Gerald Durrell - THREE SINGLES TO ADVENTURE

By taking a short-cut across the savannah we arrived back at the spot where we had left Bob well in advance of the bull.

We found things in chaos: the anteater had freed both his front legs by some gigantic effort and had then ripped open the sack and crawled half out of it. When we arrived he was dashing round in a circle, wearing the sack on his hindquarters like an ill-fitting pair of pants, with Bob in hot pursuit. After recapturing the beast and pushing it into a new sack, I soothed Bob by producing the bottle of water, and after this lukewarm refreshment he recovered enough to tell me what had happened since we left him. As soon as we were out of sight his horse (which he had thought securely tied to a small bush) had wandered off and refused to be caught for some time. Bob pursued it over the savannah, mouthing endearments, and eventually succeeded in catching it; when he got back he found that the anteater had broken out of the sack and was trying to undo the ropes. Hot and angry. Bob forced him back into the sack, only to find that the horse had wandered off again. This apparently went on for a long time; at one point the monotony was relieved slightly by the arrival of a herd of long-horned cattle that stood around watching Bob's efforts in the supercilious and slightly belligerent way that cattle have. Bob said that he would not have minded their presence so much if bulls had not seemed so predominant in the herd. Eventually they drifted off, and Bob was making yet another sortie after the anteater when we appeared.

"The world," he said, "was just starting to turn round on me when you all arrived."

Just at that moment Francis's wife appeared, galloping across the grass on the bull, and Bob watched her approach with bulging eyes.

"What is that?" he asked in tones of awe. "Can you see it too?"

"That, my dear fellow, is the draftball procured at considerable expense to rescue us."

Bob lay back in the grass and closed his eyes.

"I've seen quite enough of bulls today to last me a lifetime," he said.

"I refuse to help you load the anteater on to that creature. I shall lie here until you have been gored to death, and then I'll ride quietly home."

So Francis, his wife, and I loaded the snorting anteater on to the bull's broad and stoical back. Then we levered our aching bodies on to the horses again and set off on the long trail back to Karanambo. The sun hung for a brief moment over the distant rim of mountains, flooding the savannah with a glorious green twilight, and then it was dark. In the gloom the burrowing owls called softly to one another, and as we passed the lake a pair of white egrets skimmed its surface like shooting stars. We were dead tired and aching in every limb. Our horses stumbled frequently, nearly sending us over their heads. The stars came out, and still we plodded on over the endless grass, not knowing in which direction we were travelling and not caring very much. A pale chip of moon rose, silvering the grass and making the draft ball look huge and misshapen in its light, like some great heavy-breathing prehistoric monster moving across the gloom of a newly formed world. I dozed uncomfortably, jogging back and forth in my saddle. Occasionally Bob's horse would stumble, and I would hear him curse fluently as the jerk stabbed the pommel of the saddle into his long-suffering stomach.

Presently I noticed a pale light flickering through some trees ahead of us, vanishing and reappearing like a will-o'-the wisp. It seemed very small and wan in comparison to the gigantic stars that hung, it appeared, only a few feet above our heads.

"Bob," I called, "I think those are the lights of the jeep."

"Praise the Lord!" said Bob fervently. "If you only knew how I long to get off this saddle!"

The lights of the jeep got brighter, and then we could hear the throb of its engine. It rounded the trees, bathing us in the cold beam of its headlights, and the horses bobbed and bucked, but in a very tired and dispirited manner. We dismounted and hobbled towards the car.

"What luck?" asked McTurk from the gloom.

"We got a big male," I replied, with a certain amount of vanity.

"And we've had a lovely day," said Bob.

McTurk chuckled. We sat down and had a smoke, and presently the prehistoric monster staggered into the glare of the headlights, and we unloaded the anteater from his back. The precious creature was then placed in the jeep on a bed of sacks, and we scrambled in beside him, having turned our horses loose on the savannah to find their way back to the outstation. The anteater awoke suddenly as the jeep started, and began to thrash about. I held his long nose in a firm grip, for I knew if he banged it on the metal sides it would kill him as surely as a bullet would.

"Where are you going to keep him?" asked McTurk.

The thought had not occurred to me before. I realized suddenly that we had no cages and no wood to make them.

Moreover we could not obtain any. But it would have taken more than this sobering thought to destroy my delight in having captured the anteater.

"We'll have to tether him somehow," I said airily.

McTurk grunted.

When we got back to the house we unloaded the beast and unwound the yards of rope and sacking that enveloped him.

Then, with McTurk's aid, we fashioned a rope harness and placed it round his shoulders. To this was attached a long piece of rope which we tethered to a shady tree in the compound. Beyond giving him a drink of water I did nothing for him that night, for I wanted to get him on to a substitute food straight away, and I felt he would be more likely to take to it if he was really hungry.

Getting an animal on to a substitute food is one of the most difficult and worrying jobs a collector has to face. It happens when you obtain a creature like the anteater that has a very restricted diet in the wild state: it might be a certain kind of leaf or fruit, a particular kind of fish or something equally tricky. Only very rarely can this diet be supplied when the animal reaches England , and so the collector's job is to teach his specimen to eat something else, something that can be supplied by the zoo to which the animal is going. So you have to concoct a palatable substitute food which the creature will eat, enjoy and thrive on. With some beasts it is a very difficult job, this changing over of diets, for you stand the risk of the substitute disagreeing with the creature and making it ill.

If this happens you may lose it. Some beasts are very stubborn and go on refusing the substitute until in despair you are forced to let them go. Others, again, fall on the substitute the first time it is offered and feed off it greedily. Sometimes you get this contradictory attitude in two members of the same species.

The substitute for the anteater consisted of three pints of milk with two raw eggs and a pound or so of raw, finely minced beef mixed with it, the whole thing being topped off with three drops of cod liver oil. I prepared this mixture early the next morning, and when it was ready I broke open the nearest termites' nest and scattered a thick layer of these creatures on the surface of the milk. Then I carried the bowl out to the anteater.

He was lying curled up on his side under the tree, completely covered by his tail, which was spread over him like an enormous ostrich feather. It hid his body and nose from view, and from a distance it made him look more like a pile of grey grass than an anteater. When you see these animals in the zoo you never realize how useful their great tails are: on the open savannah, curled up between two tussocks of grass, his tail spread over him like an umbrella, he is sheltered from all but the very worst weather. When he heard me approaching he snorted in alarm, whipped back his tail and rose on to his hind legs, ready to do battle. I put the bowl down in front of him, offered up a brief prayer that he would not be difficult, and retreated to watch. He shambled over to it and sniffed loudly round the rim. Then he plunged the tip of his nose into the milk, and his long, grey, snakelike tongue started whipping in and out of the mixture. He did not pause once until he had emptied the bowl, and I stood and watched him with incredulous delight.