Encounters With Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  There was one nasty moment when I bent down to pick up one of the reptiles and heard a loud hissing apparently coming from somewhere horribly close to my ear. I straightened up and found myself staring into a pair of angry silver-coloured eyes approximately a foot away. After considerable juggling I managed to get this snake down on to the ground and pin him beneath my stick. On the whole, the reptiles were just as scared of me as I was of them, and they did their best to get out of my way. It was only when I had them cornered that they fought and struck viciously at the stick, but bounced off the brass fork with a reassuring ping. However, one of them must have been more experienced, for he ignored the brass fork and bit instead at the wood. He got a good grip and hung on like a bulldog; he would not let go even when I lifted him clear of the ground. Eventually I had to shake the stick really hard, and the snake sailed through the air, hit the side of the pit and fell to the ground hissing furiously. When I approached him with the stick again, he refused to bite and I had no difficulty in picking him up.

  I was down in the pit for about half an hour, and during that time I caught twelve Gaboon vipers; I was not sure, even then, that I had captured all of them, but I felt it would be tempting fate to stay down there any longer. My companions hauled me out, hot, dirty and streaming with sweat, clutching in one hand a bag full of loudly hissing snakes.

  ‘There, now,’ said my friend triumphantly, while I was recovering my breath, ‘I told you I’d get you some specimens, did I not?’

  I just nodded; by that time I was beyond speech. I sat on the ground, smoking a much-needed cigarette and trying to steady my trembling hands. Now that the danger was over I began to realize for the first time how extremely stupid I had been to go into the pit in the first place, and how exceptionally lucky I was to have come out of it alive. I made a mental note that in future, if anyone asked me if animal-collecting was a dangerous occupation, I would reply that it was only as dangerous as your own stupidity allowed it to be. When I had recovered slightly, I looked about and discovered that one of my audience was missing.

  ‘Where’s your brother got to?’ I asked my friend.

  ‘Oh him,’ said MacTootle with fine scorn, ‘he couldn’t watch any more – he said it made him feel sick. He’s waiting over there for us. You’ll have to excuse him – he couldn’t take it. Sure, and it required some guts to watch you down there with all them wretched reptiles.’

  Sebastian

  Not long ago I spent some months in Argentina, and it was while there that I first met Sebastian. He was a gaucho, the South American equivalent of the North American cowboy. Like the cowboy, the gaucho is becoming rare nowadays, for most of the farms or estancias in Argentina are increasingly mechanized.

  My reasons for being in Argentina were twofold: firstly, I wanted to capture live specimens of the wild animal life to bring back for zoos in this country, and, secondly, I wanted to film these same animals in their natural haunts. A friend of mine owned a large estancia about seventy miles from Buenos Aires in an area noted for its wild life, and when he invited me down there to spend a fortnight I accepted the invitation with alacrity. Unfortunately, when the time arrived my friend had some business to attend to, and all he could do was to take me down to the estancia and introduce me to the place before rushing back to the city.

  He met me at the little country station, and as we jogged down the dusty road in the buggy he told me that he had got everything arranged for me.

  ‘I’ll put you in charge of Sebastian,’ he said, ‘so you should be all right.’

  ‘Who’s Sebastian?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, just one of our gauchos,’ said my friend vaguely. ‘What he doesn’t know about the animal life of this district isn’t worth knowing. He’ll be acting host in my absence, so just ask him for anything you want.’

  After we had lunched on the veranda of the house, my friend suggested I should meet Sebastian, so we saddled horses and rode out across the acres of golden grass shimmering in the sun, and through the thickets of giant thistles, each plant as high as a man on horseback. In half an hour or so we came to a small wood of eucalyptus trees, and in the middle of it was a long, low, whitewashed house. A large and elderly dog, lying in the sun-drenched dust, lifted his head and gave a half-hearted bark before going back to sleep again. We dismounted and tied up the horses.

  ‘Sebastian built this house himself,’ said my friend. ‘He’s probably round the back having a siesta.’

  We went round the house, and there, slung between two slender eucalyptus trees, was an enormous hammock, and in it lay Sebastian.

  My first impression was of a dwarf. I discovered later that he measured about five feet two inches, but lying there in that vast expanse of hammock he looked very tiny indeed. His immensely long and powerful arms dangled over the sides and they were burnt to a rich mahogany brown, with a faint mist of white hair on them. I couldn’t see his face, for it was covered by a black hat that rose and fell rhythmically, while from underneath it came the most prolonged and fearsome snores I have ever heard. My friend seized one of Sebastian’s dangling hands and tugged at it vigorously, at the same time bending down and shouting in the sleeping man’s ear as loudly as he could: ‘Sebastian – Sebastian! Wake up, you have visitors.’ This noisy greeting had no effect whatever; Sebastian continued to snore under his hat. My friend looked at me and shrugged.

  ‘He’s always like this when he’s asleep,’ he explained. ‘Here, catch hold of his other arm and let’s get him out of the hammock.’

