Three Singles to Adventure

by Gerald Durrell

  I was a bit doubtful whether he would succeed, as the sack was extremely heavy and we were a good eight or nine mile from Karanambo. But I helped him to get the sack on to his back, and we set off. Francis struggled along bravely, the sweat pouring off him, his burden making things as difficult as possible by wiggling violently.The heat of the afternoon sun was intense, and there was no breeze to fan the brow of our anteater carrier. He started to mutter to himself. Soon he was lagging fifty yards behind. We progressed a tortuous half-mile, and Bob turned round to have a look.

  ‘What’s the matter with Francis?’ he asked in astonishment.

  Turning round I saw that our guide had put the anteater down and was walking round and round it, talking to it violently and waving his arms.

  ‘I have a horrible feeling that the world’s turning round on him,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what he says happens when he has a fit.’

  ‘Good God! said Bob, really startled. ‘I hope you know the way back from here?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Anyway, hang on to his horse a second, and I’ll go back and see what’s happening.’

  I cantered back to where Francis was having his long conversation with the anteater. My arrival did not interrupt him in any way; he did not even look up. From the expression on his face and his wild gesticulation I gathered that he was going into the subject of the anteater’s ancestors with all the thoroughness allowed by the Munchi dialect. The object of his abuse was gazing up at him unmoved, blowing a few gentle bubbles from its nose. Presently, having exhausted his vocabulary, Francis stopped talking and looked at me sorrowfully.

  ‘What’s the matter, Francis?’ I asked soothingly, and rather fatuously, since it was perfectly obvious what was the matter. Francis drew a deep breath and then let forth a torrent of speech at me. I listened carefully, but all I could understand was the oft repeated word ‘draftball’, which, whatever it was, struck me as having nothing whatsoever to do with the matter in hand. After some considerable time I gathered that what Francis wanted us to do was this: someone was to stay with the anteater while the other two rode to the outstation (a distant speck on the horizon he pointed out to me), in order to procure this very necessary item, a draftball. Hoping we would find someone at the outstation who had a greater command of English, I agreed to the suggestion and helped him carry the anteater into the shade of some nearby bushes. Then I rode back to explain to Bob.

  ‘You’ll have to stay here with the anteater while Francis and I ride back to the outstation for a draftball,’ I said.

  ‘A draughtboard?’ asked Bob in amazement. ‘What the devil for?’

  ‘Not a draughtboard, a draftball,’ I corrected airily. And what is a draftball?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Some form of transport, I imagine.’

  ‘Is this your idea, or did Francis think it up?’

  ‘Francis. He seems to think it’s the only way.’

  ‘Yes, but what is a draftball?’

  ‘My dear chap, I’m no linguist; some form of cart, I think. Anyway, there will be other people at the outstation, and I can enlist their aid.’

  ‘By which time I will have died of thirst, or been disemboweled by the anteater,’ said Bob bitterly. ‘What a wonderful idea.’

  ‘Nonsense, the anteater’s perfectly safe in his sack, and I’ll bring you a drink from the outstation.’

  ‘If you reach the outstation. For all you know, Francis, in his present mental condition, might take you on a four-day jaunt over the Brazilian border. Oh, well, I suppose I shall have to sacrifice myself once again for the sake of your collecting.’

  As I rode off with Francis, Bob shouted after us:

  ‘I would like to point out that I came to Guiana to paint, not play nursemaid to a blasted anteater . . . and don’t forget that drink . . .’

  I prefer not to remember the ride to the outstation. Francis made his horse go like the wind, and mine, obviously under the impression that we were going home for good, followed suit. It seemed as if we rode for ever, but at last I heard dogs barking, and we galloped in at a gate and drew up in front of a long, low white house, in a manner I have rarely seen equalled outside a Western film. I half expected a sign informing me that we had arrived at the Gold Dust Saloon. A delightful old Amerindian appeared and greeted me in Spanish. I grinned stupidly and followed him into the blessed cool and shade of the house. Two wild-looking youths and a handsome girl were seated on the low wall of the room, one of the youths engaged in splitting up a stick of sugar cane and dropping the bits to three naked infants who sprawled on the floor. I seated myself on a low wooden form, and presently the girl brought me a most welcome cup of coffee, and while I drank it the old man conducted a long conversation with me in a mixture of English and very inferior Spanish. Presently Francis re-appeared and led me outside to a field, where grazed a large and very obvious bull.

