The Drunken Forest

by Gerald Durrell

  ‘And what will you do now?’ asked Bebita.

  ‘Well, we’ve got a few days left before the ship sails. We’ll just have to try and get as much stuff in that time as we can.’

  ‘You will want to go out into the campo?’ she asked.

  ‘If it’s possible.’

  ‘I will ask Maria Mercedes if she will let you go down to her estancia.’

  ‘D’you think she would?’

  ‘But naturally, began Bebita, ‘she’s . . .’

  ‘I know . . . she’s a friend of yours.’

  So it was arranged that we take the train from Buenos Aires out to Monasterio, some forty miles away. Near here lay Secunda, the estancia of the De Sotos. Here Rafael and his brother Carlos would be waiting to help us.

  The Rhea Hunt

  The village of Monasterio lay some forty miles from Buenos Aires, and we travelled there by train. Once we had left the last straggling houses of the capital behind, the pampa stretched on either side of the track, limitless and frosted with dew. Along the edge of the track grew a wide swathe of convolvulus, the flowers a brilliant electric blue, growing so thickly that they all but obscured the heart-shaped leaves.

  Monasterio turned out to be a small village that looked like a Hollywood filmset for a Western film. A straggle of square houses lined a street that was muddy, deeply lined with wheel-ruts and the marks of horses’ hooves. On the corner stood the village store and tavern, its shelves lined with an incredible quantity of merchandise, from cigarettes to gin, from rat-traps to khaki drill. Outside this store several horses were tethered to a fence, while inside their owners drank and gossiped. They were on the whole short, rather stocky men with brown faces, sun-crinkled, eyes as black as jet, and large rather Victorian moustaches stained with nicotine. They were wearing the typical peon’s outfit: wrinkled, black half-boots with small spurs; bombachas, the baggy trousers that hang down over the top of the boot like plus-fours; blouse-like shirts with a brightly coloured handkerchief knotted round the throat, and perched on their heads were the small, black pork-pie hats with narrow brims turned up in front, held on to the head by an elastic band round the back of the head. Their broad leather belts were studded with silver crowns, stars, and other decorations, and from each hung a short but serviceable knife.

  As we entered the store they turned to stare at us, not rudely, but with interest. In reply to our greeting in bad Spanish, they grinned broadly and replied courteously. I bought some cigarettes, and we hung around the store, waiting for Carlos and Rafael to appear.

  Presently there was a jingling of harness, the clop of hooves and the scrunch of wheels, and a small dog-cart came lurching down the road; and in it was our erstwhile interpreter and his brother Carlos. Rafael greeted us with overwhelming enthusiasm, his spectacles flashing like a lighthouse, and introduced us to his brother. Carlos was taller than Rafael, and gave the erroneous impression of being portly. His pale, calm face had a faintly Asiatic look about it, with small dark eyes and glossy black hair. While Rafael hopped about like an excited crow, talking fast and almost incomprehensibly, Carlos quietly and methodically loaded our bags into the cart and then sat patiently waiting for us to climb in. When we were installed he slapped the horses’ rumps with the reins, clucked at them affectionately, and the cart trundled down the road. We drove for about half an hour, the road lying as straight as a wand across the vast expanse of grass. Here and there a herd of some hundred head of cattle grazed slowly, knee-deep in the pasture, and over them wheeled the spur-winged plovers on black-and-white wings. In the ditches at the roadside, filled with water and lush plants, ducks fed in small flocks, and rose with a clap of wings as we passed. Presently, Carlos pointed ahead to where a wood of dark trees lay – a black reef across the green of the pampa.

  ‘That is Secunda,’ he said, smiling at us, ‘ten minutes we’ll arrive there.’

  ‘I hope we’ll like it,’ I said jokingly.

  Rafael turned to me, his eyes wide with shocked expression behind his glasses.

  ‘Migosh!’ he said, aghast at such a thought, ‘of course you will like, Gerry. Secunda is our estancia.’

