FIVE
Eleanor and the aye-ayes
Village life sometimes does look idyllic, particularly if you don’t ask too many questions but concentrate on wildlife. For another National Geographic article I absolutely had to see an aye-aye, the strangest of lemurs, in the wild.1 Jean-Jacques Petter had pronounced aye-ayes almost extinct twenty years before, but he announced that a few survived in the beach-front forests of the East Coast. We have since learned that they live in both rainforest and dry forest, but they are very rare and very rightly wary of humans. Everywhere there are taboos for or against. In many places they must be killed on sight. I know of one aye-aye that was killed on the East Coast and wrapped in funeral cloths. The desiccating corpse passed from village to village all across the south until it finally reached a village with the courage to bury it. Instead, in the village of Ivontaka, the taboo protected these wonderful creatures.
Ivontaka was due to become part of the Biosphere Reserve of Mananara-Nord, established by Unesco in 1987 under the direction of mammalogist Roland Albignac. Biosphere reserves were originally imagined as concentric circles: an inner absolutely protected core, surrounded by areas where sparing use of the habitat is permitted, and then further outside, full agricultural use, or fishing in a marine zone, with interventions to help the population manage for greater productivity. The biosphere idea became the model for the later ICDPs, or Integrated Conservation and Development Projects: light use around the intact core.2
Of course this idea was threatening or even incomprehensible to people who had used the whole area before. People in Madagascar feel a profound, indeed sacred, link to their land, mediated through their ancestors, their ancestral tombs, and their immensely complicated interlace of local taboos. This means that the forest and land are theirs to use. They do not see themselves as forest destroyers, but as enrichers of the gift of the ancestors. Sandra Evers writes: ‘Land anchors not only the individual, but also entire kinship groups to their history, for it connects the living with the dead… It thus lies at the heart of Malagasy cultural life. Malagasy people revere the ancestors, whom they believe to be possessed of powers that they use to exert influence over the lives of the living. Consequently, the Malagasy take considerable pains to remain on good terms with the ancestors.’3
The Western view of land as mere property which can be bought or sold is in fundamental conflict with deeply rooted Malagasy values. This conflict will reappear throughout this book: in attempts to ‘rationalize’ land tenure, in foreigners as land-grabbers in local eyes whether investors or conservationists, and even playing a part in national government change. But back in 1987 people of Mananara town and Ivontaka village just knew the Biosphere Reserve was coming, even though as yet it hardly touched their customary ways.
July 1987, Mananara and Ivontaka. Letter to Mother.
Dear Mom,
I shall tell what I’ve been up to and please don’t be put out with me. Remember you let Pop read me all Rider Haggard, and you weren’t much more stay-at-home yourself, what with your St. Nicholas Magazine firing you up to come to Madagascar and find an elephant bird.
I flew to Mananara last Sunday with some trepidation to join Eleanor Sterling. I had a list of names from Jean-Jacques Petter and Roland Albignac, and a mission—this region is to become a Biosphere Reserve for the aye-aye. I also was fascinated by aye-ayes since my Bastille Day visit to Vincennes Zoo. They feel everything, like raccoons, not at all like a lemur. Their minds must be as different as their looks. Humphrey, the adolescent male in Paris, ran round poking his finger into everything like a naughty child in a supermarket.
I lumbered off the Twin Otter with my camping duffel. There was Eleanor Sterling, ever so pretty in washed blond hair, glaucous hazel eyes, and a purple full skirt she’d ‘borrowed’ from her mother. It turned out she was recovering on Sunday from a grueling week running up and down hill 20 or 30 kilometers a day, with guides who were really hunters that swarmed up trees to shake and poke every aye-aye’s nest they found. Eleanor was captain of her cross-country team at Yale: the background that’s needed for the thesis she’s planning. She has given up her job with the World Wildlife Fund and is now a grad student of Alison Richard’s at Yale. She is all prepared to gallop after aye-ayes all night long. That is, if she can find any.
