THREE SINGLES TO ADVENTURE

by Gerald Malcolm Durrell

  The female we captured could only just have had her eggs installed, for their lids were still soft. As the weeks passed the skin on her back became more spongy, swollen, and leprous looking and the bulging pockets more pronounced.

  When the young were old enough to leave their mother's back they chose a moment when I was on board ship, approximately in the middle of the Atlantic . The toads were housed in kerosene tins and placed, with the rest of the collection, down in the hold of the ship. The first indication I had that there was a happy event imminent among the amphibians was when I went to change their water one morning. The big female was lying, heavy and bloated, spreadeagled on the surface of the water in her usual attitude, looking as all pipa toads look in repose as though she had been dead for some weeks and was already partially decomposed. As I looked at her carefully which I always did to make sure she was not really dead I noticed something moving on her back. Close inspection proved this to be a tiny arm, sticking out of her back and waving about in a feeble manner, and I realized that the great moment had at last arrived. I moved the apparently indifferent mother to a special tin of her own and put this in a convenient position so that I could keep an eye on it during my work, for I was greatly excited and determined not to miss a minute of such a unique birth.

  During the morning, whenever I peeped into the tin, there appeared to be much activity going on in the pockets: minute arms and legs stuck out at strange angles, waved vaguely, and were pulled hastily back. Once I found one baby with his head and arms stuck out of his pocket, looking like someone appearing from a manhole. As I tipped the tin to get a better look at him he became shy and struggled frantically back inside his pocket again. The female pipa seemed completely oblivious to the wiggling and kicking and pushing that was going on all over her ample back. She just lay in the water and pretended she was dead.

  It was not until the following night that the babies were ready to leave the mother, and I would have missed this extraordinary exodus if I had not glanced casually into the tin at about midnight. I had just finished the last job of the night, which was to give the armadillos their hot-water bottle. The weather had been getting colder, and these little animals seemed to feel it more than the others.

  Before switching off the arc-lights and retiring to my cabin I looked into the pipa toad's maternity ward, and I was surprised to see a minute replica of the mother floating on the surface of the water at her side. Obviously the moment for the great hatching had arrived. I had for the last two hours been yearning for my comfortable bunk, but the sight of this queer, misshapen little amphibian made me suddenly feel very wide awake. I carried an arc-light across the hold and hung it over the tin; then I squatted down to watch.

  Now I have witnessed, at one time or another, a great variety of different births. I have watched amoebae splitting into two as casually as quicksilver; hens going through the apparently effortless performance of egg-laying; the messy and prolonged labour of a cow, and the quick, dainty birth of a fawn; the nonchalant, careless spawning of fish, and the pathetic and incredibly human birth of a baby monkey. All these have moved and fascinated me. There are many other phenomena in nature, some quite common, which I can never watch without a feeling of awe: the turning of tadpoles into half-frogs, and then complete frogs; the fantastic way a spider will step out of its own skin and walk away, leaving a transparent, microscopically exact replica of itself, fragile as wood ash, lying there to be destroyed by the wind; the way a blunt and ugly pupa will split and tear, releasing from inside a wonderfully coloured butterfly or moth, a transformation more extraordinary than anything to be found in a fairy tale. But I have rarely been so absorbed or so astounded as I was that night by the arrival of the baby pipa toads in mid-Atlantic.

  At first there was little activity apart from the usual arm and leg waving. I thought that the fierce glare of the arc-light might be disturbing them, so I shaded it slightly, and very soon things began to happen. In one of the pockets I could see the tiny occupant twitching and struggling frantically, turning round and round, so that first his legs and then his | head would appear in the opening. Then he remained quiet for some time. Having rested he proceeded to thrust his head and shoulders through the opening. Then he paused again to rest, for it seemed to cost him a considerable effort to prise himself loose from the encircling rim of his mother's thick, elastic skin. Presently he started to wiggle like a fish, throwing its head from side to side, and slowly his body started to ease itself out of the pocket, like a reluctant cork out of a bottle. Soon he was lying exhausted across his mother's back, with his hind feet still hidden inside the pock-mark that had seen his nursery for so long. Then he dragged himself across his mother's cratered and eroded skin, slid into the water and loafed immobile, another scrap of life entering the universe. He and his brother who floated beside him would have fitted comfortably on to the surface of a sixpence and left plenty of room to spare, yet they were perfect little pipa toads, and from the moment they entered the water they could swim and dive with great speed and strength.

  I had watched four pipa toads enter the world, when I was joined by two members of the ship's crew. Coming off duty hey had seen the light in the hold and had come down to find out if there was anything wrong. They were interested to find out why I was crouching over a kerosene tin at two o'clock in the morning. Briefly I explained what pipa toads were, how hey mated and laid their eggs, and how I was now watching he last act in the drama being unfolded in the depths of the kerosene tin. The men stared into the tin just as another toad started his struggle to get out, and they stayed to watch. Presently three other members of the crew arrived to see what was keeping their companions, and were immediately shushed to silence. In whispers the mystery of the toads was explained, and three new members joined the circle of watchers.

