Nothing Gerald ever wrote gives quite such a raw, moment-by-moment impression of the sheer excitement of animal collecting and the demands made on the stamina and ingenuity of the collector as his diary account of his pursuit of the rare Anomalurus (flying squirrel) and Idiurus (pigmy flying squirrel) in the rainforest around Eshobi between 4 and 8 March. These animals had never been seen in any zoo anywhere in the world, and were of great exhibition value and scientific interest. To get them safely back to Britain would be a tremendous coup.
The walk to Eshobi was as abominable as it had been the previous year, but Gerald was given a warm welcome when he arrived, the whole village turning out to greet their long-lost white friend and much-missed moneybags. That evening he met up with the hunters and gave them all a pep talk about the importance of catching Idiurus and Anomalurus the next day. ‘They said they all fit try, and that by God Power we should get them, on which happy note the party broke up and we all went to bed.’
At first light the next day Gerald set off with his hunters to find the tree where he had seen an Anomalurus the previous year. To his amazement the animal was still there, though there was no easy way of catching it.
The diary continued:
As we were blundering about the base of the tree, the thing inside took fright at the sound of our voices and shot out of the top. It left the tree as if it had been catapulted and soared through the air, giving me my first sight of a Flying Squirrel in action. It was a breathtakingly beautiful sight. It had about forty feet to go before it reached the nearest tree, and it hurtled through the air with the straight swoop of a glider, the membranes on the sides of its body curved out like umbrellas with the rush of air. Just before it reached the next tree it straightened up, and then as it was just about to touch the bark it turned completely upright, standing, as it were, in mid-air. Then it landed and proceeded to scuttle upwards, hunching its body like a huge caterpillar. I then did a thing which I have regretted ever since: I lifted the gun and fired. It dropped like a stone, and I rushed forwards, tripping through the undergrowth shouting to the hunters to keep the dogs off, and praying that it would only be slightly wounded. Of course the poor thing was dead, and as I picked it up I could have cried, it was such a very beautiful creature …
The next day Gerald and the hunters set out at dawn and smoked ten trees. Nothing much came out of the first nine, apart from a few bats, millipedes and scorpions.
We came to the last tree, but by then I was so tired and my lungs so full of smoke that I just sat down and couldn’t have cared less what was produced. So I thought. The net was hung, the fire lit, and green leaves (for smoke) put on it. Then we just sat and waited, while I dug thorns out of my hands and wished that I was in bed and asleep. At last I gave the order that the net was to be taken down, as it was obvious that nothing was inside. James the washboy started to take the net down, and then I saw him pick something up from inside the tree. He came forward holding it by its tail. ‘Master want this kind of beef ?’ he inquired with an engaging smile. I took one look at it and shot to my feet with a yelp, for there, dangling by its curious feathery tail, its sides heaving and its eyes closed, was a small brownish mouse-like creature: a real live Idiurus macrotis. ‘Quick, quick,’ I snarled to the small boy, ‘bring box for this beef … no, not that one you bloody fool, a good one … that’s it … now put small leaf for inside … small leaf, not half a tree … there!’ And Idiurus was placed reverently inside. It lay there quite unconscious from the smoke, its tiny sides heaving and its little pink paws twitching, and I gathered a bunch of leaves and fanned him thoroughly. Slowly he started to come round, and then I put the lid on the box and we made tracks for home. When we got back it was quite dark and by bush light I had to sit down and make a cage for the Idiurus, then, keeping awake only with a very liberal application of White Horse, I skinned the bats and cleaned the gun, then fell into bed and slept like a log. The Idiurus is the most curious little beast, looking not unlike an English dormouse, but more greyish in colour. The speed it can travel up wood is really extraordinary. It runs like a dog, unlike the Anomalurus, which has to hunch itself like a caterpillar.
The next day was a real red-letter day. Deep in the forest the hunting party found a hollow tree 150 feet high, and when Gerald crawled inside its base and looked up he was stunned to discover that it was swarming with Idiurus. Fortunately there was a small tree growing alongside, which enabled one of the hunters to climb it and hoist a net over the main tree, and when a fire was lit at its base the smoke drove the Idiurus out into it. Altogether eight Idiurus were caught in this way, along with three extraordinary-looking bats which Gerald was convinced were a new species. ‘I killed them with great care to avoid damage,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and packed them in cotton wool.’
