Long John set off to get the wood in Kenema, and some other supplies we needed, while I finished cleaning and feeding the animals and awaited the arrival of the BBC team. They arrived simultaneously with Long John, for they had met up in Kenema. Long John had obviously filled them full of stories of what a ghastly place we were living in, for when their Land Rover drew up and Chris got out of it he was wearing an expression of disbelief on his face.
‘Lucky devil! I see you’ve fallen on your feet again,’ he said, grinning, as he came towards me.
‘Well, it’s not bad. It’s a modest little place,’ I said, ‘but it’s got all mod. con. and that sort of thing. And after all, there’s plenty of jungle at the back there that we can film in.’
‘Lucky devil!’ he repeated.
Chris is a man of about medium height, with a very prominent nose, the end of which looks as though, at some time or other, it had been chopped off. He has heavy-lidded, green eyes, which he tends to hood like a hawk when he is thinking, and in moments of crisis he retreats behind his nose like a camel. He introduced me to the other two members of the team. There was Howard, who was short and stocky with dark curly hair, and enormous horn-rimmed spectacles which made him look like a benevolent owl – and Ewart, the cameraman, who was tall, blond and rather Scandinavian looking. We all sat down and I asked Sadu to bring us some beer.
‘How did you find this place?’ asked Chris.
‘Pure chance,’ I said. ‘The whole place is deserted; it’s like a sort of village Marie Celeste. But we’ve got all the necessities of life. Bathrooms in both the houses – which work, and the lavatories work, too, which is even more important. And we’ve got a fridge so we can have cold drinks and keep food. And we’ve also got electricity, which would be rather useful, I thought, for charging the batteries for the cameras and so forth. Also, just down the end of the road there, there’s a swimming pool, if you boys are feeling energetic.’
‘Good God,’ said Chris. ‘It’s incredible!’
‘It is. It’s the most fabulous base camp I’ve ever had in all my days of collecting. I’ve never had such luxury.’
‘Well,’ said Chris, raising his glass. ‘Let’s drink to the chrome mines.’
‘They’re not called the chrome mines any more,’ said Long John. ‘They’re called the beef mines.’
And from then onwards that is exactly what we called them.
When we’d finished our drinks I took them down to show them their living quarters. As we passed the lavatory I waved at it in an airy fashion.
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘don’t go and unbolt that door, will you? There’re a couple of leopards in there.’
‘Leopards?’ said Howard, his eyes growing wide behind his spectacles. ‘You mean . . . you mean . . . leopards?’
‘Yes. You know, those spotted things,’ I said. ‘We’ve got them locked in there until we’ve got a suitable cage ready for them.’
‘You sure they can’t get out?’ said Howard, in trepidation. ‘No, no. I don’t think so for a moment,’ I said. ‘Anyway, they’re quite young and tame.’
After lunch, Ewart, Howard and Chris went down to their house to unpack and check the recording and photographic gear, to make sure that no damage had been done to it over the rough roads. Long John was busy giving milk feeds to all the baby animals, and I was writing a letter. Suddenly, there were shouts of ‘Gerry! Gerry!’ and a distraught-looking Howard came panting up the hillside, his spectacles all misted over with emotion.
‘Gerry!’ he called. ‘Come quick! Come quick! The leopards have got out!’
‘Dear God!’ I said, and leapt to my feet.
Long John dropped what he was doing instantly, and arming ourselves with sticks, we went down the hill after Howard’s palpitating figure.
‘Where are they?’ I inquired.
‘Well, they were sitting on the roof of the lavatory when I left. Chris and Ewart were standing guard.’
‘God save us,’ I said. ‘If they get into this forest, we’ll never catch them again.’
When we got down there we found Chris and Ewart, armed with sticks and looking extremely apprehensive, standing at a discreet distance from the lavatory, on the top of which was perched Gerda, snarling in a gentle sort of way to herself. But there was no sign of Lokai.
‘Where’s Lokai gone?’ I asked.
‘He jumped down a minute ago. I couldn’t stop him,’ said Chris apologetically. ‘He’s gone off in that direction.’
He pointed down the hill towards the swimming-pool.
‘John,’ I said, ‘you handle Gerda. She likes you better than me. But for God’s sake don’t do anything silly. See if you can get her down . . . or get up to her and get a rope through her collar. Chris, you come with me and we’ll look for Lokai.’
Chris and I went down the hill and searched and searched, but I really thought that Lokai had turned off into the thick forest that lay behind us, and that we would never see him again. Then, suddenly, we spotted him lying placidly under a small orange tree. Slowly I approached him, crooning sweet nothings, and he purred at me in a friendly sort of way. With somewhat tremulous hands I slipped the rope through his collar and tied it securely. Then I handed the end of the rope to Chris.
‘Here. You wait here with him,’ I said. ‘I must go back and see how Long John’s getting on with Gerda.’
