The Aye-Aye and I

by Gerald Durrell

  The ancestor seemed satisfied with the answer and there was silence for a bit, while he refreshed himself with more beer and luxurious puffs at his cigarette. Then he said that, our motives being pure, we would assuredly meet with success. This simple prediction took quite a long time to be delivered since, first of all, it was spoken with great verve in Malagasy and the Malagasy love long, complicated speeches with accompanying histrionics and, of course, there were appropriate pauses for refreshment.

  Finally, when the beer had been consumed and the cigarette stubbed out, the ancestor went back under the lamba and reappeared as the soothsayer. We gave him the minuscule payment that he asked for his services and, to our astonishment, he insisted on paying us for the beer. Then, he and his entourage padded off into the night.

  Whether our ultimate success was a result of intervention by the ancestor, there is no way of knowing, but certainly success attended our efforts shortly after the soothsayer’s visit to us. I am in no way trying to recount this in a farcical manner, for the Malagasy take this contact with their ancestors very seriously indeed. If some people want to believe in Jesus, or Mohammed, or Buddha, or their ancestors, who is to say which is right and which wrong? It seems to me that most of the religions in the world are too dogmatic. They preach the ‘live and let live’ philosophy, but rarely do they practise it.

  On the following evening, the local schoolmaster paid us a visit and, after a few beers, regaled us with tales of the strange, mythical fauna with which the Malagasy have peopled their landscape. You would think they had a surfeit of curious creatures in reality, without going to the trouble of inventing fictional ones. However, what the schoolmaster divulged to us were like tales from a medieval bestiary. There was one creature, for example, that looked like a gigantic cat and, apart from its fearsome aspect and its ability to kill merely by looking at you, it had an extraordinary attribute: it possessed seven livers. As it was so hostile, it was a little difficult to assess how anyone had found this out. Nevertheless, seven livers it possessed. One has heard, of course, of a cat having nine lives, but seven livers seemed excessive. I wondered to myself whether this plethora of livers was due to the fact that the animal was a heavy drinker and, if so, whether one should put it in touch with Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Another magical creature is a large, rat-like beast who, should you encounter him, immediately starts to masturbate. With a serious air, you should take this curious behaviour in your stride and continue on your way. If you stop and laugh at him – and I suppose one could find a masturbating rat a subject for hilarity – he would fly into a rage and conjure up a huge storm that so alters the aspect of the forest that you become lost and may easily perish.

  Another story concerns a real animal, a slender, beautiful mongoose-like creature called a galidia. These little animals have a penchant for chickens and, to the villagers’ wrath, kill and eat them whenever they find them. The galidia, it appears, is possessed of a nasty trait of character. Should it come upon a hen-house that has been well constructed and is stuffed with delectable birds, the galidia makes every possible attempt to get in. If the sturdiness of the structure defeats his murderous plans, he becomes frustrated and reveals the baser side of his nature. Gnashing his teeth with rage, he backs up to the hen-house and proceeds to break wind through the bars. The farmer, coming out to his hen-house in the morning, finds that this dastardly deed has asphyxiated all his hens, so both the galidia and the farmer lose by this diabolical action. I did not ask the schoolmaster if it was possible to air-condition the hen-houses to obviate the risk of such a traumatic occurrence.

  The abortive hunting went on apace, and the day that the television team were due to leave got nearer and nearer. We had, of course, been filming all the time and had taken a lot of footage of Verity being fed by Lee. Since the whole film was being done on tape and we had with us a mini-television set for viewing what we had filmed, we thought it might be a good idea to take it to the local school and show the children some of the shots of Verity. This would, we hoped, fulfil three functions. Firstly, we thought it would be amusing to film the children’s reaction, for many of them had never seen television before. Secondly, it would show them how gentle Verity had become and how harmless. Thirdly, we hoped that the tales they would tell their parents would encourage them, to help us in the aye-aye hunting. Things did not turn out quite as we expected.

