Gerald Durrell (24 page)

No other
animal’s arrival had created half the upheaval that the Angwantibo’s did: a
family of Pouched rats that were sleeping peacefully in their cage were routed
out unceremoniously, and the cage was swept and cleaned as a temporary abode
for the creature. The carpenter was given a big box and told to produce, in
record time, the biggest and best cage he could construct, or else suffer a
dreadful fate. Various members of the staff were sent scurrying in all
directions to procure eggs, pawpaw, banana, and dead birds. At last, when the
cage had been furnished with a nice set of branches and there were plates of food
and drink on the clean sawdust floor, the great moment came. With a thick crowd
around me, hardly daring to breathe in case they disturbed this valuable animal
and thus earned my wrath, I carefully tipped the Angwantibo out of the basket
and into his temporary home. He stood on the floor for a moment, looking about
him; then he walked over to one of the plates, seized a bit of banana in his
mouth, and then climbed swiftly up into the branches, and crouching there
commenced to eat the fruit greedily. This was a very pleasant surprise; after
my experiences with other nervous creatures I had not expected him to eat at
once. As I watched him sitting on the branch mumbling his banana I felt quite
unreasonably proud, as though I had captured him myself.

“John,” I called
in a hoarse whisper, “come and see him.”

“Oh, he’s quite
a pretty little animal,” he said.

This was the
highest praise you could get out of John for anything without feathers. And
indeed he was a pretty little animal. He looked not unlike a teddy-bear, with
his thick golden-brown fur, his curved back, and golden eyes. He was about the
size of a four-week-old kitten, and though his body was fat and furry enough,
his legs, in proportion, seemed long and slender. His hands and feet were
extraordinarily like a human’s, except that on his hands the first and second
fingers had been reduced to mere stumps. This, of course, gave him a much
greater grasping power, for without the first two fingers in the way he could
get his little hands round quite a thick branch, and once having got a grip he
would cling on as though glued.

After I had
stood in silent and awed contemplation of the beast for half an hour, during
which time he ate one and a half bananas, he scrambled on to a suitably sloping
branch, grasped it firmly with hands and feet, tucked his head between his
front legs, his forehead resting on the wood, and went to sleep. Reverently I
covered the cage with a cloth so that the sunlight should not disturb him, and
tiptoed away.

Every half-hour
or so I would creep back to the cage and peep at him to make sure that he had
not dropped down dead or been spirited away by some powerful
ju-ju
, and
for the first two days I would leap out of bed in the morning and rush to his
cage, even before imbibing my morning cup of tea, a most unheard-of event. John
also became infected with my nervousness, and would peer out from under his
mosquito-net like a woodpecker from its hole and watch me anxiously as I
removed the sacking from the cage front and looked inside.

“Is it all
right?” he would inquire. “Has it eaten?”

“Yes, half a
banana and the whole of that dead bird.”

Now, there were
several reasons for the fuss that was made over the Angwantibo, or, to give it
its correct title,
Arctocebus calabarensis
. The first was that the
animal is extremely rare, being found only in the forests of the British and
French Carneroons, and even there they do not seem common. The second reason
was that they had long been wanted by the London Zoo, and they had asked us
specially to try and obtain them a specimen.

Though the
Angwantibo had been known to science since 1859, the British Museum have still
only some dozen specimens of it, and all naturalists who have searched for the
animal in its native haunts agree that it is extremely rare and hard to find.
The Angwantibo is a lemuroid, a group of animals closely related to the
monkeys. Only once before had this little creature been kept alive in captivity
and studied, but this was the first time that anyone had tried to bring one back
alive to England. If we were successful it meant that for the first time
zoologists and anatomists would be able to observe the habits and movement of a
live Angwantibo. So, naturally, we weren’t taking any chances with losing the
one we had, for we thought it might well be the only one we should get.

I will give this
little fellow his due and state that he was no trouble at all. At once he
showed a preference for bananas and the plump breast of a dead bird. This he
would wash down with a drink of milk. Then he would have a light snack of half
a dozen grasshoppers just before we went to bed. All day he would sleep,
clinging tightly to the branch, his head buried between his front legs. In the
evening, just before sunset, he would wake up, give himself a rapid grooming,
yawn once or twice, showing his bright pink tongue, and then he would start on
his stroll about the cage to work up an appetite. He would climb down one side
of the cage, walk across the floor to the other side, hoist himself into the branches,
scramble along them until he was back where he started, and then repeat the
whole performance over again. This little circular tour he would continue for
about an hour, until it was time to feed. As soon as his plate was put in he
would start to eat, showing no sign of fear at all. Sometimes he would come
down and stand on the floor, his head hanging low and his back humped up,
looking more like a miniature bear than ever. Occasionally, if his plate was
placed directly under a convenient branch, he would hang down by his feet, and
grab the pieces of banana with his pink hands and stuff them into his mouth,
smacking his lips and licking the juice from his nose. During all the time that
I had him I never heard him make any noise except a cat-like growl and a faint
hissing when I tried to handle him. To get him off a branch required
considerable effort, for with his queer misshapen hands and feet he would grip
the branch with incredible strength. To get him off you were forced to grab him
round the chest and pull, and he would counter this by ducking his head between
his front legs and biting you in the thumb with his needle-sharp teeth.

