The overloaded ark, p.9
The Overloaded Ark, page 9
“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.
Another one of the unwritten rules of collecting, however, seems to be that you may go to endless trouble to get your first specimen, but, once having got it, the others follow thick and fast. So, some time later, I was pleased, but not unduly surprised, when a youth wandered into the compound carrying a wicker fish-trap, inside of which crouched a lovely young Giant Water Shrew. It was a female and could not have been more than a few months old, for she measured about twelve inches with her tail, against the two feet of the adult I had captured. I was very elated with this arrival, for I thought that, being a young specimen, she would settle down to captivity and a substitute diet in a more satisfactory manner than an adult. I was perfectly right, for within twenty-four hours she was eating the substitute food, snorting like a grampus in her bathing pool, and even allowing me to scratch her behind the ears, a liberty I could not have taken with the adult. For a month she lived happily in her cage, feeding well, and growing rapidly. I was confident that she was to be the first Giant Water Shrew to arrive in England. But, as if to warn me against undue optimism, and to prove that collecting is not as easy as it sometimes seems, fate stepped in, and one morning on going to the cage I found my baby Shrew dead. She had apparently died in the same mysterious way as the adult, for she had seemed as lively as usual the night before, when I had fed her, and she had eaten a good meal.
The Giant Water Shrew was really the zenith of our night hunting results. Short of getting an Angwantibo (an animal which by now I was coming to look upon as an almost mythical beast!), we could not have beaten it as a capture. For weeks after every waterway for miles around was filled with hunters who, spurred on by the price I had offered, were determined to get me another Shrew. But they had no luck, and after two weeks of intensive night hunts, during which I wore myself out looking for Shrews and Angwantibos, I had to give up night hunting and confined my attentions to the camp, where the ever-growing collection provided me with quite enough work.
CHAPTER SIX
BEEF AND THE BRINGERS OF BEEF
THE camp site was a rectangular area hacked out of the thick undergrowth on the edge of the forest. Fifty feet away a small stream had carved itself a valley in the red clay; and it was on the edge of the valley that the camp was situated. My tent was covered with a palm-leaf roof for extra protection, and next door to this was the animal house, a fairly large building constructed out of palm-leaf mats on a framework of rough wood saplings, lashed together with forest creepers. Opposite was the smaller replica which served as a kitchen, and behind some large bushes was the hut in which the staff slept.
It had taken considerable time and effort to arrange this camp just as I wanted it. At one time there had been three separate gangs of men building different houses, and the noise and confusion was terrible. The whole area was knee deep in coiling creepers, palm mats, boxes of tinned food, wire traps, nets, cages, and other equipment. Africans were everywhere, wielding their machetes with great vigour and complete disregard for human life. Through this chaos came a steady trickle of women, some old and withered with flat dugs and closely shaven grey heads, smoking stubby black pipes; some young and plump with shining bodies and shrill voices. Some brought food to their husbands, some brought calabashes full of frogs, beetles, crabs, and catfish, specimens they had caught while down at the river, and which they thought I might buy.
“Masa . . . Masa,” they would call, waving a calabash full of clicking, bubble-blowing crabs, “Masa go buy dis ting? Masa want dis kind of beef?”
At first, with no cages ready for the reception of specimens, I was forced to refuse all the things they brought. I was afraid that, as I had to do this, they would become disgruntled and give up bringing animals; I need not have worried: some women returned with the same creatures three and four times a day to see if I had changed my mind.
Before accepting any creatures I wanted to get the camp site more or less organized, and then I had to get down to the construction of cages to house the animals. With this end in view I engaged a man who had once been a carpenter, and he squatted down with a great pile of broken boxes in the middle of the camp and proceeded to work quickly and well, undeterred by the noise and upheaval around him. Soon my stock of cages had grown, and I felt I was then in a position to deal with any eventuality, so the message went whispering around the village that Masa was now buying animals, and the trickle of beef bringers swelled into a flood, a flood that threatened to overwhelm both the carpenter and me. Sometimes we would be working by the light of hurricane lamps until two and three in the morning, hurrying to finish a cage, while near us, on the ground, would lie a row of sacks and bags, each heaving and twitching with the movement of its occupant.
The Bringers of Beef were divided into three categories: the children, the women, and the hunters. From the children I would get such things as palm spiders, great brown palm weevils, various types of chameleon, and the lovely silver and brown forest skinks. From the women I would get crabs, both land and river, frogs and toads, water-snakes, an occasional tortoise, a few fledgeling birds, and the great whiskered catfish from the muddy river. It was the hunters who brought the really exciting specimens: mongoose, brush-tailed porcupine, squirrels, and other rarer inhabitants of the deep forest. The children preferred to he paid in the big shiny West African penny, with a hole through its middle; the women preferred to be paid half in salt, and half in shillings; and the hunters would take nothing but cash payments. They fought shy of accepting paper money and would prefer to carry away a couple of pounds in pennies rather than accept a note. And so they came, from the tiny youngsters who could only just walk, to the oldest man or woman hobbling to the camp with the aid of a stick, each carrying some living creature, either in a calabash, or a sack, tied to a stick, or in a neat wicker basket. Some arrived stark naked and unembarrassed, their contribution wrapped in their loin cloth. Every box and basket was pressed into commission as a cage, every empty kerosene tin was washed and cleaned, and soon contained a mass of vacant-faced frogs, or a tangled knot of snakes. Bamboo cages full of birds hung everywhere, and monkeys and mongooses were tethered to every post and stump. The collection was really under way.
One morning, bright and early, I was shaving outside the tent, when a large and scowling man made his appearance carrying a palm-leaf bag on his back. He strode forward, dumped the bag at my feet, and stood back glowering silently at me. I called Pious, who was in the kitchen supervising the cooking of breakfast.
“Pious, what has this man brought?”
“Na what kind of beef you get dere?” Pious asked the man.
