Wahab had stopped the car at a tiny shop where the owner and his entire family, from grandmother to youngest child, were absorbed in manufacturing chapatties and rolling them up with a filling of spiced lentils inside, by the light of glittering, yellow oil lamps. We purchased a goodly supply of these delicacies and then drove to the cool, moon-drenched hillside outside the town beneath a sky heavy with stars, where we sat and ate our chapatties and discussed our forthcoming bat-catching expedition to the neighbouring island of Rodrigues.
‘You will have to take fruit with you, of course,’ said Wahab wiping his fingers fastidiously on his handkerchief.
‘Take fruit? What on earth for?’ I asked, my mouth full of delicious chapatti. To take fruit to a tropical island seemed to me to be the Mascarene equivalent of taking coals to Newcastle.
‘Well you see,’ said Wahab, ‘there is very little fruit grown in Rodrigues and, anyway, now it’s the end of the fruit season.’
‘It would be,’ I said, ruefully.
‘Isn’t it going to be a bit of a problem?’ asked John. ‘I mean transporting fruit in a small plane.’
‘No, no,’ said Wahab, ‘you just pack it up as if it’s excess baggage, no trouble at all.’
‘We’d better take some ripe, some medium, and some green,’ I said, ‘like you do on board ship to feed animals.’
‘Yes,’ said Wahab, ‘and I will try and find you a Jak fruit.’
‘What’s a Jak fruit?’ asked Ann.
‘It’s a large fruit that the bats are very, very fond of,’ said Wahab. ‘It has a strong smell, you see, and the bats can smell it from a distance.’
‘Is it good eating?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ said Wahab, adding cautiously, ‘if you like that sort of thing.’
By the time our trip to Rodrigues was over, I had come to look upon Jak fruit as one of the tropical delicacies least likely to succeed in any culinary contest but at that moment, I only had a mental image of a host of bats flying straight into our arms at the merest whiff of its delectable odour.
The next couple of days we spent checking our nets and other equipment, reading up on Rodrigues and, whenever possible, snorkelling on the reef, reviewing the multi-coloured ever-changing pageant of sea life that lived on or around it. News drifted to us that Wahab was having difficulty in getting Jak fruit and that Rodrigues was experiencing its first rainfall in eight years. Neither piece of gossip seemed of vital importance and yet, had we known it, both things were to affect our plans. Two days before we were due to fly to Rodrigues, Wahab phoned. He had, he said, tracked down positively the last Jak fruit on the island of Mauritius and had commandeered it for us. He was sending it round by special messenger.
‘It’s rather ripe, Gerry,’ he explained, ‘so you should keep it wrapped up so that it doesn’t lose its scent, and keep it out of a high temperature.’
‘How do you suggest I do that?’ I enquired sarcastically, mopping the sweat from my brow. ‘I can’t even keep myself out of a high temperature.’
‘Your hotel room is air conditioned, isn’t it?’ asked Wahab. ‘Keep it there.’
‘My hotel room already contains twenty-four hands of bananas, two dozen avocado pears, two dozen pineapples, two water melons and four dozen mangoes, purchased for this damned bat catching. It looks more like a market than the Port Louis market does; still, I suppose the addition of one Jak fruit won’t make all that difference?’
‘That’s right,’ said Wahab, ‘and, by the way, this sudden rain Rodrigues is having. It may affect your flight.’
‘How?’ I asked, suddenly filled with anxiety, for any delay would cut into the time we had allotted for the bat catching.
‘Well, you know the airfield in Rodrigues is only an earth one.’ explained Wahab. ‘All this rain has made it very slippery. The plane yesterday had to turn back. Still, you may be all right.’
‘Well, I hope to heaven we are,’ I said, feeling depressed. ‘If there’s too much of a delay, we’ll have to cancel our whole trip there.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you won’t have to do that,’ said Wahab merrily. ‘Let me know if there is anything else you want. The Jak fruit should be arriving later on in the morning. Goodbye.’
Telephone conversations with Wahab tended to begin and end abruptly.
The Jak fruit, wrapped up in swaddling clothes of polythene and sacking, arrived in the arms of a smartly uniformed forest guard at about midday. Judging by the size of the parcel, a Jak fruit was considerably bigger than I had imagined. I had visualised it as being about the size of a coconut, but this fruit was obviously as big as a large marrow. The parcel had, during its travels, got very hot and I took it into the bedroom and reverently unwrapped it so as to let the cool air get at its contents. What was revealed, when the swaddling clothes were stripped away, was an obscene green fruit covered with knobs and looking rather like the corpse of a Martian baby. To help the illusion, there arose from it a thick, sweetish, very pungent smell, vaguely reminiscent of a putrefying body.
I was to learn, as time progressed, that this sickly cloying scent permeated everything and insinuated itself everywhere, rather as paraffin does when left in untutored hands. Within an astonishingly short space of time, the whole room smelt like a gigantic Jak fruit, or a morgue where the freezing unit has developed a fault. Our clothes smelt of Jak fruit, as did our shoes; the books, cameras, binoculars; the suitcases and the bat-catching nets. You escaped from the room in order to snatch a breath of fresh air, only to find you had taken the smell with you. The whole landscape was redolent of Jak fruit. In an effort to elude this all-pervading scent, we went snorkelling on the reef and it smelt as though we had Jak fruits imprisoned in our masks. Our lunch tasted entirely of Jak fruit, as did dinner. Breakfast, heavily impregnated with Jak fruit, made me glad that we were flying to Rodrigues that day, where we could leave this diabolical fruit in the forest and perhaps escape its effluvium.
