THREE SINGLES TO ADVENTURE

by Gerald Malcolm Durrell

  The cayman was still lying quietly between the boats; it seemed as though his last struggle had exhausted him. McTurk went into one of the boats alongside him to attract his attention, while I scrambled down the cliff and, with infinite caution, dropped a noose over his jaws and pulled it tight. With his jaws thus out of commission we felt safer, for now we only had his tail to reckon with. We got another noose round his chest and a third one round the thick base of his tail. He rolled about once or twice while we were doing this, but it was a half-hearted effort.

  Feeling that he was now more secure with all these additional ropes round him we retired to our hammocks on the banks and slept fitfully until dawn.

  The plane was due in at midday, but we had a lot to do before it arrived. The collection, with the exception of the anteater, had to be transported out across the savannah in the jeep and left near the landing strip with an Amerindian in charge. Then we started on the job of getting the cayman well roped up and hauled out on to the bank, where he could be picked up by the jeep when the plane arrived.

  The first thing we had to do was to tie his fat and stumpy legs close to his body, and this was easily accomplished; then we had the more difficult job of sliding a long plank underneath him and tying him to it. This took us some time, for he was in shallow water, and most of his body and tail was resting on the mud; in the end we had to float him out to slightly deeper water so that we could get the plank under him. When he was trussed up to the plank we had to haul him out of the water and up the steep bank, and this was a long and laborious process. It took McTurk, Bob, myself, and eight Amerindians an hour to do so. The bank was wet and muddy, and we kept slipping and falling. Each time we fell the cayman's enormous weight would slide him back the few precious inches we had gained. At last, covered with mud and wet with water and sweat, we eased him over the top and slid him to rest on the green grass.

  He was about fourteen feet long, his head as broad and as thick as my body, his shining scaly tail like a tree trunk and packed tight with iron-hard muscles. His back and neck were covered with great nodules and bumps, and his tail boasted a tall, serrated crest along it, each triangular scale the width of my palm. His top parts were ash-grey, patched in places with green, where the river slime still clung to him; his belly was bright yellow. His unblinking eyes were as large as walnuts, jet black, and patterned with an intricate and fierce filigree of gold. He was a magnificent creature.

  We left him lying in the shade while we went to take the anteater down to the landing strip, for we could hear the distant drone of the plane. The anteater, of course, caused as much trouble as he could, hissing and snorting and lashing out at us as we manhandled him into the jeep and held him quiet while we bumped across the savannah. His uncooperativeness had delayed us, and the plane was landing as we arrived at the strip. I ran forward and found, to my relief, that Smith had sent a large pile of boxes; there was no time to lose, for we had to get the animals boxed up and go back for the cayman.

  "You hold the capybara, and I'll get the anteater crated," I said to Bob. The anteater, never having been in a box before, strongly objected to the whole process, and he galloped round and round the crate while I made ineffectual efforts to slow him up and push him inside. After a few minutes of this both he and I needed a rest, so we paused for breath, and I looked round desperately for help. Bob, however, was fully occupied with the capybara. They had been thoroughly alarmed by the plane and had proceeded to run round and round him in ever diminishing circles, while Bob, rapidly enveloped in yards of string, was reeling about like an animated maypole.

  He was obviously too engrossed to be able to help me; but fortunately McTurk came to my rescue, and the anteater was bundled into his crate. Then we unwound Bob, boxed up the capybara and loaded them on the plane with the rest of the collection. When we had finished, McTurk approached me gloomily.

  "You can't take your cayman," he said.

  "Why not?" I asked, horror-stricken at the very idea.

  "Pilot says there's not enough room. They're picking up a load of meat at the next stop."

  I pleaded, cajoled, argued, all in vain. In desperation I tried to persuade the pilot that the vast reptile would hardly be noticeable inside the plane; I even offered to sit on it to make room for the meat, but the pilot was a singularly obstinate man.

  "I'll try and get him on the next plane for you," said McTurk; "make arrangements in Georgetown and let me know."

  So, very reluctantly, I had to leave my gargantuan reptile, and boarded the plane casting dirty looks at the pilot.

