The Drunken Forest

by Gerald Durrell

  As soon as she knew she had her bedroom to retire to in moments of stress, Cai became very tame and trusting, even allowing us to stroke her. Jacquie would hold a piece of banana or a grape in her clenched hand, and offer it to Cai. She would come down from her bedroom and sit there solemnly opening Jacquie’s hand, finger by finger, until she could get at the delicacy. With plenty of fruit and insect life, and two bowls of milk with raw egg and vitamins beaten in it a day, she soon put on weight, and her fur became glossy and thick as a powder-puff. You would not have recognized her as the frightened, faded scrap of fur she had been when we first got her. The credit for her well-being was Jacquie’s, for Cai liked her better than she liked me, and so Jacquie had the task of cleaning and feeding her, tempting her appetite with delicacies, and playing with her so that she did not become bored. I can honestly say (without vanity, since it was not my handiwork) that when we landed Cai in England I have never seen a douracouli like her in any zoo.

  For some time Cai reigned supreme as Queen of the Camp, and then one day there arrived another creature to share her throne. On being tipped out of the basket, this new addition resembled a very small, very fluffy chow puppy, with a black-and-white ringed tail, and wearing, for reasons best known to himself, a mask of black fur across his face, from which two wistful, rather sad brown eyes contemplated us. He stood there on immensely large and very flat feet, looking like a dismal highwayman who has lost his pistol. The soles of his paws, we noticed, were pink, and his fingers and toes long and slender, of the type that is generally known as artistic. He was a baby crab-eating raccoon, and we soon decided to call him Pooh, for he closely resembled the famous bear of that name, and it was generally the first thing we said when we went to clean out his cage in the morning.

  I put Pooh into a nice roomy cage with wooden bars and a neat door with a latch, gave him a couple of buckets of sawdust to sit in and left him to settle down. He behaved, to begin with, with the utmost decorum, squatting on his ample behind and gazing through the bars, looking like Dick Turpin awaiting trial. When we came back after lunch, however, we found Pooh had been busy. He was sitting with an air of depressed innocence, surrounded by our day’s egg supply, or, to be more accurate, he was surrounded by the shells, while his paws, face, and coat were sticky with yolk or white. He gazed at us, when we scolded him, with the expression of one who has always found life harsh and is beyond expecting sympathy or understanding. I decided that his burglar-like method of getting out of his cage deserved further study, for I could not see how he had managed it. I put him back inside the cage, securely latched the door and then kept a wary eye on him from a distance. After a long pause, a black nose appeared through the bars and whiffled to and fro; having decided the coast was clear, this was withdrawn and its place taken by a long, slender set of fingers and a pink paw which groped in the most human fashion round the bars in the direction of the latch. Having located it, one of the artistic fingers was inserted under the hook, and with an expert flick it knocked the latch up. The door was pushed open guiltily and Pooh’s face appeared slowly and thoughtfully round the edge. The next quarter of an hour I spent fixing a bolt to the door, as well as the latch, and it took him three days to learn the intricacies of this and escape again. By the end of the week the door of his cage bristled with an assortment of bolts, latches, and hooks that would have made Houdini think a bit, but the only result was that we took longer to open the door than Pooh did. In the end, I had to fix a padlock on the door, and that did the trick. But Pooh would sit for hours with his paws stuck through the bars, fondling the padlock with his sensitive, pink paws, occasionally sticking a finger into the keyhole in a hopeful sort of way.

  Now a sentimentalist might argue that Pooh was trying desperately to escape from his wooden prison to the gay, abandoned freedom of the forest. This, however, would be exaggerating. Whenever Pooh escaped, he had only two objectives: firstly, the food-table, and, if this was empty the bird-cages. If food was available, Pooh would be found in the midst of it. If there was no food, he would send the birds into an hysterical twitter by peering through the wire at them and licking his lips. It might be argued that, if Pooh was not interested in regaining his lost freedom, he was merely escaping in order to secure a square meal which we denied him. To counter this, I should like it to go on record that Pooh, for his size, ate more than any other animal I have ever come across, This walking stomach had a daily ration consisting of two raw eggs, vitamins, and cod-liver oil, beaten up in half a pint of milk, a quarter of a pound of minced steak or heart, and fruit in the shape of bananas, guavas, or pawpaws. Having consumed all this in the space of an hour, he would, after a slight doze, be ready for more.

  When Pooh discovered that the padlock would not yield its secrets to him, he did not give up hope, but devoted half an hour a day to it, and the rest of the time he devoted to other good works. Among these were his spring-cleaning activities. Every day, having indulged in the herculean task of cleaning his cage, we would spread a layer of clean sawdust in the bottom of it. Pooh would then be seized with what appeared to be a housewifely desire for tidiness. The fact that the sawdust was spread all over the cage would get on his nerves. Starting in one comer, he would begin to work backwards, sweeping the sawdust with his front paws and shooting it out between his hind legs to be bulldozed along by his ample bottom. He would solemnly work his way over the cage like this until the floor was not marred by one speck of sawdust, while in one corner his bottom had amassed a huge conical pile of the stuff; needless to say, the corner with the sawdust in it was the one he did not use for those functions of nature for which this commodity had been provided. Instead, he used it as a couch, a sort of sawdust chaise-longue, against which, during the treat of the afternoon, he would recline, on his back, plucking meditatively with his long fingers at the hair on the enormous mound of his stomach. He liked nothing better, while wrapped in these Buddhist meditations, than to have a piece of fat to play with. Holding one end in his mouth and the other end between his hind-paws, he would pull alternately with his teeth or toes, thus producing a gentle rocking-chair-like motion which was apparently very conducive to slumber.

  In order to give Pooh more exercise, I thought it would be a good idea to put him out on a lead for a few hours every day, so I drove a stake into the ground, fashioned a collar out of plaited string, and a lead out of rope. Within half an hour Pooh had gnawed his way through the rope, visited the food-table, and had eaten twenty-four bananas. I tried a variety of different materials as leads, and the one that took him longest to get through was a thong of rawhide, but even this gave up the unequal struggle eventually. In the end I procured a length of chain which had, originally, been intended for other purposes, and this, though short, at least resisted all Pooh’s efforts to bite through it. In spite of Pooh’s flat-footed, slow, shuffling walk and his air of benign obesity, he was really a most active creature, rarely still and always on the look-out for something to stick his paws into. Being so active, he was easily bored, and sometimes we had to exercise the utmost ingenuity in finding things to occupy him. A length of old ciné film kept him amused for days: he would stroll back and forth with yards of celluloid trailing from his mouth, or else lie on his back, holding the film in his paws and peering at it short-sightedly, looking like a plump and rather melancholy film mogul contemplating his latest epic.

  The day I found the husk of an old coconut was a red-letter one for Pooh. At first he was a bit suspicious of it and approached it with a curious sideways shuffle, ready to run for it should the coconut attack him. Then he touched it delicately with one paw and discovered to his pleasure that the coconut would roll about. He spent a happy half-hour chasing it to and fro; and several times he grew over-excited and knocked it outside the limit of his chain, so he had to give his loud yarring screams until Jacquie or I retrieved it for him. Then Jacquie had an idea and suggested I should bore a hole in the husk. This simple action transformed the coconu
t from being a passing fancy to being Pooh’s favourite toy. Now he would sit for hours with it clasped between his hind legs, one arm and paw delving deep inside it and occasionally surfacing with some microscopic fragment of shell. The first time, he delved so enthusiastically that he got stuck, and, having extricated him, I had to enlarge the hole. So Pooh would spend the day with his coconut, playing football with it, plunging his hand into it like a child with a bran-tub, and eventually, when he was tired, falling asleep draped over it.

  Our third animal character was known by the rather unimaginative name of Foxey. He was a small, delicately made, grey pampas fox, with slender legs and enormous brush and eager brown eyes. Foxey had been procured by a Paraguayan at a very tender age, and when he came to us he must have been some three or four months old. He was about the size of a wire-haired terrier, and he had obviously given up all ideas of behaving like a fox. In fact, I think that privately he was convinced he wasn’t a fox, but a dog, and he had certainly developed some most unfox-like habits. We kept Foxey on a collar and chain, which was, in turn, attached to a ring. Through the ring was threaded a wire stretched between two posts. In this way he would have a greater area to run about in and yet his leash was short enough to ensure he did not get tangled up in it. At night he slept in a large, grass-filled cage. Every morning when he caught sight of us he would greet us with loud and prolonged yowls of joy, and as soon as his cage was opened he would wag his great tail frantically from side to side, lift his upper lip and display his baby teeth in the most endearing grin of delight. His final moment of ecstasy came as he was lifted out of his cage, and then you had to be careful how you held him, for he would be so overcome with joy at seeing you again that he could no longer contain himself, and the resulting stream could drench you if you were not careful.

  Shortly after he arrived we discovered he had two passions in life: one was chickens, and the second was cigarette butts. Chickens, or for that matter any birds, fascinated him, Occasionally one or two members of Paula’s fowl-run would invade the collection and wander near to where Foxey was tethered. He would crouch down, head on his paws, ears pricked, and his tail moving gently from side to side. The hens would approach, pecking and uttering hiccupping, slightly inebriated, chucks, and the closer they got, the brighter grew Foxey’s eyes. The hens’ vacant meanderings always took some time, and Foxey could not contain himself. Long before they were within range, he would gather himself together and charge to the limit of his leash, yapping excitedly. The hens would scuttle off, squawking hysterically, and Foxey would squat down and beam over his shoulder at us, creating a miniature dust-storm with the frantic wagging of his tail.

  His interest in cigarette butts amounted to almost an obsession. Whenever he found one he would pounce on it and devour it, with the expression of utmost loathing on his face. Then he would spend an uncomfortable half an hour coughing violently, have a long drink of water and be ready for the next butt-end.

  One awful day, however, Foxey learnt his lesson. Carelessly I had left a nearly full packet of cigarettes within his reach, and before I had discovered it Foxey had eaten the lot. To say that he was sick would be a vast understatement. His stomach performed the emesis of all time, and every last shred of paper and tobacco was returned to the light of day, tastefully mixed with Foxey’s breakfast. He was so exhausted by this effort that he just lay and let a chicken walk right past him, and never even twitched an ear. By evening he had recovered enough to eat a couple of pounds of meat and two raw eggs, but the offer of a cigarette caused him to back away, sneezing indignantly. Never again did he sample tobacco in any shape or form.

  Fawns, Frogs, and Fer-de-lance

  One day we learnt that on the following morning an autovia was travelling some twenty-five kilometres up the line to a place that delighted in the name of Waho. Apart from the name, which attracted me, Waho seemed worth a visit, for I had been told that it was the best area for jaguar, and I wanted to see the overseer about setting some traps. Also, being a cattle-station, Waho had quite a substantial population – at least fifty people, which is substantial by Chaco standards – and I thought that they might have some pets which they would be willing to part with.

  We had been told that the autovia would start at four in the morning and could not, on any account, wait for us if we were late. With a considerable effort we managed to get Rafael out of bed and semi-conscious by this hour, and we stumbled down the road to the railway line, past the canals where the frogs and toads were still holding their nightly jazz club, and through the dark and lifeless village, shrouded in mist from the river. We found the autovia squatting on the line, and climbed in and sat dozing on the hard seats for half an hour, waiting for the driver. He appeared at last, yawning prodigiously, and informed us that we could not start until five, as they had forgotten to give him the mails for Waho, and he had had to send someone to collect them. We sat in an irritated silence, listening to the village cockerels starting up, and presently a small boy appeared out of the mist, bearing the sack of mails. The driver flung the sack into the back of the autovia, engaged his gears with a retching sound that any of the cockerels would have envied, and we clattered off down the buckled lines into the mist.

  Gradually, as the line curved inland and away from the river, the mist grew thinner, and eventually disappeared altogether, except for small eiderdown patches of it that hung over the pools and streams we passed. The sky ahead turned steel grey, and against it the tangled crest of the forest was etched with microscopic exactness. Gradually the grey faded, to be replaced by a purplish-red which spread across the horizon like a bruise. This, in its turn, rapidly faded to pale pink, and then to blue, as the sun rose over the rim of the forest. In the first slanting rays the whole landscape gained perspective and became alive. The forest was no longer a flat black silhouette, but a solid, interlaced crochet work of branches, vines, and thorns, its leaves glossy with mist. Flocks of guira cuckoos sat preening the moisture from their feathers, or crouched with drooped wings in the first heat of the day. We passed a small lake, the edge of which was trembling with the movement of birds: ibis strolling in groups, probing the mud eagerly with their curved beaks; an openbill stork, lank and dark, standing in rapt contemplation of his own reflection; two jacanas bathing, their underwings flashing buttercup yellow as they threw up a glittering spray of water over their heads and bodies. A small grey fox, returning from his night’s hunting, scuttled on to the line and then galloped ahead of us for about fifty yards before swerving off into the undergrowth. We chugged on, and very soon we passed a small grass-field that was an incredible sight.

  It was some two acres in extent, neatly fenced in with tall palms, and in it the great chaco spiders had been at work. These spiders have a body the size of a hazel nut, spotted with pink and white, and mounted on long, slender legs covering the area of a saucer. The silk they spin is thick, elastic, and the colour of gold. In this small grass-field they had covered every available bush and grass tussock with their great golden webs, each one the size of a cartwheel. In the centre of each web a spider was spread-eagled, and around it each delicate thread and spoke of their kingdom was decorated with dew, like diamonds on cloth of gold, The decorative effect was breathtakingly beautiful as they shimmered and glittered in the early sunlight.

  We reached Waho at about seven-thirty. The line swept out of the forest into an immense field, glinting here and there with water. In the grass at the edge of the field flocks of black-headed conures were feeding. These small parrots had the most vivid grass-green plumage with coal-black heads and necks. They flew up and wheeled, glittering, through the sky as we passed, screaming shrilly. The line ended here, in an area of churned mud; it was the usual sort of Chaco outstation, with a long, low, whitewashed house for the overseer, and a collection of dilapidated palm-log huts that housed the workers. The autovia drew up with an important chuffing and rattle, and Fernandez, the overseer, appeared, striding ov
er the sea of mud to greet us. He was a tall, powerful man with a handsome, rather Mongolian face and very fine teeth. He had the most charming manners, and greeted us as though we were royalty, ushering us into the living-room of his house and sending his small, dark wife busting round to prepare us some mate with milk. While we drank this thick, sweet, and rather sickly drink, I spread out my books and drawings on the table, and with Rafael acting as interpreter, I went into the subject of the local fauna with Fernandez. He recognized all the creatures that I particularly wanted, and promised to do his best to try to obtain some for me. Jaguar and ocelot were very common, he told us, some cows having been killed by a jaguar only a week before; however, they were wary and not easily caught. He promised to set traps in all the likely places, and should he be successful in catching anything he would send me a message at once, When I questioned him about the smaller creatures – the frogs, toads, snakes, and lizards – he gave a disarming grin and said that we had better go over to an area of the out-station where they were clearing a section of the forest; here, he told us, they were finding any number of small bichos. While we hastily gulped down our drinks, Fernandez called two Indians, and we set off to look for small bichos.

  We followed a narrow, muddy path that zig-zagged through the long grass from which the mosquitoes rose in clouds, We passed by the cattle-slaughtering pen, a large corral some seventy feet square, with walls made of palm logs. The top of the walls was decorated with a frieze of black vultures, sitting in their usual hunch-backed, rather menacing way, waiting for the next killing. They were so bold that we walked within six feet of them and they did not take wing, but merely surveyed us appraisingly, looking like a convention of elderly undertakers. Fernandez led us down the path for about half a mile, until it left the grass-field and entered the forest. Here we found a group of Indians hacking away at the thorny undergrowth with machetes, chattering and laughing, their huge straw hats bobbing about like animated mushrooms in the tangle of scrub. Fernandez called them together and explained what we wanted, and the Indians glanced shyly at us and grinned at each other; then one of them addressed Fernandez and pointed to a large log lying half-hidden in the undergrowth. Fernandez relayed the information to Rafael, who, in turn, translated for me.