Sylva

Nor did she stop there. After thus discovering the tool, she discovered the magic object. Here too I shall try not to exaggerate. According to Dr. Sullivan, it was an extraordinary jump, a jump of tens of thousands of years and, he said, its having happened without our help was due to a quite extraordinary chance. That may be so. Personally I consider that such a chance, in some form or other, was bound to happen some day, and it was unlikely that it should fail to bear fruit in a mind on the march such as Sylva’s. But let others be the judge.

We generally kept Sylva away from the garden, which was too vast to be easily and effectively fenced in; but we did not, for all that, deprive her of fresh air and exercise or of the rustic pleasures that appealed to her nature. The farmyard is extremely large and surrounded by buildings on all sides, and Sylva would spend long hours there whenever the weather was fine, amidst the chickens, ducks, turkeys and rabbits.

The first few times she had been frightened of the dogs. Even though they were chained up, a bark or a growl was enough to put her to flight. She would go and cower behind some barrels or a cart, and stay there shaking for a long time. One day, however, she lost her fear in rather strange circumstances.

I have said that the two dogs-strong, brawny mastiffs-though tied up all day and ferocious-looking, were actually the most harmless creatures alive. I could not have borne to keep vicious ones about. They were only dangerous to nightly prowlers carrying a sack or a stick. Although they would shake their chains with alarming fervor, they were in fact merely impatient to play; and as soon as they were set free, whoever was about had to beware of one thing only, and that was the too exuberant tokens of their gratitude.

Whenever they saw Sylva playing and running around amid the poultry, they just could not keep still. She had a way of scaring the whole barnyard and transforming it into a deafening aviary of squawks and snowy down that made them marvel with excitement. Their delight knew no bounds. I can’t say the same of the farmer and his folk. They would glare at this daily pandemonium with every sign of a most sullen disapproval. They claimed that if it went on, Sylva would cause the hens to stop laying, make the turkeys succumb to blood pressure, and jeopardize the whole poultry breeding.

“She’ll turn all your fowl into walking skeletons, the poor thing will,” they said, for they blamed not the “backward” child but me-and my unjustifiable leniency which, in their eyes, was past comprehension.

The fact was that Sylva was not content to chase and scare birds and rabbits. Now and then she would grab hold of one. She would suddenly swoop on a fowl with such force that anybody else would have had bruised elbows and knees. Her astonishing litheness spared her such consequences. For a few seconds there would be a turmoil of feathers, shrill squawks and flapping wings, then she would jump to her feet with her quarry clasped against her and dart off to some shed into which she would disappear. Later the corpse of her victim would be found there, showing the symbolic tooth marks of an animal that kills without hunger.

(In the end I found a remedy for these murders by forcing Sylva to eat the birds she had killed. I would wait until she had finished her ordinary meal, which was always very abundant, and under the threat of the stick and despite her heaving stomach she then had to devour her victim from head to tail. With the result that she quite soon stopped killing birds and rabbits and was content to keep them tightly clasped in her arms for a long moment. This produced an unexpected result: prompted by this gesture of motherly tenderness, she took an affectionate liking to these animals, and instead of killing them began to rock them as a child rocks its teddy bear.)