Two in the Bush (Bello)

by Gerald Durrell

  It was now getting near the time when we could expect the birth and so we took up residence in a motel, conveniently situated about half a mile down the road from the laboratories. This was when Pamela decided that she was going to give us a run for our money. For three days she designed a series of false alarms for us, and she timed these so cleverly that they did the maximum amount of damage to our nervous systems. Suddenly, as we were in the middle of lunch, or in the bath, or just drifting cosily off to sleep, there would be a frantic telephone message from Geoff to say that he thought, from Pamela’s behaviour, that the birth was imminent. If we happened to be bathing or sleeping it meant a frantic scramble into our clothes, a wild gallop out into the courtyard with our equipment, and we would pile into the Land-Rover and drive off with a deafening roar. Our rather curious actions seemed to mystify the owner of the motel, as well as the other guests, and they started giving us such peculiar looks that, in self-defence, we had to explain what we were trying to achieve, whereupon they all took an intense interest in the whole matter and would rush to the windows to cheer us on our way as we galloped towards the Land-Rover, dropping bits of equipment and tripping each other up in our haste. Every time we got down to the yards, however, Pamela would be munching some delicacy and would look up with a faintly surprised air that we should have bothered to pay her yet another visit.

  Then came the evening when, in the middle of dinner, the motel proprietor came galloping into the dining-room and informed us that Geoff Sharman had just phoned and said that quite definitely Pamela was going to give birth at any minute. Knocking over a bottle of wine and leaving our napkins strewn across the floor like autumn leaves, we fled from the dining-room, pursued by cheers and shouts of ‘Good luck’ from our fellow guests. Chris, in his eagerness, started the Land-Rover so quickly that I was left with one foot inside and one on the ground when he was changing into top; with a fearful effort that almost dislocated my spine, I managed to scramble in, and we zoomed down the road to the laboratories.

  ‘She’s definitely going to do it this time,’ said Geoff. ‘I’m quite certain of it.’

  She could not have picked a better time. It was pitch dark, bitterly cold, and everything was drenched in dew. Hastily we rigged up the arc lights and got the cameras in position. Pamela was sitting, leaning against a fence and getting on with the good work of cleaning out her pouch. This she did very fastidiously, using her front paws. The pouch, when untenanted, tends to exude a waxy substance similar to the wax in a human ear, and it was this that she was cleaning out, carefully combing the furry interior of the pouch with her claws. We filmed her doing this and then sat and gazed at her expectantly. She continued cleaning her pouch out for about half an hour, stared round moodily, then hopped down to the far end of the paddock and started to eat.

  ‘I think we’ve got a little time to wait,’ said Geoff.

  ‘Are you quite sure that this isn’t another of her false alarms?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Geoff, ‘this is the real thing; she wouldn’t clean out her pouch as thoroughly as that if she wasn’t going to give birth.’

  We sat in the freezing cold and stared at Pamela and she stared back at us, her jaws moving rhythmically.

  ‘Let’s go into the hut while we’re waiting,’ said Geoff, ‘it will be a little bit warmer. If your hands get too cold, you won’t be able to manipulate your equipment.’

  We crowded into the tiny shed, where I produced, to the delight of the assembled company, a bottle of whisky that I had had the foresight to bring with me. We took it in turns, between drinks, to go out and peer hopefully in Pamela’s direction, but nothing happened.

  ‘Jolly experience, this,’ said Jim, ‘sitting up all night, sloshing whisky and waiting for a kangaroo to be born. Never had an experience like it.’

  ‘Well, you’ll be able to add it to your repertoire of unusual events that have taken place in your life,’ said Chris, ‘together with the hair drier and being sick on a pontoon bridge.’

  ‘What,’ enquired Geoff, ‘is all this about hair driers and pontoon bridges?’

  We explained that Jim was not a normal mortal and went through life involving himself in the most unlikely situations.

  ‘You should get him to tell you about the time he got a bicycle jammed in the chimney,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ said Geoff. ‘How on earth did he manage that?’

  ‘He’s lying,’ said Jim excitedly, ‘I never did anything of the sort.’

  ‘I definitely remember you telling me,’ I said. ‘I can’t recall the exact details but I remember it was a fascinating story.’

  ‘But how,’ said Geoff, his scientific interest deeply aroused, ‘did you get a bicycle jammed up a chimney?’

  ‘He’s lying, I tell you,’ said Jim, ‘I’ve never owned a bicycle, let alone got it jammed in a chimney.’

  By now Geoff and all his co-workers were quite convinced that Jim had got a bicycle jammed in a chimney and was merely being modest about this achievement, and they spent the next hour endeavouring to work out how he could have managed this feat, with Jim getting more and more irritable with each passing suggestion.

  It came as somewhat of a relief to him when one of Geoff’s assistants appeared in the doorway of the hut and said, ‘Action stations, I think we’re off.’