  McTurk waved as the plane roared over the golden grass, gathering speed. As we rose in the air we saw the great grassland stretched below us, McTurk's tiny figure walking towards the jeep, the ragged rim of trees along the glistening river where the cayman lay; and then the plane banked sharply and we were flying away. Ahead we could see the distant dim blur where the great forest began, split by the deep rivers that flowed down to the coast; behind us lay the savannah, vast and unmoving, golden, green, and silver in the sunlight.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Crab Dogs and Carpenter

  Thirds we had been back in Georgetown for twenty-four hours; the anteater and the other specimens had been properly caged and had settled down well in their new surroundings. Both Bob and I were beginning to feel a bit restive and confined in the town, after the spaciousness of the Rupununi, and so we decided that the best thing we could do was to get out of Georgetown again as quickly as possible. One morning Smith approached me with a peculiarly smug expression on his face.

  "Didn't you say that you wanted to go up the creek lands, beyond Charity, on your next trip?" he asked.

  I said that I had thought it would be a good idea.

  "Well," said Smith, preening himself, "I've got the very man to act as your guide; he's a first-class hunter and he knows the whole district and everyone there. I'm sure he'll get us some good specimens. He seems to know where everything's found."

  This paragon turned up in the afternoon. He was a short, coconut-shaped East Indian, with an ingratiating grin that displayed a glittering facade of gold teeth, a rolling cumulus of belly and a fat and unctuous laugh that made him wobble like a quagmire. He was impeccably clad in beautifully cut trousers and a mauve silk shirt. He did not look like a hunter to me, but as we intended to go up the creek lands anyway, and as he assured me that he knew many people up there, I thought it would do no harm if he came along with us. I arranged that he should meet Bob, Ivan, and myself the following day, down at the ferry.

  "Don't you worry, Chief," said Mr. Kahn, giving his rich oily laugh and dazzling me with his teeth, "I'll see you get so many animals you won't know where to put them."

  "If they're not good specimens, Mr. Kahn," I replied sweetly, "I shall be able to find at least one answer to that problem."

  Early the next morning we arrived at the ferry with our mountain of luggage, and Mr. Kahn was there to greet us, flashing his teeth like a lighthouse, laughing uproariously at his own jokes, organizing and arranging things left and right and skipping about with extreme nimbleness in spite of his obese figure. Getting on to the ferry was usually an exhausting enough process in itself, but, with Mr. Kahn to assist, the whole episode took on the appearance of a three-ring circus. He sweated and shouted, laughed loudly and dropped things until, by the time we were safely on board, we were all limp with exhaustion. Mr. Kahn's good spirits were, however, unabated. During the trip across the river he regaled us with the story of how his father, while bathing in a stream, had been attacked by a monster cayman and had only escaped by gouging its eyes out with his fingers.

  "Imagine that!" said Mr. Kahn. "With his fingers!" Both Bob and I had heard the same story, with all its infinite variations, many times before, and so we were not impressed. Mr. Kahn obviously thought that we were completely green, and I could not allow that, so I retaliated by telling him how my grandmother had been attacked by a mad dromedary and had strangled it with her ba
re hands. The effect of this fabrication was rather spoilt by the fact that Mr. Kahn did not know what a dromedary was. So, instead of silencing him, it only made him try harder, and by the time we were bouncing along in the rickety old bus on the last lap of our journey to Charity we were sitting in a hypnotized silence while Mr. Kahn told us how his grandfather had got the better of a tapir by vaulting on to its back and blocking up its nostrils so that it suffocated to death. It was quite clear that Mr. Kahn had won the first round.

  Charity was a scattering of houses where the road ended on the banks of the Pomeroon River . It was, so to speak, the last outpost of civilization, for here you gave up the more comfortable forms of transport. From Charity a maze of waterways, creeks, rivers, flooded valleys, and lakes spread like a broken mirror through the forest to the Venezuelan border, and the only way of exploring them was by boat. I had thought that Charity would be a suitable base to use while exploring these creek lands, but after half an hour in the place I decided against it; it was forlorn, ramshackle, and depressing, and the inhabitants seemed a dull crowd who were not willing to live up to the name of their village.

