Two in the Bush (Bello)

by Gerald Durrell

  The fact that the park was full of wildlife meant nothing.

  In that dense and extremely tall forest, the difficulty was firstly to come into contact with the animals and secondly, once you had made contact with them, to try to film them. But gradually, little by little, we managed to build up a picture of the inhabitants of the park and their daily routine. There were the small herds of seladang, for example, a powerful, handsome species of wild ox with their dark chocolate brown or black coats and white socks and handsomely curved, thick white horns. They would graze in small clearings in the forest throughout the morning until the sun became increasingly hot, when they would retreat into the cooler recesses among the trees, where they would muse and doze until the cool of the evening; then they would rouse themselves and spend the night drifting through the forest in search of food. The seladang is so big and powerful and so quickly aroused to terrible defensive rage that it has few enemies brave enough to tackle it. The two chief predators are, of course, the tiger and the leopard. The tiger appears to be on the decline in Malaya, but the leopard is still relatively common. While the tiger will tackle, on occasions, a fully powerful seladang, the leopard, being a smaller and less powerful cat, generally prefers to try its hand at the youngsters; but there is easier game in the forest than seladang.

  For the great majority of the forest creatures, night is the time when they are up and about. The sun sets and there is a very brief twilight when the whole forest and the sky is washed in a pale, almost luminous apple-green light.

  Suddenly the whole sky becomes freckled with tiny black dots that drift over the tree tops in great waves like columns of smoke. They are the large, honking, leathery-winged fruit bats on their way into the interior of the park to search for food. All day long they have hung upside down in a dead tree some two miles downstream. Why they chose this leafless tree I could never make out, but they hung there in great clusters like badly made umbrellas, occasionally stretching their wings out and fanning themselves vigorously to try to cool their bodies under the torrid rays of the sun. Once the bats were aloft in the sky, honking and flapping their way in untidy clouds towards their feeding grounds, it was the signal that the night shift had taken over.

  Now the Seladang started to move, the tigers and the leopards yawned and stretched and sniffed appreciatively, gourmet fashion, at the exciting night-time smells of the forest. Now the tiny, mahogany-coloured mouse deer appeared, neatly camouflaged with white spots and stripes, their fragile legs no thicker than a pencil. Knowing that they were favourite food for nearly every predator, they lived in a permanent state of high tension bordering on hysteria, and seemed to shimmer through the leaves and low undergrowth. The slightest sound or movement and they would flash away with such rapidity that the eye could not follow them and you wondered how on earth any predator was skilful enough to catch them. Up in the canopy of the forest, where the daytime chorus of those insane and incessant zitherers, the cicadas, had now given place to a more fully fledged orchestra of tree frogs, various other creatures would be uncurling themselves and thinking about food. The tree shrews – squirrel-like but with long, pointed faces and little pink noses that were perpetually twitching like geiger counters – would scuttle along the branches and pass from tree to tree along the lianas. These lashed the trees together and acted like some curious vegetable switch-back through the forest. At first glance, you might be pardoned for thinking that a tree shrew was a rather unsuccessful cross between a squirrel and a rat, and you would be amazed and possibly indignant if somebody suggested that you were looking at a relative of yours, but the tree shrew is related to the great group of primates which includes everything from bushbabies to apes, from Aborigines to Members of Parliament. It is, in fact, from such a lowly creature as the tree shrew that the whole primate group has evolved, but when you see them fussing around the tree tops, chattering shrilly at each other, or scrunching up beetles with all the aplomb of a debutante engulfing ortolans, there appears to be no shadow on its conscience.

  Another night-time prowler was the slow loris, which looks somewhat like a miniature, silver-pink teddy bear. Its enormous, owl-like eyes stare wildly through the branches as though the creature were on the borders of an acute and sustained nervous breakdown. This effect is enhanced by the fact that it has a dark rim of fur round each eye which makes it look as though it is suffering from two permanent black eyes. Normally the loris moves with all the speed and bounce of an elderly and excessively corpulent clergyman suffering from angina pectoris and in-growing toe-nails. This slow movement is, of course, useful to him in capturing his prey, but it is deceiving, for try to catch a loris up a tree and he will put on a turn of speed that is amazing. After the loris the binturongs would appear, strange creatures that look like badly made hearth rugs, with tufted ears and rather curious, oriental looking eyes. They would plod their way through the branches in a somnambulistic sort of way, making use of their prehensile tails as an anchor every time they stopped. Anything is grist to the binturong’s mill – fruit, unripe nuts, tree frogs, baby birds or eggs – all are engulfed with great relish – The binturong is another of those unfortunate animals that the Chinese have decided possesses magical properties, and so its blood, bones and internal organs are in great demand; in consequence, this placid, harmless and completely unmagical creature is on the decrease throughout its range.

