The Drunken Forest

by Gerald Durrell

  The other animals, Cai, Foxey, and Pooh, were inclined to look upon Sarah with jealous eyes, for we made such a fuss of her. One day, pottering aimlessly about the camp, she wandered towards the spot where Pooh was tied. Cai and Foxey watched Sarah blundering along to what they thought was going to be the fright of her life. Pooh sat stolidly on his haunches, like a Buddha, patting his stomach with pink paws and watching Sarah’s approach with a thoughtful eye. Being full of low cunning, he waited until she had ambled past, and then, leaning forward, he grabbed a large section of her trailing tail and tried to bite it. Now Sarah looks slow and stupid, but I knew from our nightly games that she could move with great speed when she wanted to. She whirled round, reared up, and bashed Pooh on the head with great force and precision; Pooh, grunting with astonishment, scuttled off and hid in his box. Sarah, however, had tasted blood, and was not going to let her enemy off that easily; fur bristling, she wheeled about, nose in the air, trying to find out where Pooh had gone. Catching a dim glimpse of the box, she proceeded to give it a severe beating, while Pooh cowered inside. Foxey saw her heading in his direction and hastily retreated behind a bush. Cai sat smugly on top of her post, chattering softly to herself. Sarah, as she passed, caught sight of the post and, still being in a bad temper, decided to teach it a lesson. She leapt at it and delivered several uppercuts, and, while the pole swayed wildly, Cai clung to the top, screaming for help. Not until the post was leaning over drunkenly, and Cai was almost hysterical, did Sarah decide that she was the victor and wander off in search of someone to hug. It was the last time any of them tried tricks with Sarah.

  The birds were quite unanimous in their dislike of the little ant-eater. I think that her long, slender snout had a faint resemblance to a snake, and this they disapproved of. I once heard the most terrible commotion in the bird section, and on going to investigate, I discovered that Sarah had somehow escaped from her cage and had her nose stuck through the wire of the seriemas’ cage, to whom she had taken a fancy; the seriemas did not share her friendly attitude, and were screaming shrilly for assistance. As soon as she heard me call, however, she lost interest in the seriemas and came galloping lopsidedly towards me and shinned up my legs as far as my waist, where she settled down with a happy sigh.

  Sarah had been with us some weeks when the first rains of the Chaco winter started. Now was the time when we should have to start thinking about travelling back the thousand odd miles to Buenos Aires to catch our ship. There was still one big job to accomplish before we left, and that was to make our film. I had decided that we would refrain from filming the animals in the collection until the very last moment, for then we should have a larger cast of stars. I had therefore reserved the last three weeks of our stay in the Chaco purely for filming. When this was completed, we would travel down the river to Asunción. That was our plan, but then the blow fell.

  Paula brought in the tea one morning in a state of great excitement, and was so incoherent that it was some time before I could make out what she was talking about. When at last I understood, I laughed long and heartily.

  Jacquie, in a semi-conscious early-morning condition, wanted to know what was amusing me.

  ‘Paula says that there’s a revolution in Asunción,’ I said, chuckling. ‘No, really?’ said Jacquie, joining in my mirth; ‘well, I must say Paraguay’s living up to its reputation.’

  ‘It’s a wonder to me they know who’s in power half the time, they liquidate them so rapidly; I said, with the jovial and unctuous manner of one whose country is too cold-blooded to waste bullets or blood on politics.

  ‘I suppose it won’t affect us in any, way, will it?’ suggested Jacquie, sipping her tea thoughtfully,

  ‘Good Lord, no! It’ll probably all be over in a few hours – you know what it is, instead of football, they have revolutions as the national game here – a few shots fired and everyone’s happy,’ I said. Anyway, I shall go down and find out if the radio station has any news.’

  Puerto Casado boasted the astonishing luxury of a minute radio station which was in contact with the capital. By this means, lists of supplies were broadcast to Asunción and sent up on the next river steamer.

  ‘I’ll go down after breakfast,’ I said, ‘but I shouldn’t be surprised to find it all over by now.’

