Encounters With Animals

by Gerald Durrell

  Pavlo lived with us for eight years, and it was rather like having a leprechaun in the house: you never knew what was going to happen next. He did not adapt himself to our ways, we had to adapt ourselves to his. He insisted, for example, on having his meals with us, and his meals had to be the same as ours. He ate on the window-sill out of a saucer. For breakfast he would have porridge or cornflakes, with warm milk and sugar; at lunch he had green vegetables, potatoes and a spoonful of whatever pudding was going. At tea-time he had to be kept off the table by force, or he would dive into the jam-pot with shrill squeaks of delight; he was under the impression that the jam was put on the table for his benefit, and would get most annoyed if you differed with him on this point. We had to be ready to put him to bed at six o’clock sharp, and if we were late he would stalk furiously up and down outside his drawer, his fur standing on end with rage. We had to learn not to slam doors shut without first looking to see if Pavlo was sitting on top, because, for some reason, he liked to sit on doors and meditate. But our worst crime, according to him, was when we went out and left him for an afternoon. When we returned he would leave us in no doubt as to his feelings on the subject; we would be in disgrace; he would turn his back on us in disgust when we tried to talk to him; he would go and sit in a corner and glower at us, his little face screwed up into a scowl. After half an hour or so he would, very reluctantly, forgive us and with regal condescension accept a lump of sugar and some warm milk before retiring to bed. Pavlo’s moods were most human, for he would scowl and mutter at you when he felt bad-tempered, and, very probably, try to give you a nip. When he was feeling affectionate, however, he would approach you with a loving expression on his face, poking his tongue out and in very rapidly, and smacking his lips, climb on to your shoulder and give your ear a series of passionate nibbles.

  His method of getting about the house was a source of astonishment to everyone, for he hated running on the ground and would never descend to the floor if he could avoid it. In his native forest he would have made his way through the trees from branch to branch and from creeper to creeper, but there were no such refinements in a suburban house. So Pavlo used the picture-rails as his highways, and he would scuttle along them at incredible speeds, hanging on with one hand and one foot, humping himself along like a hairy caterpillar, until he was able to drop on to the window-sill. He could shin up the smooth edge of a door more quickly and easily than we could walk up a flight of stairs. Sometimes he would cadge a lift from the dog, leaping on to his back and clinging there like a miniature Old Man of the Sea. The dog, who had been taught that Pavlo’s person was sacred, would give us mute and appealing looks until we removed the monkey from his back. He disliked Pavlo for two reasons: firstly, he did not see why such a rat-like object should be allowed the run of the house, and secondly, Pavlo used to go out of his way to be annoying. He would hang down from the arm of a chair when the dog passed and pull his eyebrows or whiskers and then leap back out of range. Or else he would wait until the dog was asleep and then make a swift attack on his unprotected tail. Occasionally, however, there would be a sort of armed truce, and the dog would lie in front of the fire while Pavlo, perched on his ribs would diligently comb his shaggy coat.

  When Pavlo died, he staged his deathbed scene in the best Victorian traditions. He had been unwell for a couple of days, and had spent his time on the window-sill of my sister’s room, lying in the sun on his bit of fur-coat. One morning he started to squeak frantically to my sister, who became alarmed and shouted out to the rest of us that she thought he was dying. The whole family at once dropped whatever they were doing and fled upstairs. We gathered round the window-sill and watched Pavlo carefully, but there seemed to be nothing very much the matter with him. He accepted a drink of milk and then lay back on his fur-coat and surveyed us all with bright eyes. We had just decided that it was a false alarm when he suddenly went limp. In a panic we forced open his clenched jaws and poured a little milk down his throat. Slowly he regained consciousness, lying limp in my cupped hands. He looked at us for a moment and then, summoning up his last remaining strength, poked his tongue out at us and smacked his lips in a last gesture of affection. Then he fell back and died quite quietly.

  The house and garden seemed very empty without his minute strutting figure and fiery personality. No longer did the sight of a spider evoke cries of: ‘Where’s Pavlo?’ No longer were we woken up at six in the morning, feeling his cold feet on our faces. He had become one of the family in a way that no other pet had ever done, and we mourned his death. Even the white cat next door seemed moody and depressed, for without Pavlo in it our garden seemed to have lost its savour for her.

  When you travel round the world collecting animals you also, of necessity, collect human beings. I am much more intolerant of a human being’s shortcomings than I am of an animal’s, but in this respect I have been lucky, for most of the people I have come across in my travels have been charming. In most cases, of course, the fact that you are an animal-collector helps, since people always seem delighted to meet someone with such an unusual occupation, and they go out of their way to assist you.

