A big-game hunter, Heck spent the peak moments of his life pursuing danger and adventure, several times a year launching trips to garner animals for his zoo and perhaps bag a pair of longhorn sheep heads for his wall or come face to face with a toweringly mad female grizzly. He relished wild razor-edged hunts, in Africa especially, which he recapped in scenic letters, written by lantern light, astride a camp stool near a well-fed fire, while lions grunted invisibly in the blackness and his companions slept. “The campfire flickering in front of me,” he once wrote, “and behind me coming out of the dark infinity the sounds of an invisible and mysterious wild animal.”[16] Alone yet faintly haunted by circling predators, he would replay the day’s exploits in ink, some to save, some to share with friends in another drape of reality, the Europe that seemed to him planets away. Action photographs often accompanied his letters: lassoing a giraffe, leading a baby rhinoceros, capturing an aardvark, evading a charging elephant.
Heck loved collecting trophies, as memory aids to a wild part of his self that emerged in remote wilderness—live animals to display at his zoo, dead animals to stuff, photographs to share and frame. In the heyday of his travels he seemed to collect life itself, keeping voluminous diaries, snapping hundreds of photographs, and writing popular books (such as Animals—My Adventure) which limned his passion for the wilderness, in which he detailed feats of extraordinary bravery, stoicism, and skill. Heck knew his strengths, admired the heroic in himself and others, and could tell a bar-gripping story over drinks at annual meetings. Though he indulged in self-mythology from time to time, his personality fit a profession which has always attracted some people with a yen for exploration, in flight from domesticity, and craving just enough ordeal to feel the threads of mortality fraying. Without his type, maps would still show a flat earth and no one would believe the source of the Nile. Sometimes Heck slayed dragons—or rather their real-life equivalents—but mainly he captured, photographed, and displayed them with gusto. Passionate and single-minded, when he set his sights on an animal, either in the wild or belonging to someone, he lusted after it, tried every lure or ruse he could think of, and persisted until he exhausted the animal or wore down its owner.
For decades the Heck brothers had pursued a fantastic goal, a quest that engaged Heinz but completely infatuated Lutz: the resurrection of three pure-blooded, extinct species—the Neolithic horses known as forest tarpans, aurochsen (the wild cow progenitor of all European cattle breeds), and the European or “forest” bison. On the eve of the war the Hecks had produced some near aurochsen and tarpans of their own, but the Polish strains ran truer to type, the clear inheritors.
Only prehistoric creatures would do, ones untainted by racial mixing, and although Lutz hoped to gain influence and fame in the process, his motives were more personal—he sought the thrill of bringing extinct, nearly magical animals back to life and steering their fate, hunting some for sport. Genetic engineering wouldn’t emerge until the 1970s, but he decided to use eugenics, a traditional method of breeding animals which showed specific traits. Heck’s reasoning went like this: an animal inherits 50 percent of its genes from each parent, and even an extinct animal’s genes remain in the living gene pool, so if he concentrated the genes by breeding together animals that most resembled an extinct one, in time he would arrive at their purebred ancestor. The war gave him the excuse to loot east European zoos and wilds for the best specimens.
As it happens, the animals he chose all thrived in Poland, their historic landscape was Białowieża, and the imprimatur of a respected Polish zoo would legitimize his efforts. When Germany invaded Poland, Heck scouted the farms for mares preserving the most tarpan traits to mate them with several wild strains, including Shetlands, Arabians, and Przywalskis, hoping to breed back to the ideal animal, the fierce, nearly unridable horses painted in ochre on Cro-Magnon caves. Heck assumed it wouldn’t take many generations of back-breeding—maybe only six or eight—because as recently as the 1700s tarpans still roamed the forests of northeastern Poland.
During the Ice Ages, when glaciers blanketed northern Europe and a wind-ripped tundra stretched down to the Mediterranean countryside, thick forests and fertile meadows gave refuge to great herds of tarpans that roamed the central European lowlands, browsed the east European steppes, and galloped across Asia and the Americas. In the fifth century B.C., Herodotus said how much he enjoyed watching herds of tarpans grazing in the bogs and marshes of what is now Poland. For ages, purebred tarpans outwitted all the hunters and somehow survived in Europe, but by the eighteenth century not many remained, in part because diners prized tarpan meat—it was sweet, but more appealingly, it was rare—and in part because most tarpans had interbred with farm horses to produce fertile offspring. In 1880, pursued by humans, the last wild tarpan mare fell down a crevasse in Ukraine and died; and the last captive tarpan died seven years later in the Munich Zoo. At that point the species officially became extinct, just one more chapter in the annals of life on Earth.
Humans domesticated wild horses about six thousand years ago, and immediately began refining them: killing the defiant ones for food while breeding the most genial, to produce a horse that submits more easily to saddle and plow. In the process, we revised the horse’s nature, compelling it to shed its zesty, ungovernable, evasive wildness. The aloof, free-range Przywalski horses retained that fury, and Heck planned to weave their combative spirit into the new tarpan’s genetic mix. History credits Colonel Nikolai Przywalski, a Russian explorer of Polish descent, with “discovering” the wild Asiatic horse in 1879, hence its name, though, of course, the horse was well known to the Mongolians, who had already named it tahki. Heck factored the tahki’s stamina, temper, and looks into his formula, but he craved even older creatures—the horses that dominated the prehistoric world.
What a powerful ideal—that sexy, high-strung horse, pawing the ground in defiance, its hooves all declaratives. Heinz Heck wrote after the war that he and his brother had begun the back-breeding project out of curiosity,[17] but also from “the thought that if man cannot be halted in his mad destruction of himself and other creatures, it is at least a consolation if some of those kinds of animals he has already exterminated can be brought back to life again.” But why have tarpans to ride if there were nothing worthy to hunt?
Lutz Heck soon began ministering to a handful of European bison, including those he stole from the Warsaw Zoo, hoping that they might prosper in Białowieża’s spirit-house of trees, just as their ancestors had. Heck envisioned forest bison once again galloping along the trails, as sunlight speared through branches of hundred-foot oaks, in a woodland throbbing with wolves, lynx, wild boar, and other game, soon to be joined, he hoped, by herds of ancient horses.
Heck also sought a legendary bull, the aurochs, once the largest land animal in Europe, known for its savagery and vigor. When Ice Age glaciers melted, about twelve thousand years ago, most giant mammals vanished, but in the cold forests of northern Europe, some aurochsen survived, and all modern cattle have descended from those few—not that aurochsen would have been easy to domesticate eight thousand years ago. Because the aurochs went extinct in the 1600s, recent in evolutionary terms, Heck felt sure he could reconstruct it, and in so doing save it, too, from “racial degeneration.” He dreamt that, alongside the swastika, the bull might become synonymous with Nazism. Some drawings of the era showed the aurochs and a swastika joined in an emblem of ideological suavity combined with ferocious strength.
17
Though Polish scientist Tadeusz Vetulani had tried the same back-breeding process years before without success, Heck stole Vetulani’s research and, ultimately, thirty animals, which he sent to Germany, later installing them in Rominten and then Białowieża.