Three Singles to Adventure

by Gerald Durrell

  He was about the size of a fox terrier, and his coat was short and sleek. He sat in a curious humped-up manner that made him look as though he was hunchbacked, and this was accentuated by the way he carried his head, drooping low beneath the level of his shoulders, like a charging bull’s. His tail was long and bushy, neatly ringed with black and white; his legs were slim and ended in large, flat paws, the soles of which were bare and coloured a bright pinky-red. His fur, with the exception of his black face markings and black feet, was a light ash grey mixed in places with yellow. He presented, altogether, a quite ludicrous appearance; with his head hung low, and a pair of bewildered brown eyes looking out from the black mask across his face, he looked just like an amateur burglar who bad been caught in the act.

  When I pushed a flat dish of water and chopped-up fish into his cage he behaved in a way that Bob found vastly amusing. He approached the plate, showing all the enthusiasm of a condemned man facing his last breakfast, and squatted down in front of it; then he plunged his front paws into the water and proceeded to move them about with a patting, stroking motion, watching us all the while with a dismal expression on his face. When he had patted the bits of fish for a considerable time he pulled a piece to the edge of the plate and, sitting up like a rabbit, he lifted it delicately between the slim fingers of his front paws and popped it into his mouth. When he had eaten it he fell to patting the rest of the fish again before lifting and eating another piece.

  Bob was very intrigued by what he called ‘Burglar Bill’s paddling’, and so later on, when we were moored for the night, I caught some river crabs and put them in with the raccoon to show Bob the reason for the animal’s strange performance. When he saw the crabs he surveyed them with a slightly worried expression, and then, choosing a large one, he squatted down in front of it and began to pat and stroke it swiftly and gently, occasionally stopping and shaking his paws. The crab made wild lunges with its pincers, but the raccoon’s paws were too swift to be caught; then it retreated, but the raccoon followed it, still patting. After ten minutes of this the crab, though quite undamaged, was exhausted and had given up trying to defend itself with its pincers. This was the moment the raccoon had been waiting for: he leant forward suddenly and bit the unfortunate crab in half. Then he sat back and mournfully watched its death throes; when it had stopped twitching he picked it up daintily between the tips of his toes and popped it into his mouth, scrunching and swallowing with a look of acute melancholy on his face.

  We had moored at the landing stage outside a house belonging to a regal East Indian, clad in robes and turban, who had invited us to eat with him. We went up to the house and squatted in a circle on the floor, devouring a delicious curry and chapatties by the light of a flickering hurricane lamp. Mr Kahn was in great form, crouching there like some great toad, his teeth glittering in the lamplight like fireflies, stuffing himself with food and talking and laughing incessantly. He monopolised the conversation, and his stories got wilder and wilder as the meal progressed.

  ‘I remember once,’ he said, chuckling through a mouthful of curry, ‘I was up huntin’ in the Mazeruni. Man, what jaguars you get up there! Fierce? Worst of all Guiana, man, and I’m telling you truly! Well, it was evening-time, like this. I’d just finished my food and I wanted to relieve myself, so I took my gun and went a little way through the trees.’

  He had finished his curry now, and was waddling round the room showing us in pantomime what had happened. He squatted in the corner with a grunt and beamed at us.

  ‘All went well,’ he continued, ‘and I had just finished. I got up to pull on my pants, holding the gun with one hand.’ He got to his feet with an effort and stooped for imaginary trousers.

  ‘What d’you think happened, man?’ he inquired rhetorically, clutching his abdomen. ‘A great damn jaguar ran out from the bushes in front of me! Hew! Hew! Hew! Man, was I scared? Sure I was. The jaguar had caught me with my pants down!’

  ‘I can’t say I envy the jaguar,’ remarked Bob.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr. Kahn went on, ‘that was a fix. I had to hold my pants up with one hand and fire with the other. Man, what a shot! Right in its eye. Bang! It was dead.’

  He stepped up to the imaginary dead jaguar and kicked it scornfully.

