‘How they brought the moonshine uwarie from Ghent to Aix,’ said Bob, handing me a bottle of beer. ‘I really began to think you wouldn’t make it. The captain was getting quite shirty. I think he thought I was being disrespectful to his uniform when I told him you had gone back for an uwarie.’
I unpacked the carpentry tools, and during our trip up the river I converted the box into a cage for the opossum. When it was ready I had the job of untying the string from around its waist. It opened its mouth and hissed at me in the usual friendly opossum manner, but I got it by the scruff of the neck and untied the string. While I was doing so I noticed that the skin of its belly, between the hind legs, was distended into a long sausage-shaped swelling and I thought that the noose round its waist might have damaged it internally. The real reason for this protuberance did not occur to me until later, when I examined it, and my prying fingers disclosed a long slit in the swelling, and, on parting the skin, I found myself looking into a pouch full of quivering pink babies. The opossum was furious at my violating the privacy of her nursery and gave a loud, tinny screech of rage. When I had shown the babies to Bob and counted them (there were three, each half as long as my little finger) I put the apoplectic mother in her cage. She immediately sat up on her hind legs and examined her pouch with great care, combing the fur straight that I had disarranged and grumbling to herself. Then she ate a banana and curled up and went to sleep.
I was immensely thrilled with my opossum family, and talked of nothing else all the way back to Georgetown. When we arrived we showed our collection to the excited Smith. I saved the opossums until last, as I felt sure he would be as thrilled with them as I was. I displayed them with great pride and complacency, but to my surprise Smith gave them a look of acute distaste.
‘What’s the matter with them?’ I asked, rather nettled. ‘They’re lovely little animals, and I had a devil of a job getting, them back here.’
Smith led me to a tier of five cages.
‘I’ve got a pair of moonshines in each of these cages,’ he said lugubriously. ‘I’ve had to stop buying them. They’re as common as dirt round here.’
I thought of the price I had paid for my opossum and the race I had run on her behalf. I sighed.
‘Oh, well,’ I said philosophically, ‘they might have been rare, and then I would have kicked myself for not getting any.’
4. Big Fish and Turtle Eggs
The southernmost area of Guiana is an oblong wedge of country bordered on two sides by the vast forests of Brazil and on the remaining side by the equally dense forests of Surinam. It is within these 40,000-odd square miles of country that you find the savannah lands of Guiana, the forest giving way to a rolling grassland covered with a scattering of orchard bush. One of the most important of these grassland areas is the Rupununi savannah, about five thousand square miles in size, and it was there that Bob and I decided to go on our return from Adventure, for the grass-lands had many species of animal that were not found in the forested regions.
Our departure for the Rupununi was altogether too hurried. I had decided that we would stay, if we could, with one Tiny McTurk who had a ranch at Karanambo in the middle of the savannah. So we went down to the offices of the Guiana Airways to find out about planes, for flying is the only really practical way of reaching the interior in Guiana; if you travelled overland or by canoe it would take you weeks to reach your destination, and, fascinating though such a journey might be, we had not the time. We found, to our consternation, that there was only one plane a fortnight calling at Karanambo, and that plane was due to leave on the morrow, which left us exactly twenty-four hours in which to pack, contact McTurk, and do a host of other things before we left. We purchased our tickets and spent a hectic day trying to do everything. I tried to contact McTurk to let him know that we were coming, but I could not get through. The rest of the day we spent trying to pack the essentials and yet keep the weight of our luggage below that allowed by the Airways. Some helpful people, who should have known better, told me that I need take only the barest essentials to the Rupununi with me; I was assured that there was a store at Karanambo at which 1 would be able to purchase such necessary things as nails, wire-netting and the vital supplies of boxes to make cages from. Innocently I believed them and cut my luggage down to almost nothing.
