The Drunken Forest

by Gerald Durrell

  While Paula was evoking the aid of the saints and assuring Jacquie that she would be a widow within half an hour, I bent down to get a closer look at our protégé. Immediately he gulped convulsively, blew himself up to twice his previous size, and then exhaled the air in a series of indignant wheezing screams, at the same time taking little jumps towards me and snapping his great mouth. This was a most effective and startling display, for the inside of his lips was a bright primrose-yellow.

  At the sound of the toad’s war-cry, Paula clasped her hands and rocked to and fro in the window. I thought this would be a most suitable opportunity to teach her some elementary natural history and, at the same time, enhance my prestige. I picked up the toad, who kicked violently and wheezed asthmatically, and approached the window where Paula was posturing like an outsize puppet. ‘Bueno, Paula, mira . . . no es venenoso . . nada, nada,’ I said.

  As the toad opened his colossal mouth for another bagpipe-like cry, I stuffed my thumb into it. The creature was so surprised that his mouth remained open for a second, and I smiled soothingly at Paula, who appeared to be on the verge of a swoon.

  ‘No es venenoso,’ I repeated. ‘No es . . .’

  At that precise moment the toad recovered from his surprise and snapped his mouth shut. My first impression was that someone had amputated the entire first joint of my thumb with an extremely blunt hatchet. With an effort, I stifled the cry of agony that rose to my lips. Paula was regarding me pop-eyed, and, for the first time, without a sound. I gave a lop-sided sneer, which I hoped she would mistake for a debonair grin, while the toad amused himself by clenching his jaws as hard as he could at half-second intervals, so that the effect was as if my thumb was lying in the path of an extremely long goods train with more than the normal complement of wheels.

  ‘Santa Maria,’ said Paula, ‘qué extraordinario . . . no tiene veneno, señor?’

  ‘No, nada de veneno,’ I said hoarsely, still wearing my fixed smile.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Jacquie curiously.

  ‘For Heaven’s sake, get the woman away. This damn thing’s nearly taken my thumb off.’

  Jacquie hastily distracted Paula’s attention with a discreet inquiry about the lunch, and she floated off to the kitchen, still ejaculating ‘extraordinario’ at intervals. When she had vanished, we turned our attention to saving the remnants of my thumb. This was not so easy, for the toad had an immensely powerful grip but very fragile jaw-bones, and all our attempts at prising open his mouth with a stick caused them to bend alarmingly. Then every time we removed the stick, he would give my thumb a triumphant squeeze. At last, in desperation, I laid my hand and the toad down on the concrete, hoping that this would persuade him to let go, but he just squatted there like a nightmare bulldog, and glared up at me with defiance.

  ‘Perhaps it’s the wrong sort of place,’ suggested Jacquie helpfully.

  ‘Well, what do you expect me to do?’ I inquired irritably. ‘Go and sit in a swamp with him?’

  ‘No, but if you stuck your hand into that hibiscus bush, he might feel he could escape if he let go.’

  ‘If he won’t let go here, I don’t see that crawling about in an hibiscus bush is going to help.’

  ‘Have it your own way. What are you going to do, spend the rest of your life wearing a horned toad on your thumb?’

  Eventually I saw that the only alternative to the hibiscus bush experiment was to risk damaging the toad’s mouth in prising it open, so I crawled into the shade of the bush and plunged my hand into the thickest tangle of the undergrowth. Immediately the toad sprang backwards, at the same time spitting out my thumb with every indication of disgust. I recaptured and put him back in the tin, without much opposition beyond a few half-hearted wheezes. My thumb had a scarlet line round it where his jaws had clamped together, and within an hour an ugly bruise had spread across the nail. It was three days before I could use my thumb without pain, and a month before the bruise faded.

  It was the last time I attempted to demonstrate to the inhabitants of the Chaco the harmlessness of the horned toad.

  The Chaco being such a paradise for bird-life, naturally the specimens in the avian section of our collection outnumbered the others by about two to one. The largest of our birds were the Brazilian seriemas. Their bodies were about the size of a chicken and were mounted on long, powerful legs; their necks were also long and their heads large. Their beaks were slightly curved at the end, and this, with the big, pale silver eyes, made them somewhat like hawks. Their plumage was a soft grayish-brown on the neck and back, with cream underparts. On their heads, just over the nostrils, they had curious tufts of feathers that stuck up in the air. When they walked with their necks curved and the head thrown back, wearing their usual haughty expressions, they reminded me of immensely superior feathered camels. The two we had were perfectly tame, and so we used to let them out each day to wander round the camp.

