Part of the Pride Read Online Free Page B

I could draw a pretty good cheetah from an early age, even though I had never seen one in real life. So I started drawing my animals. I’d draw from life or memory and got help from photos in books. As I drew them, I understood them even more.
    My sisters were interested in animals, but not to the same degree as me. My brother liked our pets, but was not as hands on as I was. I have never been one who can look at an animal and say, “That’s very pretty.” Instead, I’d say, “I wonder what would happen if I touch you? If I could just get to know you a bit better perhaps we could do more together than just look at each other. Do you know me and recognize my voice? If not, I wonder if I could I form a relationship with you?” These were the questions I asked.
    I used to talk to my pigeons. They knew my voice and they would come when I called them, which was very nice. I could bounce things off them, as well, and like the dogs and (sometimes) the cats, they gave unconditional love. The pigeons just wanted some food and a scratch on the head. “Kevin, come and get your dinner now,” Mom would call. “If you don’t come now you can sleep with those pigeons.” Sometimes I did, as it was simply better to be with them in the pigeon house than going inside and being witness to the strained relationship that was developing between my parents.
    I even tried to develop relationships with the goldfish, which were more my sisters’ than mine. I wanted to be interactive with the fish and found the whole concept of keeping them quite amusing. I couldn’t believe that anyone would be happy just staring at a fish in a bowl. I used to pat the water and I loved it when the goldfish would come and suck my finger. Eventually I learned that rather than my being able to commune with the fish, they were actually just trying to suck the tiny air bubbles that formed around my finger. I soon realized I’d never be a big keeper or trainer of fish.
    I did, however, try and get my animals to do things. I was fascinated with those stories about bird trainers in America who could get their parrots to ride bicycles and perform all sorts of tricks. Before he died, I was able to teach J.R. the parrot how to do bench presses with a pencil.
    My career choices as a child included bird trainer, veterinarian, zookeeper, or game ranger. Every young boy in South Africa wants to become a game ranger, but the closest I came to South Africa’s national parks and private wildlife reserves in those days was listening to stories from other kids. The Kruger National Park is less than three hundred miles from Johannesburg, but it may as well have been on the other side of the moon as far as I was concerned. Boys would get up in class at show-and-tell and talk about seeing lions and elephants and all sorts of other wild animals in the Kruger National Park, or their family’s visit to the pools at Warmbaths, which was considered the height of sophistication as a holiday destination for the people of Orange Grove. I didn’t know anything about the wider Africa, with its wide open plains and thorny Bush-veld teeming with wild animals, other than what I’d read in a book or seen on television. To me, Africa was my backyard. When it was my turn to get up in front of the class for show and tell, I would say, “Well . . . err, I found a bird’s egg.”
    I changed my mind, though, about wanting to be a zookeeper after a visit to the Johannesburg Zoo when I was in grade one. Zoos in those days were pretty bad. The animals basically lived in concrete cages, and the first time in my life that I saw a lion, pacing from one side of its tiny enclosure to another, it was pretty uninspiring. That visit certainly didn’t make me want to abandon my birds and bugs and work with big cats. I stood in front of the concrete pen and looked at the king of the jungle, and all I could think was, “Shame, man,