The Aye-Aye and I

by Gerald Durrell

  The Malagasy on the whole seem to have a robust and cheerful attitude towards death. Many of the Malagasy tribes believe in exhuming from their tombs the bones of their ancestors, giving them – as it were – a good party and then reburying them with all solemnity. It is said (with how much truth I could not discover) that in Madagascar there are taxi signs which read:

  ‘City, 7,000 francs

  Marriages, funerals and exhumations, price negotiable’

  The reburial ceremony is called a famadihana and sometimes takes place when a corpse is brought from distant parts to be incarcerated in the ancestral tomb when it also provides a chance to bring out the already-buried corpses to treat them (washing the bones, for example) and wrap them up again in a fresh silken shroud. This ritual may also be performed at the ‘opening’ ceremony of a new tomb, when bodies are brought to it from temporary burial sites. The famadihana is accompanied by much festivity, plenty of music, singing and dancing (dancing even with the ancestors’ bones). On one occasion, it is reported that one of the tunes chosen was ‘Roll out the Barrel’. The body is held or carried, talked to by its descendants and perhaps even taken on a quick ‘walkabout’ to see any new developments in the home, town or village. It is rather a joyous thing to do and so completely the opposite of our own gloomy, tear-drenched obsequies for the dead.

  Finally, in the late afternoon, to our infinite relief, we reached Mananara, a conglomeration of decrepit houses that must surely have given birth to the phrase ‘a one-horse town’ (only in this case I think even the horse was missing). It had three roads that looked more accidental than planned, each one riddled with holes like a Gruyère cheese. The local livestock were under the impression that this warm, pock-marked area had been constructed for their benefit. Zebu lay there, stoically chewing the cud, treating motor traffic as if it did not exist. Two huge cockerels, with thighs like wrestlers, were having an exhilarating fight, valiantly attempting to stab each other with long, curved, yellow spurs. Their bronze, gold and yellow plumage shone in the sun as they fought. In one pothole, a hen with five chicks crooned to herself, looking for non-existent edible matter; in another, four ducks, with much honking, were taking a dust bath; in yet another, a lanky bitch in the last stages of emaciation was lying on her side while three stalwart puppies butted at her with their heads vigorously, in their efforts to obtain some liquid from her shrivelled dugs.

  The inhabitants of the town treated the roads, such as they were, in the same cavalier fashion, lounging to and fro with baskets of produce on their heads, looking neither to left nor right, and sometimes stopping to have a gossip in what was, after all, the main thoroughfare. Even when we blew our horns they sometimes ignored us, or else glanced casually around and then drifted languidly out of our way.

  As befitted a one-horse town, the hotely looked vaguely like a Wild West saloon. It was a plank-and-pole building with a veranda running round the outside. Inside was a large bar and eating area, with a kitchen out at the back. When you descended from this main structure, you came upon a cluster of minute chalets in the back garden. The beds were wooden and uncontaminated by such things as box-spring mattresses. The bathroom, which was slightly larger than a dropsical man’s coffin, was equipped with buckets of water and, when you had finished your ablutions, you got rid of the bathwater by the simple expedient of pouring it through the gaps in the plank floor. This salubrious place was lit by one electric light bulb, little bigger than a chestnut and dangling on the end of a frayed cord. As the Malagasy tend to be people of small stature, the bulb was in exactly the right position to hit me in the eye when entering or leaving the bathroom. After I had washed my hair, the cord took on a sinuous life of its own and wound itself lovingly round my damp head in a way calculated to electrocute instantly had the voltage pumped out by the dynamo been a shade higher. The living quarters were linked by a series of narrow paths constructed out of seashells which tinkled gently as you walked on them and, if you were late to bed, woke up everyone in the hotely.