Though he was by now exhausted, he decided take the Idiurus into Mamfe that night, since at least there was a proper cage for them there. ‘As the little chaps jumped out of the tin and started to scurry up the walls of the cage,’ he noted in his diary, ‘Smith was screeching with excitement and fluttering round the tent like an elderly will-o’-the-wisp. I was dead beat but very happy, hearing the Idiurus squeaking and rustling in their cage.’
It turned out that James the washboy had found a way of climbing the unclimbable Idiurus tree of the previous day, and next afternoon he arrived with a carrier who brought a huge cage covered with banana leaves into the Mamfe camp. ‘What a sight met our popping eyes: it was crammed like the Black Hole with Idiurus of all ages and sexes to the tune of thirty-five! Smith and I nearly went mad. If we get the whole colony back alive we will shake the zoological world to its foundations!’
To his mother he wrote excitedly later that day:
Let me tell you the really great news. In the corner of the marquee stands a six foot tall cage, and it now houses about thirty of the rarest animals in West Africa – Pigmy Flying Squirrels. These are known only by a few skins in museums, and not more than a dozen people have ever seen them alive in the jungle, let alone caged in Europe. They will be, if we can get them back alive, the zoological event of the year, and coming on my Awantibo will just raise me to heights unknown. However, I mustn’t speak too soon, as the little buggers have only been with us twenty-four hours and are as nervous as old ladies on a dark common, and very tricky about their food.
It had always been part of Gerald’s plan on this expedition to travel north to the mountains, where the forest gave way to the great grasslands – a completely different world, with a cooler climate, strange vegetation and fauna quite unlike that of the steamy forests of the lowlands. A British District Officer had suggested that the most fruitful area of the grasslands might be Bafut, a region the size of Wales. Bafut’s tribal peoples were governed with benign despotism by an intelligent, wealthy and eccentric paramount chief, or king, known as the Fon. His palace, Gerald learned, was set amid rolling grassland and forested valleys with a wealth of interesting and valuable creatures: chimpanzees, bush babies, mongooses, lions, leopards, cobras, green mambas. ‘What the king says goes,’ the DO advised Gerald. ‘He’s a most delightful old rogue, and the quickest and surest way to his heart is to prove that you can carry your liquor.’ That afternoon Gerald sent a messenger to the Fon’s capital carrying a bottle of gin and a note requesting permission to visit his kingdom to collect rare animals. Four days later the messenger returned, bearing a letter from the Fon himself:
Fon’s Office Bafut, Bemenda Division
5th March 1949
My good friend,
Yours of 3rd March, 1949, came in hand with all contents well marked out.
Yes, I accept your arrival to Bafut in course of two month stay about your animals and too, I shall be overjoyed to let you be in possession of a house in my compound if you will do well in arrangement of rentages.
Yours cordially
Fon of Bafut
Gerald made arrangements to leave for Bafut at once.
11 March: We shot out to Bafut and arrived there a
bout half-past three. The guest house is built on the side of the road on a steep bank, and a flight of about fifty steps leads up to the balcony and then into the house. Standing at the top of this flight you look across the road at the fort-like compound of the chief or Fon, with its small brick guard-houses, and then beyond that the chief’s own small villa, surrounded by the grass huts of his numerous wives. As I stood there at the top of the stairs I could see the Fon with a crowd of council members approaching across this vast square. I went down and met him at the foot of the stairs, where we shook hands and beamed at one another like long-lost brothers.
