Dear Sir,
My wife was born in the hospital. Doctor has written me to go and pay for her. If you will pay us today I will go. If you are not going to pay us, please sir trust me the sum of (Le.4) or £2. I don’t want to go without your notice.
Good morning sir.
By now, the collection had increased considerably, and in addition to everything else we had three boisterous young chimps that we had got from people round about who had been keeping them as pets. One was called Jimmy, one Amos Tuttlepenny and the third Shamus No Tool. The size of the collection meant a lot of extra work, and Long John and I had to get out of bed at dawn so that we could have all the animals clean, fed and ready for filming by nine o’clock or nine-thirty when the sun was up and the light was right.
Curiously enough, getting out of bed at dawn in the beef mines was a pleasure rather than a penance. Our view stretched south over three to four hundred miles to the Liberian border, and the whole of this in the early morning looked as though it had been drowned in a sea of milk with just the odd hills sticking up here and there like islands. The sun would come up in a spectacular fashion like a frosted blood-orange, and then, as it gathered heat, it would draw up the mist into long coiling skeins so that it suddenly seemed as though the forest, as far as you could see, was on fire. After we’d had a cup of tea and admired the dawn, we’d do the routine check along the line of cages, to make sure that none of the animals had sickened for something awful during the night, and then Long John would get on with feeding the baby animals on milk or whatever it happened to be, while I would start cleaning the cages. When this was done we would spend an hour or so chopping up fruit and various other things for the animals. Then it would be breakfast time and the camera crew would come, yawning and stretching up the hill, and join us. Once breakfast was over we would discuss what the film sequence of the day was going to be, and set about it.
All filming is, of course, a fake, but there is faking and faking. In our case, if we wanted to show how an animal was captured, we would take it out of its cage back into the forest and then ‘recapture’ it for the sake of the film. Or if we wanted to show how an animal behaved, we would again take it out into the forest, put it in an appropriate setting with nets around, and then wait until it behaved naturally in the way we wanted it to. This was sometimes tedious work and took a lot of patience, specially when you had to stand in the red hot sun.
On one occasion, I remember, we wanted to film a pouched rat feeding and then, when he couldn’t eat any more, stuffing his cheek pouches full of food for future reference. This gave them the appearance of suffering from an acute attack of mumps. Pouched rats are not the most attractive of animals; they are about the size of a half-grown cat, with large pinkish ears, a mass of quivering whiskers and a long, pinky-brown tail, and their fur is slate grey. We had one called Albert who always gorged as much as he could as soon as his food plate was put in the cage, and then would stuff his cheek pouches full of whatever was left and take it over into the corner where his bed was and bury it. I felt sure that if Albert was taken out into the forest he would repeat this process for us, so when the morning came Albert was kept without his breakfast and then solemnly transported down to the buttress roots of a giant tree. We rigged up the nets, arranged a nice selection of forest fruits on the floor and released Albert.
To our consternation, the cameras were grinding away and Albert was ambling in amongst the fruit, yet he didn’t seem in the slightest bit interested in it. He found a nice little niche in the buttress roots of the tree, curled up and went to sleep. We hauled him out ignominiously and put him back amongst the fruit, and he repeated the whole performance again. Four times we did it; four times Albert took no notice of the fruit whatsoever, although by this time it was long past his breakfast time and he must have been hungry. Then, on the fifth occasion, he suddenly (almost with a start) noticed the fruit. He sniffed at one of them eagerly and then, instead of doing what I’d promised Chris he would do, picked it up daintily in his mouth, retreated to a corner, and squatting on his hind legs, ate it with all the delicacy of a dowager duchess eating an ice cream. It was not at all what we wanted, but at least it provided some material.