  One of the loveliest and most sophisticated women I know has helped me cram a couple of swans into a taxicab boot in the middle of Buenos Aires, and anyone who has ever tried to carry livestock in a Buenos Aires taxi will know what a feat that must have been. A millionaire has let me stack cages of livestock on the front porch of his elegant town house, and even when an armadillo escaped and went through the main flower-bed like a bulldozer, he remained unruffled and calm. The madame of the local brothel once acted as our housekeeper (getting all her girls to do the housework when not otherwise employed), and she once even assaulted the local chief of police on our behalf. A man in Africa – notorious for his dislike of strangers and animals – let us stay for six weeks in his house and fill it with a weird variety of frogs, snakes, squirrels and mongooses. I have had the captain of a ship come down into the hold at eleven at night, take off his coat, roll up his sleeves and set to work helping me clean out cages and chop up food for the animals. I know an artist who, having travelled thousands of miles to paint a series of pictures of various Indian tribes, got involved in my affairs and spent his whole time catching animals and none on painting. By that time, of course, he could not paint anyway, as I had commandeered all his canvas to make snake-boxes. There was the little cockney P.W.D. man who, not having met me previously, offered to drive me a hundred-odd miles, over atrocious African roads, in his brand-new Austin in order that I might follow up the rumour of a baby gorilla. All he got out of the trip was a hangover and a broken spring.

  At times I have met such interesting and peculiar people I have been tempted to give up animals and take up anthropology. Then I have come across the unpleasant human animal. The District Officer who drawled, ‘We chaps are here to help you chaps …,’ and then proceeded to be as obstructive and unpleasant as possible. The Overseer in Paraguay who, because he disliked me, did not tell me for two weeks that some local Indians had captured a rare and beautiful animal which I wanted, and were waiting for me to collect it. By the time I received the animal it was too weak to stand and died of pneumonia within forty-eight hours. The sailor who was mentally unbalanced and who, in a fit of sadistic humour, overturned a row of our cages one night, including one in which a pair of extremely rare squirrels had just had a baby. The baby died.

  Fortunately these types of human are rare, and the pleasant ones I have met have more than compensated for them. But even so, I think I will stick to animals.

  MacTootle

  When people discover my job for the first time, they always ask me for details of the many adventures they assume I have had in what they will persist in calling the ‘jungle’.

  I returned to England after my first West African trip and described with enthusiasm the hundreds of square miles of rain-forest I had lived and worked in for eight months. I said that in this forest I had spent many happy days, and during al
l this time I never had one experience that could with any justification be called ‘hair-raising’, but when I told people this they decided that I was either exceptionally modest or a charlatan.

  On my way out to West Africa for the second time, I met on board ship a young Irishman called MacTootle who was going out to a job on a banana plantation in the Cameroons. He confessed to me that he had never before left England and he was quite convinced that Africa was the most dangerous place imaginable. His chief fear seemed to be that the entire snake population of the Continent was going to be assembled on the docks to meet him. In order to relieve his mind, I told him that in all the months I had spent in the forest I had seen precisely five snakes, and these had run away so fast that I had been unable to capture them. He asked me if it was a dangerous job to catch a snake, and I replied, quite truthfully, that the majority of snakes were extremely easy to capture, if you kept your head and knew your snake and its habits. All this soothed MacTootle considerably, and when he landed he swore that, before I returned to England, he would obtain some rare specimens for me; I thanked him and promptly forgot all about it.

  Five months later I was ready to leave for England with a collection of about two hundred creatures, ranging from grasshoppers to chimpanzees. Very late on the night the ship was due to sail, a small van drew up with screeching brakes outside my camp and my young Irishman alighted, together with several friends of his. He explained with great glee that he had got me the specimens he had promised. Apparently he had discovered a large hole or pit, somewhere on the plantation he was working on, which had presumably been dug to act as a drainage sump. This pit, he said, was full of snakes, and they were all mine – providing I went and got them.

  He was so delighted at the thought of all those specimens he had found for me that I had not the heart to point out that crawling about in a pit full of snakes at twelve o’clock at night was not my idea of a pleasurable occupation, enthusiastic naturalist though I was. Furthermore, he had obviously been boasting about my powers to his friends, and he had brought them all along to see my snake-catching methods. So, with considerable reluctance, I said I would go and catch reptiles; I have rarely regretted a decision more.

  I collected a large canvas snake-bag, and a stick with a Y-shaped fork of brass at one end; then I squeezed into the van with my excited audience and we drove off. At half-past twelve we reached my friend’s bungalow, and stopped there for a drink before walking through the plantation to the pit.

  ‘You’ll be wanting some rope, will you not?’ asked MacTootle.

  ‘Rope?’ I said. ‘What for?’

  ‘Why, to lower yourself into the hole, of course,’ he said cheerfully. I began to feel an unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach. I asked for a description of the pit. It was apparently some twenty-five feet long, four feet wide and twelve feet deep. Everyone assured me that I could not get down there without a rope. While my friend went off to look for one which I hoped very much he would not find, I had another quick drink and wondered how I could have been foolish enough to get myself mixed up in this fantastic snake-hunt. Snakes in trees, on the ground or in shallow ditches were fairly easy to manage, but an unspecified number of them at the bottom of a pit so deep that you had to be lowered into it on the end of a rope did not sound at all inviting. I thought that I had an opportunity of backing out gracefully when the question of lighting arose and it was discovered that none of us had a torch. My friend, who had now returned with the rope, was quite determined that nothing was going to interfere with his plans: he solved the lighting question by tying a big paraffin pressure-lamp on to the end of a length of cord, and informed the company that he personally would lower it into the pit for me. I thanked him in what I hoped was a steady voice.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said, ‘I’m determined you’ll have your fun. This lamp’s much better than a torch, and you’ll need all the light you can get, for there’s any number of the little devils down there.’

