Gerald Durrell - THREE SINGLES TO ADVENTURE

"And what was that?" asked Bob, eyeing the box with suspicion.

"A crab-eating raccoon. How much does he want for it, Ivan?"

Ivan and the small boy bargained skilfully for a while, and then I handed over the modest sum agreed upon and triumphantly carried off the raccoon, box and all.

When we got back to the landing-stage Mr. Kahn was waiting for us. He had obtained a boat, he proclaimed proudly, and it would arrive in about ten minutes. When he saw the raccoon he beamed like a gold mine.

"Ah! Already we have success!" he said, giving a fruity chuckle, "I told you I knew where to get animals, didn't I?"

Ivan gave him a look in which dignity and distaste were nicely blended.

The boat, when it arrived, turned out to be something like a long, narrow ship's lifeboat. The whole of the inside was covered by a flat wooden deck, or rather, a sort of raised wooden roof; this was a very comfortable vantage point to recline on, and if the sun got too hot you could retire beneath it and sit in the shade on one of the seats inside.

I decided that it was altogether an admirable craft. We loaded our baggage into it and took our seats on the flat roof. As we chugged off down the twilit river Bob and I busied ourselves making a rough cage for the crab-eating raccoon, and when it was finished we managed to get him into it without much trouble. In the fading daylight we were able to take our first really good look at him.

He was about the size of a fox terrier, and his coat was short and sleek. He sat in a curious humped-up manner that made him look as though he was hunchbacked, and this was accentuated by the way he carried his head, drooping low beneath the level of his shoulders, like a charging bull's.

His tail was long and bushy, neatly ringed with black and white; his legs were slim and ended in large, flat paws, the soles of which were bare and coloured a bright pinky-red.

His fur, with the exception of his black face markings and black feet, was a light ash grey mixed in places with yellow. He presented, altogether, a quite ludicrous appearance; with his head hung low, and a pair of bewildered brown eyes looking out from the black mask across his face, he looked just like an amateur burglar who had been caught in the act.

When I pushed a flat dish of water and chopped-up fish into his cage he behaved in a way that Bob found vastly amusing.

He approached the plate, showing all the enthusiasm of a condemned man facing his last breakfast, and squatted down in front of it; then he plunged his front paws into the water and proceeded to move them about with a patting, stroking motion, watching us all the while with a dismal expression on his face. When he had patted the bits of fish for a considerable time he pulled a piece to the edge of the plate and, sitting up like a rabbit, he lifted it delicately between the slim fingers of his front paws and popped it into his mouth. When he had eaten it he fell to patting the rest of the meat again before lifting and eating another piece.

Bob was very intrigued by what he called ‘Burglar Bill's paddling', and so later on, when we were moored for the night, I caught some river crabs and put them in with the raccoon to show Bob the reason for the animal's strange performance. When he saw the crabs he surveyed them with a slightly worried expression, and then, choosing a large one, he squatted down in front of it and began to pat and stroke it swiftly and gently, occasionally stopping and shaking his paws. The crab made wild lunges with its pincers, but the raccoon's paws were too swift to be caught; then it retreated, but the raccoon followed it, still patting. After ten minutes of this the crab, though quite undamaged, was exhausted and had given up trying to defend itself with its pincers. This was the moment the raccoon had been waiting for: he leant forward suddenly and bit the unfortunate crab in half. Then he sat back and mournfully watched its death throes; when it had stopped twitching he picked it up daintily between the tips of his toes and popped it into his mouth, scrunching and swallowing with a look of acute melancholy on his face.

We had moored at the landing-stage outside a house belonging to a regal East Indian, clad in robes and turban, who had invited us to eat with him. We went up to the house and squatted in a circle on the floor, devouring a delicious curry and chupatties by the light of a flickering hurricane lamp. Mr. Kahn was in great form, crouching there like some great toad, his teeth glittering in the lamplight like fireflies, stuffing himself with food and talking and laughing incessantly. He monopolized the conversation, and his stories got wilder and wilder as the meal progressed.

"I remember once," he said, chuckling through a mouthful of curry, "I was up hunting" in the Mazeruni. Man, what jaguars you get up there! Fierce! Worst of all Guiana , man, and I'm telling you truly! Well, it was evening-time, like this. I'd just finished my food and I wanted to relieve myself, so I took my gun and went a little way through the trees."

He had finished his curry now, and was waddling round the room showing us in pantomime what had happened. He squatted in the corner with a grunt and beamed at us.

"All went well," he continued, "and I had just finished. I got up to pull on my pants, holding the gun with one hand."

He got to his feet with an effort and stooped for imaginary trousers.

"What d'you think happened, man?" he inquired rhetorically, clutching his abdomen. "A great damn jaguar ran out from the bushes in front of me! Hew! Hew! Hew! Man, was I scared? Sure I was. The jaguar had caught me with my pants down!"

"I can't say I envy the jaguar," remarked Bob.

"Yes," Mr. Kahn went on, "that was a fix. I had to hold my pants up with one hand and fire with the other. Man, what a shot! Right in its eye. Bang! It was dead."

He stepped up to the imaginary dead jaguar and kicked it scornfully.

"D'you know what?" he went on.

"That so scared me I sweared I wouldn't go and relieve myself again, except it was day time. But that damn jaguar scare me so much I have to go and relieve myself all night long. The more I go the more scared I get, and the more scared I get the more I have to go."

Mr. Kahn sat down again and laughed uproariously at the thought of his predicament, wheezing and gasping and wiping the tears from his quivering cheeks.

The talk drifted from jaguars to cayman and from cayman to anacondas, and Mr. Kahn had a story about each. His anaconda tales were, perhaps, the most colourful; apparently no cumoodi he had ever met had been less than the circumference of a barrel, and he had got the better of them all with some skilful trick or other. During the anaconda stories Ivan started to shift about uneasily, and I attributed this to boredom. I was soon to learn differently. Eventually the party broke up, and we made our way down to the boat, inside which our hammocks had been slung one above the other. We climbed into them with some difficulty, silenced Mr. Kahn with a firm good night and tried to sleep. I was just on the point of drifting off when there came a terrible yell from Ivan's hammock.

"Wharr! Look out, sir, a cumoodi … getting over the side of the boat … look out, sir…"

Our minds had been inflamed by Mr. Kahn's tales of monster anacondas, so at Ivan's cry pandemonium broke loose in the boat. Bob fell out of his hammock. Mr. Kahn leapt to his feet, tripped over Bob and narrowly missed falling into the river. I tried to jump out of my hammock, and it promptly looped the loop and deposited me, enveloped in yards of mosquito netting, on top of Bob. Mr. Kahn was screaming for a gun. Bob was begging me to get off his chest, and I was shouting for a torch. Ivan, meanwhile, was making dreadful strangling noises, as though the anaconda had coiled itself round his neck and was slowly throttling him to death.