_____"jungle.book".fever
How a childhood spent reading Kipling's wondrous tales gave a writer his spots -- India, Siberia, Africa.

Editor's Note: Every adult reader can recall the book that had the most profound influence on him as a child. Whether delightful or terrifying, there was some story or novel that etched itself indelibly into memory. This first essay in Salon's "Birth of a Reader" series marks the time in naturalist and novelist Peter Matthiessen's boyhood when a world of words first caught him. In future weeks, look for essays by Bobbie Ann Mason on "Little Women," Sherman Alexie on "The Snowy Day" and Julia Alvarez on "A Thousand and One Nights."

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BY PETER MATTHIESSEN

Hear and attend and listen, for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my best beloved, when the Tame animals were wild ... and they walked in the Wet Wild Woods by their wild lones ...

What we are offered here by Kipling is a strange and fascinating passage into another world -- a world we know by blood and gene inheritance and instinct rather than imagination, a world of earthly creatures rather than imagined monsters, lost dinosaurs, Dark Ages dragons or even that delightful wonderland on the far side of the looking glass. As a child, I preferred the true real strangeness of wild regions on the maps to the never-never realms of fairy tales and myths. Yet in choosing which childhood stories most affected my life and writing, it is very difficult to set aside such true and simple classics as Beatrix Potter's tales (Squirrel Nutkin in the talons of Old Owl!) and A.A. Milne's "Winnie the Pooh" (Mr. Edward Bear, who lived in the woods "under the name of Saunders") and Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" (with its fond and foolish Toad of Toad Hall -- "Travel! Change! Adventure!") and its mysterious, exquisite chapter called "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," which still seems to me a more profound manifestation of mystical experience than almost anything to be found in the "religious" literature.

But the inhabitants of these narratives are old neighbors of the countryside, embarking on outings rather than adventures, often with picnic hampers, while those to be found in Kipling's tales are wilder creatures altogether, aloof, enigmatic and even dangerous. Though by no means lacking in invention and charm, his narratives are permeated with a feeling of the withheld and the unfathomable, which is not only stirring but a little scary. Something of that feeling is with me still, more than a half century after those stories were first read to me at bedtime, and long after most of their details have been forgotten. My instinct is that these stories are very near the source of that lifelong fascination with wild creatures and wild places that was to become so manifest in my own fiction and nonfiction.

But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all wild places were alike to him ... [then] the Cat went back through the Wet Wild Woods waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone ...

In Kipling's own black-and-white illustration of "The Cat That Walked by Himself" that accompanies this tale in his "Just So Stories" ("It was so -- just so -- a little time ago"), a black cat is walking away down a white snow track between bare black winter trees, and its wild tail is held high in the air -- one can almost see that black tail twitch in exasperation. This is how the black cat in my own house walks away when miffed, tail high and twitching, and how even the greatest of great cats behave in their wild lones. I have seen an agitated lioness on a low umbrella acacia limb in Tanzania lash the wood with her black tail tuft in alarm and warning, and a crouched Indian leopard in low grass lift its tail straight up and wave it stiffly like a metronome, snarling horribly because its hiding place has been discovered. On the other hand, a tiger in Siberia, imagining it walked unseen down a corridor of snow between frozen spruces, kept its wild tail low, all to itself. Bobcats and lynxes and servals are all bobtailed, but when disgruntled, they look as if they would wave wild tails if they had tails worth waving.

"I am the cat that walked by itself and all places are the same to me" -- that poetic and succinct statement of essential feline principles has drifted in my brain like a sliver of old song as far back as I remember.

N E X T_ P A G E: A gifted spinner of peculiar tales

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN COPELAND