  Secunda was a long, low, whitewashed house squatting elegantly between the huge lake on one hand and a thick wood of eucalyptus and cedar of Lebanon on the other. From the back windows you looked out over the placid grey waters of the lake with its faint green rim of pampa; and from the front you looked out at a formal Victorian garden, the clipped box hedges lining the weed-grown path, the small well, its mouth nearly choked with ferns and moss. In odd corners, among the geometrical flower beds littered with a glowing mass of fallen oranges, the pale statues glimmered in the shade of the cedars. On the lake the black-necked swans swam in droves, like drifting ice-packs on the steel-grey surface, and groups of spoonbills fed among the reed-beds, like heaps of roses among the green. In the cool garden humming-birds hung purring over the well, and among the orange trees and on the path strutted the oven-birds, with inflated chests; and on the flower beds minute grey doves with mauve eyes fed hurriedly and secretively. There was a silence and peace here of a lost and forgotten world, a silence broken only by the staccato cry of the oven-birds, or the soft stammer of wings as the tiny doves flew up into the eucalyptus.

  After we had settled in and unpacked our things, we assembled in the living room for a conference about our plan of campaign. The first thing I wanted to do was to try to film the rhea, the South American equivalent of the African ostrich. Secunda was one of the few estancias within easy reach of Buenos Aires which still had wild flocks of these great birds. I had mentioned this to Rafael in Buenos Aires, and now I asked him what chance there was of locating a flock and filming it.

  ‘Do not worry,’ said Rafael complacently, ‘Carlos and I have fix everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Carlos, ‘we go look for the ñandu this afternoon.’

  ‘Also, I think maybe you like to film the way the peons catch the ñandu, no?’ asked Rafael.

  ‘How do they catch them?’

  ‘The old way with the boleadoras . . . you know, the three balls on a string.’

  ‘Good Lord! yes,’ I said enthusiastically ‘I’d love to film that.’

  ‘It is all arrange; said Carlos. ‘This afternoon we go in the cart, the peons go on horses. We find ñandu, the peons catch them, you film them. It is good?’

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said; ‘and if we don’t get them today, can we try tomorrow?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Rafael.

  ‘We will try and try until we find them,’ said Carlos, and the two brothers beamed at each other.

  After lunch the small cart appeared, its wheels scrunching softly on the damp gravel. Carlos was driving, slapping the grey horses’ buttocks gently with the reins. He pulled up opposite the veranda, jumped to the ground, and walked towards me; the big, fat greys stood with drooping heads, champing thoughtfully on their bits.

  ‘You ready, Gerry?’ inquired Carlos.

  ‘Yes, I’m ready. Have the others gone on?’

  ‘Yes, they and Rafael have taken horses . . . I get six peons. Is that good?’

  ‘Fine. All we want now is my wife,’ I said, gazing round hopefully.

  Carlos sat down on the wall and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Always we wait for womans,’ he said philosophically.

  A large yellow butterfly drifted over the grey’s heads, pausing by their ears as if struck with the thought that they might turn out to be a variety of hairy arum. The greys nodded their heads vigorously, and the butterfly flew off in its drunken, zigzag way. A humming-bird sped past the dark cedars, stopped suddenly in its own length, flew backwards for six inches, turned, and dived at a low swinging cedar branch, where it captured a spider with a minute squeak of triumph, and then shot off between the orange trees. Jacquie appeared on the veranda.

 
‘Hullo!’ she said brightly ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Carlos and I in unison.

  ‘Now, are you sure you’ve got everything? The ciné, the Rollei, film, exposure meter, lens hood, tripod?’

  ‘Yes, everything,’ I said smugly; ‘nothing left out, nothing forgotten.’

  ‘What about the umbrella?’ she inquired.

  ‘Damn, no. I forgot the umbrella.’ I turned to Carlos. ‘You haven’t got an umbrella I could borrow, have you?’

  ‘Umbrella?’ echoed Carlos, mystified.

  ‘Yes, an umbrella.’

  ‘What is this umbrella?’ asked Carlos.

  It’s extremely difficult to think of a good description of an umbrella at a moment’s notice.

  ‘It’s one of those things you use when it’s raining,’ I said.

  ‘It folds up,’ said Jacquie.