  I only wish I had been right.

  Rattlesnakes and Revolution

  When I arrived at the radio station after breakfast I asked the radio operator if he had heard which side had scored the winning goal in the revolution. Eyes flashing, arms waving he gave me the latest information, and I suddenly realized that the situation was far from funny. To begin with, Asunción appeared to be in a complete uproar, with indiscriminate street-fighting all over the place. The main centre of the battle was near the police headquarters and the military college, where the Government forces were being besieged by the rebels. Far more serious was the fact that the rebels had also gained control of the airfield, and had put all the planes out of action by removing various vital parts. But, from our point of view, the worst piece of news was that the rebels had commandeered the river shipping, and so there would be no more river steamers of any description until after the revolution was over. This item of news really shook me, for the only way we could get our collection out of the country and down to Buenos Aires was by river transport. The radio operator went on to say that the last time he had tried to contact Asunción there had been no reply, so be presumed that either everyone was in hiding, or else dead.

  I returned to our little house in a much more sober frame of mind and told Jacquie the news. It was a situation with which we were totally unprepared to cope. Quite apart from anything else, our passports and most of our money were down in the capital, and we could do little without them. We sat drinking tea and discussing our plight, while Paula hovered round us commiseratingly, occasionally interjecting a remark which, though obviously kindly meant, generally had a depressing effect on us. When I tried to look on the bright side and suggested that within a few days either the Government forces or the rebels would have won, thus making things easier, Paula proudly informed us that Paraguay had never had such a short revolution; the last one had taken six months to die down. This time perhaps, she suggested kindly, we would have to spend six months in the Chaco. It would, she pointed out, give us plenty of opportunity to increase our collection. Ignoring this, I said that, providing the fighting was over fairly soon, everything would resume its normal course, and we could then get a river steamer down to Buenos Aires. Interrupting this flight of fancy, Paula remarked that she thought this unlikely, as during the last revolution the rebels had, for some obscure tactical reason of their own, promptly sunk all the river craft, thereby disorganizing not only the Government forces but their own as well.

  In desperation I adopted Paula’s attitude of looking on the darkest possible side of the picture, saying that if the worst came to the worst we could make our way across the river into Brazil, and thence overland to the coast. This idea was immediately quashed by both Jacquie and Paula: Jacquie pointed out that we were hardly in a position to undertake a thousand-mile journey through Brazil without passports or money, while Paula said that, during the last revolution, Brazil had armed guards posted on the river-banks, in order to repel any of the rebel forces who attempted to flee from justice. It was quite likely, she added gloomily, that if we attempted to get across the river the Brazilians might mistake us for leaders of the revolution trying to escape. I pointed out, rather acidly, that the leader of a revolution would hardly attempt to flee from justice together with his wife, a baby anteater, several dozen species of birds, snakes, and mammals, and equipment ranging from recording machines to ciné-cameras, but Paula insisted that, on the whole, the Brazilians were not ‘simpáticos’ and that this aspect would probably not occur to the guards.

  After this brisk exchange, we sat in mournful silence for a bit. Then, suddenly, Jacquie bad
a bright idea. There was an American, a laconic, long-limbed individual, who bore a strong resemblance to Gary Cooper and owned a ranch some forty odd miles higher up the river. He had dropped in one day and had told us that if at any time we required any assistance we were not to hesitate to get in touch with him by radio. As he had spent a good many years in Paraguay, Jacquie suggested that we contact him, explain our predicament, and ask for his advice. Once again I hurried down to the radio station and persuaded the operator to put in a call to the American’s ranch.

  Presently his soft drawl came over the loudspeaker, slightly distorted by the roars, craddes, and wheeps of the atmospherics. Hastily I explained why I was worrying him, and asked his advice. His advice was simple and straightforward: get out of the country at the first available opportunity.

  ‘But how can we?’ I protested; ‘there aren’t any river steamers to take the animals on.’

  ‘Son, you’ll just have to leave your animals behind.’

