Gerald Durrell - The Overloaded Ark

ONE of the chief charms of collecting is its uncertainty. One day you will go out loaded down with nets and bags for the sole purpose of catching bats and you will arrive back in camp with a python in the nets, your bags full of birds, and your pockets full of giant millipedes. You can search for days in the forest after a certain species of squirrel, and when you have given it up in despair and are spending a day in camp, a pair of the wretched rodents come and play among the branches of the tree that overhangs your tent. Imagine that you can fool fate, and spend a day in the forest with twenty assistants armed with every conceivable device for catching anything from an elephant to a fly, and you will walk all day and see nothing at all. You know that a certain creature that you want is found only in one type of country, say in grass fields in the forest. It has never been recorded in any other type of country by anyone . . . until you start to look for it. You carefully search every grass field for miles around, setting traps, smoking, and generally combing the territory. You catch a remarkable variety of rats, mice, grasshoppers, snakes, and lizards, in fact everything but the animal you want. But, knowing that it is found only in grass fields, you persist in your futile task. After you have searched an acreage that appears to be twice the size of Argentine pampas you give it up as a bad job, and a week later you catch your first specimen of the animal sitting in a thickly overgrown part of the forest, approximately twenty miles from the nearest grass field. Of course, this sort of thing can be very trying, but, as I say, there is a certain charm in sallying forth into the forest and not really knowing whether you will come back empty-handed or with half a dozen of the most priceless specimens you could wish for. There are any number of interesting creatures to be found in the Cameroons, as there are in other parts of the world, and at least half of them have never been seen alive in England, or, for that matter, anywhere outside their native forests. There are other creatures which are so rare that they are only known by two or three skins in the museums of the world, and nothing is known about their habits in the wild state. All that is known is that they exist. These sort of specimens were, of course, the ones we wanted most. There are only two ways to find out about how an animal lives, and what its habits are: one is to study it in the wilds and the other is to keep it in captivity. As the greater proportion of zoologists cannot go to outlandish parts of the world to study their specimens in the field, the specimens must be brought to them. That is why I thought it was more important to bring back an animal that had never been seen alive in captivity, even if it was only a species of mouse, than to bother overmuch with the larger and better-known animals. Unfortunately, even a collector has to eat, and it is the bigger and more spectacular creatures that command the heavy prices.

There was one inhabitant of the Cameroons which I was more anxious to obtain than any other, and this was the Angwantibo, a small and exceedingly rare lemur, which is found nowhere else in the world except the Cameroon forests. I had been asked especially to try and obtain this creature by the Zoological Society of London, as they had never had a specimen, and it would prove of great interest both to naturalists and anatomists. Of this rare creature I had only one drawing, and this grew gradually more dirty and creased as the days passed, for it was shown to every hunter who came to see me, and I pleaded with them to try and obtain me a specimen. But the weeks rolled by and there was no sign of a specimen, and I began to despair. I raised the price I was offering for it to no avail. As this animal is strictly nocturnal I thought that there was a fair chance of seeing one during our night hunts, and so, whenever possible, I got Elias and Andraia to lead me to parts of the forest where the trees were overgrown with lianas and other parasitic climbing plants, for it was here, as the Angwantibo was arboreal, that I thought we should find one. It was during one of these fruitless hunts for this lemur that we came across a totally different animal but, in its own way, equally rare and interesting.

We had wended our way through miles of forest one night, and climbed up innumerable creeper- enlaced trees, without seeing a single living thing. We were seated on the floor having a smoke, all in the deepest depths of depression, when Elias suggested that we should make our way to a stream he knew of some way away, where he felt sure we should catch some baby crocodiles. Feeling that even a baby crocodile would be better than nothing at all as a night’s capture, I agreed, and we set off. This night there were four of us: as well as Andraia and Elias there was a youth called Amos, whose duty it was to carry all the bags and nets, thus leaving us all free to shin up a tree at a moment’s notice if the need arose. It would be an euphemism to call Amos a half-wit. He seemed to have only the vaguest idea of what we were trying to do, and no amount of argument would convince him that a quiet and orderly progression was necessary to capture, or even see, any animals. He blundered along, dropping tins with an ear-splitting crash, or getting himself and the bags he carried intricately entangled with any bush that he passed. We had, indeed, spent a greater amount of time disentangling him than we had spent searching for beef. I was at the end of my patience and threatened that if he made any more noise or got himself tied up again I would blow his feet off with the shotgun. This threat had the effect of making him giggle uncontrollably for the next half-hour, and fall heavily to the bottom of a small ravine which was full of dead brushwood. His descent sounded reminiscent of a stampeding herd of buffalo.

The stream ran over a bed of granite slabs which the water had hollowed out into a series of pools and waterfalls. Here and there it had worn grooves in the rocks, so that the stream was divided into three or more channels, with ridges of rock between. Occasionally where the stream was level the force of the water had churned up the white sand into small banks that glistened like ivory in the torchlight. Stopping on the bank we cut ourselves forked sticks, and then waded into the water and proceeded upstream. Half an hour of this and suddenly a pair of fiery eyes glowed on a small sandbank ahead. We moved forward cautiously and discovered a small crocodile, about eighteen inches long, lying there, his head raised alertly as he watched our approach. We kept the torches aimed at his eyes and crept forward until we were near enough to pin him down by the neck with our forked sticks. Then I picked him up and, after considerable argument with Amos, who had retreated rapidly with the gear, I put him safely in a box. We moved on, our gloom lessened by this capture, and came to a wall of rock some twenty feet high, over which the waters of the stream tumbled in a foaming torrent. The surface of the rock face was moist, overgrown with ferns and begonias. With great care we started to climb, and half-way up, as I was intrepidly edging my way along a narrow ledge above the fall, I perceived a fat and beautiful toad squatting under a bunch of ferns. It was a vivid mustard yellow, and it sat there gazing at me in the vacant way that toads have, breathing rapidly. I had never seen a toad of that colour before, and I was grimly determined that I would add him to the collection. It was not, however, as easy as it appeared, for I was standing on a very narrow ledge and clinging to the rock face by my finger-tips. The surface of the rock, as I say, was so slippery that I had to exercise the utmost caution in moving, or I would crash ten feet into the pot-holes below the falls, where the black waters swirled and foamed vigorously. I looked up and found that Elias had reached the top of the falls and was now squatting above me, lighting my progress with his torch.