  Accordingly I decided that the best thing we could do was to continue our journey into the creeks without delay. Mr. Kahn, who was supposed to know everyone in the place, was dispatched to find a boat for us; Ivan, who had remembered some last minute purchases, went off in the direction of the market, and Bob and I grubbed happily along the lush margins of the river in search of frogs. Presently Ivan returned, and with him he had a small, saucer eyed negro boy.

  "Sir, this boy says he has a crab-dog," said Ivan.

  "What's a crab-dog?" I inquired.

  "It's a sort of animal like a dog that eats crabs," said Ivan vaguely.

  "That's what I like about Ivan," said Bob, "he's so lucid."

  "Well, let's see the thing. Where is it?"

  This mysterious animal turned out to be at the boy's house, some hundred yards away along the river bank, so we all marched off to look at it. When we got there the boy dived into the hut and reappeared staggering with a box almost as big as himself. I peered through the slats nailed across the top of the box, but all I could see was a faint grey shape.

  I prised off two of the slats and had another look. As I was looking a head appeared in the hole and stared fixedly at me. It was a broad, flat head with neat rounded ears and a dog-like muzzle. The creature's colouring was ash grey, but across the eyes was a wide black band that made it look as though it was wearing a mask. It gazed at me for a moment with an unutterably melancholy expression on its face, snapped suddenly and viciously, and then retreated into the box again.

  "And what was that?" asked Bob, eyeing the box with suspicion.

  "A crab-eating raccoon. How much does he want for it, Ivan?"

  Ivan and the small boy bargained skilfully for a while, and then I handed over the modest sum agreed upon and triumphantly carried off the raccoon, box and all.

  When we got back to the landing-stage Mr. Kahn was waiting for us. He had obtained a boat, he proclaimed proudly, and it would arrive in about ten minutes. When he saw the raccoon he beamed like a gold mine.

  "Ah! Already we have success!" he said, giving a fruity chuckle, "I told you I knew where to get animals, didn't I?"

  Ivan gave him a look in which dignity and distaste were nicely blended.

  The boat, when it arrived, turned out to be something like a long, narrow ship's lifeboat. The whole of the inside was covered by a flat wooden deck, or rather, a sort of raised wooden roof; this was a very comfortable vantage point to recline on, and if the sun got too hot you could retire beneath it and sit in the shade on one of the seats inside.

  I decided that it was altogether an admirable craft. We loaded our baggage into it and took our seats on the flat roof. As we chugged off down the twilit river Bob and I busied ourselves making a rough cage for the crab-eating raccoon, and when it was finished we managed to get him into it without much trouble. In the fading daylight we were able to take our first really good look at him.

  He was about the size of a fox terrier, and his coat was short and sleek. He sat in a curious humped-up manner that made him look as though he was hunchbacked, and this was accentuated by the way he carried his head, drooping low beneath the level of his shoulders, like a charging bull's.

  His tail was long and bushy, neatly ringed with black and white; his legs were slim and ended in large, flat paws, the soles of which were bare and coloured a bright pinky-red.

  His fur, with the exception of his black face markings and black feet, was a light ash grey mixed in places with yellow. He presented, altogether, a quite ludicrous appearance; with his head hung low, and a pair of bewildered brown eyes looking out from the black mask across his face, he looked just like an amateur burglar who had been caught in the act.

  When I pushed a flat dish of water and chopped-up fish into his cage he behaved in a way that Bob found vastly amusing.

  He approached the plate, showing all the enthusiasm of a condemned man facing his last breakfast, and squatted down in front of it; then he plunged his front paws into the water and proceeded to move them about with a patting, stroking motion, watching us all the while with a dismal expression on his face. When he had patted the bits of fish for a considerable time he pulled a piece to the edge of the plate and, sitting up like a rabbit, he lifted it delicately between the slim fingers of his front paws and popped it into his mouth. When he had eaten it he fell to patting the rest of the meat again before lifting and eating another piece.