  We scrambled out of the hut and took up our positions. Pamela was moving about, looking rather uncomfortable. Presently, against the fence of the paddock, she dug a shallow hole in the ground and then took up a position in it, with her tail sticking out between her hind legs and her back resting against the fence. She sat like this for a few minutes and then obviously started feeling uncomfortable again, for she lay down on her side for a few seconds and then stood up and moved around for a bit. Then she went back to the hole she had dug and again sat with her tail sticking out between her legs and her back against the fence. She was completely unperturbed by the fact that arc lights, two cine cameras and the eyes of about a dozen people were fixed on her.

  ‘You’d better start the cameras now,’ said Geoff.

  The cameras started to whirr and, as if on cue, the baby was born. It dropped out on to Pamela’s tail and lay there, a pinky-white, glistening blob no longer than the first joint of my little finger.

  Although I knew roughly what to expect, the whole performance was one of the most miraculous and incredible things that I have ever seen in all the years that I have been watching animals. The baby was, to all intents and purposes, an embryo – it had, in fact, been born after a gestation period of only thirty-three days; it was blind and its hind legs, neatly crossed over each other, were powerless; yet in this condition it had been expelled into the world. As if this was not enough of a handicap, it now had to climb up through the fur on Pamela’s stomach until it found the entrance to the pouch. This was really the equivalent of a blind man, with both legs broken, crawling through thick forest to the top of Mount Everest, for the baby got absolutely no assistance from Pamela at all. We noticed (and we have it on film to prove it) that the mother does not help the baby by licking a path through the fur, as is so commonly reported. The baby, as soon as it was born, with a curious, almost fish-like wiggle, left the mother’s tail and started to struggle up through the fur. Pamela ignored it. She bent over and licked her nether regions and her tail clean and then proceeded to clean her fur behind the baby as it was climbing, for it was obviously leaving a trail of moisture through her hair. Occasionally her tongue passed over the baby, but I am certain that this was more by accident than design. Slowly and valiantly the pulsating little pink blob struggled on through the thick fur. From the moment it was born to the moment it found the rim of the pouch took some ten minutes. That a creature weighing only a gramme (the weight of five or six pins) could have achieved this climb was a miracle in itself, but, having got to the rim of the pouch, it had another task ahead of it. The pouch is approximately the size of a large, woman’s handbag. Into this the lilliputian kangaroo
had to crawl and then search the vast, furry area in order to find the teat; this search might take him anything up to twenty minutes. Having found the teat, he would then fasten on to it, whereupon it would swell in his mouth, thus making him adhere to it firmly – so firmly, indeed, that if you try to pull a baby kangaroo off its mother’s teat, you will tear the soft mouth parts and cause bleeding. This has given rise to the entirely erroneous idea that baby kangaroos are born on the teat, i.e. develop from the teat itself, like a sort of bud.

  Finally the baby hauled itself over the edge of the rim of the pouch and disappeared into the interior, and we could switch off the cameras and the lights. We had got some remarkable and unique film and both Chris and Jim were ecstatic. For me it had been an unforgettable experience, and I am sure that even the most hardened anti-kangaroo sheep farmer would have been impressed by the baby’s grim determination to perform its herculean task. After being cast out into the world only half formed, and being made to undertake this prodigious climb, I felt that the baby kangaroo thoroughly deserved his life in his fur-lined, centrally heated pram with its built-in milk bar. I hoped, very sincerely, that the work that was being done by Harry Frith, Geoff Sharman and the other members of the team would find a way to preserve the largest of the marsupials from complete eradication.

  PART THREE

  The Vanishing Jungle

  The Arrival

  The beaver’s best course was, no doubt, to procure

  A second-hand dagger-proof coat –

  Hunting of the Snark

  I was sitting under a tree covered with huge scarlet flowers, and meditatively sipping a beer, when I heard the boat – I was seated high on an escarpment overlooking several thousand miles of forest – a Persian carpet of greens, reds, golds and russets – and below me the Tembeling river wound its way between steep banks, brown and glinting as a slow-worm – I was, in fact, sitting outside the rest house on the edge of Malaya’s biggest national park, an enormous block of forest that stretched away in every direction.

  I took another sip of beer and listened to the stutter of the outboard engine growing louder and louder. I wondered who the new arrivals were. Presently the boat hove into view and headed for the landing stage below me. As far as I could see it was crammed to the gills with an extremely convivial party of Sikhs who, to relieve the tedium of the journey up-river, had partaken heartily – if unwisely – of some form of intoxicating liquid. I watched with interest as they landed uncertainly and wended their way, laughing and joking, up the hill. They passed me sitting in solitary state under my tree, and waved extravagant greetings and bowed. I bowed and waved back, and they made their way towards another small rest house which stood a few hundred yards off among the trees. The last of their party, who had stayed behind to give some rather incoherent instructions to the boatman, now came panting up the hill. He was a fine-looking man of about sixty with a magnificent Father Christmas beard, and with his turban slightly askew.