The Fon was a tall, slim man with a lively, and humorous face. Even though he was modestly garbed in a plain white robe and simple skullcap, there was no mistaking who he was, for his bearing was regal and his presence palpable. In the Fon Gerald was to meet his match, and in him he recognised a kindred spirit, as he was soon to discover. His diary continued:
After an exchange of flattering remarks about each other’s character and great solicitude for each other’s health, the Fon retired, saying he would come and see me after I had unpacked. So I went upstairs to unpack the whiskey and gin. When it was getting dark a messenger came over to say that the Fon would like to come and talk with me if I had ‘calmed’ myself after my journey. So then I got the glasses out alongside the bottle of Irish. The Fon arrived together with an interpreter, which at first I thought was unnecessary. We drank each other’s health (he mine in neat Irish, I his discreetly watered) and started to talk about beef. I brought out books and showed him pictures, made noises like the animals I wanted, drew them on bits of paper, and all the time his glass was being replenished with a rather frightening regularity. The bottle was full when we started, and in two hours, when he lurched to his feet to depart, there was about three fingers in the bottom. Towards the end his speech became almost incomprehensible, and I understood the presence of the interpreter. As we reached the top of the steps (down which the Fon nearly took a toss) he turned to the interpreter and told him to drink. He had a full glass of whiskey in his hand. The man went down on one knee, made a funnel of his hands into which the Fon poured half the whiskey, while the man sucked it up greedily. Then it was obviously my turn, and with a certain repulsion at treating a human being like a pet dog, I poured my glass out also. It was rather disgusting. However, after the Fon had wended his unsteady way home I could hear the drums beating, telling Bafut to bring beef.
Life henceforth was to be so action-packed, what with the endless drinking sessions with his friend the Fon and the ceaseless stream of beef coming in from the countryside, that there were times when even Gerald could barely cope. ‘Today I have become nearly mental,’ he wrote in his diary on 15 March. ‘Beef rolling in and nothing to house it in … I am dead beat.’ The following day the pace had quickened even more, and he scribbled desperately: ‘Today I have become mental … Hell let loose.’ Besides the animals the Fon’s subjects were bringing in, Gerald and his hunters were collecting their own, sometimes flushing them out of the mimbo-palm plantations with a posse of boys, sometimes shaking them out of the trees, sometimes burrowing for them, sometimes smoking them out, sometimes trapping them. A large collection of animals and birds of all sorts began to form on the veranda of the enormous guest house, many of which had rarely, if ever, been seen in any zoo. They ranged from brilliantly coloured sun-birds about four inches long to vultures the size of a turkey, from pigmy dormice that would fit into a teaspoon to giant rats the size of cats. On 14 March Gerald encountered a form of hunting that was entirely new in his African experience – a sort of beagling for beef.
What I love about Africa is that you set off into the bush with the firm resolve to catch some special beef, and almost always come back with something quite different. Today I was going out to capture Allen’s Galago [a bush baby] and Hammer-heads [hammer-headed bats]: we caught neither but brought back something quite different …
There was Joseph, myself, four hunters, and two dogs that looked as though they had just come out of Belsen. I was assured that they were first-rate hunting dogs. There was a slight altercation with one of the hunters who wanted to bring his dane gun: not wanting to return home with bits of rusty nail and flint in my backside I was firm and said NO. We worked our way through several mimbo plantations, flushed a squirrel and lost him, and then came out into the grassland proper. This is about six foot high and looks like a pigmy bamboo. The leaves have a sharp cutting edge which makes it painful to walk through.
So we continued on our way. Soon the dogs made a great pother, and the hunters assured me that they had found a Cutting-grass i.e. a Great Cane Rat. While some hunters went into the grass with the dogs, the others spread their nets in a haphazard sort of fashion along the edge of the undergrowth where it joined the path. I thought the dogs were probably on the track of a lame Tree frog (they didn’t look strong enough to run after anything faster) so I sat myself down with the thermos and started to imbibe tea. I was gently sipping my second cup when great yodelling screeches went up from the hunters, there was a great crashing in the undergrowth and something that looked the size of a well-developed beaver dashed past, crashed through the grass and leapt headlong into the net. Joseph and another hunter (whose name I am assured is M’erwegie) fell on it, and to show the brute’s strength it bucked and kicked so much that they were both lifted off the ground. After much shouting and good advice we got it into the beef bag, and sure enough it was a Cutting-grass, and a very large one at that, about two foot long, with a round fat beaver-like face. Praomys tullbergi tullbergi is the correct name for this huge rat.