  I took the other arm and we hauled him into a sitting position. The black hat rolled off and disclosed a round, brown chubby face, neatly divided into three by a great curved moustache, stained golden with nicotine, and a pair of snow-white eyebrows that curved up on to his forehead like the horns of a goat. My friend caught hold of his shoulders and shook him, repeating his name loudly, and suddenly a pair of wicked black eyes opened under the white brows and Sebastian glared at us sleepily. As soon as he recognized my friend he uttered a roar of anguish and struggled to his feet: ‘Señor!’ he bellowed. ‘How nice to see you … Ah, pardon me, señor, that I’m sleeping like a pig in its sty when you arrive … excuse me, please. I wasn’t expecting you so early, otherwise I would have been prepared to welcome you properly.’

  He wrung my hand as my friend introduced me, and then, turning towards the house, he uttered a full-throated roar: ‘Maria – Maria – !’ In response to this nerve-shattering cry an attractive young woman of about thirty appeared, whom Sebastian introduced, with obvious pride, as his wife. Then he clasped my shoulder in one of his powerful hands and gazed earnestly into my face.

  ‘Would you prefer coffee or maté, señor?’ he asked innocently. Luckily my friend had warned me that Sebastian based his first impressions of people on whether they asked for coffee or maté, the Argentine green herb-tea, for in his opinion coffee was a disgusting drink, a liquid fit only to be consumed by city people and other depraved members of the human race. So I said I would have some maté. Sebastian turned and glared at his wife.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘Didn’t you hear the señor say he would take maté? Are the guests to stand here dying of thirst while you gape at them like an owl in the sun?’

  ‘The water is boiling,’ she replied placidly, ‘and they needn’t stand, if you ask them to sit down.’

  ‘Don’t answer me back, woman,’ roared Sebastian, his moustache bristling.

  ‘You must excuse him, señor,’ said Maria, smiling at her husband affectionately, ‘he always gets excited when we have visitors.’

  Sebastian’s face turned a deep brick-red.

  ‘Excited?’ he shouted indignantly. ‘Excited? Who’s excited? I’m as calm as a dead horse … please be seated, señors … excited indeed … you must excuse my wife, señor, she has a talent for exaggeration that would have earned her a wonderful political career if she had been born a man.’

  We sat down under the trees, and Sebastian lighted a small an
d pungent cigar while he continued to grumble good-naturedly about his wife’s shortcomings.

  ‘I should never have married again,’ he confided. ‘The trouble is that my wives never outlive me. Four times I’ve been married now and as I laid each woman to rest I said to myself: Sebastian, never again. Then, suddenly … puff! … I’m married again. My spirit is willing to remain single but my flesh is weak, and the trouble is that I have more flesh than spirit.’ He glanced down at his magnificent paunch with a rueful air, and then looked up and gave us a wide and disarming grin that displayed a great expanse of gum in which were planted two withered teeth. ‘I suppose I shall always be weak, señor … but then a man without a wife is like a cow without an udder.’

  Maria brought the maté, and the little pot was handed round the circle, while we each in turn took sips from the slender silver maté pipe, and my friend explained to Sebastian exactly why I had come to the estancia. The gaucho was very enthusiastic, and when we told him that he might be required to take part in some of the film shots he stroked his moustache and shot a sly glance at his wife.

  ‘D’you hear that, eh?’ he inquired. ‘I shall be appearing in the cinema. Better watch that tongue of yours, my girl, for when the women in England see me on the screen they’ll be flocking out here to try to get me.’

  ‘I see no reason why they should,’ returned his wife. ‘I expect they have good-for-nothings there, same as everywhere else.’ Sebastian contented himself with giving her a withering look, and then he turned to me.

  ‘Don’t worry, señor,’ he said, ‘I will do everything to help you in your work. I will do everything you want.’ He was as good as his word: that evening my friend left for Buenos Aires, and for the next two weeks Sebastian rarely left my side. His energy was prodigious, and his personality so fiery that he soon had complete control of my affairs. I simply told him just what I wanted and he did it for me, and the more extraordinary and difficult my requests the more he seemed to delight in accomplishing them for me. He could get more work out of the peons, or hired men, on the estancia than anyone I met, and, strangely enough, he did not get it by pleading or cajoling them but by insulting and ridiculing them, using a wealth of glittering similes that, instead of angering the men, convulsed them with laughter and made them work all the harder.

  ‘Look at you,’ he would roar scathingly, ‘just look at you all … moving with all the speed of snails in bird-lime … it’s a wonder to me that your horses don’t take fright when you gallop, because even I can hear your eyeballs rattling in your empty skulls … you’ve not enough brain among the lot of you to make a rich soup for a bedbug …’ And the peons would gurgle with mirth and redouble their efforts. Apart from considering him a humorist, of course, the men knew very well that he would not ask them to do anything he could not do himself. But then there was hardly a thing that he did not know how to do, and among the peons an impossible task was always described as ‘something even Sebastian couldn’t do’. Mounted on his great black horse, his scarlet-and-blue poncho draped round his shoulders in vivid folds, Sebastian cut an impressive figure. On this horse he would gallop about the estancia, his lassoo whistling as he showed me the various methods of roping a steer. There are about six different ways of doing this, and Sebastian could perform them all with equal facility. The faster his horse travelled, the rougher the ground, the greater accuracy he seemed to obtain with his throws, until you had the impression that the steer had some sort of magnetic attraction for the rope and that it was impossible for him to miss.