  The school was a mile or so down the road and approached by a very steep, rain-gouged pathway of red laterite. It was difficult enough getting down it when it was dry and one wondered how the children managed in the rainy season when the path must have turned into something resembling one of the more difficult and dangerous ski slopes.

  The school buildings were quite substantial and built of wood and brick, and our audience – about a hundred and fifty six- to ten-year-olds – sat in rows, the picture of obedience. There were only a few furtive whispers, a cough or two and the scrape of bare feet on wood as we appeared. The children regarded us with huge, dark, amazed eyes. This was the troupe of great vazahas who could, if aroused, eat little Malagasy children for breakfast, lunch and tea, so it behove them to be quiet and orderly and see what miracles we would perform.

  We set up the television set so all could see and I made a short, simplistic speech saying that the aye-aye was not a bad creature and though it ate sugar cane and coconuts, this was because the forest it used to live in had been cut down – a very bad thing for the Malagasy and the aye-ayes – which forced them to steal the crops. Then, we started the film and, instantly the children were riveted. There was a hiss of indrawn breath when Verity appeared and approached the front of his cage and an outbreak of astonished voices, quickly suppressed, when Lee’s hand appeared holding a honey ball and they could hear her talking softly to Verity. Verity accepted the food and, when it was finished, Lee’s hand appeared holding one of the fat beetle larvae. A gasp went up. So this is what the children had been collecting so many grubs for, to feed an aye-aye! And they had been paid real money and given strange and delicious sweets in order to collect provender for the aye-aye. What an extraordinary thing! Their eyes shone, their teeth gleamed as they giggled at the way Verity dealt with the grub, chewing off the head and then spooning out the contents of the still-wriggling body with his magic finger.

  The film ended and the children looked as if they could have gone on watching it all day without boredom. The schoolmaster asked them to sing a song of thanks for our visit, which they did with enthusiasm. But we had another surprise up our sleeve. While they had been engrossed watching Lee feed Verity and while they sang, we had been filming them. This film we now put on.

  There was a moment’s stunned silence, until somebody recognised a friend. The news spread like wildfire through the ranks and, laughing and pointing, they identified their friends with wonder and – miracle of all miracles – themselves. This was better than watching boring old aye-ayes any day of the week. To say it was a success means nothing. A combination of The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs could not have been more highly acclaimed. It was the sort of success that Hollywood moguls dream about and so rarely achieve. Naturally, it had to have a repeat performance and, then, yet another. We began to feel that it might have a longer run than The Mousetrap if we let it.

  After this, we tried another ploy on them. We trained the camera on the class and the children could see themselves on the screen, now in close-up, now with groups of their friends. Inevitably, they waved at themselves and were convulsed with laughter when their image waved back. The children would, I think, have happily had us spend the day or even the next month with them while they revelled in our marvels. But alas, we had to leave them and return to camp, taking our sorcerer’s boxes of weird tricks with us.

  I had wondered why, in our hotely by Lac Alaotra, they left the television on even when there was no one in the bar, until I realised that an audience of about fifty people from the market stood on the pave
ment outside watching, agog, the highly coloured and extremely explicit French soap operas through the two windows that faced the set. I believe that television has much to offer, but can have a disruptive effect. I was sure that our schoolmaster was going to have more trouble keeping his class in order after we left than he would have done trying to control a cat with seven livers.

  On the way back to camp, we passed a herd of zebu, huge, placid-looking beasts with velvety skins and humps like miniature camels. This, of course, is a very common sight in Madagascar, since the beasts are revered as a symbol of social prestige. At a rich man’s funeral many of his herd are killed and the graves are sometimes decorated with the horns. The novelty of the herd that we now came across was that it consisted of about ten large beasts and was under the control of and being chivvied along by a little boy with anxious eyes, who could not have been more than six and was armed with a twig as large as himself. It would be no exaggeration to say that the zebu took no notice of their shepherd. Zebu are of the definite opinion that not only roads but everything has been constructed for their benefit.

