I was once taught a rhyme in case I met a bear: “Bear brown, lie down; bear black, fight back.” In The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure, Katherine Rundell writes crisply that this advice “requires exceptional presence of mind in the presence of teeth”. But she adds that sloth bears are tortured into dancing, polar bears stand on melting ice, Asiatic black bears and sun bears are milked for their bile, and that this human fight against bears is already a fight “in which we are all engaged”. The Golden Mole feels like a medieval bestiary, with its wide-ranging essays (some of which have appeared in the London Review of Books), its gorgeous illustrations by Talya Baldwin, and its invitation to pay attention to creatures that are “so startling that our capacity for wonder, huge as it is, can barely skim the edges of the truth”.
But this is a 21st-century bestiary, and rather than trying to slot animals, birds and fish into a Christian worldview, Rundell – author of wondrous children’s books and recently a thrilling biography of John Donne – is arguing urgently for their survival. She points out that in Atlanta, Georgia, it is illegal to tie a giraffe to a streetlamp but not “to import a cushion made from a freshly shot giraffe’s head with the eyelashes still attached” because the US will not designate giraffes as endangered. She wants to ban trawler fishing, which kills seahorses, because: “We should wake in the morning and as we put on our trousers we should remember the seahorse and we should scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep, and the same the next day, and the next.”