  Draftball; said Francis, pointing.

  I went inside and had more coffee while the bull was being saddled, and then, before mounting my horse again, I got the old man to give me a bottle of water for Bob. We said good-bye, mounted our steeds and rode through the gate.

  ‘Where’s the draftbull?’ I asked Francis.

  He pointed, and I saw the bull cantering heavily over the savannah, and perched on its back was Francis’s wife, her long dark hair flowing in the wind, looking from that distance not unlike a brunette Lady Godiva.

  By taking a short cut across the savannah we arrived back at the spot where we had left Bob well in advance of the bull. We found things in chaos: the anteater had freed both his front legs by some gigantic effort and had then ripped open the sack and crawled half out of it. When we arrived he was dashing round in a circle, wearing the sack on his hindquarters like an ill-fitting pair of pants, with Bob in hot pursuit. After recapturing the beast and pushing it into a new sack, I soothed Bob by producing the bottle of water, and after this lukewarm refreshment he recovered enough to tell me what had happened since we left him. As soon as we were out of sight his horse (which he had thought securely tied to a small bush) had wandered off and refused to be caught for some time. Bob pursued it over the savannah, mouthing endearments, and eventually succeeded in catching it; when he got back he found that the anteater had broken out of the sack and was trying to undo the ropes. Hot and angry, Bob forced him back into the sack, only to find that the horse had wandered off again. This apparently went on for a long time; at one point the monotony was relieved slightly by the arrival of a herd of long-horned cattle that stood around watching Bob’s efforts in the supercilious and slightly belligerent way that cattle have. Bob said that he would not have minded their presence so much if bulls had not seemed so predominant in the herd. Eventually they drifted off, and Bob was making yet another sortie after the anteater when we appeared.

  ‘The world,’ he said, ‘was just starting to turn round on me when you all arrived.’

  Just at that moment Francis’s wife appeared, galloping across the grass on the bull, and Bob watched her approach with bulging eyes.

  ‘What is that?’ he asked in tones of awe. ‘Can you see it too?’ ‘That, my dear fellow, is the draftball, procured at considerable expense to rescue us.’

  Bob lay back in the grass and closed his eyes.

  ‘I’ve seen quite enough of bulls today to last me a lifetime,’ he said. ‘I refuse to help you load the anteater on to that creature. I shall lie here until you have been gored to death, and then I’ll ride quietly home.’

  So Francis, his wife, and I loaded the snorting anteater on to the bull’s broad and stoical back. Then we levered our aching bodies on to the horses again and set off on the long trail back to Karanambo. The sun hung for a brief moment over the distant rim of mountains, flooding the savannah with a glorious green twilight, and then it was dark. In the gloom
the burrowing owls called softly to one another, and as we passed the lake a pair of white egrets skimmed their surface like shooting stars. We were dead tired and aching in every limb. Our horses stumbled frequently, nearly sending us over their heads. The stars came out, and still we plodded on over the endless grass, not knowing in which direction we were travelling and not caring very much. A pale chip of moon rose, silvering the grass and making the draftball look huge and misshapen in its light, like some great heavy-breathing prehistoric monster moving across the gloom of a newly formed world. I dozed uncomfortably, jogging back and forth in my saddle. Occasionally Bob’s horse would stumble, and I would hear him curse fluently as the jerk stabbed the pommel of the saddle into his long-suffering stomach.

  Presently I noticed a pale light flickering through some trees ahead of us, vanishing and reappearing like a will-o’-the wisp. It seemed very small and wan in comparison to the gigantic stars that hung, it appeared, only a few feet above our heads.