Our fellow passengers were an odd assortment: there was a young English padre and his wife, accompanied by an enormous dog of doubtful ancestry and even more doubtful temper; there was a young Amerindian boy who spent his time smiling shyly at everyone; there was a fat East Indian and his wife. We all unloaded our baggage at the airfield and sat about mournfully, waiting for orders to board the plane. Bob was feeling very unwell, and was not really looking forward to the flight. During the drive from Georgetown to the airfield over bumpy roads his face had grown progressively whiter. Now he leaned his head on his knees and groaned gently to himself. Soon we were told to board the plane, so we scrambled on and took our places in the little bucket seats along the sides, while the padre’s dog lay over most of the floor. The plane doors were closed, and then the whole structure began to shudder, the roar of the engines drowning speech. Bob gave me a mute look and sat back and closed his eyes. The pilot seemed determined to wake the dead in his attempts to ensure that the engine was properly warmed up; the noise rose to a ghastly screech, and the whole plane, though stationary, dithered and vibrated until I was sure there was not a nut or a screw in its body that had not been loosened. Then we taxied over what seemed like miles of fairway and came to a stop; again the engine was revved-up to that dreadful witch-like screech, and again we shuddered and trembled, feeling rather as a molar must feel when attacked by a dentist’s drill. Bob’s face was now a beautiful shade of ivory yellow. The plane ran forward once again, and then we were airborne; we circled once over the air strip and headed eastwards.
Below us the forest started to unfold in a thousand different shades of green, looking from this height as tight and curly as a rug of green astrakhan. Here and there a river coiled, glinting through the forest, and occasionally the carpet of trees was broken by a sand reef, white and dazzling in the sun. Soon our view was obscured by a bank of clouds, and hardly had we flown through that when we dived into another. It was just about then that the air pockets began; suddenly the plane seemed to drop hundreds of feet like a stone, and your stomach was left miles behind. Bob’s face turned a delicate jade green. The dog sat up and placed a large wet muzzle in his lap, expecting, no doubt, sympathy and compassion; Bob pushed it away without even opening his eyes. The Amerindian boy gave up smiling at everyone; he placed a large handkerchief over his face and slouched forlornly in his seat.
The young East Indian who acted as loader, unloader, and passenger assistant was reclining at ease on a pile of mailsacks, reading a paper. Now he lit a cigarette and started blowing clouds of pungent, evil-smelling smoke down towards us. The padre’s wife was trying to conduct a conversation with Bob more, I think, to keep her mind off the air pockets than from any motives of sociability.
‘Are you going to Karanambo or to Boa Vista?’
‘Karanambo.’
‘Oh? Are you staying in the Rupununi long?’
‘Only a fortnight. We’re collecting animals.’
‘Of course, now I know who you are! Your photos were in the Chronicle last week, weren’t they, holding some sort of snake?’
This was a sore point with Bob, so he only smiled faintly. Then the plane plunged earthwards again, and he suddenly sat upright and cast an imploring look at the unloader. This man seemed to have developed through long practice a sort of telepathic communication with his passengers, for without saying a word he got off the mailbags and produced from somewhere a large and rusty tin, which he presented to Bob with a courteous gesture. Bob buried his face in it and stayed there. Such a powerful thing is auto-suggestion that the padre’s wife shortly followed his example, f
ollowed in quick succession by all the other passengers, with the exception of the padre and myself.
Peering out of the plane window I saw that the forest was breaking up into clumps of trees, separated by patches of grass; soon we were flying over savannah proper, and the forest gave way to miles and miles of undulating grassland with a thin scattering of shrubs and an occasional lake tucked away in a hollow. The plane circled lower and lower over an area of grassland that seemed a trifle more level than the rest, and it became apparent that we were going to land.
‘It looks as though we’ve arrived,’ I remarked to Bob.
He reluctantly withdrew his head from the tin and glanced quickly out of the window.
‘Don’t be silly, they can’t land here.’
As he said it the plane bumped on to the grass and slowly slackened speed until we came to a standstill. The engine gave one or two despairing coughs and was silent. The unloader threw open the doors, and a warm, sweet-smelling breeze floated in to us, and a beautiful and complete silence seemed to envelop everything. A small group of Amer-indians looking, against that background of empty savannah, like a tribe of Mongolians on the steppes of central Asia, surrounded the plane. They seemed to be the only living things for two hundred miles. The savannah stretched away all round us, miles of undulating grass turning silver here and there where the breeze ruffled it; the only sign of habitation was a curious structure some hundred yards away, a sort of thatched roof raised up on poles, with no walls. The shade under this rooflooked inviting, so we went across and sat down.
Are you sure this is Karanambo?’ asked Bob.
‘That’s what the unloader says.’
‘It doesn’t seem to be exactly overpopulated,’ said Bob, eyeing the small crowd of Amerindians.
Some half a mile to our right the savannah gave place to a ridge of dusty green woodland, and out of this wood there suddenly appeared some sort of vehicle, bouncing and bucking across the grass towards us, a great cloud of red dust behind it. It drew up near the hut in which we were sitting, and a lean sunburnt man hoisted himself to the ground and ambled forward.
‘I’m McTurk,’ he said laconically, holding out his hand.
I apologised for arriving unheralded, but McTurk explained that he had already heard a rumour that we were coming, so he had been prepared.
‘This all your luggage?’ he inquired, eyeing our modest pile with suspicion.
I explained that we had to travel light.
‘Expected you to be loaded down with nets and ropes and things,’ was McTurk’s only comment.
McTurk, having collected his own mail and goods from the plane, loaded our stuff into the trailer of the jeep, and then we shot off across the savannah at an incredible speed. He steered along the red earth tracks between great tussocks of grass, potholes, and cracks, swerving and turning like a hawking swallow, while the trailer bounced and bucked behind like a tin can tied to the tail of a chunky little dog. The little Amerindian boys in the trailer laughed and chattered, clutching the sides fiercely to prevent themselves being thrown out into the grass. We roared off the grass and into the woodland, dodging between the trees along the tortuous track. Then we switchbacked across another patch of grassland, zigzagged through another wood and came out into the clearing in which stood McTurk’s house. Hens fled before our front wheels, and a group of dogs rushed forward barking madly as we drew up in front of the house. Mrs McTurk, slim and dark, dressed very sensibly in blue jeans, came forward to greet us.
McTurk’s house was one of the most unorthodox and delightful residences I have ever seen. It was square in shape, built out of red mud bricks, and the whole thing was sheltered under one huge conical thatched roof, which gave the place the appearance of a curious tropical beehive. As there were no ceilings to any of the rooms you could look up and see the point of the thatch towering some fifty feet above you, and, by mounting on a chair, you could look over the top of the wall into the next room. The main living room went even further than this, for only the two inside walls were complete: the outside walls ended some two feet from the ground, so while sitting at a meal you could enjoy an uninterrupted view over the compound outside, filled with rows of fruit trees, and the woodland that sloped down towards the river. The main furniture of this living room consisted of a radio-telephone apparatus, an enormous table, a number of deep hammocks hung at strategic points and one or two chairs. The walls were festooned with a weird variety of weapons: bows and arrows, blowpipes, shotguns and rifles, spears, and curious feather head-dresses, interspersed with bunches of maize hung up to dry.
We ate lunch in this fascinating room, and during the course of the meal we learned something that caused me acute anguish: there was no store at Karanambo, and there never had been. Moreover, McTurk had no boxes or wood suitable for crating up any animals we caught. McTurk seemed vastly amused that anyone in Georgetown should be silly enough to tell me that there was a store in Karanambo, and as I grew more and more depressed he became more and more amused.
‘Wondered why you hadn’t brought any nets and things,’ he said. ‘When I heard animal collectors were coming I thought you’d be loaded down with traps and ropes and things.’
When we had finished the meal, McTurk suggested, to lighten our gloom, that we might like to accompany him on a fishing trip he was making down the river. It would give us a chance to spy out the land and work out some sort of plan. We made our way down through the trees to the river, and there, in a tiny bay, we found an odd collection of boats. Some were native canoes, some resembled ship’s lifeboats, and one of them was a small tubby dinghy with an outboard engine. McTurk climbed into the dinghy and was carrying out some sort of adjustments to the engine, and Bob and I reclined on the bank above to have a smoke. No sooner had we settled ourselves than we were fiercely attacked by great numbers of tiny black flies a little larger than a pin-head but with a bite that was out of all proportion to their size. You felt as though you were being stabbed all over with thousands of cigarette ends, and Bob and I were soon leaping about the bank cursing and slapping, hurriedly rolling down the sleeves of our shirts. McTurk watched our antics with amusement.
‘They’re kaboura flies,’ he explained, ‘but they’re not so bad now. You should see them in the rains, millions of them.’
