Gerald Durrell (12 page)

We built up the
fire and sat round it smoking, while Elias explained to the man who we were,
and what we were doing, and from whence we came. The man, it transpired, was a
wandering hunter. These men live in the forest, shooting what they can, and
drying the meat. When they have as much as they can manage they trek into the
nearest township and sell the meat at the market, buy fresh powder with the
proceeds and set off to the bush again. This man had had very good luck, for he
had shot four full-grown drills, and he showed us the dismembered bodies, dried
by wood smoke. The largest male must have been a magnificent brute in life, and
his dried arm, strangely like a mummy’s, was knotted with great muscles. His hands
and his skull with the flesh dried close to the bone looked decidedly human.
We, in our turn, explained what we were doing, and showed the hunter the
water-snakes, which he was not enthusiastic over. When we rose to go I dashed
him four cigarettes and he, in turn, presented me with a drill leg, saying that
it was “very fine chop for white man and black”. I ate this leg in a stew, and
the hunter was proved correct: it was very fine chop indeed, with a delicate
and succulent flavour of beef with the faintest tang of wood smoke about it.

At last we came
to the caves: they were in the face of a cliff heavily overgrown with ferns and
moss, intermingled with the long creepers that hung down from the trees that
grew on the top of the cliff. The usual tumbled mass of boulders littered the
base, intergrown with shrubs and bushes. The largest cave was the size of a
small room, and from it ran a number of narrow, low tunnels. These, however,
were too small to allow us to crawl up them, so we had to content ourselves
with lying on our stomachs and shining the torch up in the hopes of seeing
something.

Presently we
each took a section of the cliff and started a search on our own. I came to
another series of these small tunnels, and as I walked along flashing my torch
about, something leapt out of the undergrowth ahead and shot into one of them.
I hurried to the spot, but I had not much hope of being able to corner whatever
it was now that it had gained the sanctuary of its tunnel. Crouching down I
shone the torch inside, and discovered that it was a false tunnel, that is to
say it ran about eight feet back into the cliff face and then ceased abruptly.
The floor of the tunnel was covered with various sized boulders, and the walls
were gnarled and full of dark corners and crevices. I could not see the animal,
but I presumed that it was hiding somewhere in there as there was, as far as I
could see, no exit. Andraia and Elias were some distance away, and I did not
like to shout to them to come and help as the more silently one worked the
better one’s chances of surprising an animal. So I lowered myself to the
ground, hung the collecting bag round my neck, put the torch in my mouth, and
proceeded to crawl up the tunnel on my stomach. This method is supposed to be
the time-honoured one for stalking game, but I found it quite the most painful
means of progression known to man. Erosion had given the boulders, which so
liberally littered the floor of the tunnel, a razor-like cutting edge to their
corners, and most of them had apparently been carefully designed to fit snugly
into the more delicate parts of the human anatomy, and thus cause the maximum
amount of pain.

I crawled on
grimly until I reached the small circular “room” at the end of the tunnel
leading off into the depths of the earth. I struggled towards it, and as I
reached its mouth a curious sound issued from it, a harsh, rustling rattle, a
pause, two thumps, and then silence. I started to crawl closer when the
rattling recommenced, a pause, the two thumps were repeated, and then silence.
I hastily ran over the list of Cameroon fauna in my mind, but the noise did not
seem to belong to anything that I knew of, so I continued my advance with
increased caution. Reaching the tunnel I shone my torch inside and found to my
surprise that it was also a cul-de-sac, only a much shorter one than the one I
was in. As I was flashing my torch round in an effort to see what had produced
the noise, there was another burst of rattling, something jumped forward, the
torch was knocked out of my hand, and a sharp stinging pain assailed my
fingers. I grabbed the torch and backed away hurriedly, and then sat down to
examine my hand. On the back of it were a number of spots of blood, and a few
deep scratches which now commenced to sting. It looked as though I had plunged
my hand into a blackberry bush. I thought about this for a few minutes and then
suddenly I realized what it was I had to deal with, one of the commonest
animals in the Cameroons, and the only one that could make that noise: a Brush-tailed
Porcupine. I was annoyed that I had not thought of it before.

I crawled back,
and, with greater care, shone my torch in: there, sure enough, was the
porcupine, standing half-turned to me, his spines bristling, and his curious
tail rattling like mad. He would give a prolonged rattle on his tail, and then
follow it up by stamping his hind feet petulantly, exactly as a rabbit will do
when it is scared. He was about the size of a cat, though it was a little
difficult to judge accurately, as his erect spines made him look larger. As all
his spines pointed backwards he naturally had to stand with his bottom half
turned to me, and he peered over his shoulder with his moist black eyes
prominent with a mixture of anger and fear. He was mostly black in colour,
except for the spines that covered his lower back, which was handsomely patched
with black and white. His long tail, which he kept in a U-shape half over his
back, was bare of both fur and spines. On its very tip was a curious cluster of
spines which had no points: they looked like a head of wheat, pure white, thick
and long. It was this appendage on his tail which produced the rattling noise,
for now and again he would stiffen his tail and rattle these hollow, harmless
spines together with a crisp crackling sound. He was all keyed up and alert for
trouble.

