Excerpt: On Bungee Tigers, Fog Wolves, and Other Unlikely Creatures

Charity first became interested in curious animals after her father died in 1874. Her eldest brother naturally inherited their father's wealth, and with all his brothers to provide for he was perfectly content for his young sister to be packed off to India to stay with her aunt, Lady Morganna Wildheart, the wife of Colonel Augustus Wildheart. It was on an expedition into the jungle, "to see the sights" as the Colonel put it, that first she encountered the ellusive Bungee Tiger. They were picnicking in the late afternoon when there was a sudden flash of orange and black and, with barely a noise to accompany the theft (bar a soft twanggg from the canopy above which seemed almost to blend in with the sounds of the jungle), half the sausage rolls were gone.

Charity was enchanted, and successfully pleaded with the Colonel not to shoot "the little stripy buggers" out of the tree. Instead, she returned to the spot over and over and spent a great many weeks trying to lure the little creatures down to the ground with an assortment of picnic dainties. Eventually she hit on the notion of honey, and was able to examine the tiger who plunged to the blanket at her leisure after his fur became stuck to it. She was thus the first, on freeing the creature, to observe that a grounded Bungee Tiger will scurry back to the tree canopies by using its own tail as if it were a rope.