Archie McKay was impatient for something to happen; he had waited a long time for this moment, almost a lifetime it seemed. He shrugged, what did a few more minutes matter? He was here now. Leaning back in the lumpy cane chair he stared at the wooden ceiling; a small green gecko was traversing the roof beam and he watched its progress with interest. It made small chirruping noises, barely audible above the slow whirr of the ceiling fan, which was doing nothing to reduce the temperature inside the wooden building. The gecko’s tongue flicked out, catching an insect, which had been careless enough to wander into its orbit. Archie lost interest as the need for a smoke became more demanding. He would really have liked a decent single malt, but this was a Muslim country and on this tiny island there was no hope of such a forbidden pleasure. He left the gecko to its hunting and went outside. The warm tropical breeze lifted his thinning hair as he leaned against the wooden wall of the hut, which had the grand title of Sanctuary Headquarters. He gazed at the pattern of light that spilled out onto the beach and lit a cigarette; as he slowly drew the smoke deep into his lungs he reflected on how it had all started.
Even now he could still smell the musky animal odour of that section of the covered market in the town where he had grown up; the section devoted to pets. Every Friday and Saturday this area was full of stalls selling pet food, hay and straw for bedding and different kinds of small pets. His sister, Marion, always headed straight for the puppies, kittens and rabbits. Occasionally, in the hopes of a sale, a stall-holder would let her hold a soft kitten or a squirming puppy. But Archie hadn’t been interested in furry creatures; they were sissy things for girls. What he liked were the reptiles, they were the real boys’ stuff. In those days there had been no laws about the sale of tortoises and every week there was a stall alive with the bizarre creatures. Archie was fascinated by the wonderful concentric patterns on their shells. Being of a somewhat lazy disposition himself he admired the way they ambled around their enclosure, stopping occasionally to chew languorously on dandelion leaves. Their beady eyes stared out at him unblinkingly from scaly heads, which they would quickly retract into their shells if Archie attempted to touch them. But sometimes a man came with snakes, which writhed under a glass cover and Archie would watch them, utterly spellbound, as they coiled around the deep tray, making intricate patterns in the sand which covered the base. He longed to own a snake.
Marion had got her kitten, but their mother would have nothing to do with Archie’s demands for a snake. She was a determined lady, and he knew he would never win her over. However she was very fair and willing to make a compromise. Archie could have a tortoise. The young reptile was christened Toby, though whether it was a male or female tortoise no one ever discovered. It spent nine summers in Archie’s garden, grazing contentedly on the small square lawn, and from time to time trespassing into the flower beds for the occasional treat of a pansy or salvia to vary his diet. Each autumn a box was prepared for his hibernation. Archie lined it with newspapers and hay, placed Toby inside, then loosely piled the rest of the hay on top of him. The box was put in a corner of the garden shed and forgotten about until the spring. Until one spring when Toby failed to wake up.
Archie was stirred from his reverie by a voice from inside the building. He dropped his cigarette and ground it into the sand. Something was happening at last. Putting his head round the door he strained his ears to learn what news the crackling walkie-talkie was delivering. The ranger at the desk shook his head, ‘Nothing yet, but it won’t be long,’ he pronounced. Archie could feel the slow trickle of sweat between his shoulder blades so took up station outside again. The gentle lap of the waves reminded him of his new home by the sea. Not a tropical paradise like this one but it suited Archie very well, the small isolated cottage with the patch of garden running down to the sea loch on the Isle of Skye.
After Toby’s demise Archie moved on to terrapins. By then he had left home and lived in a flat shared with his best mate so having a snake was an option, but he had lost interest in them. His passion now was terrapins. The testudines were a much more interesting branch of the reptile family, being far older than snakes and lizards, older too that crocodiles, and less likely to scare off girlfriends, which by now was an important factor in Archie’s life.
He kept the aquarium in which the terrapins lived scrupulously clean. He had quickly learnt the disadvantages of not doing so as Colin, his flatmate, had threatened to throw the lot out of the window when they began to smell. When he finally moved into his own home Archie had devoted a whole room to his pets and bred them successfully. He made a study of the species and had yearned to have some bigger members of the family. He watched avidly any television programmes that featured tortoises or turtles of any kind, but knew that he would have to be content with owning only their smaller brethren. But if he couldn’t own them then the next best thing was to see them in the wild; that was something he could do.
