The Drunken Forest

by Gerald Durrell

  ‘What are we doing to do with them?’ she asked at length.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. We can’t leave them wandering around here, or they’ll all be killed the moment our backs are turned.’

  ‘Have you tried shooing them away?’

  ‘I’ve tried everything short of hitting them over the head with a stick. They just won’t go.’

  Dracula had now left the contest over the piece of fat to the bittern and the ibis, and was busily trying to get back into his cage by trying to climb through the wire mesh which would have been a tight fit for a humming-bird.

  ‘I wish,’ I said viciously, ‘we had one of those twee individuals here to see this.’

  ‘What twee individuals?’

  ‘Those knowledgeable sentimentalists who are forever telling me that it’s cruel to lock up the poor wild creatures in little wooden boxes. I’d just like them to see how eagerly our furred and feathered brothers rush back to the wilds as soon as they’re given the opportunity.’

  One of the seriemas approached us and started to peck hopefully at my shoe-lace, evidently hoping it would turn out to be a worm of gigantic proportions. Dracula had eventually given up the attempt to get back into his own cage, and had compromised by squeezing through the bars of the ibis cage. He now sat inside it, peering at us with misty eyes, twittering delightedly.

  ‘Well,’ I said at length, ‘I suppose if we just ignore them they’ll get so hungry that they’ll go off in search of food, and that will solve the problem. By tomorrow they should have disappeared.’

  The rest of that day was a nightmare. Feeling that the animals should not be fed in any circumstance, we went about the task of feeding the ones we were keeping while the hungry horde of birds and animals hooted, whistled, tittered, and honked at us hungrily, rushing to cluster round our feet whenever they saw us carrying a dish, perching in rows on the food-table and watching us hopefully. The impulse to feed them was almost irresistible, but we had to harden our hearts and ignore them. The only thing that kept us going was the knowledge that by the next day hunger would have driven them back into the wilds.

  But the next morning when we went out to feed our charges we found the animals and birds still assembled around the camp, looking slightly more irritable and dejected than the day before. They greeted us with such manifestations of delight that we almost broke down and fed them. But we hardened our hearts and pretended to ignore them, even when they clustered round our feet and we were in grave danger of stepping on them. In the middle of this uproar an Indian stalked into camp carrying an old soap-box, and placed it reverently in the middle of the camp site. Then he stepped back, tripped over a seriema who happened to be walking past, recovered himself, and doffed his straw hat.

  ‘Buenos dias, señor,’ he said, ‘a fine bicho for you.’

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ groaned Jacquie; ‘this would happen.’

  ‘You’re too late, my friend,’ I said sadly. ‘I do not want any more bichos.’

  The Indian regarded me, frowning.

  ‘But, señor, you said you would buy bichos,’ he said.

  ‘I know, but that was before the revolution. Now I cannot buy, for I cannot take my bichos with me . . . There are no boats.’ I pointed to the mass of fauna wandering round the camp site; ‘you see, I have had to let all these other bichos go:

  The Indian looked around him, bewildered.

  ‘But they have not gone; he pointed out.

  ‘I realize that. But they will go. I am very sorry, but I cannot buy any more.’

  The Indian regarded me fixedly. He seemed to be fully aware that I was dying to look inside the soap-box and see what the bicho was.

  ‘It is a good bicho,’ he said at last in a cajoling tone, ‘a very fine bicho . . . muy bravo, muy venenoso . . . I had much trouble to catch it.’

  ‘What sort of bicho is it?’ I asked, weakening.

  He became animated.

  ‘A bicho of great rarity, señor, and muy, muy venenoso; he said, his black eyes sparkling, ‘a cascabel, señor, of proportions so immense that it is impossible to describe. When he is angry he makes a noise like a thousand horses.’

