Encounters With Animals Read online

  When only the head had been visible, I had the impression it was only a small creature, about the size of the average ferret, but when it eventually broke loose from its covering and waddled into view, I was astonished at its relatively large body: it was, in fact, so fat as to be almost circular. Yet it shuffled over to the bars on its short legs and fell on the lump of sugar I offered, as though that was the first piece of decent food it had received in years.

  It was, I decided, a species of mongoose, but its tip-tilted, whiffling nose and the glittering, almost fanatical eyes made it look totally unlike any mongoose I had ever seen. I was convinced now that its shape was due not to Nature but to overeating. It had very short legs and fine, rather slender paws, and when it trotted about the cage these legs moved so fast that they were little more than a blur beneath the bulky body. Each time I fed it a morsel of food it gave the same faint, breathless squeak: as much as to reproach me for tempting it away from its diet.

  I was so captivated by this little animal that before I realized what I was doing I had fed it all the lump-sugar in my pocket. As soon as it knew that no more titbits were forthcoming, it uttered a long-suffering sigh and trotted away to dive into the straw. Within a couple of seconds it was sound asleep once more. I decided there and then that if kusimanses were to be obtained in the area I was visiting, I would strain every nerve to find one.

  Three months later I was deep in the heart of the Cameroon rainforests and here I found I had ample opportunity for getting to know the kusimanse. Indeed, they were about the commonest members of the mongoose family, and I often saw them when I was sitting concealed in the forest waiting for some completely different animal to make its appearance.

  The first one I saw appeared suddenly out of the undergrowth on the banks of a small stream. He kept me amused for a long time with a display of his crab-catching methods: he waded into the shallow water and with the aid of his long, turned-up nose (presumably holding his breath when he did so) he turned over all the rocks he could find until he unearthed one of the large, black, freshwater crabs. Without a second’s hesitation he grabbed it in his mouth and, with a quick flick of his head, tossed it on to the bank. He then chased after it, squeaking with delight, and danced round it, snapping away until at last it was dead. When an exceptionally large crab succeeded in giving him a nip on the end of his retroussé nose, I am afraid my stifled amusement caused the kusimanse to depart hastily into the forest.

  On another occasion I watched one of these little beasts using precisely the same methods to catch frogs, but this time without much success. I felt he must be young and inexperienced in the art of frog-catching. After much laborious hunting and snuffling, he would catch a frog and hurl it shorewards; but, long before he had waddled out to the bank after it, the frog would have recovered itself and leapt back into the water, and the kusimanse would be forced to start all over again.

  One morning a native hunter walked into my camp carrying a small palm-leaf basket, and peering into it I saw three of the strangest little animals imaginable. They were about the size of new-born kittens, with tiny legs and somewhat moth-eaten tails. They were covered with bright gingery-red fur which stood up in spikes and tufts all over their bodies, making them look almost like some weird species of hedgehog. As I gazed down at them, trying to identify them, they lifted their little faces and peered up at me. The moment I saw the long, pink, rubbery noses I knew they were kusimanses, and very young ones at that, for their eyes were only just open and they had no teeth. I was very pleased to obtain these babies, but after I had paid the hunter and set to work on the task of trying to teach them to feed, I began to wonder if I had not got more than I bargained for. Among the numerous feeding-bottles I had brought with me I could not find a teat small enough to fit their mouths, so I was forced to try the old trick of wrapping some cotton-wool round the end of a matchstick, dipping it in milk and letting them suck it. At first they took the view that I was some sort of monster endeavouring to choke them. They struggled and squeaked, and every time I pushed the cotton-wool into their mouths they frantically spat it out again. Fortunately it was not long before they discovered that the cotton-wool contained milk, and then they were no more trouble, except that they were liable to suck so hard in their enthusiasm that the cotton-wool would part company with the end of the matchstick and disappear down their throats.