On another occasion we wanted to film a potto. These are strange little Teddy-bear-like creatures that are distantly related to the monkeys. They have the most extraordinary hands, the forefinger of which has been reduced to a mere stump to give them an extra grip on the branches of a tree, and they also have the vertebrae on the neck sticking up in a row of little spikes through the skin. The potto’s method of defence, when attacked, is to duck his head between his forelegs. When whatever is attacking him tries to grab him by the neck, it gets a mouthful of these sharp little spines, which acts as a deterrent to any but the most determined predator. We wanted the potto for what is called a ‘matching shot’, to fit in with another sequence that we had filmed the day before. All he had to do was sit on a branch, and then walk along to the end of it. We didn’t demand very much of him. He’d had his supper, so he wasn’t hungry, and we thought that by placing him on a convenient branch we would get the whole scene finished in about five minutes. We found the right sort of branch in the right sort of position, rigged up the lights and the cameras, which took quite some time, and then the potto was brought up and placed on the branch. He immediately ducked his head between his forelegs and went into his defensive position, and there he remained. A quarter of an hour passed, and the lights were getting too hot so that we had to switch them out. Still the potto remained immobile. I could not imagine why he should suddenly be afraid of us, because he would readily accept food from one’s hand, but for some reason or other he seemed terrified of the whole procedure. So we left the lights switched off and squatted there, waiting patiently.
Now a tropical forest at night is for me one of the most beautiful things I know, and this forest was a particularly beautiful spot. In the rainy season the ravine was obviously a foaming torrent of water, but now it was dry and the great boulders were covered with wigs of moss, and all over these flew and crawled hundreds and hundreds of brilliant emerald-green fireflies. Little ghostly drifts of moths would pass by you, and all round were the cries of the various cicadas and other insects, ranging from noises like a buzz-saw to somebody ringing a very, very tiny bell. Absorbed by all this I almost completely forgot the potto and the BBC, until Chris whispered in my ear.
‘I think he’s going to move.’
We got to our action stations, the lights were switched on, the potto raised his head slightly, and then ducked it again between his forelegs. Another quarter of an hour went past and then, suddenly, two things happened simultaneously. Firstly, the potto started to look up, and at that moment Ewart looked at his watch and made what I think must have been the most incongruous remark made in Africa since Stanley met Livingstone.
‘They’ll just be coming out of the pubs in Bristol now,’ he said thoughtfully.
This had an instantaneous effect upon the potto, who, I feel, must have been a Temperance leader for, instead of running along the branch towards the camera, he turned tail and fled in the opposite direction. It took us about half an hour to catch him in the maze of branches. At last we recaptured him and put him back on the branch, and then he behaved beautifully, and we got the bit of film we wanted. But it had taken well over two hours to get a sequence which on the screen only lasted for possibly thirty seconds.
Of course, we also filmed the daily routine of cleaning and feeding the animals, though nobody could possibly describe looking after a collection of animals as routine work. They do their best to irritate and amaze you every day. For instance, we had a very handsome African kingfisher. Well, we couldn’t supply him with his natural food (which consisted of small lizards and snakes and a certain number of grasshoppers and locusts) in sufficient quantities, so we had to teach him to eat meat. But whenever he took a strip of meat he insisted on killing it by banging it on his log vigorously before he would eat it.
As I had warned Long John, there comes a time on every collecting trip when you begin to think that you know it all. This is a moment of great danger, for you never know it all, however hard you try. It is when you start getting pompous and arrogant about your own abilities that you are liable to make a mistake. I made a mistake once by thinking I knew it all, and got bitten by a snake, which wasn’t a pleasant experience. It taught me always to be cautious. But one day a hunter came in, bringing with him a most enchanting baby bird. It was a young White-crested hornbill. Now these birds are predominantly shiny coal-black, but the feathers on their heads are fluffy and pure white so they look as though they are wearing a sort of cotton wool hat. I was delighted with this because it was the only hornbill that we had got so far, and I gave Long John a long lecture on hornbills and their ways. Baby hornbills and baby toucans are usually easy to rear, and I felt convinced that with Tommy, as we called him, it would be a walkover. Shortly after his arrival, we chopped up some nice fruit, put Tommy on the animal table and dangled bits of fruit in front of his nose. He took not the slightest notice of it.