Shortly after this we flushed another, which ran almost between my legs. We were off after it in full cry and ran after it for about a mile. It reminded me of beagling: first the dogs yapping and snarling, the little bells they wear round their necks clonking like mad; then the hunters and myself, and a trail of small boys screaming behind. Through the long grass, getting cut to hell, jumping (generally unsuccessfully) over streams, pushing through mimbo swamps. At last we came to a sweaty and gasping halt to find the dogs had lost it. As I lay on the ground trying to regain my breath a boy appeared from nowhere holding a dirty calabash, the long neck of which was stuffed with leaves. Joseph peered inside and then started, gurgling with delight, for inside was a ‘shilling’, or Allen’s Galago. This makes the pair that London wanted!!
Though the really big ‘stuff’ continued to elude Gerald, the quantity and variety of smaller creatures was prodigious. On 16 March alone he acquired hyraxes, pouched rats, skinks, mongooses, great cane rats, a Nile monitor, three kinds of squirrel, feral kittens (‘wild as hell’) and, ‘prize of the bunch, the thing that London wants very much, two huge Hairy Frogs!!!!! I was so pleased that I sent a message over to the Fon asking him to come and have a drink with me tomorrow evening.’
The visit was a memorable one, as Gerald noted in his diary entry for 17 March:
This evening the Fon came in about seven and left about eleven having consumed a bottle of gin. Later in the evening he sent for his wives, and they came and sang and beat drums below the house. When he noticed that the gin was finished he decided to go, and arm in arm, preceded by three men with lights, we went down the long flight of steps, at the bottom of which was this mass of stark naked females, all dancing and singing. As both the Fon and I were now well lit up, we nearly fell down the stairs together, but saved ourselves at the last minute, amid cries of horror from the population. Then we crossed the huge compound, the wives dancing in front of us, backwards, and then into a large hut, where the Fon and I sat on wicker chairs and watched the dance.
After I had developed a sore throat shouting compliments about the wives, the dance, the music, we were friends for life. Then he asked me if I could dance. Fearing what was coming, I quickly said no, to my everlasting regret I could not dance. This stopped him for a second, then he beamed all over his face, rose swaying to his feet, grasped my arm and said: ‘I go teach y
ou native dance.’
Reluctantly I went to my fate, and clasped in each other’s arms we staggered round the room. It was not a great success, owing chiefly to the fact that his very long and highly coloured robes kept getting caught up in my feet, and we would both be jerked to a standstill while six or seven people unwound his clothes from my legs. Presently he was nearly asleep, and so was I, so with deep sorrow at having to break up such a unique party, I said I must be going. He walked to the gates with me, and bade me a fond and slightly maudlin farewell.
What a hangover we will have, but what beef I hope this evening will bring forth.
Two days later the Fon was back. The occasion was a local festival called the cutting of the grass. At four o’clock a court messenger came to fetch Gerald, and with liberal application of a switch he cut a path for him through the crowd to the courtyard outside the Fon’s villa. The Bafut council, consisting of some fifty elders, was already assembled, squatting against a wall drinking mimbo (‘a milk-like liquid, very fine, light and sweet – and very potent’) out of cups made of cows’ horn. At the far end of the courtyard sat the Fon, seated on an elaborately decorated chair placed on a raised stone dais beneath a huge mango tree. He was garbed in resplendent ornamental robes and wore a conical felt hat with elephant hairs stitched to it. Gerald was made to sit at his right hand (a great honour), and one of the Fon’s wives poured him a glass of mimbo.
Then came the ceremony of the feeding of the masses. In return for bringing grass to thatch his roof, the Fon traditionally provided his subjects with a feast. The Fon rose and with Gerald at his side strode down the double rank of bobbing and clapping council members, his wives ‘uttering cries such as the Redskin is supposed to produce’. In the outer courtyard the crowd greeted them with a burst of screams and claps. With Gerald again seated on the Fon’s right, more mimbo was poured as lesser chiefs from outlying parts made their obeisance, retreating backwards after a regal nod from the Fon.
Gerald Durrell Page 21