Awful day yesterday when she’d been in one place and they actually found an aye-aye in another. Over her protests she was confronted by an animal with a noose round its neck, trussed up in a gunny sack, and five guides who demanded a $30 reward from her meager student funds because Frans Lanting the photographer bought aye-ayes for $50. They proposed to take it over the river in a pirogue to an island where Roland Albignac wants aye-ayes released. They actually got there before she paid the $30. She insisted that now it was her beast so they were taking it back where they found it, and she was coming along to make sure it was freed and not stewed. So they did half of it by river, the pirogue loaded to the gunnels (such as gunnels are in a dug-out) and the rest on foot, Eleanor shaking with misery for the poor trapped animal and fury that it was so hard to impose or even explain what a field study should be.
So when I turned up she knew the landscape and the guides, but also knew she couldn’t go out to watch at night without a car, a grant and a mastery of Malagasy—in short, try again next year. Meanwhile, every girl in town was her friend. She chaperoned them to the local disco. One youth had taken her touring to the southern coastal villages on a motorbike as preparation to a proposal of marriage on behalf of his older brother. Eleanor will go far. She even got me to the disco, which turned out to have flashing ultraviolet lights and an American rock tape singing ‘What will I do for a role model, now my role model is gone!’ You can imagine white eyes and teeth and dresses jiving in the ultraviolet lights. This in a building of palm-thatch and hand-hewn planks, with a glittering driveway of crushed quartz crystals. The rosewood-colored youth of Mananara do sedate jitterbug in their disco, not the lascivious shimmy of the villages.
Monday we tried again near Mananara. We walked for 6 or 8 hours unsuccessfully. This is all farms and villages— rice fields, coconuts, bananas, vanilla pods drying and the sweet pungency of coffee flowers. There were tufts of woods in between with a few bunched stick nests like eagle nests among the lianas, without any aye-ayes inside. I got carried away at the end when an old man, a vanilla grader, said an aye-aye lived just behind his house 2 km off. Of course it was twice as far, but I figured our only hope of seeing an animal was if we got to a nest at dusk. No hope at all. Still, it was a fabulous walk in the sunset, with rows of hills in artful views, and coming back in the dark through villages with the evening fires lit, and the Milky Way blazing across the sky.
Unfortunately we wound up on the wrong side of the Mananara river. Our guides had to liberate a locked-up pirogue fastened to a post by a massive chain. The lock was a nut and screw. Only the pirogue’s owner was rich enough to own two pairs of pliers to unlock it. He took us across— maybe 75 yards of still warm black river, with me kneeling and holding my breath the whole way, given only two inches of freeboard. We landed just in time, when I was deciding I’d be no good under torture and would have to stand up, tipping out all the people and the cameras whether or not there were crocodiles in the river. In the village on the other side a pick-up truck stopped as we flashed our lights and halloo-ed so we rode home the last 5 miles in the warm wind under all those stars, while a voice among the other passengers explained he was a teacher of mathematics from Rouen, home visiting on holiday—explaining in English!
But Eleanor said on her motorbike ride last week she had seen a most beautiful village on an idyllic cove with real rainforest behind. Even before that exhausting day’s walk in the farmland of Mananara, we arranged with merchant Nim Tack to board his Mercedes and ride south to Ivontaka village.
The 18 km to Ivontaka is mentally further than New York to Tana’s Hotel Colbert. Only a Mercedes can make it—a dinosaur with about 4 foot clearance. Its driver is King, like Mark Twain’s Mississippi steamboat pilots. He is sensitive to every incipient skid on the laterite, and strong when rocks yank the wheel, and cool in choosing his course through the ruts and ravines. At times he orders the passengers out— Eleanor and me from the cab, 31 more from the back, not counting babies. His work gang unloads planks from the undercarriage to reinforce bridges. An assistant runs before like John the Baptist for about half the way, and guides the wheels onto the bridge-planks with upraised finger. John the Baptist barefoot, of course, in remnants of shorts and a T-shirt consisting mainly of its neckband. (Of course there are rumors that the Mananara merchants do not want the road repaired, so that their boats and massive trucks like ours can gather the cash crops of vanilla and cloves with no competition from less well vehicled interlopers.)