We arrived at the airport and within minutes, the departure lounge smelt so strongly of Jak fruit that all the other passengers started to cough and glance about them uneasily. We were a motley enough looking crew to arouse thoughts of hi-jacking, with our incomprehensible bundles of nets and baskets bulging with a weird assortment of fruit, in the midst of which the Jak fruit lay and simmered in its baby clothes of sacking and polythene.
Presently, it was time to check in, and we discovered how the first rainfall for eight years in Rodrigues – desirable though it might be for the island – was detrimental to our cause. Apparently, as well as a shortage of rain, Rodrigues had a dearth of money and so it was imperative that our plane should carry a large supply of this much-needed commodity. Unfortunately money, as well as being useful, weighs a lot. Owing to the fact that the rainfall had turned the airfield into a quagmire, it was important that we were not overweight lest the plane get out of control on landing. As usual, money being the most important thing in the world, even at the end of the world like Rodrigues, the passengers had to cut down on their baggage. Frantically, we discarded all the heavy items of clothing and equipment we could manage without. It made an interesting pile. If there had been any doubts about our sanity before this they were soon dispelled, for what sane person would discard shirt, socks, shoes and other vital items of wearing apparel in favour of bananas, mangoes and a Jak fruit that one was conscious of at fifty paces?
There was a pause while a heavily guarded jeep was driven out on to the airfield and boxes of money were lifted out and weighed. Then there was a mass mathematical orgy, followed by much arm waving and argument. The news was finally broken to us that, in spite of our sacrifice we were still overweight. To the evident satisfaction of the man in charge of Weights and Measures, we sat down and ate half our fruit, It was lunch time anyway. Just as we were feeling we never wanted to eat another banana, it was announced that the flight was cancelled owing to the state of the runway in Rodrigues. Would we all kindly report at the same time tomorrow?
Taking our, by now almost lethal, Jak fruit, we drove back to the hotel. They were not overjoyed to see us since they had only just succeeded in getting the smell of the Jak fruit out of the bedrooms. The following day, having replaced our now rotting fruit with fresh, we reported once more to the airport. For some strange reason, we had to be weighed in again, as did the money. They found we were overweight. It was at this point that I began to have serious doubts about the mathematical abilities of the Mauritians but, as anyone knows who has tried it, it is useless arguing with an airport official. We sat down, having discarded virtually everything but the clothes we stood up in and our nets, and ate some more of our precious fruit. The fact that we were now carrying the extra weight within us, rather than in hands of bananas, did not appear to perturb the airport officials at all. The temptation to discard the Jak fruit was immense but even I realised its pungency might prove useful in luring the bats into our nets, provided it did not asphyxiate us or them first. We had just consumed another glut of bananas when they told us that the flight was cancelled again.
‘If this is an example of how the Rodrigues trip is going to go, I shall have a very upset stomach,’ I said, as we arrived back at the hotel, where they viewed our reappearance with a long-suffering air. I was genuinely worried, for if there was one more delay, we would have to cancel the whole Rodrigues venture. It was getting close to our departure date for Europe. The following day, having replaced all the bananas and mangoes which had become over-ripe and, for the hundredth time, wished we had an airtight box for the Jak fruit, we went to the airport once more. Again we and the money were laboriously weighed but this time, to our astonishment, we were not forced to eat half of our luggage. Soon we found ourselves on board the tiny plane with a motley assortment of passengers, who viewed the arrival of the Jak fruit in that confined space with a certain alarm and despondency The soldiers who had been guarding the plane now dispersed, and we taxied down the runway and took off, flying low over the vivid green patchwork of sugar cane and rising higher and higher into the hyacinth-blue sky, as we flew across the reef and out over the deep, sparkling blue of the Indian Ocean.
Rodrigues lies a little over 350 miles east of Mauritius, well out into the Indian Ocean; an island eleven miles long and five-and-a-quarter miles wide at its widest point. It has had an interesting history and a still more interesting fauna. One of these was that strange bird, the Solitaire, which had evolved on the island. This bird became extinct shortly after the Dodo and the reason for its demise appears to have been the destruction of its habitat, as well as ruthless hunting. Together with the Solitaire, the island was shared by a species of giant tortoise, of which there were a prodigious number. In his fascinating book on Rodrigues, Alfred North-Coombes goes into the exploitation of these tortoises:
Giant tortoises take thirty to forty years to reach maturity and may live for as long as two to three hundred years. It was only the isolated position of these islands, the absence of man and natural enemies, which favoured this development to an almost fabulous extent. Indeed, Leguat says that they were so numerous Rodrigues ‘that sometimes you see two or three thousand of them in a flock; so that you may go above a hundred paces on their backs … without setting foot to ground.’
Thus, by the time Mahé de Labourdonnais arrived at Isle de France, thousands of tortoises had already been removed from Rodrigues for Bourbon, Isle de France and the Company’s ships. The latter plundered indiscriminately, often far beyond the essential requirements of their crews and passengers. Some captains sold he surplus at Bourbon where apparently the demand was greater and the price good, refusing even to let Isle de France have some for the sick of other vessels. Labourdonnais exclaims: ‘Would you believe it, Sir, there are captains who come from Rodrigues with seven to eight hundred tortoises, who refuse to land them here for the sick of other ships, preferring to sell them at Bourbon or exchange them there for chickens!’