  They meandered, they sighed, they rubbed heads, they paused to chew the cud or take a mouthful of grass from the verge. Sometimes one would turn around and slouch back the way it had come, then look astonished and offended as the little boy danced in front of it and hit it on the nose with his twig. No sooner had the boy turned it than he would discover that another one of his charges had wandered off the road and entered a small farm which, with the deep sigh of content of a gourmet greeting the first tender asparagus shoots of the year, it would proceed to plunder, until the little boy beat it back to the road, to its obvious annoyance.

  The little boy danced around his herd, like a small brown moth round a large, indolent, slouching and potentially dangerous candle flame. At the sight of the Toyotas approaching, both he and the zebu displayed all the symptoms of a collective nervous breakdown. Although we stopped, the zebu milled about in an alarming way and we were afraid that one might step on the boy and crush him into oblivion without even noticing that he had gone. Fortunately, at that point, the boy’s father – who had stopped for a gossip – came running and, with his stout cane, rather like a fierce sergeant major with a parade ground full of slovenly recruits, he bashed and shouted the zebu into a more or less orderly herd and moved them past us, raising his hat and beaming at us cheerfully. The little boy looked chagrined, but as I had seen him escape what had appeared to be almost certain death two or three times, I felt he ought to be pleased at his father’s interference.

  It was about this time that John’s dreadful ducklings made their appearance. Until then, I think they had been too young to leave their mothers, who had confined them to the village. Now they were half-grown they were old enough to go foraging on their own. On the first day they appeared we could hear their excited quacking long before we saw them descending the path from the village in single file, as excited as children going to the seaside. There were three of them: the largest was brown, as was the second largest, and the baby was white. They did everything at a smart, waddling trot, quack-quacking incessantly the while. They descended the path and disappeared over the sand dunes in the direction of the river.

  ‘Too small to eat roasted,’ said Frank, sorrowfully. ‘Might make a nice soup, though.’

  John was thunderstruck.

  ‘You couldn’t eat them,’ he protested. ‘They’re dear little things. I love ducks.’

  ‘So do I, in a culinary sort of way,’ said Frank.

  Half an hour later, having had their swim, they appeared over the sandbank and had a conference. Obviously our campsite was of extreme interest to them and, after a short conversation as to the best means of approach, they formed a line, charged down the sandbank and waddled, quacking vociferously, into our midst, tripping up Tim who was trying to carry a cup of tea to Mickey, who was feeling rotten and was confined to his tent. Tim almost fell flat on his face; the tea went flying.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘It’s bad enough having cockerels shouting in your ear at four in the morning. Now we’ve got ducks all over the place.’

  ‘Dear little things,’ said John benignly. ‘Sweet ickle ducky-wuckies.’

  ‘Dear God,’ said Frank. ‘I’m going to sit in my tent. Tell me when Shirley Temple’s finished, will you?’

  Meanwhile, the ducky-wuckies were surveying our abode with wondering eyes, rather as the Malagasy children had done. What interested them most was the pile of empty, carefully washed tins in one corner. They approached it slowly making soft, crooning interrogative noises to each other. Then one of them leant forward and made a valiant attempt to eat a sardine tin.

  ‘They’re hungry, poor little things,’ said John, and proceeded to get a stale bread roll and break it up into small pieces for them.

  ‘You shouldn’t encourage them,’ I said, but it was too late. The ducky-wuckies had never come across bread in their short lives and their delight was unanimous. One of them, indeed, was so enamoured of this new delicacy that, when the bread was finished, he caught sight of a longish cigarette butt and fell on it. It stuck out of the corner of his beak, making him look like a raffish Donald Duck.

  ‘No, no, Uncle John says no,’ John intoned, picking the bird up and removing the offending stub.

  ‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘They re too young to smoke.’

  ‘Uncle John give you some more nice bready-weddy,’ said John.