In every village that we pass, the prettiest girl runs up with a folded note, for the driver? Or for a swain in the next village down the coast? Or she simply looks sideways at the driver from under her curly eyelashes.
It took four hours to drive 18 kilometers—and we hadn’t even been stuck.
We (that is, three guides we brought from Mananara, E. and me) arrived at last at Ivontaka. As Eleanor promised, it was perfect. The coast bent into a little cove guarded by granite points and a little fringing reef and lagoon. Perhaps thirty huts of coconut thatch, and a double row of coco palms next to the sea.
Right, Mom, Floradora scene setting all over again. The chief and owner of the four-cup café, M. Louis Rabeson Rabearivelo greeted us in most elegant French. He only moved back from Mananara four years ago. He invited us to lunch with his family. His home is one room, with benches six inches high along the walls to sit on or store things, and mats unrolled in the center. Young wife in orange and ochre lamba and lime green shirt, and two poppets of kids. It may be a village, but our host told us stuff about trade winds and pluviosity and asked if we had come to talk about the future Biosphere Reserve. He also told us an amazing tale of the village of Soanierana Ivongo, where the tavy cutting has so deforested the hills that their river has dried up.
We gave his small daughter a meter of pink flagging tape for her braids—by morning she had shared it with every girl in the village, so each had a butterfly of fluorescent pink in her hair. The chief assigned a leprechaun-like local in pink sateen shorts to take us up the forest mountain behind, and fed us and our original three guides a mountain of rice, with thin bouillon of a watercress-like green, and a very few tiny dried fish, mostly salt. Then we started uphill to camp. We had to stay out of what looked like a nearby, promising bit of rainforest—that part is fady, taboo—perhaps it holds tombs.
At this point I discovered I had walked too far the day before. I could barely climb, and soon took to lagging behind the rest. It was nice forest, but who cared. After an hour we reached the summit and put up our tents—a little one for Eleanor and me and a big one for the guides. Eleanor wanted to go on because the guide said there were black-and-white ruffed lemurs in the woods. We heard them roar in the distance. The leprechaun suddenly started a shouting sing-song, which turned out to be a prayer that we would see them. He and Eleanor and the others set off—and the prayer worked, which I knew by the bellows and squeals that ruffs give when alarmed.
It poured all night, and neither tent leaked, which is a lovely smug sensation.
Everyone agreed there are no aye-aye in primary forest. Eleanor and I aren’t convinced, but at least we’d seen what the forest looked like. So we all slid downhill, which had somehow got much lower since I climbed up it. The others pointed to another vertical slope of rocks and nasty scrub. I let them and Eleanor tackle it while I snoozed beside, not under, a coconut palm by the sea.
By the time they skidded back all bruised and scratched and muddy, even the guides were tired. It’s not often a Malagasy guide admits that.
They took us to one last place—a coconut grove well beyond the village where many of the nuts had the round gnawed holes of an aye-aye’s chisel teeth. There was a nice stick nest with fresh green leaf-lining in a tree beside the biggest palm.
Eleanor and I opted to camp in the grove that night. We sent our guides back to town for lunch and suddenly realized we’d found the only deserted beach I’ve ever seen in Madagascar. We pulled off all our filthy clothes and rushed into the turquoise water and bobbed up and down … and then rushed back up and dressed, sure we’d horrify some villager—but there was nothing to do but sunbathe all afternoon on that lovely shore. Eleanor with her Presbyterian conscience tried to feel guilty but I don’t think she did.