So Archie made his plans, and by the time he retired he had accumulated a healthy savings pot and his civil service pension was generous enough to enable him to travel. He had married, but his wife had died some years ago and there were no children to consider, so Archie felt able to indulge himself. First he had taken a trip to the Galapagos Islands to see the giant tortoises there. The following year he’d taken a holiday in Florida to marvel at the huge leatherback turtles with their rubbery shells, very different from their cousins with hard brittle carapaces. There were box turtles, snapping turtles, Hawksbill turtles and green turtles, as well as numerous species of tortoise, which Archie had learnt about and could talk for hours on if given the chance. What he had never before seen were turtles in the wild laying their eggs, and at last he was here on a tiny island off the coast of Borneo, his most distant venue yet, and the most remote. All his other jaunts had enabled him to retire to a comfortable hotel, or a cabin on board a cruise ship, but this was quite different. Earlier that day he had hired a motorboat from the quay in Sandakan and been delivered to the island to spend the night in a hut with no electricity or running water. He had planned the trip carefully to coincide with the main breeding season of the green turtles and this was the culmination of his journey.
Ideally Archie would have liked to enjoy the experience without the company of half a dozen mildly interested tourists. For him their presence was an intrusion into what he felt to be an almost religious rite. He leaned back against the hut, its wall still warm from the heat of the day, and gazed up into the black sky. The moon had not yet risen and in the inky darkness he could see the stars clearly. This close to the equator they seemed different from back home, but he was no astronomer, and couldn’t identify the constellations picked out in the vast expanse of sky. He heard the walkie-talkie crackle again; another false alarm, he thought.
But the burst of activity and excited voices from within told him otherwise. He quickly went inside to retrieve the camera he had left on his seat and, fingers trembling with anticipation, he slid it into the roomy pocket of his cargo pants. The ranger gave instructions to the assembled group: no talking, walk in single file, keep strictly to the paths. ‘Like being a bloody school-kid,’ someone muttered, but Archie didn’t care, this was what he had come for and if it meant being treated like a school-kid so be it. The small group assembled themselves behind one of the rangers and a second one brought up the rear of the party. Archie had made sure he was first in line behind the lead ranger. Using torches to pick their way through the darkness they set off to the beach on the other side of the small island. As he plodded along following the ranger Archie began to feel large spots of rain on his head, and in an instant the entire group were deluged by a sudden tropical storm. Some members of the party were eager to turn back, but Archie was glad the rangers insisted they press on or they would miss the event, the event he had been waiting half his life to observe. Rain poured down in opaque sheets, soaking the little group to the point where they could wring the water out of their cl
othing. But as suddenly as it had started the rain stopped. With their soaked clothes clinging to their backs the group trudged on. No one wore much: shorts, a long-sleeved shirt, and a wide-brimmed hat as protection from the earlier stark glare of the sun, and now insulation from the dripping trees. The storm had left in its wake the gift of a cooling breeze which brought with it a salty tang from the ocean. It rustled the papery fronds of palm which edged the beach and the pathway from the compound, drying the clothing on the backs of the wearers. It was now possible to walk barefoot across the sand, a feat unimaginable only a few hours before. The group trod the path cautiously, a slow procession of figures that resembled a snaking trail of glow worms as their torchlight pricked the darkness.
The trees and undergrowth thinned out as they reached the beach. Archie’s heart beat faster as he tried to look ahead to see what was going on. In the faint torchlight he spotted one of the rangers bending over a dark shape in the sand. From the sea’s edge to where the ranger crouched he could see a track which looked as if it might have been made by a giant tractor tyre.
‘That’s the track made by the turtle as she came ashore,’ the ranger told them. Archie looked from the shoreline to where the man was standing and saw, with awe, the huge female turtle resting in a hollow she had dug out of the sand with her flippers. The visitors stood a respectful distance from the creature as one of the rangers took a tape measure from his pocket and placed it across the width of her shell. ‘One metre exactly,’ he announced proudly. ‘She has finished laying now.’ Between them the two rangers gently lifted the turtle out of her hollow and laid her reverently on the sand, then began to transfer the eggs into a large plastic bucket they had brought with them. ‘Who would like to hold one?’ Archie was the first to step forward. The ranger placed the egg into the palm of his hand. It was completely spherical and the size of a golf ball, but with a soft shell. ‘It’s rubbery like a peeled hard-boiled egg,’ Archie whispered to the others. One by one they all picked up eggs, and had soon transferred over a hundred from the nest to the bucket. The turtle was replaced in her hollow to rest.
‘She’ll stay there for an hour or so, cover the nest hole with sand, then return to the sea. Her job is complete; she will have nothing more to do with her offspring.’
‘There are times when I wish I could do that,’ muttered one of the visitors, ‘No teenage tantrums to cope with.’
The group trailed back to the ‘nursery’ at the sanctuary building. The nursery was an area of sand divided into sections surrounded by wire netting buried deep into the ground.
‘We move them up here to protect them from predators,’ explained the ranger. They watched as the men placed the eggs in a hole in the sand, covered it up and stuck in a small wooden post labelled with that day’s date. They were then ushered to a separate section of the nursery. Another respectful circle was formed. ‘These were laid and transferred here fifty-two days ago,’ the ranger told them, ‘they almost always hatch at night as there is less chance of their being caught by a sea bird for a tasty snack. We’ll not have long to wait’.
‘It’s just like a children’s television programme back home,’ one of the English women whispered, ‘here’s one I made earlier.’ Her companion giggled. Like worshippers at some mystical ritual the group waited expectantly. Their tense anticipation was palpable. They did not have to wait long, for within minutes of their arrival the sand at their feet began to quiver and roil. Slowly the first tiny black hatchling pushed its head from its grainy dungeon and squirmed its way to the surface. It paused for a moment, taking stock of its new freedom, then scuttled a few feet away from where it had emerged and paused for a moment, as if to wait for its companions. Almost at once it was followed by a second and then a third of its siblings, until there were dozens of them scurrying around in the pen like small, round clockwork toys, all programmed to take on the hazards of life in the ocean.
The rangers quickly gathered up the tiny hatchlings and allowed the visitors to hold them. Archie took the one offered to him and held it firmly between his finger and thumb. The shell was still soft. The tiny creature waved it legs around and Archie, afraid he might drop it, reluctantly placed it, with the rest of the hatchlings, in the bucket recently occupied by the latest batch of eggs. The members of the party retraced their steps to the beach. The powerful beam of the ranger’s torch made a pathway down to the softly breaking surf. His companion carefully tipped the bucket and the crowd of tiny creatures poured out and, following the beam of light, scurried down the sand and into the water. Archie marvelled that only a few of them would make it to adulthood, and perhaps four or five years hence just one of the females might return to this beach to repeat the process all over again.
He felt rather wistful as they all made their way back to the sanctuary. It was now well past midnight and the heat and excitement of the day had tired him. ‘Must be getting a bit old for these jaunts,’ he thought, ‘perhaps this one will be my last.’ The idea didn’t bother him; anything else would be an anticlimax after tonight’s experience. Tomorrow he would be flying home to his little cottage by the loch.
Goodnights were called as the members of the party made their way to their cabins. Archie found his and closed the door behind him. By torchlight he pulled off his shirt and hung it over the back of the chair, the only furniture in the tiny room apart from the bunk. He carefully stepped out of his cargo pants. But before folding them up he removed his camera, replete with dozens of photographs, from one of the pockets. Then sliding his hand into the other pocket he tenderly lifted out two small white spheres, wrapped them in his handkerchief and slipped them under the clean shirt in his holdall. He climbed onto the bunk and switched off his torch. Feeling intensely satisfied he pulled the thin sheet over his legs and was asleep within minutes, dreaming of a quiet Scottish sea loch populated with green turtles.
Emily Street
John Hawke
The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley Page 24