‘He’ll get used to it in time,’ I said, ‘but I suppose to begin with we’d better force feed him.’
We pushed a lump of fruit down Tommy’s throat, which he promptly regurgitated. We pushed another lump farther down, and after some minutes he managed to regurgitate that, too.
‘Perhaps he hasn’t settled down properly,’ I said to Long John. ‘We’ll leave him in his cage for a bit and then return. After all, we don’t know when the hunter got him. His mother may just have fed him and he isn’t hungry.’
So we put him back in his cage. Two or three hours later we got him out again and went through the same laborious process, but every time he regurgitated the fruit. We continued trying to feed him on fruit throughout the day, and he wouldn’t have it at all.
‘I can’t understand it,’ I said to Long John. ‘I really can’t. Most baby hornbills go mad after the first couple of feeds, and you can’t give them enough.’
By the following morning Tommy was beginning to look anything but bright and, although he was obviously hungry, he still refused his fruit.
‘Damn it,’ I said. ‘There’s only one thing for it. I’ll go and look him up in the book. There may be something funny about what they feed on.’
Now I, in my ignorance, was under the impression that all hornbills fed upon things like vegetables, fruit and insects, so they could be called, as it were, omnivorous. But when I looked Tommy up in the book I found that he was one of those very rare hornbills that fed almost exclusively off meat. What we’d been trying to do was stuff a lot of fruit down him which he didn’t like at all – rather like thrusting a raw steak down the throat of a convinced vegetarian. So we got Tommy out of his cage, put him on the table, chopped up a nice selection of meat, and within about thirty seconds he was gulping it down wolfishly. From that moment onwards he never looked back. It taught me a lesson, and I hope it taught Long John one, too.
It’s one thing to look after an animal in a well conducted zoo where you have everything at your command, both from the feeding and the veterinary point of view, but it’s a different kettle of fish when you are sitting five hundred miles from nowhere, with all your animals in little wooden boxes, and you have got to be everything from veterinary surgeon to maintenance man; and of course the animals, as soon as they have accepted captivity, start exhibiting all their eccentricities for your edification. It’s curious the fads and fancies your animals develop. One day they’ll go mad for oranges, for example, so you immediately increase your supply and shower oranges upon them. The next day, if you give them an orange, they look at you as though you had mortally offended them and decide that they would much prefer peanuts. But unless you indulge them, as you would indulge an elderly lady with her pekinese, they will not be happy and they will not thrive.
We had, at one stage, a Scaly Anteater, or Pangolin, brought in to us, which pleased me greatly because in the past, when I had collected in West Africa, I’d never had any success with these curious beasts that look like animated fir cones with tails. This was because they feed principally upon the ants that build their nests in the trees, the ferocious little black tree ants. I had given the question of the pangolins’ diet some thought while I was in England and had decided that, although they would take raw egg and milk and minced meat as a mixture, something was obviously still lacking, and that something must be a trace of formic acid. So on this occasion I had brought a small bottle of formic acid out with me in order to try it, and I made up the mixture for the pangolin every day. I often wondered, as I was doing it, how a TV cook would describe the recipe:
‘Take two tablespoons of powdered milk, darlings; beat it up into a quarter of a pint of water, and when this is of a smooth creamy consistency, add one raw egg and beat briskly until it is thoroughly mixed. Then place into this a handful of finely minced raw meat; stir gently, and finally garnish with a small portion of chopped tree ants’ nest and a drop of formic acid. Serve immediately. You will be delighted with the effect that this recipe will have on your guests, and will, without doubt, be the most popular pangolin party thrower of the season.’
It would, I reflected, be interesting to do a sort of cookery book for the animal collectors; a kind of Larousse Gastronomique dealing with the best way of serving maggots and so on.
