Animal Instincts: The Apocalypse on Saint Vincent

In the aftermath of a volcanic eruption on this Caribbean island in 2021, the pets and livestock left behind fought desperately to survive. What followed surprised everyone.

Our team at Narratively is thrilled to premiere this important and incredibly timely new project: Life in the Age of Extremes. A unique collaboration with the Narrative Storytelling Initiative at Arizona State University and the Global Futures Laboratory, this special series presents big, ambitious stories that shine a light on where the human race is heading now and that help us peer into the future.

Collage by Yunuen Bonaparte | Story edited by Jesse Sposato

Warning: This story contains some descriptions of animals in distress that may be disturbing to some readers. 

Like a wind, like a storm, like a fire, like an earthquake, like a mud slide, like a deluge, like a tree falling, a torrent roaring, an ice floe breaking, like a tidal wave, like a shipwreck, like an explosion, like a lid blown off, like a consuming fire, like spreading blight, like a sky darkening, a bridge collapsing, a hole opening. Like a volcano erupting.

Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

Friday, April 9, 2021, 8:41 a.m.

Clyo Durrant, Sandy Bay

Clyornique Durrant was doing the dishes when La Soufrière started rumbling like a low groan. But Durrant didn’t notice. “I guess I had zoned out,” she chuckles. “I’m a teacher and I’m pretty good at zoning out noises, so I didn’t fully focus on the sound.”

Then, seemingly out of the blue, her husband, Keefe, yelled, “Get out of the house, get out of the house! Let’s go, we have to go now!”

Durrant, at 28, is slim and petite. She lives with Keefe, a preacher, in an incomplete concrete structure that is partly a church. It lies slightly below the coastal road in Noel, an extension of Sandy Bay Village, on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent. There, on the island’s northeast coast, the village looks up to La Soufrière, the volcano that exploded on Friday, April 9, 2021, the first of many successive eruptions to follow in the coming days.

The couple had left their home the evening before, on Thursday the 8th, when the earth started shaking almost continuously, and the government ordered everyone in the northmost third of the island to evacuate. They were fortunate. The friends they bunked with that night — the ones they would stay with for the next six months — had a large enough house that it afforded the Durrants their own private space. But they came back to Sandy Bay on Friday to collect their dogs and arrange for their other animals to be fed in their absence by a neighbor who was going to stand his ground. They had 10 chickens, three dogs and a nanny goat with three kids (Cocoa, Dolly and a feisty polka-dotted one named Spots).

As Durrant dashed out of the kitchen, Keefe shouted, “Look up there, the volcano erupted!”

Smoke shaped like a cauliflower formed from La Soufrière's eruption in 2021 over Saint Vincent. (Photo courtesy Kai Best)

Durrant gazed at the distant mountain as she normally would. And she saw nothing unusual. “Where?” she asked. Only when she craned her neck far back to peer almost vertically did she grasp the scale of what she was looking at. A mushroom cloud spread so widely it threatened to take over the whole sky. And it was growing. 

“The animals started to go crazy,” she recalls. “The goats seemed pretty calm, but the dogs ran into the house. One of them was already inside the vehicle and that one came out. Another one darted somewhere else. We had no choice but to leave them because, you know, you’re now thinking you need to get out of this area!”