Gerald Durrell (7 page)

“Arrrrr!” roared
Elias. “’E done chop me, sah . . . eh aehh! Na bad beef dis ting. . . .”

But one had just
fastened its teeth into my thumb, so I was too occupied to take much interest
in Elias’s honourable wounds. In the end we captured ten of these rats, and
emerged from the smoke looking as though we had been having a rough and tumble
with a leopard. I had five painful bites on my hands, and my face was scratched
where I had fallen into a large and evil bush. Elias’s legs were streaming with
blood and he had two bites on his hands and one on his knee. It is astonishing
how one bleeds in the tropics: the slightest scratch and the blood flows out freely
as though you had severed an artery. Our sweat was trickling into these open
bites and scratches and making them smart furiously. Our hair was full of mud
and ashes. I decided that the rats had made us pay dearly for their capture.

We decided to
smoke one more patch of grass before starting for home. The tedious business of
setting up the nets and laying the fires we now performed cheerfully, for the
captures had elated us, as captures of any sort always did. There is nothing so
depressing as repeating a thing over and over again with no results. We stood
back expectantly and watched the smoke curl sluggishly into the golden grass.

The first things
to break cover and make for the nets, under the impression that the grass field
was on fire, were two beautiful, richly coloured skinks. One I captured with
the butterfly net, but the other rushed at Elias, who made a half hearted swipe
at it with a stick, and then stood watching the reptile scuttle off into the
bushes.

“Elias, you
haven’t lost it? . . .”

“’E go for bush,
sah,” said Elias dismally.

“Why you no
catch um . . . you no get hand?” I inquired angrily, brandishing my skink under
his nose by way of illustration. He backed away hurriedly.

“Masa, na bad
beef dat. If ’e go bite you, you go die.”

“Nonsense,” I
retorted, and I pushed my little finger between the lizard’s half-open jaws and
let him bite. It was no more than a slight pinch.

“You see? He no
be bad beef. He no fit bite proper, no get power.”

“Masa, ’e get
poison,” said Elias, watching fascinated while the skink chewed on my finger.
“Na bad beef, sah, for true.”

“Weli, if he
bite me I go die, no be so?”

“No, sah,” said
Elias, with one of those wonderful twists of African logic which are impossible
to argue against, “you be white man. If dat beef go chop black man he go die
one time. White man different.”

I placed my
skink in a cloth bag and we turned our attention back to the nets, in which
were struggling three lovely rats, and a black, evil-looking shrew. The rats
were a pale fawn colour, and covered with longitudinal lines of round, intense,
cream-coloured spots. When we picked them up by their tails they hung relaxed
and quiet, and we even handled them without receiving a bite. Later I found
that these rats, although extremely timid, were the most easily tamed of the
forest rats; after two days of captivity they would climb on to the palm of
one’s hand to be fed.

The shrew, on
the other hand, had a temper as black as his fur. Although he was a bare three
inches long he struggled fiercely in the net, and as we tried to disentangle
him he attacked us, his mouth open, and his long nose wiffling with rage. Once
free of the net he sat up on his hind legs, bunched his tiny paws into fists,
and shrieked defiance at us, daring us to touch him. With great difficulty we
coaxed him into a box, where he sat, up to his waist in the dry grass with
which I had filled it, and muttered wickedly to himself. I did not intend to
keep him, for it was doubtful if such a tiny mite could survive the long and
arduous voyage to England, but I wanted to keep him for a few days and study
him at close range. To the Africans the fact that I sometimes went to all the
trouble of capturing an animal only to keep it for a few days and then release
it again, unharmed and uneaten, was sure proof that I was somewhat weak-minded.

The sun was
slanting across the grass field as we packed up and left, turning the edge of
the forest into a wall of glittering golden-green leaves. Darkness overtook us
rapidly in the forest, and soon it was pitch dark beneath the trees. I stumbled
along, tripping over roots and banging my head on branches to the accompaniment
of innumerable “Sorry, sahs” from Elias. When we reached the fields around the
village we found it was that moment of twilight before night enveloped the
world: a pair of parrots flew swiftly into the forest at a great height above
us, their screams and whistles echoing down to us. The scattered clouds were
flushed gold and pink and green. The lights of the camp gleamed a welcome to
us, and the smell of groundnut chop was wafted to my nostrils. I realized,
rather ruefully, that before I could have a bath and some food all the captures
would have to be housed and fed.

CHAPTER
THREE

BIGGER BEEF

The bigger beef
were almost as numerous as the small ones: they consisted of anything from the
size of a domestic cat to that of an elephant. The bigger beef were, as a rule,
much more easily captured, simply because they were more easily seen. After
all, a creature the size of a mouse or squirrel does not need much undergrowth
to conceal itself in, whereas something the size of a duiker does. Also the
smaller beasts had an irritating habit of squeezing through the mesh of your
nets, whereas once the bigger beef ran into a net you were fairly certain that
it was yours.