  Bob was very intrigued by what he called ‘Burglar Bill's paddling', and so later on, when we were moored for the night, I caught some river crabs and put them in with the raccoon to show Bob the reason for the animal's strange performance. When he saw the crabs he surveyed them with a slightly worried expression, and then, choosing a large one, he squatted down in front of it and began to pat and stroke it swiftly and gently, occasionally stopping and shaking his paws. The crab made wild lunges with its pincers, but the raccoon's paws were too swift to be caught; then it retreated, but the raccoon followed it, still patting. After ten minutes of this the crab, though quite undamaged, was exhausted and had given up trying to defend itself with its pincers. This was the moment the raccoon had been waiting for: he leant forward suddenly and bit the unfortunate crab in half. Then he sat back and mournfully watched its death throes; when it had stopped twitching he picked it up daintily between the tips of his toes and popped it into his mouth, scrunching and swallowing with a look of acute melancholy on his face.

  We had moored at the landing-stage outside a house belonging to a regal East Indian, clad in robes and turban, who had invited us to eat with him. We went up to the house and squatted in a circle on the floor, devouring a delicious curry and chupatties by the light of a flickering hurricane lamp. Mr. Kahn was in great form, crouching there like some great toad, his teeth glittering in the lamplight like fireflies, stuffing himself with food and talking and laughing incessantly. He monopolized the conversation, and his stories got wilder and wilder as the meal progressed.

  "I remember once," he said, chuckling through a mouthful of curry, "I was up hunting" in the Mazeruni. Man, what jaguars you get up there! Fierce! Worst of all Guiana , man, and I'm telling you truly! Well, it was evening-time, like this. I'd just finished my food and I wanted to relieve myself, so I took my gun and went a little way through the trees."

  He had finished his curry now, and was waddling round the room showing us in pantomime what had happened. He squatted in the corner with a grunt and beamed at us.

  "All went well," he continued, "and I had just finished. I got up to pull on my pants, holding the gun with one hand."

  He got to his feet with an effort and stooped for imaginary trousers.

  "What d'you think happened, man?" he inquired rhetorically, clutching his abdomen. "A great damn jaguar ran out from the bushes in front of me! Hew! Hew! Hew! Man, was I scared? Sure I was. The jaguar had caug
ht me with my pants down!"

  "I can't say I envy the jaguar," remarked Bob.

  "Yes," Mr. Kahn went on, "that was a fix. I had to hold my pants up with one hand and fire with the other. Man, what a shot! Right in its eye. Bang! It was dead."

  He stepped up to the imaginary dead jaguar and kicked it scornfully.

  "D'you know what?" he went on.

  "That so scared me I sweared I wouldn't go and relieve myself again, except it was day time. But that damn jaguar scare me so much I have to go and relieve myself all night long. The more I go the more scared I get, and the more scared I get the more I have to go."

  Mr. Kahn sat down again and laughed uproariously at the thought of his predicament, wheezing and gasping and wiping the tears from his quivering cheeks.

  The talk drifted from jaguars to cayman and from cayman to anacondas, and Mr. Kahn had a story about each. His anaconda tales were, perhaps, the most colourful; apparently no cumoodi he had ever met had been less than the circumference of a barrel, and he had got the better of them all with some skilful trick or other. During the anaconda stories Ivan started to shift about uneasily, and I attributed this to boredom. I was soon to learn differently. Eventually the party broke up, and we made our way down to the boat, inside which our hammocks had been slung one above the other. We climbed into them with some difficulty, silenced Mr. Kahn with a firm good night and tried to sleep. I was just on the point of drifting off when there came a terrible yell from Ivan's hammock.

  "Wharr! Look out, sir, a cumoodi … getting over the side of the boat … look out, sir…"

  Our minds had been inflamed by Mr. Kahn's tales of monster anacondas, so at Ivan's cry pandemonium broke loose in the boat. Bob fell out of his hammock. Mr. Kahn leapt to his feet, tripped over Bob and narrowly missed falling into the river. I tried to jump out of my hammock, and it promptly looped the loop and deposited me, enveloped in yards of mosquito netting, on top of Bob. Mr. Kahn was screaming for a gun. Bob was begging me to get off his chest, and I was shouting for a torch. Ivan, meanwhile, was making dreadful strangling noises, as though the anaconda had coiled itself round his neck and was slowly throttling him to death.