The guides came back at 4.00 with our gear. We camped with a tent each on the soft coastal beach grass and we went and sat under the nest, just Eleanor and me. In the very last light a ripply shape ran along the branch, and up a coconut palm frond. My headlamp picked up orange eyes spaced wider apart than the heads of two normal lemurs. Eleanor turned on the spotlight, and there was our aye-aye, classically chiseling open a coconut.
I didn’t think it would be handsome. That hefty head, and bat ears, and the hands like bunches of knobbed licorice sticks doesn’t seem as though it could even come together to make one animal. But it undulates as it moves with that great plume of tail rippling behind. The palm fronds did not move at all under its feet: it’s like a hologram skimming above the frond.4 The face has kohl-rimmed eyes, set off by the triangles of pale skin above and below. At least it is jolie laide. And it was curious about us, too—it hung by its hind legs, arms hanging down and ears spread, to goggle at our lights.
We watched for about 40 minutes, hiccupping with excitement while it scraped the nut meat out with flickering finger just as it’s supposed to. But then our faithful guides, all four of them, came back from their supper and clearly a tot or two of village-style sugar-cane beer. Four sets of crashing feet were too much. The aye-aye fled, fluently, for the hill forest. I got to the guides and told them they were nice to come back in the night to help, but PLEASE GO AWAY —then fell full length on a dry bush, which settled the matter. The guides did go, begging for my headlamp to see their way home.
Eleanor and I roamed hopefully through the groves, but no more aye-aye. Instead we found that the hut-sized rock which overlooked the lagoon, where I’d dislodged a very smelly squid to sit and watch that afternoon. It now had a squid put back, and, as well, a scarlet-and-mustard colored armless starfish, a pentagon big as a man’s hand. The rock was clearly fady, taboo, with its offerings from the sea. I had all too clearly violated the taboo. Eleanor reads too much anthropology. I mischievously remarked that nocturnal primate-watchers are occasionally taken for pakafo, the dread white eaters of children’s hearts. This is, on rare occasion, very bad for the scientists.
‘Look! Eyes!’ Down through the bushes by the sea gleamed orange sparks large as aye-aye eyes. As we approached, they reflected from still water. Men walked apparently on the sea surface, holding up flares of burning splints that gleamed off their brown bodies like Goya night scenes. They were walking the reef at low tide, fishing with long spears in the glassily still black lagoon, while the surf crashed impotently just beyond.
Another group of flares progressed toward us from down the beach. ‘Please put out your light. Please don’t be looking through your binoculars as if we’re spying’ quavered Eleanor.
‘But look,’ I said, ‘They’ve a bunch of little boys with them. Just walk up and say hello.’
‘But they think—that word I won’t say—come to eat children.’
At this point the group arrived. The kids ran on giggling, but the men stopped—our guides. They’d been using my precious headlamp to fish, and delightedly held up three cornucopias of banana leaf filled with tiny pale pink crabs. The lobsters on this coast are cobalt blue with purple tails and the crabs are peach-blossom pink.
They’d found us an aye-aye in its nest—let them eat all the crab they please!5
1. A. Jolly, ‘Madagascar lemurs: on the edge of survival’ (1988).
2. Unesco Biosphere Reserve Information: Madagascar, Mananara-Nord, Unesco; R. Albignac, G.S. Ramangason et al., Éco-développement des communautés rurales pour la conservation de la biodiversité (1992); G.M. Sodikoff, Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere (2012).
3. S.J.T.M. Evers, C. Campbell et al., ‘Land competition and human-environment relations in Madagascar’ (2013), p. 9.
4. An engineer told me later that this must mean active damping out of the normal waves caused by locomotion. In other words, a way to creep up on sleeping birds or lizards, and a very good way to avoid notice by their own predators—human beings.
5. Eleanor later studied aye-ayes for her Ph.D. for two years on the uninhabited island of Nosy Mangabe. She has become director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History, with work around the world, especially in Vietnam. See E.J. Sterling and E.E. McCreless, ‘Adaptations in the aye-aye: a review’ (2006).