  I touched the box cautiously with the toe of my shoe, and immediately from inside rose the weird sound with which a rattlesnake informs the world of his presence, bad temper, and evil intentions. It is certainly one of the most extraordinary sounds made by any reptile, this curious rustling crackle that starts like a whisper and ends like the crackle of toy musketry. It is far more frightening than the ordinary hissing of a snake, for it seems to have a sort of vibrating malevolence about it, a bubbling viciousness like the simmering of a witch’s brew.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ I said sadly, ‘I cannot buy it, my friend.’ The Indian looked crestfallen.

  ‘Not even for ten guaranies?’ he asked. I shook my head.

  ‘Eight guaranies, senor?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, but I cannot buy it’

  The Indian sighed, knowing that I meant what I said.

  ‘Well, señor, I will leave it with you, for it is of no use to me,’ he said, and, accepting the packet of cigarettes I gave him, he picked his way through the motley crew of birds and departed, leaving us with a rattlesnake on our hands.

  ‘And what are we going to do with that?’ asked Jacquie.

  ‘We’ll record his rattle and then let him go,’ I said: ‘he’s got a very fine rattle. I should think he’s quite a big one.’

  For a variety of reasons we could not get around to recording the rattlesnake that day The next morning our released collection was still with us, but an hour’s chasing eventually convinced at least some of them that we were not going to feed them, and they started to drift away. Then we got the recording machine and rigged it up near the rattlesnake’s box, placed the microphone in an advantageous position, and tapped on the box hopefully. There was not a sound from within. I tapped again. Silence. I thumped on the box vigorously, with no result.

  ‘D’you think he’s dead?’ asked Jacquie.

  ‘No, it’s the usual thing. These damned animals make a bell of a row until you get a recording machine anywhere near them, and then they make as much noise as a dead giraffe.’

  I tipped the box gently, and felt the weight of the snake slide from one end to the other. This had the desired effect, he rattled viciously and the green needle on the recorder swung and quivered, registering an astonishing volume of sound. Three times I tipped the box, and three times the snake responded with increasing fury. At last we had enough tape, but by this time the snake was so annoyed that he was producing a steady rattle like a machine-gun.

  ‘Now let him go,’ I said, seizing a machete.

  ‘You aren’t going to let him go here, are you?’ inquired Jacquie in alarm.

  ‘Yes, he’ll be all right. I’ll give him a prod and he’ll whisk off into the swamp.’

  ‘He sounds very bad-tempered. Make sure be does whisk off into the swamp.’

  ‘Now stop fussing and go and stand over there,’ I said, with doubt-less irritating unctuousness.

  Jacquie retreated to a safe place, and I proceeded to try and remove the lid of the rattlesnake’s prison. This was not so easy, for the Indian had nailed it on with large and rusty nails in incredible quantities. At last I managed to force the tip of my machete blade into the crack and with a stupendous heave a large section of the lid flew off. I gave a sigh of relief and then did a very foolish thing: I bent down and peered into the box to see if the snake was all right. To say that he was furious would be an understatement. He was positively bubbling with rage, and as my face appeared in the sky above him he lunged upwards with open mouth.

  Now I had always been under the impression that a rattlesnake could not lunge upwards at his victim, but that he had to lunge forward like any other snake. So it w
as with fright not unmixed with surprise that I saw the blunt head, carunculated like a pineapple, flying upwards to meet my descending face. The mouth was wide open, pink and moist, and the fangs hung down at the ready and appeared, to my startled gaze, to be about the size of a tiger’s claws. I flung myself backwards in a leap that could only have been emulated but not bettered by a wallaby in the prime of life and in full control of its faculties. Unfortunately, I rather spoilt the athletic effect by tripping over my machete and sitting down heavily. The snake crawled out of the box and coiled himself up like a watch-spring, with head raised and his rattle vibrating so rapidly that it was a mere blur hanging round the end of his tail.

  ‘Just give him a prod and he will whisk off into the swamp,’ said Jacquie sarcastically.

  I was in no mood to exchange saucy badinage. I went and cut myself a long stick and again approached the rattlesnake, in the hope of being able to pin him down and pick him up. However, the reptile had other ideas on the subject. He struck twice at the descending stick and then wriggled towards me rapidly with such obvious menace that I had once again to repeat my ballerina-like leap. The snake by now was in the worst possible temper and, what was more annoying, stubbornly refused to be frightened or cajoled into leaving the camp site. We tried throwing clods of earth at him, but he just coiled up and rattled. Then I threw a bucket of water over him. This worsened his obviously already high blood-pressure, and he uncoiled and wriggled towards me. The irritating part of the whole business was that we could not just leave him there to make off in his own time. There was work to be done, and one’s work is rather apt to suffer by continually having to look over one’s shoulder to make sure a four-foot rattlesnake isn’t there to he stepped on. Also Pooh and Cai were out on their leads, and I was worried in case the reptile went up and perhaps bit one of them. Very reluctantly, I decided that the only thing to be done was to despatch the infuriated snake as quickly and as painlessly as possible, so, while Jacquie attracted his attention with the aid of the stick, I approached him cautiously from behind, manoeuvred into position and sliced off his head with the machete. His jaws kept on snapping for a full minute after his head had been severed from his body, and half an hour later you could still see slight muscular contraction if you touched his ribs with the stick. The extraordinary thing about this snake was that rattlesnakes normally cannot strike unless they are coiled up – so as a rule, however angry one gets, they will always stay coiled up in one position ready to bite – this one, on the other hand, seemed to have no hesitation in uncoiling and coming straight for you. Whether he could have bitten us successfully with his body stretched out was rather a moot point, but it was not the sort of experiment that I cared to make.

  By the following day a great number of our specimens had disappeared, though there were still one or two hanging around the camp. At midday a messenger arrived from the radio station, to say that the American had got through to inform them that there was a lull in the fighting in Asunción, and that he was sending the plane over for us in the afternoon. Frantically we bustled about packing the rest of our things and endeavouring to console Paula, who followed us from room to room, giving long, shuddering, heart-strangled sobs at the thought of our imminent departure. Having packed, we made a hurried lunch, and then set about the job of putting the animals into their travelling boxes. All of them went in without demur except Pooh, who seemed to imagine that it was some new and refined form of torture that we had invented. First we tried to lure him by throwing bananas into the cage, but with the aid of his long, artistic fingers he managed to hook them out and eat them complacently without venturing inside. Eventually, as time was growing short, I had to grab him by the scruff of his neck and the loose skin of his large behind, and bundle him head-first into his box, while he screamed like a soul in torment and clutched madly at everything with all four feet. Once inside, we gave him an egg, and he settled down quite philosophically to suck it and gave no further trouble.

  Paula had now been joined by her girls and they all stood around in forlorn groups, looking rather like mourners at a funeral. The tears trickled steadily and in ever-increasing quantities down Paula’s face, making havoc with her make-up, but as she appeared to derive much satisfaction from her grief, I presumed that this did not matter. Suddenly she startled us all by uttering a loud groan that would have done credit to Hamlet’s father’s ghost, and then crying in a sepulchral voice: ‘It has come!’ before plunging into another Niagara of grief. Very faintly echoing through the blue sky we could hear the pulsating throb of an aeroplane engine, and at that moment the lorry drew up outside the house. While I loaded the luggage and animals on to it, Jacquie was embraced by each of Paula’s girls and then eventually clutched to Paula’s moist and magnificently palpitating bosom. When my turn came, I was relieved to find Paula’s girls had no intention of embracing me, but merely shook my hand and gave a little dipping curtsy, making me feel like some obscure species of royalty. Paula clasped my hand in both hers and clutched it to her stomach, then she raised her tear-stained face to me.

  ‘Adios, señor,’ she said, large fat tears trickling out of her black eyes. ‘Good journey to you and your señora. If God wills it, you will return to the Chaco.’

  Then the lorry was bouncing down the dusty rutted road and we were waving from the window to Paula and her girls, who looked like a cluster of brilliant tropical birds as they stood waving frantically, their shrill voices shouting ‘Adios’.

  We arrived at the airfield just as the plane, like a glittering silver dragon-fly swooped down. It made an extremely bad landing and then taxied towards us.