The kabouras continued their assault on us until the dinghy was pushed out into mid-stream and the engine started. A few of them flew after us, but we soon left them behind. McTurk explained that they only lived in moist places, and so during the dry season they inhabited only the margin of the river. During the rains, when vast areas of the savannah were covered with water, the flies had a greatly increased range which they took full advantage of, settling on you in clouds if you ventured out unprotected.
The river was not very wide, but the tawny waters were deep, and the current was fast. Where the river curved, the rippling waters had piled up great banks of golden sand, dotted with the rotting trunks of fallen trees or great slabs of smooth grey rock. The forest on the bank was not very tall but extremely dense and tangled. It was not the lush green you would expect in the proximity of so much water, but was decked out in drab shades of grey and olive green and looked dusty and parched. McTurk lounged easily in the stern of the boat, his hat over his eyes, and proceeded to show off the Rupununi to us. We could not have had a better guide, for he had lived all his life there and knew the country as well as any Amerindian, if not better.
One of the first things I asked him was whether there were any electric eels to be found in the river, for I was anxious to get some specimens. McTurk replied that there were plenty of them, and to prove his point he turned the dinghy’s nose in to the bank and landed us at a spot where the forest had given way to a series of rock slabs, arranged like steps, that were worn smooth by the action of the water. He led us across these grey steps of rock until we came to a spot, some six feet from the
water’s edge, where there were a number of potholes sunk into the rock. These were about two feet across, descending, apparently, into the bowels of the earth and filled with clear, copper-coloured water. McTurk told us to listen and stamped heavily round the edge of the holes. After a brief pause there arose a series of snoring grunts vibrating up through the rocks under our feet.
‘Electric eels,’ explained McTurk. ‘They live in these potholes. They’ve got underwater passages leading out into the river, of course. If you stamp for long enough they get scared and swim out into the river, then you get a chance to shoot one.’
He stamped again, and a chorus of frantic grunts came from beneath the rocks, curious bubbling, belching grunts, more the sort of noise you would expect from a pig in a squishy sty than from an electric eel in its underwater cave. As we continued our way down the river McTurk said that he thought the electric eel had been greatly overrated; they were not, he admitted, ideal bathing companions, but he did not think they were as vicious or as deadly as some stories about them would have you believe. I decided to reserve my judgement until I knew more about them.
Below the home of the electric eels the river curved in a series of gentle bends, and rounding one of these we came to a huge sandbank populated by three of the most fantastic birds I had ever seen. Their plumage was black and white, their legs were very short, and their beaks were elongated, top-heavy-looking affairs vividly coloured with yellow, scarlet, and black. They teetered about on the sand on their tiny legs, pointing their great clowns’ noses at us and uttering peevish squeaks of alarm. From a distance their beaks looked curiously misshapen, and it was only by studying them through the field glasses that I discovered why this was. The lower mandible was considerably longer than the upper one, so the bird looked as though someone had chopped off the first two or three inches of its upper bill. This lopsided beak, decked out in such brilliant colours, certainly made them look most peculiar. The skimmer, as this bird is called, is not a freak; this amputated and multi-coloured beak is no more due to an error of nature than is Buffon’s sloth; it is, on the contrary, a carefully worked out and ingenious device which helps the bird to obtain its food. From time to time there are published books which labour under such titles as ‘Quaint Facts of Animal Life’, and almost always, tucked away somewhere inside, you will find the author going into transports of amazement over the various beaks to be found in the bird world. The first birds mentioned are usually pelicans and flamingos. Rarely, if ever, is the skimmer described, and yet it must possess one of the most extraordinary beaks to be found on any bird. The skimmer flies low over the surface of the water, with open beak – hence its name. The long lower mandible cuts along the surface, like the blade of a pair of scissors cutting through cloth, and scoops up tiny fry and other water life on which the bird lives. It would find this trick difficult to perform if both top and bottom mandibles were the same length, so nature has carefully removed the unwanted portion of beak. The skimmers watched us anxiously, fidgeting on their short legs, as we approached the sandbank; the engine spluttered and died, and as the nose of the dinghy pushed its way into the sand with a soft hiss, the three birds flew up, pointed their coloured beaks downstream and flew off, calling to each other in a prolonged twittering screech.