As soon as Bob and Sophie had joined us in Bafut we set about the task of organizing our already large and ever-growing collection. The great, shady verandah that ran round the upstairs rooms of the Fon’s Rest House was divided into three: one section for reptiles, one for birds and one for mammals. Thus each of us had a particular section to look after and whoever finished first lent a hand with somebody else’s group. First thing in the morning we would all wander to and fro along the verandah in our pyjamas carefully looking at each animal to make sure it was all right. It is only by this day-to-day routine of careful watching that you can get to know your animals so well that you detect the slightest sign of illness, when to anyone else the animal would appear to be perfectly healthy and normal. Then we cleaned and fed all the delicate animals that could not wait (such as the sunbirds who had to have their nectar as soon as it was light, and the baby creatures that needed their early morning bottles) and then we paused for breakfast. It was during mealtimes that we compared notes on our charges. This mealtime conversation would have put any normal mortal off his food, for it was mainly concerned with the bowel movements of our creatures; with wild animals, diarrhoea or constipation is often a good indication as to whether you are feeding it correctly, and it can also be the first (and sometimes the only) symptom of an illness.
On any collecting trip acquiring the animals is, as a rule, the simplest part of the job. As soon as the local people discover that you are willing to buy live wild creatures the stuff comes pouring in; ninety per cent is, of course, the commoner species, but they do bring an occasional rarity. If you want the really rare stuff you generally have to go out and find it yourself, but while you are devoting your time to this you can be sure that all the common local fauna will be brought in to you. So one might almost say that getting the animals is easy: the really hard part is keeping them once you have got them.
The chief difficulty you have to contend with when you have got a newly caught animal is not so much the shock it might be suffering from capture, but the fact that the capture forces it to exist in close proximity to a creature it regards as an enemy of the worst possible sort: yourself. On many occasions an animal may take to captivity beautifully, but can never reconcile itself to the intimate terms on which it has to exist with man. This is the first great barrier to break down and you can only do it by patience and kindness. For month after month an animal may snap and snarl at you every time you approach its cage, until you begin to despair of ever making a favourable impression on it. Then, one day, sometimes without any preliminary warning, it will trot forward and take food from your hand, or allow you to tickle it behind the ears. At such moments you feel that all the waiting in the world was justified.
Feeding, of course, is one of your main problems. Not only must you have a fairly extensive knowledge of what each species eats in the wild state, but you have to work out a suitable substitute if the natural food is unavailable, and then teach your specimen to eat it. You also have to cater for their individual likes and dislikes, which vary enormously. I have known a rodent which, refusing all normal rodent food – such as fruit, bread, vegetables – lived for three days on an exclusive diet of spaghetti. I have had a group of five monkeys, of the same age and species, who displayed the most weird idiosyncrasies. Out of the five, two had a passion for hard-boiled eggs, while the other three were frightened of the strange white shapes and would not touch them, actually screaming in fear if you introduced such a fearsome object as a hard-boiled egg into their cage. These five monkeys all adored orange but, whereas four would carefully peel their fruit and throw away the skin, the fifth would peel his orange equally carefully and then throw away the orange and eat the peel. When you have a collection of several hundred creatures all displaying such curious characteristics you are sometimes nearly driven mad in your efforts to satisfy their desires, and so keep them healthy and happy.
But of all the irritating and frustrating tasks that you have to undertake during a collecting trip, the hand-rearing of baby animals is undoubtedly the worst. To begin with, they are generally stupid over taking a bottle and there is nothing quite so unattractive as struggling with a baby animal in a sea of lukewarm milk. Secondly, they have to be kept warm, especially at night, and this means (unless you take them to bed with you, which is often the answer) you have to get up several times during the night to replenish hot-water bottles. After a hard day’s work, to drag yourself out of bed at three in the morning to fill hot-water bottles is an occupation that soon loses its charm. Thirdly, all baby animals have extremely delicate stomachs and you must watch them like a hawk to make sure that the milk you are giving them is not too rich or too weak; if too rich, they can develop intestinal troubles which may lead to nephritis, which will probably kill them, and if too weak, it can lead to loss of weight and condition, which leaves the animal open to all sorts of fatal complaints.