  ‘Good evening good evening’ he called when he was within earshot, waving and beaming at me, ‘my God what a vunderful day, eh?’

  I had spent a hot, sticky and profitless day in extremely prickly undergrowth, being sucked dry by leeches, but I didn’t want to dampen my new friend’s enthusiasm.

  ‘Wonderful!’ I shouted back.

  He came panting up to me and stood there, grinning.

  ‘Ve have come on a fishing expedition, you know,’ he explained.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Is there good fishing here?’

  ‘Vunderful, vunderful,’ he said, ‘best fishing in Malaya.’

  He eyed my glass of beer with the air of one who had never seen such a phenomenon before, but was willing to try anything once.

  ‘Will you have a drink?’ I asked.

  ‘My dear sir, you are too kind,’ he said, seating himself with alacrity.

  I called the steward, who brought a large tankard of beer which my new friend seized firmly, in case it tried to escape.

  ‘Your very good health,’ he said, and drank half of it at one gulp without pausing for breath.

  He belched thoughtfully and wiped the froth off his moustache with a spotless handkerchief.

  ‘I need that,’ he explained untruthfully, ‘hot vork travelling.’

  For the next half-hour he regaled me with a complicated and extremely amusing lecture on the art of fishing, and I was quite sorry when eventually he rose unsteadily to his feet and said that he must go.

  ‘You must let us return your hospitality,’ he said earnestly. ‘Come over to our little house at about six and have a tiny drink, eh?’

  I had had experience of tiny drinks with Sikhs before, and the tiny drink generally extended into the small hours of the morning, but he was so eager that it would have been churlish to refuse. So I accepted, and he meandered away, waving cheerfully to me over his shoulder. Presently Jacquie and Chris joined me.

  ‘Who,’ enquired Chris, ‘was your friend – Santa Claus?’

  ‘He’s a very amusing Sikh,’ I said, ‘and he’s invited me over for a drink at six.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t accept,’ said Jacquie in alarm, ‘you know what these drinking orgies are like.’

  ‘Yes I have,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t very well refuse. But have no fear, I shall get Chris to come and rescue me at seven.’

  ‘Why me?’ enquired Chris bitterly. ‘I’m supposed to be a producer, not a sort of travelling Alcoholics Anonymous.’

  At six o’clock, bathed and changed, I presented myself at the small rest house and was welcomed in by the fishing party. It consisted of five individuals, four of whom were tall, well built men, while the fifth was a tiny and earnest-looking little man wearing an enormous pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. After the introductions had been made and they had poured me out a drink of such massive proportions that I mentally praised my foresight in getting Chris to rescue me, we started the usual conversation about fishing and animal photography. When we had exhausted these subjects there was a slight pause, while we all had another drink. Then suddenly (and to this day I cannot remember how) we were discussing homosexuality. This was a fine, rich subject for discussion and we explored it thoroughly, ranging from Oscar Wilde to Petronius via the Shakespeare Sonnets and Burton’s Arabian Nights, taking in the Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden en route. At this point, Chris arrived, and was thrust into a chair and given a drink, without causing the slightest ripple on the surface of our train of thought. During all this the earnest little man with the outsize spectacles had sat there, clasping his glass and surveying each speaker through his spectacles, but contributing nothing to the conversation. Eventually (when we had dealt at length with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire), we felt we had exhausted the subject and we all fell silent. It was the earnest little man’s great moment. He leant forward and peered at me and cleared his throat. We all looked at him, expectantly.

  ‘What I say, Mr Durrell,’ he said impressively, summing up our flights of rhetoric in one pungent phrase, ‘what I say, is that every man should have his hobby.’

  The Singers in the Trees

  While strange creepy creatures came out of their dens,

  And watched them with wondering eyes.

  Hunting of the Snark

  The Taman Negara – which used to be called The King George V National Park – was created in 1937. It is a gigantic slab of untouched forest measuring some 1,677 square miles, spreading into the states of Kelantan, Pahang and Trengganu. Only a small portion of the park is easily accessible to the average visitor; the rest of it can be investigated, but only with extreme difficulty. Therefore, there are some areas of the park that are still unexplored. Within its boundaries you can see, if you are lucky, nearly every member of the Malayan jungle fauna. Probably one of the park’s most important functions is that it provides a sanctuary for the few remaining specimens of the Sumatran rhino. There are probably not more than a hundred of these creatures left in existence. Like all the other A
siatic rhinos, they have been unmercifully hunted in order to procure their horns, which are ground into powder and shipped to China, where it is sold at exorbitant sums to aged, decrepit or sterile Chinese who have the touching belief that it will act as an aphrodisiac. Why a country so hideously over populated should waste its time and energy in such a pursuit defeats the imagination, but because of this belief nearly all the Asian species of rhino have been reduced in numbers to the very borders of extermination and, because they are getting increasingly hard to find, a similar attack is now being made on the rhinos of Africa.