  ‘D’you know what?’ he went on. ‘That so scared me I sweared I wouldn’t go and relieve myself again, except it was daytime. But that damn jaguar scared me so much I have to go and relieve myself all night long. The more I go the more scared I get, and the more scared I get the more I have to go.’

  Mr Kahn sat down again and laughed uproariously at the thought of his predicament, wheezing and gasping and wiping the tears from his quivering cheeks.

  The talk drifted from jaguars to cayman and from cayman to anacondas, and Mr. Kahn had a story about each. His anaconda tales were, perhaps, the most colourful; apparently no cumoodi he had ever met had been less than the circumference of a barrel, and he had got the better of them all with some skilful trick or other. During the anaconda stories Ivan started to shift about uneasily, and I attributed this to boredom. I was soon to learn differently. Eventually the party broke up, and we made our way down to the boat, inside which our hammocks had been slung one above the other. We climbed into them with some difficulty, silenced Mr. Kahn with a firm good-night and tried to sleep. I was just on the point of drifting off when there came a terrible yell from Ivan’s hammock.

  ‘Wharr! Look out, sir, a cumoodi . . . getting over the side of the boat . . . look out, sir . . .’

  Our minds had been inflamed by Mr Kahn’s tales of monster anacondas, so at Ivan’s cry pandemonium broke loose in the boat. Bob fell out of his hammock. Mr Kahn leapt to his feet, tripped over Bob and narrowly missed falling into the river. I tried to jump out of my hammock, and it promptly looped the loop and deposited me, enveloped in yards of mosquito netting, on top of Bob. Mr Kahn was screaming for a gun, Bob was begging me to get off his chest, and I was shouting for a torch. Ivan, meanwhile, was making dreadful strangling noises, as though the anaconda had coiled itself round his neck and was slowly throttling him to death. Crawling round frantically on all fours I eventually found the torch and switched it on, shining the beam at Ivan’s hammock. As I did so his face rose over the side, and he peered at us sleepily.

  ‘What’s the matter, sit?’ he inquired.

  ‘Where’s the cumoodi?’ I demanded.

  ‘Cumoodi?’ said Ivan, looking alarmed. ‘Is there a cumoodi?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. It was your idea,’ I pointed out, ‘you were yelling that a cumoodi was climbing into the boat.’ ‘I was, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ivan looked sheepish.

  ‘I must have been dreaming,’ he said.

  We all glared at him, and he retreated into his hammock in some confusion. I learned later that Ivan, when excited by thoughts of cumoodis, was apt to have these nightmares, during which he would scream and lash about wildly, successfully waking everyone but himself. He did it several times afterwards, but by then we had become used to it, and he never again succeeded in wreaking such havoc as he did that night in the boat. Eventually we managed to disentangle our hammocks, refused Mr Kahn’s offer to tell us another cumoodi story and managed to get to sleep.

  Just before dawn I awoke to find that we were already on our way down to the river mouth. The engine throbbed gently as the boat headed down the great smooth stretch of tree-lined water, slate grey in the dawn light. I scrambled up on to the roof and sat there admiring the view. The air was cool and full of the scents of leaves and flowers. As the light strengthened the sky turned from grey to green, the remaining stars trembled and went out, and a mist rolled up from the surface of the river, coiling and shifting across the surface and among the trees on the bank with a slow-motion, underwater grace, like giant fronds of white seaweed moved by the waves. The sky faded from green to a very pale blue, and throu
gh the gaps in the forest I could see a tattered regiment of vermilion clouds where the sun was rising. The sound of our engines echoed and re-echoed down the silent river, and the bows cut through the smooth waters with a soft silken swish. We rounded a bend and came to the end of the river: there in front stretched the sea, grey and choppy in the morning light. A dead tree lay on the bank, half in the water, the bark hanging off it in strips, showing the sun-bleached trunk beneath. Among its branches sat a pair of scarlet ibis looking like some giant red and pink blooms growing on the dead tree. As we drew closer they flapped up, circling lazily, glowing pink, red, and scarlet in the sunlight, and flew off up the river with slow flaps, their long curved beaks stuck out ahead like lances.

