Bestseller Revisited

BORN FREE (220 pp.)--Joy Adamson --Pantheon ($4.95).

As Christopher Smart, a mad 18th century English poet, remarked of the cat, in the most wonderful poem ever written on that elusive animal, "he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon." In less poetic terms, the cat has the power of teaching manners to men when they are still children and most need the lesson. Unlike the dog ("beloved of hypocrites," as the astute aelurophile, Charles Baudelaire, observed), the cat will not tolerate abuse, and thus remains master in its own or anyone else's house.

All this is known by those who keep, and are fit to keep cats, but the knowledge has seldom been applied as a policy toward the greatest of cats--the lion. This book was written to prove that the principle--don't hurt cats and they won't hurt you--is sound for lions even in the lion's own domain. Unlike most books about pets, which can only be classed with disposable Kitty Litter, this one is not sentimental. The subject, a female felis leo somaliensis, is too big for that. This great creature was the pet and pride of Joy Adamson, a Kenya game warden's wife, and she has communicated the delight and wonder of life with the lioness experienced by herself and her husband George.

Delinquency in Lions. Mrs. Adamson called her prodigious pet Elsa because it reminded her of a friend (not presumably Elsa Maxwell, the social lion tamer), and is quite formidable in her own way--one of those dauntless dames of the British Empire able to treat the fauna of 120,000 square miles of African semidesert with the regal confidence of a Scarsdale matron patting into place the play patterns of her daughter's age group. Only such a woman would speak of the gruesome noises outside the camp at night as the "chuckles" of a hyena.

Her husband is of the same stern stuff, though in his photographs he deceptively resembles George Bernard Shaw dressed for a Fabian summer school. His job in the Northern Frontier Province of Kenya was to enforce a doctrine of apartheid between man and beast--to see that men did not kill the animals and, as far as possible, that the animals did not kill the men. Elsa was one of a litter of three cubs orphaned when George Adamson shot their mother. As a result, George felt in honor bound to take the cubs home to Isiolo. Kenya, to join Joy.

At this stage, the book becomes Joy Adamson's treatise on How to Bring Up a Cat, with problems familiar to those who keep one, but lifted to the heroic plane (by the Hegelian principle that quantity turns into quality: if you get enough of something, it becomes not just more of the same thing, but something else in itself). A selection of Mrs. Adamson's wisdom includes some notable deductions about cats of all sizes.

Play the Game. They are hard to wean, as anyone who has fed condensed milk to a lion will know. They are conservative and hate being left alone. They are hard to give away; in the case of Elsa's litter mates, voted into non-pet status at five months, it involved a 180-mile trip by Land-Rover to Nairobi and arrangements with the Rotterdam Zoo. When they want to mate, they don't hang about the house complaining about the heat; they get lost. They are superb athletes when it comes to climbing trees, but are sometimes fools at getting down. They are hard to punish, and do not fully understand the nature of their crimes. "I gave her the beating we thought she deserved,'' says Author Adamson of Elsa, when her lioness had broken house rules by trying to eat one of George's donkeys. The donkey had been "provocative," Joy explains in truly liberal fashion.

In general, Elsa's appetite raised problems both practical and moral. The Adamsons were obliged to go on safari (the author is genuinely naive enough to explain what the word means, as if Hemingway and Ruark had written in vain) accompanied by a flock of six sheep for Elsa's dietary demands. "Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?'' asked Blake, posing the moral dilemma of those who are kind to animals; kindness must be tempered by discrimination.

Author Adamson's book is unique not only for its lion-tamer expertise about getting the jungle cat to adapt itself to human life but for its astonishing account of how Elsa was taught to adjust to the lion group. The Adamsons virtually had to train civilized Elsa to hunt before she could be turned loose in the jungle. Aged 27 months and weighing more than 300 Ibs., Elsa had become too much for even the Adamson household. Now, whenever Joy turns up in Elsa's neighborhood, a few friendly rifle shots will bring the great lioness bounding out of the bush, nuzzling her Androclean foster mother, licking her thumb and purring like a motorboat.

Cat-loving readers will be happy with a publisher's codicil to the book announcing that Elsa is now a mother.

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