FROM THE BOOK

In The Golden Mole And Other Living Treasure, Katherine Rundell goes home and discovers an amazing relationship between a pangolin and its keeper

This particular pangolin, in Zimbabwe, has a keeper – a man who walks with her through the bush from anthill to termite mound for 10 hours a day, keeping her always in sight. She needs to consume roughly 70 million insects a year in order to stay alive.

If the distance is relatively short, she walks. If it’s longer, she is carried in her keeper’s arms, or in a specially designed backpack. He set her down on the ground to demonstrate how a pangolin walks; she moves on her hind legs only, her forelegs raised and her long claws clasped together in front of her, as if knitting her fingers together in anxious thought. She returned to her handler, setting one hind foot on his shoe in order to allow herself to be more easily lifted onto his shoulder. It was unlike anything I have ever seen. Her loveliness makes other forms of loveliness – diamonds, rubies, wrists bedecked with Rolexes – look like a con. But unauthorised ownership of a pangolin comes with a nineyear prison sentence in Zimbabwe; for which I am glad.

Pangolins are more beautiful than seems plausible in this fallen old world; they look as though they should be strictly prelapsarian. And they are in fact prehistoric; they are 80 million years old, in contrast to our six million.

They were here first, at the origins of things; they have an ancient, unassailable, ungainsayable right to remain.