The New Noah

by Gerald Durrell

  Now, to catch one of these big snakes is very easy: you seize him by the tail, pull him out and then try to get a good grip on the back of his head. This is exactly what I did, and I hauled the angry reptile out of the undergrowth and grabbed him behind the head before he could turn and strike me. He was about nine feet long, and so was quite safe to handle by myself. To cope with anything over that length would have required two people. Once I had a good grip on the back of his neck, I simply held him down in the grass until my companion joined me, when, with his help, I managed to get the wriggling and hissing, and extremely annoyed, anaconda into the bag.

  It is necessary when catching a snake of any sort, even one like this anaconda, to examine it as soon as you reach your camp. There are several reasons for this. First, however carefully it is captured, there is a risk that you might break one of the very fragile ribs which snakes possess, and a broken rib can give a great deal of trouble. Secondly, you look for ticks. A snake can be simply covered in ticks and can do very little to get rid of them. They fasten themselves on the thin skin between the scales, sometimes in such numbers that the scales drop off and an ugly bare patch of roughened skin is left, so it is very important to remove the ticks, otherwise the appearance of your snake may be ruined.

  Now you just can’t pull a tick off. If you do, its mouth parts will be left imbedded beneath the surface of the skin and create a tiny sore which might turn into a nasty ulcer. The best way to remove ticks is with a little paraffin, or failing that, by touching them with a lighted cigarette, whereupon they will loosen their grip and fall off.

  Another thing you have to look for is any old wounds that the reptile might have received and which may be in need of attention. When a snake sheds its skin, which occurs regularly throughout the year, it leaves a perfect transparent replica of itself behind, even to the two scales that look like minute watch-glasses that cover its lidless eyes. Occasionally, however, as the creature wriggles through thorn bushes or rocks in an effort to work the skin loose, it will tear, and though the reptile usually gets rid of the whole of the skin it may be left with the two watch-glass scales still covering the eyes. This causes partial blindness, and if the scales are left on for too long, the creature may become permanently blind. So with a newly caught snake you must always examine its eyes to see if the last time it shed its skin its eyes were freed from the two watch-glass scales.

  The story of Cai; Pooh; and Sarah Huggersack the only ant-eater film star

  There are not a great many kinds of monkey found in Chaco, but while we were there we were fortunate enough to obtain a specimen of one of the rarer ones, and what must be one of the strangest monkeys in the world. It is called the douroucouli and is the only nocturnal monkey known. It has enormous eyes, rather like an owl’s, and is coloured silver-grey on its back with a lemon-coloured tummy and chest. During the day, these monkeys sleep in hollow trees, or some other dark place, and as soon as it begins to grow dark they venture out and spend the whole night wandering in large parties through the forest, searching for food, such as fruit, insects, tree frogs, or birds’ eggs.

  Now, when we first caught Cai, as we called her, she was very thin and miserable-looking, but a few weeks on a good diet with plenty of milk and cod-liver oil soon put her right. Cai was a very charming little animal and though she was very tame, she was extremely nervous, and so you could not treat her in quite the same way as any other sort of monkey. I built her a nice cage, in the top of which was a square bedroom for her sleeping quarters. Cai, being like all monkeys very inquisitive, could not bear not to know all that was going on around her, so during the day she would lie half in and half out of her bedroom door, her head nodding as she dozed, but waking instantly and chirruping with curiosity should anything happen in the camp.

  She refused all food except milk, hard-boiled eggs, and bananas, though she would occasionally take a lizard. She seemed, however, to be quite frightened of insects, and when I gave her a tree frog she took it in her hand, smelt it, dropped it with an expression of disgust, and then wiped her hand vigorously on the side of the cage. Towards evening, she would become very lively and be quite ready for a game, bounding up and down in her cage, her big eyes shining and reminding me of the galagos that I had collected in West Africa. She displayed a great deal of jealousy towards the other animals if we took any notice of them, and particularly to a crab-eating racoon, called Pooh.

  Pooh was a strange little creature with great big flat paws, and a black mark across his eyes made him look not unlike a giant panda. Pooh always wore a very dismal expression and looked as if everything depressed him, but it was his large hands with their long thin fingers that we had to watch, for he could push them between the bars of his cage and steal anything within reach with the greatest of ease, and he was so curious that he would do his very best to get hold of almost anything. He would lie for hours on his back in the corner of his cage, plucking in a thoughtful sort of way at the hairs on his large tummy. When he grew tame, we could put our hands inside the cage and play with him. He used to love these games, pretending to bite, rolling over and kicking his big paws in the air.