  ‘Bob,’ I called, ‘I think those are the lights of the jeep.’ ‘Praise the Lord!’ said Bob fervently. ‘If you only knew how I long to get off this saddle!’

  The lights of the jeep got brighter, and then we could hear the throb of its engine. It rounded the trees, bathing us in the cold beam of its headlights, and the horses bobbed and bucked, but in a very tired and dispirited manner. We dismounted and hobbled towards the car.

  ‘What luck?’ asked McTurk from the gloom.

  ‘We got a big male,’ I replied, with a certain amount of vanity.

  ‘And we’ve had a lovely day,’ said Bob.

  McTurk chuckled. We sat down and had a smoke, and presently the prehistoric monster staggered into the glare of the headlights, and we unloaded the anteater from his back. The precious creature was then placed in the jeep on a bed of sacks, and we scrambled in beside him, having turned our horses loose on the savannah to find their way back to the outstation. The anteater awoke suddenly as the jeep started, and began to thrash about. I held his long nose in a firm grip, for I knew if he banged it on the metal sides it would kill him as surely as a bullet would.

  ‘Where are you going to keep him?’ asked McTurk.

  The thought had not occurred to me before. I realised suddenly that we had no cages and no wood to make them. Moreover we could not obtain any. But it would have taken more than this sobering thought to destroy my delight in having captured the anteater.

  ‘We’ll have to tether him somehow,’ I said airily. McTurk grunted.

  When we got back to the house we unloaded the beast and unwound the yards of rope and sacking that enveloped him. Then, with McTurk’s aid, we fashioned a rope harness and placed it round his shoulders. To this was attached a long piece of rope which we tethered to a shady tree in the compound. Beyond giving him a drink of water I did nothing for him that night, for I wanted to get him on to a substitute food straightaway, and I felt he would be more likely to take to it if he was really hungry.

  Getting an animal on to a substitute food is one of the most difficult and worrying jobs a collector has to face. It happens when you obtain a creature like the anteater that has a very restricted diet in the wild state: it might be a certain kind of leaf or fruit, a particular kind of fish or something equally tricky. Only very rarely can this diet be supplied when the animal reaches England, and so the collector’s job is to teach his specimen to eat something else, something that can be supplied by the zoo to which the animal is going. So you have to concoct a palatable substitute food, which the creature will eat, enjoy and thrive on. With some beasts it is a very difficult job, this changing over of diets, for you stand the risk of the substitute dis-agreeing with the creature and making it ill. If this happens you may lose it. Some beasts are very stubborn and go on refusing the substitute until in despair you are forced to let them go. Others, again, fall on the substitute the first time it is offered and feed off it greedily. Sometimes you get this contradictory attitude in two members of the same species.

  The substitute for the anteater consisted of three pints of milk with two raw eggs and a pound or so of raw, finely minced beef mixed with it, the whole thing being topped off with three drops of cod liver oil. I prepared this mixture early the next morning, and when it was ready I broke open the nearest termites’ nest and scattered a thick layer of these creatures on the surface of the milk. Then I carried the bowl out to the anteater.

  He was lying curled up on his side under the tree, completely covered by his tail, which was spread over him like an enormous ostrich feather. It hid his body and nose from view, and from a distance it made him look more like a pile of grey grass than an anteater. When you see these animals in the zoo you never realise how useful their great tails are: on the open savannah, curled up between two tussocks of grass, his tail spread over him like an umbrella, he is sheltered from all but the very worst weather. When he heard me approaching he snorted in alarm, whipped back his tail and rose on to his hind legs, ready to do battle. I put the bowl down in front of him, offered up a brief prayer that he would not be difficult, and retreated to watch. He shambled over to it and sniffed loudly round the rim. Then he plunged the tip of his nose into the milk, and his long, grey, snake-like tongue started whipping in and out of the mixture. He did not pause once until he had emptied the bowl, and I stood and watched him with incredulous delight.

