The Drunken Forest

by Gerald Durrell

  One of the nicest things about the jays was their incessant chattering, for it was always subdued in tone. They would spend hours on their perches, facing each other with raised eyebrows, carrying on the most involved conversations in a series of squawks, wheezes, trills, chuckles, and yaps, managing to get the most astonishing variety of expression into these sounds. They were great mimics, and in a few days had added the barking of the village dogs to their repertoire, together with the squawk of triumph of a laying hen, cockerels crowing, Pooh the crab-eating raccoon’s yarring cries, and even the metallic tapping of Julius Caesar Centurian’s hammer. Just after the jays had finished their breakfast and settled down to a good gossip, the variety of sounds that came from their cage was amazing, and you would have thought the cage contained an assortment of twenty or thirty different species of birds, instead of the solitary pair. Before we had kept them long, they had mastered the cries of nearly every creature in the collection and were becoming very cocky about it. But with the arrival of Sarah Huggersack a new noise was added to the camp chorus, and it was one that the jays found impossible to master.

  Paula appeared in the living-room one day bearing the luncheon tray in her brawny arms at double her normal speed. Almost inundating me with hot soup, she asked if I would please go out to the kitchen, as an Indian had brought a bicho, an animal of enormous stature and indescribable ferocity. No, she didn’t know what sort of bicho it was – it was inside a sack and she hadn’t seen it, but it was tearing the sack to pieces and she feared for her life. Outside the back door I found a young Indian boy squatting on his haunches, chewing a straw, and watching a small sack which was busily shuffling round in vague circles and snuffling at intervals. My only clue to the contents of the sack was a very large, curved claw sticking through at one place, but even this did not help me, for I could not, offhand, think of an animal small enough to fit in the sack, and yet at the same time big enough to possess such a claw. I surveyed the youth, who grinned back at me and bobbed his head, so that his long, straight, soot-black hair rippled.

  ‘Buenos dias, señor.’

  ‘Buenos dias. Tiene un bicho?’ I asked, pointing at the waltzing sack.

  ‘Si, si, señor, un bicho muy lindo,’ he replied earnestly.

  I decided the best thing to do was to open the sack and see the creature, but first I wanted to know what it was. I did not want to take any chances with such a claw.

  ‘Es bravo?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no señor,’ said the Indian, smiling, ‘es manso — es chiquitito — muy manso.’

  I didn’t feel my command of Spanish was sufficient for me to point out that because a creature was young it need not necessarily be very tame Some of the most impressive scars I possess are legacies from baby animals that didn’t look capable of killing a cockroach, Hoping for the best, and trying to remember where the penicillin ointment was, I grabbed the gyrating sack and undid the mouth. There was a pause, and then from between the folds of sacking appeared a long, curved, icicle-shaped head and snout, with small, neat, furry ears, and, embedded in the ash-grey fur, two bleary little eyes that looked like soaked currants. There was another pause and then the tiny, prim mouth at the extreme end of the snout opened, and about eight inches of slender greyish-pink tongue curved out gracefully. It slid back inside again, the mouth opened a bit wider and from it came a sound that defies description. It was midway between the growl of a dog and the raucous bellow of a calf, with just the faintest suggestion of a ship’s foghorn suffering from laryngitis. The sound was so powerful that Jacquie came out on to the veranda, looking startled. By this time the head had retired into the sack, except for the end of the snout. Jacquie frowned at it.

  ‘What in the world’s that thing,’ she asked.

  That,’ I said happily, ‘is the end of a baby giant ant-eater’s snout.’

  ‘Is it responsible for that ghastly noise?’

  ‘Yes, it was just greeting me in ant-eater fashion.’

  Jacquie sighed lugubriously. ‘It isn’t enough to have the jays and parrots deafening us all day long, now we’ve got to add a sort of bassoon to it,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, it will be quiet enough when it’s settled down,’ I said airily, and the creature thrust its head out of the sack, as if in response to my remark, and let forth another bassoon solo.

  I opened the sack further and peered down into it. I was astonished that such a small creature could produce such a volume of sound, for from the tip of its curved snout to the end of its tail the ant-eater measured two and a half feet.

  ‘Why, she’s minute,’ I said in amazement; ‘she couldn’t be more than a week or so old.’

  Jacquie moved over, looked into the sack, and was lost.

  ‘Oh, isn’t she adorable?’ she crooned, taking it for granted that it was a female. ‘Poor little thing . . . Here, you pay, and I’ll take her inside.’

  She picked up the sack and carried it gently into the house, leaving me to argue with the Indian.

  When I re-entered the house, I tried to get the creature out of the sack, but this was not an easy task, for the long, curved claws on the front paws clung to the sacking with a vice-like grip. In the end it took the combined efforts of Jacquie and myself to remove her. She was the first really young giant anteater I had seen, and I was surprised to find that she was, in almost every way, a miniature replica of the adult. The chief difference was that her fur was short, and she had no mane of long hair on her back, but merely a ridge of bristles. Her tail, too, gave no indication of the enormous shaggy plume it was to become; it looked just like the blade of a canoe-paddle covered with hair. To my consternation, I found that the central great claw on her left foot had been ripped away and was hanging by a thread. We had to cut this away carefully and put disinfectant on the raw toe, an operation which seemed to cause her no discomfort, for she lay across my lap, clasping a large section of my trouser leg with one claw, while we doctored the other. I thought she was doomed to go through life with only one large claw, but I was mistaken, for it eventually grew again.

  In the sack and on my knee she had behaved with great self-assurance and aplomb, but as soon as she was placed on the floor, she staggered round in vague circles, bellowing wildly, until she discovered Jacquie’s leg, and with an inarticulate bray of delight clutched it and endeavoured to shin up it. As the trousers Jacquie was wearing were thin, the effect of the little animal’s claws was considerable, and it took us some time to unhook her. During this process she attached herself to my arm, like a leech, and before I could stop her she had shinned up and arranged herself across my shoulders like a fox fur, digging her claws into my neck and back to prevent herself slipping, her long snout on one side of my face and her tail on the other. Any attempt to remove her from this perch was received with indignant snorts and a fiercer tightening of her grip, and this was so painful that I was forced to leave her where she was while we ate our lunch. She dozed intermittently while I drank my lukewarm soup, and I found that my gestures had to be very slow and deliberate, or she would suddenly awake in a panic and dig her grappling irons in, almost decapitating me. Things were complicated by Paula, who refused to come into the room. I was in no position to argue, for any incautious movement of my head put my jugular vein in grave danger Fortified by food, we made another attempt to remove the ant-eater from my shoulders, but after my shirt had been ripped in five places and my neck in three, we abandoned the project. The difficulty was that as soon as Jacquie had prised one set of claws loose and turned to the next lot the first set would regain the ground they had lost. I began to feel like Sindbad during his association with the Old Man of the Sea. Eventually an idea struck me:

  ‘Get a sack full of grass, darling, and when you’ve got one paw loose, let her take hold of the sack.’

  This simple stratagem worked perfectly, and we lowered the stuffed sack to the floor, with the ant-eater clasp
ing it desperately, a blissful expression on her face.

  ‘What are we going to call her?’ asked Jacquie, as she dealt with my honourable wounds.

  ‘How about Sarah?’ I suggested; ‘she looks like a Sarah, some-how . . . I know – let’s call her Sarah Huggersack.’

  So, Sarah Huggersack entered our lives, and a more charming and lovable personality I have rarely encountered. Up to the time I had met Sarah, I had had a fair amount of experience with giant ant-eaters, for I had captured some adults on another collecting trip to British Guiana, but I had never considered them to be beasts that were overburdened with intelligence or scintillating qualities. Sarah, however, converted me.

  To begin with, she was tremendously vocal, and would not hesitate to blare her head off if she could not get her own way, whereas adult ant-eaters rarely make any sound louder than a hiss. Keep her waiting for her food, or refuse to cuddle her when she demanded affection, and Sarah battered you into submission by sheer lung-power. Although I could not have resisted buying her, I had qualms about it, for ant-eaters, having such a restricted diet in the wild state, are not the easiest things to establish on a substitute diet in captivity, even when adult. To take on the job of hand-rearing a week-old baby, therefore, was a very doubtful proposition, to say the least. Right from the start we had trouble over her bottle: the teats we had were too large for Sarah to hold comfortably in her tiny mouth. Paula made a frantic search which resulted in a very battered teat being found in some village house. This was the same size as ours, but had been used, and so was soft, and Sarah approved of it. She grew so attached to this teat, in fact, that even when we once again had a variety to offer her, she refused to drink from them and clung obstinately to the old one, sucking it so vigorously that it changed from scarlet to pink, and then to white; it became so limp that it was difficult to get it to stay on the bottle, and the hole enlarged to such an extent that, instead of a gentle stream, a positive flood of milk used to pour down Sarah’s eager throat.

  It was fascinating to have caught Sarah so young, for I could watch her develop day by day, and she taught me a great deal about her family. The use of her claws was an example. The front feet of an ant-eater are so designed that the animal walks on its knuckles, the two large claws thus pointing inwards and upwards. The claws, of course, are primarily used for breaking open the tough ant nests, to obtain food. I have also seen the adults using their claws as a comb for their fur. In Sarah’s case, in her early stages, her claws were used solely to grip with, for the female ant-eater carries her young perched on her back. An adult, with its claw bent back against the palms like the blade of a penknife, can of course get a tremendous grip in this way, and so I was not surprised to find that Sarah, once she had fastened on to something, was extremely difficult to dislodge. As I have said, the slightest movement on the part of the thing to which she was clinging would cause her to tighten her grip convulsively. Thus, carrying her baby on her back must be an extremely painful undertaking for the female ant-eater.