  Once the whole forest is up and about, then the last but by no means the least of the animals makes its appearance: the elephant. Throughout the hot day they have been musing and swaying in some cool recess of the forest, but now they rouse themselves and drift to their feeding grounds like great grey shadows, their bodies moving through the undergrowth so gently that the only sound you can hear is the faintest whisper of leaves, as though caused by a tiny breeze. Sometimes, in fact, a herd of elephants will move so cautiously and silently through the tangled undergrowth that you are only aware of their presence by the one noise over which they have no control – the loud, prolonged and sonorous rumbling of their tummies. Elephants adore water, and even the elderly and more sedate matriarchs and patriarchs of herds will get positively skittish when there is any water around.

  We watched and filmed an old female with her baby which, towards evening, she had brought down to a stream in order to cool off. She stepped into the shallow water and paused, musing to herself, as if to test the temperature of the water; then she waded out and slowly lowered herself until she was lying down. The baby, who had had a certain difficulty in negotiating the steep bank of the stream, arrived at the water’s edge and gave a ridiculous squeak of delight, like the noise of a small, falsetto tin bugle. He then hurled himself into the stream and rushed across to where his mother was lying, placidly squirting water over her head and back. To the female, of course, the water was not deep, but the baby was well out of his depth; this, however, did not deter him in the slightest. He just disappeared beneath the surface of the water and used his trunk like a periscope. Having reached his mother’s side, he scrambled out on to her wet flank, giving little squeals of pleasure to himself. He then evolved a game which I could only presume to be the elephant equivalent of playing submarines. Disappearing beneath the water, he circled round and round his mother, attacking her from different angles under the surface until she reached down into the water with her trunk and hauled him up by his ear. We watched them for an hour or so, until it grew too dark to see, and the baby was still indulging in his underwater game with undiminished vigour.

  By the time dawn comes to the forest, in a blaze of scarlet, gold and blue stripes, most of the nocturnal animals have retreated to holes in trees or caves, and now the diurnal animals take over. There is a great, echoing burst of bird song, and in the morning dew the cicadas start zithering experimentally, getting in trim for the great orchestral effort that they will produce during the heat of the day. Then the forest suddenly rings with its most characteristic noise – the wild, exuberant cries of the gibbons. These singers in t
he trees are found everywhere, and at all times of the day you can hear their joyous, whooping cries that rise to a crescendo and then trail away into a hysterical giggle. The biggest of the gibbon family is the siamang, a huge black ape whose throat, when he sings, swells up to the size of a small grapefruit and produces the most astonishingly resonant volume of sound.

  The only day we were lucky enough to see siamang turned out to be quite an auspicious day from a number of points of view. It had started early in the morning with Chris insisting that he wanted to get some shots of Jacquie and myself on top of a hill that lay downstream. No amount of argument on anyone’s part would convince him that these shots could equally well be done in a more accessible position, and so we headed downstream in a large canoe fitted with an outboard engine. We landed on a long white shingle beach and then, humping our heavy equipment, we entered the forest and started to climb. The hill got steeper and steeper and we got hotter and hotter. The low undergrowth in the Malayan forest has evolved some of the spikiest and most malignant bushes it has ever been my misfortune to come into contact with. Delicate, pale green, fern-like growths shimmer at you innocently. They look so fragile that you feel a harsh word would make them wilt and die, and so you brush them out of your path with great tenderness, only to find that the underside of each of these innocent looking fronds is furnished with a set of curved, needle-sharp hooks. Immediately, the plant sinks these vegetable grappling-irons into your flesh and clothing, and the more you struggle the more deeply involved you become, until you begin to feel like – and are bleeding as copiously as – an early Christian martyr. Jim had an even greater penchant for getting himself caught by these evil plants than I had, and so our progress up the hillside was slow. We had to keep stopping and disentangling him, at the same time trying to stifle his screams for fear that they would frighten away any animals which we might otherwise be lucky enough to see. Eventually, bloodstained and sweaty, we arrived at a small clearing at the top of the hill and sat down to have a rest.

  Now, most of the Malayan forest is infested with leeches, but for some reason or other this particular clearing had more than its fair share, and they seemed to be twice as voracious. When we sat down in the clearing there was not a leech to be seen. Whether they got to know of your presence by vibrations of the ground as you move, or whether they smell you, is a thing that I could never satisfactorily decide, but no sooner had we sat down and lit cigarettes than out of the undergrowth on all sides of the clearing there appeared a creeping carpet of them, humping their way across the leaves like small black looper caterpillars. Occasionally they would stand right up on end, waving their heads about as if they were testing the air for scent. It was utterly impossible, wherever you went in the forest, to keep the leeches off you; all you could do was hope that they would not attach themselves to some inaccessible nook or cranny of your anatomy. They will creep through the tiniest places and their movements are so gossamer light that you do not know they are on you until you suddenly see their black bodies, bloated with blood, hanging from you like small figs. The only two methods of dealing with them, always provided you know they are on you, is a lighted cigarette end or a pinch of common salt. Both these methods of attack make the leeches release their hold and drop off. Should you be unwise enough to pull them off, they leave their mouthparts embedded in your flesh and you get a nice suppurating sore for your pains.

  So we sat there, trying to recover our breath, while the swarms of leeches engulfed us.