  When he grew very tame, we made him a little collar and used to let him out on a very long rope tied to a stick in the middle of the camp clearing. We had another stick farther along, to which Cai, the monkey, was tied. The very first thing in the morning, when Pooh saw the food basket arriving, he would start uttering his loud complaining screams for food, and in sheer desperation we would have to give him something to keep him quiet. If we did this, Cai would become jealous, and when it came to her turn to be fed she would sulk, turning her back on us and refusing the food.

  Strangely enough, Cai was rather afraid of Pooh, though she did not at all mind a pair of baby deer whose little pen was near to her stick, and she would frequently go and lie quite close to the bars while the deer sniffed at her in an astonished sort of manner. Another thing that she was frightened of was snakes. When I brought back the anaconda, whose capture I mentioned in a previous chapter, and took him out of his sack to examine him, Cai, who was sitting in the bottom of her cage, took one look and fled up to her bedroom, much to our amusement, where she sat, peering timidly round the door and uttering horrified twittering noises.

  One morning, as we were cleaning out the cages, a young Indian came into the camp and asked if we would like to buy an animal off him. We asked him what sort of an animal it was and he explained that it was a baby fox. We thought it might be interesting to take a look at it, so we told him to bring it along later in the day. As he did not turn up, we thought he had forgotten all about it, and that we wouldn’t get our baby fox after all. To our surprise though, just before luncheon the following day, he came into the camp, dragging a small creature behind him. This was our long-promised baby fox. In appearance he was very like an Alsatian puppy, and he was so frightened that he was inclined to snap. We put him into a cage and gave him a plateful of meat and milk, and left him to calm down. We then sat back and watched him very carefully. The thing that seemed to interest Foxey was to see which of our tamer animals that came near to his cage he could get hold of. Although he was bloated with food he was constantly on the lookout for an even tastier dish. We had a number of tame birds at that time which were allowed to wander freely round the camp, but we soon had to alter this as every now and then we would hear squawks and have to rush to the rescue of some bird which had approached too closely to the fox’s cage. Later on, as he became tamer, we also had him out on a lead with Pooh and Cai, but with large distances between them.

  To our astonishment, he used to act in exactly the same way as a dog, for when we arrived in the morning he would whine excitedly until we went to talk to him, whereupon he would dance round and round our legs and wag his tail vigorously, a most unfox like thing to do.

  Amongst the specimens we brought back to camp from one of our trips were three large green parrots, all very talkative and full of mischief. At first, we put them
all in one cage, thinking that they would be perfectly all right together. Almost immediately the three parrots began to fight, and the noise was so great that we were forced to take out the ringleader and put him in a separate cage. We thought this would create a better atmosphere in the camp once more. We had reckoned without one of the other two. He apparently spent all his spare time gnawing frantically at the wire on the front of his cage, and one day there was a terrific burst of chattering and the bird flew off. We made great efforts to capture it, but he was too quick for us and flapped away over the trees, screaming excitedly.

  That, we thought, was the end of our parrot. When we got up the following morning, we were amazed to see the parrot back again, sitting on top of his cage, talking to his companion through the wire. When we opened the door, he hurriedly went into the cage again. He had obviously decided that the amount of food he was getting with us made captivity a better proposition than living in the forest.

  Shortly before we left Paraguay to return to England, an Indian brought in what turned out to be our most delightful specimen. It was a baby giant ant-eater which could only have been a few days old. We christened her Sarah Huggersack because at that age she would spend all her time clinging to her mother’s back, and so when she came to us she wanted to cling on to us all the time, or hug a sack. Sarah had to feel she was holding on to something, and if you put her on the ground she would stagger after you, making loud protesting honking noises, and as soon as you stopped she would scramble up until she was in her favourite position lying across your shoulders. Owing to the fact that she had such long sharp claws and also that she could grip so hard with them, this was a very painful procedure.

  We had to feed Sarah on a bottle. She would take four bottles of milk during the day and very soon learnt how to suck from them. While she was drinking, she would allow her long, sticky, snake-like tongue to protrude, so that it dangled down alongside the bottle.

  She grew quite rapidly and soon looked upon us as her adopted parents and would have great games with us after taking her food. Sarah liked to be rolled on her back and have her stomach scratched. If you lifted her up and tickled her under the armpits, she would lift both her paws and clasp them over her head, like a boxer who has just won his fight. At other times, if you pulled her tail or tickled her ribs, she would rear up on to her hind legs and fall on you, uttering loud snuffling noises of pleasure.

  When I eventually arrived back in England, Sarah was one of the first to go with Pooh and Cai to live at Paignton Zoo, where she became a great character The last time I saw Sarah was a few weeks later I was giving a lecture at the Festival Hall on animal collecting, and showing the colour film of the trip to Paraguay and Argentina. As Sarah was one of the stars of the film, I wrote to Paignton Zoo and asked if it would be possible for her to come up and appear with me on the stage. The authorities kindly consented to this, and so on the morning of the lecture Sarah Huggersack, accompanied by her keeper, travelled up on the train from Devon.

  When she arrived at the Festival Hall she was given a special dressing-room all to herself, which had been kept nice and warm for her arrival. She behaved very well, and at the end of the lecture my wife carried her on to the stage. Sarah was a great success, doing all her tricks on the stage, and ended up by walking over to the table and leaning against it to scratch herself. Afterwards she received any number of admirers in her dressing-room, and I think that her success rather went to her head, for I heard that when she got back to the zoo, the keeper could do nothing with her for several days, as she refused to be left and cried piteously if she was alone in her cage. I think I can safely say that Sarah is the only ant-eater film-star in the world, and though perhaps not as beautiful as some, she certainly has a lot of personality.

  So our collecting trip to Paraguay and Argentina ended, but a collector has no sooner finished one trip than he starts thinking about the next one, and, as I write, I am making plans for another expedition. It is always a difficult thing to choose your next collecting ground, for there are so many wonderful places in the world to see and so many extraordinary animals to capture that you generally spend some weeks hesitating before you pick a spot on the map.

  One thing a collector knows, however, is that wherever he goes in the world he is sure to meet a great array of fascinating little creatures which are perhaps elusive to capture and difficult to keep. They may cause him much anxiety and sometimes a great deal of trouble, but they will always be interesting and amusing, and when he eventually returns to his own country, he will look upon them not merely as a collection of rare specimens but more like a big family.

  A MESSAGE FROM

  THE DURRELL WILDLIFE CONSERVATION TRUST

  The end of this book isn’t the end of Gerald Durrell’s story. The various experiences you have just read about gave impetus and inspiration to his lifetime crusade to preserve the rich diversity of animal life on this planet.

  Although he died in 1995, the words of Gerald Durrell in this and his other books will continue to inspire people everywhere with love and respect for what he called ‘this magical world’. His work goes on through the untiring efforts of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust.

  Over the years many readers of Gerald Durrell’s books have been so motivated by his experiences and vision that they have wanted to continue the story for themselves by supporting the work of his Trust. We hope that you will feel the same way today because through his books and life, Gerald Durrell set us all a challenge. ‘Animals are the great voteless and voiceless majority,’ he wrote, ‘who can only survive with our help.’

  Please don’t let your interest in conservation end when you turn this page. Write to us now and we’ll tell you how you can be part of our crusade to save animals from extinction. For further information, or to send a donation, write to:

  Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust

  Les Augrès Manor

  La Profonde Rue

  Trinity

  Jersey, Channel Islands

  JE3 5BP

  Or visit the website:

  www.durrell.org

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe new life into previously published, classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

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  By Gerald Durrell

  My Family and Other Animals

  A Zoo in My Luggage

  Birds, Beasts and Relatives

  Garden of the Gods

  The Overloaded Ark

  The Talking Parcel

  The Mockery Bird

  The Donkey Rustlers

  Catch me A Colobus

  Beasts In My Belfry

  The New Noah

  The Drunken Forest

  The Whispering Land

  Rosy is My Relative

  Two in the Bush

  Three Singles to Adventure

  The Ark’s Anniversary

  Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons

  Menagerie Manor

  The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium

  The Bafut Beagles

  Marrying off Mother and Other Stories

  The Aye-Aye And I

  Fillets of Plaice

  Ark on the Move

  Encounters with Animals

  The Stationary Ark

  First published in 1955 by Collins

  This edition published 2012 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New W
harf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  www.curtisbrown.co.uk

  ISBN 978-1-4472-1457-1 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-1456-4 POD

  Copyright © Gerald Durrell, 1955

  The right of Gerald Durrell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.