanne. The grass is speckled with daisies and clover; a spider's thread catches the sun and becomes a tiny laser beam; a brown butterfly tumbles past, as if churned by some hidden current in the still air; a fledgling thrush hops guilelessly into view. There are ants, a bumblebee, the inelegant flap of a woodpigeon moving from beech to ash, the rhythmic
chomp
of a baler in a hayfield. A ladybird settles on my arm. Banal thoughts sometimes are difficult to resist. I stroll down to the dyke outside my garden, a narrow trickle that feeds a stream that joins a river that flows down to the sea, which, by way of gulf, delta and estuary, joins me to every place on earth. Thus do I now see the brown butterfly, the bumblebee, the ant, the pigeon, the tractor driver, me – all of us rafting on the same river of life, eddying and moving on.