I began to
wonder what to do. It really needed two people to capture him, but even if I
enlisted the aid of Andraia or Elias, there was not room in this narrow tunnel
for two people. There was nothing for it but to try and capture him myself. So
I carefully wrapped my hand in a canvas bag, laid another bag out on the floor
in readiness to put him in, and proceeded to crawl cautiously towards him. He
rattled and stamped, and uttered shrill squeaks of warning. I manoeuvred into
position and then suddenly grabbed him by his tail, as this seemed the least
protected and most easily handled part of his body. I got it, and immediately
he backed with full force on to my hand, and his spines ran straight through
the canvas that I had wrapped round as protection, as though it was so much
paper. It was extremely painful, but I hung on and dragged him towards me, for
I felt that if I let go I might not get another chance to grab him now that he
knew my plan of attack. Slowly I wriggled backwards dragging the reluctant
porcupine with me, until we were in the small room at the end of the first
tunnel. Here there was slightly more room to move, and I tried to get the bag
over the animal’s head, but he struggled madly, and backed into my chest, the
spines going through my thin shirt and well into my flesh. The confined space
was in his favour, for whichever way he turned he managed to dig a spine into
the, while I had not room to evade his attentions. The only thing to do was to
keep on crawling until I reached the open air. So I wriggled along backwards
dragging the porcupine, and those last few feet seemed like miles. Just as we
reached the open air he gave a terrific bound and a wriggle in an attempt to
throw off my hand, but I hung on like grim death. I got shakily to my feet and
kept the animal aloft so he could do no damage to me or himself. He hung there
quite quietly; all the fight seemed to have gone out of him.

“Andraia . . .
Elias . . . come quick, I done catch beef,” I called.

They came
running, their torches bobbing through the rocks. When they saw what I held
they were astonished.

“Na Chook-chook
beef,” said Elias. “Which side Masa done fine um?”

“Here for dis
hole. But he done chop me too much. Get a bag to put him into, my hand done
tire.”

Elias opened a
big canvas bag and I neatly dropped my capture into it. This was my first
meeting with a porcupine, and to have captured it single-handed was, I felt,
something of a feat.

The Bush-tailed
Porcupine, or, as it is known locally, the chook-chook beef, is one of the
commonest animals in the Cameroons: it is found everywhere and in almost every
type of country. Most of the faint, twisting paths one found in the forest were
the result of the nightly perambulations of this rodent. They would, I found
later, make their homes anywhere, but they seemed to favour caves, and
particularly caves with small openings under a massive rock, or piles of rocks.
In nearly every cave one came across signs of their tenancy: footprints on a
sandy floor, a few cast quills, or a half-eaten fruit. In one cave I found
fresh palm nuts, which showed that this porcupine in question must have
travelled very long distances at night, for the nearest native farm at which he
could have obtained this commodity was some six miles away. In another cave I
found indications that these porcupines play in much the same way as an English
otter will. In this cave there was one wall which was a natural slide, a wall
of rock some eight feet high sloping to the ground at a gentle angle of
forty-five degrees. This slide had been worn smooth by the constant passage of
porcupine bodies or bottoms. Judging by the tracks in the sand, they scrambled
up to the top of this slope, slid down, walked round, climbed up again, and
slid down once more. They must have been indulging in this game for a number of
generations, as the rock-face was worn as smooth as glass. The pidgin-English
term for this animal is derived from the word “chook”, which means any thorn or
spike, and particularly the doctor’s hypodermic needle. In pidgin you form the
plural of a word by repeating it, so the Brush-tailed Porcupine became
naturally the chook-chook beef. I decided that this was a good name for the
animal, as I was sore and smarting all over from contact with it. Within two
days this specimen had become very tame, and would come to the door of his cage
to take fruit from my hand. He would only put up his spines, rattle his tail,
and stamp his feet if I put my hand right inside the cage and tried to touch
him. Later on he would even come to the bars and let me tickle his ears or
scratch a soothing spot under his chin, but this was only allowed if there were
bars between us.

After I had
finished my smoke and had described in boastful details to my hunters how I had
captured the porcupine, we continued on our way. Presently I made another
capture, and this made me feel better still: true, it was not such an important
specimen as the porcupine, but it was worth while, nevertheless. Clasped
tightly to a branch, some ten feet from the ground, my wandering torch beam
picked out a pair of sleeping chameleons. They were lying close together, their
big eyes closed, their legs tucked carefully in, and body-colour a pale and
deceiving silvery-green. We had broken the branch and shaken them into a bag
almost before they had woken up and realized what was happening. I presumed,
since they were sleeping together like that, that they were either in the
process of mating or had just mated. It turned out that I was right, for some
weeks later the female laid five white eggs the size of a sparrow’s, in the
bottom of her cage.

By the time we
had bagged the chameleons I was in such an elated mood that I would have hurled
myself unhesitatingly into a single-handed battle with a leopard if one had
happened along. Luckily, the great cats in the Cameroons are retiring in the
extreme. What did make their appearance in the torch beams, shortly afterwards,
was a diminutive pair of galagos or bush-babies. There are three species of
galago found in the Cameroons, and two of these are rare and have not, to the
best of my knowledge, been represented in any zoological collection in England.
Accurate identification as to species when an animal is twenty feet above you, and
only lit by a torch beam, becomes impossible, so the rule was that any animal
remotely resembling a galago was always pursued with determination and vigour.
This we proceeded to do with this pair, who were dancing about on some lianas,
occasionally looking down at us so that their enormous eyes glowed like outsize
rubies. It was definitely a two-man job, so, leaving Andraia to shine the torch
on the prey, Elias and I went aloft in different parts of the tree, and started
to converge on the animals. They looked not unlike a pair of fluffy grey
kittens dancing about from creeper to creeper with a fairy-like grace and
lightness, their eyes glowing as they moved. Slowly Elias and I drew nearer,
and I manoeuvred the butter-fly net into position for capture. After catching
two chameleons and a porcupine, I felt that this was going to be child’s play.
Just as I leant forward to swipe at them, three things happened with startling
suddenness: