THREE SINGLES TO ADVENTURE

by Gerald Malcolm Durrell

  "Draftball," said Francis, pointing.

  I went inside and had more coffee while the bull was being saddled, and then, before mounting my horse again, I got the old man to give me a bottle of water for Bob. We said good-bye, mounted our steeds and rode through the gate.

  "Where's the draft-bull?" I asked Francis.

  He pointed, and I saw the bull cantering heavily over the savannah, and perched on its back was Francis's wife, her long dark hair flowing in the wind, looking from that distance not unlike a brunette Lady Godiva.

  By taking a short-cut across the savannah we arrived back at the spot where we had left Bob well in advance of the bull.

  We found things in chaos: the anteater had freed both his front legs by some gigantic effort and had then ripped open the sack and crawled half out of it. When we arrived he was dashing round in a circle, wearing the sack on his hindquarters like an ill-fitting pair of pants, with Bob in hot pursuit. After recapturing the beast and pushing it into a new sack, I soothed Bob by producing the bottle of water, and after this lukewarm refreshment he recovered enough to tell me what had happened since we left him. As soon as we were out of sight his horse (which he had thought securely tied to a small bush) had wandered off and refused to be caught for some time. Bob pursued it over the savannah, mouthing endearments, and eventually succeeded in catching it; when he got back he found that the anteater had broken out of the sack and was trying to undo the ropes. Hot and angry. Bob forced him back into the sack, only to find that the horse had wandered off again. This apparently went on for a long time; at one point the monotony was relieved slightly by the arrival of a herd of long-horned cattle that stood around watching Bob's efforts in the supercilious and slightly belligerent way that cattle have. Bob said that he would not have minded their presence so much if bulls had not seemed so predominant in the herd. Eventually they drifted off, and Bob was making yet another sortie after the anteater when we appeared.

  "The world," he said, "was just starting to turn round on me when you all arrived."

  Just at that moment Francis's wife appeared, galloping across the grass on the bull, and Bob watched her approach with bulging eyes.

  "What is that?" he asked in tones of awe. "Can you see it too?"

  "That, my dear fellow, is the draftball procured at considerable expense to rescue us."

  Bob lay back in the grass and closed his eyes.

  "I've seen quite enough of bulls today to last me a lifetime," he said.

  "I refuse to help you load the anteater on to that creature. I shall lie here until you have been gored to death, and then I'll ride quietly home."

  So Francis, his wife, and I loaded the snorting anteater on to the bull's broad and stoical back. Then we levered our aching bodies on to the horses again and set off on the long trail back to Karanambo. The sun hung for a brief moment over the distant rim of mountains, flooding the savannah with a glorious green twilight, and then it was dark. In the gloom the burrowing owls called softly to one another, and as we passed the lake a pair of white egrets skimmed its surface like shooting stars. We were dead tired and aching in every limb. Our horses stumbled frequently, nearly sending us over their heads. The stars came out, and still we plodded on over the endless grass, not knowing in which direction we were travelling and not caring very much. A pale chip of moon rose, silvering the grass and making the draft ball look huge and misshapen in its light, like some great heavy-breathing prehistoric monster moving across the gloom of a newly formed world. I dozed uncomfortably, jogging back and forth in my saddle. Occasionally Bob's horse would stumble, and I would hear him curse fluently as the jerk stabbed the pommel of the saddle into his long-suffering stomach.

  Presently I noticed a pale light flickering through some trees ahead of us, vanishing and reappearing like a will-o'-the wisp. It seemed very small and wan in comparison to the gigantic stars that hung, it appeared, only a few feet above our heads.

  "Bob," I called, "I think those are the lights of the jeep."

  "Praise the Lord!" said Bob fervently. "If you only knew how I long to get off this saddle!"

  The lights of the jeep got brighter, and then we could hear the throb of its engine. It rounded the trees, bathing us in the cold beam of its headlights, and the horses bobbed and bucked, but in a very tired and dispirited manner. We dismounted and hobbled towards the car.

