Gerald Durrell (14 page)

“Eh . . . aehh!”
muttered Elias in righteous indignation, and he drew his machete and crept
forward; I peered to see what it was that he was stalking, and saw something
long and dark lying on the sandbank ahead, something which was the size and
shape of a small crocodile and which glinted in the light like one. Elias crept
near, and then made a sudden dive, trying to pin it to the sand with his
machete blade, but it wriggled through his legs, plopped into the water and
swam at great speed towards Andraia. He jumped at it as it passed, but it put
on a spurt of speed and shot towards me like a miniature torpedo. By now I was
convinced it was a crocodile, so, waiting until it came level, I flung myself
into the water on top of it. I felt its body give a convulsive wriggle against
my chest, but as I grabbed at it, it slid through my fingers like oil. Now no
one stood in its path to freedom except Amos. Elias, Andraia, and I lifted up
our voices and yelled instructions to him. He stood there with his mouth open,
watching its approach. It was level with him, churning a small wake in the
stream, and then it was past him and making for the sanctuary of a tangle of
boulders and still he stood and watched it.

“Arrrrr!” roared
Elias. “You blurry fool, you. Why you no catch um?”

“I see um,” said
Amos suddenly, “he go for under dat stone. . . .”

The three of us
rushed down towards him in a tidal wave of foam and water, and Amos pointed out
the rock under which the quarry was lurking. This was by the bank, in shallow
water, and under it was the hole in which the creature had taken refuge. Elias
and Andraia, in their eagerness, both bent down at the same time to examine
this hole, and banged their heads together with a resounding clump. After a
short pause for abuse, Andraia bent down and pushed his hand into the hole to
see how large it was. The creature had apparently been waiting for such a move,
for he withdrew his hand with a cry of anguish, his forefingers dripping blood.

“This beef can
bite man,” said Elias, with the air of having made a discovery.

Andraia was at
last persuaded, since he had the longest arm, to put his hand back in the hole
and drag out the beef by force, but not before he and Elias had had a long and
shrill altercation with each other in Banyangi, and accusations of cowardice
had been made and indignantly denied. Andraia lay down on his tummy in six
inches of water and insinuated his hand into the bowels of the earth,
explaining all the time how clever he was to do this. Then there was a short
silence, broken only by his frenzied grunts in his efforts to reach the beast.
Suddenly he gave a yell of triumph, scrambled to his feet dripping with water,
and holding the beast by its tail.

Now, up to that
moment, I had been convinced that we were attempting the capture of yet another
baby crocodile, so as I gazed at the creature which now hung from his hand I
received a considerable shock. For there, dangling in the torchlight, sleek and
angry, hissing like a snake out of a quivering maze of whiskers, was a
full-grown Giant Water Shrew, an animal that I had never expected to find. I
could do nothing intelligent, I just stood there gazing at this fabulous
creature with my mouth open. The shrew, however, got tired of hanging by his
tail, so he turned and climbed up his own body with sinewy grace, and buried
his teeth in Andraia’s thumb. The proud hunter leapt wildly into the air and
uttered an ear-splitting scream of pain: “Ow! . . . Ow! . . . Ow! . . .” he screamed,
wagging his hand in an effort to dislodge the shrew. “Oh, Elias, Elias, get it
off. . . . Ow! My JESUSCRI . . . it done kill me. . . . Ow! . . . Ow! . . . Ow!
. . . Elias, quickly!” Elias and I struggled with the shrew to make it let go,
but it seemed quite content to hang there, occasionally tightening its jaws to
show it was still taking part in the contest. After prolonged effort, during
which Andraia nearly deafened us with his cries of pain and calls for aid to
the Almighty, we succeeded in prising the shrew loose, and dropped it, hissing
and wriggling, into a canvas bag. Then I examined Andraia’s hand: the whole
first joint of his thumb was a mass of blood, and when I had washed this away I
found that he had been badly mangled by the creature’s teeth. It had bitten
through the ball of his thumb right down to the bone, the flesh was hanging off
in strips, and the wounds were bleeding profusely. I decided that we should
return home, partly owing to Andraia’s thumb, which must have been exceedingly
painful, and also because I wanted to get my new specimen into a decent cage as
soon as possible. So we walked swiftly back to the village, the groans emitted
by Amos and Andraia giving the whole trek the air of a funeral procession
rather than a triumphant homecoming.

While I changed
out of my wet clothes Elias went down to the village and roused the Carpenter
from his bed, and then we set to work to fashion a cage fine enough to house
this rarity. The sky was a pale green flecked with the red of coming dawn as we
drove in the last nail, then I tenderly undid the sack and gently shook the
Giant Water Shrew into his new home. He sat there for a minute, wiffling his
mass of whiskers, and then slid swiftly through the hole into his darkened
bedroom. I could hear him rustle round once or twice among the dry banana
leaves inside, and then came a deep sigh and silence. The Water Shrew was
taking his capture very quietly. I did not emulate him: the entire staff was
marshalled to go down to the river and catch me fish, frogs, water-snakes, and
crabs; and two carriers were hastily dispatched into Mamfe to procure an empty
drum to act as a swimming pool for the Shrew. While all this was taking place I
kept creeping back to his cage every five minutes to see if there was any sign
of life. Soon I had a basket full of crabs, six frogs, ten fish, and a rather
anaemic-looking water-snake. Arranging all these within easy reach I started to
feed the Shrew.

