9 Return

Our expedition had come to an end. Jack and Tim were to bring the animals back to London by sea, but Charles and I had to return immediately by air to begin work on the film. Before we left Jack gave us a large square parcel. “Inside this,” he said, “there are a few nice spiders, scorpions and one or two snakes. They are all in sealed tins with tiny air holes so there’s no possibility of them escaping, but try and keep them with you in the cabin so that they don’t catch cold. And will you also take this young coatimundi kitten?” he added, passing me a delightful furry creature with bright brown eyes, a long ringed tail, and a pointed inquisitive snout. “He’s still on a milk diet, so you will have to feed him from the bottle every three or four hours on your way back.”

Charles and I climbed into the plane with the parcel and the coatimundi in a little traveling basket. The kitten was the object of a great deal of interest. As we flew over the islands of the Caribbean, a lady came to fondle him. She asked what sort of an animal he was, and how we came by him, and gradually we had to explain that we had been on an animal-collecting expedition. She looked at the box by my feet.

“I suppose,” she said with a smile, “that that is full of snakes and other creepy-crawlies.”

“As a matter of fact,” I said in sepulchral tones, “it is,” and we all laughed uproariously at such an absurd suggestion.

The coatimundi behaved very well for the first part of the journey, but as we began flying north toward Europe he refused his milk. Fearing that he might catch cold, I tucked him inside my shirt, where he nuzzled beneath my arm and slept peacefully. I tried to persuade him to feed again in Lisbon, and once more at Zürich, but though we heated the milk and even tempted him with mashed bananas and cream in a saucer, he still declined to feed. We arrived in Amsterdam at one o’clock in the morning. The London plane left at six. Charles and I settled down to wait on the long leather couches of the airport foyer. Our little kitten had not fed now for thirty-six hours and we were becoming very anxious about him. We searched our memories trying to recall what is the favorite food of a coatimundi, but we could only remember that they were described in the natural history books as being “omnivorous.”

Charles had a brainwave. “What about some worms?” he said, “He might be tempted if they were nice and wriggly.” I agreed, but neither of us was clear as to where we could get any worms at four o’clock in the morning in Amsterdam. Then it occurred to us that the Dutch, proud of their flowers, had surrounded the airfield with beautiful beds of plants which were now in full bloom. Leaving the kitten with Charles, I walked out onto the airfield, and in the glare of the floodlights I surreptitiously waded into the flowerbeds. Airport officials walked within a few feet of me as I dug in the soft earth with my fingers, but no one took the slightest notice and after five minutes I had over a dozen pink, wriggling worms. I took them back in triumph and to our delight the little coatimundi ate them greedily. When he had finished, he licked his lips and plainly asked for more. We made four more trips to the tulip bed before he was satisfied. Six hours later we handed him over, kicking lustily, to the London Zoo.

Meanwhile back in Georgetown a great amount of work still remained to be done to get the animals ready for the long voyage home. The last few weeks of our trip had been clouded by Jack’s increasing ill health. Slowly it became apparent that he had contracted an extremely serious paralyzing illness, and a few days after we left him doctors in Georgetown recommended that he should be flown home as soon as possible to see a specialist in London. John Yelland, the Curator of Birds in the Zoo, flew out to Georgetown to take Jack’s place and help Tim Vinall bring the collection to London by sea.

This was an arduous and complicated task: to ensure that the manatee had a comfortable trip, they arranged for a special canvas swimming bath to be erected on one of the decks of the ship; to cater for the enormous appetites of the animals they took on board a stock of provisions which included 3,000 lbs. of lettuces, 100 lbs. of cabbages, 400 lbs. of bananas, 160 lbs. of green grass and 48 pineapples; and to keep the collection clean and well fed on the nineteen-day voyage, Tim and John had to work unceasingly from dawn to dusk.

It was some weeks before I was able to go to the Zoo to see the animals again. I found the manatee swimming lazily to and fro in a crystal clear pool that had been specially built for her in the Aquarium. She was now so tame that when I leaned over and dabbled a cabbage leaf in the water, she swam to the side and took it from my hand. The little parrot that we had been given on the Kukui was now fully fledged and almost unrecognizable, but I convinced myself that he knew me, for when I talked to him he jerked his head up and down exactly as he had done when I had been feeding him chewed cassava bread from my mouth months before. The hummingbirds looked magnificent, darting and hovering among tropical plants in a specially heated house. Percy, the porcupine, I discovered curled up asleep in the angle of a branch, still with his unmistakable sour expression on his face.

When I found the capybara they were just about to leave for a large paddock in Whipsnade, the Zoo’s country estate; they whistled and giggled and sucked my fingers as enthusiastically as they had done on the Barima. The anteaters still flourished on their diet of raw minced meat and milk, and in the Insect House I discovered that the spider we had caught at Arakaka had given birth a few days after it arrived to several hundred tiny young which were now fast growing up.

It took me some time to find Houdini, the animal that had caused me personally more trouble than any other. When I at last discovered him he had his head down noisily champing and guzzling in a large dish of swill. I leaned over the wall of his paddock and called him several times. He ignored me completely.