The Aye-Aye and I

by Gerald Durrell

  In every village from which we obtained animals we only paid ‘recompense’ prices, prices so low that the trade in these creatures would not be encouraged, and in every village we carefully and patiently explained the law and showed people documents to prove that we were working with the permission of the Malagasy Government to collect the lemurs and set up breeding colonies. How much of what we said sank in I do not know, but we were meticulous about it.

  We drove on to another village where there was a small dispensary at which I hoped we could procure a hypodermic syringe for feeding milk to the unweaned baby. All four of the babies were terrified of the noise that Romulus’ car made (as, indeed, we all were), so when we got to Andreba we purchased some milk and a syringe and stopped for an hour during which we fed the babies. They all drank the milk greedily and then the older ones ate some bananas, which was encouraging. Mihanta disappeared once again while the feeding took place, and reappeared with an adult female lemur with a leash around her waist. She had been in captivity for some time and was comparatively tame. Her coat was dull, her teeth were worn and she had a generally apathetic air about her but, nevertheless, we bought her. (Later, it turned out that it was a very good thing we did.) By this time, the four babies had fed well and were sufficiently rested to face the horror of Romulus’ engine for the second time. I suggested we make all speed to our hotely, not only for the babies’ sake but for my own, as none of the antibiotics I had taken appeared to have had any effect.

  We were now in a predicament. We had one adult, one sub-adult and four baby lemurs in our possession and it was not possible to conceal this fact from the management of the hotel. Coward that I am, I dispatched Lee to break the news of this infestation of lemurs to M. le Patron and his wife. To our astonishment, they greeted the news with joy, saying that they were ardent animal lovers, and immediately rented us a room next door to ours, where we could keep our precious charges. It was a small room with a basin, a table and a gigantic double bed. We stripped the bed down to the mattress and carefully covered it with a plastic sheet. The table became the food preparation area and the basin was used for washing dishes. The animals were placed on the bed and various fruit and vegetables piled in baskets under the table. I have not had as much fun disrupting a hotel since, when making a film in Corfu and at the suggestion of the manager (a keen herpetologist), I kept a flock of terrapins in our bath. The shriek of a Greek maid when faced with a bathful of terrapins is as pervasive as the sound of the late Maria Callas treading on a scorpion (though slightly less dulcet).

  The following morning, I began to feel that, if anyone sidled up to me and made me an offer of five farthings for all my internal organs, I would accept it without hesitation. As a result, I told Lee that I could not accompany her on a lemur hunt around the lake but would stay at the hotely, lashed, as it were, to the lavatory, and look after our new acquisitions. Aside from my own problems, I felt that our baby lemurs – particularly the smallest – needed feeding at regular intervals. Having fed them all, I took my diary down to the bar and sat there finishing off my notes, being waited on by an enchanting little maid who spoke nothing but Malagasy. In the corner of the bar was a large, loud colour television and, in between serving me drinks, the maid stared at the screen, watching an explicit French soap opera, most of which seemed to take place in bed and involved much moaning and gasping.

  Just before lunch, I went up to feed the babies again. The older ones were now lapping up milk greedily from a saucer, but the smallest still needed to be fed with the syringe. He drank until his little tummy was bulging, however, holding on to my hand with a vice-like grip and staring up into my face with wide, golden eyes. At that age, lemurs’ heads, hands and feet are wildly out of proportion to their slender bodies and when they move on a flat surface they have the most comical Chaplinesque walk. When they climb into the branches, however, you realise that their outsize hands and feet are the most efficient grasping organs. I had moved the cages onto the double bed so that our youngest acquisition could see the new elderly female (whom we had named Araminta) and I was pleased to hear them exchanging gossip and popping noises.

  I returned to the bar, where the soap opera’s sexual activities continued enthusiastically, and ordered a bowl of soup with plenty of rice, hoping that this would have a soothing effect on my stomach, as well as some mangoes to dissect for the lemurs. The bar and restaurant had filled up by now and the cacophony of voices added to the grunting and moaning from the television and caused such a din that I decided to repair to our bedroom. Finding I was unable to handle the mangoes and my diary, I indicated in sign language to the little maid that I would like her assistance. With tongue protruding and with the solemn air of one who is carrying a sacred chalice, she picked up the diary and carried it carefully upstairs and into the bedroom. Juggling the mangoes, I followed her. She placed the book reverently on the bedside table, ducked her head, gave me a glittering smile in response to my Malagasy ‘misaotra’ or thank you, and disappeared. It was some moments later before I discovered that, on leaving, she had turned the key in the door and securely locked me in.

  To say that I was in a quandary would be an understatement. The doors and furniture in Madagascar all seem to be made out of a form of wood that in weight and consistency resembles granite, so it was impossible for me to do a James Bond and break the door down by charging it – I would only have dislocated my shoulder. It was useless shouting since the decibel levels of the diners below and the noisy sexual activities in the soap opera would have drowned my cries for succour. I gazed round the room for some weapon with which I could assault I the door and found nothing. I went to the heavily barred window, hoping to attract some passer-by’s attention. I shouted. Several people looked up and waved to me in a friendly fashion as they walked past. Most of them held up their palms hoping for alms. I sat on the bed and thought about my problem. The baby lemurs needed their food and, almost as important, the lavatory was situated down the corridor.

  Suddenly, I remembered having been told that you could open any door, even a Yale lock, with a credit card. My spirits soared. Out of my wallet I produced my American Express card and attacked the lock. I don’t know why I carry this card, since it has been refused by shops and hotels around the world. This occasion was no different. The door refused my card as well. In fairness to American Express, I must admit that Malagasy locks are peculiar. Of massive and ornate design, they were apparently a gift from Mao Tse-tung and have many Chinese peculiarities, not least of which is that you are supposed to put the key in upside down and then turn it from left to right to lock the door and from right to left to unlock. It takes several weeks of experimentation to learn how to get in and out of your hotel room in Madagascar. For the next hour, I paced up and down the room trying to think of a way out of my predicament. All the time, my stomach was informing me in no uncertain fashion that if I did not find my way out fairly soon, it would not be responsible for the consequences. I could have unscrewed the whole lock, but I had nothing to act as a screwdriver.

  I was examining the lock and reconciling myself to captivity until Lee returned in the evening, when suddenly the door flew open and there stood the little Malagasy maid. She gave me a wide, warm smile and then, without a word of explanation or apology, she vanished. Hastily, I removed the key from the door to prevent a repetition of my imprisonment and made rapid tracks for the comfort station. My parole had not come a moment too soon.

  When I went to feed the babies I found the older ones in a boisterous mood, leaping about in the branches and occasionally thumping down onto the floor and trampling over the youngest, who was looking very dejected. The older babies were in no way bullying him but rather treating him as an inanimate object like a log or a banana, and this was obviously not to his liking. He gazed at me dolefully. I could have put him in one of the lovely little raffia baskets which Lee had obtained, but I felt that he would be even more miserable on his own. Then I had an idea. Gentle lemurs are
very social creatures and, as their name implies, are not given to rowdy bickering among their own kind. We had an elderly female (who I suspected was past childbearing), so why not make her a surrogate mother for the baby? The more I thought about it the more the scheme seemed to have merit. I did not know if the ancient female would share my views, but she was comparatively tame and this made matters easier. I lifted the door of her cage and inserted the baby, readying myself for an immediate rescue operation should she show signs of displeasure. The baby took one look at her, rushed across the cage and flung himself onto her – in his enthusiasm climbing right over her head and face before finding the correct niche for a baby lemur, spreadeagled firmly across her chest. She was momentarily startled by this sudden invasion but, to my relief, clasped him in her arms as he burrowed into her thick, warm fur. Of course, she had no milk and the next problem was whether he would leave her in order to be fed. As it transpired, I need not have worried. He tried once to feed from her milkless teats and was given a sharp nip for his pains. After that, as soon as he saw the door of the cage open and Lee’s hand with the syringe full of milk, he would scramble off his surrogate mother, stagger across the cage like a dying man in a desert who sees an oasis, fling himself on to Lee’s hand and then drink his fill. It was the perfect arrangement: we fed him, she provided him with love and warmth.

  Later that evening, the intrepid hunters arrived back tired and thirsty but carrying in triumph two semi-adult lemurs, a male and a female, both in lovely condition. Having fed them and bedded them down, we celebrated. Araminta and I had antibiotics and whisky and the others had whisky.

  I was uncomfortable during the night, with a temperature of 103 and sweating as though newly emerged from a Turkish bath, but in the morning I felt a little better and we decided to have a quick run out to some villages we had not yet visited. At one of these, Mihanta insisted we drive a mile or two up a dilapidated track. Presently, we came to a large mound with a theodolite perched on top. From there we could see parts of the lake proper, surrounded by reed beds and rice paddies. The lake itself did not seem terribly big but it was obvious that before it was clogged by the debris of erosion from the surrounding hills it must have been enormous. Mihanta explained that after heavy rains the water level in the lake rose, flooding the reed beds. When these were cut they formed rice paddies. As the water level of the lake receded it left behind pools which were natural fish traps, giving a rice harvest from the paddies where the reed beds used to be, and a larder of fish in the pools that were left. Owing to the red silt, however, the rich production of Alaotra has dropped and the rice bowl has become depleted. When you compare the figures for the population increase and those showing the drop in rice production over the last few years, the seriousness of the situation is obvious.

  Another interesting but depressing change in the life of the lake is the disappearance of the endemic fish. Man, who is forever tinkering with nature because he thinks he knows best, introduced various outside species like tilapia and carp, fish whose ways were so inimical that the local species died out. Nobody knows how many Malagasy species vanished, for no proper study of the lake fauna had been done, but vanish they did, some of them without even having the doubtful privilege of having had a scientific name bestowed upon them.

  In a village nearby, Mihanta did his Cheshire Cat vanishing act, leaving us (like Alice) with only the memory of his wide beguiling grin, but he soon returned looking very pleased with himself and carrying three raffia baskets with a half-grown lemur in each one. We found ourselves in something of a pickle as now we had exceeded our quota and had ten specimens instead of six. It was impossible to leave any of the lemurs when we knew that they would be on the menu that night in one or other of the village huts.

  We wended our way back to the hotely and held a council of war. We had succeeded in what we had set out to do magnificently, for I had thought we would be lucky to obtain a pair of lemurs, let alone ten of these beautiful creatures. The plan had been, of course, to take our furry cargo back to Antananarivo by train. However, Araminta and I were now feeling so rotten that we decided that the best thing to do – rather than face a bone-shaking, twelve-hour train ride – was to send the healthy male members of the party, Edward and Mihanta, off with the adult lemurs on the train while the rest of us flew back with the babies.

  Lee carried the babies in individual baskets wrapped in lambas and Araminta was festooned with her Christmas presents so she looked like a walking section of the market. Fortunately, for the most part, the Malagasy are a placid people and, moreover, travel with the strangest burdens themselves, so they viewed our eccentric luggage with equanimity. Once we were settled in the tiny plane and had taken to the air, I consulted an English-Malagasy dictionary I had purchased in the hope of taking my mind off my stomach cramps and improving my knowledge of Malagasy which, up until now, extended only to ‘good morning’ and ‘thank you’, not enough, I felt, to enable me to conduct an intellectual conversation. Almost as soon as I settled down to learn, I soon found, to my dismay, that this was easier said than done.

  Malagasy is a fine, rackity-clackity, ringing language which sounds not unlike someone carelessly emptying a barrel of glass marbles down a stone staircase. It may be apocryphal, but it is said that written Malagasy was first worked out and put down on paper by early Welsh missionaries. They must have greeted the task with all the relish of people who christened towns and villages in their own country with names that seem to contain every letter in the alphabet. The map of Wales is bestrewn with such tongue-twisting names as Llanaelhaiarn, Llanfairfechan, Llanerchymedd, Penrhyndeudraech, and, of course, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. So the missionaries, licking their lips, must have approached with zeal the job of making a whole language one gigantic tintinnabulation, and they surpassed themselves in the length and complexity of their translation. So, when my dictionary fell open at the word ‘bust’ and informed me that in Malagasy it was ‘ny tra tra seriolona voasokitra hatramin ny tratra no ho miakatra’, I was not surprised. It did not, of course, tell me whether it translated ‘bust’ in the sense of broken, going bust in a financial sense, or a woman’s bosom. If it was a lady’s bust, however, I decided it would take considerable time to get around to describing and praising other delectable bits of her anatomy, by which time she may well have come to the conclusion that you had a mammary fixation and lost interest in you. A language as elongated as this tends to slow down communication, particularly of a romantic nature.

  We arrived safely in Tana and smuggled the babies into the hotel. This time we had commandeered a suite of two large bedrooms and a bathroom. The extra bedroom was needed for storage of all our pieces of animal kit (folding cages and so on) and, in any case, would be useful when the Jersey Channel Television team arrived. Channel Television had, for many years, filmed our exploits in the zoo in Jersey. Now they had a chance to film a real expedition catching aye-aye and they jumped at it and would soon appear with their complex outfit of everything from film to generators. The adult lemurs from the lake had arrived safely under the tender care of Edward and Mihanta and soon we had them bedded down comfortably at Tsimbazaza Zoo. We decided to keep the babies at the hotel for the time being since they needed feeding so frequently.

  The morning after our arrival, I was lying in bed thinking drowsily about getting up and feeding the baby lemurs when I heard a chorus of excited popping noises coming from the room next door, where we had installed our infants in their neat round baskets. The popping noises increased and reached a crescendo. Then came silence. I wondered what on earth our tiny charges were up to. Suddenly it occurred to me that a cat or a rat may have got into the room somehow and could, at this very moment, be devouring our precious babies. This awful thought galvanized me into action and I leapt out of bed just in time to see Edward (the smallest of the quartet) saunter into the room with his Chaplin walk, all big eyes and innocence. He must have somehow shifted the lid of his basket an
d escaped. Obviously, he could hear us in the next room and, as we represented provender and he was more than ready for his breakfast, he made his way to us. As I leant over to pick him up, he uttered a bark of horror and fled behind the door. I suppose, from his point of view, it was as terrifying as suddenly being attacked by the Eiffel Tower or Mount Everest. I closed the door to get at him and he immediately went on the defensive, standing on his hind legs, arms outstretched, back against the wall, yapping defiance at me. I scooped him up and when I got him level with my face he started playing with my beard and purring like a kitten.

  I put him on my bed with a piece of banana and, carrying this moist trophy he immediately walked over Lee’s face in order to eat it in comfort on the pillow. I opened the door and peered into the next room to ascertain how Edward’s compatriots were faring and was faced with what appeared to be a sea of baby lemurs. They must have watched Edward’s escaping technique with close attention and copied him. It took me some time to round them up and assemble them in a neat circle round a saucer of milk on the bed. I was grateful, though, that they had not decided to explore our equipment because, if they had got in amongst the rucksacks and other gear, the job of finding them would have been as difficult as extricating them from the Hampton Court maze.

  ‘They’re adorable little things,’ said Lee, as she wiped some semi-masticated banana from the pillow and I mopped up a pool of milk on the bedspread (the babies’ table manners left a lot to be desired), ‘but I shall be glad when we can pass them over to the zoo for safe keeping.’

  ‘So shall I,’ I said, rescuing Edward, who was determined to be the first mountaineering lemur to scale the curtains. ‘That popping chorus they indulge in sounds like a perpetual cocktail party.’