  "What luck?" asked McTurk from the gloom.

  "We got a big male," I replied, with a certain amount of vanity.

  "And we've had a lovely day," said Bob.

  McTurk chuckled. We sat down and had a smoke, and presently the prehistoric monster staggered into the glare of the headlights, and we unloaded the anteater from his back. The precious creature was then placed in the jeep on a bed of sacks, and we scrambled in beside him, having turned our horses loose on the savannah to find their way back to the outstation. The anteater awoke suddenly as the jeep started, and began to thrash about. I held his long nose in a firm grip, for I knew if he banged it on the metal sides it would kill him as surely as a bullet would.

  "Where are you going to keep him?" asked McTurk.

  The thought had not occurred to me before. I realized suddenly that we had no cages and no wood to make them.

  Moreover we could not obtain any. But it would have taken more than this sobering thought to destroy my delight in having captured the anteater.

  "We'll have to tether him somehow," I said airily.

  McTurk grunted.

  When we got back to the house we unloaded the beast and unwound the yards of rope and sacking that enveloped him.

  Then, with McTurk's aid, we fashioned a rope harness and placed it round his shoulders. To this was attached a long piece of rope which we tethered to a shady tree in the compound. Beyond giving him a drink of water I did nothing for him that night, for I wanted to get him on to a substitute food straight away, and I felt he would be more likely to take to it if he was really hungry.

  Getting an animal on to a substitute food is one of the most difficult and worrying jobs a collector has to face. It happens when you obtain a creature like the anteater that has a very restricted diet in the wild state: it might be a certain kind of leaf or fruit, a particular kind of fish or something equally tricky. Only very rarely can this diet be supplied when the animal reaches England , and so the collector's job is to teach his specimen to eat something else, something that can be supplied by the zoo to which the animal is going. So you have to concoct a palatable substitute food which the creature will eat, enjoy and thrive on. With some beasts it is a very difficult job, this changing over of diets, for you stand the risk of the substitute disagreeing with the creature and making it ill.

  If this happens you may lose it. Some beasts are very stubborn and go on refusing the substitute until in despair you are forced to let them go. Others, again, fall on the substitute the first time it is offered and feed off it greedily. Sometimes you get this contradictory attitude in two members of the same species.

  The substitute for the anteater consisted of three pints of milk with two raw eggs and a pound or so of raw, finely minced beef mixed with it, the whole thing being topped off with three drops of cod liver oil. I prepared this mixture early the next morning, and when it was ready I broke open the nearest termites' nest and scattered a thick layer of these creatures on the surface of the milk. Then I carried the bowl out to the anteater.

  He was lying curled up on his side under the tree, completely covered by his tail, which was spread over him like an enormous ostrich feather. It hid his body and nose from view, and from a distance it made him look more like a pile of grey grass than an anteater. When you see these animals in the zoo you never realize how useful their great tails are: on the open savannah, curled up between two tussocks of grass, his tail spread over him like an umbrella, he is sheltered from all but the very worst weather. When he heard me approaching he snorted in alarm, whipped back his tail and rose on to his hind legs, ready to do battle. I put t
he bowl down in front of him, offered up a brief prayer that he would not be difficult, and retreated to watch. He shambled over to it and sniffed loudly round the rim. Then he plunged the tip of his nose into the milk, and his long, grey, snakelike tongue started whipping in and out of the mixture. He did not pause once until he had emptied the bowl, and I stood and watched him with incredulous delight.

  Anteaters belong to a group of animals that do not possess teeth; instead they are furnished with a long tongue and sticky saliva with which to pick up their food, a tongue that acts on the principle of a flypaper. So each time the anteater whipped his tongue back into his mouth it carried with it a certain amount of egg, milk, and chopped meat.