  We then had to wait a while for the arrival of my friend’s brother and sister-in-law: he had asked them to come along, he explained, because they would probably never get another chance to see anyone capturing snakes, and he did not want them to miss it.

  Eventually eight of us wended our way through the banana plantation and seven of us were laughing and chattering excitedly at the thought of the treat in store. It suddenly occurred to me that I was wearing the most inadequate clothing for snake-hunting: thin tropical trousers and a pair of plimsoll shoes. Even the most puny reptiles would have no difficulty in penetrating to my skin with one bite. However, before I could explain this we arrived at the edge of the pit, and in the lamplight it looked to me like nothing more nor less than an extremely large grave. My friend’s description of it had been accurate enough, but what he had failed to tell me was that the sides of the pit consisted of dry, crumbling earth, honeycombed with cracks and holes that offered plenty of hiding-places for any number of snakes. While I crouched down on the edge of the pit, the lamp was solemnly lowered into the depths so that I might spy out the land and try to identify the snakes. Up to that moment I had cheered myself with the thought that, after all, the snakes might turn out to be a harmless variety, but when the light reached the bottom this hope was shattered, for I saw that the pit was simply crawling with young Gaboon vipers, one of the most deadly snakes in the world.

  During the daytime these snakes are very sluggish and it is quite a simple job to capture them, but at night, when they wake up and hunt for their food, they can be unpleasantly quick. These young ones in the pit were each about two feet long and a couple of inches in diameter, and they were all, as far as I could judge, very much awake. They wriggled round and round the pit with great rapidity, and kept lifting their heavy, arrow-shaped heads and contemplating the lamp, flicking their tongues out and in in a most suggestive manner.

  I counted eight Gaboon vipers in the pit, but their coloration matched the leaf-mould so beautifully that I could not be sure I was not counting some of them twice. Just at that moment my friend trod heavily on the edge of the pit, and a large lump of earth fell among the reptiles, who all looked up and hissed loudly. Everyone backed away hastily, and I thought it a very suitable opportunity to explain the point about my clothing. My friend, with typical Irish generosity, offered to lend me his trousers, which were of stout twill, and the strong pair of shoes he was wearing. Now the last of my excuses was gone and I had not the nerve to protest further. We went discreetly behind a bush and exchanged trousers and shoes. My friend was built on more generous lines than I, and the clothes were not exactly a snug fit; however, as he rightly pointed out, the bit of trouser-leg I had to turn up at the bottom would act as additional protection for my ankles.

  Drearily I approached the pit. My audience was clustered round, twittering in delicious anticipation. I tied the rope round my waist with what I very soon discovered to be a slip-knot, and crawled to the edge. My descent had not got the airy grace of a pantomime fairy: the sides of the pit were so crumbly that every time I tried to gain a foothold I dislodged large quantities of earth, and as this fell among the snakes it was greeted with peevish hisses. I had to dangle in mid-air, being gently lowered by my companions, while the slip-knot grasped me ever tighter round the waist. Eventually I looked down and I saw that my feet were about a yard from the ground. I shouted to my friends to stop lowering me, as I wanted to examine the ground I was to land on and make sure there were no snakes lying there. After a careful inspection I could not see any reptiles directly under me, so I shouted ‘Lower away’ in what I sincerely hoped was an intrepid tone of voice. As I started on my descent again, two things happened at once: firstly one of my borrowed shoes fell off and, secondly, the lamp, which none of us had remembered to pump up, died away to a faint glow of light, rather like a plump cigar-end. At that precise moment I touched ground with my bare foot, and I cannot remember ever having been so frightened, before or since.

  I stood motionless,
sweating with great freedom, while the lamp was hastily hauled up to the surface, pumped up, and lowered down again. I have never been so glad to see a humble pressure-lamp. Now the pit was once more flooded with lamplight I began to feel a little braver. I retrieved my shoe and put it on, and this made me feel even better. I grasped my stick in a moist hand and approached the nearest snake. I pinned it to the ground with the forked end of the stick, picked it up and put it in the bag. This part of the procedure gave me no qualms, for it was simple enough and not dangerous provided you exercised a certain care. The idea is to pin the reptile across the head with the fork and then get a good firm grip on its neck before picking it up. What worried me was the fact that while my attention was occupied with one snake, all the others were wriggling round frantically, and I had to keep a cautious eye open in case one got behind me and I stepped back on it. They were beautifully marked with an intricate pattern of brown, silver, pink, and cream blotches, and when they remained still this coloration made them extremely hard to see; they just melted into the background. As soon as I pinned one to the ground, it would start to hiss like a kettle, and all the others would hiss in sympathy – a most unpleasant sound.