After my banging
on his bedroom door for a bit he condescended to come out into the open part of
his cage, and as the sun was now up I had my first real good look at him. He
was nearly two feet long, of which more than half was composed of his tail.
This strong muscular member was not flattened from top to bottom as an otter’s
is, but from side to side like a tadpole’s. The hair on it was so short and
sleek that it looked as though the whole tail was made out of polished black
leather. All the top half of the animal was black, but paws, belly, throat and
chest were pure white. The body was small and dumpy, and the head curiously
flattened. Its muzzle and parts of its cheeks near the nose were swollen and
enlarged, and from this bristled a forest of stiff white whiskers. From on top,
the Shrew’s head looked not unlike the head of a hammer. Its feet were small
and neat, and its eyes were microscopic pin-points of glinting jet buried in
the fur.

I opened the
door of its cage and threw the snake in. The Shrew approached it, preceded by
its quivering mass of whisken. The snake made a slight movement, the Shrew
sniffed, and then backed rapidly away, hissing furiously in the same way I had
noticed before. I removed the snake and tried a frog, with the same results.
Then I tried a fish which, according to the earliest reports on this animal, is
its only food, and the Shrew refused that as well. He was rapidly getting bored
with these proceedings, and was casting hopeful looks at his bedroom, when I
threw in a large crab. He approached, sniffed, and then, before the crab had
time to get his pincers ready, the Shrew had overturned it and delivered a
sharp bite through the underside, almost cutting the crab in two with one bite.
Having done this, he then settled down and finished off his meal with great
rapidity, scrunching loudly and quivering his whiskers. Within half an hour he
had polished off four crabs, and so his feeding problem was settled for the
moment.

The next day the
carriers returned from Mamfe staggering under the weight of a huge petrol drum.
This had to be cut in half, lengthways, all the rust scraped out, and any trace
of oil removed by boiling water in it for twenty-four hours. Then the Shrew was
removed from his cage while a sliding door was fitted in the bottom. The whole
cage was then placed on top of the half petrol drum; thus, by opening and
closing the sliding door I could let the Shrew in and out of his private
bathing pool. He enjoyed this immensely, and every night made the most
resounding hisses and grunts in its hollow interior while in pursuit of his
crab dinner. I found that the water fouled very quickly, so that it had to be
changed three times a day, much to the water-boy’s annoyance.

The Shrew, now
adequately housed and with access to water, settled down very well and
proceeded to demolish twenty or twenty-five crabs a day, which proved lucrative
for the small boys who collected them.

The Giant Water
Shrew is perhaps one of the most interesting animals to be found in West
Africa. It is, to all intents and purposes, a living prehistoric creature, a
warm-blooded, breathing, biting fossil.
Potomagale velox
, as it is
called scientifically, was first discovered by Du Chaillu, the gentleman who
brought such discredit upon himself by his lurid accounts of gorilla-hunting in
the eighteen-hundreds. Owing to his penchant for colouring his material with
the aid of a fertile imagination, Du Chaillu’s every statement or discovery
became suspect in the eyes of zoologists. However, in the case of
Potomagale
he seems to have contented himself with repeating just what the natives told
him, and so in his original description he endows it with habits and a choice
of food which appear to be completely wrong.

The animal has
no relatives in the world, except a small mouse-like creature called
Geogale
,
which lives in Madagascar. As it is unknown in fossil form it is impossible to
say exactly how old an animal
Potomagale
is, but we do know that it
comes from an ancient lineage, for ages ago in the earth’s history, at a time
known to geologists as the Cretaceous Period, there lived an animal which is
called by the jaw-breaking name of
Palaeoryctes
. It is the earliest
insectivore known to science, and must have been a forerunner of the
Potomagale’s
family, for their teeth are almost identical, except that the
Potomagale’s
are much larger. So the Giant Water Shrew can trace his family back to a period
in the world’s history before man was even known, in his present shape, on
earth. He has also one other peculiarity which makes him distinct from all
other insectivores, and thus more aristocratically sure of his uniqueness: he
does not have collar-bones!

My thought now
turned to a very important matter: what was I going to give him to eat on the
long voyage home? True, I could take a supply of live crabs with me, but even
then these would run out eventually, and there was no supply of freshwater
crabs in England that I knew of. The only thing was to get him on to a
substitute food, and my heart sank at the thought. Then I remembered that the
natives in the Cameroons catch the fresh-water shrimps, dry them in the sun,
and sell them in the markets as a delicious addition to groundnut or palm oil
chop, or, for that matter, any other dish. I decided that these would have to
be the substitute for the crabs, so a member of the staff was sent to the
nearest market to procure several pounds of this product. Using these small,
biscuit-dry shrimps as a base, I mixed in raw egg and some finely chopped meat.
Then I got two large crabs, killed them, scooped out their insides and
proceeded to stuff them with this rather nauseating mess. Having prepared them
I went to the Shrew’s cage and threw him a small, live, and unstuffed crab,
which he soon demolished, and then started to look round for more. Then I threw
in a stuffed crab, and he fell on it and proceeded to scrunch it avidly.

After the first
few bites he paused, sniffed suspiciously (while I held my breath), and then
stared at it for a minute. But, to my delight, he fell to again and demolished
the lot.

Gradually I
weaned him on to this new diet until he was eating it out of a dish, and having
four or five crabs as dessert, and he thrived on it. I was getting prepared to
show him off to John on arrival as Bakebe, and even making up boastful speeches
on how easy it was to keep a Giant Water Shrew in captivity, when the object of
my love suddenly died. He was fat, and in the best of spirits one night, and
the next morning he was dead. As I sadly consigned his body to the formalin
bottle I reflected that it was probably the only chance I would ever get of
keeping one of these fascinating creatures alive.