  Sarah also used her claws when feeding. She liked to grip a finger with one claw and keep the other raised in a sort of salute as she sucked at her bottle. Periodically, about once every fifteen seconds, she would use this claw to squeeze the teat. The teat suffered in consequence, and I was always expecting her claw to go right through it; but I couldn’t break her of the habit. The female ant-eater has, therefore, to put up with the grip on the back when carrying her young, and then submit to what must be a painful assault at feeding time. Some indication of Sarah’s grip can be gathered from the fact that I once placed an empty matchbox in the palm of her front paw, and when she tightened her grip – but not to the full extent – her claw went straight through the box. Then she put on full pressure and the box was flattened. The extraordinary thing was that I had placed the box edgewise on, and not flat, so there was quite considerable resistance.

  The most worrying time with any baby wild animal is the first week, for, although it may be feeding well, you cannot tell if the milk you are giving it agrees with it. So for the first seven days or so its bowel motions become of absorbing interest to you, and you have to check them, to see that they are neither too hard nor too soft, and that the consistency is more or less normal. Diarrhoea or constipation indicates that the food is too rich or perhaps does not contain enough nourishment, and you have to vary the food accordingly. Sarah, during her first week, nearly drove us mad. To begin with, her motions were small and of a putty-like consistency, but what was more worrying still was that she only relieved herself once in two days. Thinking that she was not perhaps getting enough nourishment from her milk, I increased the vitamin content, but this made no difference at all. I thought it might help to feed her more often, and so we increased the number of feeds per day, but she still stuck rigidly to her forty-eight-hour routine. The constipation might be due to insufficient exercising, though a young ant-eater carried on its mother’s back would receive little in the way of direct exercise, but might obtain a certain amount when the mother moved around. So, for half an hour every day Jacquie and I would walk slowly to and fro, while Sarah, honking indignantly, would shuffle behind, trying to climb up our legs. But this enforced exercise made no difference, and she so obviously and heartily disapproved of it that we gave it up. So she would spend all day lying in her box, clutching her sackful of straw and dozing, while her stomach grew more and more bloated. Then would come the great moment, she would relieve herself, her stomach would assume normal proportions, and for a few hours – until the next feed – she would have a slim and sylph-like figure. As this rather curious biological functioning appeared to do her no harm, I eventually ceased to worry about it. I came to the conclusion that all baby ant-eaters, when they are young, do this. I believe this must be so, for when Sarah was a little older and started to sleep without her sack, her bowels started working normally.

  Sarah’s one delight in life was to be hugged, and to hug in return. If I held her to my chest and supported her with one arm, I found that she clung with less painful tenacity; but her favourite perch was always across my shoulders, and no matter where she started off, she slowly crept upwards, a few inches at a time, hoping that I would not notice, until she was lying across my shoulders. At first she could not bear to be put on the ground and would bellow forlornly. When you picked her up, you could feel her heart beating like a trip hammer, and she would clutch you frantically, She did not object to being on the ground providing she could hang on to some part of you, even your foot, for it gave her a feeling of security.

  When she was about a month old, she grew less scared of being on the ground, but she liked to feel that Jacquie or I was near. Her sight, like that of all ant-eaters, was very bad and if you moved more than five feet away from her, she could not see you, even if you moved. Only by smell, or by hearing you call, could she locate you. Stand still and silent, and Sarah would revolve like a top, her long snout pointing frantically in all directions, trying to find you.

  The older she grew, the more skittish she became. Gone now were the days when you lifted her out of the cage, lying like some Roman potentate on her sack, to give her food. The moment the door of her cage was opened she would rush out like a tornado, breathing deeply with excitement, and clutch at her bottle so eagerly you would have thought it was the first food she had seen for weeks. She was always most lively in the evenings, and it was after her pint of supper that she felt most energetic. Her stomach bulging like a hairy balloon, you would have to work her into the mood for one of her boxing matches by pulling her tail gently. She would peer at you shortsightedly over her shoulder, and one hefty forepaw would be brought slowly up until it was raised above her head; then, with amazing speed, she would whirl round and try to clout you. If you showed no further interest in her, she would shuffle past you several times with a preoccupied air, trailing her tail temptingly near. Grab it, and pull a second time, and Sarah would change her tactics: this time sh
e would whirl round, stand on her hind legs, with arms raised above her head as though about to dive, and then fall flat on her face, in the hope that your hand would be underneath her. These exchanges would continue for some time until Sarah had worked off all her surplus energy, and then another stage in the game would be reached. You were supposed to lay her on her back and tickle her ribs, while she, in ecstasy, would pluck at her tummy with her long claws. When we were exhausted, we would proclaim her the winner, by picking her up and holding her under the arms, whereupon she would put both paws straight up in the air and interlock the claws over her head in the usual champ manner. She grew to like these evening romps so much that if for some reason we were forced to forgo them one evening, Sarah would sulk all next day.