Contrary to my gloomy prognostications, the baby black-eared squirrel, Squill-lill Small (Small to her friends) proved an exemplary baby. During the day she lay twitching in a bed of cotton-wool balanced on a hot-water bottle in the bottom of a deep biscuit-tin; at night the tin was placed by our beds under the rays of a Tilley infra-red heater. Almost immediately we were made aware of the fact that Small had a will of her own. For such a tiny animal she could produce an extraordinary volume of noise, her cry being a loud and rapid series of ‘chucks’ that sounded like a cheap alarm clock going off. Within the first twenty-four hours she had learnt when to expect her feeds and if we were as much as five minutes late she would trill and chuck incessantly until we arrived with the food. Then came the day when Small’s eyes opened for the first time and she could take a look at her foster-parents and the world in general. This, however, presented a new problem. We happened that day to be a bit late with her food. We had rather dawdled over our own lunch, deep in a discussion about some problem or other, and we had, I regret to say, forgotten all about Small. Suddenly I heard a faint scuffling behind me and, turning round, I saw Small squatting in the doorway of the dining-room looking, to say the least, extremely indignant. As soon as she saw us she went off like an alarm clock and hurrying across the floor hauled herself, panting, up Jacquie’s chair and then leapt to her shoulder, where she sat flicking her tail up and down and shouting indignantly into Jacquie’s ear. Now this, for a baby squirrel, was quite a feat. To begin with, as I say, her eyes had only just opened. Yet she had succeeded in climbing out of her tin and finding her way out of our bedroom (piled high with camera equipment and film); she had made her way down the full length of the verandah, running the gauntlet of any number of cages filled with potentially dangerous beasts, and eventually located us (presumably by sound) in the dining-room which was at the extreme end of the verandah. She had covered seventy yards over unknown territory, through innumerable dangers, in order to tell us she was hungry. Needless to say, she got her due of praise and what was more important from her point of view, she got her lunch.
As soon as Small’s eyes opened she grew rapidly and soon developed into one of the loveliest squirrels I have ever seen. Her orange head and neat, black-rimmed ears nicely set off her large dark eyes, and her fat body developed a rich moss green tinge against which the two lines of white spots that decorated her sides stood out like cats’-eyes on a dark road. But her tail was her best feature. Long and thick, green above and vivid orange below, it was a beautiful sight. She liked to sit with it curved over her back, the tip actually hanging over her nose, and then she would flick it gently in an undulating movement so that the whole thing looked like a candle flame in a draught.
Even when she was quite grown-up, Small slept in her biscuit-tin by my bed. She awoke early in the morning and, uttering her loud cry, she leaped from the tin on to one of our beds and crawled under the bedclothes with us. Having spent ten minutes or so investigating our semi-comatose bodies, she jumped to the floor and went to explore the verandah. From these expeditions she would frequently return with some treasure she had found (such as a bit of rotten banana, or a dry leaf, or a bougainvillaea flower) and store it somewhere in our beds, getting most indignant if we hurled the offering out on to the floor. This continued for some months, until the day when I decided that Small would have to occupy a cage like the rest of the animals; I awoke one morning in excruciating agony to find her trying to stuff a peanut into my ear. Having found such a delicacy on the verandah she obviously thought that simply to cache it in my bed was not safe enough, but my ear provided an ideal hiding-place.
Bug-eyes, the needle-clawed lemur we had captured near Eshobi, was another baby, although she was fully weaned when we found her. She had become tame in a short space of time and very rapidly became one of our favourites. For her size she had enormous hands and feet, with long, attenuated fingers, and to see her dancing around her cage on her hind legs, her immense hands held up as though in horror, her eyes almost popping out of her head, as she pursued a moth or butterfly we had introduced, was a delightfully comic spectacle. Once she had caught it she sat there with it clasped tightly in her pink hand and regarded it with a wild, wide-eyed stare, as if amazed that such a creature should suddenly appear in the palm of her hand. Then she stuffed it into her mouth and continued to sit with what appeared to be a fluttering moustache of butterfly wing decorating her face, over which her huge eyes peered in astonishment.