Labourdonnais did not keep an exact account of the number of tortoises removed from Rodrigues during his governorship. It could hardly have been less than 10,000 annually. One of his successors, Desforges-Bourcher, the same who was formerly governor of Bourbon and had attempted to establish a colony at Rodrigues in 1725, was more precise. Four little ships were engaged during his governorship in transporting the tortoises to Isle de France. They were La Mignonne, L’Oiseau, Le Volant and Le Pénelope. Thousands of tortoises were brought back each time, as the following extract from one of his reports to the Company shows:
14 December 1759
– L’Oiseau arrives from Rodrigues with 1035 tortoises and 47 turtles. She had loaded 5000, but took eight days to reach Isle de France and lost most of the cargo.
15 May 1760
– L’Oiseau brings 6000 tortoises
29 September 1760
– L’Oiseau arrives with 1600 tortoises and 171 turtles
12 May 1761
– Le Volant docks with a cargo of 4000 tortoises
6 December 1761
– L’Oiseau brings 3800 tortoises alive out of a shipment of 5000.
The Royal Navy helped itself too, when in Rodrigues waters. Thus on 26 July 1761 two ships loaded 3000 tortoises.
Presently, after two-and-a-half hours’ flying, we saw ahead of us the meandering, ever-moving scarf of ivory-white foam that marked the reef around Rodrigues. This great bastion of coral ringed the island and, indeed, formed a great shelf in the deep ocean on which the island stood. The reef in some places was twenty miles from the island’s shore and the great piece of placid, emerald green water it guarded was dotted with smaller islands, some mere sand dunes, others substantial enough to have given refuge to giant tortoises and a giant species of lizard, also now extinct. We banked and came in low to land on the tiny, red earth airfield. From the air, the island looked biscuit-brown and pretty barren, though there were patches of green in the valleys and a scattering of dusty green vegetation elsewhere. From the moment we left the plane, we were enveloped in the magic charms one only feels on small, remote, sun-illuminated islands. We made our way over the red laterite airstrip and into the minute airport building, on the facade of which was the heartwarming sign saying ‘Welcome to Rodrigues’. Inside, I saw, to my astonishment, a desk set in an open window on which there was a sign saying ‘Immigration’.
‘Immigration?’ I said to John. ‘What can they mean? They’ve only one plane a week from Reunion and three from Mauritius.’
‘Don’t ask me,’ he said, ‘perhaps it’s not for us.’
‘Please to have passports ready for Immigration,’ said a jovial policeman in smart green uniform, thus dispelling any doubt.
It was fortunate we had by chance brought our passports with us, since it had not occurred to us that we would need them, Rodrigues being a dependency of Mauritius. At that moment, the Immigration Officer himself arrived; a large, chocolate-coloured Rodriguan in a handsome, khaki uniform. He was sweating profusely and carried a big bundle of unruly files. He had an earnest, nervous, wrinkled face like a bloodhound recovering from a nervous breakdown. He seated himself at the desk, knocked over the sign saying ‘Immigration Officer’ with his files, and smiled at us nervously as he righted it. We lined up in front of him, dutifully brandishing our passports. He gave us a little bow, cleared his throat and then, with a flourish, opened a file which contained immigration forms of the sort that ask you every imaginably fatuous question, from your date of birth to whether your grandmother had ingrowing toenails. His stern demeanour as an upholder of the law was slightly undermined when a gust of warm air from the window blew his forms all over what, for want of a better term, one must call the airport lounge. We all scrabbled around collecting them for him and he was pathetically grateful.
He was now sweating even more profusely than before. He leant his rotund elbows on the forms to prevent another unfortunate episode, and took Ann’s passport. Laboriously he copied out her place and date of birth, her age and her profession. This was all plain sailing and he handed her back her passport with a wide glittering, triumphant smile; the smile of a man who has the situation under control. His confidence was premature, however, for, flushed with enthusiasm, he leant forward to take my passport and another sly gust of wind scattered his forms like confetti across the airport lounge. It took several minutes to retrieve them all and by that time Ann’s form had a handsome boot mark on it where a helpful member of the airport police had stamped on it as it slid past him along the floor.
We re-established the Immigration Officer at his desk and he accepted, with gratitude, Ann’s offer that she stood behind him and held down his migratory paper forms while he devoted his time to filling them in. Rid of the burden of this paperwork, as it were, he was now free to show his mettle as Immigration Officer. He took my passport and riffled it with his chocolate-coloured fingers like an expert card sharper. He gave me what I think was supposed to be a shrewd and penetrating glance, but it was far too beguiling to be this.
‘Where have you come from?’ he asked.
As Rodrigues had been waterlogged for two weeks and we were the first plane in from Mauritius in that time and as there was only that plane on the airport, I found the question baffling. If it had been made to me at London Airport, say, with hundreds of planes an hour coming in, it would have had some relevance, but here in Rodrigues with, at best, only four planes a week the question took on a slightly ‘Looking-Glass’ quality, I resisted the impulse to say that I had just swum ashore, and told him instead that I had come from Mauritius. He puzzled over the ‘author/zoologist’ designation under ‘Occupation’ in my passport, obviously thinking it might be something as dangerous as CIA or MI5; then, with some difficulty over the ‘zoologist’, he copied it out slowly and carefully on to his form. Then he stamped my passport and handed it back to me, with his ingratiating smile, and I made way for John. Meanwhile, Ann was having a struggle with the forms, as quite a stiff breeze had sprung up. She was now helped in her task by the policeman who had contributed his boot mark to her form. He seemed determined that the police force should not be lagging behind the immigration authorities in devotion to duty.
The immigration man now took John’s passport and asked him where he had come from.
‘Yorkshire, in England,’ said John innocently, before I could stop him.
‘No, no,’ said the immigration man, confused by this largesse of information, ‘I mean where you come from now?’
‘Oh,’ said John, ‘Mauritius.’