  ‘Well, supposing we did that?’ I asked, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, ‘how do we get out then?’

  ‘I’ve got a plane . . . only a small one, a four-seater . . . Soon as there’s a suitable break I’ll send her over, and then you can beat it. They generally have a parley some time during these revolutions, and it’s my guess they’ll be having one any day now. So be ready; I’ll try and give you some warning, but I may not be able to.’

  Thanks . . . thanks a lot,’ I said, my thoughts whirling.

  ‘That’s O.K. Happy landings,’ said the voice, and then with a series of loud crackles the loudspeaker went dead.

  I thanked the radio operator absent-mindedly, and walked back to the house in the grip of one of the blackest moods of depression I can ever remember. To have worked so hard for so many months and to have assembled such a lovely collection, and then to be told at the end of it that you had to let the whole lot go, simply because some obscure Paraguayan wanted to become President by force, is not the sort of thing calculated to make you feel on top of the world. Jacquie, on being told the news, shared my view, and together we spent half an hour dealing with the ancestry, physical deformation, and purely personal habits of the leaders of the rebels – a sheer waste of time, not helping our position in any way, but it certainly relieved our feelings.

  ‘Well,’ said Jacquie when we had run out of adjectives, ‘which ones are we going to let go?’

  ‘He said to let all of them go,’ I pointed out.

  ‘But we can’t,’ Jacquie protested, ‘– we can’t let them all go. Some of them wouldn’t last two minutes in the wilds. We’ll have to take some with us, even if it means leaving most of our clothing behind.’

  ‘Look, even if we travel naked we can’t take more than three or four of the smaller things.’

  ‘Well, that’s better than nothing.’

  I sighed.

  ‘All right, have it your own way. But that brings us back to the question: which ones do we let go and which ones do we keep?’ We sat and thought about it for a bit.

  ‘We must take Sarah, anyway,’ said Jacquie at length. ‘After all, she’s only a baby, and she couldn’t possibly fend for herself.’

  ‘Yes, we must take her . . . but she’s damned heavy, remember.’

  ‘Then there’s Cai,’ continued Jacquie, warming to her rescue work: ‘we can’t leave her behind . . . and Pooh, poor little chap. If we let them go, they’re so tame they’d go up to the first person they met, and probably get their heads blown off’.

  ‘I must take a pair of orange armadillos, they’re too rare to leave; I said brightening, ‘oh, yes, and the homed toads and those curious black ones.’

  ‘And then there are the cuckoos,’ agreed Jacquie, ‘and the jays . . . They’re far too tame to let go.’

  ‘Wait a minute; I said, coming suddenly down to earth, ‘if we go on like this we’ll be taking the whole damn collection, and there won’t be room for us on the plane.’

  ‘I’m sure just those few wouldn’t weigh much; said Jacquie convincingly, ‘and you could make them some light travelling cages, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I think I could. I might be able to construct something entirely out of wire.’

  Greatly heartened by the thought that we would be able at least to save a few specimens from our collection, we set to work to prepare for our escape. Jacquie packed busily, dividing our belongings into two groups – those things that we simply had to take with us, such as recording machine, films, and so on, and those things that could conveniently be left behind, such as clothing, towels, nets, traps, and so forth. Meanwhile, armed with a pair of shears, a coil of wire, and a roll of small-mesh wire-netting I set to work to try and make some very light yet strong travelling cages that would hold the creatures until we reached Buenos Aires. It was no easy job, for the netting had to be bent into shape, ‘sewn’ up with wire, and then any sharp points had to be felt for and bent over. At the end of two hours I had made one cage large enough to hold Sarah, and my fingers and hands were scratched and torn.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ asked Jacquie, appearing with a most welcome cup of tea.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, surveying my bleeding fingers. ‘I feel as though I’m doing a life sentence in Dartmoor. But I bet picking oakum is child’s play to this.’