  Even by this laborious method it did not take him long to clean up the mixture, and when he had finished he sniffed around the bowl for some time, to make sure he had not overlooked any. Then he went and lay down, curled himself up, spread his tail over himself like a tent and sank into a contented sleep. From that moment on he was little or no trouble to look after.

  Some weeks later, when we were back in Georgetown , we got a mate for Amos, as we called him. A pair of slim, well dressed East Indians arrived one morning in a sleek new car and asked us if we wanted a barim (the local name for the giant anteater). When we replied that we certainly did, they calmly opened the boot of the car, and inside, tied up with masses of rope, was a full-grown female anteater. As a conjuring trick it was considerably more impressive than producing a rabbit out of a hat. However, the creature was very exhausted and had several nasty cuts on her body and legs; we were a bit doubtful whether she would survive. But after some first aid to her wounds, and a long drink she revived enough to attack us all in a very determined manner, and so we thought she was well enough to be introduced to Amos.

  Amos was living in a spacious, fenced-in pen under the trees. When we opened the door of his pen and introduced the pointed end of his bride-to-be he greeted her with such an ungentlemanly display of hissings, snuff lings and waving of claws that we hastily removed her to safety. Then we divided Amos's pen with a row of stakes and put his wife next door to him. They could see and smell each other through this division, and we hoped that constant sniffing would bring about a more tender feeling on the part of Amos.

  The first day the female worried us by refusing the substitute food completely. She would not even sample it.

  The next day I had an idea, and I pushed Amos's feeding bowl right up against the dividing fence at breakfast time. As soon as the female saw (and heard) him eating his meal she went across to investigate. Obviously Amos was enjoying whatever it was, so she poked her long tongue through the bars and into his bowl. Within ten minutes they had finished the food between them. So, every day, we were treated to the touching sight of Amos and his wife, separated by bars, feeding lovingly out of the same bowl. Eventually she learnt to eat out of her own dish, but she always preferred to feed with Amos if she could.

  When I landed Amos and his wife at Liverpool , and saw them driven off to the zoo they were destined for, I felt considerable pride at having landed them safely, for anteaters are not the easiest of creatures to keep in captivity.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Capybara and Cayman

  Our fortnight in the Rupununi passed so quickly that we were surprised one night when we discovered, swinging in our hammocks and calculating on our fingers, that we had only four days left.

  Owing to the efforts of McTurk and the local Amerindians our collection had increased considerably. A few days after catching the anteater, Francis arrived on horseback, carrying a sack that squeaked and twitched as though it was full of guinea-pigs, but I soon found this noise came from three young and very alarmed capybara. I have mentioned these creatures before, in describing the ferocity of piranhas, but their chief claim to fame is that they are the largest of living rodents. This means nothing unless you compare them with one of their smaller relations, and then you get some idea of their size. A full-grown capybara measures about four feet in length, stands two feet high, and can weigh nearly a hundredweight. Compare this bulk with, say, the English harvest mouse, which measures four and a half inches including the tail and weighs about one-sixth of an ounce.

  This enormous rodent is a fat, elongated beast clad in harsh, shaggy fur of a brindled brown colour. Since its front legs are longer than its back ones, and it has an ample rump with no tall, the capybara always looks as though it is on the point of sitting down. It has large feet, with broad, webbed toes, and on the front ones the nails are short and blunt, looking curiously like miniature hooves.

  Its face is very aristocratic: a broad, flat head and the blunt, almost square, muzzle giving it a benign and superior expression like a meditative lion. On land the capybara moves with a peculiar shuffling gait or a ponderous, rolling gallop; but once in the water it swims and dives with astonishing ease and skill. A slow, amiable vegetarian, it lacks the personality displayed by some of its relatives but makes up for it by a placid and friendly disposition.

  The three youngsters that Francis had brought were, however, anything but friendly; they kicked and squeaked and regarded us with bulging eyes, as though we were a troop of jaguars.