  ‘You open it out again when it rains.’

  ‘It’s like a mushroom.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Carlos, his face clearing; ‘I know.’

  ‘Have you got one?’

  Carlos gave me a reproachful look.

  ‘Of course . . . I tell you we have everything.’

  He disappeared into the house, and returned carrying a Japanese paper parasol decked out in gay colours, with a circumference about half that of a bicycle wheel.

  ‘It is good?’ he asked, twirling it proudly so that the colours ran together.

  ‘You haven’t got anything bigger, have you?’

  ‘Bigger? No, no bigger. What you want this for, Gerry?’

  ‘To cover the camera, so that the sun doesn’t make the film too hot.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Carlos. ‘Well, this will be good. I will hold it.’

  We climbed into the little cart, and Carlos slapped the massive grey rumps with the flat of the reins and chirruped. The greys sighed deeply and sorrowfully and lurched forward. The drive was lined with giant eucalyptus trees, with their bark peeling off in huge twisted strips, showing the gleaming white trunk beneath. In the branches were massive structures, huge matted haystack-like collections of twigs, the tenement nests of the Quaker parrakeets. These slender grass-green birds flew chattering and screaming through the branches as we passed below, and swooped, glittering in the sunshine, into the entrance holes of their enormous communal nests. ‘Eeee-hup! eeee-hup!’ sang Carlos falsetto, and the greys broke into a shambling trot, snorting affrontedly. We reached the end of the long, tree-lined drive, and there before us lay the pampa, glistening and golden in the afternoon sun. The greys pulled the cart over the dew-soaked grass, weaving in and out among the giant thistles, each standing stiffly, as tall as a man on horseback, like spiky and weird candelabra with the bright purple flame of the flower on each branch. A burrowing owl, like a little grey ghost, did a dance above the mouth of its burrow as we passed: two steps one way, two steps the other; pause, to stare with golden eyes; shake the head from side to side, bob up and down rapidly; then a leap off the ground and a swift circling flight on wings as soft and silent as a cloud.

  The cart rumbled and staggered on and, ahead, the pampa stretched to the horizon, a flat, placid sea of golden grass, shadowed in places where the thistles grew more thickly. Here and there, like a small dark wave on that smooth expanse, a small copse of wind-tangled trees gave shade to the cattle. The sky was early morning blue, and great puffy cumulus-clouds moved across it with the speed and dignity of albino snails on a pale window-pane. The thistles grew thicker, and the horses had to weave more and more, to avoid bumping into them and retaining a bellyful of spikes. The wheels crushed the brittle plants down with a noise like miniature musketry. A hare leapt from under the greys’ thudding hooves and loped off in a curving run before freezing again and melting into the brownish haze of thistles. Far ahead we could see tiny dark shapes spotted with bright colours . . . the peons on horseback on the horizon.

  They were waiting for me, bunched together in the long grass. Their horses moved restlessly, heads tossing and feet mincing. The peons laughed and chattered together, their brown faces alight with excitement, and, as they swayed and turned on their waltzing horses, the silver medallions that studded their broad leather belts glittered in the sun. Carlos drove our cart into their midst and the greys stopped, heads drooping, emitting loud sighs as of exhaustion. Carlos and the peons worked out our plan of campaign: the peons would split up into two groups, riding spread out into a long line, with the cart at the centre. As soon as the rheas broke cover, they would try to encircle the birds and drive them back to the cart, so that I could get the ciné-camera working.

  When the babel had died down a bit: ‘D’you think we’ll find some ñandu, Carlos?’

  Carlos shrugged. ‘I think so. Rafael say he see them here yesterday. If they not here they will be in the next Potrero.’

  He chirruped to the horses, and they roused themselves from their trance and the cart moved on through the crackling thistle plants. We had not travelled more than fifty feet when one of the outriders let out a long-drawn whoop and waved excitedly at us, pointing ahead at a particularly thick patch of thistles into which the cart was just about to plunge. Carlos pulled the greys up sharply, and we stood on the seat to peer over the thistles, a mist of purple flowers. For a minute we could see nothing, and then Carlos grasped my arm and pointed.