  On leaving the river mouth we had to cross a mile or so of open sea before turning shorewards again at the entrance to the creeks. The vast quantity of river water flowing out to meet the sea created a swirling, choppy area of water, and our boat bounced and bucked from wave to wave like a skimming stone, while a stiff breeze threw curtains of fine spray over us. A flock of pelicans flew by us in elegant V-formation and landed some fifty yards away with ungainly splashes. They tucked their beaks into their chests and stared at us with their usual benevolent expressions. From that distance, bobbing up and down on the waves, they looked ridiculously like a troop of celluloid ducks in a dirty bath.

  Presently the boat turned and headed for land. As far as I could see there did not appear to be any opening in the line of forest along the shore, and I merely thought that the boatman wanted to hug the land in case the waves got worse; the boat, after all, had not been built for sea work. But we headed straight for the trees, and they came nearer and nearer, and still the boat did not turn. Just as I thought we were about to run aground we twisted under the branches of a tree, the undergrowth closed behind us, shutting out the sound of the sea, and we were chugging slowly up a narrow, placid creek into a new world.

  The creek was some twenty feet wide, with high banks that were thickly covered with undergrowth. The twisted trees, leaning out over the water to form a tunnel, had their branches and trunks festooned with lichen, long waterfalls of grey Spanish moss, rich patches of pink and magenta orchids and a host of other green climbing plants. The water at the edges of the creek was invisible under a tangled mat of waterplants, covered with a host of tiny, colourful flowers. This beautifully patterned carpet of leaves and flowers was broken here and there by patches of water-lily leaves, like shining green plates, grouped round their spiky pink and white flowers. The creek water was deep and clear, a rich tawny sherry colour. In this trough of vegetation the air was still and hot, and we sat on the roof of the boat basking drowsily in the sun and watching new scenes unfold as the boat followed the twisting, lazy course of the creek.

  At one point the creek had cheerfully overflowed its banks and the waters had covered several acres of a valley. This was a drowned landscape, and the boat zigzagged through a small wood of trees that had remained standing in ten feet of brown water, their trunks ringed with weeds and lilies. A small cayman was sunning himself on a grassy bank; he lay with his jaws slightly apart in an evil grin, and when he saw us he lifted his head, snapped his jaws shut and slid hastily down the bank and plunged through the mat of weeds that hid the edge of the water, leaving a jagged hole in the green. Further along the bank had been scooped out into a series of gently curving bays, and in each lay a fringe of pink water-lilies lying motionless on the dark, polished water. The lily leaves formed a green flagged path-way across the water, meandering carelessly from one point to another, dotted with flowers. Across one of these natural bridges we watched a female jacana leading her brood of fluffy, newly-hatched chicks, each not much bigger than a walnut. The jacana resembles an English moorhen except for its long slender legs ending in a bunch of fragile, greatly elongated toes. As we watched this bird we realised how useful these delicate toes are. She stepped cautiously from lily pad to lily pad, placing her weight carefully in the centre of each leaf, and her toes spreading out like the legs of a spider, distributing her weight evenly. The leaves dipped and trembled slightly as she stepped on them, but that was all. Her chicks, like a swarm of gold and black bumblebees, scuttled after her; their weight was so slight that they could all congregate on one leaf without altering its position in the water. The jacana led them across the bridge of lily pads swiftly and carefully, the babies trotting behind, stopping obediently when their mother was testing the next leaf. When they reached the end of the lilies the female dived into the water and the babies plopped after her, one by one, leaving only a few silver bubbles and a dipping leaf to show where they had been.

  At the end of the valley the creek waters dutifully re-entered their appointed bed and flowed through a section of thickly wooded countryside. The trees grew closer and closer, until we were travelling in green twilight under a tunnel of branches and shimmering leaves, on water that was as black as ebony, touched in places with silver smears of light where there were gaps in the branches overhead. Suddenly a bird flew from a tree opposite to us and sped up the dim tunnel, to alight on the trunk of another tree that was spotlighted with sunshine. It was a great black woodpecker with a long, curling wine-red crest and an ivory-coloured beak. As it clung to the bark, peering at us, it was joined by its mate, and together they started to scuttle up and down the tree trunk, tapping it importantly with their beaks and listening with their heads on one side. Occasionally they would utter a short burst of shrill, metallic laughter, tittering weirdly over some private joke between themselves. They looked like a couple of mad, red-headed doctors, sounding the chest of the great tree and giggling delightedly over the disease they found, the worm holes, the tubercular patches of dry rot, and the army of larvae steadily eating their host to pieces. The woodpeckers thought it a rich jest.

  They were exotic, fantastic-looking birds, and I was determined to try and add some of them to our collection. I pointed them out to Ivan.

  ‘What do they call those, Ivan?’

  ‘Carpenter birds, sir.’

  ‘We must try and get some.’

  ‘I will get you some,’ said Mr. Kahn. ‘Don’t you worry, Chief, I will get you anything you want.’

  I watched the woodpeckers as they flew from tree to tree, but they were eventually lost to sight in the tangled forest. I hoped that Mr Kahn was right, but I doubted it.

  Towards evening we were nearing our destination, an Amerindian village with a tiny mission school, hidden away among the backwaters of the creek lands. We left the main creek and entered an even narrower tributary, and here the growth of aquatic plants was so thick that it covered the water from bank to bank. This green lawn was studded with hundreds of miniature flowers in mauve, yellow, and pink, each thimble-sized bloom growing on a stem half an inch high. It seemed when I sat in the bows that the boat was drifting smoothly up some weed-grown drive, for only the ripple of our wash undulating the plants as we passed gave indication of the water beneath. We followed this enchanting path for miles as it twisted through woodland and grassfields, and eventually it led us to a small white beach fringed with palm trees. We could see a few shacks, half hidden among the trees, and a cluster of canoes lying on the clean sand. As we switched off the engine and drifted shorewards a host of chattering, laughing Amerindian children ran down to meet us, all stark naked, their bodies glistening in the sun. Following them came a tall African who, as soon as we landed, introduced himself as the schoolmaster. He led us, surrounded by the noisy, laughing children, up the white beach to one of the huts, and then he left us, promising to return when we had unpacked and settled down. Our ears had got used to hearing the throb of the boat’s engine all day, so the peace and quiet of that little hut among the palms was delightfully soothing. We unpacked and ate a meal in a contented silence; even Mr Kahn seemed to be affected by the place, and remained unusually quiet.

  Presently the schoolmaster returned, and with him was one of
his small Amerindian pupils.

  ‘This boy wants to know if you will buy this,’ said the schoolmaster.

  ‘This’ turned out to be a baby crab-eating raccoon, a tiny ball of fluff with sparkling eyes, that looked just like a chow puppy. There was no trace of the mournful expression that it was to wear in later life; instead it was full of good spirits, rolling and gambolling and pretending to bite with its tiny milk teeth, waving its bushy tail like a flag. Even if I had not wanted him I would have found it difficult to resist buying such a charming creature. I felt that he was too young to share a cage with the adult, so I set to work and built him a special one of his own; we installed him in this, his tummy bulging with the meal of milk and fish I had given him, and he curled up in a pile of dry grass, belched triumphantly and then went to sleep.

  The schoolmaster suggested that we should attend his class the next morning and show the children pictures of the various animals we wanted. He said that he knew many of his pupils had pets that they would be willing to part with. He also promised to find us some good hunters who would take us out into the creeks in search of specimens.

  So the next morning Bob and I attended the school and explained to forty young Amerindians why we had come there, what animals we wanted and the prices we were willing to pay. With great enthusiasm they all promised to bring their pets that afternoon, all, that is, except one small boy who looked very worried and conversed rapidly with the schoolmaster in a whisper.

  ‘He says,’ explained the master, ‘he has a very fine animal, but it is too big for him to bring by canoe.’

  ‘What sort of animal is it?’

  ‘He says it is a wild pig.’

  I turned to Bob.

  ‘Could you go and fetch it in the boat this afternoon, d’you think?’

  Bob sighed.