Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  The canoe arrived at some ungodly hour and the loads were carried down the hill and across the white beach and piled into it. We shoved off and raced down stream at a fine pace, and, once we had left the white man’s tropical suburbia, the river plunged into the proper jungle.

  It was here that I decided that travelling down an African river in a canoe is one of the most enchanting and lovely occupations one can conceive. For perhaps three miles the river runs unbroken by rapids, the waters like a black mirror sliding softly between the grey slopes of rock. The solid tangle of trees and shrubs runs right down to these rocks, two lines of green running down the river as far as the eye can see. The various shades of green are infinite, some rich and shining, some so delicate and ethereal they defy description: jade green, olive green, bottle green, emerald green, chartreuse green, all woven into this incredible filigree of leaves and branches. Even the rocky slopes themselves are covered, sometimes almost obscured, with a blanket of quivering ferns and patches of gleaming moss.

  You pass several beaches, white as ivory and dazzling in the sun, with the bleached skeletons of trees lying across them. Everything is drenched in sunlight and silence. The only sounds are the piping cicadas, the soft, husky, plaintive coo of the Emerald Doves, and the pleasant, lazy plop and splash of the paddles in the waters. Then, far away, you hear a murmur, a sound so faint that it merges into the insect and bird calls. Slowly it gets louder, from a murmur to a chuckle to a full-throated, frightening roar. The placid waters seem suddenly to stir themselves to life, and you feel them seize the canoe in a fierce and exultant grip. Long shining black waves appear, moving restlessly along the sides of the canoe. The paddlers stop work – a few strokes to keep an even course and the river does the rest. Then you reach the bend in the river. The great rocks stretch across the river, tangled and jagged as the vertebra of some prehistoric monster. Through the gaps the river squeezes its waters, churning itself into a creamy froth and throwing a thousand glittering rainbows above the rocks. The roar of the waters is now so loud that you have to shout to be heard. The canoe hurtles forward, and for an awful moment it seems as though you are heading straight for solid rock; then suddenly a cleft appears, and you are carried through on a polished stream of water. Suddenly it is all over, and you are drifting through the shallows where the waters hurry along, chuckling and clinking on the smooth brown pebbles.

  A river trip of this sort is ideal in so many ways. You go just slow enough to examine things around you. You get a wonderful view of the forest, for it is as if someone had cut a great cleft in it and allowed you to see the various stratas of foliage, from the tiny ground plants to the feathery tops of the hundred foot trees. Above all there is the delicious lazy peace of it, the warm waters, the endless horizon of the trees, and the tameness of everything.

  Sometimes, where the river curved into a deep pool with shady banks, a hippo would rise from the depths and regard you with watchful but not unfriendly eyes. Then he would submerge silently, leaving only an ever widening circle of ripples and a few drifting silver bubbles. In the shallows where we bathed even the fish were tame, and little silver and green fellows some three inches long nosed gently around you and nibbled at your toes. We passed a troop of Mona monkeys coming down to drink and they shouted what I think were insulting remarks at us. Then an outcry arose, for there on the bank stood an adult Harnessed Antelope, the first one I have seen. It looked simply magnificent, a gleaming chestnut coat covered with great white stripes and strokes like giant writing. The hunters begged me to shoot, so, feeling that my reputation was at stake, I took careful aim at a spot about fifty yards to the right of her and let fly. Groans of disappointment, and suspicious looks from Pious, who knows I am quite a good shot really. The antelope stood stock still for a moment, then bounded up the bank and into the undergrowth, with my blessing.

  We arrived at Asagem about four, and it turned out to be a tiny little village boasting about seventy inhabitants, sixty of whom were senile and rotting and the other ten young and festering. I was met by the Chief, a dirty old man, who was suffering from so many diseases that he looked as though he would fall to pieces if one blew at him, and he conducted me to the juju house where I was to stay. Here I unpacked and my bed was arranged under several skulls, a row of juju drums and other oddments of ‘medicine’. Then I went off into the forest, walked about five miles and saw a lot of stuff, including a huge troop of Mona monkeys, moving through the trees. They made a great noise in the trees, and the swish of the leaves when they jump sounds like giant surf on a beach. Then I went home and slept the sleep of the dead, juju house and all.