  So while I continued to lacerate my hands, Jacquie took each cage as it was finished and covered it with a ‘skin’ of sacking sewn on with a large darning-needle. So, by ten o’dock that night we had enough cages to house those animals we intended to take with us. The cages were feather light, being only sacking and wire-netting, warm and fairly strong. They were, of course, not roomy, but for twenty-four hours the animals would come to no harm in them. The heaviest of the lot was Pooh’s cage, for, knowing his burglar-like ability to break in or out of a cage, I had been forced to use wood in the construction. Tired and depressed, we crawled into bed.

  ‘I’ll start letting the other stuff go tomorrow,’ I said as I switched off the light, and knew, as I said it, that it was not going to be a job I relished.

  The next morning I put off the liberation duty for as long as I could, but eventually I could think of no more excuses for delaying it. The tiger bittern was the first one to be released; his wing had healed perfectly by now, and this, combined with his bad temper, gave me no qualms as to his ability to look after himself. I hauled him, protesting loudly, from his cage, carried him over to the edge of the small swamp that bordered our domain and perched him in a convenient tree. He sat on the branch, swaying drunkenly to and fro, and uttering loud and rather surprised honks. Dracula, the bare-faced ibis, was next on the list. As I carried him over to the swamp he twittered excitedly, but as soon as I placed him in the long grass and walked away he gave a squeak of alarm and scuttled after me. I picked him up and returned him to the swamp and hurried away, while he uttered hysterical squeaks for help.

  I next turned my attention to the parrots and parakeets, and had the greatest difficulty in persuading them to leave their cages. When I eventually got them out, they perched in a tree nearby and refused to move, screaming loudly at intervals. Just at that moment I heard a shrill and triumphant titter and, turning round, I saw Dracula running into the camp clearing, having found his way back. I caught him and again carried him to the swamp, only to discover that the tiger bittern was rapidly approaching camp, flying heavily from tree to tree with a determined expression on his face. Having shooed them both back to the swamp, I set about letting the black-faced ibis and the seriemas go. In my melancholy mood I committed a faux pas by letting both species of seriemas go at once, and before I knew what was happening I was surrounded by a whirling merry-go-round of feathers, and the air was quivering with indignant screams as each seriema tried to prove its superiority over the others. I managed to separate them with the aid of a broom, and hustled them off into the undergrowth
in different directions. Feeling hot, flustered, and not a little indignant that I was receiving so little cooperation from the specimens in my distasteful task, I suddenly discovered that the parrots had seized the opportunity to descend from their trees, and were now sitting in a row on top of their cages, regarding me with pensive eyes, obviously waiting for the doors to be opened so that they could return.

  I felt that I had better ignore the birds for the moment, so I started on the mammals and reptiles. Keeping only the pair we were going to take with us, I rolled all the other armadillos off into the undergrowth. The other species I arranged in a circle round the camp, their noses pointing out in the direction of the great open spaces, and hoped that they would be all right. The reptiles, to my relief, behaved perfectly and showed no inclination to stay, wrig-gling off into the swamp with gratifying rapidity. Feeling that I had done a good morning’s work (considered from the animals’ point of view alone), I went in to have some food.

  Lunch was a gloomy affair, and as soon as it was over we went outside to attend to the rest of our charges. The sight that met our eyes would have been extremely funny if it had not been so depressing.

  In one corner of the camp Dracula, the tiger bittern, and the black-faced ibis were squabbling over a piece of fat that Pooh had discarded. Round the pile of unwashed pots the three-banded armadillos foraged, like a troupe of animated cannonballs. The seriernas paced like sentries round the empty cages, and Flap-arse was pacing to and fro in an agitated manner, looking like a schoolmaster whose entire class has played truant. The parrots and parrakeets still sat in a hopeful row on top of their cages, with the exception of two who, obviously tired of waiting for me to let them in again, had taken the law into their own hands, gnawed through the wire-netting front, and gained access to the cage that way They sat on their perch glowering at us hungrily and giving those curious asthmatic grunts that some Amazon parrots use to show their indignation. Jacquie and I sat down on a box and surveyed them hopelessly.