The Donkey Rustlers

by Gerald Malcolm Durrell

  The sky was pearly pink and green with dawn light and there were still a few freckles of stars in it when David went into Amanda’s room and woke her up. They went and met Yani and Coocos and made their way down in the fresh morning air to the little bridge. Conveniently close to the bridge several large clumps of bamboo were growing, which offered extremely good hiding places from which they could watch the result of their experiment and here they settled down and waited in silence for the first of the villagers to put in an appearance.

  It was perhaps unfortunate that the first person to come down to the bridge that morning was Mayor Oizus himself. He was certainly the last person the children had expected, for normally Mayor Oizus spent most of his time sitting in the local café, while Mrs Oizus did all the work in the fields, but the previous day Mrs Oizus had complained about some curious animal which seemed to be ruining the corn crop and so the Mayor had decided to take the unprecedented step of going down to see for himself. In order to save himself the arduous task of walking, he had decided to ride on one of his donkeys.

  “Saint Polycarpos!” whispered Yani, his eyes wide. “It’s the Mayor himself.”

  “Splendid.” said Amanda, starting to giggle.

  “Shut up,” hissed David. “He’ll hear us.”

  “He’s going to be terribly angry,” said Yani.

  “Serves him right,” said Amanda. “That’s what my father would call ‘poetic justice’.”

  They watched as the donkey, with great patience, considering the weight of the Mayor, plodded down the hillside and clip-clopped its way towards the bridge. It was very early and the Mayor, who was unaccustomed to such physical exertion as donkey-riding at dawn, was nodding sleepily as his mount jogged along. It came to the bridge and the children held their breath. It clattered on to the bridge and David watched in an agony of suspense, for he was not at all sure that his sabotage would work, but, to his intense delight, as the donkey reached the centre of the bridge, the whole thing gave way with a most satisfying scrunch, and both donkey and Mayor were precipitated into the water with a most glorious fountain-like splash, accompanied by a very heart-warming yell of fear from the Mayor.

  “It worked!” said David, his eyes shining with excitement, “It worked!”

  “Absolutely wonderful!” Amanda exclaimed ecstatically.

  “You did that very well, David,” said Yani.

  However, they now discovered two things: that the donkey could swim remarkably well, and soon had itself out of the canal, whereas the Mayor could not swim at all.

  “What shall we do?” said Yani. “We can’t let him drown. We’d better go and help him.”

  The Mayor was clinging to a piece of driftwood from the bridge and bellowing for help at the top of his lungs, although at that hour in the morning it was unlikely, he felt, that there would be anybody around. He invoked the saints several times and tried to cross himself, but if he crossed himself he found he had to let go of the piece of wood, which was the only thing between himself and a watery grave.

  “Yani can’t go and help him,” said Amanda, “because if he sees Yani he’ll know, so we’d better go.”

  Amanda and David ran along the bank towards the floundering Mayor.

  “Don’t worry, Mr Mayor,” shouted Amanda. “We’re coming.”

  “Save me! Save me!” yelled the Mayor.

  “Stop shouting, we’re coming,” said David impatiently. They made their way down the banks of the canal and plunged into the water.

  “I’m drowning,” cried the Mayor in such a plaintive tone of voice that Amanda was seized with a fit of giggles.

  “Be quiet,” said David soothingly. “You are all right.”

  The children got on each side of the portly Mayor and, supporting him under his armpits, they dragged him, dripping and covered with mud and water-weed, to the bank up which he scrambled looking not unlike a rather ungainly walrus getting out on to an ice floe, He presented a sight so comic that Amanda had to go and stand behind an olive tree so that she could laugh, and even David’s mouth was not under complete control as he inquired tenderly after the Mayor’s health.

  “You saved me,” said the Mayor, crossing himself several times with great rapidity. “You brave children, you saved me.”

  “Oh, it was nothing,” said David unconcernedly. “We just happened to be passing and we heard you shouting. We were just going down for a — for — er — for an early morning swim.”

  “It was in the mercy of God that you were passing,” said the Mayor, removing a piece of water-weed from his moustache. “Undoubtedly the mercy of God.”

  “What were you doing up so early?” said David accusingly.

  “I had to go down to the fields to see about my corn. It just shows one should not do foolish things. Somebody should have repaired that bridge a long time ago. I kept telling them about it,” he panted, completely untruthfully. “So now they will have to do something about it.”

  It was fortunate that the Mayor’s donkey had scrambled ashore on the same bank as the Mayor and was standing grazing placidly under the trees. Amanda and David hoisted the mud-covered and dripping Mayor Oizus on to the back of his donkey and accompanied him up to the village.

  “We know two things now,” said Amanda in English, so that the Mayor would not understand. “One is that donkeys swim and the other thing is that mayors don’t.” She was convulsed once more with giggles.

  “Shut up. you fool,” hissed David. “He’ll think there’s something funny if you go on like that.”

  By the time they got back to the village everybody was astir and their mouths dropped open with astonishment at the sight of their leading citizen, caked from head to foot in mud and leaving a trail of water, riding into the main square. Immediately, magically, almost the entire village assembled. For one thing it gave them considerable pleasure to see the Mayor in this distraught condition, and for another thing, nothing exciting had happened in the village since old Papa Nikos, three years previously, had got drunk and fallen down a well, from which he was extracted with extreme difficulty.

  The Mayor, making the most of the situation, climbed painfully off his donkey and staggered to the nearest chair in the café. He had realised, as all Greeks do, the good dramatic possibilities of such a situation, He gasped, he fainted several times and had to be revived with ouzo, and was so incoherent at first that the villagers were quivering with a desire to know precisely what had happened. At last, with much gesturing and much crossing of himself, the Mayor told his story and although there must have been nearly two hundred people standing around, you could have heard a pin drop. The entire village, it seemed, was holding its breath, so that nobody should miss a word of this thrilling story. When the Mayor came to the rescue part. the villagers were delighted. Fancy! The children of their English people rescued the Mayor! The fact that, later on, when speculating on the incident, the general consensus of opinion was that it was rather a pity he had been rescued, was not thought of for this brief moment. Amanda and David were the heroes of the day. They were embraced and kissed and plied with glasses of wine and those hideous sticky preserves which were so dear to the hearts of the people of Kalanero. Amanda and David were, of course, acutely embarrassed and felt very guilty, and indeed looked it, but this the villagers attributed to natural English modesty.

  Eventually, having been embraced and kissed on both cheeks by the Mayor, who was beginning to smell a bit owing to the mud, they were released by the happy villagers and made their way to the villa, accompanied by shouts of “Bravo!” and “Brave things” and similar encouraging phrases.

  When the children got back to the villa they found their parents in the middle of breakfast. Having changed, they slipped into their places as unobtrusively as possible.

  “Ah, there you are,” said Mrs Finchberry-White. “I was just coming to look for you.”

  “I understand,” said the General, scrunching his way through large quantities of toast, “that you have
just had the somewhat doubtful privilege of saving our Mayor’s life.”

  “How did you know that?” asked Amanda, startled.

  “There are many things,” said the General, “such as the Facts of Life for example, which a parent is not supposed to vouchsafe to his children and that includes his sources of information.”

  “Well, it wasn’t anything really,” said David hastily. “It’s just that the bridge gave way and he fell into the water and he can’t swim, so we pulled him out.”

  “A noble feat,” said the General. “After all, he is no mean weight.”

  “Want some more marmalade? asked Amanda, in an effort to steer the conversation on to different lines.

  “No. thank you,” said the General.

  He took his pipe out of his pocket and beat out a rapid tattoo on his leg.

  “Must you do that, Henry?” asked Mrs Finchberry-White.

  “That’s the noise of Wattusi drums when they’ve failed in an attack,” said the General. “I remember it vividly. There we were — five of us — holed up in a kopje and they attacked at dawn. Enormous fellows, all over six feet, with zebra-skin shields and long slender spears. The plain below us was black with them — like ants. We fired until our gun barrels got red hot and finally drove them off; that was where I lost my leg.”

  “No dear,” said Mrs Finchberry-White, “you lost it falling downstairs at the Westburys’.”

  “I do wish, my dear,” said the General, testily. “that you wouldn’t always spoil a good story by introducing truth into it.”

  The General had at one time or another lost his leg in such a variety of circumstances and in such a variety of places that the children now took very little notice of his stories.

  David had something else to occupy his mind: a problem which he put to Amanda as soon as they had finished breakfast and were alone together.

  “What about the donkeys braying?” he asked.

  “Braying?” said Amanda. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” explained David, “that if we have got all the donkeys on Hesperides and they start braying, then everyone will know where they are.”

  Amanda frowned over this problem for a moment or so.

  “I don’t think we need worry,” she said. “After all, donkeys only bray to each other. It’s sort of like one donkey talking to another donkey across the valley, but if they are all together and there are no donkeys on the mainland to talk to, I think they’ll be quiet.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said David. “Now, let’s go down and see Yani and have another council of war.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The Rustling

  The children met at Yani’s small whitewashed house and sat out under the vine drinking lemonade. Coocos was in a tremendous state of excitement because his goldfinch had laid an egg, and he was carrying it round carefully in the pocket of his shirt in the hope of hatching it. As the goldfinch had had no opportunity of coming in contact with another goldfinch, the children thought that his chances of success were very slight, but they did not tell him so for fear of hurting his feelings.

  “Now,” said Amanda, “when are we going to do this?”

  “I’ve decided,” said David, “that we must wait for full moon.”

  “But that’s not until about ten days’ time,” protested Amanda.

  “I don’t care,” said David stubbornly, “it must be full moon. We have got to have enough light to see by and we won’t waste the ten days because there are masses of things that we’ve got to do. Remember, we can’t afford to make any mistakes.”

  “I agree with David,” said Yani. “I think it’s essential that we do it at full moon, otherwise it’s going to make the job twice as difficult.”

  “All right,” said Amanda reluctantly, “but what are we going to do in the meantime?”

  “Well,” said David, “the first thing to do is to take some food over to the island to feed the donkeys when we’ve got them. We don’t know how long we’re going to have to keep them there. We can’t take it all at once, because it would look suspicious, so every day, little by little, we will take some hay and some corn out.”

  “Sometimes Coocos can do this at night,” suggested Yani. “Nobody really worries about what he does.”

  “That’s a good idea,” said Amanda, and Coocos beamed at her.

  “Then,” said David, “we ought to have some practice runs so that we know exactly what we are doing on the night.”

  “Yes,” said Amanda. “I think that’s very important. Otherwise we will get muddled up and make a hash of it.”

  So during the next ten days the four of them quietly and unobtrusively shifted enough fodder to Hesperides to keep even the most finicky of donkeys happy for at least one week. They also worked out a system of communication by owl noises, the number of hoots varying with the message. They found the easiest path from the village down to the beach opposite Hesperides and walked up and down it until they knew every stone and every twist of it. They also went round the village again and again checking on where the donkeys were stabled at night.

  Then at last the moon, which had been a mere silver thread in the sky became round and fat and rose blood-red from the sea and they knew that the time had come for their great endeavour.

  “Mother, do you mind if we spend to-night out camping?” asked Amanda one morning. “The moon is so lovely now, we thought it would give us a chance to do some moonlight bathing.”

  “Of course not, dear,” said Mrs Finchberry-White. “I’ll pack up some food, shall I? And make sure you take a blanket and that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” said Amanda. “I’ll organise all that side of it.”

  “Where are you going?” inquired the General, adding a touch of purple to an unfortunate cypress tree. “Not that I am particularly interested, but I feel it might be useful to know in case I have to send someone to rescue you from a shark or something.”

  “Oh,” said David. “We are not going very far. Just down to the beach opposite Hesperides.”

  Amanda packed up sufficient food for herself and David, Yani and Coocos and, in order to add a certain air of verisimilitude to their story (and to put her mother’s mind at rest) she rolled up a couple of blankets and (on her mother’s insistence) a couple of sheets. Then, at five o’clock, carrying their things, the children made their way down to the beach where Yani and Coocos were waiting for them. Here they lit a fire out of drift-wood and grilled some fish while they waited for it to get dark and for the moon to rise. They had decided to leave the fire alight so that, from a casual observer’s point of view, it would give the impression that they were still on the beach, and it would also act as a beacon for them as to the exact spot on the beach which was closest to Hesperides. David had spent two days working this out with the aid of a length of clothes line and endless mathematical formulae.

  Although the children pretended to be very casual about the whole thing, they were all tense with excitement and Amanda, though she would never have admitted it, even felt slightly sick. Presently the moon, round and as red as a drop of blood, lifted itself over the edge of the sea and floated slowly up into the sky turning gradually to bronze and then to gold and finally to silver,

  Well,” said David, with an air of nonchalance, “I suppose it’s about time we started.”

  “Yes,” said Amanda, swallowing.

  “Now, are we all sure that we know what we have got to do?” asked David.

  Coocos nodded vigorously, so did Yani and Amanda. They had, after all, been practising it for ten days.

  They had decided that their first sortie should be directed against the Mayor. This, they thought, was not only fair, but, apart from that, he owned one of the largest number of donkeys in the village. So they made their way up the hillside and crept with infinite stealth towards the Mayor’s house. The Mayor stabled his horse and his donkeys in a small shed that lay behind the house and so, while Amanda concealed herself behin
d an olive tree ready to give the alarm should the Mayor suddenly appear, the others made their way round the back of the house to the stables. The door to the stables was an old one and held shut by a heavy wooden bar, and this caused them a certain amount of trouble. The bar had to be lifted out with infinite precautions against noise and the doors eased open inch by inch so that they did not creak. Then the reluctant donkeys had to be led out one by one and tethered to each other and then finally the horse was tethered to them as the leader. They led the string of animals into the olive groves, where Amanda awaited them, twittering with excitement.