The immigration man wrote it down carefully. He opened John’s passport and laboriously copied out the relevant information regarding John’s nascence. Then he looked at John’s occupation and saw the dreaded and incomprehensible word ‘herpetologist’. His eyes shut and his face wrinkled in alarm. He looked like a man who every night for years has awoken, screaming, from a dream in which his superiors have not only asked him to define what a ‘herpetologist’ was but to spell it as well. Now his dream had come true. He licked his lips, opened his eyes, and glanced nervously at the dreaded word, hoping it had gone away. It stared back at him implacably, ununderstandable and unspellable. He made a valiant attempt.
‘Herpa … er … Herper …’ he said, and looked desperately at the policeman for help. The policeman leant over his shoulder and glanced at the word that was confusing his colleague, with the amused air of one for whom The Times crossword puzzle is child’s play, then his eyes alighted on ‘herpetologist’ and he became less confident.
‘Herp … herp …’ he said, dolefully and unhelpfully.
‘Herpa … herper …’ said the immigration man.
‘Herp … herp … herp …’ said the policeman.
It began to sound like one of the lesser-known, and more incomprehensible German operas.
‘Herpetologist,’ I said, briskly.
‘Ah, yes,’ said the Immigration Officer, wisely.
‘What is that?’ asked the policeman, more bluntly.
‘It means someone who studies snakes,’ I explained.
He gazed at the word, fascinated.
‘You have come here to study snakes?’ asked the policeman, at last, with the air of one humouring a dangerous lunatic.
‘Here, there are no snakes,’ said his colleague, speaking with the authority of one who would never let a snake wriggle through Immigration if he could help it.
‘Well, no, we’ve come here to catch bats,’ I said, incautiously. They stared at me, disbelievingly.
‘Bats?’ asked the policeman.
‘Bats is not snakes,’ said the Immigration Officer, with the air of Charles Darwin giving the fruits of his life’s researches to the world.
‘No, I know,’ I said, ‘but we have come here at the invitation of the Commissioner, Mr Hazeltine, to catch bats.’ I felt sure that Mr Hazeltine, whom I had never met, would forgive me this innocent falsehood. Both the policeman and the immigration man nearly stood to attention at the mention of the Commissioner’s name.
‘You know Mr Hazeltine?’ asked the immigration man.
‘He asked us to come,’ I said, simply.
The immigration man knew when he was beaten. He laboriously and carefully spelt out ‘Herpetologist’, stamped John’s passport and smiled at us with evident relief. We shook hands with him and the helpful policeman, and as we did so, they wished us a happy stay in Rodrigues. I wondered why it was necessary to burden a simple, straightforward and happy island people with a bureaucracy that was so out of place and so futile in such a setting.
We got into the hotel jeep and were driven along the winding roads, through an eroded and desiccated landscape. Here and there the edges of the road were green and there were pockets of dusty trees and bushes around ramshackle, corrugated iron huts. The driver assured us that, after its recent rainfall, the island was green. I wondered, looking at the dry and dusty landscape under the fierce sun, what it had looked like before.
Eventually, the jeep edged its way down the one main street of Port Mathurin, the metropolis of Rodrigues. This was edged with a scrappy collection of wooden and corrugated iron houses and shops, but its length was as bright as a flower bed with the inhabitants of the port dressed in their bright clothes, busy about their shopping. A little outside the port, the jeep came to a standstill and there, on the crest of the hill above us, was the hotel. It was a low structure with a broad, steeply-pitched roof covering a deep, shady verandah that surrounded the building. This verandah was approached by wide steps and had complicated, wrought iron railings, painted white, running round its length. On the verandah were scattered tables and long cane chairs. The hotel, perched on the hilltop, commanded a view of the whole of Port Mathurin and the reef some three miles away. It resembled nothing so much as a rather exaggerated film set for a Somerset Maugham story, and this atmosphere was enhanced by the steep path leading up to it, flanked by hibiscus bushes covered with large magenta and orange flowers, that looked like paper cutouts, and a herd of slightly grubby, but most attentive and welcoming pigs that were holding a convention under and around the hotel itself.
Once we had established ourselves and made contact with Mr Hazeltine, the Commissioner, who lived in an imposing old residence, surrounded by massive trees loaded with epiphytes within a walled garden and whose gate was guarded by a belligerent-looking cannon, we contacted Mr Marie, the Head of the Forestry Department, and he offered to drive us out to view the bats. According to him, the bat colony resided in the valley of Cascade Pigeon, some three miles away from Port Mathurin. He thought that there might be two or three odd specimens living a solitary existence in other parts of the island, but he was sure that the bulk of the colony was in this valley. So we piled into his Land-Rover and, together with young Jean Claude Rabaude, a Forest worker, who was also a keen amateur naturalist and who had helped Anthony Cheke on his expedition, we drove out to the valley.
When we got there, we parked the jeep and made our way down the rocky, slippery slope, along a path that resembled nothing so much as a stream bed. Presently, about halfway to the bottom of the valley, we came on to a rocky promontory that commanded a view up the valley slope to the left. Here the trees were fairly low, some twenty feet in height, but in their midst grew a number of very large mango trees. It was these tall trees, with their broad, glossy, shade-giving leaves, that constituted the roosting area for the bats.
At first glance through the binoculars it appeared that each mango tree had produced a strange crop of furry fruit, chocolate brown and golden red, but as the bats yawned and stretched, you could see the leather, umbrella-like wings were dark chocolate brown, while the fur on the bodies and heads ranged from bright, glittering yellow, like spun gold, to a deep fox red. They were, without doubt, the most colourful and handsome fruit bats I had ever seen. They had rounded heads with small, neat ears and short, somewhat blunt muzzles that made them look like pomeranians. The bulk of the colony hung in these three mango trees, and solitary individuals roosted in the smaller trees around.