  The events of the following day or two proved to be by far the most distressing of Gerald’s brief career. The plan was to snatch a hippo calf, and it was an iron rule of the river that it was impossible to do this without killing the parents first, for an enraged adult hippo is an utterly lethal creature.

  At about six on the morning of 1 May Gerald and his little band of African hunters set out from Asagem, paddling upriver till they reached a small herd consisting of a hippo bull, cow and calf of about the right size. ‘The idea was to shoot both the parents,’ Gerald recorded afterwards, ‘and then catching the calf would be easy. Accordingly I landed and worked my way down stream through the bushes until I reached a spot where I got a good view of them. The first shot I fired missed the cow completely, as I had never fired the .450 before and was a bit timid about the kick. She submerged with a splash and I thought she would swim off, but she came up again a few yards to the right and this time I shot her right between the eyes.’ In the split-second it took for the bullet to shatter the hippo’s brain, Gerald Durrell underwent a sea-change. He watched the consequences of his act with horror: ‘She sank at once into the gloomy depths, and I was filled with an awful remorse.’

  He still had the bull hippo to deal with. ‘I felt that I must try and get rid of him without hurting him,’ he wrote in his diary that night, ‘as one hippo on my conscience was quite enough. Accordingly we leapt into the canoe and raced down the river towards him, while I fired shot after shot into the water just near him. We chased him about two miles down stream, and he made a great fuss, snorting and roaring and at one moment looking so ugly I thought he would attack the canoe.’

  With the mother hippo dead and the father repelled, Gerald judged it was safe to retrieve the calf. But it was nowhere to be seen, having sunk beneath the surface of the river. When it failed to reappear it was assumed a crocodile had eaten it, and eventually a crocodile did indeed rise to the surface near the last spot where the baby hippo had been seen. ‘The self-satisfied smirk on the croc’s face enraged me,’ Gerald wrote afterwards, ‘so I shot him neatly between the eyes.’ As he had feared, the remains of the baby hippo were found inside the crocodile’s stomach – ‘blast the bloody thing!’

  Later the mother hippo was hauled up from the riverbed and dragged to the village, where the carcass was set upon by the protein-famished population ‘like a pack of animals, fighting, tearing, screaming and pushing’. One old woman got hold of a rib almost as big as herself, and finding herself beset by a hungry mob leapt into the river with it under one arm. ‘She was a game old thing,’ Gerald recorded, ‘and she was a good twenty or thirty feet from the shore when they caught up with her and the rib and its owner disappeared under a forest of waving knives and bobbing black heads. The old lady at last swam back to shore, weeping and moaning, with a nasty cut on her forehead. I got her a large bit of meat and gave it to her, then I escorted her up to her house to see it was not pinched from her, and bathed her wound as well as I could. Now, every time she sees me she starts dancing and clapping her hands.’

  Profoundly conscience-stricken by the day’s events, Gerald wrote in his diary: ‘I don’t think I have ever felt so depressed. If I had got the baby I would not feel so bad about shooting the cow: but it seems such a shame to shoot a fat, lazy, funny-looking animal like a hippo for no reason.’

  As far
as is known, the hippo and the crocodile were the last animals that ever met a gratuitous end at Gerald Durrell’s hands. When, four years later, he came to write his best-selling book about his second Cameroons venture, The Bafut Beagles, he made no mention of his shooting exploits, for they no longer represented something he wished to remember or be remembered for. In future years, even the distant sound of a pheasant shoot would pitch him into a mood of outrage and impotent despair, knowing all the tiny deaths the gunfire implied. By then the poacher had long become an ardent gamekeeper. ‘For me the road to Damascus had been a very slow road with only one lane,’ he was to confess years later. It was on the hippo hunt near Asagem that he met his blinding light.

  With two hippo dead and gone, Gerald’s permit had been used up. Dejected, he retreated to Bakebe, where he settled himself in some style in the courthouse, a huge place with three-foot-thick walls all round. ‘Having ensconced myself,’ he recorded on 10 May, ‘I then sent for all the local hunters and planned the capture of every beef from the French border to the foot of N’da Ali.’