  Of course, from that moment on, we had not a hope. The ducks would come down each morning, have a quick dip in the river and then appear over the sand-dunes, galloping down upon us like a troop of US cavalry descending on a recalcitrant Indian village. They got everywhere and tried to eat everything with grim determination. We were forever tripping over or stepping on them. It is a miracle that we never killed one. They integrated themselves so closely into our daily lives that they even took siestas when and if we took them. As camp companions they were as boisterous and irritating as a litter of newly weaned, undisciplined puppies. Then came the fatal day when the Battle of the Thunder Box took place.

  While we were staying at the hotely in Mananara, we were visited by two old friends, Renée and David Winn. When living in Paris, Renée had helped look after and study the first trio of aye-ayes and she had introduced me to the baby aye-aye called Humphrey which inspired our expedition. When she left, Renée gave me a most useful present. It was a black plastic bag with a shower attachment. You filled this with water and laid it in the sun and within an hour or so the water was at bath temperature. Then, it could be hoisted into a convenient tree to make a hot shower unit.

  We had cleared an area among the bushes which we dignified with the term ‘bathroom’. In one corner was a small, palm-leaf hut in which was a large hole over which the thunder- or Bloxam box crouched regally. From a tree hung the shower unit and beneath it a plastic sheet on which to stand. At once, we had a problem with the shower unit. If it was high enough for me to stand under, it meant that Lee could not reach the knob to turn the shower on. We puzzled over this problem for a day or two and then Lee had a brilliant idea.

  ‘The Bloxam box,’ she said, triumphantly. ‘We simply put it under the shower when you use it and you sit on it.’

  I greatly looked forward to this novel experience, although I would not have been so anxious to participate in the experiment if I had known what the end result was going to be.

  The next morning the Bloxam box was duly moved, I took my seat upon it and was soon covered in soap and hair shampoo. Just at this point, the ducky-wuckies, having finished their morning swim, arrived in camp. To their astonishment, there was no one there. All the kind human beings who normally tripped over them, stamped on them, shouted at them and occasionally fed them were missing. At this moment, invigorated by soap and water, I burst into song.

  The ducks were immediately galvanized into action. They came rushing round the tent, bumping into each other, falling over in their excitement and j
oy at having found at least one lovely human. They paused as they entered the bathroom and gazed round in astonishment. They had never been in there before, and here was one of their lovely humans sitting in a pool of water like a duck. At least, he would have been like a duck if it had not been for two things. The human was sitting on a box and the water was covered in white froth.

  ‘Hello ducks,’ I said amicably, breaking off my rendering of ‘Rule, Britannia’. ‘Come in for a swim.’

  The ducks held a rapid, muffled conference. The white stuff on the water they decided must be edible, a sort of fluffy bread, perhaps. Anyway, they decided to sample it. They waddled forward as one and dipped their beaks into my bathwater, nibbling at the froth. As they had surmised, it was edible, something like a sorbet smelling of lavender. They started to gobble. Alarmed at this, for I thought the froth might well contain something toxic that would harm them, I looked around for my stick, only to find that I had stupidly left it hooked over a tree branch some twenty feet away. I was unable to drive them away as they converged under the Bloxam box.

  A moment later, I was not concerned for their welfare but for my own. The Bloxam box had a hole in the top through which (discreetly, of course) you were forced to display those parts of your anatomy not generally exposed to public view. The eldest duck looked upwards and quacked with interest. The other two looked up and quacked as well. Were these delectable morsels being displayed to them perhaps edible, a fruit new to their experience? In unison they decided to find out.

  They say that my scream of pain and rage could have been heard in Antananarivo with a brisk following wind. Lee came at a run, but when she saw what was happening she just leant against a tree and had hysterics. Some wives help their husbands in an emergency; others are callous, with an approach to life that the Marquis de Sade would have applauded.

  ‘Get these damn ducks away. Don’t just stand there laughing,’ I roared. ‘They’re trying to turn me into a bloody eunuch.’