‘What do I do if he moves?’ called Chris plaintively to me as I ran back up the hill.
‘Follow him,’ I shouted back. ‘But don’t try to stop him.’
When I got back to the lavatory, Ewart and Howard were still dithering in the background with their sticks, while Long John had found a box and had climbed up and managed to get the rope through Gerda’s collar. So at least we knew she was secure from that point of view. But for some reason she seemed in a bad mood, and disinclined to come down from the roof of the lavatory. In the end we had to get a long pole and push her gently towards the edge, until she had to leap to the ground, where she turned and snarled at Long John as though he were responsible and made a vague patting motion with her paw. Now, although these leopard cubs were only six months old, it must be remembered that they were lethal animals, and a playful swipe from one of their paws could easily take away half your face. So it was with great circumspection that we urged Gerda to go back into the lavatory. Once we’d got her back inside, Long John sat with her and talked to her and stroked her, and she seemed to calm down considerably. I then went back down the hillside to find Chris, looking like a forlorn stork, holding on to the rope from the other end of which Lokai was regarding him with a somewhat baleful stare. I took the rope away from Chris and gently pulled Lokai to his feet.
‘Come on, Lokai,’ I said. ‘Come on . . . Nice food . . . Gerda’s waiting for you. Come on . . . lovely lavatory. Come on . . .’
And by this means, slowly, with many pauses to smell at things and look around and admire the view, we managed to get Lokai back to the lavatory.
In the meantime, the carpenter had been alerted and had brought planks which he nailed round the gap in the roof so that there could be no repetition of this escape. We all went back up to the house and had a beer to soothe our shattered nerves.
‘I hope that sort of thing doesn’t happen every day,’ said Ewart.
‘Well, not every day,’ I said. ‘On an average, about three or four times a week, you know. But then, after all, that’s what you’re out here to film, isn’t it?’
‘You can’t keep them in there indefinitely,’ said Chris. ‘What are you going to do with them?’
‘The carpenter’s in the process of building a cage for them now. It should be ready by tonight, and then we’ve got to get them into it. That’s going to be another jolly little lark.’
‘Good lord! What a wonderful film sequence that’ll make,’ said
Chris.
‘Well, he won’t have finished the cage till after dark.’
‘That’s all right.’ said Ewart. ‘We can rig up the lights.’
‘As long as the lights don’t frighten them,’ I said. ‘If they start getting too nervous, I’m afraid you’ll have to stop the whole operation and switch them off. I’m not risking my neck for the BBC.’
‘Yes, all right,’ said Chris. ‘I promise that.’
So the rest of the afternoon was spent bringing up lights while the carpenter put the finishing touches to the handsome cage he’d made for the two leopards. By the time he’d finished it was quite dark, and we switched on the lights experimentally. They were very powerful indeed and lit up the whole area with a great glare that I felt was not going to be the most soothing thing that a leopard had ever seen. Eventually, when everything was ready, Long John and I, armed with platefuls of dog food and our ropes and sticks, went down to fetch the leopards up the hill. First we pushed the food in and then, when they’d finished it, we went in and talked to them soothingly, told them they were going to be film stars, put the ropes through their collars, and led them out. Gradually we moved up the hill, letting them make the pace. They loved to stop and stare, and their ears would twitch and you could see their whiskers come out almost as though they were antennae. Slowly we moved on and came over the brow of the hill and into the glare of the searchlight.
One moment Long John was with me, the next he wasn’t. He was off, tearing down the hillside, with Gerda dragging him along as though he had been a puppet. There was nothing I could do because I was attached firmly to Lokai, and he didn’t seem to have the same feelings about the searchlight as Gerda did. I led him slowly up and towards the cage. He’d never seen a cage before, so he was naturally a little suspicious. I allowed him to walk round and sniff it, and then I put a plate of dog food inside and urged him in. I got him half-way through the door when he suddenly decided that this was a dastardly trick I was playing on him and tried to back out. But luckily he had an ample behind and with a quick push I managed to get him in and slam the door. Then, when he was eating, I got the rope detached from his collar and out of the cage. By this time a panting Long John had appeared on the horizon dragging a reluctant Gerda with him. She was in a filthy temper and we now had the problem of trying to get one leopard in a bad temper into a cage containing another leopard who showed every desire, having finished his food, of wanting to come out again. It took us some time to accomplish this, but at last we managed it, safely slammed the door on both of them and heaved heartfelt sighs of relief. From behind the searchlight came Chris’s voice.
‘That was a marvellous sequence,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘And it went off so smoothly. I don’t know what you were all so worried about.’
Long John and I, drenched in sweat, covered with scratches that had been playfully delivered by the leopards en route , stared at each other.
‘What I say is,’ said Long John, with conviction, ‘blast the BBC.’
‘Motion carried,’ I said.
6. Catch Me a Colobus
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 c
alled 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.