Gerald Durrell - THREE SINGLES TO ADVENTURE

Collecting is a curious occupation. Most of the time you have so many failures and meet with so many disappointments that you wonder why you bother to go collecting at all. But then suddenly your luck changes you go out, as we had done that night, and capture a specimen that you have been dreaming and talking about for months. Immediately you are suffused in a rosy glow, the world is a wonderful place once again, and all your failures and disappointments are forgotten. You decide, quite suddenly, that there is no job that gives you the same pleasure and satisfaction as collecting, and you think of all the human beings doing other jobs, and a faint, pitying sneer comes over your face. In a state of intoxicated happiness you feel that you would not only forgive your friends the wrongs they have done you, but even your relatives.

So we paddled back along the silent creeks, the black waters reflecting the star-shimmering sky with such faithfulness that we felt the canoe was floating through space among the planets. Cayman grunted among the reeds, strange fish rose and gulped at the myriads of pale moths that drifted across the water. In the bottom of the canoe, spreadeagled in a tin, lay the amphibians that had made our evening so perfect. Every few minutes we would glance down at them and smirk with satisfaction. The capturing of an incredibly ugly toad: of such simple pleasures is a collector's life made up.

It was not long before our small hut was overflowing with animals. Tied to posts and stakes outside were capuchin and squirrel monkeys, marmosets, and pacas. Inside in a variety of makeshift cages were agoutis, pattering urgently back and forth on deer-like feet, armadillos, grunting like pigs, iguanas, cayman, anacondas, a pair of mar gays (small and beautifully spotted forest cats), a box marked 'danger' which contained three fer-de-lance, probably the most poisonous snake in South America. Hung from the walls of the hut were rows of thin cloth bags containing frogs, toads, and the smaller lizards and snakes. There were hummingbirds, glinting and purring tremulously round their feeding pots, macaws clad in riotous carnival-coloured feathers, talking to themselves in deep voices, smaller parrots chuckling and squeaking, sun-bitterns, in their autumn-tinted feathers, spreading their wings to display the startling, eye-like markings. All these creatures took a lot of looking after; in fact, we had almost reached that saturation point where the quantity of specimens you have assembled at camp prevents you from going out in search of more. When this point is reached you are forced to pack up your catch and take them back to base camp. Neither Bob nor I was anxious that our stay in the creek lands should end, for we realized that this was the last trip we should have time for before we left Guiana .

But, as I say, the arrival of each new specimen brought the final day of our stay nearer. Our kindly schoolmaster, who had worked untiringly to increase our collection, told us that there was a small Amerindian village some distance away which he was sure would yield some specimens if we went there. So Bob and I decided to visit it as a last treat; when we had been there we would really pack up and return to Georgetown .

One of the most charming traits in the Amerindian character is their delight in keeping pets, and their villages usually contained a weird assortment of monkeys, parrots, toucans, and other wild creatures that they had adopted. Most primitive people live a hard and precarious life in jungle or grassland, and you generally find that their only interest in animals is a purely culinary one. You cannot blame them, because for these people the task of keeping alive is a hard and constant struggle. They do not simply lie about in a tropical paradise and pluck what they need from the nearest bush. The wellstocked jungle of Tarzan has not, I am afraid, spread beyond the confines of Hollywood .

It is therefore all the more remarkable to find the Amerindians getting such pleasure out of keeping pets, taming them with such ease and gentleness, and sometimes (though we offered ample reward) refusing to part with them.

The schoolmaster found for us two stalwart Amerindians who were to paddle us to this village. When they appeared outside our hut early one morning we asked them how far the village was and how long it would take us to get there and back. They said, rather vaguely, that it was not very far and that we should not be long on the journey. At about six o'clock that evening, when we were still paddling home, I remembered their replies and decided that there was a vast discrepancy between our idea of a short time and an Amerindian's. But we did not know this in the morning, so we set off in high spirits. We took no food with us because, as we explained to Ivan, we would be back by lunchtime.

We travelled in a long, deep-bellied canoe, Bob and I sitting in the middle, with an Amerindian at each end. Going through the creeks in a canoe is, perhaps, the best way to enjoy them. There is no noise, except the clop and gurgle of the paddles, rhythmic as a heart-beat. Occasionally one of the paddlers would lift his voice in song, a brief, lilting and rather mournful little tune that ended as suddenly as it began. It would echo and die across the sunlit water, and then there would be silence again, broken only by an occasional muttered curse as Bob or I pinched our fingers between the paddles and the sides of the canoe. We were helping with the paddling, having offered to do so in a weak moment; after an hour or so, when the first blisters started to come up, I began to realize there was more to paddling a dugout than I had previously suspected.

We slid smoothly down mile after mile of creek, the orchid-decorated trees curving over us to form a delicate shimmering silhouette against the intense blue sky. They cast their tattered shadows on the water, turning the creek into a pathway of polished tortoiseshell. Occasionally the creek led across a piece of flooded savannah, where the top of the grass rose golden above the water. In one of these places we passed a spot where the grass had been trampled and squashed into a rough circle; from this depression led a trail weaving across he savannah where something had dragged itself, leaving a ieat parting in the grass. One of the paddlers explained that t was the resting-place of an anaconda and, if the trail was inything to go by, it must have been a remarkably large me.

After three hours paddling there was still no sign of a ullage; in fact we had seen no sign of native life at all.

There was, however, plenty of animal life to be seen. We passed under a great tree with a bushel of white and gold orchids strewn about its trunk and branches, and in it a troop of five toucans played, leaping and scuttling among the twigs, peering at us with their great beaks cocked up, uttering high itched, creaking yaps, like a group of asthmatic pekinese. In a tangle of reeds and branches we saw a tiger bittern, his range and fawn plumage streaked with chocolate brown, squatting immobile on a small mud-bank. We drifted past him, and he was so close I could have touched him with my laddie, but he never moved a fraction of an inch the whole time we were in sight, relying on his lovely camouflage to ave him.

At one point the creek widened into something almost the size of a lake, a great oval area in which no water was visible under the carpet of water-lilies, a forest of pink and white blooms against shining green leaves. The bows of the canoe lushed through this mass of flowers with a soft, crisp rustling, and we could feel the bottom of the dugout being pulled and angled among the long, rubbery lily-stalks.

Jacanas fled before us across the leaves, fluttering their vivid yellow wings; a pair of muscovy ducks rose out of the reeds with a tremendous amount of splashing and flew heavily away over the forest. Tiny fish leapt ahead of the canoe, and a small, thin snake uncoiled himself from his bed on a sun-warmed lily-leaf and lid into the water. The air vibrated with the sound of the multitude of dragonflies gold, blue, green, scarlet, and bronze, hat zoomed and hovered about us or settled briefly on the lily-leaves, trembling their glass-like wings nervously.