  My attention was now divided between the toads and the sailors, for I found them both equally interesting. In the tin the small, flat flakes of amphibian life struggled through the portholes in their mother's skin, oblivious of everything except their own microscopic fight for life; found this tin squatted the group of ordinary seamen, reasonably hard-living and, one would have thought, unemotional men whose every word was prefaced by a procreative expletive and whose only interests in life (if you judged by their conversation) were drink, gambling, and women. Yet those hardened and unsentimental examples of the human race crouched round that kerosene tin at two o'clock in the morning, cold and uncomfortable, watching with incredulous wonder the beginnings of life for the baby toads, talking occasionally in hushed whispers as though they were in church. Half an hour previously they had not known that such things as pipa toads existed, yet now they were as interested and as anxious for the welfare of the little amphibians as they would have been over their own offspring. With worried expressions they watched the babies twirling in their pockets before struggling to freedom. Then they became tense and anxious as the young wiggled and twisted their way out, pausing to recuperate now and then. When one, weaker than the rest, took a tremendously long time to work free, the men became quite restive, and one of them asked me plaintively if we could not help it with a matchstick. I pointed out that the baby toad's arms and legs were as thin as cotton, and his body as fragile as a soap bubble, so any attempting to help him might maim him terribly. When, eventually, the laggard hauled himself free there came a general sigh of relief, and the man who had suggested helping the toad turned to me.

  "Game little sod, isn't he, sir?" he said proudly. The time seemed to fly past, and before we realized it dawn was coming up over the grey sea, while we still sat in a circle round the toads. We arose, stiff and aching, and made our way down to the galley for an early-morning cup of tea. The news of the wonderful toads soon spread through the ship, and for the next two days I had an endless stream of visitors coming down into the hold to see them. At one point the crowd round the tin got so dense that I feared they might accidentally kick it over, so I enlisted the aid of the five men who had been wit
h me on the night the babies hatched. They took it in turn, when off duty, to come down into the hold and guard the toads from harm. As I went about my endless task of feeding and cleaning I could hear these protectors keeping the crowd in order.

  "Shut up, can't you? What d'you want to stamp about like that for? D'you want to scare 'em to death?"

  "Yes, all out of the old one's back … there, see them 'oles? In there they was, all curled up neat.

  "Ere! No pushing, now. You want me to upset the ruddy can?"

  I really think those men were sorry to lose the toads when I disembarked at Liverpool .

  All this came about, as I say, because of Bob's determined efforts at dredging in one of the smallest and most uninteresting streams in the whole of the creek lands. When we had assured ourselves that no more toads lurked in the leaf choked channel we moved to another equally unattractive stream and worked up its length. But the Gods of collecting had smiled on us once that night and they were not going to overdo things, so we caught no more pipa toads. At length, muddy and tired, carrying our precious captures most carefully, we made our way back to the main creek. Here we found that we were about an hour overdue, and a worried Ivan was searching the bank for us, thinking that we must have been eaten by jaguars. We proudly exhibited our treasures to him, climbed into the canoe and set off for the village.

  Collecting is a curious occupation. Most of the time you have so many failures and meet with so many disappointments that you wonder why you bother to go collecting at all. But then suddenly your luck changes you go out, as we had done that night, and capture a specimen that you have been dreaming and talking about for months. Immediately you are suffused in a rosy glow, the world is a wonderful place once again, and all your failures and disappointments are forgotten. You decide, quite suddenly, that there is no job that gives you the same pleasure and satisfaction as collecting, and you think of all the human beings doing other jobs, and a faint, pitying sneer comes over your face. In a state of intoxicated happiness you feel that you would not only forgive your friends the wrongs they have done you, but even your relatives.

  So we paddled back along the silent creeks, the black waters reflecting the star-shimmering sky with such faithfulness that we felt the canoe was floating through space among the planets. Cayman grunted among the reeds, strange fish rose and gulped at the myriads of pale moths that drifted across the water. In the bottom of the canoe, spreadeagled in a tin, lay the amphibians that had made our evening so perfect. Every few minutes we would glance down at them and smirk with satisfaction. The capturing of an incredibly ugly toad: of such simple pleasures is a collector's life made up.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Pimpla Hog and Tank ‘e God

  It was not long before our small hut was overflowing with animals. Tied to posts and stakes outside were capuchin and squirrel monkeys, marmosets, and pacas. Inside in a variety of makeshift cages were agoutis, pattering urgently back and forth on deer-like feet, armadillos, grunting like pigs, iguanas, cayman, anacondas, a pair of mar gays (small and beautifully spotted forest cats), a box marked 'danger' which contained three fer-de-lance, probably the most poisonous snake in South America. Hung from the walls of the hut were rows of thin cloth bags containing frogs, toads, and the smaller lizards and snakes. There were hummingbirds, glinting and purring tremulously round their feeding pots, macaws clad in riotous carnival-coloured feathers, talking to themselves in deep voices, smaller parrots chuckling and squeaking, sun-bitterns, in their autumn-tinted feathers, spreading their wings to display the startling, eye-like markings. All these creatures took a lot of looking after; in fact, we had almost reached that saturation point where the quantity of specimens you have assembled at camp prevents you from going out in search of more. When this point is reached you are forced to pack up your catch and take them back to base camp. Neither Bob nor I was anxious that our stay in the creek lands should end, for we realized that this was the last trip we should have time for before we left Guiana .