  ‘Ah,’ said the driver of the lorry, ‘you have got the mad one.’

  ‘Mad one,’ I said, puzzled; ‘what mad one?’

  ‘This pilot,’ he said scornfully, jerking his thumb at the approaching plane. ‘They say he is mad. Certainly he never seems to land the plane without making it jump like a deer.’

  The pilot, when he scrambled down out of the machine, turned out to be a short, stocky Pole with silvery hair and the vague, gentle expression of the White Knight in Alice through the Looking Glass. With the aid of a small hand-weighing machine we weighed our luggage and discovered to our consternation that we were several kilos over the maximum weight that the plane was allowed to take.

  ‘Never mind; said the pilot, beaming at us. ‘I think she will do it’.

  So we proceeded to wedge our suitcases into the plane, and then we scrambled in ourselves, while the lorry driver piled my lap head-high with the assortment of animal life that we were taking with us, Sarah, who had refused her bottle half an hour before, now decided that she was hungry, and honked dismally at the front of her cage until I was forced to take her out and put her on Jacquie’s lap to keep her quiet.

  The pilot fiddled with the controls, then gave a smile of childlike pleasure when the engine roared into life. ‘Very difficult,’ he said, and laughed merrily. We taxied about in all directions for some five minutes before we found a dry enough patch to allow us to take off. The pilot let her out and the plane roared across the grass, jumping and lurching. We left the ground at the last possible moment and, zooming some six inches over the tops of the trees that bordered the airfield, the pilot wiped his forehead.

  ‘Now she is up,’ he yelled at me. ‘All we have to worry about now is to get her down again.’

  Below us the great flat plain stretched, blurred with heat-haze. The plane banked and then straightened out, and we were flying over the great molten curves of the river that coiled and wound away into the shimmering obscurity of the horizon towards Asunción.

  Interlude

  I have never liked cities particularly, and I never thought that I should be glad to see one. But the relief and pleasure we felt were extraordinary when we looked out of the plane and saw Buenos Aires beneath the wing, like a vast geometrical pattern of sequins glittering in the dusk. At the air
port I made my inevitable pilgrimage to the nearest phone booth and dialled Bebita’s number.

  ‘Ah, child, I am so glad you are safe. Ah, you have no idea how we worried about you. Where are you now? At the airport? Well, come to dinner.’

  ‘It’s the animals again,’ I said gloomily. ‘We’ve got to find somewhere to put them. It’s bitterly cold here, and they’ll get pneumonia if we don’t get them into the warm soon.’

  ‘Ah, of course, the animals,’ said Bebita. ‘I have fixed a little house for them in B-B-Belgrano.’

  ‘A house?’

  ‘Yes, only a little one, of course. It has, I think, two rooms. It has running water, but I do not think it is heated. B-b-but that does not matter – you can call here and I will lend you a stove.’

  ‘I can only suppose that this house belongs to a friend of yours?’

  ‘B-b-but naturally. You will have to return the stove soon, though, b-b-because it b-b-belongs to Monono, and he will simply die without it.’

  Bebita’s ‘little house’ turned out to be two good-sized rooms leading out into a little courtyard surrounded by a high wall. Leading off this was another small building which contained a large sink. With the aid of the stove, surreptitiously removed from Bebita’s husband’s room, we got the temperature nice and high, and all the animals started to look better. A phone call to Rafael had brought him scurrying round, spectacles gleaming, armed with fruit, meat, and bread removed from his mother’s larder. When I protested that his mother would probably take exception to this, he pointed out that the only alternative was for the animals to go hungry, for all the shops were shut. My indignation at this rape of his mother’s larder was then forgotten, and we gave ourselves up to the pleasure of stuffing our animals with delicacies which they had never had before – such things as grapes, pears, apples, and cherries. Then, leaving them warm and full, we went to Bebita’s, where we sat down to the first civilized meal we had eaten in months. At last, as replete as our animals, we sank into chairs and sipped our coffee.