The Drunken Forest

by Gerald Durrell

  Having got the little creatures on to a substitute diet, I felt that this had been the final obstacle, and that by all the laws of collecting we should have no more trouble with them. For a time all went well. During the day they would sleep in their bedroom, either curled up into a ball, or else lying on their sides, half unrolled, one armadillo fitting into the other. At three-thirty they would wake up and come out of their bedroom to tip-toe round the cage, like ballerinas, occasionally tick-tacking up to the bars and sticking their heads through to test the breeze with their pink noses to find out if the food was on its way. Very occasionally, the males would have a fight. This consisted of one armadillo barging another into a corner, and then endeavouring to get his head under the edge of his opponent’s shell, in order to turn him over; once he was on his side, the victor also turned on his side and scrabbled frantically in an effort to disembowel him. As soon as I noticed these tournaments, I kept a close watch on them. Though they never seemed to do each other any harm, I saw that the big ones were fighting the smaller ones at feeding time, and, by their superior size and weight, keeping the smaller and lighter ones from the food. I decided the best thing would be to keep them in pairs, male and female of approximately the same size. So I built a cage that Jacquie used to call Sing-Sing: it was a series of ‘flats’, one on top of the other, each with its own bedroom. By this time we had acquired ten of these little armadillos, consisting of four pairs and two odd males. It was a curious thing that the females seemed to be in the minority, for any number of males were brought to us, but only very occasionally did a female get caught. The married couples settled down very well in the Sing-Sing apartments, and there were no more tournaments at feeding time.

  One day Jacquie had just finished giving them their food, and she appeared holding one of the large males in her hand. By this time they had become so used to handling that they no longer curled into a tight ball when touched. Jacquie looked worried, but the armadillo lay blissfully on his back in her cupped hands, while she stroked his pink, furry tummy.

  ‘Just look at this one’s feet,’ she said, holding out the beast for my inspection.

  ‘What’s the matter with them?’ I inquired, taking the semi-hypnotized beast and looking at it.

  ‘Look . . . the soles of his hind-feet are all raw.’

  ‘Good Lord! So they are. I wonder what he’s been doing?’

  ‘It strikes me,’ said Jacquie, ‘that these animals are going to be more trouble than they’re worth . . . they’ve already caused us more worry than the rest of the collection put together.’

  ‘Are the others all right?’

  ‘I didn’t look. I wouldn’t have noticed this one, only he came rushing to the door and fell out when I put the plate in; when I picked him up I noticed his feet.’

  We went and examined the others, and discovered to our consternation that all of them had these circular, sixpenny size raw patches on their hind-feet. The only reason for this that I could think of was that the wooden floors of their cages were too hard for them, and, trotting about as much as they did, they had worn the delicate skin off the soles of their hind-feet. So every day all the armadillos had to be taken out of Sing-Sing and laid on the ground, like a row of pumpkins, while we anointed their hind-feet with penicillin ointment. Then something had to be done about the floor of their cages, and I tried covering them with a thick layer of soft earth. This was quite useless, for at feeding time the armadillos splashed their food about with wild abandon, and then trod the sticky mixture of mud and brain into a paste that set as hard as cement, not only on the-floor of the cage, but on the soles of their hind-feet as well. After some experiment, I discovered that the best flooring consisted of a deep layer of sawdust, covered by another layer of dry leaves and grass. This acted very well, and within a few weeks their feet had healed up nicely, and we had no recurrence of the trouble.

  To the average person it would no doubt seem as though we had taken a lot of unnecessary trouble over a small and unimportant beast, but to us it represented a major triumph. To find and capture a difficult and delicate creature, to house it properly, teach it to eat a substitute food, cope successfully with its illnesses and other problems – these are some of the most irritating, heart-breaking, and worrying of a collector’s jobs, but the accomplishment of them is by far the most exciting and satisfying. A creature which settles down well in captivity, never becomes ill, and eats whatever it is given, is regarded with affection by the collector; but the tricky, stubborn, and delicate animal is regarded as a challenge which, though it may be exhausting, is much more satisfying when one achieves success in the end.

  Bevy of Bichos

  Our own efforts, combined with the help of the local male population (under orders from Paula), soon produced a flood of local fauna; and Jacquie, Rafael, and I were kept hard at work all day, cage-building, cage-cleaning, feeding and watering, recording and photographing. Even with the three of us working, we were still hard put to it to cope with all the work. Reluctantly, I decided that we would have to employ a carpenter to deal with the caging. I say reluctantly, because I have had a good deal of experience of these craftsmen in various parts of the world. Carpenters, as a breed, I have discovered, have one-track minds: employ them to make a door or a table, and, however unskillfully, they will produce the article required. But engage a carpenter and tell him that he must make a variety of cages for animals, and he immediately goes all to pieces. By the time you have taught him the rudiments of cage-making, it is generally time for you to leave. So it was with certain misgivings that I asked Rafael to get Paula to obtain a carpenter for us. The following day he turned up, a short, plump little man with a face so devoid of expression that he might have been a goldfish. In a hoarse voice he confided to us that his name was Anastacius. We spent an exhausting half-hour explaining to him what we wanted, and then gave him a box and told him to convert it into a bird-cage. We very soon discovered that Anastacius had two most irritating habits; first, he whistled loudly and tunelessly while he worked, and, secondly, he seemed to be under the impression that nails had a life of their own, or were possessed of malignant spirits. He would hammer a nail into the wood with a series of tremendous blows that continued to rain down long after the head was flush with the board. Then he would pause and survey the nail narrowly out of the corner of his eye, presumably waiting for it to start creeping out of the wood. Usually the nail remained immobile, but occasionally Anastacius would notice some slight movement, and he would leap forward and bring the hammer down with devastating violence until he was sure that the nail had succumbed. As soon as he had successfully killed a nail, be would break into a loud, tuneless whistle of triumph. So he toiled for two hours over his first cage, and then, when we all had splitting headaches, he produced the result for my inspection.

  Now, a bird’s cage is one of the simplest things to construct: all it needs is a wire front, with a half-inch gap at the bottom for cleaning purposes; two perches; and a door just big enough to admit one’s hand. Anastacius’ effort was a masterpiece: the woodwork was a mortuary of dead nails, mostly twisted and crushed, and the wire front had several large dents in it where the creator had swung too wildly in his pursuit of a nail. The door was so contrived that, once shut, it was almost impossible to open, and, once open, it was impossible for me to get my hand inside. The gap he had left for cleaning out was so ample that anything, except a very fat vulture, could have flown through it with ease. We contemplated it in gloomy silence.

  ‘I think it better we do ourselves, Gerry, no?’ said Rafael at last. ‘No, Rafael, we’ve got too much to do – we’ll just have to put up with this butcher and hope he’ll improve.’

  ‘It couldn’t be difficult to improve on that,’ said Jacquie. ‘What on earth are we going to put in it? It’ll have to be something tame, so that if it escapes we can catch it again easily.’

  For a week the Butcher, as we called
him, produced a series of cages each worse than the last. The climax came when I asked him to make me a cage for a creature which needed its housing lined with tin. He had attached the tin to the inside of the cage by the novel method of drawing huge nails through from the outside. The result was that the inside of the cage was full of jagged bits of tin and a forest of nail-points. The whole construction looked rather like some strange medieval device for torture.

  ‘It’s no good, Rafael, he’ll have to go – I can’t stand any more of this – the man’s obviously mental. Just look at this effort; one would think we wanted to kill the animals, instead of keeping them alive,’ I said. ‘Tell him he’s sacked, and tell Paula we want someone else – someone who at least has some rudiments of intelligence.’

  So the Butcher returned to whatever work of demolition he’d been engaged on in the village, and the next morning Paula appeared leading a thin, shy young man wearing a peaked cap. Paula introduced him as the new carpenter, and held forth at great length on his prowess, personality, and intelligence. Rafael showed him the cages that we had made, and the man examined them carefully, and then said he thought he would be able to construct similar ones.

  ‘Good,’ I said, when all this had been translated to me. ‘What’s his name, Rafael?’

  ‘Como se llama?’ asked Rafael.

  ‘Julius Caesar Centurian,’ said the man, giving a nervous giggle.

  So Julius Caesar Centurian came into our midst, and a charming, resourceful, and likeable character he turned out to be. What was more important, he was an excellent carpenter as well. As soon as he took over the caging, we found we had far more time to concentrate on the animal work.

  In any collection of animals there are bound to be two or three which endear themselves to you particularly; they need not necessarily be very rare or exotic, nor overburdened with intelligence. But the moment you see them you realize they are possessed of those rare and indefinable qualities, charm and personality, and that they are destined to become characters in camp. To begin with, we had three such beasts in the Chaco; later this trio was joined by a fourth who outshone them all – but more of her anon. The three beasts were as unlike one another as possible, yet they all possessed the basic qualification to turn them into characters rather than just specimens.

  The first of these was Cai, the douracouli monkey. She was brought in one day by a rather repulsive-looking Indian who wore a very battered straw hat with a blue ribbon dangling from it. I was very pleased to get her; apart from liking monkeys, I was particularly interested in douracoulis, since they are the only nocturnal monkey in the world. Cai was about the size of a small cat and clad in lichen-grey fur. On her chest the fur was a pale orange shade fading to cream on her tummy. Her small ears were so deeply embedded in the hair of her head that they were almost invisible. She had enormous owl-like eyes of pale amber and they were surrounded by an area of white fur edged with black. This marking, together with her big eyes and her apparent lack of ears, gave her a most remarkable resemblance to an owl. She was very shabby and unkempt and terribly thin. For the first three days she was intensely nervous, and we could do nothing with her We kept her tied to a stake with a big box to retreat into, and at first she spent her whole time cowering out of sight. If we made any overtures of friendship she would cringe back, gazing at us with wide-eyed horror, her little hands trembling with fright. She was, of course, half-starved, and ate greedily of the food we gave her But, however hungry she was, she would never come out of her box to feed until we had retreated some distance. Then, one day, I succeeded in catching a lizard for her. I killed it and, approaching Cai’s box, I squatted down and held out the still-writhing reptile on the palm of my hand. Cai took one look, at the delicacy, and delight overcame her caution. She leapt out of her box, gave a faint ghost-like scream, and, grabbing the lizard firmly, she squatted down in front of me. Suddenly she realized that I was much closer than she normally allowed me, and she was just proposing to retreat into her box when the lizard’s tail gave a convulsive wriggle. Immediately she forgot me, and with a look of intense concentration she bit the tail off and sat there holding it in one hand, munching happily, as though it was a stick of celery. I sat perfectly still until she had finished her meal, and she gazed at me while she ate, with a watchful expression in her enormous liquid eyes. When the last bit of lizard had been chewed, taken out and gazed at, chewed again and finally swallowed, she examined her hands carefully and the ground around her, to make sure no bits were left. Then she stretched out her hind-leg, scratched her thigh vigorously, got up, and sauntered off to her box. From that day onwards her confidence increased.

  We soon discovered that Cai did not care for being tied up in the open. I think it gave her a naked, unprotected feeling. So I set to work and built her a cage. This was a tall, narrow structure, with a little bedroom at the top, into which she could retire when she felt like it. She adored this bedroom and would spend her whole day sitting in there, just her head and front paws poking out of the door. In this position she would go off to sleep. Her eyes would droop half shut, and then suddenly open again; a few seconds later they would droop once more, her head would start to nod, until eventually, after many fits and starts and sudden awakenings, her head would sink down and rest peacefully on her paws. But let anything interesting or unusual happen, and her great eyes would fly open and she would crane out of her bedroom to see what was going on, sometimes, in her excitement, twisting her head round so that it was completely upside down and you feared that another half an inch and it would drop off. She could also turn her head round and look over her back, with an almost owl-like ability. She was intensely curious and could not bear to stop watching something, even if it frightened her. Sometimes she would witness the arrival of a new snake and, uttering a series of her faint, squeaky sighs, would come down and peer at it through the wire, wide-eyed with horror, glancing continually over her shoulder to make sure her line of retreat was secure. If she thought the snake was too close, she would leap on to the branch near her bedroom and sit facing the door, and then screw her head round and continue to watch the snake over her shoulder. Thus her body was facing the exact way for a rapid retreat to safety, and she could still keep one eye on the reptile. For a nocturnal creature she spent an awful lot of the day awake, and scarcely anything happened in camp that her big eyes did not notice or her faint voice remark on.

  One day when I was hacking up a rotten log for the woodpecker, I discovered some large and juicy cockroaches hiding under the bark. Thinking I would give Cai a treat, I captured them and carried them to her. She was spread-eagled on the floor of the cage, having a sun-bath, eyes closed, mouth half open in ecstasy. She woke up when I called her, and sat blinking in a bemused fashion. I opened the door of her cage and dropped in the largest and most agile cockroach, thinking that it would amuse her to catch it for herself. But Cai, half-awake, only saw that I had put something in her cage which was alive, and she was not going to hang about and see what it was. She disappeared into her bedroom in a flash, while the cockroach stalked about the floor of the cage, waving its antenna in a vague sort of way. Presently Cai poked her head cautiously out of her bedroom door to see what my offering was. She gazed down at the cockroach with suspicion, her face, as always when she was nervous or excited, seeming to be all eyes. After due consideration, she decided that the insect was harmless, and possibly edible, and so she climbed down and sat contemplating it closely for a while. The cockroach ambled about for a bit and then stopped for a quick wash and brush-up. Cai sat, hands folded over her stomach, watching it with absorbed interest. Then she stretched out a cautious hand and very delicately, with one finger, tapped the cockroach on the back. The insect immediately scuttled frantically across the floor, and Cai leapt backwards in fright and wiped her hand hurriedly on her chest. The cockroach, legs and feelers working overtime, reached the front of the cage and started to squeeze through the wire. With a shrill twit
ter, Cai leapt forward and grabbed it, but she was too late. I caught the insect and reintroduced it into the cage, and this time Cai followed it about, tapping it on the back and then smelling her fingers. Finally she decided that, however revolting its appearance, it must be edible, and so, closing her eyes tightly and screwing up her face into an expression of determination tinged with disgust, she grabbed at it with both hands and stuffed it into her mouth, so that the wriggling legs stuck out like a walrus moustache. Ever after that I used to kill her cockroaches before giving them to her, otherwise she would take so long plucking up the courage to catch them that they always escaped through the wire.