  This ambitious if desperate scheme did not go entirely to plan. Gerald’s luck, it seemed, was out. He began to go down with sandfly fever, and though he had set a number of traps, including three for leopard, they yielded little of value. The leopard business was particularly frustrating, for though he could hear them at night and see them by day, none of them was tempted to take the fresh meat with which he baited the snares. The reason, he complained, was that the local tribesmen, many of them leopard worshippers, believed that the animals were inhabited by the spirits of their ancestors, and so placed a ju-ju on Gerald’s traps.

  What with one thing and another, his diary lapsed, and from 14 to 22 May there were no entries at all. ‘Got all behind with this bloody thing again,’ he noted on the twenty-third, ‘owing to hard work on the traps and sandfly fever. The other day I received a very rude letter from Ken accusing me of not working, and all sorts of things, so I wrote back a carefully controlled snorter and received his apology today.’

  In spite of the daily aggravations, Gerald was not yet – nor ever would be – impervious to the spell Africa could cast. He wrote in his diary in late May:

  Today, somewhat to my surprise, I awoke at five-thirty, just as it started to get light. Staggering from my bed to attend the pangs of nature I was treated to one of the most lovely sights that I have ever seen.

  The mist, white as snow, was starting to drift and disperse, and as it twisted its way into the sky like smoke the forest and mountains came into view. Everything was a deep jade green, and the mist, hanging in great swathes along the base of the mountains, made them look like dark islands in a white sea. The sky above the mist was a pale apple green tinged with gold where the sun was just starting to come up over the forest. As it rose higher and higher, the sky turned from green to gold and from gold to a lovely pink. Down in the village the cocks were crowing lustily and across the pink sky flew three hornbills, honking in the wild and hysterical way that hornbills have.

  Gerald stood stock still, staring in awe and humility as if at the dawn of creation, and with his feet rooted firmly in the mud and his eyes fixed firmly on the sublime he responded to the call of nature in more senses than one. Etched in his memory for ever, this scene would recur to him in other places and at other times, a permanent testimony, an article of faith perhaps, to the lost world before man – precious, transcendental, but perishable.

  The Cameroons diary ends on 23 May. Apart from a letter to Mother a fortnight later, Gerald left no written records of the remainder of the African adventure. Towards the end of the month Ken Smith wrote to Leslie, thanking him for his part in arranging for money to be sent to keep the collectors alive and functioning. Gerry was still at Bakebe, he reported, but as soon as he returned to the base camp at Mamfe they would start crating up, prior to moving down to the coast and the port of embarkation. Ominously, perhaps, the long rains were starting. ‘Most days now, or at nights, we get heavy thunderstorms and torrential rain. Fortunately the jolly old tent stands up to it well, otherwise we should be washed away. It seems strange to think we will be back in England (blast the place!) in 8 weeks time.’

  Then came calamity. The two Englishmen had hung on in the Cameroons desperately hoping to take delivery of a young gorilla that had been promised them. They had even cancelled their bookings on a cargo ship sailing from Tiko on 3 June, on the basis that the enormous sale price of a gorilla in Britain would well outweigh the extra cost of staying on in Africa. But the gorilla never turned up, and with the next available boat not due for another two months, they faced a grim wait in the torrential rains that now began to drown the country in earnest. No gorilla, no boat, no money – their circumstances were so straitened that Gerald was forced to sell his precious shotgun and .318 rifle, and anything else that could be spared. On 8 June he wrote to his mother:

  We are now hung up till August the sixth, so won’t be home till the 20th. Our position at the moment is that we have enough stock to sell at stupidly low prices and still make enough profit to pay back our debts, but I don’t think it will leave enough to go collecting again. This is an awful thought, and we are straining every nerve to try and get something big before we leave. Our collection is zoologically wonderful, but just needs the one or two big items which the zoos will buy for their bloody Public.

