Gerald Durrell - THREE SINGLES TO ADVENTURE

"Look out, sir, he's a very bad snake," said Ivan.

"He will bite you. Chief," squeaked the East Indian.

"You'll get blood poisoning," said Bob.

But their warnings came too late, for at the second attempt I had grabbed the reptile round the neck and pulled him out of the sack, hissing and squirming. Measured by his owner, he came to five feet six inches, quite a modest length for an anaconda. They have been known to grow to twenty-five feet in length. After paying the East Indian the required sum per foot, Bob and I wrestled with the snake and forced him into one of the heavy sacks we had brought with us for this purpose. Then I doused the sack with a couple of buckets of water and placed it in the room that housed our other specimens.

Some time later I went down the road to the only shop in Adventure to buy some nails, and on returning I was intrigued to see Bob standing on top of the wooden steps leading to the kitchen, clutching a branch in one hand and with a fixed expression on his face. He looked not unlike Horatio at the bridge. I could hear Ivan yelping and muttering to himself inside the house.

"What's going on?" I called cheerfully.

Bob gave me a look of despair.

"Your anaconda's escaped," he said.

"Escaped? But how could it?"

"I don't know how, but it has. It's taken up residence in the kitchen. It seems to like it there."

I climbed up the steps and looked through the

"How are we going to catch it, sir?" he asked. The snake turned and hissed at him, and he disappeared rapidly.

"We'll have to go in and pin him down," I said, in what I hoped was an authoritative tone of voice.

"Have you noticed the temper it's in?" inquired Bob."You can go in and pin it down. I'll cover your retreat."

Finding that I could not inveigle either Bob or Ivan into the kitchen with me, I was forced to go in alone. I armed myself with a long, forked stick and a sack and approached the snake with the sack held out in front of me, rather as a bullfighter approaches a bull. The anaconda gathered itself into a tight rippling bunch and struck at the sack, while I danced about trying to pin it down with my stick. For one brief moment its head was still, and I jabbed at it hopefully, but the snake flung off the stick with an angry wiggle and slid swiftly towards the back door, hissing like a gas jet. Bob, seeing it coming towards him, took an involuntary step backwards, forgetting the steps, and disappeared from view with a crash, closely followed by the snake. When I reached the door Bob was sitting at the bottom of the steps in a puddle of water and the snake was nowhere to be seen.

"Where did it go?"

Bob rose slowly to his feet.

"I couldn't tell you," he said."I was more concerned with finding out if I had broken my neck than watching where your specimen went to."

We searched all around and under the house, but could find no trace of the snake. I discovered that it had escaped by pushing its way through a minute tear in the corner of the sack. At least, the tear must have been small when it started, but now the sack looked as though it had two mouths. As we sat down for tea I delivered a long tirade about the loss of such a nice specimen.

"Never mind," said Bob,"I expect it will turn up in Ivan's hammock tonight, and then he can recapture it for you."

Ivan said nothing, but from the expression on his face I could tell that the idea of finding an anaconda in his hammock did not appeal to him.

Our tea was interrupted by the arrival of a short, fat, and extremely bashful Chinaman carrying under his arm a large and ridiculous bird. It was about the size of a domestic turkey, and clad in sober black feathers, except for a few white ones on the wings. Its head was surmounted by a crest of curly feathers that looked rather like a wind-swept toupe. The beak was short and thick, swollen at the base into a great cere round the nostrils. This beak, together with the heavy, chicken-like feet, was bright canary yellow.

The bird stared at us with a pair of large, dark, soulful eyes that had a mad expression in them.

After a certain amount of bargaining with the Chinaman I bought this curassow, and the owner stooped and placed the bird at our feet. It stood there for a minute blinking its eyes and uttering a soft and plaintive 'peet. peet. peet', a noise that was quite out of keeping with the size and appearance of the bird. I bent down and started to scratch its head, and immediately the curassow closed its eyes and fell flat on the ground, shivering its wings in ecstasy and giving vent to a throaty crooning. Each time I stopped scratching it would open its eyes and regard me with astonishment, peetpeetpeeting in tones of injured entreaty.

When it found that I had no intention of sitting there all afternoon massaging its head, it rose heavily to its feet and approached my legs, still pee ting ridiculously. Slowly and cunningly it crept forward. Then it lay down across my shoes, closed its eyes and started to croon again. Neither Bob nor I had ever met quite such a gentle, stupid, and amiable bird, and we christened it Cuthbert forthwith, as it was the only name we could think of that perfectly fitted its sloppy character.

The Chinaman had assured us that Cuthbert was so tame that he would not wander, so we let him have the run of the house, only shutting him up at night. The first evening, he gave us a sample of what we were to expect. We discovered the wretched bird had a passion for human company; not only that, but he liked to be as near as possible to one. After the Chinaman had departed I started work on the diary, which was sadly behindhand. It was not long before Cuthbert decided he could do with a little attention, so he flew up on to the table with a great clatter of wings. He walked across it slowly, pee ting in pleased tones, and tried to lie across the paper I was writing on. I pushed him away, and he stepped backwards with an expression of injured innocence and upset the ink. While I was mopping this up he proceeded to embellish two pages of the diary with his private seal, which was large and of a clinging consistency. This meant that I had to rewrite two pages. Meanwhile Cuthbert made several cunning attempts to climb into my lap and was vigorously repulsed. Finding the slow approach did not work, he thought about it for a while and then decided the best method would be to take me by surprise, so he tried to fly up on to my shoulder. He missed his mark and fell heavily on to the table, upsetting the ink for the second time. During the whole of this performance he kept up his ridiculous peeting. Finally I lost patience with him and pushed him off the table, so he retreated to a corner of the room and sulked.

Not long afterwards Bob came in to hang up the hammocks, and Cuthbert greeted his arrival with delight. While Bob was absorbed in the job of disentangling the hammocks from their ropes, Cuthbert cautiously approached across the floor and lay down just behind his feet. During the course of his struggles with a hammock Bob stepped backwards and tripped heavily over the recumbent bird behind him. Cuthbert gave a squawk of alarm and retired to his corner again. When he judged that Bob was once more engrossed, he shuffled forward and laid himself across his shoes. The next thing I knew there was a crash, and Bob fell to the floor together with the hammocks. Prom underneath the wreckage of mosquito-nets and ropes Cuthbert peered, peeting indignantly.

"It's all very well for you to laugh," said Bob savagely, "but if you don't remove this disgusting bird you're going to be minus a specimen. I don't mind him making love to me when I've got nothing better to do, but I can't deal with his attentions and hang up hammocks."

So Cuthbert was consigned to the animal room. There I tied him by the leg to one of the cages and left him peering pathetically after me.