The sand was covered with a multitude of different tracks, and interlaced among them were the tracks of the skimmers, branching across the sand like a stalk of ivy. Among the tracks was one that led up from the waters’ edge to the top of the bank. It was a long, smooth furrow, as would be made by rolling a heavy ball across the sand, and on each side of it were lines of short, deep clefts. Where the track ended there was a circular area, which looked as though it had been roughly patted down with a spade. I was puzzling over this strange track when McTurk explained.
Turtle,’ he said, ‘comes out to lay its eggs.’
He went to the end of the track and started to dig in the sand, and about six inches down he unearthed a clutch of ten eggs, each the size of a small hen’s egg, with a thin leathery shell. He opened one by tearing the shell off the end, disclosing the rather glutinous white and the bright yellow yolk, and emptied the contents into his mouth. Following his example, I discovered that turtles’ eggs are the most delicious of foods; eaten raw like that, warmed slightly by the sun, they had a sweet nutty flavour that was most delightful. We sat on the sand and ate the rest of the eggs at one sitting, and a little further along the bank I found another nest, and these eggs we took back to have cooked for supper. Hardboiled, I discovered, they tasted like sweet chestnuts.
Presently, wiping the egg-stains from our mouths, we made our way across the sandbank and plunged into what appeared to be thick forest. But it turned out to be only a dense, narrow belt of trees bordering the river, and we soon found ourselves out on the savannah once more, moving waist-high through the crisp, sun-withered grasses. The going was difficult, for interspersed with the ordinary tough savannah grass was another kind which turned out to be one of the most annoying plants I have come across. It grew in great clumps, with each leaf about seven feet long, green and slender, coiling and sprouting across our path with Machiavellian cunning, looking lush, dainty and cool. Yet the edge of each leaf was sharper than most razor blades, and was microscopically nicked along its edge like a hacksaw blade. The merest touch of it and your skin was slashed in a dozen places, long, deep grooves like scalpel cuts. After trying to brush a large clump out of the way with my bare arm I was covered with these shallow incisions, which bled profusely and made me look as though I had been having a tussle with a couple of jaguars. Bob, who found it difficult to distinguish the razor grass from the ordinary sort, sat down on a large clump for a rest and registered the fact even through his trousers.
After crossing the grassland we came to another strip of wood, which bordered a placid lake fed by a small and sluggish tributary from the main stream. The lake was almost circular, and in the very centre, six feet of its trunk underwater, grew a tall, straight tree, its branches laden with strange flask-shaped nests woven from palm fibres and grass, looking like a crop of weird fruit. Fluttering from branch to branch and diving in and out of the nests were the owners, a colony of yellow-backed caciques, birds the size of a thrush with lemon yellow and black plumage and long, sharp, ivory-coloured beaks. Every detail of the tree, the swinging nests and the host of fluttering, wheezing, brilliant birds were reflected in the still, honey-coloured waters in which the tree stood. Occasionally this water picture would blur and tremble for an instant as a falling leaf or twig pricked the water into a quivering net of black ripples.
As we sat watching the birds there was the slightest disturbance of the water at the edge of the lake, a faint wrinkle on the glossy surface as a long, gnarled snout surmounted by protuberant eyes rose into view.
‘That’s old One Eye,’ said McTurk, as the cayman swam towards us, its head seeming to glide over the surface of the water almost imperceptibly. When he came nearer we could see that one of his eye sockets was empty and shrivelled, and we watched how he manoeuvred himself so that his blind eye was always turned away from us. He had been king of this little lake for as long as McTurk could remember. How he had come to lose his eye was a mystery: perhaps some Amerindian arrow had pierced it, or perhaps he had fought with a jaguar long ago, and in the struggle the great cat’s claws had burst the ball. Whatever the cause, the accident did not seem to affect him, for he lived happily in the lake, lording it over the smaller cayman like a reptilian Nelson. He swam up to within thirty feet of where we were sitting, and then turned and made off to the other end of the lake. There he floated with his blind eye towards us. McTurk picked up a stick and struck the trunk of a tree with a resounding crack that echoed across the quiet waters, causing the caciques to stop their chatter. At once One Eye submerged smoothly and efficiently, and when he rose to the surface again he had his good eye fixed on us. As we walked round the edge of the lake he swam out into the middle and revolved like a slow-motion top, keeping us carefully in view.
We made our way to a spot where a great tree leant out over the water at an angle of seventy-five degrees, its trunk festooned with great bunches of Spanish moss and clumps of orchids bearing dozens of large, waxy magenta blooms. We climbed up to the topmost branches and found ourselves as though hanging in an enchanted, orchid-filled balcony high above the water. Below we could see our reflections, shivering slightly where the orchid petals we had dislodged were still waltzing down on to the surface. As we sat there looking out over the lake McTurk suddenly pointed at a spot below us, some fifty feet off along the bank.