  But, as I say, the arrival of each new specimen brought the final day of our stay nearer. Our kindly schoolmaster, who had worked untiringly to increase our collection, told us that there was a small Amerindian village some distance away which he was sure would yield some specimens if we went there. So Bob and I decided to visit it as a last treat; when we had been there we would really pack up and return to Georgetown .

  One of the most charming traits in the Amerindian character is their delight in keeping pets, and their villages usually contained a weird assortment of monkeys, parrots, toucans, and other wild creatures that they had adopted. Most primitive people live a hard and precarious life in jungle or grassland, and you generally find that their only interest in animals is a purely culinary one. You cannot blame them, because for these people the task of keeping alive is a hard and constant struggle. They do not simply lie about in a tropical paradise and pluck what they need from the nearest bush. The wellstocked jungle of Tarzan has not, I am afraid, spread beyond the confines of Hollywood .

  It is therefore all the more remarkable to find the Amerindians getting such pleasure out of keeping pets, taming them with such ease and gentleness, and sometimes (though we offered ample reward) refusing to part with them.

  The schoolmaster found for us two stalwart Amerindians who were to paddle us to this village. When they appeared outside our hut early one morning we asked them how far the village was and how long it would take us to get there and back. They said, rather vaguely, that it was not very far and that we should not be long on the journey. At about six o'clock that evening, when we were still paddling home, I remembered their replies and decided that there was a vast discrepancy between our idea of a short time and an Amerindian's. But we did not know this in the morning, so we set off in high spirits. We took no food with us because, as we explained to Ivan, we would be back by lunchtime.

  We travelled in a long, deep-bellied canoe, Bob and I sitting in the middle, with an Amerindian at each end. Going through the creeks in a canoe is, perhaps, the best way to enjoy them. There is no noise, except the clop and gurgle of the paddles, rhythmic as a heart-beat. Occasionally one of the paddlers would lift his voice in song, a brief, lilting and rather mournful little tune that ended as suddenly as it began. It would echo and die across the sunlit water, and then there would be silence again, broken only by an occasional muttered curse as Bob or I pinched our fingers between the paddles and the sides of the canoe. We were helping with the paddling, having offered to do so in a weak moment; after an hour or so, when the first blisters started to come up, I began to realize there was more to paddling a dugout than I had previously suspected.

  We slid smoothly down mile after mile of creek, the orchid-decorated trees curving over us to form a delicate shimmering silhouette against the intense blue sky. They cast their tattered shadows on the water, turning the creek into a pathway of polished tortoiseshell. Occasionally the creek led across a piece of flooded savannah, where the top of the grass rose golden above the water. In one of these places we passed a spot where the grass had been trampled and squashed into a rough circle; from this depression led a trail weaving across he savannah where something had dragged itself, leaving a ieat parting in the grass. One of the paddlers explained that t was the resting-place of an anaconda and, if the trail was inything to go by, it must have been a remarkably large me.

  After three hours paddling there was still no sign of a ullage; in fact we had seen no sign of native life at all.

  There was, however, plenty of animal life to be seen. We passed under a great tree with a bushel of white and gold orchids strewn about its trunk and branches, and in it a troop of five toucans played, leaping and scuttling among the twigs, peering at us with their great beaks cocked up, uttering high itched, creaking yaps, like a group of asthmatic pekinese. In a tangle of reeds and branches we saw a tiger bittern, his range and fawn plumage streaked with chocolate brown, squatting immobile on a small mud-bank. We drifted past him, and he was
so close I could have touched him with my laddie, but he never moved a fraction of an inch the whole time we were in sight, relying on his lovely camouflage to ave him.

  At one point the creek widened into something almost the size of a lake, a great oval area in which no water was visible under the carpet of water-lilies, a forest of pink and white blooms against shining green leaves. The bows of the canoe lushed through this mass of flowers with a soft, crisp rustling, and we could feel the bottom of the dugout being pulled and angled among the long, rubbery lily-stalks.

  Jacanas fled before us across the leaves, fluttering their vivid yellow wings; a pair of muscovy ducks rose out of the reeds with a tremendous amount of splashing and flew heavily away over the forest. Tiny fish leapt ahead of the canoe, and a small, thin snake uncoiled himself from his bed on a sun-warmed lily-leaf and lid into the water. The air vibrated with the sound of the multitude of dragonflies gold, blue, green, scarlet, and bronze, hat zoomed and hovered about us or settled briefly on the lily-leaves, trembling their glass-like wings nervously.

  The canoe plunged once more into the creek, and after half a mile or so we heard to our joy, voices and laughter echoing through the trees. We slid along in the shadow of the bank and then turned into a tiny bay where a group of Amerindian women were washing in the warm creek water, splashing, laughing, and chattering as cheerfully as a group of birds.