  At first I kept them in a small basket by my bed. This was the most convenient spot, for I had to get up in the middle of the night to feed them. For the first week or so they really behaved very well, spending most of the day sprawled on their bed of dried leaves, their stomachs bulging and their paws twitching. Only at meal-times would they grow excited, scrambling round and round inside the basket, uttering loud squeaks and treading heavily on one another.

  It was not long before the baby kusimanses developed their front teeth (which gave them a firmer and more disastrous grip on the cotton-wool), and as their legs got stronger they became more and more eager to see the world that lay outside their basket. They had the first feed of the day when I drank my morning tea; and I would lift them out of their basket and put them on my bed so that they could have a walk round. I had, however, to call an abrupt halt to this habit, for one morning, while I was quietly sipping my tea, one of the baby kusimanses discovered my bare foot sticking out from under the bedclothes and decided that if he bit my toe hard enough it might produce milk. He laid hold with his needle-sharp teeth, and his brothers, thinking they were missing a feed, instantly joined him. When I had locked them up in their basket again and finished mopping tea off myself and the bed, I decided these morning romps would have to cease. They were too painful.

  This was merely the first indication of the trouble in store for me. Very soon they had become such a nuisance that I was forced to christen them the Bandits. They grew fast, and as soon as their teeth had come through they started to eat egg and a little raw meat every day, as well as their milk. Their appetites seemed insatiable, and their lives turned into one long quest for food. They appeared to think that everything was edible unless proved otherwise. One of the things of which they made a light snack was the lid of their basket. Having demolished this they hauled themselves out and went on a tour of inspection round the camp. Unfortunately, and with unerring accuracy, they made their way to the one place where they could do the maximum damage in the minimum time: the place where the food and medical supplies were stored. Before I discovered them they had broken a dozen eggs and, to judge by the state of them, rolled in the contents. They had fought with a couple of bunches of bananas and apparently won, for the bananas looked distinctly the worse for wear. Having slaughtered the fruit, they had moved on and upset two bottles of vitamin product. Then, to their delight, they had found two large packets of boracic powder. These they had burst open and scattered far and wide, while large quantities of the white powder had stuck to their egg-soaked fur. By the time I found them they were on the point of having a quick drink from a highly pungent and poisonous bucket of disinfectant, and I grabbed them only just in time. Each of them looked like some weird Christmas cake decoration, in a coat stiff with boracic and egg yolk. It took me three quarters of an hour to clean them up. Then I put them in a larger and stronger basket and hoped that this would settle them.

  It took them two days to break out of this basket.

  This time they had decided to pay a visit to all the other animals I had. They must have had a fine time round the cages, for there were always some scraps of food lying about.

  Now at that time I had a large and very beautiful monkey, called Colly, in my collection. Colly was a colobus, perhaps one of the most handsome of African monkeys. Their fur is coal black and snow white, hanging in long silky strands round their bodies like a shawl. They have a very long plume-like tail, also black and white. Colly was a somewhat vain monkey and spent a lot of her time grooming her lovely coat and posing in various parts of the cage. On this particular afternoon she had decided t
o enjoy a siesta in the bottom of her box, while waiting for me to bring her some fruit. She lay there like a sunbather on a beach, her eyes closed, her hands folded neatly on her chest. Unfortunately, however, she had pushed her tail through the bars so that it lay on the ground outside like a feathery black-and-white scarf that someone had dropped. Just as Colly was drifting off into a deep sleep, the Bandits appeared on the scene.

