Gerald Durrell - The Overloaded Ark

Another one of the unwritten rules of collecting, however, seems to be that you may go to endless trouble to get your first specimen, but, once having got it, the others follow thick and fast. So, some time later, I was pleased, but not unduly surprised, when a youth wandered into the compound carrying a wicker fish-trap, inside of which crouched a lovely young Giant Water Shrew. It was a female and could not have been more than a few months old, for she measured about twelve inches with her tail, against the two feet of the adult I had captured. I was very elated with this arrival, for I thought that, being a young specimen, she would settle down to captivity and a substitute diet in a more satisfactory manner than an adult. I was perfectly right, for within twenty-four hours she was eating the substitute food, snorting like a grampus in her bathing pool, and even allowing me to scratch her behind the ears, a liberty I could not have taken with the adult. For a month she lived happily in her cage, feeding well, and growing rapidly. I was confident that she was to be the first Giant Water Shrew to arrive in England. But, as if to warn me against undue optimism, and to prove that collecting is not as easy as it sometimes seems, fate stepped in, and one morning on going to the cage I found my baby Shrew dead. She had apparently died in the same mysterious way as the adult, for she had seemed as lively as usual the night before, when I had fed her, and she had eaten a good meal.

The Giant Water Shrew was really the zenith of our night hunting results. Short of getting an Angwantibo (an animal which by now I was coming to look upon as an almost mythical beast!), we could not have beaten it as a capture. For weeks after every waterway for miles around was filled with hunters who, spurred on by the price I had offered, were determined to get me another Shrew. But they had no luck, and after two weeks of intensive night hunts, during which I wore myself out looking for Shrews and Angwantibos, I had to give up night hunting and confined my attentions to the camp, where the ever-growing collection provided me with quite enough work.

THE camp site was a rectangular area hacked out of the thick undergrowth on the edge of the forest. Fifty feet away a small stream had carved itself a valley in the red clay; and it was on the edge of the valley that the camp was situated. My tent was covered with a palm-leaf roof for extra protection, and next door to this was the animal house, a fairly large building constructed out of palm-leaf mats on a framework of rough wood saplings, lashed together with forest creepers. Opposite was the smaller replica which served as a kitchen, and behind some large bushes was the hut in which the staff slept.

It had taken considerable time and effort to arrange this camp just as I wanted it. At one time there had been three separate gangs of men building different houses, and the noise and confusion was terrible. The whole area was knee deep in coiling creepers, palm mats, boxes of tinned food, wire traps, nets, cages, and other equipment. Africans were everywhere, wielding their machetes with great vigour and complete disregard for human life. Through this chaos came a steady trickle of women, some old and withered with flat dugs and closely shaven grey heads, smoking stubby black pipes; some young and plump with shining bodies and shrill voices. Some brought food to their husbands, some brought calabashes full of frogs, beetles, crabs, and catfish, specimens they had caught while down at the river, and which they thought I might buy.

“Masa . . . Masa,” they would call, waving a calabash full of clicking, bubble-blowing crabs, “Masa go buy dis ting? Masa want dis kind of beef?”

At first, with no cages ready for the reception of specimens, I was forced to refuse all the things they brought. I was afraid that, as I had to do this, they would become disgruntled and give up bringing animals; I need not have worried: some women returned with the same creatures three and four times a day to see if I had changed my mind.

Before accepting any creatures I wanted to get the camp site more or less organized, and then I had to get down to the construction of cages to house the animals. With this end in view I engaged a man who had once been a carpenter, and he squatted down with a great pile of broken boxes in the middle of the camp and proceeded to work quickly and well, undeterred by the noise and upheaval around him. Soon my stock of cages had grown, and I felt I was then in a position to deal with any eventuality, so the message went whispering around the village that Masa was now buying animals, and the trickle of beef bringers swelled into a flood, a flood that threatened to overwhelm both the carpenter and me. Sometimes we would be working by the light of hurricane lamps until two and three in the morning, hurrying to finish a cage, while near us, on the ground, would lie a row of sacks and bags, each heaving and twitching with the movement of its occupant.

The Bringers of Beef were divided into three categories: the children, the women, and the hunters. From the children I would get such things as palm spiders, great brown palm weevils, various types of chameleon, and the lovely silver and brown forest skinks. From the women I would get crabs, both land and river, frogs and toads, water-snakes, an occasional tortoise, a few fledgeling birds, and the great whiskered catfish from the muddy river. It was the hunters who brought the really exciting specimens: mongoose, brush-tailed porcupine, squirrels, and other rarer inhabitants of the deep forest. The children preferred to he paid in the big shiny West African penny, with a hole through its middle; the women preferred to be paid half in salt, and half in shillings; and the hunters would take nothing but cash payments. They fought shy of accepting paper money and would prefer to carry away a couple of pounds in pennies rather than accept a note. And so they came, from the tiny youngsters who could only just walk, to the oldest man or woman hobbling to the camp with the aid of a stick, each carrying some living creature, either in a calabash, or a sack, tied to a stick, or in a neat wicker basket. Some arrived stark naked and unembarrassed, their contribution wrapped in their loin cloth. Every box and basket was pressed into commission as a cage, every empty kerosene tin was washed and cleaned, and soon contained a mass of vacant-faced frogs, or a tangled knot of snakes. Bamboo cages full of birds hung everywhere, and monkeys and mongooses were tethered to every post and stump. The collection was really under way.

One morning, bright and early, I was shaving outside the tent, when a large and scowling man made his appearance carrying a palm-leaf bag on his back. He strode forward, dumped the bag at my feet, and stood back glowering silently at me. I called Pious, who was in the kitchen supervising the cooking of breakfast.

“Pious, what has this man brought?”

“Na what kind of beef you get dere?” Pious asked the man.

“Water-beef.”

“He say it water-beef, sah,” said Pious.

“What’s a water-beef? Have a look, Pious, while I finish shaving.”

Pious approached the bag and carefully cut the string round its mouth. He peered inside.

“Crocodile, sah. It very big one,” he said, “but I tink it dead!”

“Is it moving?” I inquired.

“No, sah, it no move at all,” said Pious, and proceeded to shake four and a half feet of crocodile out on to the ground. It lay there, limp as it is possible for a crocodile to be, with its eyes closed.

“It dead, sah,” said Pious, and then he turned to the man. “Why you go bring dead beef, eh? Why you no take care no wound um, eh? You tink sometime Masa go be foolish an’ he go pay you money for dead beef?”