  They were only about two feet long and a foot high, but they were compact and muscular, and when they bucked and kicked they were quite a handful. I noticed that they never attempted to bite, although they were armed with large bright orange incisors, as sharp and about as large as a penknife blade. They could have inflicted very nasty wounds with these teeth if they had wanted to. After a considerable struggle we got them out of the sack, and then we stood around foolishly, our arms full of squeaking capybara, wondering what to do with them, for we had forgotten that we had no cage in which to put them. We solved this problem, after much debate, by making them tiny harnesses out of string, the same type of thing we had made for the anteater. Then we tied them up on long cords to three orange trees and stood back to admire our handiwork. The capybara, finding themselves free but still close to us, rushed towards one another for protection and got their cords entangled round themselves and the trees. A quarter of an hour later we had disentangled them from one another, from the trees and from our own legs and retted them to trees further apart. This time they ran round and round the trees, squeaking hideously, until the trunks were covered with string and the beasts nearly strangling. At last we solved the problem by tying the ends of their strings to branches high above them; this gave them a considerable area to run about in but prevented them from getting tied up and strangling.

  "I bet that won't be the last bit of trouble we have with them," I said gloomily as we finished.

  "Why?" asked Bob, "I thought you didn't seem very pleased to see them. Don't you like them?"

  "I had a rather trying introduction to capybara in Georgetown ," I explained, "and it has put me off the family."

  It had happened when Smith and I were staying in a boarding house in the back streets of Georgetown while we were looking round for a place in which to establish a base camp.

  Our landlady had very kindly told us that we might use her front garden in which to keep any specimens we got in the meanwhile, and we took her at her word. I don't think the poor woman quite realized what her invitation would entail, but as her tiny garden began to get overcrowded with monkeys and other creatures, and we still had not found a base camp, she began to look a little worried. Even we were beginning to feel that the garden was getting a bit congested, for the other guests had to pick their way into the house with great care if they did not want to have their legs seized by an inquisitive monkey. With the arrival of the capybara things came to a head.

  A man led the huge rodent in on a string late one evening.

  It was half grown, very tame, and it sat there with an aloof and regal expression on its face while we bargained with its owner. The bargaining was protracted, for the owner had noticed the acquisitive gleam in our eyes when we first beheld the beast, but at last the capybara was ours.
He was housed in a large, coffin-shaped crate with a wire mesh front that seemed strong enough to withstand any onslaughts he might make upon it. We showered him with choice fruits and grasses, which he accepted with royal condescension, and congratulated ourselves on having acquired such a lovely animal. We gazed at him spellbound while he ate, tenderly pressed a few more mangoes through the bars and went upstairs to sleep. We lay in the dark for a while, talking about our wonderful new specimen, and then eventually dozed off. At about midnight it began.

  I was awakened by a most curious noise coming from the garden beneath our window; it sounded like someone playing on a Jew's harp accompanied rather erratically by someone else beating on a tin can. I was lying there listening to it, and wondering what it could be, when I suddenly remembered the capybara. With a cry of 'the capybara's escaping!' I leapt out of bed and fled downstairs to the garden, barefoot and in my pyjamas, closely followed by my drowsy companion. When we reached the garden all was quiet; the capybara was sitting on its haunches, looking down its nose in a superior manner. We had a long argument as to whether or not it was the capybara that had been making the noise; I said it was and Smith said it was not. He insisted that the creature looked too calm and innocent, and I maintained that that was exactly why I thought it was the culprit. The capybara just sat in its moonlit cage and stared through us. There was no repetition of the sound, so we went back to bed, arguing in fierce whispers. No sooner had we settled down than the noise started again, and, if possible, it sounded louder than ever. I got out of bed and peered out of the window. The capybara cage was vibrating gently in the moonlight.

  "It is that blasted animal," I said triumphantly.

  "What's he doing?" inquired Smith.

  "God knows, but we'd better go and stop him or he'll have the whole place awake."