  ‘There, Gerry, see? ñandu . . .’

  In the maze of thistles with their grey-and-white stalks I could distinguish a bulky form dodging and twisting. The peons had started to close in, when suddenly one of them stood up in his stirrups and waved his hand and shouted.

  ‘What’s he saying, Carlos?’ I asked.

  ‘He says it ñandu with babies,’ said Carlos, and, pulling the greys round, he slapped them into a canter, so that the cart bounced and rattled along the side of the thistle-patch. Where the thistles ended and the grass began he pulled up.

  ‘Watch, Gerry, watch; they will come this way’ he said.

  We sat watching the tall wall of thistles, listening to the scrunching as the peons’ horses forced their way through. Then, suddenly, a tall thistle swayed, cracked, and fell to the ground, and over its prickly carcase a rhea leapt out on to the green grass, with the grace and lightness of a ballet-dancer making an entrance. It was a large male, and he paused for one brief moment after his appearance, so that we could see him. He looked like a small, grey ostrich, with black markings on his face and throat. But his neck and head were not bald and ugly, like the ostrich’s, but neatly feathered; his eyes had not the oafish expression of the ostrich, but were large, liquid, and intelligent. He paused for that one brief moment, getting his bearings, and then he saw us. He twirled like a top and was off across the pampa, taking great strides, with his head and neck stretched out in front of him and his great feet almost touching his chin with every step. He seemed to bounce more than run, as though his legs were giant springs causing him to rebound from the earth. Standing upright, he had been some five and a half feet high, but now, running with the speed of a galloping horse, his whole being – body, legs, and neck – was stretched out and streamlined. As he ran, one of the peons crashed through the barrier of thistles and cantered out on to the grass within twenty feet of the flying bird, and we were treated to the sight of a rhea’s evasive tactics. As soon as he saw the horse and rider, his head came up, and he seemed to stop dead in the middle of one of his prodigious bounds, twist round in mid-air, and set off in the opposite direction, without any appreciable loss of speed. This time he ran in a zig-zag pattern, each bound taking him six feet to the right, and then six feet to the left, so that from the rear he looked like a gigantic feathered frog.

  Just as Carlos was about to urge the greys forward again, the second rhea broke cover. It was a smaller bird, and of a lighter shade of grey, and it bounded through the gap in the thistles that the first one had created,
and then skidded to a halt on the grass.

  ‘This one is womans,’ whispered Carlos. ‘See, she is small.’

  The female rhea could see us, but she did not sprint off as the male had done: instead, she stood there, shifting uneasily from one leg to the other, and watching us with large, timid eyes. Suddenly we realized the reason for her delayed flight, for through the thistles scuttled her brood – eleven baby rheas that could not have been much more than a few days old. Their round, fluffy bodies were about half the size of a football, mounted on thick, stumpy legs ending in great splay feet. Their baby down was a light creamy fawn, with neat slate-grey stripes, and they stood about a foot high. They waddled out of the forest of thistles and gathered round their mother’s enormous feet, their eyes bright and unafraid, squeaking shrilly to each other. The mother glanced down at them, but it was obviously impossible for her to know by looking at the milling, wasp-striped swarm whether they were all there or not, so she turned and set off across the grass. She ran, as it were, in slow motion, her head up, her big feet thumping the turf with each stride. The babies followed, running as their mother ran, but strung out in a line behind her: the effect was rather ludicrous, for the mother looked like an elderly, rather arty, spinster running for a bus with all the dignity she could muster, trailing behind her a striped feather boa that bobbed and twisted through the grass.

  When the rhea family had vanished from view, and Jacquie had finished uttering crooning noises over the appearance of the babies, Carlos started the cart once more and we crackled onwards through the thistles.

  ‘Soon we will see more, the big ones,’ said Carlos, and the words were hardly out of his mouth when we saw Rafael galloping towards us, waving his hat, his scarlet scarf trailing out behind. He crashed through the thistles and pulled up alongside the cart, spouting a flood of Spanish and gesturing wildly. Carlos turned to us, his eyes gleaming.