One morning
Elias and Andraia arrived at what seemed to me a most ungodly hour. Lying in
the gloom of the tent I could hear them outside arguing in fierce whispers with
Pious as to whether or not I was to be disturbed. Pious was a martinet on this
point; it took a long time for me to teach him that newly arrived animals could
not wait for attention. If someone arrived with a specimen while I was shaving,
or eating, or cleaning the gun, Pious would majestically order him to wait. The
poor specimen, having already endured a none too gentle capture, probably a day
without food and water, and a long walk in the sun in an uncomfortable bag or
sack, would probably expire with this additional wait. This applied
particularly to birds. At first I could not get the bird trappers to understand
that if they caught a bird last thing at night, and did not bring it to me
until the following morning, its chances of living were so slight they were not
worth considering. Always, when this was explained, I would get the same
answer:

“Masa, dis na
strong bird. Dis bird no fit die, Masa, for true.” In view of this attitude
among the hunters I had to explain to Pious that an animal could not wait, and
whatever time a specimen arrived, in the middle of lunch or the middle of the
night, it was to be brought straight to me. After a great deal of shouting I
thought that I had driven the point home, yet here he was keeping Elias and
Andraia away from me: I presumed, from the argument going on outside the tent,
that he had forgotten his instructions. It seemed evident that Elias and
Andraia had been out into the forest rather early, and that they had got
something and were anxious that I should purchase it before it died on their
hands, while Pious was determined that I should not be disturbed before the
lawful hour of six-thirty. I was annoyed.

“Pious!” I
roared.

“Sah?”

After a pause he
came into the tent bearing a steaming cup of tea in one hand. This placated me
somewhat.

“Good morning,
sah.”

“Good morning,”
I answered, clutching the cup. “What’s all that row outside? Someone brought
beef?”

“No, sah, Elias
and Andraia come to take you for bush.”

“Good Lord, at
this hour. Why so early?”

“They say,” said
Pious, in a disbelieving tone of voice, “they find a hole for ground, very
far.”

“A hole for
ground . . . you mean a cave?”

“Yes, sah.”

This was good
news, for I had told the hunters to find some caves for us to investigate, but
hitherto they had met with no success. I crawled out of bed and went forth
resplendent in my blue and red dressing-gown.

“Good morning,
Elias . . . Andraia.”

“Good morning,
sah,” as usual in a chorus, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

“What’s all this
about a hole?” I asked, sipping my tea with a lordly air. They tore their
fascinated eyes away from my dressing-gown with an effort.

“Yesterday I
done go for bush, Masa,” said Elias, “I done find hole for ground like Masa de
want. Dere be some kind of beef dere for inside, I hear um.”

“You see dis
beef?”

“No, sah, I no
see um,” said Elias, shuffling his feet. Being by himself, I realized, he would
not have ventured into the cave, for the noise may have been produced by a
malignant
ju-ju
of some description.

“All right, what
we go do, eh?”

“Masa, we go get
four men and we go for bush. We go take catch-net and we catch dis beef. . . .”

“All right, go
for village and find some good hunter men. Then you go come back in one hour,
you hear?”

“We hear, sah,”
and they went off to the village.

“Pious, I want
breakfast at once.”

“Yes, sah,” said
Pious mournfully. He had been afraid of this. He whisked off to the kitchen and
raised hell with the cook to relieve his feelings. “You no hear Masa say he
want breakfast
now
. . . you go sit there like bushman, eh? Gimme plate,
gimme cup, quick, quick.”

Within an hour
we were deep in the forest, climbing up a great hillside between the twisting
roots of the trees. Besides Elias and Andraia there were three other men: a
shifty, fox-faced individual known as Carpenter, by virtue of his trade; a
boisterous likeable youth called Nick; and a gaunt, taciturn person called
Thomas. Daniel the animal boy followed behind carrying the food supply for the
party. We were all in high spirits, the hunters conversing loudly, laughing and
ejaculating “eh . . . aehh!” at intervals, the ringing “chunk” of their
cutlasses biting into the wood as they marked the trail. We climbed steadily
for about half a mile, and then the forest floor levelled out, and walking
became easier. In certain places we came across a tree, about six inches in
circumference, growing straight and branchless as a wand up into the maze of
foliage above. The trunk of this tree was covered with numbers of tiny waxy
blossoms, a deep and beautiful pink, growing on a minute stem about a quarter
of an inch long. The flowers were about the size of one’s little fingernail,
and grew so close together that they completely hid great sections of the bark.
In the strange, underwater light of the forest these trees glowed against the
dark background like great spiky sticks of pink coral. In one place we passed
six of these trees growing out of a hillock of big boulders, which were covered
with green velvet-like moss, and the flowers of the yellow begonias. One could
walk for hours in the forest, and just as one’s eyes were getting tired of the
never-ending sameness of the smooth, branchless trunks, and the thin wispy
undergrowth, you would suddenly come upon a scene like this, fantastic in
colour and grouping, and your interest would be revived by its beauty.