  The Bandits, as I pointed out, believed that everything in the world, no matter how curious it looked, might turn out to be edible. In their opinion it was always worth sampling everything, just in case. When he saw Colly’s tail lying on the ground ahead, apparently not belonging to anyone, the eldest Bandit decided it must be a tasty morsel of something or other that Providence had placed in his path. So he rushed forward and sank his sharp little teeth into it. His two brothers, feeling that there was plenty of this meal for everyone, joined him immediately. Thus was Colly woken out of a deep and refreshing sleep by three sets of extremely sharp little teeth fastening themselves almost simultaneously in her tail. She gave a wild scream of fright and scrambled towards the top of her cage. But the Bandits were not going to be deprived of this tasty morsel without a struggle, and they hung on grimly. The higher Colly climbed in her cage, the higher she lifted the Bandits off the ground, and when eventually I got there in response to her yells, I found the Bandits, like some miniature trapeze-artists, hanging by their teeth three feet off the ground. It took me five minutes to make them let go, and then I managed it only by blowing cigarette-smoke in their faces and making them sneeze. By the time I had got them safely locked up again, poor Colly was a nervous wreck.

  I decided the Bandits must have a proper cage if I did not want the rest of my animals driven hysterical by their attentions. I built them a very nice one, with every modern convenience. It had a large and spacious bedroom at one end, and an open playground and dining-room at the other. There were two doors, one to admit my hand to their bedroom, the other to put their food into their dining-room. The trouble lay in feeding them. As soon as they saw me approach with a plate they would cluster round the doorway, screaming excitedly, and the moment the door was opened they would shoot out, knock the plate from my hand and fall to the ground with it, a tangled mass of kusimanses, raw meat, raw egg and milk. Quite often when I went to pick them up they would bite me, not vindictively but simply because they would mistake my fingers for something edible. Yes, feeding the Bandits was not only a wasteful process but an extremely painful one as well. By the time I got them safely back to England they had bitten me twice as frequently as any animal I have ever kept. So it was with a real feeling of relief that I handed them over to a zoo.

  The next day I went round to see how they were settling down. I found them in a huge cage, pattering about and looking, I felt, rather lost and bewildered by all the new sights and sounds. Poor little things, I thought, they have had the wind taken out of their sails. They looked so subdued and forlorn. I began to feel quite sorry to have parted with them. I stuck my finger through the wire and waggled it, calling to them. I thought it might comfort them to talk to someone they knew. I should have known better: the Bandits shot across the cage in a grim-faced bunch and fastened on to my finger like bulldogs. With a yelp of pain I at last managed to get my finger away, and as I left them, mopping the blood from my hand, I decided that perhaps, after all, I was not so sorry to see the back of them. Life without the Bandits might be considerably less exciting – but it would not hurt nearly so much.

  Wilhelmina

  Most people, when they learn for the first time that I collect wild animals for zoos, ask the same series of questions in the same order. First they ask if it is dangerous, to which the answer is no, it is not, providing you do not make any silly mistakes. Then they ask how I catch the animals – a more difficult question to answer, for there are many hundreds of ways of capturing wild animals: sometimes you have no set method, but have to improvise something on the spur of the moment. Their third question is, invariably: don’t you become attached to your animals and find it difficult to part with them at the end of an expedition? The answer is, of course, that you do, and sometimes parting with a creature you have kept for eight months can be a heartbreaking process.

  Occasionally you even find yourself getting attached to the strangest of beasts, some weird creature you would never in the normal way have thought you could like. One such beast as this, I remember, was Wilhelmina.

  Wilhelmina was a whip-scorpion, and if anyone had told me that the day would come when I would feel even the remotest trace of affection for a whip-scorpion I would never have believed them. Of all the creatures on the face of this earth the whip-scorpion is one of the least prepossessing. To those who do not adore spiders (and I am one of those people) the whip-scorpion is a form of living nightmare. It resembles a spider with a body the size of a walnut that has been run over by a steamroller and flattened to a wafer-thin flake. To this flake are attached what appear to be an immense number of long, fine and crooked legs which spread out to the size of a soup-plate. To cap it all, on the front (if such a creature can be said to have a front), are two enormously long slender legs like whips, about twelve inches long in a robust specimen. It possesses the ability to skim about at incredible speed and with apparently no effort – up, down or sideways – and to squeeze its revolting body into a crack that would scarcely accommodate a piece of tissue-paper.

  That is a whip-scorpion, and to anyone who distrusts spiders it is the personification of the devil. Fortunately they are harmless, unless you happen to have a weak heart.