Having located the colony, we had to try to assess its numbers with some degree of accuracy. As many bats were roosting deep in the shady mango trees, they were not always visible and as, periodically, one or more bats would fly from one mango tree to another, or simply flap their way in a leisurely fashion across the hillside and back again, the count presented problems. First of all, the five of us counted the colony from where we stood, and we took a number mid-way between all our estimates. We felt this was fairly haphazard, since a lot of bats were on the move, but even so we were encouraged by the fact that two of us had counted more than the number that Anthony Cheke had estimated two years previously.
According to Jean Claude, who was convinced that the colony had increased substantially since Cheke’s day, the best time for counting – that is, when the bats were the stillest – was first thing in the morning when they had just arrived back from their night feed, and at noon when the sun was hottest. As it was only eleven o clock, we decided to wait until noon and count again. In the meantime, we looked round for a suitable spot in which to set up the net, should we decide to catch any bats.
It was John who found the perfect glade, a clearing facing down towards the valley, surrounded by big trees which were ideal for slinging the nets from, and which provided us with maximum shelter from the sun. In the torrid quiet of noon, we counted the bats again. They were very still now, with only the occasional movement when they spread their dark wings and flapped them to keep cool. We counted over one hundred. Greatly elated, but determined to be cautious, I sent John round to the other side of the valley with Jean Claude to do another count. Then, to make finally sure, we counted them flying from the roost that night and again the next morning. Our final estimate was that the colony consisted of between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and thirty individuals, certainly not an impressive number but heartening, nevertheless, as it meant that the colony had increased by some thirty-five specimens since Cheke counted them.
Thus encouraged, we decided that the maximum number we could take without damaging the survival chances of the colony and the minimum number we needed for successful breeding groups was eighteen specimens. As with most animals which lived in colonies, I felt that the bats would need the stimulus of their own kind about them if they were to settle down and breed successfully, therefore, it was useless thinking in terms of one pair or even two pairs. The numbers had to give the impression of a colony, albeit a small one. But it is one thing to decide how many and what sexes of an animal you are going to catch, even if you know where it is; quite another to accomplish this successfully.
The clearing we had chosen for our operations was about a quarter of a mile from the colony, and lay on the route down the valley which they seemed to take when flying off to feed each evening. When they actually flew down the valley, it was at a slightly lower level than the clearing but here I was hoping that the Jak fruit (now making the hotel unique as a hostelry) would come into its own and lure the bats up to our level.
The method of capture we chose was simplicity itself. With the aid of Jean Claude and a compatriot (who distressed my intrepid explorer’s instincts by wearing a tee shirt emblazoned with the words ‘I dig President Kennedy’) we hitched up some eight mist nets to the trees so that they formed a hollow square or box, some fifty feet by seventy feet, with walls about forty feet high. Then, out of wire netting, we built something that looked like a miniature coffin, heavily disguised with branches, and slung it in readiness in the centre of the nets. This was to be the repository for the fruit. Thus, having organised everything satisfactorily, we sped back to the hotel, had a hasty meal and returned to the valley, armed with torches and fruit, just as the twilight was turning greenish, preparatory to fading into grey.
The bats were waking up, getting ready for their nightly sortie for food. They were more vocal and they kept taking off from the mango trees and flying in anxious circles round it before settling again. It was obvious that it was not quite dark enough for them yet. We stuffed our wire coffin with over-ripe mangoes, bananas and pineapples, and then I approached the Jak fruit with a machete. Without waiting for it to protest, I split it in twain lengthways, and then wished I had not done so. I had believed that it was impossible for the smell of this endearing fruit to get any stronger, but I was wrong. Within seconds, apparently, the whole of Rodrigues smelt strongly of Jak fruit. Hoping the bats would appreciate it, even if we did not, we stuffed the fruit into the coffin and hauled the whole thing up until, in its shroud of branches, it hung some twenty feet up in the centre of the nets. Then we found ourselves a suitable hiding place in the bushes overlooking the trap, and settled down to wait. Unfortunately, owing to the fact that we had been forced to discard most of our clothing in an effort to save weight, we were all clad in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, a garb that did not help us when approximately three-quarters of the mosquito population of Rodrigues decided to join us in our vigil.
So we waited, our ears ringing with the shrill, excited, friendly cries of the mosquitoes, while the green twilight faded into grey and then an even darker shade. Just before it became too dark to see, the bats started to flight. They flew singly, or in little groups of three or four, heading down the valley towards Port Mathurin. As they flapped across the sky at the edge of our clearing, they looked astonishingly big and their slow, heavy flight made them resemble something out of a Dracula movie. With praise-worthy single-mindedness, they flew down the valley, not deviating to right or left, and completely ignoring us, our nets and our odoriferous bait of overripe fruit. We sat there in a haze of mosquitoes, scratching ourselves and glowering at the passing stream of bats. Presently, the stream thinned to a trickle and then to the odd late risers, flapping hurriedly after the bulk of the colony. Soon there were no bats at all. Not one of them had displayed the faintest interest in our Jak-fruit-permeated clearing.
‘Well, this is jolly’ said John, stretching his lanky form out of one of the bushes, like a wounded giraffe. ‘I’m rather glad we came really, I would hate to think of all these mosquitoes going hungry’
‘Yes, it’s a form of conservation programme really’ I said. ‘You can imagine how many mosquitoes we have saved from starvation tonight. In years to come, the World Wildlife Fund will probably erect a posthumous Golden Ark on this spot to commemorate our contribution to nature.’
