Free Gerald Durrell by The Overloaded Ark Page A

creeper swaying and twitching, indication of some movement one hundred and
fifty feet above you in the black tree-top. Ripe fruit would patter down on to
the forest floor, and dead twigs would fall. The cicadas, who never seemed to
sleep, would be screeching away, and occasionally a big bird would start a loud
“Car . . . carr . . . carr” cry, which would echo through the forest. One of
the commonest night noises was caused by an animal which I think was a tree
hyrax. It would start off its piercing whistle softly, at regular intervals,
then gradually it would work faster and faster until the sounds almost merged,
and the whistle would get shriller and shriller. Then,just as it reached a top
note and its highest speed, the cry would stop, as though cut short with a
knife, leaving the air still quivering with the echoes of the cry. Then there
were the frogs and toads: as darkness fell they would start, whistling,
hooting, rattling, chirruping and croaking. They seemed to be everywhere, from
the tops of the highest trees to the smallest holes under the rocks on the
river banks.
     
    The forest
seemed twice as big as normal when you were hunting at night: you moved along
under the great, rustling canopy of trees, and outside your torch beam
everything was a solid wall of blackness. Only in the small pool of light cast
by your torch could you see colour, and then, in this false light, the leaves
and the grasses seemed to take on an ethereal silvery-green hue. You felt as
though you were moving in the darkest depths of the sea, where there had been
no light for a million years, and the pathetically feeble glow of your torch
showed up the monstrous curling buttress roots of the trees, and faded the
coloration of the leaves, and the silver moths fluttered in groups across the
beam, and vanished into the gloom like a silvery school of tiny fish. The air
was heavy and damp with dew, and by shining your torch beam upwards, until it
was lost in the intricate maze of trunks and branches above, you could see the
faint wisps of mist coiling sluggishly through the twigs and creepers.
Everywhere the heavy black shadows played you false, making tall slender trees
seem to crouch on deformed trunks; the tree roots twisted and writhed as you
moved, seeming to slide away into the darkness, so that you could swear they
were alive. It was mysterious, creepy, and completely fascinating.
     
    The first night
I ventured into the forest with Andraia and Elias we started early, for Elias
insisted that we hunted along the banks of a largish river which was some
distance from the camp. Here, he assured me, we would find water-beef. What
this beast was I had only the haziest notion, for the hunters employed this
term with great freedom when discussing anything from a hippo to a frog. All I
could get out of Elias was that it was “very fine beef”, and that I would be
“glad too much” if we caught one. We had progressed about a mile down the path
that led into the forest, and we had just left the last of the palm plantations
behind, when Elias suddenly came to a halt, and I walked heavily on to his heels.
He was shining his torch into the head foliage of a small tree about forty feet
high. He walked about, shining his torch from different angles, grunting to
himself.
     
    “Na whatee?” I
asked, in a hoarse whisper.
     
    “Na rabbit,
sah,” came back the astonishing reply.
     
    “A rabbit . . . are you sure , Elias?” I asked in surprise.
     
    “Yes, sah, na
rabbit for true. ’E dere dere for up, sah, you no see ’e eye dere dere for
stick?”
     
    While I flashed
my torch about at the tops of the trees I hastily ran over my knowledge of the
Cameroon fauna: I was sure no rabbit had been recorded from the Cameroons, and
I was certain an arboreal one had not been recorded from any part of the
world. I presumed that a rabbit sitting in the top branches of a forty-foot
tree could be termed arboreal with some justification. Just at that moment