  The hotely was owned by a slim but somewhat pugilistic-looking Malagasy who might, in his previous incarnation, have been a ruthless Mongolian pirate. It was run by his wife, a tall, slender, sumptuously beautiful Chinese lady with eyes as black and inscrutable as olives in a skin of a delicate, creamy-white shade. She was always impeccably dressed and ruled her assortment of young staff with a rod of iron. The bar, which seemed to be open twenty-four hours a day, contained a wide variety of drinks ranging from beer to a local rum which was guaranteed to grow hairs on the chest of even the most feminine of Rubens’s models. Under the hawk-eyed dictatorship of Madame, meals were delicious and plentiful and served without any demur at any time of the day or night, which suited our somewhat erratic habits.

  The hotely was the centre of the crystal trade and this explained a mystery to me. Madagascar and Brazil are the crystal-gathering centres of the world, Madagascar having a slight edge over the New World. In my ignorance, I had supposed that there were crystal mines somewhere on the island where muscular miners with picks extracted the precious stones from the bowels of the earth, rather like the Seven Dwarfs. Nothing could be further from the truth. The crystals, heavily disguised as stones, litter the forest floor and enterprising villagers go and collect them and sell them to local exporters, of which the hotely owner was one.

  I discovered this on our first morning when I heard a curious noise. Not unlike the monotonous cry of the African tinker bird, it sounded like somebody beating tin on a tiny anvil, producing a ringing, tinkling sound that was most attractive, like a marsh full of tiny frogs in nuptial chorus. Pursuing this sound to its source, I found a group of girls sitting in the shade of a makeshift matting shelter, each armed with a small hammer, beating at large crystals, reducing them to chips the size of a Brazil nut or slightly bigger. They would knock off a sizeable chunk from the mother crystal and then proceed to gently hammer it, flaking off the impurities. Each crystal thus produced glittered white and grey like a tiny icicle as it was flung onto an ever-growing heap. These were then packed up and sent to Europe to be used in the manufacture of lasers, among other things.

  My discovery produced the nearest approach to animation we had seen in Frank so far, for it turned out that he collected crystals, and to find himself unexpectedly at their source was very exciting. After some hard bargaining with the owner of the hotely, who was also a crystal merchant, Frank purchased a dark crystal almost the size of the average brick and slightly thicker. It was called a black crystal, which was a misnomer, for it was a variety of smoky-greys like a Persian cat. Later on in the trip, I procured a large crystal which I considered to be infinitely superior. It was a delicate shade of pinky mauve like well-watered red wine and was quite beautiful, even without being polished, like a gigantic, crumpled rose petal.

  We settled into the hotely in a state of frustration for several reasons. First of all, we were uncertain which was the best area to set up our base camp: once this was established we had to stay put and bring any animals we caught to it, fanning out to do our hunting. Secondly, we were not quite sure which areas of forest we could hunt in without consulting the elusive Professor Roland Albignac, adviser to the Man and Biosphere Reserve which lay just outside the town, who had been meant to meet us on the way up and whose help we now needed urgently.

  The whole concept of the reserve is a fascinating and important one, particularly for a country like Madagascar which has so little forest left. The area designated for the reserve is very large and is divided up into concentric rings, rather like an archery target. The bull’s-eye in the centre is a tract of untouched forest which must remain inviolate. Even scientists are forbidden entry except for the most excellent reasons and, of course, neither hunting nor tree-felling are allowed. The next ring of the reserve is also virgin forest but it is utilized under supervision for limited hunting and tree-felling. The forest is used as it should be, gently and wisely for the service of man, but with care for the myriad other li
fe forms that inhabit it. The third zone, the extreme outside of the target, is for agriculture, sensibly monitored so that the land is not raped, and continues to provide for the people. This is a remarkably intelligent concept and, if it works, could really help Madagascar. It was essential for us to know where these various zones began and ended so that we would know where to start our hunt for the elusive aye-aye. So the whereabouts of Pimpernel Albignac became of great importance to us in the choosing of an area for our base camp.

  I found myself in an irritating personal predicament since my hips had decided to seize up on me as a protest against the drive. I could only hobble in a fashion that made me look like an octogenarian in a sack race. My helpless condition was brought home to me rather forcibly by the sanitary arrangements in the hotely. Having made my way down the path of shells like a somnambulistic tortoise emerging reluctantly from hibernation, I had to incarcerate myself in a corrugated-iron edifice containing two cement ‘footprints’ and a hole, the dimensions of which made it look like an abortive attempt at the Channel Tunnel. The disadvantage of this contraption from my point of view was that, having squatted down, there was nothing with which to lever myself upright again. After the first abortive attempt when, fortunately, Lee was in earshot and could rescue me, we had to visit the toilet facilities in tandem so that Lee could prise me loose. I cannot imagine what the other inhabitants of the hotely thought we were doing, since it was hardly the place to choose for a romantic interlude.

  I put the problem to Q who was, at that moment, terrorizing a local carpenter into constructing some nest-boxes that we hoped, before long, would contain aye-aye.

  ‘Is this carpenter of yours any good?’ I asked Q.

  ‘Yes, very good if you keep after him,’ said Q.

  ‘He doesn’t leave any nails sticking through, does he? It is a favourite habit of carpenters in my experience.’

  ‘No, he’s very careful. Why?’

  ‘Because when he’s finished the nest-boxes I want him to construct what was called, in my young days, a thunderbox,’ I explained.

  ‘A thunderbox? What the hell’s that?’ asked Q, considerably startled at my request.

  ‘It’s an invaluable open-sided box with no bottom and a hole in the top. Perch this over a hole in the ground and voilà! you have a thunderbox. Comfy to sit on and handsome as well. The one I had made in Paraguay was built out of rosewood but I can’t expect those refinements here, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll make you that easily,’ said Q, ‘but why are they called … Oh, yes, I see.’

  ‘I’m so glad,’ I said, austerely. I had no wish to go into the details of the nomenclature of this piece of furniture.

  In due course, Q produced the required box. It was sturdy and well constructed and so I christened it the Bloxam box forthwith and found my communing with nature considerably more endurable.

  On our way to Mananara, we had, of course, stopped at every likely looking village with a bit of forest left, to enquire about aye-aye. The results had been discouraging. Most villagers had never seen one. Even the oldest inhabitant we met, who must have been well into his eighties, vehemently denied the existence of such a dangerous beast in their midst. At one village, they did confess to having had an aye-aye invade their plantations some ten years previously and said that it had been promptly killed. All in all, there was no account of a plethora of aye-aye to lift our nagging spirits.

  While waiting for Roland Albignac to materialize, we decided to explore the countryside, searching for a suitable site for our base camp, and to continue questioning villagers about the animal. John took one of the Toyotas and sped northwards in a hopeful way, while Q set to work to explore Mananara’s surroundings. We were reasonably confident that our magic-fingered beast did exist in this area, for it was here that several had been captured a few years previously by Vincennes Zoo in Paris and Duke University in the USA, to start their captive breeding programmes, which were yet to bear fruit. The youngest of the Aye-aye they caught, a baby with the unlikely name of Humphrey, had been the first aye-aye I had ever seen and had, in effect, set our whole expedition in motion.

  We had just added to our number by employing Julian, a handsome if slightly simple youth, whose claim to fame was the fact that he was an aye-aye hunter par excellence and had caught several of the creatures for various zoological collections in the past. He had the audacity to shin up the trees and catch the animals by hand: no mean feat when you consider the size of the aye-aye’s teeth and the fact that it can shave off the top of a coconut – husk and shell – with a mere two or three bites. Needless to say, Julian had some impressive scars on his arms and hands to testify to the aye-aye’s biting abilities. It was decided that he and Q should go out at night to explore the forest in the vicinity of Mananara and see if they could find traces of our curious quarry. I stayed in the hotely, getting more and more irritated with the infirmities that were preventing me from joining in the night hunts as I would have wished; while Lee explored the immediate vicinity of the town.

  On one of her jaunts, Lee discovered that there was a river, just on the outskirts of the town, over which a substantial iron bridge had been erected. From this bridge onwards, the road was macadamized and in excellent condition. It ran for about thirty-five miles and then inexplicably stopped at a small village called Sandrakatsy. On enquiry, we found out the reason for this piece of road, built in the middle of nowhere for no apparent purpose. The wife of a past president had been born in Sandrakatsy and all her ancestors had been born and buried there. If she wished to visit her ancestors from time to time (as all good Malagasy should) she had to proceed to their graves over an atrocious road. Her husband (as all good husbands should) became aware of her problem and solved it by macadamizing the road. Naturally, his wife was delighted and so were all the villagers who lived along the road, for it made their trips to Mananara to sell their produce that much easier. Exploring this road, Lee had found a village on the banks of the beautiful Mananara River with vast sandbanks which would make an ideal campsite. But we were still waiting on will-o’-the-wisp Roland before we could decide.

  In the meantime, John returned from his scouting trip having found an area where the villagers said there were aye-aye as well as a suitable campsite. The snag was that the road to it was appalling and the bridges geriatric. If one or more of the bridges collapsed, the whole expedition (plus any aye-aye we may have captured) would be trapped, for unless we could use the road we were hamstrung. All we could do was wait and see what Roland had to say.

  Q had been out on several night hunts with Julian and they had seen nothing. Then, one morning, while I was sitting on the veranda over breakfast, Q staggered in.

  ‘You’ll never believe it,’ he said, sinking thankfully into a chair.

  ‘Never believe what?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye-aye,’ he said. ‘Aye-aye everywhere. They were all dashing about in the trees. It was the most … well, I can’t begin to describe. It was the most fabulous … well, it was just incredible. I mean to say … aye-aye all over the place.’

  ‘Now, take a deep breath and speak slowly and carefully from the diaphragm,’ I said, pouring him out some coffee. Q gulped down the revitalizing fluid and told us his tale.

  At about seven-thirty in the evening, he and Julian had come to an area of untouched forest. Suddenly, it seemed as if they were surrounded by aye-aye. They saw between eight and ten animals and Q thought it must have been some sort of mating gathering. It is known that the females attract several males at a time when in oestrus. Q said that there was a lot of crashing which sounded like males seeing each other off as the females excited them. The cry that the males made was a prolonged ‘ahhha’ not unlike the sound of the ring-tailed lemur, whereas the females made a shrill shriek that sounded like ‘eehee’. There was also a lot of aggressive sound – hissing snorts which may, again, have been males fighting or warning each other. He saw them scuttling up and down the creepers like squirrels an
d licking the base of the fresh flowers of the Ravenala palm, presumably to get some sort of nectar, and chewing on a sort of gall on the trees. This they then spat out, so presumably there were some grubs or beetles which they prized within the galls. Q said they were dextrous and agile in the trees, coming down head first, climbing upside down and hanging by their back legs to feed.

  Of course, this was wonderful news. It meant that we had come to the right place and located a pocket of these elusive creatures. Now all we had to do was catch them, something easier said than done. It was important that we spread the news around to the villages as well, for two days previously we had had some disquieting information from a village just down the road.

  An animal collector of experience is quite used to certain amazing things that can happen. They travel far and uncomfortably in search of some beast and when they finally arrive at their destination and inquire about their quarry everyone says, ‘Oh, there are none about now but you should have been here last week. I saw twenty and Charlie here … Charlie, how many did you see? Forty. There you are, but it’s the wrong season now. As I say, you should have been here last week.’ An animal collector of weak moral fibre would be confined to a padded cell after a few weeks of this sort of thing. What we came up against was something worse. We had been told, in one particular village, that an aye-aye nest had been spotted and so we went to investigate. When we got there we found that it was a rats’ nest, but the villagers assured us that there were aye-aye about for, they said proudly, ten days previously they had caught one. ‘What had they done with it?’ we enquired eagerly. They said that they had killed it because it was eating their coconuts. ‘Had they not been informed that it was a protected animal?’ we asked. They looked uneasily at each other. Yes, they had heard a rumour to that effect but they had not thought it to be true because at another village a few miles away an aye-aye had been caught, killed and eaten. Our hearts sank, for once upon a time the aye-aye was fady and, although killed, was not eaten. If it had become an item of culinary importance, the animals in the vicinity would soon be eliminated. We later found out that these two villages were within the Biosphere Reserve, which did not lift our spirits.