After a week,
when I was sure that Arcto, as we called him, had thoroughly settled down, I
again attempted my reconnaissance of N’da Ali. Once again Daniel and I rode
through the dust and pot-holes, but this time we were not turned back, and we
arrived hot and dishevelled at Fineschang round about eleven one morning. I
found the hunter awaiting me, and a more surly, objectionable character I have
never met. Apart from his face, which left much to be desired, his feet were
swollen to twice normal size with elephantiasis, and he had those peculiar
patches all over his legs which you sometimes see among the natives: areas like
large birth-marks which are devoid of the natural brown pigment, and are a
horrible pale pink, with the surface of the skin shiny like patent leather. We
started without delay, leaving Daniel in the village, for I thought that such a
climb would be too much for one so young and of such frail physique. It wasn’t
until we were half-way up that I discovered my own physical condition left much
to be desired.

The hunter
walked up the slope of the mountain, which appeared to be a gradient of two in
one, at a tremendous speed, and I scrambled behind with the sweat pouring down
my face, doing my best to uphold the White Man’s prestige. Only once did the
hunter check his speed, and that was at one point where a green mamba, probably
the fastest and most deadly of West African snakes, whisked across our path
like a streak of green lightning. It appeared round the trunk of one tree,
wiggled across the path some three feet in front of the hunter’s misshapen
feet, and disappeared among the bushes; the hunter stopped dead and went a pale
cheese colour. He gazed ferociously in the direction the reptile had taken, and
then turned to me:

“Ugh!” he said
vehemently and comprehensively. It was the only remark he had made since we
started, so I felt I ought to be sociable.

“Ugh!” I agreed.

We continued
upwards in silence.

When we had
reached the half-way mark the hunter led me to a large shallow pool at the base
of the waterfall, and here he removed his sarong and proceeded to bathe. I did
likewise, choosing a position upstream from him as I had no particular desire
to catch any of the great variety of diseases he was suffering from. When he
had washed he drank vigorously, belching in between gulps . . . a remarkable
and sustained performance. I squatted on a rock to open a bottle of beer; it
was then that I discovered the opener had been left behind. Offering a brief
prayer for the soul of the person who had packed the bag, I broke the neck off
the bottle and drank gratefully, hoping that there was not too much glass
inside. The hunter had now disappeared behind some rocks, with becoming
modesty, and was performing what appeared to be, to judge from the noise he was
making, his annual catharsis. Not wishing to intrude on so private and, it
seemed, so painful a matter, I amused myself by wandering among the rocks at
the base of the falls, in search of frogs.

Eventually my
guide reappeared and we went on our way. After a time I walked in a sort of
trance, the sweat running down into my eyes unheeded. That part of the trip
seems to be a complete blank. I came to as we burst out of the forest into a
tiny grass field, bleached white by the sun, and a troop of Mona Guenons rushed
from the grass and leapt into the trees with a crashing of leaves. We could
hear them crashing off, shouting “oink . . . oink . . .” to each other, as
Monas do. The hunter led me to the edge of the grass field where there was an
enormous rock, as big as a house, perched on the edge of the cliff we had just
climbed. Scrambling to the top of this a wonderful sight met my eyes.

In every
direction stretched the forest below us, miles and miles of undulating country,
here and there rising into a curious shaped hill, all of it covered with a
thick pelt of trees in every shade and combination of greens. Far away below
us, like a faint chalk stripe among the trees, lay the road, and following it
along with my eyes I could see Bakebe and, perched on the hill above, the big
hut that housed our collection. In front of us the forest rolled away to the
French border and beyond, and to our right, seen dimly shimmering in the heat
haze, more like a faint fingerprint on the blue sky, I could see Mount
Cameroon, nearly eighty miles away. It was a breath-taking and beautiful sight,
and for the first time I fully realized the vastness of the incredible forest.
From the plain below where we sat the forest stretched, almost unbroken, right
across Africa, until it merged into the savannah land of the east: Kenya,
Tanganyika, and Rhodesia. It was an astonishing thought. I sat there smoking a
much-needed cigarette, and wondering how many beef there were to a square mile,
but after a few minutes of intense mental arithmetic I began to feel dizzy at
the thought of such numbers and I gave it up.

The hunter lay
on the rock and went to sleep. I sat there and examined a vast area of forest
with the aid of my field-glasses, and I found it a fascinating occupation. I
followed the flight of the hornbills across the tops of the trees, which, from
this distance, resembled the head of a cauliflower: I watched a troop of
monkeys, only visible by the movement of the leaves as they jumped from tree to
tree.

Along the road a
speck that looked like an exotic red beetle became the Mamfe to Kumba lorry,
apparently creeping along the road and dragging a plume of dust behind it. I
followed it along for quite some time and then switched to something else,
which was a pity, as half a mile further on the lorry went through a bridge and
dropped twenty feet into the river below, a thing I did not learn about until I
returned home and found that John had spent the afternoon administering first
aid to the wounded passengers.

As the hunter
was slumbering peacefully I at last climbed down from the rock and explored the
grass field. On the opposite side, some twenty feet into the trees, I came upon
a glade between the great tree trunks, and here a tiny stream meandered its way
through moss-covered boulders. This, I decided, was the very place for a camp.
When I had examined the ground, peered under a few boulders, and generally
investigated the position, I walked on through the forest, and presently came
to another grass field, much larger than the first. So apparently the camp site
I had chosen was in a tongue of forest, bordered on two sides by grass. This
struck me as admirable, for I felt that these grass fields might well yield
some good specimens.

Returning, I
found the hunter awake, and I suggested that we should now return as I had seen
all I wanted to see, and it was getting late. He led the way without a word; he
was by far the most silent inhabitant of the Cameroons I had come across. The
way down was much easier, and so we made better time. As we reached the last
slope of the mountain a sudden wind sprang up, bringing with it a sharp shower
of rain. Leaves and small branches were ripped from the trees and fell all
about us, and somewhere in the forest we heard a splintering crash that denoted
the fall of quite a large branch or tree, bent beyond endurance by this sudden
fierce wind.