The Drunken Forest

by Gerald Durrell

  The Four-Eyed Bird and the Anaconda

  One morning we received an addition to the collection, which we could hear arriving when it was still a good half-mile down the road. I saw an Indian trotting rapidly towards the camp clearing, endeavouring with moderate success to keep his large straw hat on with one hand while with the other he tried to prevent something from climbing out of a rather frayed wicker basket. The thing, whatever it was, kept complaining about its confinement in a series of rich, base honks which sounded like someone trying to play a complicated Bach fugue on an old bulb motor-horn. The Indian dashed up to me, laid the basket at my feet, then stood back, doffing his big hat and grinning broadly.

  ‘Buenos dias, señor,’ he said, ‘es un bicho, señor, un pajaro muy lindo.’

  I wondered what species of bird could possibly produce that complicated series of organ-like brays. The basket lay on the ground, shuddering, and more of the wild cries broke out. Looking down, I found myself staring into a cold, fish-like eye of pale bronze colour that glared through the wicker-work, at me. I bent down, undid the lid of the basket, and lifted it a trifle, so that I could see the occupant; I caught a brief glimpse of a tumble of tawny feathers, and then a long, green, dagger-shaped beak shot out through the crack, buried itself half an inch in the fleshy part of my thumb, and was immediately whipped back into the basket again. Drawn by my yelp of pain and resulting flood of bad language, Jacquie appeared on the scene and asked resignedly what had bitten me this time.

  ‘A bittern,’ I said, indistinctly, sucking my wound.

  ‘I know, darling, but what bit you?’

  ‘I was bitten by a bittern,’ I explained.

  Jacquie stared at me blankly for a moment.

  ‘Are you being funny?’ she inquired at length.

  ‘No, I tell you I was bitten by this blasted bird . . . or rather I was pecked by it . . . It’s a tiger bittern.’

  ‘Not a jaguar bittern?’ she asked sweetly.

  ‘This is no time for silly jokes; I said severely; ‘help me get it out of the basket . . . I want to have a look at it.’

  Jacquie squatted down and eased the lid off the basket, and once more the green beak shot out, but this time I was ready for it and grabbed it adroitly between finger and thumb. The bird protested deafeningly, and kicked and struggled violently in the basket, but I managed to get my other hand inside and to grab him firmly by the wings and lift him out.

  I don’t know what Jacquie was expecting, but the sight of him made her gasp, for a tiger bittern is definitely one of the more spectacular of the wading birds. Imagine a small, rather hump-backed heron, with sage-green legs and beak, and clad entirely in plumage of pale-green colour spotted and striped with a wonderful, flamboyant pattern of black and tiger-orange so that the whole bird seems to glow like a miniature feathered bonfire.

  ‘Isn’t he lovely?’ said Jacquie. ‘What gorgeous colouring!’

  ‘Here,’ I said, ‘just hang on to his feet a second – I want to look at his wing. It seems to be hanging in a rather peculiar fashion.’

  While Jacquie held on to his green legs, I ran my hand down the underside of his left wing, and half-way down the main bone I found the ominous swelling of the muscles that generally denotes a break. I probed the swelling with my fingers, and manipulated the wing gently: sure enough, there was a break about three-quarters of the way down, but to my relief it was a clean break, and not a complicated mass of splintered bone.

  ‘Anything wrong with it?’ asked Jacquie.

  ‘Yes, it’s broken fairly high up. Quite a clean break.’

  ‘What a shame! He’s such a lovely bird. Isn’t there anything we can do about it?’

  ‘Well, I can have a shot at setting it. But you know how damn stupid these creatures are about bandages and things.’

  ‘Let’s try, anyway. I think it’s worth it.’

  ‘OK. You go and get the money, and I’ll try to explain to Daniel Boone, here!

  Jacquie disappeared into the house, while I explained slowly and tortuously to the Indian that the bird’s wing was broken. He felt it and agreed, shaking his head and looking very sad. I went on to explain that I would pay him half the value of the bird then, and the other half should it still be alive in a week’s time. This was a fairly complicated explanation that taxed my primitive Spanish to the extreme. Also, I find it helpful, when attempting to speak a language other than my own, to use my hands lavishly, for a gesture can explain something when a limited vocabulary would let me down. Clutching the infuriated bittern to my bosom, I could not indulge in gestures to help me out, for one hand held the bird round the body, while the other clasped his beak; in consequence I had to repeat everything two or three times before the Indian got the hang of it. At length he grasped my meaning and nodded vigorously, and we both smiled at each other and gave little bows and murmured ‘Gracias, gracias.’ Then a thought struck the Indian, and he asked me how much I was going to pay; this simple question was my undoing. Without thinking, I let go of the bittern’s beak, and lifted my hand to show him the requisite number of fingers. It was the opportunity the bird had been waiting for, and he did what all members of his family do in a fight. He looked upwards and launched his beak in a murderous lunge at my eyes. By sheer luck I managed to jerk back my head in time, so that he missed my eyes, but I did not jerk it back far enough; his beak shot squarely up my left nostril, and the point imbedded itself briefly somewhere near my sinus.