‘It’s all very well for you to joke,’ said Ann, bitterly. ‘You don’t seem to be affected when they bite you, whereas I itch like hell and then swell up and go red.’
‘Never mind,’ I said, soothingly, ‘just close your eyes and try to work out what we are going to do with all those bats we are going to catch.’
Ann grunted derisively. After a couple of hours, when no bats had appeared and when the mosquitoes had returned for the main course, as it were, we held a council of war. I felt it was important that at least one of us should stay there all night in case a bat or bats returned and got caught. The nets were slung up in such a complicated way that it was impossible to lower them, and I did not want any bats to hang in the nets all night, should one be caught. After some discussion, we all decided to stay and made ourselves as comfortable as we could among the bushes, having decided that one would keep watch, while the others slept.
Then, in the early hours of the morning, the rain began. There was no warning, no thunder, no lightning, none of those brash preliminaries. There was suddenly a roar like an avalanche of steel ball-bearings as the clouds parted and dropped rain on us with the concentrated fury of a suddenly opened flood gate. Within seconds, we were soaked and sitting in what appeared to be the opening stages of a waterfall, that had all the promise of growing into something like Niagara. The rain, in contrast to the hot, steamy night, felt as if it had newly emerged from some glacier, and we shivered with cold. We removed from the bushes to a spot under the tree as this afforded us a little more shelter; the leaves were being machine-gunned by huge raindrops and the water was running in streams down the tree trunks.
We stood it for an hour, then an investigation proved that the sky over the whole island was black and stretched, as far as we could make out, from Cascade Pigeon across the Indian Ocean to Delhi. It was obvious that no self-respecting bat was going to fly around in that torrential downpour, so we packed up our dripping equipment and made our way back to the hotel where we could at least shelter from the rain and the mosquitoes, and snatch two or three hours’ sleep. We were determined to be back at the nets at dawn, for this was when the bats would return from their feeding grounds and might conceivably blunder into our nets.
Dawn saw us, stiff and half-asleep, crouched under the nets, in a strange green light. The whole forest smelt warm and as redolent as a fruit cake freshly made from an oven. The scents of the earth and moss and leaves, air-warmed and rain-washed, were strong enough but transcending all these subtle olfactory treats was the bugle-blast of the Jak fruit, slung some twenty feet above us. Presently, the sky lightened and soon the bats reappeared, flapping languidly back to their roost. A number had passed us when, to our excitement, several veered away from what could be describedas the flight path and circled over our clearing in a suspicious, but interested manner, before flapping off to the mango tree. Encouraged by this show of interest, we spent the day rigging up more nets among the trees, helped by sudden downpours of rain.
Our two helpers from the Forestry Department, shocked by the fact that we had been out all night during one of the heaviest rainstorms Rodrigues had experienced in eight years, cut poles and banana leaves and constructed for us, well concealed in the bushes, a small banana-leaf hut, something a Congo pigmy might have considered a baronial hall. You cannot, however, look gift huts in the mouth and we decided that, if John left half his legs outside, it would provide us with adequate shelter against the weather.
We took the precaution of visiting the inevitable Chinese stores in Port Mathurin – there did not appear to be any other kind of store – and purchased some plastic sheeting and a few cheap blankets. When dark fell, and the bats had flown past us again, after some considerable argument, it was decided that Ann should go back to the hotel and get a decent night’s sleep and join us again at dawn. When she had departed, John and I made up makeshift beds of plastic sheeting and blankets in our banana-leaf cottage, and arranged our accoutrements – a good supply of sandwiches and chocolate; a Thermos of tea; torches; and a hopeful clutch of small, but delightful, wicker baskets, called Tantes, which are one of Rodrigues’s chief exports, and in which we hoped to incarcerate our catch of bats. We tossed for who should keep the first watch and I won, so I curled up happily and was soon asleep.
When it was my turn to assume sentry duty, I went for a short walk around the clearing to stretch my legs. The earth and vegetation were still saturated with moisture, although it had not rained for some hours, and the air was warm and so water-laden that each breath you took made you feel as though your lungs were absorbing moisture like a sponge. On the fallen and rotting branches that lay about, I found innumerable small, phosphorescent fungi that glowed with a bright greenish-blue light, so that part of the forest floor was illuminated like a city seen from the air at night. I collected some of these twigs and branches, and found that ten or twelve of these glowing fungi produced enough light to be able to read by, providing you kept your light source fairly close to the page.
It was while I was attempting to read by the light of the fungi that I heard a curious sound that seemed to emanate from the forest behind our little hut. It was a fairly loud scrunching noise. It sounded to me, for some bizarre reason, like a matchbox being crushed in the hands of a very powerful man. Reluctantly I was forced to admit that, eccentric though the Rodriguans might be, it was unlikely that they crept about rain-drenched forests at three in the morning crushing matchboxes. Taking a torch, I eased my way out of our fragile hut and went to investigate. This was not quite so intrepid as it may appear, since there is nothing harmful in the animal line in Rodrigues, if you ignore the human animal. I made a careful search of the forest behind the hut, but could find nothing living that looked as though its normal cry resembled the crushing of a matchbox, and met nothing more ferocious than a large moth which seemed intent on trying to fly up the barrel of my torch. I went back to the hut and sat there, thinking. I wondered if we would catch any bats in the morning. Time was running short and I was debating with myself whether to move the nets nearer to the colony’s roosting site. As I was pondering this problem, I was startled by the rasping matchbox noise again, this time very much closer and from several different directions. John, who had woken up, sat up and stared at me.