By this time we had filmed most of the animals in the collection, and the rolls of film were mounting up, but we still hadn’t found two of the animals that we had specially come to Sierra Leone to get, the Red-and-black and the Black-and-white Colobus monkeys. The hunters would bring us in, monkeys of every other description, and in the end I began to despair.
‘It’s no good,’ I said to Chris. ‘We’ll have to organise a couple of monkey drives and see if we can’t get them that way.’
‘What are monkey drives?’ inquired Chris, puzzled.
‘Well, they do them down on the cocoa plantations,’ I explained. ‘They drive all the monkeys into a certain area, and then they kill them because they raid the cocoa crops and ruin them. They’re paid a bounty of a shilling a head, I think, by the government. I’ll send Long John into Kenema this morning and get him to find out the best areas which they think we can operate in. It should make quite an interesting film sequence, actually.’
So I sent Long John into Kenema and he returned, in due course, telling us he’d got the names of three or four villages where monkey drives were held fairly regularly, but that we would have to go and see the Paramount chief of the area to get his assistance before we could persuade the villagers to organise a monkey drive out of season. We decided to go and see the chief the following day, and organise the monkey drive as rapidly as possible.
Next morning I got up at dawn as usual and wandered out on to the veranda waiting for Sadu to bring the tea. Long John never appeared before the tea; he clung to his bed like a limpet. I was standing, looking out over the misty forest, when I heard some noises in the valley just below the house. I knew it was monkeys because there was that lovely sound as they leap into the leaves, like the crash of surf on a rocky shore. But I couldn’t see, at first, exactly what kind of monkeys they were. They were heading for a big and rather beautiful tree that grew a couple of hundred yards from the veranda just below us. It had a sort of greeny-grey trunk, the leaves were a very vivid green, and it was covered, at this time of year, with bright cerise-pink seed pods about six inches long. There was another crash and rustle amongst the leaves. Then silence for a moment. And then, suddenly, it seemed as though the whole tree had burst into bloom, a bloom of monkeys. They were Red-and-black Colobus, and they were the most breathtaking sight. They had rich, shining, chestnut-red and coal-black fur, and in the morning sun they gleamed as though they had been burnished; they were magnificent. There must have been a dozen or so with a couple of babies, and it amused me the way the babies would use their parents’ tails or the branches of the tree quite indiscriminately, as a means of hoicking themselves from one place to another. To my surprise, they were not feeding on the seed pods but were stuffing themselves with vast quantities of young leaves and shoots of the tree. They were, without doubt, some of the most beautiful monkeys I’d ever seen, and I was determined that we were going to add a few to our collection, come what might. They stayed in the tree, feeding quietly and uttering little cries to each other, until Sadu suddenly arrived on the veranda with a great rattling tray of teacups. When I looked back at the tree they had all disappeared. As I sat sipping my tea, I remembered a stupid woman I’d met at a cocktail party in Freetown, who’d said, ‘I cannot understand why you’re going up country, Mr Durrell. There’s absolutely nothing to do or see there.’ I wish she could have seen those Colobus.
Later that day the team and I set off to interview the Paramount chief and elders of an area quite close to our village, leaving Long John behind to look after the animals. The Paramount chief and elders were having a meeting of some sort and we had to wait until this was over before we could have an audience. The chief himself was quite a young man and very handsome, dressed in plain white robes and a multicoloured skullcap, whereas most of the other elders were wearing flamboyant robes of different colours. I described, through an interpreter, why we’d come to Sierra Leone and, in particular, that we wanted to film, and catch alive, the two species of Colobus monkey. But I had to keep stressing the ‘catch alive’ part, because they were so used to killing the monkeys that they couldn’t quite grasp the fact that we wanted them alive and unhurt. I finally convinced the elders and the chief of what we wanted, and I hoped that they would tell the various villages and put the message across in no uncertain terms. Both the chief and the elders were delighted. They had such mobile, such beautiful faces. Their great black eyes were as cold and calculating as any street vendor in Petticoat Lane, but they could break into life at the slightest joke, when they’d glow and flash with an animation that is, by and large, totally lacking in a European. The chief said to us that, if we wanted merely to film the various types of monkeys, he thought one of the best places was a cocoa plantation not far from the village. There, he said, there were plenty of monkeys of all different kinds. But it wasn’t a good place to hold a monkey drive. We’d have to go to a village some way away for that. Since we were there, however, we thought we’d take a look at this cocoa plantation.
As we drove along to it, I gave some thought to the monkey situation in Sierra Leone. Every year, between two and three thousand monkeys are killed in monkey drives. This is due to the fact that the monkeys, unfortunately, have not been told about the importance of the cocoa crop to Sierra Leone’s economy, and so they pour into the cocoa plantations and do a great deal of real damage; therefore, of course, they have to be controlled. It is unfortunate, however, that every monkey suffers from this. When they organise a monkey drive in Sierra Leone, the participants are paid a bounty for the head of each monkey and every species is indiscriminately killed. This includes the two species of Colobus that we were after, in spite of the fact that these were, theoretically, protected by law. Here you had the situation, and a typical one, where one man was being hanged for another man’s crimes, because the Colobus, in fact, does no damage to the cocoa plantations at all. It was the same situation that I had seen all over the world and which always sickens me; governments ready to pay out millions of pounds for airy fairy schemes, but not a penny towards animal conservation. So you get the situation where three thousand monkeys are slaughtered per annum, half of which have committed no crime against the cocoa crop and which could, in fact, be a valuable tourist asset.
As soon as we arrived at the cocoa plantation I could see why monkey drives were necessary. On all sides there were large troops of them feeding in the young cocoa trees. But, as I had suspected, they were mainly Spot-nosed and Diana monkeys; not a single Colobus amongst them. When you saw the nurseries of young cocoa trees all laid out in regimented rows, you could quite see that a cocoa tree two or three years old could be completely stripped by a rowdy troop of monkeys in about ten minutes.
Chris and the others had set up the cameras and were filming the Spot-nosed and Diana monkeys in the trees, so I walked to the outskirts of the plantation and soon found myself in the forest. There’s no real demarcation line but eventually when you can no longer see any cocoa trees, only indigenous forest and the giant rustling bamboos spout up like solidified fountains, you realise that you are outside the plantation. Walking through these bamboos was a strange experience, for in the slightest breeze their great trunks – which are as thick as a man’s thigh – would creak and groan musically. It must have sounded like that rounding the Horn in an old sailing ship in a high wind. I was looking for Colobus monkeys, but the trouble is that in the tropics you are inclined to forget your objective because every step of the way is so filled with interest. You see a flower that you’ve never seen before, or a brilliantly coloured fungus or moth, or an equally brilliantly coloured tree frog or grasshopper. The tropics have been designed like a flamboyant Hollywood epic to make you realise how tiny and insignificant you really are, and how complex and beautiful the world is that you live in.
I walked quietly through the forest, pausing now and then to examine something that caught my eye and, suddenly, to my delight, I achieved my objective. There was a rustling crash ahead of me in the trees and, moving quietly towards it, I found myself just below a group of Black-and-white Colobus. It was quite a small group, consisting of about six individuals, and one of the females was carrying twins, which was very unusual. They were feeding quietly among the branches some fifty feet above me, and although they knew I was there they showed no fear at all. Looking at them through my field glasses I discovered that they were not nearly as colourful as the Red-and-black Colobus, but with their jet-black fur and snow-white tails, and a picture-frame of white fur round their faces, they had all the quiet dignity of some strange religious order. Eventually, when they had fed enough in that tree, they moved off. Now, I’d thought that the Red-and-black Colobus were pretty agile in the trees, but the Black-and-white ones had them beaten hands down. Without apparently even thinking, they would hurl themselves from the top of a one-hundred-and-fifty foot tree and crash into the branches below with a grace and precision that would make Billy Smart burst into tears of joy. I walked back to the plantation, where I found Chris quite exuberant for once since they’d got some excellent shots of Diana monkeys and Spot-nosed monkeys feeding. Then we packed up our gear and made our way back to the village.
It was market day, and I love African markets so much that we stopped and wandered about a bit. Everyone was so busy and so predatory, their beautiful eyes glowing, their teeth shining, everyone in their Sunday best – the most vivid colouring. Piles of multicoloured fruit and vegetables, and long rows of highly-coloured bundles of cloth: it was just like walking through a rainbow. There was nothing, it seemed, that you could not buy, from dried frogs neatly skewered on slivers of bamboo, to sandals made out of old motor car tyres. As we were wandering about I was suddenly approached by a slim young man wearing a battered solar topee, white singlet and khaki shorts. He raised his topee politely and said, ‘Are you Mr Dullell, sir?’ in such a shrill squeaky voice that for a moment – in spite of his garb – I thought he was a woman.
I admitted that that was who I was.
‘The chief has sent me, sir,’ he said. ‘I am Mohammed and the chief has told me that you want to catch monkeys alive. Now I, sir, can organise it for you.’
‘Thank you very much,’ I said, cautiously, because he didn’t look to me the sort of man who could organise a monkey drive. Nevertheless, if the chief had sent him to me, he must know what he was doing.
‘When would you like to do a monkey drive, Mr Dullell?’ he went on.
‘As soon as possible. The monkeys I want to catch particularly are the Colobus – the Black-and-white and the Red-and-black. You know them?’
‘Yes, sir, I know them,’ he said. ‘There are plenty here, plenty.’
‘How, actually, do you do these monkey drives?’ I inquired.
‘Well, sir,’ he said. ‘First we find the monkeys, very early in the morning, and then we drive them, we drive them, we shout, we drive them, and we shout more, and then we drive them, until we get them to the right spot. Then we cut down all the trees all round. Then we must build, at the bottom of the tree in which the monkeys are, a coop.’
‘A coop? What on earth’s a coop?’
‘We pile all the branches on the ground at the foot of the tree – a great big pile, you understand – and then the monkeys come down the tree and they go into the coop, and you catch them.’
It sounded highly unlikely to me, but I could tell, from the seriousness of his face, that he meant what he was saying.
‘When could we organise a drive?’ I asked.
‘The day after tomorrow I can do it.’
‘Fine,’ I said. And we want to be there when you actually start, so that we can film everything. You understand? So you mustn’t start without us.’
‘No, sir.’
‘We’ll be there about nine o’clock.’
‘Oooohhh . . . that’s very late, sir,’ he said.
‘You see, we can’t film before then because there’s no light,’ I explained.
‘Well . . . if we get the monkeys near the proper tree, can you film from then?’ he asked me anxiously.
‘Yes . . . if there’s enough light,’ I said. ‘If it’s about nine o’clock or nine-thirty. Then there’ll be enough light for us to film.’
He thought about this for a bit.
‘All right, sir,’ he said. ‘You come to the village at nine o’clock, and I’ll have the monkeys ready there for you.’
‘All right. Thank you very much.’
‘Don’t mention it, sir,’ he said, and put on his solar topee and strutted off through the crowded market place.