It was Bug-eyes who first showed me an extraordinary habit that bushbabies have, a habit which to my shame I had never noticed before, in spite of the fact that I had kept innumerable bushbabies. I was watching her one morning when she had popped out of her nesting box for a feed of mealworms and a quick wash and brush up. She had, as I said before, large ears which were as delicate as flower petals. They were so fine that they were almost transparent and, presumably to prevent them from becoming torn or damaged in the wild state, she had the power of folding them back against the sides of her head like the furled sails of a yacht. Her ears were terribly important to her as you could tell by watching her. The slightest sound, however faint, would be picked up and her ears would twitch and turn towards it like radar. Now I had always noticed that she spent a lot of time cleaning and rubbing her ears with her hands, but on this particular morning I watched the whole process from start to finish and was considerably startled by what I saw. She began by sitting on a branch, staring dreamily into space while she daintily cleaned her tail, parting the hair carefully and making sure there were no snags or tangles, reminding me of a little girl plaiting her hair. Then she put one of her outsize, puppet-like hands beneath her and deposited in the palm a drop of urine. With an air of concentration, she rubbed her hands together and proceeded to anoint her ears with the urine, rather after the manner of a man rubbing brilliantine into his hair. Then she got another drop of urine and rubbed it carefully over the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands, while I sat and watched her in amazement.
I watched her do this three days in succession before I was satisfied that I was not imagining things, for it seemed to me to be one of the weirdest animal habits I had ever encountered. I can only conclude that the reason for it was this: unless the skin of the ears, so extremely delicate and thin, were kept moistened it must inevitably get dry and perhaps crack, which would have been fatal for an animal that relied so much on hearing. The same would apply to the delicate skin on the soles of her feet and hands, but here the urine would also provide an additional advantage. The soles of feet and hands were slightly cupped, so that as the creature leapt from bough to bough the hands and feet acted almost like the suckers on the toes of a tree-frog. Now, moistened with urine, these ‘suckers’ became twice as efficient. When, later on in the trip, we obtained a great number of Demidoff’s bushbabies (the smallest of the tribe, each being the size of a large mouse) I noticed that they all had the same habit.
This is, to my mind, the best part of a collecting trip, the close daily contact with the animals that allows you to observe, learn and record. Every day, and almost at every moment of the day, something new and interesting was happening somewhere in the collection. The following diary entries show fairly well how each day bristled with new tasks and interesting observations:
February 14: Two patas monkeys brought in; both had severe infestation of jiggers in toes and fingers. Had to lance them, extract jiggers and as precaution against infection injected penicillin. Baby civet did her first adult ‘display’, making the mane of hair on her back stand up when I approached her cage suddenly. She accompanied this action with several loud sniffs, much deeper and more penetrating than her normal sniffing round food. Large brow-leaf toad brought in with extraordinary eye trouble. What appears to be a large malignant growth, situated behind the eyeball, had blinded the creature and then grown outwards, so that the toad looked as though it was wearing a large balloon over one eye. It did not appear to be suffering so am not attempting to remove the growth. So much for animals being happy and carefree in the wild state.
February 20: At last, after much trial and error, Bob has discovered what the hairy frogs eat: snails. We had previously tried young mice and rats, baby birds, eggs, beetles and their larvae, locusts, all without success. Snails they devour avidly, so we have high hopes of getting the frogs back alive. Have had an outbreak of what appears to be nephritis among the Demidoff’s bushbabies. Two discovered this morning drenched in urine as though they had been dipped. Have weakened the milk they get; it may be too strong. Also organized more insect food for them. The five baby Demidoff’s are still thriving on their Complan milk, which is curious as this is incredibly rich, and if ordinary dried milk affects the adults one would have thought Complan would have had a similar effect on the babies.
March 16: Two nice cobras brought in, one about six feet long and the other about two feet. Both fed straight away. Best item today was female pigmy mongoose and two babies. The babies are still blind and an extraordinary pale fawn in contrast to the dark brown mother. Have removed babies to hand-rear them as felt sure female would either neglect or kill them if they were put with her.
March 17: Young pigmy mongooses flatly refuse to feed from bottle or from fountain-pen filler. In view of this (since their chances seemed slim) put them into cage with female. To my surprise she has accepted them and is suckling them well. Most unusual. Had two broken leg jobs today: Woodford’s owl which had been caught in a gin-trap and a young hawk with a greenstick fracture. I don’t think the owl will regain use of leg for all the ligaments appear to be torn, and the bone badly splintered. Hawk’s leg should be O.K. as it’s a young bird. Both are feeding well. Demidoff’s make a faint mewing hiss when disturbed at night, the only sound I have heard them make apart from their bat-like twittering when fighting. Clawed toads have started to call at night: very faint ‘peep-peep’ noise, rather like someone flicking the edge of a glass gently with finger-nail.