  Those who have never been pecked in the nose by a tiger bittern can have little idea of the exquisite agony it produces, nor of the force of the blow. I felt rather as though I had been kicked in the face by a horse, and reeled back, momentarily blinded by the pain and stunned by the force of the thrust. I managed to keep my head well back to avoid a second stab from the beak, while my nose gushed blood like a fountain that splashed all over me, the bittern, and the Indian, who had rushed forward to help me. I handed the bird over to him and went to the house in search of first-aid; Jacquie busied herself with wet towels, cotton wool, and boracic, scolding and commiserating as she did so.

  ‘What would have happened if he’d got you in the eye?’ she asked, scrubbing at the crust of dried blood on my lips and cheeks.

  ‘I dread to think. His beak’s at least six inches long, and if he’d got a straight peck, with that force behind it, he’d have gone right through into my brain, I should imagine.’

  ‘Well, perhaps that will teach you to be more careful in future,’ she said unsympathetically. ‘Here, hold this cotton wool to your nose; it’s still bleeding a bit’.

  I went outside again, looking rather like one of those lurid anti-vivisection posters, and concluded my bargain with the Indian. Then I put the bittern into a temporary cage and went to collect the necessary medical appliances for the operation on his wing. First, I had to carve two splints out of soft white wood and pad them carefully with a layer of cotton wool held in place by lint. Then we prepared a large box as an operating table, and laid out bandages, scissors, razor-blade. I put on a thick gauntlet glove and went to fetch the patient. As I opened the door of his cage he lunged at me, and I caught him by the beak and pulled him out, squawking protestingly. We bound his feet with a bandage, and dealt in the same way with his beak. Then he was laid on the table, and, while Jacquie held his feet and beak, I set to work. I had to clip off all the feathers on the wing; this was not only in order to make it easier to fix the splint, but also to take as much weight off the wing as possible. When the wing was almost as bare as a plucked chicken, I manoeuvred one of the flat splints under the wing, so that the break lay in the centre of it; then came the delicate and tricky job of feeling until I located the two broken ends of bone, and then twisting and pulling them gently until they lay together in a normal position. Holding them in this position on the splint with my thumb, I slid the other splint on top, and held the break fi
rmly, trapped between the two slats of padded wool. Then the whole thing had to be bound round and round with yards of bandages, and the finished product tied firmly against the body with a sort of sling, so that the weight of the bandages and splints did not drag the wing down and pull the broken ends of bone out of place. This done, our patient was put back in his cage, and supplied with a plate of chopped meat and some fresh water.

  For the rest of the day he behaved very well, eating all his food, standing in one position, not attempting to interfere with his wing, and generally behaving as though he had been in captivity for years. Most wild creatures have the strongest possible views about bandages, splints, and other medical accoutrements, and no sooner do you put them on, than their one ambition in life is to get them off again as quickly as possible. I had had a number of irritating experiences in the past with both birds and mammals over this vexed question of first-aid, and so I was surprised and pleased when the tiger bittern seemed to take the whole thing calmly and philosophically. I felt that at last I had found a bird who was sensible and who realized that we were strapping him up for the best possible reasons. However, was a bit premature in my judgement, for next morning, when we were checking round the collection, Jacquie peered into the bittern’s cage, and then uttered an anguished groan.

  ‘Just come and look at this stupid bird,’ she called.

  ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘He’s got all his bandage off . . . I thought you were being a little too optimistic about him last night.’

  The tiger bittern was standing gloomily in the comer of his cage, glaring at us with his sardonic bronze eyes. He had obviously spent an energetic evening stripping the bandages from his wing, and he had made a good job of it. But he had not reckoned with one thing: the inside edge of his beak was minutely serrated, like a fretsaw, the teeth of which were directed backwards, towards the bird’s throat. When he caught fish, these little ‘teeth’ helped him to hold on to the slippery body, and made sure that it only slid one way This is a very fine thing when you are catching fish, but when you are unwinding bandages you find this type of beak a grave disadvantage, for the bandages get hooked on to the serrated edge. So the tiger bittern stood there with some twelve feet of bandage, firmly hooked to his beak, and dangling down in a magnificent festoon. He looked like an attenuated, morose Father Christmas whose beard had come askew after a hot half-hour distributing presents. He glared at us when we laughed, and gave an indignant and slightly muffled honk through the bandages.

  We had to get him out of his cage and spend half an hour with a pair of tweezers stripping the tattered bandage from his beak. To my surprise and pleasure, I found that he had not succeeded in removing the splints, so the wing-bones were still held in the same position. We bound him up once more, and he looked so contrite that I felt he had learnt his lesson. The next morning, though, all the bandages were off and trailing from his beak, and we had to go through the whole laborious re-bandaging again. But it was no use, for every morning we would be treated to the sight of him standing in his cage, heavily disguised under a patriarchal cascade of white beard.