So, two days later, we rose very early. All the camera equipment and the sound recording equipment was carefully checked and we set off for the village where the monkey drive was to take place. When we arrived we were led along a narrow path through a banana plantation, and then some distance into the forest. Gradually, an enormous uproar made itself heard from somewhere ahead of us, and eventually we came to the place where they had got the monkeys. My first impression was that there was a hell of a lot of noise and confusion, and about three hundred Africans hacking down the undergrowth in all directions, with Mohammed strutting about among them shrieking, at the top of his voice, instructions which apparently nobody obeyed. They had succeeded in getting two troops of Colobus into one enormous tree, and they were busy cutting down all the undergrowth that could possibly form escape routes for them. As they gradually sealed off the escape routes, the monkeys began to panic. One or two of them leapt out of the huge tree, hurtling perhaps one hundred and fifty feet down into the top of a palm tree, and escaping; whereupon all the Africans would yell in unison and redouble their efforts.
I hate felling trees at the best of times, and I hated to see some of these trees go crashing down, but I knew that this area was going to be cleared for a cocoa plantation anyway, so the trees would have had to come down in the end. Finally, the last big tree that could have formed an escape route crashed into the undergrowth, and then all that was left were several palm trees from which they had to cut away the great fronds. As each frond was severed and fell to the ground it made the most wonderful whispering, rustling sound, like somebody curtseying in a stiffly starched crinoline.
By now the efforts of my noble band of hunters had felled a considerable area of forest round the main tree, and I waited expectantly for the next move – which consisted of the African equivalent of a tea break. Some of them cut lengths of a certain creeper which is hollow and contains quite a large quantity of water inside – it’s a sort of living well – and these they held up to their mouths and sucked the water from them. They were hot and thirsty and dripping with sweat and they all argued, as they drank from the creepers, about the best way to go about the following stage of the operation.
The next thing, Mohammed informed me in his piping voice, was to build the coop. So there was further hacking and sawing and great branches and palm fronds were piled in a conical mass round the base of the tree. This we surrounded with nets. Having done this, the Africans all went into the surrounding undergrowth and cut themselves long forked sticks. These were necessary because, when the monkeys finally came down into the coop and then out of the coop into the nets, one had to have a forked stick to pin the net down over them so that one could get a grip on their head and their tail.
I had been keeping a careful watch on the top of the tree in which the monkeys were congregated, but the foliage was so thick that I couldn’t tell exactly how many were up there, although I knew I had the two species of Colobus we wanted. Mohammed told me that everything was now in readiness and, in a spirit of bonhomie rather than conviction, I ordered the cages to be carried up to the front line. I wasn’t at all sure that their methods were going to be proved right, but there was just a chance that we might catch the Colobus and I wanted to be prepared. Then two men produced, from God knows where, an enormous and very ancient saw which had practically no teeth at all, and they climbed over the nets, up the coop to the trunk of the great tree, and started to saw at it.
‘What,’ I enquired of Mohammed, ‘are they trying to do?’
‘If the monkey thinks that we are cutting down the tree, sir, he go come down to the coop, and then we catch him,’ he explained, wiping the perspiration from his brow.
I trained my field glasses on the top of the tree. The sawing didn’t appear to be having any effect upon the monkeys. The tree was of an enormous girth and it was quite obvious that it would take the men approximately six months to get through it with that antiquated saw. After half an hour or so I was convinced that their efforts were going to be in vain. I called Mohammed over.
‘Yessir,’ he said, coming at a run and saluting smartly.
‘Look, Mohammed, I don’t think we are going to do it this way,’ I said. ‘The monkeys don’t seem to be a bit disturbed by the sawing, and it’s going to take them ages to get through that tree. Why don’t we try something else?’
‘Yessir. What else, sir?’ he asked.
‘If you clear a small area at the base of the tree,’ I said, ‘so that the actual coop itself doesn’t catch fire, and you light a small fire there and put plenty, plenty, plenty of green leaves on it, then the smoke will go up into the tree and maybe this will make the monkeys come down.’
‘All right, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ll try.’
He went off, screaming at the top of his voice like a seagull, and presently a small area had been cleared at the base of the tree and the fire had been lit. I watched the smoke from it coil lazily up, sneaking its way round the trunk of the giant tree, climbing higher and higher. And then I looked to see what the effect on the monkeys was going to be. As they smelt the first few wisps of smoke, the Colobus I could see moved about a bit anxiously, but otherwise did not seem unduly perturbed. But presently, when more green leaves had been piled on the fire, and the smoke grew thicker and thicker and thicker, they began running to and fro among the branches.