  I made my first acquaintance with Wilhelmina’s family when I was on a collecting trip to the tropical forest of West Africa. For many different reasons, hunting in these forests is always difficult. To begin with, the trees are enormous, some as much as a hundred and fifty feet high, with trunks as fat as a factory chimney. Their head foliage is thick, luxuriant and twined with creepers and the branches are decorated with various parasitic plants like a curious hanging garden. All this may be eighty or a hundred feet above the forest floor, and the only way to reach it is to climb a trunk as smooth as a plank which has not a single branch for the first seventy feet of its length. This, the top layer of the forest, is by far the most thickly populated, for in the comparative safety of the tree-tops live a host of creatures which rarely, if ever, descends to ground-level. Setting traps in the forest canopy is a difficult and tedious operation. It may take a whole morning to find a way up a tree, climb it and set the trap in a suitable position. Then, just as you have safely regained the forest floor, your trap goes off with a triumphant clang, and the whole laborious process has to be endured once more. Thus, although trap-setting in the tree-tops is a painful necessity, you are always on the look-out for some slightly easier method of obtaining the animals you want. Probably one of the most successful and exciting of these methods is to smoke out the giant trees.

  Some of the forest trees, although apparently sound and solid, are actually hollow for part or all of their length. These are the trees to look for, though they are not so easy to find. A day of searching in the forest might end with the discovery of six of them, perhaps one of which will yield good results when finally smoked out.

  Smoking out a hollow tree is quite an art. To begin with, you must, if necessary, enlarge the opening at the base of the trunk and lay a small fire of dry twigs. Then two Africans are sent up the tree with nets to cover all the holes and cracks at the upper end of the trunk, and then station themselves at convenient points to catch any animals that emerge. When all is ready, you start the fire, and as soon as it is crackling you lay on top of the flames a large bundle of fresh green leaves. Immediately the flames die away and in their place rises a column of thick and pungent smoke. The great hollow interior of the tree acts like a gigantic chimney, and the smoke is whisked up inside. You never realize, until you light the fire, quite how many holes and cracks there are in the trunk of the tree. As you watch, you se
e a tiny tendril of smoke appear magically on the bark perhaps twenty feet from the ground, coiling out of an almost invisible hole; a short pause and ten feet higher three more little holes puff smoke like miniature cannon-mouths. Thus, guided by the tiny streamers of smoke appearing at intervals along the trunk, you can watch the progress of the smoking. If the tree is a good one, you have only time to watch the smoke get half-way up, for it is then that the animals start to break cover and you become very busy indeed.

  When one of these hollow trees is inhabited, it is really like a block of flats. In the ground-floor apartments, for example, you find things like the giant land-snails, each the size of an apple, and they come gliding out of the base of the tree with all the speed a snail is capable of mustering, even in an emergency. They may be followed by other creatures who prefer the lower apartments or else are unable to climb: the big forest toads, for example, whose backs are cleverly marked out to resemble a dead leaf, and whose cheeks and sides are a beautiful mahogany red. They come waddling out from among the tree-tops with the most ludicrously indignant expressions on their faces, and on reaching the open air suddenly squat down and stare about them in a pathetic and helpless sort of way.

  Having evicted all the ground-floor tenants, you then have to wait a short time before the occupants higher up have a chance to make their way down to the opening. Almost invariably giant millipedes are among the first to appear – charming creatures that look like brown sausages, with a fringe of legs along the underside of their bodies. They are quite harmless and rather imbecile creatures for which I have a very soft spot. One of their most ridiculous antics, when placed on a table, is to set off walking, all their legs working furiously, and on coming to the edge they never seem to notice it and continue to walk out into space until the weight of their body bends them over. Then, half on and half off the table, they pause, consider, and eventually decide that something is wrong. And so, starting with the extreme hind pair of legs, they go into reverse and get themselves on to the table again – only to crawl to the other side and repeat the performance.