Gerald Durrell (11 page)

Elias felt very
deeply the loss of the water-beef, and it was not long afterwards that he
suggested we should again hunt by the river, mentioning as additional bait that
he knew of some caves in that area. So we set off at about eight o’clock one
night, determined to spend all the hours of darkness in pursuit of beef The
night did not start well, for a few miles into the forest we came to the dead
stump of a great tree. It had died and remained standing, as nearly all these
giants did, until it was hollowed out by insects and the weather into a fine
shell. Then the weight of the mass of dead branches at the top was too much,
and it snapped the trunk off about thirty feet from the ground, leaving the
base standing on its buttress roots like a section of a factory chimney, only
much more interesting and aesthetically satisfying. Halfway up this stump was a
large hole, and as we passed our torches caught the gleam of eyes from its dark
interior. We stopped and held a hasty consultation: as before, Andraia and I
kept our torches trained on the hole, while Elias went round the other side of
the trunk to see if he could climb up.

He returned
quickly to say that he was too short to reach the only available footholds, and
so Andraia would have to do the climbing. Andraia disappeared round the trunk,
and shortly after scraping noises and subdued ejaculations of “Eh . . . aehh!”
announced that he was on his way up. Elias and I moved a bit closer, keeping
our torches steady on the hole. Andraia was two-thirds of the way up when the
occupant of the hole showed itself: a large civet. Its black-masked face
blinked down at us, and I caught a glimpse of its grey, black-spotted body.
Then it drew back into the hole again.

“Careful,
Andraia, na bushcat,” whispered Elias warningly, for a full-grown civet is the
size of a small collie dog.

But Andraia was
too busy to answer, for clinging to the bark of the trunk with fingers and
prehensile toes was a full-time job. Just as he reached the edge of the hole
the civet launched itself out into space like a rocket. It shot through the
air, and landed accurately on Elias’s chest with all four feet, its weight
sending him spinning backwards. As it landed on his chest I saw its mouth open
and close, and heard the chop of its jaws. It only missed making its teeth meet
in his face because he was already off his balance and starting to fall
backwards, and so its jaws missed him by about three

inches. It leapt
lightly off his prostrate body, paused for one brief moment to stare at me, and
then in a couple of swift leaps disappeared into the forest. Elias picked
himself up and grinned at me ruefully:

“Eh . . . aehh!
Some man done put bad
ju-ju
for dis hunting I tink,” he said. “First we
lose water-beef, next dis bush-cat. . . .”

“Consider
yourself lucky you’ve still got a face left,” I said, for I had been
considerably shaken by this display of ferocity on the part of the civet, an
animal I had always thought was shy and retiring. Just at that moment a
strangled yelp came from above us, and we shone our torches up to where Andraia
was clinging like a lanky black spider.

“Na whatee?”
asked Elias and I together.

“Na something
else dere dere for inside,” said Andraia shrilly. “I hear noise for inside
hole. . . .” He felt in his loincloth, and with some difficulty he withdrew his
torch and shone it into the hole.

“Eh ... aehh!”
he shouted, “na picken bushcat here for inside.”

For a long time
Andraia performed the most extraordinary contortions to try and cling on to the
tree, while shining the torch into the hole with one hand and endeavouring to
insert the other into the hole to catch the baby. At length he succeeded, and
his hand came into view holding a spitting, squirming young civet by the tail.
Just as he got it out of the hole and was shouting, “Look um, look um,” in
triumph, the baby bit him in the wrist.

Now Andraia was
a complete coward about pain: if he got the smallest thorn in his foot he would
put on an exaggerated limp as though he had just had all his toes amputated. So
the sharp baby teeth of the civet were like so many hot needles in his wrist.
Uttering an unearthly shriek he dropped the torch, the civet, and released his
precarious hold on the tree. He, the torch, and the civet crashed earthwards.

How Andraia was
not killed by the fall I shall never know: the torch was smashed, and the baby
civet landed on its head on one of the iron-hard buttress roots of the tree,
and was knocked unconscious. It had a severe haemorrhage about ten minutes
later and died without regaining consciousness. Andraia, apart from being
severely shaken, was unhurt.

“Eh . . . aehh!
Na true some man done put
ju-ju
for us,” said Elias again. Whether it
was
ju-ju
or not, we were not worried by ill-luck for the rest of the
night: on the contrary, we had very good luck. Shortly after our little affair
with the civet we came to the banks of a wide stream, about three feet deep in
the middle. The water was opaque, a deep chocolate brown colour, and even our
torch beams could not pierce it. We had to wade up this stream for about half a
mile, until we came to the path on the opposite bank which we were following.
Though the surface of the stream was unruffled, there was a considerable
undercurrent, and we felt it clutch our legs as we waded in. The water was
ice-cold. We had reached the centre and were wading along as swiftly as the
deep water and the current would let us, when I became aware that we were not
the only occupants of the stream. All around us, coiling and shooting through the
dark waters, were dozens of brown water snakes. They swam curiously alongside
us, with only their heads showing above water, their tiny eyes glittering in
the torchlight. Andraia became conscious of the snakes’ presence at the same
moment, but his reactions were not the same as mine.