Now, in strange contrast to the extraordinary cacophony that had been going on when the undergrowth had been cleared, the circle of some three hundred Africans had fallen absolutely silent and were standing in a ring round the net, their forked sticks at the ready. I was just about to tell Mohammed to impress upon the Africans not all to rush at the first monkey that came down – if, indeed, it did come down – thus leaving practically the whole net unguarded, when a Black-and-white Colobus leapt from the top of the tree, landed gracefully on the coop and, to my astonishment, disappeared inside it. There was a sort of ‘Aaahhh’ from the Africans, rather like a football crowd when a goal has been scored. There was a long pause and then, quite suddenly, the Colobus popped up and ran straight into the net. As I had predicted, most of the Africans rushed forward eagerly with their forked sticks.
‘Tell them to get back into line . . . to get back into line!’ I shouted to Mohammed.
He, screeching orders, drove the men back into line, leaving only two of them to deal with the Colobus. They pinned it down successfully under the net, and I ran forward to look at it. By this time one man had got a good grip on the back of its neck and a firm hold on the base of its tail, and was lifting it out of the net. It was a female, half-grown, I judged, and in beautiful condition. Although they look so sombre and so tractable, these monkeys can, in fact, give you a wicked bite, and they have to be handled with great care. We carried her over to one of the cages, put her in and shut the door on her, and then covered the cage with palm leaves so that she would feel more secure in the dark. Then, as I turned back from doing this, the tree suddenly seemed to rain monkeys. They crashed down on to the coop, one after the other, so fast that I couldn’t count them, and by the time they were on the coop and I tried to count them there, they’d disappeared inside the branches.
Now there was complete pandemonium. Monkeys were appearing and diving into the net one after the other, and the Africans were pinning them down with their forked sticks and shouting and screaming. The confusion was indescribable. I could do nothing, except stand by the cages and rapidly try to sex and count the monkeys as the Africans brought them to me.
It is amazing, looking back on it, how many things your mind has to think of at once. As each pair of Africans came towards me, carrying a struggling monkey, I would wonder whether they were handling it too roughly or holding it too tightly. Then I’d got to check what sort of condition it was in. If it was an adult, and the teeth were well worn, it meant it was a fairly old specimen; in which case, how well would it settle down in captivity? I had to watch carefully while they put them into the cages because they were tending to slam the doors and catch the monkeys’ tails in them. Then I’d be wondering, in the back of my mind, how much shock the animal had suffered? Was it cool enough? Would it survive the journey back to the beef mines? And if I got it back there, how would it settle down? It was curious that, in spite of the fact that the capture must have frightened the monkeys considerably, they were most of them accepting food from my hand within a couple of hours of capture.
When the final monkey had been caged, we examined the coop carefully to make sure that there were no more lurking inside the branches. At last I could go and examine my captives individually, and count them. All I knew, up to that point, was that we had been incredibly lucky to catch both the Red-and-black and the Black-and-white in one fell swoop. When I examined the cages I found that we had caught, in fact, ten Red-and-black Colobus and seven Black-and-white, of varying ages and sizes and sexes, which was the important thing. Each cage, carefully covered with palm leaves, had to be lashed to a pole and we set off in a troop through the forest, the men carrying the swaying cages between them in a long line, chanting a gay and triumphant song.
I felt very exultant. After all the weeks of waiting, and all the sweat and labour we’d put into the trip, we’d achieved our final objective, we’d caught our Colobus. But this was only the first stage of the game, I reflected, as the cages were packed into the back of our giant Land Rover, and we drove slowly over the bumpy road back to the beef mines. Now came the crucial test: could we keep them?