  Stranded in Mamfe, his thoughts began to turn to home, and particularly to his long-lost girls of home: ‘Please ask Margo, if you ever see her, to give my love to Rosemary and Connie at the Barn Club. What’s wrong with Diane [Ursula]? She wrote me a very back-up letter …’

  Gerald and his companion now reversed roles, and it was Ken Smith who set off into the interior, aiming for the Endop Plain, right up in the mountains, for as big a trawl of the local wildlife as he could manage in the time remaining. ‘This is his first real trip by himself,’ Gerald wrote, ‘and he went off as excited as a schoolboy. He certainly deserves it.’

  For all its remorseless routine of cleaning the cages and feeding their occupants, being stuck at base camp was almost as much fun as collecting in the wilds, as Gerald wrote home:

  Going to bush, you get the thrill of seeing new places and of catching new animals. Here you can really study the animals day by day, and each day learn some new thing. For example, Mary, the female chimp, is cleaned out in the morning, and by night her straw is all dirty. So, before going to sleep, she turns the whole lot over and sleeps on the nice clean underside. She has a habit of lying on her back and looking at you daringly, then if you blow on her bottom she will cover it up with her hands and scream with laughter. This is now referred to, even by the animal boys, as Blowing Mary’s Wicked Parts. Mary has a passion for clothes, and will lure a native up to her cage by patting her tummy or turning somersaults or some other trick, and then, when he is within reach, she will shoot out her hand, and there will be a loud ripping sound mingled with yelps of fright, and the now shirtless native will be left glaring with rage while Mary puts the shirt over her head and looks coy. Both chimps are so fat they can hardly move. The other day I thought I would see how greedy Charles, the young male chimp, really was, so I kept on pushing bananas through the bars and he ended up by having two in his mouth, one in each hand and one in each foot – and still screamed when I wouldn’t hand him any more. He is very ticklish on his collar-bones and will start screaming with helpless laughter before you even touch his neck.

  Gerald was no longer just a zoological mercenary, a bring-’em-back-alive bounty hunter. Though he had no formal qualifications as a zoologist, his intimate, round-the-clock association with a vast horde of some three hundred creatures from a huge range of species and his minute observation of their physical forms, habits and mannerisms, as well as the environments and micro-habitats from which they came, represented a prolonged and intensive field-study course which would have been the envy of any zoology department in the world. It was to be the foundation of the formidable knowle
dge of animal behaviour he was to build up over the years. Out of the zoo collector was emerging the zoological polymath.

  ‘No two animals are alike,’ he was to say later. ‘They are irritating, annoying, frustrating, but never boring. They vary as much as humans do. There are the great characters among them, the natural comedians, the wide boys, the problem children, the greedy ones, the inquisitive ones, the hypocrites, mental defectives, split personalities and so on. Watching them once you have got them is one of the chief charms of the trip. So I gave short shrift to a man who once said he couldn’t understand why I liked animals so much, they were all so dull, all the same.’

  But it was killing work. ‘There is little time for anything, even sleep,’ he wrote to Mother, ‘as it seems that no sooner have you given the Red River Hogs their midnight feed than it is dawn and you have to start cleaning out all over again.’ Only after the nocturnal animals had had their evening feed was it possible to relax a little. ‘You then have three lovely hours to yourself, and can do anything you want to: generally there are some specimens to bottle and a few to skin. Then your bath, a few quick ones, and chop. After chop you fill in the diary and the additions book, feed the Bushbaby and the Red River Hogs and give a last bottle to the baby Chevrotain, then crawl into bed.’ As for being asked out to dinner, ‘you are so near to sleep that your host might as well carry on a conversation with his bookcase’.

  So the weeks passed, and the rain continued to pour and the grass to soar and the bugs to swarm and the creatures in their cages to complain. Eventually Ken Smith returned from the hills with a large new batch of animals, and by the end of July the collection had increased to some five hundred specimens, including a number of unspectacular species of largely scientific interest, for Gerald was no longer just a menagerie collector, but a field zoologist anxious to make a contribution to knowledge. Finally, in early August the time came to dismantle the base camp overlooking the Mamfe River and to transport the collection down to Tiko and the boat home. ‘It was,’ Gerald was to recall, ‘one of the worst journeys I can remember.’