April 2: Young male chimp, about two years old, brought in today. Was in a terrible mess. Had been caught in one of the wire noose-traps they use for antelopes, and had damaged its left hand and arm. The palm of the hand and the wrist were split right open and badly infected with gangrene. The animal was very weak, not being able to sit up, and the colour of the skin was a curious yellowish grey. Attended to wound and injected penicillin. Drove it in to Bemenda for the Dept. of Agriculture’s vet to have a look at, as did not like skin colour or curious lethargy in spite of stimulants. He took blood test and diagnosed sleeping-sickness. Have done all we can but the animal appears to be sinking fast. He seems pathetically grateful for anything you do for him.
April 3: Chimp died. They are a ‘protected’ animal and yet up here, as in other parts of the Cameroons, they are killed and eaten regularly. Big rhinoceros viper fed for first time: small rat. One of the green forest squirrels appears to be developing a bald patch on his back: presume lack of vitamins so am increasing his Abidec. As we now get good supply of weaver-birds’ eggs each day all the squirrels are getting them, in addition to their normal diet. The brush-tail porcupines, when disturbed at night beat rapid tattoo with their hind-feet (like a wild rabbit) then swing their backside round to face danger and rustle bunch of quills on end of tail, producing a sound reminiscent of rattle-snake.
April 5: Have found simple, rapid way of sexing pottos. Nice young male brought in today. Although external genitalia in both sexes are remarkably similar to a superficial glance, have discovered that simplest way is to smell them. The testicles of the male give out a faint, sweet odour, like pear drops, when the animal is handled.
We were not the only ones interested in the animals. Many of the local people had never seen some of the creatures we had acquired, and many called and asked for permission to look round the collection. One day the Headmaster of the local Mission School called and asked if he could bring his entire school of two-hundred-odd boys to see the collection. I was glad to agree to this, for I feel that if you can, by showing live animals, arouse people’s interest in their local fauna and its preservation you are doing something worthwhile. So, on the appointed date, the boys came marching down the road in a double column, shepherded by five masters. In the road below the Rest House the boys were divided up into groups of twenty and then brought up in turn by a master. Jacquie, Sophie, Bob and I took up stations at various points in the collection to answer any queries. The boys behaved in a model fashion; there was no pushing or shoving, no skylarking. They wended their way from cage to cage, absorbed and fascinated, uttering amazed cries of ‘Wah!’ at each new wonder and clicking their fingers in delight. Finally, when the last group had been led round, the Headmaster grouped all the boys at the bottom of the steps and then turned to me, beaming.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘we are very grateful to you for allowing us to see your zoological collections. May I ask if you would be kind enough to answer some of the boys’ questions?’
‘Yes, with pleasure,’ I said, taking up my stand on the steps above the crowd.
‘Boys,’ roared the Head, ‘Mr Durrell has kindly say that he will answer any questions. Now who has a question?’
The sea of black faces below me screwed themselves up in thought, tongues protruded, toes wiggled in the dust. Then, slowly at first, but with increasing speed as they lost their embarrassment, they shot questions at me, all of which were extremely intelligent and sensible. There was, I noticed, one small boy in the front of the crowd who had, throughout the proceedings, fixed me with a basilisk eye. His brow was furrowed with concentration, and he stood stiffly at attention. At last, when the supply of questions started to peter out, he suddenly summoned up all his courage, and shot his hand up.
‘Yes, Uano, what is your question?’ asked the Head, smiling down fondly at the boy.
The boy took a deep breath and then fired his question at me rapidly. ‘Please, sah, can Mr Durrell tell us why he take so many photographs of the Fon’s wives?’
The smile vanished from the Head’s face and he threw me a look of chagrin.
‘That is not a zoological question, Uano,’ he pointed out severely.
‘But please, sah, why?’ repeated the child stubbornly.
The Head scowled ferociously. ‘That is not a zoological question,’ he thundered. ‘Mr Durrell only said he would answer zoological questions. The matter of the Fon’s wives is not zoological.’
‘Well, loosely speaking it could be called biological, Headmaster, couldn’t it?’ I asked, coming to the lad’s rescue.
‘But, sir, they shouldn’t ask you questions like that,’ said the Head, mopping his face.
‘Well, I don’t mind answering. The reason is that, in my country, everyone is very interested to know how people in other parts of the world live and what they look like. I can tell them, of course, but it’s not the same as if they see a photograph. With a photograph they know exactly what everything is like.’
‘There …’ said the Headmaster, running a finger round the inside of his collar. ‘There, Mr Durrell has answered your question. Now, he is a very busy man so there is no more time for further questions. Kindly get into line.’
The boys formed themselves once more into two orderly lines, while the Headmaster shook my hand and earnestly assured me that they were all most grateful. Then he turned once more to the boys.
‘Now, to show our appreciation to Mr Durrell I want three hearty cheers.’
Two hundred young lungs boomed out the hearty cheers. Then the boys at the head of the line produced from bags they were carrying several bamboo flutes and two small drums. The Headmaster waved his hand and they started to walk off down the road, led by the school band playing, of all things, ‘Men of Harlech’. The Head followed them mopping his face, and the dark looks he kept darting at young Uano’s back did not augur well for the boy’s prospects when he got back to the classroom.
That evening the Fon came over for a drink and, after we had shown him the new additions to the collection, we sat on the verandah and I told him about Uano’s zoological question. The Fon laughed and laughed, particularly at the embarrassment of the Headmaster. ‘Why you never tell um,’ he inquired, wiping his eyes, ‘why you never tell um dat you take dis photo of dis ma wife for show all Europeans for your country dat Bafut women be beautiful?’
‘Dis boy na picken,’ I said solemnly. ‘I think sometime he be too small to understand dis woman palaver.’
‘Na true, na true,’ said the Fon, chuckling, ‘’e be picken. ’E catch lucky, ’e no get women for humbug him.’
‘They tell me, my friend,’ I said, trying to steer the conversation away from the pros and cons of married life, ‘they tell me tomorrow you go for N’dop. Na so?’
‘Na so,’ said the Fon, ‘I go for two days, for Court. I go come back for morning time tomorrow tomorrow.’
‘Well,’ I said, raising my glass, ‘safe journey, my friend.’
The following morning, clad in splendid yellow and black robes and wearing a curious hat, heavily embroidered, with long, drooping ear flaps, the Fon took his seat in the front of his new Land-Rover. Into the back went the necessities of travel: three bottles of Scotch, his favourite wife and three council members. He waved vigorously to us until the vehicle rounded the corner and was lost from sight.
That evening, having finished the last chores of the day, I went out on to the front verandah for a breath of air. In the great courtyard below I noticed large numbers of the Fon’s children assembling. Curiously I watched them. They grouped them selves in a huge circle in the centre of the compound and, after much discussion and argument, they started to sing and clap their hands rhythmically, accompanied by a seven-year-old who stood in the centre of the circle beating a drum. Standing like this they lifted up their young voices and sang some of the most beautiful and haunting of the Bafut songs. This, I could tell, was not just an ordinary gathering of children; they had assembled there for some definite purpose, but what they were celebrating (unless it was their father’s departure) I could not think. I stood there watching them for a long time and then John, our houseboy, appeared at my elbow in his unnervingly silent way.
‘Dinner ready, sah,’ he said.
‘Thank you, John. Tell me, why all dis picken sing for the Fon’s compound?’
John smiled shyly. ‘Because de Fon done go for N’dop, sah.’
‘Yes, but why they sing?’
‘If the Fon no be here, sah, each night dis picken must for sing inside de Fon’s compound. So dey keep dis his compound warm.’
This, I thought, was a delightful idea. I peered down at the circle of children, singing lustily in the gloomy wastes of the great courtyard, to keep their father’s compound warm.
‘Why they never dance?’ I asked.
‘Dey never get light, sah.’
‘Take them the pressure light from the bedroom. Tell them I send it so that I can help keep the Fon’s compound warm.’
‘Yes, sah,’ said John. He hurried off to fetch the light and presently I saw it cast a golden pool round the circle of children. There was a pause in the singing, while John delivered my message, and then came a series of delighted shrieks and echoing up to me the shrill voices crying, ‘Tank you, Masa, tank you.’
As we sat down to dinner the children were singing like larks, and stamping and weaving their way round the lamp, their shadows long and attenuated, thrown half-way across the courtyard by the softly hissing lamp in their midst.