‘What’s that?’ he enquired, sleepily.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea, but it’s been going on for about ten minutes. I had a look round and I couldn’t see anything.’
Just then, there was a positive battery of rasping noises, and the walls and the roof of the hut started to vibrate.
‘What the hell can it be?’ asked John.
I shone my torch at the banana-leaf roof and saw it was quivering and swaying, as though in an earthquake.
Before we could do anything intelligent, the whole roof gave way and a cascade of giant landsnails, each the size of a small apple, descended upon us. They were fat, glossy and wet, and they gleamed in the torchlight, frothing gently and leaving an interesting pattern of slime on our beds. It took us ten minutes to rid our shelter of these unwanted gastropods and to repair the roof. John curled up and went to sleep again, and I sat wondering if the bats, perhaps, had the same feeling about the Jak fruit as I had, and that this was why we had not met with success. An hour later, John woke up and claimed he was hungry.
‘I think I’ll have a sandwich or two,’ he said, ‘can you bung some over to me?’
I switched on the torch and shone it in the corner of the shelter that acted as our commissariat. To my dismay, I saw that all the giant landsnails we had so painstakingly evicted from our hut had silently and surreptitiously returned, and now formed a glittering, amber pile on our sandwiches, eating the bread with evident relish. They were aided and abetted by a half-grown, grey rat with glossy fur, white paws, and a forest of black whiskers. The snails were not alarmed by the torchlight and continued browsing happily on our supper, but the rat was of a more nervous disposition. As the torch beam hit him, he froze for an instant, only his whiskers quivering and his eyes rolling; then, with a piercing soprano scream, he turned round and rushed straight under the blanket into bed with me. He seemed convinced that this was a haven of safety, and I dislodged him with considerable difficulty by taking my bed to pieces. Having shooed him out of the hut and into the forest, I then retrieved the remainder of the sandwiches from the snails and while John was sorting out the less ragged and more edible ones, I banished the snails once more to the outer edges of the clearing. An hour or so later, John woke up again and claimed himself still hungry.
‘You can’t be still hungry,’ I said, ‘you only had some sandwiches an hour ago.’
‘I only had what the snails had left,’ said John, aggrievedly. ‘Didn’t we have some biscuits? Biscuits and a cup of tea. That would be nice.’
Sighing, I switched on the torch and, to my amazement, found the identical scene in our kitchen area. The snails had oozed their way back and were now feeding on the biscuits, as was my friend, the rat. Once again, as the torchlight hit him, the latter uttered his hysterical scream and dived into bed with me; this time, presumably so that I could give him even greater protection, he tried to climb up inside my shorts. I banished him with some firmness into the forest, hurled the snails after him, and removed the remainder of our food over to John’s side of the hut. I felt it was his turn to get on intimate terms with the rat. By this time, of course, we were so wide awake that we could not get to sleep, so sat and talked in a desultory fashion, waiting for it to get light. Just before dawn, we heard Ann stumbling through the forest towards us.
‘Caught anything?’ she asked when she arrived.
‘No,’ I said, ‘if you discount snails and a rat. But we might get something when it gets lighter.’
Gradually, the sky paled primrose yellow and the light strengthened as we left our snail-eaten hut and moved down to the trees nearer the nets.
‘I can’t understand why they don’t come,’ I said. ‘They must be able to smell that damned Jak fruit in Chicago!’
‘I know,’ said John, ‘what I think is …’
But what he thought was never vouchsafed to us, for he leant forward, peering intently.
‘What’s that?’ he said, pointing. ‘Surely it’s something in the net. Is it a bat?’
We all strained our eyes, staring into the clearing where the mist nets, fine as gossamer, vanished against the trees and shadows.
‘Yes,’ said Ann, excitedly, ‘I can see it. I’m sure it’s a bat.’
‘I think you’re right,’ I said, ‘but how the hell did he get in there without us knowing?’
At that moment, a bat entered the clearing, did a swift and cautious investigation and then flew away, demonstrating first of all the complete silence of its approach and, secondly, the fact that from where our hut was, higher up the hill, we could not have seen it, for once it entered the clearing, it vanished into the broken shadows.
By now, the light had strengthened considerably and, to our excitement, we could see not one, but ten bats hanging in the nets. To say that we were elated was putting it mildly, for, secretly, I think all of us had felt our chances of success were slight.
The bats were hanging, immobile, in the nets and as they were not struggling and panicking, we decided to wait for a while and see if we caught any more before releasing them. Several bats flew into the clearing during the next half-hour, but they were too cautious and kept too high to get entangled in the mist nets. At length, it became obvious that we were not going to catch any more, and so we got our supply of Tantes ready and set about the task of disentangling the ones we had caught.
First of all, we sexed them. To our irritation, they were all males. They were even more beautiful close to than from a distance, for their backs were a bright chestnut fox red, changing to glittering spun gold on the shoulders and belly. The soot black wings were as fine and soft as chamois leather. Their funny little, chubby, golden faces with pale, straw-coloured yellow eyes, made them look like strange, indignant, miniature, flying teddy bears. The fine mesh of the net had done a good job and the delicate wings of each bat were intricately entangled; after spending a quarter of an hour trying to free one wing unsuccessfully, we gave up and simply cut the animals loose. Even this had to be done with great care to make sure you did not cut or tear the delicate wing membrane, and at the same time we tried to do as little damage as possible to the net.
It was a difficult job, not made any easier by the anger of the bats, who seized every opportunity to sink their needle-sharp teeth into unwary fingers. But, at last, we had cut them all loose without doing too much damage to the nets, and placed them safely in individual Tantes. Then we attended to the laborious business of mending the nets and re-hanging them aloft again. By this time, our two helpers had arrived to take over the day shift, and were vastly amused by our story of the house and the sandwich-eating snails. They set about rebuilding our banana-leaf shelter. We left them, promising to return in the evening, and carried our bats in triumph down to Port Mathurin.
The local school, with extreme generosity, had offered us a newly-built classroom – as yet untenanted by the knowledge-hungry youth of Rodrigues – in which to keep our bats. It was a room some twenty feet by ten feet, newly painted and decorated, and ideal, as far as we were concerned, for keeping bats in. We had decked it out with plenty of branches and various hanging trays of wire on which we were going to serve the galaxy of fruit we had brought from Mauritius. We decided that we would let all the males we had caught loose in the room, and keep any females we got in Tantes. Lest I be accused of being a Chauvinist Pig, let me hasten to say that this apparent discrimination was due entirely to the fact that the females we got would be immensely more valuable than the males, and so we would have to be very careful with them.
Late in the afternoon, we returned to the glade and our two faithful bat watchers. In the fading afternoon light, we climbed to our vantage point in the valley and watched the colony. By and large, there was little movement, although the bats slept fitfully and frequently, and with great agility changed sleeping positions, moving through the branches with the aid of the hooks on their wings, with extraordinary skill. Only occasionally did one take flight and flap languidly round, before returning to the same roost or finding a new one.
On the whole, the colony was very silent; there was occasional bickering when a bat got too close to one of its sleeping compatriots, but this was seldom.
There was, however, one bat in the colony that was far from silent. It was a fat baby that we had christened ‘Ambrose’, and he was being weaned by his mother and was not taking kindly to the process. Although he was almost as big as she was he did not see why he should not cling to her as he had always done, nor why he should give up suckling whenever he felt like it. His mother, however, was being firm about it and his rage and petulance were horrible to hear. Screeching and twittering, he pursued his unfortunate mother from branch to branch, endeavouring to pull her within range with the hooks on his wings, and letting out outraged shrieks of frustration when he failed. The only let-up to this awful noise came when his mother, nerves cracking under the strain, would take flight and settle in a tree some distance away. Then Ambrose would stop screaming briefly, because he was concentrating all his efforts on screwing up the courage to fly after her. Eventually he would join her and as soon as he had recovered from the journey, his whining and importuning would start all over again.
‘What a ghastly bat,’ said Ann, ‘I’d slaughter it if it were mine.’
‘It needs to be sent to a public school,’ said John, judiciously.
‘A reform school would be better,’ suggested Ann.
‘All I can say is that I hope we don’t, by some mischance, catch it in the nets. If we do, it will be one we will certainly let go, even if it’s female,’ I said.
‘Too true,’ said John. ‘Imagine having that screeching around you all day.’
When it grew dark, we moved down to our banana-leaf home and spent the night with some persistent giant snails, several million mosquitoes, and one or two large and belligerent centipedes. The rat did not visit us, and I can only suppose he was in his burrow having a nervous breakdown. In the morning, we found we had caught two more bats and these, to our delight, proved to be females. We cut them loose and transported them carefully to the schoolroom, where our previous captives had settled down very well. The floor was deep in guano, and there was fruit everywhere.
We were booked to leave on the flight to Mauritius that took off at two o’clock the following day, so this meant that we had to catch our full quota of bats early that morning. It was obviously going to be touch and go, but in the green light of dawn, to our relief, we saw that we had caught thirteen bats and that among them were the females we required. In all, we had caught twenty-five bats; seven of the males we were going to release. Having extracted the thirteen bats from the nets and put them in their individual Tantes, we folded up the nets and for the last time climbed up the rocky path, out of Cascade Pigeon. As we left, we could hear Ambrose still screeching imploringly to his mother. That was one bat who was determined not to become extinct if he could help it!
When we got to the schoolroom, we had to go through the process of checking on all the male bats and picking out the right proportion of fully adult and of younger males, so that we would have the right age balance in our colonies. This done, we gathered up all the surplus males in Tantes and drove out of town to the beginning of the Cascade Pigeon to let them go. We chose a really high vantage point and threw the bats, one at a time, into the air. They all turned towards the colony further up the valley. There was quite a stiff breeze blowing down the valley, and it was interesting to note that the bats flying against it made very heavy weather and had to land in the trees frequently for a rest. We wondered how they would fare in a cyclone lasting three or four days, or a week.
So, eventually, we had all our bats in their individual Tantes and we drove down to the airport. The immigration and police waved us a cheerful farewell as we loaded our strange cargo on to the plane. We taxied down the dusty runway and took off, flying low over the reef. I was sorry to leave Rodrigues; for from what I had seen of it, it seemed an enchanting and unspoiled island. I hoped that it would long remain so, for once tourism discovered its whereabouts, it would suffer the same fate as has befallen so many beautiful places on earth.
When we got back to Mauritius, we drove the bats down to the aviaries at Black River, which Dave had prepared for their reception. They had travelled very well and they settled down, hanging from the wire top of the aviary, chittering gently to each other and displaying great interest in the wide variety of food which Dave had prepared for them. Flushed with success, we went back to the hotel, had baths and then went in to dinner. When it came to the sweet course, Horace asked me what I would like.
‘Well, what have you got?’ I enquired, determined not to be caught, as we had been with the lobsters.
‘Some nice fruit, Sir,’ he said.
I looked at him. He did not appear to be pulling my leg. ‘What sort of fruit?’ I asked.
‘We’ve got some beautiful, ripe Jak fruit, Sir,’ he said enthusiastically.
I had cheese.