Gerald Durrell - The Bafut Beagles

When the Bandits became old enough to have a special cage of their own, complete with bedroom, feeding them was a job fraught with great difficulty and danger. They grew so excited at meal-times that they would fasten their teeth into anything that looked even remotely like food, so that you had to watch your hands. Instead of waiting until the food dish was put inside their cage, like any sensible animal, they would leap through the door to meet it, knock the dish out of your hand, and then fall to the ground in a tangled heap, all screaming loudly with frustrated rage. Eventually I became rather tired of having the Bandits shoot out like ginger rockets every time I went to feed them, so I evolved a plan. Two of us would approach the cage at meal-times, and the Bandits would hurl themselves at the bar, screaming loudly, their eyes popping with emotion. Then one of us would rattle the bedroom door, and they, thinking that the food was being put in there, would throw themselves into the sleeping quarters, fighting and scrambling to get there first. While they were thus engaged you had exactly two seconds' grace before they found out the deception: during that time you had to open the cage door, put the food inside and withdraw your hand and lock the door again. If you were not quick, or made some slight noise to attract their attention, the Bandits would tumble out of the bedroom, screeching and chittering, upset the plate, and bite indiscriminately at the food and your hand. It was all very trying.

About this time we had another pair of babies brought to us, who proved to be full of charm and personality. They were a pair of baby Red River Hogs and, as with the Kusimanses, they looked totally unlike the adult. A fully grown Red River Hog is probably the most attractive member of the pig family, and certainly the most highly coloured. They have bright rusty-orange fur, with deeper, almost chocolate markings round the snout. Their large ears end in two extraordinary pencil-like tufts of pure white hair, and a mane of this white hair runs along their backs. The two babies were, like all young pigs, striped: the ground colour was a deep brown, almost black, and from snout to tail they were banded with wide lines of bright mustard-yellow fur, a colour scheme that had the effect of making them look more like fat wasps than baby pigs.

The little male was the first sto arrive, sitting forlornly in a basket carried on the head of a brawny hunter. He was obviously in need of a good feed of warm milk, and as soon as I had paid for him I prepared a bottle and then lifted him out on to my knee. He was about the size of a pekinese, and had very sharp little hooves and tusks, as I soon found out. He had never seen a feeding-bottle and treated it with the gravest suspicion from the start. When I lifted him on to my knee and tried to get the teat into his mouth, he kicked and squealed, ripping my trousers with his hooves and trying to bite with his tiny tusks. At the end of five minutes we both looked as though we had bathed in milk, but not a drop of it had gone down his throat. In the end I had to hold him firmly between my knees, wedge his mouth open with one hand while squirting milk in with the other. As soon as the first few drops trickled down his throat he stopped struggling and screaming, and within a few minutes he was sucking away at the bottle as hard as he could go. After this he was no more trouble, and within two days had lost all his fear of me, and would come running to the bars of his pen when I appeared, squeaking and grunting with delight, rolling over on to his back to have his bulging stomach scratched.

The female piglet arrived a week later, and she was brought in protesting so loudly that we could hear her long before she and the hunter came in sight. She was almost twice the size of the male, so I decided that they must have separate cages to start with, as I was afraid that she might hurt him. But when I put her in the pen next door to him, their obvious delight at seeing each other, and the way they rushed to the intervening bars, squeaking and rubbing noses, made me decide that they should share a cage straight away. When I put them together the tiny male ran forward, sniffing loudly, and butted the female gently in the ribs; she snorted and skipped away across the cage. He chased her, and together they ran round and round the cage, twisting and turning and doubling back with astonishing agility for such portly beasts. When they had worked off their high spirits, they burrowed deep into the pile of dry banana leaves I had provided for them and fell asleep, snoring like a beehive on a summer night.

The female, being so much older, very soon learnt to supplement her bottle-feed with a dish of chopped fruit and vegetables. After giving both of them their bottle I would put a broad, shallow pan full of this mixture into the cage, and she would spend the morning standing there with her nose buried in it, making slushy, squelching piggy noises and sighing dreamily at intervals. The little male could not understand this, and he used to become very incensed at being ignored; he would go and prod her with his snout, or nibble at her legs, until she would suddenly turn on him with squeals of rage and drive him away. He tried several times to see what it was in the dish that was attracting her, but could not discover anything very exciting about a lot of chopped fruit, so he would wander off moodily and sit in a corner by himself until she had finished. One day, however, he decided that he, too, could get an extra meal, by the simple expedient of sucking the female's long tail. He became convinced that if he sucked it long enough and hard enough he would get milk from it. So she used to stand there with her nose buried in the dish of food, while behind her stood the male with her tail held hopefully in his mouth. This did not seem to worry her unduly, but he sucked so enthusiastically that her tail became quite bald, and in order to let the hair grow again I had to keep them in separate cages, only allowing them to be with one another for a game twice a day.

Life in the marquee with half a hundred animals to look after was anything but dull. We were surrounded on all sides by animals of all shapes, sizes, and kinds, from tree-frogs to owls, and from pythons to monkeys. At all hours of the day and night a steady mutter of strange noises filled the air –noises that ranged from the maniacal screams and giggles of the chimpanzees to the steady rasping sound of a Pouched Rat who was convinced that, by sticking to it in spite of all opposition, he could gnaw his way through a metal feeding-pot. At any time of the day you could find something to do, or something new to note or observe. The following extracts from a week's entries in my diary give some indication of the wealth of small but exciting or interesting incidents that were worth noting:

The young female Stanger's Squirrel's eyes have now changed from that beautiful shade of sky blue to steel grey; when you disturb her at night she makes a noise like a clockwork train when it is lifted off the rails… one of the Palm Vipers has given birth toeleven young: about five inches long, ground colour pale slate grey with cross bands of dark ash grey, making wonderful contrast to vivid green and white mother; they all struck viciously at a stick when only a couple of hours old … large green tree frogs make a noise like a clock slowly ticking, just before rain, but will stop if you go near their cage, and won't perform again until next cloudburst… discovered that the galagos like the flowers of a species of marigold that grows around here; they hold flower head in one hand and pluck off petals with the other, cramming them into their mouths; then they play with the remains as though it were a shuttlecock, looking quite ridiculous, with their great eyes staring…