  ‘Charming!’ said Jim bitterly. ‘I did manage to save half an ounce of blood from those damned plants and now even that’s going to be drained out of me by these filthy things.’

  His temper was not improved when Chris, in a rather crest-fallen manner, admitted that the top of the hill was not suitable for the shots that he had in mind after all. So, carrying a full cargo of leeches, we picked up the equipment and staggered down the hill again. When we arrived on the sandbank, we all discreetly stripped and de-leeched each other with the aid of cigarettes.

  ‘Now,’ said Jim, pulling on his trousers, ‘what jolly little thing would Chris like us to do now? How about swimming across the river, Gerry? With a bit of luck you might see a crocodile. What a good sequence that would make!’

  ‘Actually, what I was thinking,’ said Chris musingly, ‘is that if you took the canoe up those rapids there, we could get some rather impressive shots.’

  I gazed at the area he indicated, where some great brown slabs of rock bisected the river like a row of ancient and discoloured dentures. Between these rocks the water was squeezed and tangled and gushed in a series of rapids with all the forces of a fire hose.

  ‘Are you nuts?’ I enquired of our producer.

  ‘No,’ said Chris, ‘it looks much worse than it is, actually.’

  ‘Yes!’ said Jim enthusiastically. ‘And think of the thrill after you’ve done it of being told he doesn’t want the shots after all.’

  After a certain amount of argument we decided to leave the casting vote to the boatman. He, to my intense annoyance, said that he would be only too charmed to take the canoe up the rapids, so there was nothing for it. Jim and Chris took up their stations by the camera, while Jacquie and I climbed into the canoe and set off. The canoe had seemed fairly precarious when we had started off in her that morning, but she seemed to become frailer and frailer and less and less seaworthy the nearer we got to the rapids. The boatman appeared to be enjoying the whole thing immensely, and was poling the boat along vigorously, periodically uttering wild, gibbon-like cries, apparently indicative of a joie de vivre which neither Jacquie nor I shared. As he was poling the boat from the back and we were sitting up towards the bows, it meant that we got the full benefit of the water when we struck the rapids. Great, hissing waves hit the prow of the canoe and spread themselves lavishly all over us, and within thirty seconds we were both so wet that we might just as well have swum up the rapids. To my astonishment, we eventually passed through the jagged chain of rocks unscathed and got into calmer water.

  ‘Marvellous,’ bellowed Chris, leaping up and down on the bank, ‘now just do it once more so that we can get the close-ups.’

  So once again, muttering unprintable things about our producer, we re-shot the rapids.

  ‘Well,’ said Jacquie after we had successfully passed through them for the second time, ‘that’s my lot. You can now take me back to the rest house so that I can change.’

  Chris, who knew mutiny when he saw it, agreed to this.

  ‘We’ll leave Jacquie at the rest house,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll go upstream and get a few more shots.’

  Jim gave me an eloquent look.

  Having dumped my damp and irritable wife back at the rest house, we chugged off upstream. After we had been travelling for about half an hour, the outboard motor suddenly made a strange series of popping noises and then died on us. In the pregnant silence that ensued, Jim whistled a few bars of ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’.

  ‘What’s the matter with it?’ said Chris, glaring at the engine in an affronted fashion.

  ‘It’s stopped,’ I said.

  ‘I know that,’ he said irritably, ‘but why?’

  The boatman, meanwhile, with an air of puzzled preoccupation, had attacked the engine with a spanner and appeared to be disemboweling it. Presently, with a wide smile of pleasure, he produced a section of its internal anatomy which even I could see was irrevocably broken. He informed us that he would have to go back to the rest house in order to replace this vital part.

  ‘Well, there’s no sense in going with him,’ said Chris, ‘let’s wait here’.

  ‘One of us is going with him,’ I said firmly, ‘I’ve been caught on this sort of lark before. He’ll get talking to his best friend’s wife and that’s the last we’ll see of him for the next three days. I suggest you and I stay here, with the equipment, and Jim can go back with him.’

  So we unloaded the equipment on to a sandbank and watched Jim being pad
dled downstream.

  Chris and I were squatting on our haunches on the sandbank, with our backs to the river, deeply immersed in discussing the film sequence we hoped to obtain if and when Jim returned with the canoe. We were taking absolutely no notice of our surroundings, so in consequence what happened next came as a considerable shock to us both. I half turned my head to flip my cigarette into the river and there, some fifteen feet away and swimming towards us at a rate of knots, was an exceptionally large and lethal looking king cobra. He must have been about eight feet long, and his head and neck protruded a good six inches above the water; he had large, glittering eyes and from their expression I judged him to be of an irascible nature. If he kept on his present course, he would land on the sand-bank exactly between Chris and myself. Ardent naturalist though I am, I felt that to have a king cobra on such intimate terms was an experience I could well do without.

  ‘Look out!’ I shouted, and leapt to my feet. Chris, after darting one horrified glance over his shoulder, did likewise and we both retreated hurriedly up the sandbank.