By the Lake

(3 of 5)

"He Just Sat There." Then one day Bushman balked at going back to his cage. Finally, mild-mannered Eddie Robinson slapped the gorilla across the face. Bushman got down on his knuckles and gave forth a low, ominous growl. Then he started running. He pulled Robinson after him, pell-mell down a flight of stairs, across the monkey-house basement. There he stopped. Robinson started petting him. Said Robinson later: "He could have killed me easily. But he followed me into the cage. He sat in front of the door of the cage and wouldn't let me leave. He just sat there looking at me like I'd done something awful bad. Finally he looked at me, kind of disgusted, and walked to the corner of the cage. I got out. That's the last time he was out."

Bushman did not turn mean. Although much of his box-office appeal, which is tremendous, lies in his menacing look, he generally seems playful, happy and welladjusted. He still likes to be fed by hand through an opening in his cage. Zoo Boss Perkins often helps with his feeding; Bushman took a quick liking to him.

Awful Boy. The fact that Bushman exhibited a fondness for Marlin Perkins was a natural thing; any good animal man could explain it. The feeling was mutual. To Perkins, man is a creature to talk to and drink with; animals live to be understood. Like most boys, he began with a dog. But from there he progressed so rapidly to ownership of goats, rabbits, squirrels, possums and garter snakes that, in Carthage, Mo., where he was born and in Pittsburg, Kans., where he spent his boyhood, he was inevitably known to the neighbors as "that awful Perkins boy." The neighbors had a point.

His father, a circuit judge, was a sedate and patient man who permitted young Marlin to bring home all the animal life he wanted. Snakes turned out to be his favorites. He is still unable to explain this preference adequately, although he admits it stems somewhat from his feeling that snakes are misunderstood. He points out that snakes are the world's best rodent hunters. When people fail to agree that this should win universal affection for reptiles, Perkins helplessly throws up his hands and says: "Some people would rather have rats than snakes around the house."

At 14, young Perkins was sent to Wentworth Military Academy, in Lexington, Mo., where he hid snakes in his closet. One day, an instructor caught him exercising two of them in a field. Although Perkins let himself be bitten to show how harmless they were, he was given a dressing down and ordered to throw the snakes away. He finished high school at Carthage.

After working for a year at odd jobs, Perkins went off to the University of Missouri to study zoology. His dedication to snakes kept him in minor but fairly constant trouble. Once, while talking to his girl, he casually produced a king snake from his pocket. "I honestly thought she'd like it as well as I did," he recalls wistfully, "but she took one look and had hysterics. That ended the romance." Another time, he lost a snake in the house where he boarded. He thought it would be only fair to report the disappearance to his landlady. "She never forgave me," he says. "That snake seemed to haunt her."