‘Watch that spot,’ he commanded.
We strained our eyes, but the surface of the water remained unbroken. I was just about to ask what we were supposed to be looking for, when there was a loud plop, something broke the surface briefly and was gone, leaving only a few ripples and a handful of golden bubbles shaking themselves up from the depths.
Arapaima,’ said McTurk with satisfaction, ‘heading this way. Watch down below.’
I stared down at the water, determined not to miss such a sight. There was another plop, and then another, each one nearer to us. Then, suddenly, we could see the great fish swimming lazily below us, its great body drifting through the translucent amber water. For a brief moment we saw its ponderous, torpedo-shaped body, a deep fin curving along its back like a fan, and a tail that seemed small and blunt for a fish of that size, and then it was gone among the multicoloured reflections of our tree, and we could see it no longer.
This, I regret to say, was the only glimpse we had of an arapaima, one of the largest freshwater fish in the world, although they were common enough in the lakes and rivers of the Rupununi. These tremendous fish grow to a length of six or seven feet and weigh between two and three hundred pounds. McTurk told us that the largest he had ever caught measured nine feet in length. They are so large and so swift that probably their only enemies are man and the ever-present jaguar. Man hunts them with spear and bow and arrow, but the jaguar has another method. He will wait until the great fish swims close to the bank and then hurl himself into the water on top of it and proceed to ‘box’ it ashore with his powerful paws, rather as a domestic cat will box with a leaf.
McTurk said that he could quite easily spear an arapaima for me if I wanted to examine one, but I felt it would be a shame to kill one of these lovely fishes for no reason; to catch one alive was, of course, out of the question, for even if we had succeeded there would be the question of transporting it down to the coast, together with several hundred gallons of water. Even I, enthusiastic though I was, reluctantly had to abandon the idea of taking a live arapaima back to Georgetown with me.
McTurk told us a curious thing about these fish, which has not, so far as I can find out, been recorded before. During the breeding season the female arapaima develops a form of gland on the back of the head, which exudes a white, milk-like substance. He said that on several occasions he had observed young arapaima clustering round their mother’s head and apparently feeding on this white ‘milk’. This astonished me, and I hoped that we might be lucky enough to see such a sight during our stay in the Rupununi, but unfortunately we did not. The discovery of
a fish that ‘suckles’ its young would, I feel, cause no little sensation among zoologists and ichthyologists.
We waited in our tree for some time in the hope that another arapaima would swim past, but the water below remained unruffled and empty of life. Eventually we climbed down and made our way round to the far side of the lake where the water was shallow. Here McTurk gave us a demonstration of the Amerindian method of fishing. He unhitched a small bow he had been carrying, a frail and useless-looking weapon, and fitted a slender arrow to it. Then he waded out knee-deep in the dark water and stood motionless for a few minutes. Suddenly he raised the bow, the string thrummed, and the arrow plopped into the water about fifteen feet away from him and stuck there, some five inches of the shaft showing above the surface. Almost instantly the arrow appeared to take on a life of its own: it twitched and trembled, moving fast through the water in a vertical position, tracing a wavering path. After a minute or so, more and more of the shaft showed above the surface, until the arrow tilted and lay almost flat. On the end of it, the barb and part of the shaft through its back, a large silvery fish was gasping its life away in a web of blood. Now until the fish had risen to the surface I had seen nothing in the water except the twisting arrow; thinking this was because I was on the bank, I waded out and joined McTurk. We waited in silence for a short time, and then McTurk pointed.
‘There . . . by that log . . . see him?’
I looked at the spot he indicated, but the surface of the water was like a dusty mirror, and I could see nothing. But McTurk could see it, and he raised his bow, discharged another arrow, and soon a second fish floated to the surface, impaled on the slender shaft.
Three times I watched McTurk fishing like this, but never once did I see the fish before it came to the surface, on the end of the arrow. Years of practice had made his eyesight abnormally keen, and he could see the faint blur beneath the water that indicated a fish’s position, work out which way it was travelling, allow for deflection, fire his arrow and hit it, all before you could even see any sign of life.
When we returned to the sandbank in the main river where we had left the dinghy, McTurk left us to go on some errand, and Bob and I amused ourselves by looking for more turtles’ eggs. Being unsuccessful in this I decided to have a swim. The sandbank sloped gently into the water, forming a long shelf on which the water was only some six inches deep. It looked fairly safe bathing, and soon Bob joined me. Presently he called me from further along the shelf, and I found him proudly pointing to some large circular depressions in the sand; if you sat in these holes the water came up to your chin, as if you were reclining in a natural bathtub. We each chose a pothole and lay back at ease, singing lustily. Then we capered up and down the sand to get dry, looking like a couple of half witted albino Amer-indians. As we were dressing, McTurk reappeared, and I told him what a wonderful place for bathing the sand-bank was.