  Anteaters belong to a group of animals that do not possess teeth; instead they are furnished with a long tongue and sticky saliva with which to pick up their food, a tongue that acts on the principle of flypaper. So each time the anteater whipped his tongue back into his mouth it carried with it a certain amount of egg, milk, and chopped meat. Even by this laborious method it did not take him long to clean up the mixture, and when he had finished he sniffed around the bowl for some time, to make sure he had not overlooked any. Then he went and lay down, curled himself up, spread his tail over himself like a tent and sank into a contented sleep. From that moment on he was little or no trouble to look after.

  Some weeks later, when we were back in Georgetown, we got a mate for Amos, as we called him. A pair of slim, well-dressed East Indians arrived one morning in a sleek new car and asked us if we wanted a barim (the local name for the giant anteater). When we replied that we certainly did, they calmly opened the boot of the car, and inside, tied-up with masses of rope, was a full-grown female anteater. As a conjuring trick it was considerably more impressive than producing a rabbit out of a hat. However, the creature was very exhausted and had several nasty cuts on her body and legs; we were a bit doubtful whether she would survive. But after some first aid to her wounds, and a long drink she revived enough to attack us all in a very determined manner, and so we thought she was well enough to be introduced to Amos.

  Amos was living in a spacious, fenced-in pen under the trees. When we opened the door of his pen and introduced the pointed end of his bride-to-be he greeted her with such an ungentlemanly display of hissings, snuffling, and waving of claws that we hastily removed her to safety. Then we divided Amos’s pen with a row of stakes and put his wife next door to him. They could see and smell each other through this division, and we hoped that constant sniffing would bring about a more tender feeling on the part of Amos.

  The first day the female worried us by refusing the substitute food completely. She would not even sample it. The next day I had an idea, and I pushed Amos’s feeding bowl right up against the dividing fence at breakfast time. As soon as the female saw (and heard) him eating his meal she went across to investigate. Obviously Amos was enjoying whatever it was, so she poked her long tongue through the bars and into his bowl. Within ten minutes they had finished the food between them. So, every day, we were treated to the touching sight of Amos and his wife, separated by bars, feeding lovingly out of the same bowl. Eventually she learnt to eat out of her own dish, but she always preferred to feed with Amos if she could.

  When I landed
Amos and his wife at Liverpool, and saw them driven off to the zoo they were destined for, I felt considerable pride at having landed them safely, for anteaters are not the easiest of creatures to keep in captivity.

  6. Capybara and Cayman

  Our fortnight in the Rupununi passed so quickly that we were surprised one night when we discovered, swinging in our hammocks and calculating on our fingers, that we had only four days left.

  Owing to the efforts of McTurk and the local Amerindians our collection had increased considerably. A few days after catching the anteater, Francis arrived on horseback, carrying a sack that squeaked and twitched as though it was full of guinea pigs, but I soon found this noise came from three young and very alarmed capybara. I have mentioned these creatures before, in describing the ferocity of piranhas, but their chief claim to fame is that they are the largest of living rodents. This means nothing unless you compare them with one of their smaller relations, and then you get some idea of their size. A full-grown capybara measures about four feet in length, stands two feet high, and can weigh nearly a hundredweight. Compare this bulk with, say, the English harvest mouse, which measures four and a half inches including the tail and weighs about one-sixth of an ounce.

  This enormous rodent is a fat, elongated beast clad in harsh, shaggy fur of a brindled brown colour. Since its front legs are longer than its back ones and it has an ample rump with no tail, the capybara always looks as though it is on the point of sitting down. It has large feet, with broad, webbed toes, and on the front ones the nails are short and blunt, looking curiously like miniature hooves. Its face is very aristocratic: a broad, flat head and the blunt, almost square, muzzle giving it a benign and superior expression like a meditative lion. On land the capybara moves with a peculiar shuffling gait or a ponderous, rolling gallop; but once in the water it swims and dives with astonishing ease and skill. A slow, amiable vegetarian, it lacks the personality displayed by some of its relatives but makes up for it by a placid and friendly disposition.