“Warr!”he
screamed, and dropping the collecting bag he was carrying, he tried to run for
the bank. He had forgotten the water. Here it was almost waist high, and any
attempt at running was doomed to failure almost before it was started. As I had
anticipated, the strength of the current caught him off his balance, and he
fell into the water with a splash that sent every water-snake diving for cover.
He surfaced some yards downstream, and struggled to his feet. His lovely sarong,
which he had been carefully carrying on his head to protect it, was now a
sodden mass.

“Na whatee?”
asked Elias, turning round and surveying Andraia, wallowing in the stream like
a wounded whale. He, apparently, had not seen the snakes.

“Na snake Elias,”
spluttered Andraia, “na snake
too much
for dis water. Why we no fit pass
for land?”

“Snake?” asked
Elias, shining his torch about the calm waters.

“Na true,
Elias,” I said, “na water-snake. Andraia de fear too much.”

“Eh . . . aehh!”
exclaimed Elias wrathfully. “You stupid man, Andraia. You no savvay dis beef no
go bite you if Masa be here?”

“Ah!” said
Andraia, humbly, “I done forget dis ting.”

“What’s all
this?” I asked. “Why snake no bite Andraia if I’m here?”

Standing in the
middle of the stream while Andraia fished about for the collecting bag, Elias
explained to me:

“If black man go
for water him only, some kind of bad beef, like snake, go smell him, he go come
one time and chop him. If black man go for water with white man, de beef smell
de white man and he de fear too much, so he no go come.”

“Only when we go
for water dis ting happen?” I asked. “Yes, sah.”

It was a useful
piece of knowledge, and I stored it away in my memory for future use. Andraia
had by now collected all the things he had dropped, and I suggested that we
should turn out the torches and wait to see if the water-snakes returned and,
if they did, try to catch some. With a certain lack of enthusiasm my hunters
agreed. We stood there in the water, in complete darkness, for about half an
hour and then, at a prearranged signal, we all switched on our torches
together. All around us were water-snakes, weaving silver patterns in the
torchlight. Seizing the net I plunged after the nearest, and after a scramble,
managed to get him hissing and wriggling into the net, and from there into the
bag. Thus encouraged, Elias and Andraia joined in and within a very short time
we had captured twenty of these snakes. But now they were growing wise, and the
slightest movement on our part would send them all diving to the murky depths
of the river, so we called off the hunt and continued on our way.

I don’t know
what the attraction of that river was for these snakes, as I never saw them
congregated in one spot in such numbers again. Often in the day, and also
during our night hunts, we had waded long distances up rivers, but only
occasionally had we seen an odd water-snake. In the half-mile we travelled up
that stream we saw hundreds of them. It may have been some sort of mating
gathering, or maybe a sudden abundance of food in that particular area which
had attracted them. We never found out. Some weeks later we crossed the same
stream at the same point during the night, and not a snake was to be seen. In
places like this you come into contact with many enigmas of this sort, but,
unfortunately, you have not the opportunity to investigate as fully as you
would like. You can do little more than note them, and wonder about the reason.
It is one of the most annoying things about collecting, that you have not the
time to investigate these riddles and find an answer, fascinating though that
investigation might prove.

We came at last
to the place where we had our meeting with the “water-beef”, and though we beat
the low growth thoroughly, we did not flush another. So we gave it up as a bad
job and walked along the sandy banks towards the cliff where Elias said there
were some caves. As we rounded the bleached carcass of a huge tree that had
fallen across the bank I saw something glowing on the sand ahead of us.

“Elias, na
whatee dat?” I asked, pointing.

“Na fire, sah,”
he replied.

“A fire, out
here?”

“Yes, sah, I
tink some hunter man sleep here.”

As we walked
nearer I saw that the glow was caused by the embers of a small fire. Next to
the fire was a tiny, frail lean-to made out of saplings and creepers.

“Ahey!” called
Elias, “someone ’e dere dere?”

There was a
stirring in the depths of the hut and a black face, sleep-crumpled, peered out
at us.

“Na who?” asked
the stranger, and I could see he was reaching for his muzzle-loader which lay
beside him. Hastily we turned our torches on to ourselves so that he could see
who we were.

“Eh . . . aehh!”
he gasped. “Na white man dis?”

“Yes,” said
Elias, “na white man dis.”

“What thing
white man do for bush for nighttime?” asked the stranger, and I could see a
suspicion dawning on his face that perhaps we were some sort of terrible
ju-ju
in disguise.

“We hunt for
beef,” said Elias.

I kicked the
dying fire into a small flame, sat down beside it and produced cigarettes. The
stranger accepted one, but he still kept a hand on his gun.

“Elias,” I said,
“bring more stick for dis fire, den we get more light, den dis man fit see I be
a white man proper and not
ju-ju
.” Elias and Andraia laughed, and the
man essayed a feeble smile and removed his hand from his gun.