‘Those holes Bob found might have been specially made,’ I said. ‘You’re completely covered with water and not out of your depth.’
‘Holes?’ said McTurk. ‘What holes?’
‘Those sort of craters in the sand,’ explained Bob.
‘Have you been sitting in those?’ asked McTurk.
‘Why, yes,’ said Bob, puzzled.
‘What’s wrong with them?’ I asked.
‘Nothing, except that they’re made by sting rays,’ said McTurk, ‘and if you’d sat on one of them you’d have known all about it.’
I looked at Bob.
‘How big are they?’ he asked nervously.
‘They generally fit the holes,’ replied McTurk.
‘Good God! The one I was sitting in was almost the size of a bath,’ I exclaimed.
‘Oh, yes,’ said McTurk, ‘they grow quite large.’ We walked back to the dinghy in silence.
As we headed upstream towards Karanambo the sinking sun turned the river into a shimmering path of molten copper, across which drifted clouds of egrets, like snow. In the placid backwaters the fish were rising, a sudden splash and a hoop of golden ripples across the water. The dinghy chugged round the last bend and nosed her way to her moorings amongst the collection of strange craft; the engine stuttered and died, and silence came back to the river, broken only by the harsh barks of the large toads on the opposite bank.
‘Want another swim?’ asked McTurk as we stepped out of the boat.
I looked at the twilit river.
‘Here?’ I inquired.
‘Yes, I always bathe here.’
‘What about piranha?’
‘Oh, they won’t bother you here.’
Thus consoled we undressed and slid into the warm waters, feeling the current tug and vibrate against our bodies. Some thirty feet from the bank I could not touch the bottom by diving and the water six feet down was ice-cold. As we floated there I suddenly heard a harsh snort and a splash from the direction of a small island in the middle of the river, some hundred and fifty feet away.
‘What was that?’ I asked McTurk.
‘Cayman,’ he replied laconically. ‘There are lots of them round here.’
‘Don’t they ever attack?’ asked Bob in an offhand manner, treading water and glancing over his shoulder to see how far the bank was.
I glanced shorewards as well, and was quite surprised; only a few minutes previously it had seemed that a couple of powerful strokes would take us back to the beach. Now what appeared to be miles of water separated us from dry land.
McTurk assured us that the cayman never attacked, but we did not feel really safe until we were out on the bank again. There is something unnerving about lying in fifteen feet of dark water, knowing that down below you there may be electric eels, flocks of hungry piranha in search of supper, or a cruising cayman. When we had dressed, McTurk shone his torch out across the river to where the island lay. With that beam we counted six pairs of eyes, glowing like red-hot coals, dotted about the water.
‘Cayman,’ said McTurk again. ‘Plenty of them about here. Well, let’s go and get some food.’
He led the way through the trees towards the house.
5. After the Anteater
To capture a giant anteater had been one of our main reasons for going to the Rupununi, for we had heard that they were much easier to catch in the grassland than in the forests of Guiana.
So for three days after our arrival at Karanambo we did nothing but talk and think about anteaters, until eventually Mc Turk promised to see what he could do about the matter. One morning just after breakfast a short, squat Amerindian materialised in front of the house, in the disconcertingly silent way these people do. He had a bronze, Mongolian-looking face, and his dark slit eyes were saved from being crafty by the shy twinkle in them. He was dressed quite simply in the remains of a shirt and pants, and on his sleek black head was perched an absurd pixie hat constructed out of what once used to be velvet. To anyone who had been expecting a fierce Warrior, clad in a vivid feather head-dress and daubed tribal signs in clay, he would have been a great disappointment. As it was, he had an air of dour confidence about him, which I found comforting.
‘This is Francis,’ said McTurk, waving at the apparition. ‘I think he knows where you might find an anteater.’
We could not have greeted him more delightedly if he had known the whereabouts of a large reef of gold. And we discovered after some questioning that Francis did know where an anteater was, having seen one some three days before, but whether it was still there or not was another matter. McTurk suggested that Francis should go and see, and, if the creature was still hanging around, he would come and fetch us and we would have a try at catching it. Francis smiled shyly and agreed to the plan. He went off and returned the next morning to say that he had been successful: he had found where the anteater was living, and was willing to lead us there the next day.
‘How are we to reach the pla
ce?’ I asked McTurk.
‘On horses, of course,’ he answered. ‘It’s no use going in the jeep; you’ll have to criss-cross about the savannah a good bit, and the jeep’s no use for that sort of thing.’
I turned to Bob.
‘Can you ride?’ I inquired hopefully.
‘Well, I’ve been on a horse, if that’s what you mean,’ said Bob cautiously, and then hastily added, ‘only a very quiet one, of course.’
Three Singles to Adventure Page 8