  When they were released from their cage in the morning, they would first walk all round the camp on a tour of inspection. They would stalk along for a few yards, pacing slowly and solemnly on long legs, and then all of a sudden they would stop with one leg in mid-air and freeze in that position, their tattered tiara of feathers quivering, expressions of outraged, aristocratic indignation on their faces. After a moment or so they would unfreeze, the suspended leg would come down and they would continue their constitutional with measured steps before once again becoming immobile a few yards farther on. From their demeanour you would imagine them to be a couple of dowager duchesses who, whilst strolling in the park, had been whistled at by a tipsy soldier.

  Occasionally the duchesses would drop their aloof pose and indulge in wild and fantastic dances. One of them would discover a twig, or tuft of grass, and, picking it up in her beak, she would rush towards her companion with great bouncing strides and then toss the offering on to the ground. They would both stare at it for a minute and then start to pirouette around it on their long, ungainly legs, bowing courteously to each other and fluttering their wings, now and again picking up the twig or grass and tossing it into the air with gay abandon. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the dance would stop; they would freeze, glare at each other with what seemed like glacial rage, and then stalk off in opposite directions.

  The seriemas developed a passion for nails, which they were convinced (rather as Anastacius, the butcher, had been) were live creatures. They would carefully pick a nail out of the packet and proceed to bang it on the ground until it was ‘dead’. Then they would drop it and pick up another. In a short time the packet would be empty and the seriemas would be standing proudly in a sea of ‘dead’ nails. Fortunately, they never attempted to swallow them, but the habit grew irritating, for every time I wanted to construct something I had to spend a considerable time grovelling about in the dust, collecting the slaughtered nails which the seriemas had spent a happy morning scattering about the camp.

  Apart from the seriemas, the bird that probably amused us most was a rail: a small marsh bird with piercing eyes of rich wine-red, a long, sharply pointed beak, and enormously large feet. This bird had the honour to be the one and only specimen that Paula obtained for us during our sojourn in the Chaco, and, needless to say, no one was more surprised than Paula herself. It happened like this.

  One day Jacquie woke up with a slight temperature and shivering fits which indicated a mild dose of sandfly fever, and so I made her stay in bed. After a hurried breakfast, I told Paula that the señora was ill and would be staying in bed, and then left to get on with the animal work. When I returned at lunchtime I was amazed to see Jacquie’s bed, with her still in it, out on the veranda, while from inside the house rose a confused cacophony of sounds, among which Paula’s steamship-like hoot was predominant.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I inquired of my wife.

  ‘Thank goodness you’ve come back,’ she said wearily. ‘I’ve had the
most exhilarating morning. For the first two hours Paula kept tiptoeing in and out of the room with the most ghastly selection of herb-teas and jellies, but when she found I only wanted to sleep she gave that up and started to clean the house. Apparently she gives the whole place a thorough going over once a week, and this happens to be the day.’

  It sounded as if a troop of Cossacks was galloping round and round the house, pursued by several soprano Red Indians. There was a crash and a tinkle of glass, and a broom handle appeared through a window pane.

  ‘But what the hell’s going on in there?’ I demanded.

  ‘Wait a minute and I’ll tell you,’ said Jacquie. ‘Well, just as I was dropping off to sleep, Paula came in and said she wanted to clean out the bedroom. I said that I didn’t want to get out of bed and she’d have to leave it until next week. She seemed very shocked at the idea, rushed out here, and screamed for her girls. About ten of them came over, and before I knew what was happening they’d lifted the whole bed up and carried it out here. Then they set to work to clean out the bedroom . . . the whole crowd.’

  There came another crash from inside the house, followed by shrill squeals and the patter of running feet.

  ‘Is that what they’re doing now? It seems a novel way of cleaning out a bedroom’.

  ‘No, no; they’ve finished the bedroom. They all trooped out here to carry me back inside, when Paula gave one of those screams of hers that nearly took the top of my head off, and said she could see a bicho in the garden. I couldn’t see anything, but all the girls apparently could. Before I could ask them what sort of bicho it was, they’d all dashed down to the end of the garden and were crashing about in the bushes with Paula directing operations. Whatever the thing was, it took to its heels and for some peculiar reason it dashed straight into the house through the door . . . they all followed it inside and they’ve been chasing it from room to room ever since. Heaven alone knows what they’ve broken in there, but they’ve been galloping around for the past half-hour. I’ve shouted at them till I’m hoarse, but they won’t answer. It’s a wonder the beast hasn’t died of heart failure, the row they’ve been making.’

  ‘Well, there’s one thing certain: it must be a harmless kind of bicho, or they wouldn’t have chased it in the first place. Anyway, I’ll go and have a look.’

  Cautiously I poked my head round the front door. The living-room was a shambles of overturned chairs and broken plates. Distant crashes and yelps indicated that the hunt had ended in the second bedroom. I edged open the bedroom door, and was almost deafened by the chorus from inside; pushing the door open further, I peered round it. A broom-handle appeared from nowhere and swiped viciously downwards, missing my head by inches. I retreated and closed the door a trifle.

  ‘Hey, Paula, qué pasa?’ I bellowed through the crack.

  There was silence for a moment, and then the door was flung open and Paula stood on the threshold, quivering like a half-inflated barrage balloon.

  ‘Señor!’ she proclaimed, pointing a fat finger at the bed, ‘un bicho, señor, un pájara muy lindo.’

  I entered the room and closed the door. Paula’s gang of girls surveyed me with glittering smiles of satisfaction from among the ruins of the room. Their hair was disarranged, they panted with exhaustion, and one of them had lost a large portion of the front of her dress, which left little of her more obvious charms to the imagination. This seemed to cause her more gratification than anything else, and I noticed that she panted more vigorously than the others. The smell of eleven different varieties of scent in such a small space made my senses reel, but I approached the bed and got down on all fours to look under it. The girls and Paula clustered round me in a giggling, asphyxiating scrum as I looked for the bicho. Under the bed, covered with bits of fluff and dust, stood a panting, irritated, but still extremely belligerent rail. An exciting five minutes followed: the girls and Paula went round one side of the bed to chivvy the bird out, while I crawled under the bed with a towel and tried to grab him. My first attempt was thwarted because when I came to hurl the towel at him I discovered that Paula was innocently standing on one end. My second attempt was also a failure, for one of the girls in her excitement trod heavily on my hand. The third time, however, I was lucky and scrambled out from underneath the bed with the rail wrapped up in the towel and screaming at the top of his voice. I carried him out to show Jacquie, while Paula marshalled her girls and set them to repairing some of the chaos the rail hunt had produced.

  ‘D’you mean to say that all that row was over that?’ asked Jacquie in disgust, looking at the dust-covered head of the rail sticking out from the depths of the towel.

  ‘Yes. Ten of them chasing him, and they couldn’t get him. Amazing, isn’t it?’

  ‘He doesn’t look worth getting to me,’ said Jacquie; ‘in fact he looks a horribly dull brute.’

  But there, as it happened, she was quite wrong, for the rail turned out to be a bird which, though exceedingly irascible and short-tempered, had a distinct personality, and he very soon became one of our favourite bird characters.

  We soon discovered that he moved about in almost as unusual and comical a way as the seriemas. Like a lanky schoolmaster, he would stop and lower his head and peer myopically, neck stretched out, as though glaring through a keyhole, in the hope of catching his class misbehaving. Then, apparently satisfied, he would straighten up, give three or four quick flips of his short, pointed tail, and mince off to the next imaginary keyhole. This habit of flipping his tail up and down earned him the apt but regrettable name of Flap-arse. His spear-like beak he never hesitated to employ, lunging wildly at the hand of whoever was cleaning out his cage; this job became one of the bloodier and more painful tasks. I remember, on the day of his capture, putting in a large Player’s cigarette tin filled with water. As soon as it appeared through the door, Flap-arse leapt forward and stabbed at it; to our surprise, his beak went straight through the tin, like a needle through cloth. He danced about the cage, wearing the tin on his beak, and it was some time before I was able to catch him and remove it. Flap-arse was kept in a cage with wooden bars, through which he was forever peering hopefully, occasionally uttering a rasping ‘Arrrk’, in an admonishing tone of voice.

  In the cage on top of Flap-arse’s lived a bird, one of Jacquie’s favourites, whom, to her annoyance, I christened Dracula almost as soon as he arrived. He was a bare-faced ibis, a bird the size of a pigeon, and had stubby, flesh-coloured legs and a long, curved beak of the same shade. His whole body was covered in funereal-black plumage, with the exception of an area round the eyes and base of his beak, which was bare and a pale tallow yellow. From this bald area a pair of small, circular, and sad little eyes peered forth mistily. Dracula was a very dainty feeder, and seemed quite incapable of eating his meat unless it was shredded to a microscopic minuteness and saturated with water. If a little raw brain was mixed into this slush, his happiness was complete and he would dip and patter his beak in the food, giving tiny, wheezing titters of pleasure. Although he was a sweet-tempered and very likeable little bird, there was something rather eerie about the way he would chuckle to himself as he probed the bloody slush of brain and meat, with the enthusiasm of a ghoul that has found a fresh grave.

  Another bird that enjoyed brain was a black-faced ibis, known to us simply as BFI. He throve on a pure meat diet for some time, until one day, thinking he would like a treat, I mixed some brain with it. BFI could have had no opportunity of sampling this delicacy in the wild state, but he fell on it as though it was his favourite food. Unfortunately, he then decided that meat was too coarse and lowly a fare for him, and vociferously demanded brain at every meal. Whereas Dracula was a dainty feeder, BFI had no pretensions to manners. His idea of feeding was to stand as close to his food-pan as possible (preferably in it) and then toss bits of brain all over himself and the cage with the gay abandon of someone throwing confetti, and crying ‘Arrr-onk!’ loudl
y and triumphantly with his beak full.

  Once a week Flap-arse, Dracula, and BFI had a fish-feed to keep them in condition. This had been difficult to organize, for no one ever dreams of eating fish in the Chaco, so it could not be bought in the local market. Armed with lengths of thick string and fearsome barbed fish-hooks that appeared to have been designed for catching sharks, we would make our way down to the riverbank in the morning. Half a mile below the village was an old landing-stage, now disused, its worm-eaten timbers infested with spiders and other creatures, and almost hidden under a great eiderdown of glossy convolvulus leaves brocaded with pink, trumpet-shaped flowers. By picking our way from beam to beam, moving cautiously, so as not to disturb the great electric-blue wasps that had their nests in the wood, we would eventually arrive at the remains of the small jetty that jutted out into the dark waters, its fragile piles decorated with ruffs of lily leaves. Perched on the end, we would bait our hooks and cast them into the brown waters. It could scarcely be called fishing, for the river was infested with piranhas, and a bloody scrap of meat as bait would soon create a churning, snapping merry-go-round of fish below us, all fighting to be caught. It could not, therefore, be classified as sport, for there was no element of doubt about the outcome, but these fishing expeditions gave us an excuse to sit on the jetty’s edge which commanded a wonderful view of the river as it wound away westwards. The sunsets were so magnificent that not even the haze of mosquitoes around us lessened our pleasure. After two months, Rafael had to leave us in the Chaco and return to Buenos Aires. The night before he left, we went fishing, and were rewarded with one of the most spectacular and impressive sunsets I have ever seen.

  Somewhere to the north, in the great Brazilian forests, there had been rain, and so the river was swollen and swift with the extra water. The sky was a pale blue, smooth and unclouded as a polished turquoise. As the sun sank lower and lower, it changed from yellow to a deep red that was almost wine colour, and the black river waters took on the appearance of a bale of shot silk being unwound between the banks. As the sun reached the horizon, it seemed to pause in its descent, and from somewhere out of the vast empty sky appeared three small clouds which looked as though they were composed of a small crowd of black soap-bubbles edged with blood red. The clouds arranged themselves with artistic precision, curtain-like, and the sun sank discreetly behind them. Then, round the bend of the river, appeared the vanguard of the camelotes. The floodwater had brought them down from higher levels, these islands of lilies, convolvulus, and grass entwined round water-softened logs from the great forests. The sun had sunk and the river was moon-white in the brief twilight; and the camelotes in their hundreds swept past us silently and swiftly on their eager journey to the sea, some only as big as a hat, others a solid tangled mat as big as a room, each carrying their cargo of seeds, shoots, bulbs, leeches, frogs, snakes, and snails. We watched this strange armada sliding past us, until it was too dark to distinguish anything, only now and then becoming aware of the passing of the great fleet of camelotes, for one would brush against the piles of the jetty with a quiet, soothing whisper of soft leaves and grass. Soon, mosquito-bitten and stiff, we made our way silently back to the village, and all night long the endless string of camelotes hurried on, but in the morning the river was as smooth and empty as a mirror.