Wide-eyed, a child peers at the metre-long corkscrew horns rising above the crowd. She takes in the enormous raggedy hide and the strangeness of the wild creature stomping through her streets. Up ahead, a giraffe peeks warily through a first-floor window as a zebra skitters backwards from a growling dog. “Kudu, washa!” The instruction comes through my radio. We turn away from the child and hurl our hefty creature forwards. The crowd scatters. We thunder through the narrow alleys to catch up with the rest of The Herds.
In 2021, Little Amal, the puppet of a refugee child almost 4m tall, walked from the Syria-Turkey border to the UK. The Herds, from the same team, is even more ambitious. This new theatrical mega-marathon is shepherding a pack of life-size animal puppets a distance of 20,000km, from the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle. More than 1,000 people will take part in creating the odyssey and, as the animals march into Marseille, I become one of them – as a volunteer puppeteer – for a galvanising (if sweaty) week.