  ‘I’m getting sick of bandaging this bloody bird,’ I said, as Jacquie and I cleaned his beak for the eighth morning running.

  ‘I am, too. But what can we do? We’re using up an awful lot of bandage; I wish we’d thought of bringing some sticking-plaster.’

  ‘Or even some plaster bandage . . . that would have fooled him. What worries me, though, is that all this messing about isn’t going to do the wing any good. For all I know, the bones may have shifted under the splint, and his wing will heal with a damn great bend in it, like a croquet hoop.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jacquie philosophically, ‘all we can do is to wait and see. We can’t do any more than we’re doing.’

  So, every morning for three interminable weeks, we unpicked, unravelled, and re-bandaged the bittern. Then the great day came when the bones should have healed, and the bandage was removed from his beak for the last time. I seized the scissors and started to cut away the splints.

  ‘I wonder what it’ll be like,’ said Jacquie.

  ‘Probably look like a corkscrew,’ I said gloomily.

  But as the splints fell away, they revealed the bittern’s wing lying there as straight as a die. I could hardly believe my eyes; it was impossible to see where the break had been, and even when I felt the bone with my fingers I could not have located the break if it had not been for a slight ridge of protecting bone which had appeared at the point where the two broken ends had grown together. The wing-muscles had, of course, grown weak through lack of use, and so the wing dropped considerably, but after a week or so of use he soon regained the power in it, and the wing went back to its normal position. For some time it remained bald, but eventually the feathers grew again, and when he attacked his food-pan with beak snapping and wing flapping, you could not have told that there had ever been anything wrong with him at all. We were very proud of him, not only because he was a good advertisement for our surgery, but also because he was a good example of how worthwhile it is to persevere with even the most hopeless-looking cases. Of course, we never received any gratitude from the bird himself – unless a savage attack every feeding time could be interpreted as gratitude – but we were repaid in another way, for indirectly the tiger bittern was the cause of our meeting the Four-eyed Bird and the anaconda.

  The Indian who had brought us the bittern did not turn up to collect the other half of his money on the appointed date – a most unusual occurrence. But he did appear some ten days later, and seemed genuinely pleased at the good job we had done on the bird. He explained that the reason he had delayed in coming was that he had been trying to catch us a snake of monstrous proportions, ‘muy, muy grande’, as he put it, and of incredibly evil disposition. This grandfather of all reptiles lived in a swamp behind his house, and twice in the past three months it had paid a visit to him and stolen one of his chickens. Each time he had followed it into the swamp, but had failed to find it. Now, the night before, the snake had made a third raid on his chickens, but this time he was fairly sure he knew the area in which it was lying up to digest its meal. Would the señor, he inquired diffidently, care to accompany him to catch it? The seri or said that nothing would give him greater pleasure, and the Indian promised to come back early the next morning to guide us to the serpent’s lair.

  I felt that this hunt for – and I hoped capture of – the anaconda (for that was obviously what the snake was) would make an ideal subject for our ciné-camera, so I made arrangements for an ox-cart to come the next morning, in which Jacquie and the camera could travel. These ox-carts are fitted with gigantic wheels, some seven feet in diameter, which enable them to get through swamp-land that would bog down any other form of vehicle. They are pulled by any number of oxen, according to the load, and though they are slow and uncomfortable, they enable you to get right into the swampy areas that would otherwise be inaccessible. So early the next morning we set off, the Indian and I on horse-back, and Jacquie squatting in a cart drawn by a couple of dreamy-eyed and stoical oxen.

  Our destination proved to be farther than I had thought. I had hoped that we would reach the swamp before the sun had risen too high in the sky, but by ten o’clock the heat was intense and we were still wending our way through the thorn-scrub. The speed of our little caravan was governed entirely by the oxen; they kept going at a steady slouching walk, but, as it was only half the speed of the horses, it slowed down our progress considerably. The country we were travelling through was dry and dusty, and we were forced to ride alongside the cart; for if we rode behind we were suffocated by the clouds of dust kicked up by the oxen, and if we rode in front our horses enveloped the cart in their dust. The landscape was alive with birds, all filled with that early-morning liveliness and bustle which seems common to birds the world over. Flocks of guira cuckoos fed in the short growth by the side of the path, chu
rring and giggling to each other. They would wait until the lumbering cart was within six feet of them, and then they would take wing and stream off like a flock of brown-paper darts, chattering excitedly, to land twenty yards farther on. In a group of tall palo borracho five toucans leapt and scuttled among the branches from which the Spanish moss hung like the faint silvery spray of a fountain. The toucans watched us knowingly over their great, gleaming beaks, uttering high-pitched, Pomeranian-like yelps to each other. On every tree-stump or other vantage point sat a little white flower, a widow tyrant, its breast shining like a star. Every now and then they would slip off their perch, dive through the air like determined snowflakes, snip a passing insect neatly in their beaks and swoop back to their perch again with a flutter of neat black wings. A seriema swept across the path, paused with one leg in the air to give us an aristocratically sneering glance, dismissed us as being of no importance, and hurried on as though late for some civic function.