  If Sebastian was a master with a rope, he was a genius with his whip, a short-handled affair with a long slender thong, a deadly weapon which he was never without. I have seen him, at full gallop, pull this whip from his belt and neatly take the head off a thistle plant as he passed. Flicking cigarettes out of people’s mouths was child’s play to him. I was told that in the previous year a stranger to the district had cast doubts on Sebastian’s abilities with a whip, and Sebastian had replied by stripping the man’s shirt from his back, without once touching the skin beneath. Sebastian preferred his whip as a weapon – and he could use it like an elongated arm – yet he was very skilful with both knife and hatchet. With the latter weapon he could split a matchbox in two at about ten paces. No, Sebastian was definitely not the sort of man to get the wrong side of.

  A lot of the hunting I did with Sebastian took place at night, when the nocturnal creatures came out of their burrows. Armed with torches, we would leave the estancia shortly after dark, never returning much before midnight or two in the morning, and generally bringing with us two or three specimens of one sort or another. On these hunts we were assisted by Sebastian’s favourite dog, a mongrel of great age whose teeth had long since been worn down level with his gums. This animal was the perfect hunting-dog, for even when he caught a specimen it was impossible for him to hurt it with his toothless gums. Once he had chased and brought to bay some specimen, he would stand guard over it, giving one short yap every minute or so to guide us to the spot.

  It was during one of these night hunts that I had a display of Sebastian’s great strength. The dog had put up an armadillo, and after it had been chased for several hundred yards the creature took refuge down a hole. There were three of us that night: Sebastian, myself and a peon. In chasing the armadillo the peon and I had far outstripped Sebastian, whose figure did not encourage running. The peon and I reached the hole just in time to see the rear end of the armadillo disappearing down it, so we flung ourselves on to the grass and while I got a grip on its tail the peon grasped its hind legs. The armadillo dug his long front claws into the sides of the hole, and though we tugged and pulled he was as immovable as though he were embedded in cement. Then the beast gave a sudden jerk and the peon lost his grip. The armadillo wriggled farther inside the hole, and I could feel his tail slipping through my fingers. Just at that moment Sebastian arrived on the scene, panting for breath. He pushed me out of the way, seized the armadillo’s tail, braced his feet on either side of the hole and pulled. There was a shower of earth, and the armadillo came out of the hole like a cork out of a bottle. With one sharp tug Sebastian had accomplished what two of us had failed to do.

  One of the creatures I wanted to film on the estancia was the rhea, the South American ostrich, which, like its African cousin, can run like a racehorse. I wanted to film the rheas being hunted in the old style, by men on horseback armed with boleadoras. These weapons consist of three wooden balls, about the size of cricket balls, each attached to the other by a fairly long string; they are whirled round the head and thrown so that they tangle themselves round the bird’s legs and bring it to the ground. Sebastian arranged the whole hunt for me, and we spent my last day filming it. As most of the peons were to appear in these scenes, they all turned up that morning in their best clothes, each obviously trying to outdo the other by the brilliance of his costume. Sebastian surveyed them sourly from the back of his horse:

  ‘Look at them, señor,’ he said, contemptuously spitting. ‘All done up and as shining as partridge eggs, and as excited as dogs on a bowling green, just because they think they’re going to get their silly faces on the cinema screen … they make me sick.’

  But I noticed that he carefully combed his moustache before the filming started. We were at it all day in the boiling sun, and by evening, when the last scenes had been shot, we all felt in need of a rest – all of us, that is, except Sebastian, who seemed as fresh as when he started. As we made our way home, he told me that he had organized a farewell party for me that night, and everyone on the estancia was to be present. There would be plenty of wine and singing and dancing, and his eyes gleamed as he told me about it. I had not the heart to explain that I was dead tired and would much rather go to bed, so I accepted the invitation.

  The festivities took place in the great smoke-filled kitchen, with half a dozen flickering oil-lamps to light it. The band consisted of three guitars which were played with great verve. I need hardly say that
the life and soul of the party was Sebastian. He drank more wine than everyone else, and yet remained sober; he played solos on the guitar; he sang a great variety of songs ranging from the vulgar to the pathetic; he consumed vast quantities of food. But, above all, he danced; danced the wild gaucho dances with their complicated steps and kicks and leaps, danced until the beams above vibrated with his steps and his spurs struck fire from the stone flags.

  My friend, who had driven down from Buenos Aires to pick me up, arrived in the middle of the party and joined us. We sat in the corner, drinking a glass of wine together and watching Sebastian dance, while the peons clapped and roared applause.

  ‘What incredible energy he’s got,’ I remarked. ‘He’s been working harder than anyone else today, and now he’s danced us all off our feet.’

  ‘That’s what a life on the pampa does for you!’ replied my friend. ‘But, seriously, I think he’s quite amazing for his age, don’t you?’

  ‘Why?’ I asked casually, ‘how old is he?’

  My friend looked at me in surprise: