The Whispering Land

THE CUSTOMS OF THE COUNTRY

The plane taxied out across the darkened airfield to where the runway lay, between two strips of diamond-bright lights. Here it paused, revved up[232] its engine until every bone in the plane's metal body seemed to screech out in protest, and then suddenly rushed forward. The strip-lights fled past, and then suddenly we were airborne, the plane tipping from side to side like a slightly drunken swallow as it climbed higher and higher. Then, below me, Buenos Aires lay spread in the warm night like a chessboard of multicoloured stars. I unfastened my safety belt, lit a cigarette and lay back in my seat, feeling very mellow and full of farewell brandy. At last I was on my way to a place I had longed to visit, a place with a magical name: Jujuy.[233]

When we had returned from the south the effects of the car crash we had had soon after arrival in Argentina (in which Jacquie was the only one hurt) had begun to make themselves felt; the terrible jolting we had undergone on the Patagonian roads, and the rough conditions under which we had been forced to live, had resulted in her getting blinding headaches. It was obvious that she could not continue the trip, so we had decided to send her back to England. She had departed the week before, and this left Sophie[234] and me to finish the trip. So, while Sophie remained in our little villa with its garden already stuffed with animals which she had to minister unto,[235] I made tracks for Jujuy,[236] to try and add to the collection.

As the plane droned on through the night I dozed in my seat and tried to remember all I knew about Jujuy, which was precious[237] little. It is a north-western province of Argentina, bordered on the one side by Bolivia, and on the other by Chile. It is a curious place in many ways, but chiefly because it is like a tropical tongue, as it were, inserted into Argentina. On the one side you have the mountains of Bolivia, on the other the curious, desiccated province of Salta, and between the two the lush tropical area of Jujuy, which compares favourably with anything to be found in Paraguay or southern Brazil. Here I knew that you could find the colourful, exciting tropical fauna, just starting to encroach on the Pampa and grassland fauna, and it was these creatures I was after. Thinking about all these magnificent animals I fell into a deep sleep, and was just dreaming that I was catching a particularly malevolent jaguar with a lassoo,[238] when I was awoken by the steward shaking my arm. Apparently we had arrived at some god-forsaken place, and all passengers had to dismount while the plane refuelled. Plane travel has never been my favourite form of transportation (except for very small planes, where you get a real sense of flying), so to be roused from a brandy-soothed sleep at two in the morning and be forced to stand around in a tiny bar that did not offer anything more exciting than lukewarm coffee did not improve my temper. As soon as they would allow I got on the plane again, settled down in my seat and tried to sleep.

Almost immediately I was roused by what appeared to be a ten-ton weight descending on my arm. I extricated it with difficulty, before any bones were broken, and glared at the person responsible. This was not very effective, as the interior of the plane was lit by what appeared to be a series of fireflies suffering from pernicious anaemia.[239] All I could see was that the next seat to me (until then mercifully empty) was now being inundated – there is no other word – by a female of colossal proportions. The various portions of her anatomy, which she could not cram into her own seat, she had generously allowed to overflow into mine.

"Buenas noches,"[240] she said pleasantly, exuding sweat and scent in equal quantities.

"Buenas noches," I mumbled, and hastily closed my eyes and huddled into what was left of my seat, in order to put an end to the conversation. Fortunately, my companion, after this exchange of pleasantries, settled herself down for sleep, with much grunting and shifting and deep shuddering sighs that were vaguely reminiscent of the elephant seals. Presently she twitched and mumbled her way into sleep,[241] and then started a prolonged and interesting snore that sounded like someone rhythmically rolling small potatoes down a corrugated iron roof. Lulled, rather than disturbed by this sound, I managed to drop off myself.

When I awoke it was light, and I surreptitiously examined my still sleeping companion. She was, as I say, a fine figure of a woman – all twenty stone of her.[242] She had clad her generous body in a silk dress in yellow and green, and she was wearing scarlet shoes, both now reclining some distance from her feet. Her hair was bright glossy black and carefully arranged in tiny curls all over her head, and to crown this[243] she was wearing a straw hat to which half the fruit and vegetable produce of Argentina appeared to have been attached. This breath-taking horticultural achievement[244] had slipped during the night, and now reclined over one of her eyes at a saucy angle.[245] Her face was round and dimpled, and separated from her ample bosom by a lavaflow of chins.[246] Her hands, I noticed, were folded demurely in her lap, and though they were reddened and work-roughened they were tiny and beautifully formed, like the hands of so many fat people. As I was watching her she suddenly gave a great, shuddering sigh and opened large, pansy-dark eyes and gazed about her with the vacant expression of an awakening baby. Then she focused on me and her dumpling face spread into a dimpled smile.

"Buenos dias,[247] señor" she said, inclining her head.

"Buenos dias, señora" I replied, also inclining my head gravely.

From somewhere under the seat she hoicked out[248] a handbag the size of a small cabin-trunk and proceeded to repair the damage that the night's sleep had done to her face. This was little enough, as far as I could see, for her complexion was as perfect as a magnolia petal. Satisfied at last that she was not going to let her sex down,[249] she put away her bag, resettled her bulk, and turned her bright, kindly eyes on me. Wedged as I was there was no escape.

"Where are you travelling to, señor?" she asked.

"Jujuy, señora," I replied.

"Ah, Jujuy?" she said, opening wide her dark eyes and raising her eyebrows, as though. Jujuy was the most interesting and desirable place in the world.

"You are German?" she asked.

"No, English."

"Ah, English?" with again the delighted surprise, as though to be English was something really special.

I felt it was time I took a more active part in the conversation. "I do not speak Spanish at all," I explained, "only a very little."

"But you speak beautifully," she said, patting my knee, and then qualified[250] it by adding, "and I will speak slowly so that you may understand."

I sighed and gave myself up to my fate; short of jumping out of the window[251] on my left there was nothing else I could do. Having decided that my knowledge of Spanish was limited she came to the conclusion that I would get a better grasp of her conversation if she shouted, so now the whole plane was party to our exchange of confidences. Her name, it appeared, was Rosa Lillipampila and she was on her way to visit her married son in Salta. She had not seen him for three years, and this was to be a terrific[252] reunion. This was also her first flight in a plane, and she was taking a childlike delight in it. She kept breaking off her conversation with shrill cries (which made the more nervous of the other passengers jump) in order to lean over me, enveloping me in scent and bosom, to peer at some landmark passing below. Several times I offered to change seats with her, but she would not hear of it. When the steward came round with morning coffee she fumbled for her bag to pay, and when it was explained that it was free she was so delighted that you would have thought the rather grubby paper cup full of gritty liquid was a magnum[253] of champagne which the benevolent air company had bestowed upon her. Presently the red lights went on to tell us that we were landing yet again at some obscure township to refuel, and I helped her struggle to get the safety belt round her enormous girth. This was a strenuous task, and her shrieks of merriment at our efforts echoed up and down the plane.

"You see," she panted, between gusts of laughter, "when one has six children and one likes to eat, one loses control over the size of one's body."

At last, just as the plane touched down, we got the belt hitched round her.

We clambered out on to the tarmac,[254] stiff and crumpled, and I found that my girl-friend moved with the grace and lightness of a cloud. She had obviously decided that I was to be her conquest of the trip, and so, with a courteous, old world[255] gesture I offered her my arm, and she accepted it with a beaming, coquettish smile. Linked together like a courting couple we made our way towards the inevitable small cafe and toilets that decorated the airport. Here she patted my arm, told me she would not be long, and drifted to the door marked "Señoras", through which she passed with difficulty.

While she was communing with nature I took the opportunity to examine a large bush which grew alongside the little cafe… It was about the size of the average hydrangea,[256] and yet on its branches and among its leaves (after only a cursory inspection) I found fifteen different species of insect and five species of spider. It was obvious we were nearing the tropical area. Then I spotted a very old friend of mine, a praying mantis,[257] perched on a leaf, swaying from side to side and glaring about with its pale, evil eyes. I detached it from its perch and was letting it stalk its way up my arm, when my girl-friend returned. On seeing the creature she let out a cry that could, with a following wind, have been heard in Buenos Aires, but, to my surprise, it was not a cry of horror, but a cry of delighted recognition.

"Ah, the Devil's horse!" she cried excitedly. "When I was a child we often used to play with them."

This interested me, for, as a child in Greece, I used to play with them as well, and the local people had also called them the Devil's horse. So, for ten minutes or so, we played with the insect, making it run up and down each other's arms, and laughing immoderately, so that all the other passengers obviously doubted our sanity. At last we returned the mantis to his bush and went to have a coffee,[258] but just at that moment an official arrived, and with apologetic hand-spreading informed us that we would be delayed two hours. Groans of rage rose from the assembled passengers. There was, however, the official went on, a company bus which would run us into town, and there, at a hotel, the air company had arranged for us to have anything we wanted at their expense. My girl-friend was delighted. Such generosity! Such kindness! I helped her into the bus, and we rattled over the dusty road into the town and drew up outside a curiously Victorian-looking hotel.

Inside, the hotel was so ornate that my lady friend was quite overcome. There were huge, brown, imitation marble pillars, pots and pots of decayed-looking palms, flocks of waiters who looked like ambassadors on holiday, and a sort of mosaic of tiny tables stretching away, apparently, to the farthest horizon. She held very tight to my arm as I steered her to a table and we sat down. All this splendour seemed to bereave her of speech, so in my halting Spanish I ordered lavishly from one of the ambassadors (who did not appear to have shaved since his last official function) and settled back to enjoy it. Soon, under the influence of five large cups of coffee with cream, a plate of hot medialunas[259] and butter, followed by six cream cakes and a half pound of grapes, my companion lost her awe of the place, and even ordered one of the ambassadors to fetch her another plate to put her grape-pips on.

Presently, replete with free food, we made our way outside to the coach. The driver was sitting on a mudguard,[260] moodily picking his teeth with a matchstick. We inquired if we were now ready to return to the airport. He gazed at us with obvious distaste.

"Media hora"[261] he said, and returned to the cavity in his back molar,[262] in which he obviously hoped to find a rich deposit of something, maybe uranium.

So my girl-friend and I went for a walk round the town to kill time. She was delighted to have this chance to act as guide to a real foreigner, and there was nothing she did not show and explain to me. This was a shoe-shop… see, there were shoes in the window, so one knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was a shoe-shop. This was a garden, in which they grew flowers. That was a donkey, over there, that animal tethered to a tree. Ah, and here we had a chemist's shop, where you purchased medicines when you were not well. Oblivious to the people trying to force their way past on the pavement, she insisted on standing in front of the chemist's window and giving such a realistic display of suffering that I expected someone to call for an ambulance, if the town boasted of such an amenity. Altogether our tour was a great success, and I was quite sorry when we had to return to the bus and be driven back to the airport.

Once more in the plane we had the Herculean task[263] of lashing her into her seat, and then unlashing her once we were airborne on the last leg[264] of our journey. Hitherto the country we had been flying over had been typical Pampa, with here and there an occasional outcrop of small hills, but by and large[265] the view from the plane had been flat and featureless. But now the hills became more and more frequent, and higher and higher, covered with scrub and gigantic cacti like huge green surrealist candelabra.[266] And then the air-pockets started.

The first was quite a big one, and one felt one's stomach had been left at least a hundred feet up as the plane dropped. My companion, who had been in the middle of an intricate and – to me – almost incomprehensible story about some remote cousin, opened her mouth wide and uttered a cry of such a piercing quality that the whole of the aircraft was thrown into confusion. Then, to my relief she burst into peals of happy laughter.

"What was that?" she asked me.

I did my best, in my limited Spanish, to explain the mysteries of air-pockets, and managed to get the basic facts across to her. She lost all interest in the story about her cousin, and waited expectantly for the next air-pocket to make its appearance so that she could enjoy it to the full, for, as she explained, she had not been prepared for the first one. She was soon rewarded with a real beauty, and greeted it with a scream of delight and a flood of delighted laughter. She was like a child on a switchback in a fair, and she treated the whole thing as a special treat, which the air company had provided for her enjoyment, like the meal we had just eaten. The rest of the passengers, I noticed, were not treating the air-pockets in the same light-hearted way, and they were all glowering at my fat friend with faces that were growing progressively greener. By now we were flying over higher and higher ground, and the plane dropped and rose like a lift out of control. The man across gangway had reached a shade of green I would not have thought the human countenance could have achieved. My friend noticed this too, and was all commiseration. She leant across the gangway.

"Are you ill, señor?" she inquired. He nodded mutely.

"Ah, you poor thing," she said and burrowing into her bag produced a huge bag of very sticky and pungent sweets which she thrust at him.

"These are very good for sickness," she proclaimed. "Take one."

The poor man took one look at the terrible congealed mass in the paper bag and shook his head vigorously.

My friend shrugged, gave him a glance of pity, and popped three of the sweets into her mouth. As she sucked vigorously and loudly she suddenly noticed something that had escaped her sharp eyes before, the brown paper bag in a little bracket attached to the back of the seat in front of us. She pulled it out and peered inside, obviously wondering if some other magnificent largesse[267] from the kindly air company was concealed inside it. Then she turned a puzzled eye on me.

"What is this for?" she asked in a penetrating voice.

I explained the necessity of the paper bag. She held it aloft and examined it minutely.

"Well," she said at last, "if I wanted to get sick I should want something much larger than that."

The man across the gangway cast a look at her ample form and the size of the brown paper bag, and the vision conjured up by her words was obviously too much for him, for he dived precipitously for his own bag and buried his face in it.

When the plane eventually touched down my girlfriend and I were the only ones who dismounted without looking as though we had just been through a hurricane. In the foyer[268] of the airport her son was waiting, a pleasant-faced man who was identical in shape to his mother. Uttering shrill cries they undulated towards each other and embraced with a fat-quivering crash. When they surfaced, I was introduced and commended for the care I had taken of my protegee[269] en route.[270] Then, because the driver who was to meet me was nowhere to be seen, the entire Lillipampila family (son, wife, three children and grandmother) hunted round the airport like foxhounds until they found him. They saw me to the car, embraced me, told me to be sure to look them up[271] when I was in Salta, and stood, a solid facade of fat,[272] beaming and waving as I drove off on my way to Calilegua, the place where I was to stay. Kindness in Argentina is apt to be overwhelming, and after having been embraced by the entire Lillipampila family I felt every bone in my body aching. I gave the driver a cigarette, lit one myself and leant back and closed my eyes. I felt I deserved a few moments' relaxation.

Chapter Five JUJUY

Calilegua was primarily a sugar-producing estate though it also grew a certain amount of the more tropical varieties of fruit for the Buenos Aires market. It was a flat plain that lay cupped in a half-moon of mountains[273] that were covered with thick, tropical forest. It was curious how suddenly you came upon this lushness of vegetation. We left the airport and for the first hour or so drove through a desiccated landscape of semi-eroded hills, sun-baked, scrub-covered, dotted here and there with the great swollen trunks of the palo borracho trees, their bark as thickly covered with spines as a hedgehog's back, and here and there you saw one of the giant cacti rearing up, perhaps twenty feet high, decorated with strange curving branches. These again were spine-covered and unfriendly. Then we sped round a couple of corners, down a hill and into the valley of Calilegua, and the vegetation changed, so suddenly that it was almost painful to the eye. Here were the vivid greens of the tropics, so many shades and some of such viridescence[274] that they make the green of the English landscape look grey in comparison. Then, as if to assure me that I was back in the tropics, a small flock of parakeets[275] swooped across the road, wheezing and chittering. Shortly afterwards we passed a group of Indians, dressed in tattered shirts and trousers and gigantic straw hats. They were short and squat, with Mongolian features and the curious sloe-coloured[276] eyes over which there seems to be a bloom[277] like a plum that covers thought and expression. They glanced at the car incuriously as we passed. After being among Europeans so long, and in the flat scenery of the Pampa and Patagonia, the Indians, the parakeets and the vividness of the country through which we drove went to my head like wine.

Presently the driver slowed down and swung off the main road on to a rough track that was thickly lined on both sides by thick clumps of gigantic bamboos, some of the canes being as thick as a man's thigh and pale honey-coloured, tiger-striped with green. These huge canes bent gracefully over the road and intertwined their fluttering green leaves overhead so thickly that the road was gloomy, and it was like driving down the nave[278] of a cathedral. The sunlight flickered and flashed between the giant stems as we drove down the rutted track, and above the noise of the car engine I could hear the strange groans and squeaks that bamboos make when swayed by the wind. Presently we came to a villa half-hidden in a riot[279] of flowers and creepers, and here the car stopped. Joan Lett, who, with her husband Charles, had invited me to Calilegua, came out to greet me, took me inside and gave me the most welcome cup of tea. Presently, when Charles returned from his work, we sat on the balcony in the fading indigo evening night and discussed my plan of campaign.

It has always been my experience in most parts of the world, that if you go to an area which is fairly well populated you can obtain most of your common local fauna without much difficulty, for the local people keep the creatures either as pets, or rear them until they are old enough to form the basis for a meal. So your first job should be to go round every ranch and village in the vicinity and buy what you can. Then you can review your collection and try and fill in the gaps (which are generally the rare creatures) yourself. I propounded this philosophy to Charles, as the ice tinkled musically in our gin-and-tonics,[280] but to my dismay he was not inclined to agree with me. He said that he did not think the Indians in Calilegua kept anything in the livestock line, except the usual run[281] of cats, dogs and chickens. However, he promised that the next day he would get one of his more intelligent helpers to make inquiries in the village, and let me know the result. I went to bed fortified by gin but in a gloomy frame of mind, wondering if after all I had come to the wrong place. Even the faint whisper of crickets outside in the garden and the huge trembling stars that told me I was back in the tropics did little to cheer me.

The next morning, however, things looked brighter. After breakfast I was out in the garden watching a flock of gold, blue and silver butterflies feeding on the scarlet blooms of a bush when Luna arrived. I had heard him singing, in a pleasant tenor voice, as he came down the avenue of bamboo, and as he reached the gate he paused in his song, clapped his hands in the customary manner of anyone in South America when arriving at your house, opened the gate and joined me by the bush and the butterflies. He was a tiny man, about five feet in height, and as slender as a fourteen-year-old boy. He had a handsome, faintly skull-like face, with huge dark eyes, and black hair that was cropped close to his head. He held out a hand that looked as fragile as the butterflies we were surrounded by.

"Señor Durrell?" he inquired.

"Yes," I replied, shaking his hand gently, for fear it should break off at the wrist.

"I am Luna," he said, as if this should be sufficient explanation.

"Señor Lett sent you?" I asked.

"Si, si," he answered, giving me a smile of great charm and sweetness.

We both stood and watched the butterflies drifting round the red blooms, while I racked my brains for the right Spanish phrases.

"¡Que lindo," said Luna, pointing at the butterflies, "que bicho mas lindo!"[282]

"Si," I said. There was another pause, and we smiled at each other amiably.

"You speak English?" I inquired hopefully.

"No, very small," said Luna, spreading his hands and smiling gently, as if deploring this terrible gap in his education.

It was obvious that his knowledge of my language was about as extensive as mine was of his. This later proved to be true. Both of us could understand a quite complicated conversation in each other's language, but both were incapable of doing more in speech than string a few ungrammatical nouns and verbs together.

"You… I… go Helmuth," suggested Luna suddenly, waving a delicate hand.

I agreed, wondering what a Helmuth was; it was a new word to me, and, as far as I was concerned, could have been anything from a new type of jet-engine to a particularly low night-club. However, I was willing to try anything once, especially if it turned out to be a nightclub. We walked down the musically squeaking, creaking, groaning and rustling avenue of bamboo, and then came to a large area of lawn, dotted with gigantic palm-trees, their trunks covered with parasitic plants and orchids. We walked through these towards a long, low red brick building, while the humming-birds[283] flipped and whirred around us, gleaming and changing with the delicate sheen one sees on a soap bubble. Luna led me through gauze-covered doors into a large cool dining-room, and there, sitting in solitary state at the end of a huge table, devouring breakfast, was a man of about thirty with barley-sugar coloured hair, vivid blue eyes, and a leathery, red, humorous face. He looked up as we entered and gave us a wide, impish grin.

"Helmuth," said Luna, pointing to this individual, as if he had performed a particularly difficult conjuring trick. Helmuth rose from the table and extended a large, freckled hand.

"Hello," he said, crashing my hand in his, "I'm Helmuth. Sit down and have some breakfast, eh?"

I explained that I had already had some breakfast, and so Helmuth returned to his victuals, talking to me between mouthfuls, while Luna, seated the other side of the table, drooped languidly in a chair and hummed softly to himself.

"Charles tells me you want animals, eh?" said Helmuth. "Well, we don't know much about animals here. There are animals, of course, up in the hills, but I don't know what you'll get in the villages. Not much, I should think. However, when I've finished eating we go see,eh?"

When Helmuth had assured himself, somewhat reluctantly, that there was nothing edible left on the table, he hustled Luna and myself out to his station-wagon,[284] piled us in and drove down to the village, over the dusty, rutted roads that would, at the first touch of rain, turn into glutinous mud.

The village was a fairly typical one, consisting of small shacks with walls built out of the jagged off-cuts from the saw mill, and whitewashed. Each stood in its own little patch of ground, surrounded by a bamboo fence, and these gardens were sometimes filled with a strange variety of old tins, kettles and broken barrels each brimming over with flowers. Wide ditches full of muddy water separated these "gardens" from the road, and were spanned at each front gate by a small, rickety bridge of roughly-nailed branches. It was at one of these little shanties that Helmuth stopped. He peered hopefully into the riot of pomegranate trees, covered with red flowers, that filled the tiny garden.

"Here, the other day, I think I see a parrot," he explained.

We left the station-wagon and crossed the rickety little bridge that led to the bamboo gate. Here we clapped our hands and waited patiently. Presently, from inside the little shack, erupted a brood of chocolate-coloured children, all dressed in clean but tattered clothing, who lined up like a defending army and regarded us out of black eyes, each, without exception, sucking its thumb vigorously. They were followed by their mother, a short, rather handsome Indian woman with a shy smile.

"Enter, señores, enter," she called, beckoning us into the garden.

We went in, and, while Luna crouched down and conducted a muttered conversation with the row of fascinated children, Helmuth, exuding good-will and personality,[285] beamed at the woman.

"This señor," he said, gripping my shoulder tightly, as if fearful that I might run away, "this señor wants bichos, live bichos, eh? Now, the other day when I passed your house, I saw that you possessed a parrot, a very common and rather ugly parrot of a kind that I have no doubt the señor will despise. Nevertheless, I am' bound to show it to him, worthless though it is."

The woman bristled.

"It is a beautiful parrot," she said shrilly and indignantly, "a very beautiful parrot, and one, moreover, of a kind that is extremely rare. It comes from high up in the mountains."

"Nonsense," said Helmuth firmly, "I have seen many like it in the market in Jujuy, and they were so common they were practically having to give them away. This one is undoubtedly one of those."

"The señor is mistaken," said the woman, "this is a most unusual bird of great beauty and tameness."

"I do not think it is beautiful," said Helmuth, and added loftily, "and as for its tameness, it is a matter of indifference to the señor whether it be tame or as wild as a puma."

I felt it was about time I entered the fray.

"Er… Helmuth," I said tentatively.

"Yes?" he said, turning to me and regarding me with his blue eyes flashing with the light of battle.

"I don't want to interfere, but wouldn't it be a good idea if I saw the bird first, before we start bargaining? I mean, it might be something very common, or something quite rare."

"Yes," said Helmuth, struck by the novelty of this idea, "yes, let us see the bird."

He turned and glared at the woman.

"Where is this wretched bird of yours?" he inquired.

The woman pointed silently over my left shoulder, and turning round I found that the parrot had been perching among the green leaves of the pomegranate tree some three feet away, an interested spectator of our bargaining. As soon as I saw it I knew that I must have it, for it was a rarity, a red-fronted Tucuman Amazon,[286] a bird which was, to say the least of it, unusual in European collections. He was small for an Amazon parrot, and his plumage was a rich grass-green with more than a tinge of yellow in it here and there; he had bare white rings round his dark eyes, and the whole of his forehead was a rich scarlet. Where the feathering ended on each foot he appeared to be wearing orange garters. I gazed at him longingly. Then, trying to wipe the acquisitive[287] look off my face I turned to Helmuth and shrugged with elaborate unconcern, which I am sure did not deceive the parrot's owner for a moment.

"It's a rarity," I said, trying to infuse dislike and loathing for the parrot into my voice, "I must have it."

"You see?" said Helmuth, returning to the attack, "the señor says it is a very common bird, and he already has six of them down, in Buenos Aires."

The woman regarded us both with deep suspicion. I tried to look like a man who possessed six Tucuman Amazons, and who really did not care to acquire any more. The woman wavered, and then played her trump card.[288]

"But this one talks" she said triumphantly.

"The señor does not care if they talk or not," Helmuth countered quickly. We had by now all moved towards the bird, and were gathered in a circle round the branch on which it sat, while it gazed down at us expressionlessly.

"¿Blanco…, Blanco," cooed the woman, "como te va, Blanco?"[289]

"We will give you thirty pesos for it," said Helmuth.

"Two hundred," said the woman, "for a parrot that talks two hundred is cheap."

"Nonsense," said Helmuth, "anyway, how do we know it talks? It hasn't said anything."

"Blanco, Blanco," cooed the woman in a frenzy, "speak to Mama… speak Blanco."

Blanco eyed us all in a considering way.

"Fifty pesos, and that's a lot of money for a bird that won't talk," said Helmuth.

"Madre de Dios,[290] but he talks all day," said the woman, almost in tears, "wonderful things he says… he is the best parrot I have ever heard."

"Fifty pesos, take it or leave it," said Helmuth flatly.

"Blanco, Blanco, speak," wailed the woman, "say something for the señores… please."

The parrot shuffled his green feathering with a silken sound, put his head on one side and spoke.

"Hijo de puta"[291] he said, clearly and slowly.

The woman stood as though transfixed, her mouth open, unable to believe in the perfidy of her pet. Helmuth uttered a great sigh as of someone who knows the battle is won. Slowly, and with a look of utter malignancy, he turned to the unfortunate woman.

"So!" he hissed, like the villain in a melodrama. "So! This is your idea of a talking parrot, eh?"

"But, señor…" began the woman faintly.

"Enough!" said Helmuth, cutting her short. "We have heard enough. A stranger enters your gates, in order to help you by paying you money (which you need) for a worthless bird. And what do you do? You try and cheat him by telling him your bird talks, and thus get him to pay more."

"But it does talk" protested the woman faintly.

"Yes, but what does it say?" hissed Helmuth. He paused, drew himself up to his full height, took a deep breath and roared:

"It tells this good-natured, kindly señor that he is the son of a whore."

The woman looked down at the ground and twiddled her bare toes in the dust. She was beaten and she knew it.

"Now that the señor knows what disgusting things you have taught this bird I should not think he will want it," continued Helmuth. "I should think that now he will not even want to offer you fifty pesos for a bird that has insulted not only him, but his mother."

The woman gave me a quick glance, and returned to the contemplation of her toes. Helmuth turned to me, "We have got her," he said in a pleading tone of voice, "all you have to do is to try to look insulted."

"But I am insulted," I said, trying to look offended and suppress the desire to giggle. "Never, in fact, in a long career of being insulted, have I been so insulted."

"You're doing fine," said Helmuth, holding out both hands as if begging me to relent. "Now give in a bit."

I tried to look stern but forgiving, like one of the less humorous saints one sees in ikons.

"All right," I said reluctantly, "but only this once. Fifty, you said?"

"Yes," said Helmuth, and as I pulled out my wallet he turned again to the woman. "The señor, because he is the very soul of kindness, has forgiven you the insult. He will pay you the fifty pesos that you demanded, in your greed."

The woman beamed. I paid over the grubby notes, and then approached the parrot. He gazed at me musingly. I held out my finger, and he gravely climbed on to it, and then made his way up my arm to my shoulder. Here he paused, gave me a knowing look, and said quite clearly and loudly:

"¿Como te va, como te va, que tal?"[292] and then giggled wickedly.

"Come on," said Helmuth, revitalised by his session of bargaining. "Let's go and see what else we can find."

We bowed to the woman, who bowed to us. Then, as we closed the bamboo gate behind us and were getting into the car, Blanco turned on my shoulder and fired his parting shot.

"Estupido" he called to his late owner, "muy estupido"[293]

"That parrot," said Helmuth, hastily starting the car, "is a devil."

I was inclined to agree with him.

Our tour of the village was not entirely unproductive. By careful questioning and cross-questioning nearly everyone we met we managed to run to earth[294] five yellow-fronted Amazon parrots, an armadillo and two grey-necked guans.[295] These latter are one of the game-birds, known locally as charatas, which is an onomatopoeic[296] name resembling their cry. They look, at first glance; rather like a slim and somewhat drab hen pheasant of some species. Their basic colouring is a curious brown (the pale colour a stale bar of chocolate goes[297]) fading to grey on the neck. But, see them in the sun and you discover that what you thought was a mat brown is really slightly iridescent with a golden sheen. Under the chin they have two drooping red wattles, and the feathers on their heads, when they get excited, stand up in a kind of crest that looks like a lengthy crew-cut. They were both young birds, having been taken from the nest when a few days old and hand-reared, so they were ridiculously tame. The Amazon parrots were also tame, but none of them had the knowingness or the vocabulary of Blanco. All they could do was to mutter "Lorito"[298] at intervals, and whistle shrilly. Nevertheless, I felt for one morning's work we were not doing too badly, and so I carried my purchases back in triumph to the house, where Joan Lett had kindly allowed me to use their empty garage as a sort of storehouse for my creatures.

As I had no cages ready for the reception of my brood, I had to let them all loose in the garage and hope for the best. To my surprise this arrangement worked very well. The parrots all found themselves convenient perches, just out of pecking range of each other, and, though it had obviously been agreed that Blanco was the boss, there was no unmannerly squabbling. The guans also found themselves perches, but these they only used to sleep on, preferring to spend their days stalking about the floor of the garage, occasionally throwing back their heads and letting forth their ear-splitting cry. The armadillo, immediately on being released, fled behind a large box, and spent all day there meditating, only tip-toeing out at night to eat his food, casting many surreptitious and fearful glances at the sleeping birds. By the following day the news had spread through the village that there had arrived a mad gringo[299] who was willing to pay good money for live animals, and the first trickle of specimens started. The first arrival was an Indian carrying, on the end of a length of string, a coral snake[300] striped in yellow, black and scarlet, like a particularly revolting Old School tie.[301] Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm, the Indian had tied the string too tightly about the reptile's neck, and so it was very dead.

I had better luck with the next offering. An Indian arrived clasping a large straw hat tenderly to his bosom. After a polite exchange of greetings I asked to see what he had so carefully secured in his hat. He held it out, beaming hopefully at me, and then looking into the depths of the hat I saw reclining at the bottom, with a dewy-eyed expression[302] on its face, the most delightful kitten. It was a baby Geoffroy's cat,[303] a small species of wild cat which is getting increasingly rare in South America. Its basic colouring was a pale fawny yellowy and it was dappled all over with neat, dark brown spots. It regarded me with large bluey-green eyes from the interior of the hat, as if pleading to be picked up. I should have known better. In my experience it is always the most innocent-looking creatures that can cause you the worst damage. However, misled by its seraphic[304] expression, I reached out my hand and tried to grasp it by the scruff of the neck. The next moment I had a bad bite through the ball of my thumb and twelve deep red grooves across the back of my hand. As I withdrew my hand, cursing, the kitten resumed its innocent pose, apparently waiting to see what other little game I had in store for it. While I sucked my hand like a half-starved vampire, I bargained with the Indian and eventually purchased my antagonist. Then I tipped it, hissing and snarling like a miniature jaguar, out of the hat and into a box full of straw. There I left it for an hour or so to settle down. I felt that its capture and subsequent transportation in a straw hat might be mainly responsible for its fear and consequent bad temper, for the creature was only about two weeks old, as far as I could judge.

When I thought it had settled down and would be willing to accept my overtures of friendship, I removed the lid of the box and peered in hopefully. I missed losing my left eye by approximately three millimetres. I wiped the blood from my cheek thoughtfully; obviously my latest specimen was not going to be easy. Wrapping my hand in a piece of sacking I placed a saucer of raw egg and minced meat in one corner of the box, and a bowl of milk in the other, and then left the kitten to its own devices.[305] The next morning neither of the offerings of food had been touched. With a premonition that this was going to hurt me more than the kitten, I filled one of my feeding-bottles with warm milk, wrapped my hand in sacking and approached the box.

Now I have had, at one time and another, a fair amount of experience in trying to get frightened, irritated or just plain stupid animals to feed from a bottle, and I thought that I knew most of the tricks. The Geoffroy's kitten proceeded to show me that, as far as it was concerned, I was a mere tyro[306] at the game. It was so lithe, quick and strong for its size that after half an hour of struggling I felt as though I had been trying to pick up a drop of quicksilver with a couple of crowbars. I was covered in milk and blood and thoroughly exhausted, whereas the kitten regarded me with blazing eyes and seemed quite ready to continue the fight for the next three days if necessary. The thing that really irritated me was that the kitten had – as I knew to my cost – very well-developed teeth, and there seemed no reason why it should not eat and drink of its own accord, but, in this stubborn mood, I knew that it was capable of quite literally starving itself to death. A bottle seemed the only way of getting any nourishment down it. I put it back in its box, washed my wounds, and was just applying plaster to the deeper of them when Luna arrived, singing cheerfully.

"Good morning, Gerry," he said, and then stopped short and examined my bloodstained condition. His eyes widened, for I was still bleeding profusely from a number of minor scratches.

"What's this?" he asked.

"A cat… gato. "[307] I said irritably.

"Puma… jaguar?" he asked hopefully.

"No," I said reluctantly, "chico gato montes."[308]

"Chico gato montes" he repeated incredulously, "do this?"

"Yes. The bloody little fool won't eat. I tried it on the bottle, but it's just like a damned tiger. What it really needs is an example…" my voice died away as an idea struck me. "Come on, Luna, we'll go and see Edna."

"Why Edna?" inquired Luna breathlessly as he followed me down the road to Helmuth's flat.

"She can help," I said.

"But Gerry, Helmuth won't like it if Edna is bitten by a gato montes" Luna pointed out in Spanish.

"She won't get bitten," I explained. "I just want her to give me a kitten."

Luna gazed at me with dark, puzzled eyes, but the conundrum[309] was too much for him, and so he merely shrugged and followed me round to Helmuth's front door. I clapped my hands and went into Helmuth's and Edna's comfortable sitting-room, where Edna was ensconced over a huge pile of socks, darning placidly and listening to the gramophone.

"Hello," she said, giving us her wide, attractive smile, "the gin is over there, help yourself."

Edna had a beautiful and placid nature: nothing seemed to worry her unduly. I am sure that if you walked into her sitting room with fourteen Martians in tow[310] she would merely smile and point out the location of the gin.

"Thank you, dear," I said, "but I didn't come for gin, strange though it may sound."

"It does sound strange," agreed Edna, grinning at me mischievously. "Well, if you don't want gin, what do you want?"

"A kitten."

"A kitten?"

"Yes… you know, a small cat."

"Today Gerry is loco"[311] said Luna with conviction, pouring out two liberal measures of gin and handing one to me.

"I have just bought a baby gato montes" I explained to Edna. "It's extremely wild. It won't eat by itself, and this is what it did to me when I tried to feed it on the bottle." I displayed my wounds. Edna's eyes widened.

"But how big is this animal?" she asked.

"About the size of a two-week-old domestic cat."

Edna looked stern. She folded up the sock she was darning.

"Have you put disinfectant on those cuts?" she inquired, obviously preparing herself for a medical orgy.

"Never mind the cuts… I washed them… But what I want from you is a kitten, an ordinary kitten. Didn't you say the other day that you were infested with kittens over here?"

"Yes," said Edna, "we have plenty of kittens."

"Good. Well, can I have one?" Edna considered.

"If I give you a kitten will you let me disinfect your cuts?" she asked cunningly. I sighed.

"All right, blackmailer," I said.

So Edna disappeared into the kitchen quarters, from whence came a lot of shrill exclamations and much giggling. Then Edna returned with a bowl of hot water and proceeded to minister unto my cuts and bites, while a procession of semi-hysterical Indian maids filed into the room, carrying in their arms groups of kittens of all shapes and colours, from ones still blind to ones that were half grown and looked almost as wild as my Geoffrey's cat. Eventually I chose a fat, placid female tabby[312] which was approximately the same size and age as my wild cat, and carried it back in triumph to the garage. Here I spent an hour constructing a rough cage, while the tabby kitten purred vigorously and rubbed itself round my legs, occasionally tripping me up. When the cage was ready I put the tabby kitten in first, and left it for an hour or so to settle down.

Most wild animals have a very strong sense of territory. In the wild state, they have their own particular bit of forest or grassland which they consider their own preserve, and will defend it against any other member of their own species (or other animals sometimes) that tries to enter it. When you put wild animals into cages the cages become, as far as they are concerned, their territory. So, if you introduce another animal into the same cage, the first inmate will in all probability defend it vigorously, and you may easily have a fight to the death on your hands. So you generally have to employ low cunning. Suppose, for example, you have a large vigorous creature who is obviously quite capable of looking after itself, and it had been in a cage for a period of a few weeks. Then you get a second animal of the same species, and you want to confine them together, for the sake of convenience. Introduce the new specimen into the old one's cage, and the old one may well kill it. So the best thing to do is to build an entirely new cage, and into this you introduce the weaker of the two animals. When it has settled down, you then put the stronger one in with it. The stronger one will, of course, still remain the dominant animal, and may even bully the weaker one, but as far as he is concerned he has been introduced into someone else's territory, and this takes the edge off his potential viciousness.[313] It's a sort of Lifemanship[314] that any collector has to practise at one time or another.

In this case I was sure that the baby Geoffroy's was quite capable of killing the domestic kitten, if I introduced the kitten to it, instead of the other way round. So, once the tabby had settled down, I seized the Geoffroy's and pushed it, snarling and raving, into the cage, and stood back to see what would happen. The tabby was delighted. It came forward to the angry Geoffroy's and started to rub itself against its neck, purring loudly. The Geoffroy's, taken aback by its greeting as I had hoped, merely spat rather rudely, and retreated into a corner. The tabby, having made the first overtures of friendship, sat down, purring loudly, and proceeded to wash itself with a self-satisfied air. I covered the front of the cage with a piece of sacking and left them to settle down, for I was sure now that the Geoffroy's would do the tabby no real harm.

That evening, when I lifted the sacking, I found them lying side by side, and the Geoffroy's, instead of spitting at me as it had done up until now, contented itself with merely lifting its lip in a warning manner. I carefully inserted a large bowl of milk into the cage, and a plate containing the finely chopped meat and raw egg, which I wanted the Geoffroy's to eat.

This was the crucial test, for I was hoping that the tabby would fall upon this delicious fare and, by example, encourage the Geoffroy's to eat. Sure enough, the tabby, purring like an ancient outboard engine,[315] flung itself at the bowl of milk, took a long drink and then settled down to the meat and egg. I had retreated to a place where I could see without being seen, and I watched the Geoffroy's carefully. To begin with it took no interest at all, lying there with half-closed eyes. But eventually the noise the tabby was making over the egg and meat – it was a rather messy feeder – attracted its attention. It rose cautiously and approached the plate, while I held my breath. Delicately it sniffed round the edge of the plate, while the tabby lifted a face that was dripping with raw egg and gave a mew of encouragement, slightly muffled by the portion of meat it had in its mouth. The Geoffroy's stood pondering for a moment, and then, to my delight, sank down by the plate and started to eat. In spite of the fact that it must have been extremely hungry it ate daintily, lapping a little raw egg, and then picking up a morsel of meat, which it chewed thoroughly before swallowing. I watched them until, between them, they had cleaned both plates, then I replenished them with more milk, egg and meat, and went to bed well satisfied. The next morning both plates were spotless, and the Geoffroy's and the tabby were locked in each other's arms, fast asleep, their stomachs bulging like two little hairy balloons. They did not wake up until midday, and then they both looked distinctly debauched.[316] But when they saw me approaching with the plates of food they both displayed considerable interest, and I knew that my battle with the Geoffroy's was won.

Chapter Six A CITY OF BICHOS

Ever since my arrival in Calilegua, Luna had been pestering me to accompany him to a town called Oran, which lay some fifty miles away, and where, he assured me, I would get plenty of bichos. I was a bit chary about this idea, for I knew how easy it is to rush frantically from one place to another on a collecting trip, and, though each place in itself might be a good centre, you achieve very little by virtue of your grasshopper-like activities.[317] I decided to discuss it with Charles, and so, that evening, as we sat gently imbibing gin and watching a moon with a blue halo silvering the palm fronds,[318] I put my problem to him.

"Why is Luna so keen on Oran?" I asked.

"Well," said Charles drily, "it's his home town, for one thing, but this might prove an advantage, for it means that he knows everyone. I think you could do worse than go and investigate,[319] Gerry. It's got a much bigger population than Calilegua, and in view of what you've found here, I should think you'd get twice as much stuff there."

"Can Luna get the time off?"[320] I asked.

Charles smiled his gentle smile.

"I don't think that we would notice his absence for three days," he said, "and that should give you time to denude Oran of whatever fauna is lurking there."

"Could we leave on Monday?" I inquired hopefully.

"Yes," said Charles, "that would be all right."

"Wonderful," I said, finishing my drink, "and now I must go across and see Edna."

"Why Edna?"

"Well, someone's got to feed my animals, while I'm away, and I'm hoping Edna has a kind heart."

I found Helmuth, Edna and Luna arguing over the relative merits of two folk-songs which they kept playing over and over again on the gramophone. Edna pointed silently to the drinks and I helped myself, and then went and sat on the floor at her feet.

"Edna," I said, during a lull in the argument, "I love you."

She raised one eyebrow sardonically and regarded me.

"If Helmuth wasn't bigger than me I would suggest that we elope," I went on, "since the first day I saw you I have been mad about you, your eyes, your hair, the way you pour gin…"

"What do you want?" she inquired.

I sighed.

"You have no soul," I complained. "I was just getting into my stride.[321] Well, if you must know, Charles says that Luna and I can go to Oran for three days. Will you look after my animals for me?"

"But, of course," she said, surprised that there should have been any doubt in my mind.

"But, of course," echoed Helmuth. "Gerry, you are very stupid. I tell you we will help all we can. You have only to ask. We will try and do anything for you."

He splashed more gin into my glass.

"Except," he added reluctantly, "let you elope with my wife."

So, early on Monday morning, Luna and I set out in a small station-wagon driven by a gay, semi-inebriated[322] individual, sporting[323] a moustache so large it looked like a Nature Reserve.[324] We took with us only the bare essentials of travel: Luna's guitar, three bottles of wine, my wallet well stuffed with pesos, recording machine and cameras. We also had a clean shirt each, which our driver had placed reverently and tenderly in a pool of oil. All the previous night it had rained with a loudness and thoroughness that only the tropics can achieve; this now had thinned out to a fine grey drizzle, but the earth road had turned into something resembling the consistency of a badly-made blancmange.[325] Luna, undeterred by the weather, the surface of the road and the doubtful driving capabilities of our driver, the fate of our clean shirts and the fact that the roof of the station-wagon leaked daintily but persistently, sang happily to himself as we slithered and swooped along the road to Oran.

We had been travelling some three-quarters of an hour when our driver, concentrating more on harmonising with Luna in a mournful song than on the car, rounded a corner on two wheels, and as we slithered miraculously on to the straight again I saw something ahead that made my heart sink. Before us lay a torrent of red, froth-flecked water some four hundred yards across. At the edge of this, like a line of depressed elephants, stood three lorries, while in mid-stream, twisted to one side by the force of the water, another lorry was being laboriously dragged across to the opposite bank by a thing like a gigantic tractor, fitted with a winch and steel cable. Our driver joined the line of waiting lorries, switched off his engine and beamed at us.

"Mucha agua"[326] he pointed out to me, in case my eyesight should be defective and I had missed noticing the miniature Bay of Biscay we had to cross. I knew that the previous day this broad torrent had probably been a mere trickle of water, shallow and glinting over its bed of pebbles, but one night's rain had swollen it suddenly and out of all proportion. I knew, from experience, how a tiny stream can grow into a fierce full-sized river in next to no time,[327] for once in West Africa I had had my camp almost washed away by a stream that started by being a mere three feet wide and four inches deep, and had, in the course of an hour or so, turned into something resembling the upper reaches of the Amazon. No one who has not seen this sudden transformation can believe it, but it can be one of the most irritating (and sometimes dangerous) aspects of travel in the tropics.

At last, after an hour of waiting, the last of the lorries had been hauled over and it was our turn. The hawser was attached to our bumper and gingerly we were drawn into the flood. Slowly the water rose higher and higher, and became stronger, until it was rustling and lapping along one side of the station-wagon like a miniature tidal wave. The water spurted in through the cracks of the door and trickled across the floor under our feet. Gradually the water rose until it covered our shoes. We were now approximately halfway across, and the force of the water was kindly but firmly pushing us downstream so that, although to begin with we had been opposite the tractor and the winch, we were now some fifty yards downstream from them. The hawser was taut, and I felt as though we were some gigantic and misshapen fish that the two laconic-looking Indians on the tractor were playing.[328] The water had now reached the level of the seats; here it paused for a moment and then overflowed generously under our behinds. At this crucial moment, sitting in half an inch of icy water, we heard the winch step.

"Arrrr!" roared the driver, sticking his head out of the window, his moustache quivering impressively, "que pasa?"[329]

One of the Indians leapt off the tractor, and loped slowly off down the road; the other pushed his big straw hat on to the back of his head and slowly approached the bank of the river.

"Nafta no hay."[330] he explained, scratching his stomach with every evidence of satisfaction.

"Fine bloody time for them to run out of petrol," I said irritably to Luna.

"Yes," said Luna despondently, "but the other Indian has gone for some. He will not be long."

Half an hour passed. Then an hour. By now our nether regions[331] were so frozen that we were all shifting uneasily in our seats to try and get some feeling back, making noises like a troupe of hippopotami enjoying a wallow in a particularly succulent swamp. At last, to our relief, the Indian appeared loping down the road carrying a can of petrol. He and other Indian then had a long argument as to the best method of putting the life-giving fluid into the tractor, while our driver roared insults at them from between chattering teeth. But at last they had finished this highly complicated operation, the tractor sprang into life, the hawser tightened and we were drawn slowly but inexorably towards the bank, while the water-level in the wagon fell.

When we eventually reached dry land we all got out, removed our trousers and wrung them out, while our driver soundly berated the Indians for their attempted homicide, while they both grinned amiably at us. Then the driver, in his shirt-tails,[332] opened the bonnet of the car and peered into the engine, his moustache twitching, muttering to himself. He had carefully wrapped in cotton waste certain vital parts of the internal organs of our vehicle before we entered the flood, and these he now unwrapped, and then proceeded to dry other parts of the engine. Eventually, he climbed in, pressed the starter, and with a wide grin of pride, heard the engine roar into life.[333] We piled in and jolted off down the road, the Indians waving their straw hats in gay farewell.

We had travelled some five miles and were just beginning to dry out when we met our next water hazard.[334] The road here ran along the lower slopes of the mountains, and the terrain was intersected at intervals by deep, narrow gorges through which the water from the mountains drained. Where the road crossed one of these narrow but powerful rivers one would have thought that the simplest engineering method would have been to throw a small bridge across from bank to bank. Apparently the vast numbers of these rivers made this too costly, and so another method was employed. A slightly concave apron[335] of cement was laid across the river bed, which at least gave your wheels some purchase.[336] In the dry season, of course, this looked merely like a continuation of the road, but when the waters from the mountains stormed down they roared over the apron, sometimes four feet deep, and then dropped into a graceful ten foot waterfall the other side to join the river lower down. A few days covered with water and the cement developed a surface like glass, owing to the algae that adhered to it, and so it was considerably more hazardous than the original riverbed would have been.

Here there was no winch to help us, and the driver nosed[337] the station-wagon carefully into the red water, scowling fearfully behind his bristling moustache. We had got half-way across the invisible cement apron, when the engine stalled.[338] We sat and looked at each other mutely, until suddenly the force of the water piling up against the side of the vehicle shifted it an inch or so in the direction of the waterfall on our right, and then we were all suddenly galvanised into activity. We none of us wanted to be sitting in the station-wagon if the torrent suddenly got a good grip on her and swept her over the edge and downstream among the tangle of rocks we could see. We left the vehicle as one man.

"Push… we must all push," said Luna, raising his voice above the noise of the falls. He was clinging to the side of the station-wagon with both hands, for the force of the water was considerable. He was so slight in build that I expected at any moment to see him plucked away by the current and swept over the waterfall like a feather.

"Go round the other side of the car," I shouted, "the water won't sweep you away there."

Luna realized the force of this argument, and made his way round the wagon in a starfish-like manner, until it stood between him and the waterfall. Then we laid our shoulders to the wagon and started to push. It was quite one of the most unrewarding tasks I have ever undertaken, for not only were we trying to push the wagon up the opposite slope of the cement apron, but we were also pushing against the current which all the time was trying to twist the wagon round at an angle. After about ten minutes of struggling we had managed to shift our vehicle approximately three feet nearer the edge of the waterfall. I began to get really warned, for at this rate I could see the wagon plunging gracefully over the water-fall in a matter of another half-hour, for the three of us alone had not the strength to push her up the slope and against the current. We had a rope in the back of the wagon and, if it was long enough, the only thing I could suggest was that we tethered the wagon to a tree on the opposite bank, and just sat there until the waters subsided. I was just about to try and put this plan into Spanish, when round the corner of the road on the opposite bank appeared a Fairy Godmother,[339] heavily disguised as a wheezing, snorting lorry, which in spite of its age and rust, looked powerful and phlegmatic. We greeted it with shouts of joy. The driver of the lorry took in our predicament in a glance,[340] and slowing down, drove the vast bulk of his vehicle slowly into the red torrent until he was within a few feet of us. Hastily we got out our rope and shackled the two vehicles together; then the lorry went into reverse and gently drew our vehicle out of the flood and on to dry land. We thanked the lorry driver, gave him a cigarette, and watched enviously as he drove his mighty steed through the torrent as if it bad not been there. Then we turned our attention to the laborious and messy process of drying out our engine.

Eventually we reached Oran at two o'clock in the afternoon, having had to navigate three more water hazards, none of which, fortunately, was as bad as the first two. Nevertheless, we arrived at Luna's house all looking as though we had spent our entire day in the river, which was not so far from the truth. Luna's charming family greeted us with delight, whipped our clothes away to be dried, cooked us an enormous meal, and sat us down to eat it in an indoor courtyard, overflowing with flowers, where the frail sunlight was just starting to make its heat felt. While we ate and drank good, warming red wine, Luna sent an apparently endless stream of his smaller relatives on mysterious missions to different parts of the town, and they kept reappearing to whisper reports to him, whereupon he would nod his head portentously and smile, or else scowl ferociously, according to the news that was being vouchsafed to him. Everyone had an air of suppressed excitement, and stiffened expectantly if Luna so much as coughed or looked in their direction. I began to feel as though I was having lunch with the Duke of Wellington on the eve of Waterloo.[341] At last he leant forward, poured us both out a last glass of wine, and then grinned at me, his big black eyes sparkling with suppressed excitement.

"Gerry," he said in Spanish, "I have found you some bichos."

"Already?" I asked. "But how?"

He waved a hand at his small army of relatives, standing in a grinning line.

"I have sent my family to make inquiries, and they have discovered a number of people who have bichos. Now it only remains for us to go and buy them if they are the bichos you want."

"Wonderful," I said enthusiastically, finishing my wine at a gulp, "let's go, shall we?"

So, in ten minutes' time, Luna and I set off to quarter[342] Oran like huntsmen, preceded by our pack of Luna's young and excited relatives. The town was not really so large, but rather straggling, built on the typical Argentine chessboard pattern. Everywhere we went, as Charles had predicted, Luna was greeted with cries of joy, and we had to refuse many invitations of the more bibulous[343] variety. But Luna, with a reluctant gleam in his eye, sternly turned his back on such frivolity, and we continued on our way. Eventually, one of the younger members of our retinue ran ahead and beat a loud tattoo on a most impressive-looking door of a large house. By the time we had reached it the door had been opened by an ancient woman dressed in black, which made her look like a somewhat dilapidated cockroach. Luna paused in front of her and gave her a grave good evening, to which she bowed slightly.

"I know that you have in your house a parrot," said Luna with the air of a policeman daring a criminal to deny the existence of a corpse, which he knows to be concealed beneath the sofa.

"That is so," said the woman, mildly surprised, "This English señor is collecting for his jardin zoologico[344] in England," Luna went on, "and it is possible that he may wish to purchase this bird of yours."

The woman surveyed me from dark, dry eyes, without curiosity.

"You are welcome to him," she said at last, "for he is a dirty bird and he does not talk. My son brought him to me, but if I can sell him I will be only too glad. Come in, señores, and see him."

She shuffled ahead of us and led us into the inevitable courtyard of potted plants, forming the well of the house.[345] When I saw the bird it was all I could do to stifle a yelp of delight, for the creature was a yellow-naped macaw,[346] a rare member of the parrot family. It was sitting on the remains of a wooden perch, which it had obviously, over the past week, demolished slowly and systematically until scarcely anything remained. It glanced up at us as we gathered round it, a fine sliver of wood in its beak, uttered a short gurking noise, and returned to its work of demolition. Luna gave me a quick glance from his brilliant eyes, and I nodded my head vigorously. He took a deep breath, surveyed the macaw with loathing, and then turned to the woman.

"One of the commoner ones, I see," he said carelessly, "but even so the señor is interested in buying it. You realize, of course, that for such a common, destructive bird, and one, moreover, that does not talk, we cannot afford to be generous. The señor would not dream of considering paying anything more than, say, twenty-five pesos for such a creature."

Then he folded his arms and looked at the woman, waiting for her outburst of indignation at the mere mention of such a low price.

"All right," said the woman, "you can have him."

While Luna regarded her open-mouthed she picked up the macaw, plonked him unceremoniously on my shoulder, and held out her wrinkled palm for the notes which I was hastily counting out from my wallet before she changed her mind. We were back in the street again, with the macaw making surprised and pleased gurking noises in my ear, before Luna recovered the power of speech. Then he shook his head despondently.

"What's the matter, Luna?" I asked. "It's a wonderful bird, and to get it so cheap is incredible."

"For your sake," said Luna gloomily, "I am glad. But it makes me fear for the future of Argentina when I meet someone who will not bargain, but accepts the first price offered. Where would we all be if everyone did that?"

"Life would probably be a lot cheaper," I pointed out, but he refused to be comforted, and continued to grumble over the woman's behaviour for the rest of our tour of the town, though a brisk half-hour exchange with a man who drove a hard bargain over another parrot shortly restored his faith in humanity.

We continued on our way through the town until it grew dark, by which time all of us were carrying what amounted to a small zoo. There were five parrots (including, to my delight, another yellow-naped macaw), two pigmy Brazilian rabbits,[347] with ginger paws and white spectacles of fur round their eyes, and an orange-rumped agouti,[348] a large rodent with dark eyes, slender legs and the disposition of a racehorse suffering from an acute nervous breakdown.[349] We carried this assortment of wild life back to Luna's house and let them all loose in the patio,[350] while Luna organized his band of relatives once more and sent them scurrying in all directions to fetch empty boxes, wire-netting, saws, hammers, nails and other accoutrements[351] of the carpenter's trade. Then, for the next two hours we were fully occupied building suitable habitations for my acquisitions. At length, when the last of the creatures had been placed in its cage, Luna and I sat at the table nearby and ate and drank heartily, while from the pile of wooden boxes came the faint scufflings and squawks which are such music to the animal-collector's ears. Presently, a large tumbler of good wine by my side, I sat down in front of the cages to examine my charges by lamplight, while Luna called for his guitar and sang the soft, mournful folk-songs of Argentina, occasionally, where the music required it, using the deep wooden belly of his guitar as a drum.

The parrots we had acquired were all blue-fronted Amazons, all rather scruffy because of bad feeding, but all reasonably tame and able to mutter the inevitable "Lorito" which is the Argentine equivalent of "Polly". As they were all much the same size and age we had caged them together, and now in the lamplight they sat in a row, like a highly coloured jury, regarding me with the ancient, reptilian and falsely-wise expressions that parrots are such masters at adopting. I was pleased with them in spite of their tattered appearance, for I knew that a few weeks of good feeding would make a world of difference, and that, at their next moult, their feather would glow with lemon-yellow, blue and a multitude of greens that would make a collection of emeralds look dowdy in comparison. Gently I lowered a piece of sacking over the front of their cage and heard them all fluff and rearrange their feathers (a sound like someone riffling through a pack of cards) preparatory to sleep. Next I turned my attention to the yellow-naped macaws, and gloated over them for some time. We had, experimentally, caged them together, and the way they had immediately taken to each other and started to bill and coo inclined me to think that they were a true pair. They sat on the perch now and regarded me solemnly, occasionally turning their heads on one side as if to see whether I looked any more attractive that way. Basically their colouring was a deep, rush green, only relieved[352] on the neck where they had a broad half-moon-shaped patch of feathers which were bright canary-yellow.[353] For macaws – which are as a rule the largest of the parrots – they were diminutive, being slightly smaller and more slender than the common Amazon parrots. They gurked gently to me and to each other, their pale eyelids drooping sleepily over their bright eyes, so I covered them up with sacking and left them.

Next to the macaws the Brazilian rabbits were the creatures I was most delighted to have obtained, for they were animals I had long wanted to meet. The two we had got were only babies, and I lifted them out of their cage and they sat, one in each hand, comfortably filling my palms with the soft, fat warmth of their bodies, their noses wiffling with all the strange scents of food and flowers with which the patio was filled. At first glance you would have taken them for the young of the common European rabbit, but closer inspection soon showed the differences. To begin with their ears were very short for their size, and very neat and slender. The basic colouring on the back was a dark rich brown, flecked and patterned with rusty-coloured patches and blobs. Their feet and part of the leg was a bright, rich ginger, and, as I said before, they had a fine circle of white hair round each eye. Their nose and lips, I now noticed, were faintly outlined in white as well. When they were fully adult, I knew, they would still be among the dwarfs of their breed, being only half the size of the European wild rabbit. As far as I knew, no zoo in the world possessed these interesting little creatures, and I was delighted to have got them, though I had faint qualms about being successful in taking them back to Europe, for the rabbit and hare family do not, on the whole, take kindly to captivity,[354] and are reputedly difficult. However, these were very young, and I had hopes that they would settle down satisfactorily.

When I lifted the sacking off the front of the agouti's cage she leapt straight up into the air, and landed with a crash in her straw bed, quivering in every limb, with the expression of an elderly virgin who, after years of looking under her bed, has at last found a man there. However, with the aid of a piece of apple I managed to soothe her into a fairly reasonable state, and she actually allowed me to stroke her.

Agoutis are, of course, rodents, members of that enormous and interesting family that includes creatures like the harvest mouse, which would hardly fill the bowl of a teaspoon, to capybaras[355] that are the size of a large dog and in between these two extremes a great variety of squirrels, dormice, rats, porcupines and other unlikely[356] beasts. Agoutis are not, let us admit at once, the most prepossessing of their family. To be perfectly frank, they look like a cross between one of the smaller forerunners of the horse, and a rather lugubrious rabbit. Their basic colouring is a rich, shining mahogany, fading to reddish-ginger on their rumps. Their legs are chocolate brown, very long and slender and racehorse-like, ending in a bunch of frail, artistic toes which give them the ancient-horse look.[357] Their hind legs are powerful in order to support a backside that is out of all proportion to the forequarters, so that the creature looks, if I might put it like this, as though it had a hump-behind.[358] The head is rabbit-like, but again slightly elongated so that there is still a faint suggestion of horse about it. They have large, fine eyes, neat rounded ears and a mass of black whiskers, which are in a constant state of agitation about everything. Combine all this with the beast's temperament, its constantly neurotic state, its wild leaps into the air at the slightest sound followed by a period of acute ague,[359] and you begin to wonder how the species survives at all. I should imagine that a jaguar would only have to growl once and every agouti within a hundred yards radius would die of heart-failure immediately. Musing on this I lowered the sacking over the front of my agouti's cage, and she immediately leapt once more into the air and came down shaking in every limb. However, within a few minutes she had recovered from this terrible experience sufficiently to make an attack on the apple I had left in the cage for her. Luna had now, by the application of song and wine, worked himself into a pleasant state where he sat at the table, humming softly like a drowsy bee. We had a final glass of wine as a nightcap,[360] and then, yawning prodigiously, stumbled off to bed.

I was awoken at what seemed to me to be a most uncivilized hour of the morning by a burst of song from Luna's bed, in the opposite corner of the room. Song and music ran through Luna's being as naturally as the blood flowed through his veins. When he was not talking he was singing or humming, and he is the only man I have ever met who can stay up until three in the morning and rise at five, bursting into song before he is even out of bed. But he sang so pleasantly and with such obvious pleasure that you forgave him, even at that hour of the morning, and, after knowing him some time, you took no more notice of it than you would have done of a dawn chorus of birds.

"The moon is like a little white drum in the sky," he sang from under a pile of bedclothes, "leading me to my love with the dark hair and the magic eyes, behind the mountains of Tucuman."

"If you sing to all your female acquaintances at this hour of the morning," I said drowsily, "I should think you lead a pretty lonely life in bed. These things get around, you know."

He chuckled and stretched luxuriously.

"Today is going to be a fine day, Gerry," he said. I wondered how he knew, for the shutters on the two windows were tightly closed. The night air, in which the Argentine will sit as late as he pleases without any harm to his being, becomes, as soon as he retires to bed, a deadly gas waiting to strangle him. So all shutters must be tightly closed to guard against such a dangerous experience. However, when we had dressed and gone out into the patio to breakfast, I found he was right, for it was flooded with sunshine.

We were finishing our last cup of coffee when our troupe of spies appeared to report. Apparently they had been out and about at the crack of dawn,[361] and they made their reports to Luna as he sat there, sipping his coffee, and occasionally giving a lordly nod. Then one of the younger of the spies was dispatched with money to purchase provisions for my specimens, and, on his return, the spies stood wide-eyed and watched me while I chopped up food and vegetables, filled bowls with milk or water, and generally ministered to my animals. When the last one had been fed, we filed out into the sunlit street and started once more on our search of the town. This time Luna used our retinue slightly differently. While we made our way to a house which he knew contained some wild pet, our young helpers fanned out[362] and explored every alley and street in the immediate vicinity, clapping their hands outside people's doors and, questioning complete strangers as to what pets they kept. Everyone was most good-humoured about this intrusion on their privacy and, even if they had no creatures themselves, would sometimes direct us to another house in which lurked some member of the local fauna. By this means, during the morning, we ran to earth three more pigmy rabbits, another parrot, two seriemas,[363] a strange, leggy type of bird, and two coatimundis,[364] the odd little raccoon-like[365] predator of South America. We took them back to Luna's house, caged them, ate a hearty lunch and then, exhilarated by our morning's success, set out to explore the outer limits of Oran, with the aid of an ancient car, let to us by one of Luna's friends.

Luna had learnt, by some M.I.5[366] methods of his own, that in one of the more far-flung portions of the town was a man who possessed a wild cat of some sort, but no one was quite sure who it was or the exact location of his house. Eventually, however, we narrowed our search down to one rambling street, and by the simple process of knocking or clapping outside every house we eventually found the man we were looking for. He was a large, dark, sweating and unclean-looking man of about forty, with an unhealthy paunch and beady black eyes that were alternately cringing or cunning. Yes, he admitted, he had got a wild cat, an ocelot;[367] and then, with all the fiery eloquence of a pre-election politician, he proceeded to tell us about the animal's beauty, grace, tameness, value, coloration, size, appetite, until I began to feel that he was trying to sell me an entire zoo instead of one animal. Breaking in on his asthmatic eulogy on the fine feline tribe in general and his specimen in particular, we asked to see it. He led us round into one of the filthiest backyards I had been in to date,[368] for in Oran and in Calilegua, however poor and tiny the house, the backyard was always neat and full of flowers. This looked like a council rubbish dump,[369] with old broken barrels, rusty tin cans, piles of old wire-netting, bicycle wheels and other flotsam and jetsam.[370] Our host lumbered over to a rough wooden cage in one corner which would have been small for the average rabbit. He opened the door, caught hold of a chain inside and hauled out on to the ground one of most pathetic sights I have seen. It was a half-grown ocelot, and how it managed to fit in such a small cage was a mystery. But it was its condition that was so appalling. Its coat was so matted with its own filth that you could only just discern the natural pattern of the skin. It had a large, running sore on one flank, and it was so thin that you could, under its matted coat, see its ribs and backbone clearly. Indeed, it was so weak that it wavered from side to side, like a drunk, when it was dropped on to the ground, and eventually gave up the attempt to stay upright, and sank dejectedly down on to its dirty belly.

"You see how tame it is?" inquired the man, giving us a display of tattered yellow teeth in an ingratiating grin. "She is very tame with everybody. Never has she been known to bite." He was patting the cat as he spoke, with one great sweaty palm. I could see that it was not tameness that stopped the animal from turning on him, but sheer inertia due to lack of food. She had almost reached the point of no return,[371] where she felt so weak that she just did not care.

"Luna," I said, making a valiant attempt to keep my temper, "I will pay fifty pesos for this cat. No more. Even that is too much, for she will probably die. I won't bargain, so you can tell this bloated illegitimate son of an inadequate whore that he can take it or leave it."

Luna translated my message, tactfully leaving out my character rendering[372]. The man clasped his hands in horror. Surely we were joking? He giggled feebly. For such a magnificent animal three hundred pesos would be a beggarly sum to pay. Surely the señor could see what a wonderful creature… and so on. But the señor had seen enough. I spat loudly and accurately into the remains of a barrel, lovingly entwined with a bicycle-wheel, gave the man the dirtiest look I could achieve, turned on my heel and walked back to the road. I got into our ancient car and slammed the door with such violence that, for a moment, I thought the whole thing was going to fall to pieces in the road. I could hear Luna and the man arguing, and presently, when I detected a weakening note in the repulsive man's voice, I leant out of the window and roared at Luna to come on and not waste time. Within thirty seconds he appeared .

"Give me the money, Gerry," he said. I gave him the fifty pesos, and presently he appeared with the box and put it in the back seat. We drove off in silence. Presently when I had finished mentally working out what I would like to have done to the cat's late owner, which would not only have been painful but have made his marital state, if any, difficult in the extreme, I sighed and lit a cigarette.

"We must get home quickly, Luna. That animal's got to have a decent cage and some food or she's going to die," I said. "Also I shall want some sawdust."

"Si, si" said Luna, his dark eyes worried. "I have never seen anyone keep an animal like that. She is half dead."

"I think I can save her," I said. "At least, I think we've got a fifty-fifty[373] chance."

We drove in silence along the rutted road for some way before Luna spoke.

"Gerry, you do not mind stopping once more, only for a minute!" he inquired anxiously. "It is on our way. I hear of someone else that has a cat they might sell."

"Yes, all right, if it's on the way. But I hope to God it's in better condition than the one we've got."

Presently Luna ran the car off the road on to a sizable stretch of greensward. On one corner of this stood a dilapidated-looking marquee,[374] and near it a small, battered-looking merry-go-round and a couple of small booths made of striped canvas now so faded as to be almost white. Three fat, glossy horses, one a bright piebald, grazed near by, and around the marquee and the booths trotted a number of well-fed-looking dogs, who had the air of professionals.[375]

"What is this? It looks like a circus," I said to Luna.

"It is a circus," said Luna, grinning, "only a very small one."

I was amazed that any circus, even a small one, could make a living in a place as remote and small as Oran, but this one appeared to be doing all right for, although the props were somewhat decrepit, the animals looked in good condition. As we left the car a large ginger-haired man appeared, ducking out from under the flap of the marquee. He was a muscular individual with shrewd green eyes and powerful, well-kept hands, who looked as though he would be capable of doing a trapeze act or a lion act with equal skill. We shook bands, and Luna explained our business.

"Ah, you want my puma,"[376] he grinned. "But I warn you I want a lot of money for her… she's a beauty. But she eats too much, and I can't afford to keep her. Come and see her, she's over here. A real devil, I pan tell you. We can't do a thing with her."

He led us to a large cage in one corner of which crouched a beautiful young puma, about the size of a large dog. She was fat and glossy, and still had her baby paws, which, as in all young cats, look about three times too big for the body. Her coat was a rich amber colour, and her piercing, moody eyes a lovely leaf green. As we approached the cage she lifted one lip and showed her well-developed baby teeth in a scornful snarl. She was simply heavenly, and a joy to look at after the half-starved creature we had just bought, but I knew, fingering my wallet, that I should have to pay a lot for her.

The bargaining lasted for half an hour and was conducted over a glass of very good wine, which the circus proprietor insisted we drank with him. At length I agreed to a price, which, though high, seemed to me to be fair. Then I asked the man if he would keep her until the following day for me, if I paid for her evening meal, for I knew that she would be in good hands, and I had no cage ready for her reception. This our amiable ginger friend agreed to and the bargain was sealed with another glass of wine, and then Luna and I drove back home to try and resurrect the unfortunate ocelot.

When I had built a cage for her, and one of Luna's lesser relatives had appeared with a large sackful of sweet-smelling sawdust, I got the poor creature out of her evil-smelling box and dressed the wound on her thigh. She just lay on the ground apathetically, though the washing of the wound must have hurt considerably. Then I gave her a large shot of penicillin, which again she took no notice of. The third operation was to try and dry her coat out a bit, for she was drenched with her own urine, and already the skin of her belly and paws was fiery red, burnt by the acid. All I could do was literally to cover her in sawdust, rubbing it well into the fur to absorb the moisture, and then gently dusting it out again.

Then I unpicked the more vicious tangles in her fur, and by the time I had finished she had begun to look faintly like an ocelot. But she still lay on the floor, uncaring. I cut the filthy collar away from her neck, and put her in her new cage on a bed of sawdust and straw. Then I placed in front of her a bowl containing one raw egg and a small quantity of finely-minced fresh steak. At first she displayed no interest in this, and my heart sank, for I thought she might well have reached the stage of starvation where no amount of tempting offerings would induce her to eat. In sheer desperation I seized her head and ducked her face into the raw egg, so that she would be forced to lick it off her whiskers. Even this indignity she suffered without complaint, but she sat back and licked the dripping egg off her lips, slowly, carefully, like someone sampling a new, foreign and probably dangerous dish. Then she eyed the dish with a disbelieving look in her eye. I honestly think that the animal, through ill-treatment and starvation, had got into a trance-like state, where she disbelieved the evidence of her own senses. Then, while I held my breath, she leant forward and lapped experimentally at the raw egg. Within thirty seconds the plate was clean, and Luna and I were dancing a complicated tango of delight round the patio, to the joy of his younger relatives.

"Give her some more, Gerry," panted Luna, grinning from ear to ear.

"No, I daren't," I said. "When a creature's that bad,[377] you can kill it from overfeeding. She can have a bowl of milk later on, and then tomorrow she can have four small meals during the day. But I think she'll be all right now."

'That man was a devil," said Luna shaking his head.

I drew a deep breath and, in Spanish, gave him my views on the cat's late owner.

"I never-knew you knew so many bad things in Spanish, Gerry," said Luna admiringly. "There was one word you used I have never heard before."

"I've had some good teachers," I explained.

"Well, I hope you say nothing like that tonight," said Luna, his eyes gleaming.

"Why? What's happening tonight?"

"Because we are leaving tomorrow for Calilegua my friends have made an asado in your honour, Gerry. They will play and sing only very old Argentine folk-songs so that you may record them on your machine. You like this idea?" he asked anxiously.

"There is nothing I like better than an asado," I said, "and an asado with folk-songs is my idea of Heaven."

So, at about ten o'clock that evening, a friend of Luna's picked us up in his car and drove us out to the estate, some distance outside Oran, where the asado had been organised. The asado ground was a grove near the estancia, an area of bare earth that told of many past dances, surrounded by whispering eucalyptus trees and massive oleander bushes. The long wooden benches and trestle-tables[378] were lit with the soft yellow glow of half a dozen oil-lamps, and outside this buttercup circle of light the moonlight was silver brilliant. There were about fifty people there, many of whom I had never met, and few of them over the age of twenty. They greeted us uproariously, almost dragged us to the trestle-tables which were groaning under the weight of food, and placed great hunks of steak, crisp and sizzling from the open fires, in front of us. The wine-bottles passed with monotonous regularity, and within half-an-hour Luna and I were thoroughly in the party spirit, full of good food, warmed with red wine. Then these gay, pleasant young people gathered round while I got the recorder ready, watching with absorbed attention the mysteries of threading tape and getting levels. When, at last, I told them I was ready, guitars, drums and flutes appeared as if by magic, and the entire crowd burst into song. They sang and sang, and each time they came to the end of a song, someone would think of a new one, and they would start again. Sometimes a shy, grinning youth would be pushed to the front of the circle as the only person there capable of rendering a certain number, and after much encouragement and shouts of acclamation he would sing. Then it would be a girl's turn to sing the solo refrain in a sweet-sour voice, while the lamps glinted on her dark hair, and the guitars shuddered and trembled under the swiftly-moving brown fingers of their owners. They danced in a row on a flagstoned path, their spurs ringing sparks from the stone, so that I could record the heel-taps[379] which are such an intricate part of the rhythm of some of their songs; they danced the delightful handkerchief dance with its pleasant lilting tune, and they danced tangos that made you wonder if the stiff, sexless dance called by that name in Europe was a member of the same family. Then, shouting with laughter because my tapes had run out and I was in despair, they rushed me to the table, plied me with more food and wine, and sitting round me sang more sweetly than ever. These, I say again, were mostly teenagers, revelling in the old and beautiful songs of their country, and the old and beautiful dances, their faces flushed with delight at my delight, honouring a stranger they had never seen before and would probably never see again.

By now they had reached the peak. Slowly they started to relax, the songs getting softer and softer, more and more plaintive, until we all reached the moment when we knew the party was over, and that to continue it longer would be a mistake. They had sung themselves from the heavens back to earth,[380] like a flock of descending larks. Flushed, bright-eyed, happy, our young hosts insisted that we travelled back to Oran with them in the big open back of the lorry in which they had come. We piled in, our tightly-packed bodies creating a warmth for which we were grateful, for the night air was now chilly. Then as the lorry roared off down the road to Oran, bottles of red wine were passed carefully from hand to hand, and the guitarists started strumming. Everybody, revived by the cool night air, took up the refrain, and we roared along through the velvet night like a heavenly choir. I looked up and saw the giant bamboos that curved over the road, now illuminated by the lorry's headlights. They looked like the talons of some immense green dragon, curved over the road, ready to pounce if we stopped singing for an instant. Then a bottle of wine was thrust into my hand, and as I tipped my head back to drink I saw that the dragon had passed, and the moon stared down at me, white as a mushroom-top against the dark sky.

Chapter Seven VAMPIRES[381] AND WINE

On my return from Oran the garage almost overflowed with animals. One could scarcely make oneself heard above the shrill, incomprehensible conversations of the parrots, the harsh rattling cries of the guans, the incredibly loud trumpeting of the seriemas, the chattering of the coatimundis, and an occasional dull rumble, as of distant thunder, from the puma, whom I had christened Luna in the human Luna's honour. As a background to this there was a steady scrunching noise that came from the agouti cage, for it was always engaged in trying to do alterations to its living quarters with its chisel-like teeth.

As soon as I had got back I had begun constructing cages for all our various creatures, leaving the caging of Luna until last, for she had travelled in a large packing-case that gave her more than enough room to move about in. However, when all the other animals were housed, I set about building a cage worthy of the puma, which, I hoped, would show off her beauty and grace. I had just finished it when Luna's godfather[382] arrived, singing lustily as usual, and offered to help me in the tricky job of getting Luna to pass from her present quarters into the new cage. We carefully closed the garage doors so that, if anything untoward happened, the cat would not go rampaging off across the countryside and be lost. It also had the advantage, as the human Luna pointed out, that we would be locked in with her, a prospect he viewed with alarm and despondency. I soothed his fears by telling him that the puma would be far more frightened than we were, and at that moment she uttered a rumbling growl of such malignance and fearlessness that Luna paled visibly. My attempt to persuade him that this growl was really an indication of how afraid the animal was of us was greeted with a look of complete disbelief.

The plan of campaign was that the crate in which the puma now reposed would be dragged opposite the door of the new cage, a few slats removed from the side, and the cat would then walk from the crate into the cage without fuss. Unfortunately owing to the somewhat eccentric construction of the cage I had built, we could not wedge the crate close up to the door: there was a gap of some eight inches between crate and cage. Undeterred, I placed planks so that they formed a sort of short tunnel between the two boxes, and then proceeded to remove the end of the crate so that the puma could get out. During this process a golden paw, that appeared to be the size of a ham, suddenly appeared in the gap and a nice, deep slash appeared across the back of my hand.

"Ah!" said Luna gloomily, "you see, Gerry?"

"It's only because she's scared of the hammering," I said with feigned cheerfulness sucking my hand. "Now, I think I've removed enough boards for her to get through. All we have to do is wait."

We waited. After ten minutes I peered through a knot hole and saw the wretched puma lying quietly in her crate, drowsing peacefully, and showing not the slightest interest in passing down our rickety tunnel and into her new and more spacious quarters. There was obviously only one thing to do, and that was to frighten her into passing from crate to cage. I lifted the hammer and brought it down on the back of the crate with a crash. Perhaps I should have warned Luna. Two things happened at once. The puma, startled out of her half-sleep, leapt up and rushed to the gap in the crate, and the force of my blow with the hammer knocked down the piece of board which was forming Luna's side of the tunnel. In consequence he looked down just in time to see an extremely irritable-looking puma sniffing meditatively at his legs. He uttered a tenor screech, which I have rarely heard equalled, and leapt vertically into the air. It was the screech that saved the situation. It so unnerved the puma that she fled into the new cage as fast as she could, and I dropped the sliding door, locking her safely inside. Luna leant against the garage door wiping his face with a handkerchief.

"There you are," I said cheerfully, "I told you it would be easy."

Luna gave me a withering look. "You have collected animals in South America and Africa?" he inquired at length. "That is correct?" "Yes."

"You have been doing this work for fourteen years?" "Yes."

"You are now thirty-three?" "Yes."

Luna shook his head, like a person faced with one of the great enigmas of life.

"How you have lived so long only the good God knows," he said.

"I lead a charmed[383] life," I said. "Anyway, why did you come to see me this morning, apart from wanting to wrestle with your namesake?"

"Outside," said Luna, still mopping his face, "is an Indian with a bicho. I found him with it in the village."

"What kind of bicho?" I asked as we left the garage and went out into the garden.

"I think it is a pig," said Luna, "but it's in a box and I can't see it very clearly."

The Indian was squatting on the lawn, and in front of him was a box from which issued a series of falsetto squeaks and muffled grunts. Only a member of the pig family could produce such extraordinary sound. The Indian grinned, removed his big straw hat, ducked his head, and then, removing the lid of the box, drew forth the most adorable little creature. It was a very young collared peccary,[384] the common species of wild pig that inhabits the tropical portions of South America.

"This is Juanita," said the Indian, smiling as he placed the diminutive creature on the lawn, where it uttered a shrill squeak of delight and started to snuffle about hopefully.

Now, I have always had a soft spot for the pig family,[385] and baby pigs I cannot resist, so within five minutes Juanita was mine at a price that was double what she was worth, speaking financially, but only a hundredth part of what she was worth in charm and personality. She was about eighteen inches long and about twelve inches high, clad in long, rather coarse greyish fur, and a neat white band that ran from the angle of her jaw up round her neck, so that she looked as though she was wearing an Eton collar.[386] She had a slim body, with a delicately tapered snout ending in a delicious retrousse[387] nose (somewhat like a plunger), and slender, fragile legs tipped with neatly polished hooves the circumference of a sixpence. She had a dainty, lady-like walk, moving her legs very rapidly, her hooves making a gentle pattering like rain.

She was ridiculously tame, and had the most endearing habit of greeting you – even after only five minutes' absence – as if you had been away for years, and that, for her, these years had been grey and empty. She would utter strangled squeaks of delight, and rush towards you, to rub her nose and behind against your legs in an orgy of delighted reunion, giving seductive grunts and sighs. Her idea of Heaven was to be picked up and held on her back in your arms, as you would nurse a baby, and then have her tummy scratched. She would lie there, her eyes closed, gnashing her baby teeth together, like miniature castanets, in an ecstasy of delight. I still had all the very tame and less destructive creatures funning loose in the garage, and as Juanita behaved in such a lady-like fashion I allowed her the run of the place[388] as well, only shutting her in a cage at night.

At feeding time it was a weird sight to see Juanita, her nose buried in a large dish of food, surrounded by an assortment of creatures – seriemas parrots, pigmy rabbits, guans – all trying to feed out of the same dish. She always behaved impeccably, allowing the others plenty of room to feed, and never showing any animosity, even when a wily seriema pinched titbits from under her pink nose. The only time I ever saw her lose her temper was when one of the more weak-minded of the parrots, who had worked himself into a highly excitable state at the sight of the food plate, flew down squawking joyously, and landed on Juanita's snout. She shook him off with a grunt of indignation and chased him, squawking and fluttering, into a corner, where she stood over him for a moment, champing her teeth in warning, before returning to her interrupted meal.

When I had got all my new specimens nicely settled, I paid a visit to Edna to thank her for the care and attention she had lavished on my animals in my absence. I found her and, Helmuth busy with a huge pile of tiny scarlet peppers, with which they were concocting a sauce of Helmuth's invention, an ambrosial[389] substance which, when added to soup, removed the roof of your mouth with the first swallow, but added a flavour that was out of this world.[390] An old boot, I am sure, boiled and then covered with Helmuth's sauce, would have been greeted with shouts of joy by any gourmet.[391]

"Ah, Gerry," said Helmuth, rushing to the drink cupboard. "I have got good news for you."

"You mean you've bought a new bottle of gin?" I inquired hopefully.

"Well, that of course," he said grinning. "We knew you were coming hack. But apart from that do you know that next week-end is a holiday?"

"Yes, what about it?"

"It means," said Helmuth, sloshing gin into glasses with gay abandon, "that I can take you up the mountains of Calilegua for three days. You like that, eh?"

I turned to Edna.

"Edna,"I began, "I love you…"

"All right," she said resignedly, "but you must make sure[392] the puma can't get out, that is all I insist upon." So, the following Saturday morning, I was awoken, just as dawn was lightening the sky, by Luna, leaning through my window and singing a somewhat bawdy love-song. I crawled out of bed, humped my equipment on to my back, and we made our way through the cool, aquarium light of dawn to Helmuth's flat. Outside it was a group of rather battered-looking horses, each clad in the extraordinary saddle that they use in the north of Argentina. The saddle itself had a deep, curved seat with a very high pommel in front, so that it was almost like an armchair to sit in. Attached to the front of the saddle were two huge pieces of leather, shaped somewhat like angel's wings which acted as wonderful protection for your legs and knees when you rode through thorn scrub. In the dim dawn light the horses, clad in their weird saddles, looked like some group of mythical beasts, Pegasus[393] for example, grazing forlornly on the dewy grass. Nearby lounged a group of four guides and hunters who were to accompany us, delightfully wild and unshaven-looking, wearing dirty bombachas, great wrinkled boots and huge, tattered straw hats. They were watching Helmuth, his corn-red hair gleaming with dew, as he rushed from horse to horse, stuffing various items into the sacks, which were slung across the saddles. These sacks, Helmuth informed me, contained our rations for the three days we should be away. Peering into two of the sacks I discovered that our victuals consisted mainly of garlic and bottles of red wine, although one sack was stuffed with huge slabs of unhealthy-looking meat, the blood from which was dripping through the sacking, and whose curious shape gave one the rather unpleasant impression that we were transporting a dismembered body. When everything was to Helmuth's satisfaction, Edna came out, shivering in her dressing gown, to see us off, and we mounted our bony steeds[394] and set off at a brisk trot towards the mountain range which was our goal, dim, misty and flecked here and there with gold and green in the morning light.

At first we rode along the rough tracks that ran through the sugar-cane fields, where the canes whispered and clacked in the slight breeze. Our hunters and guides had cantered on ahead, and Luna and I and Helmuth rode in a row, keeping our horses at a gentle walk, Helmuth was telling me the story of his life, how at the age of seventeen (as an Austrian) he had been press-ganged[395] into the German Army, and had fought through the entire war, first in North Africa, then Italy and finally in Germany, without losing anything except the top joint of one finger, which was removed by a land-mine that blew up under him and should have killed him. Luna merely slouched in his great saddle, like a fallen puppet, singing softly to himself. When Helmuth and I had settled world affairs generally, and come to the earth-shaking[396] conclusion that war was futile we fell silent and listened to Luna's soft voice, the chorus of canes, and the steady clop of our horses' hooves, like gentle untroubled heart-beats in the fine dust.

Presently the path left the cane fields and started to climb up the lower slopes of the mountain, passing into real forest. The massive trees stood, decorated with trailing epiphytes[397] and orchids,[398] each one bound to its fellow by tangled and twisted lianas,[399] like a chain of slaves. The path had now taken on the appearance of an old watercourse (and in the rainy season I think this is what it must have been) strewn with uneven boulders of various sizes, many of them loose. The horses, though used to the country and sure-footed,[400] frequently stumbled and nearly pitched you over their heads, so you had to concentrate on holding them up unless you suddenly wanted to find yourself with a split skull. The path had now narrowed, and twisted and turned through the thick undergrowth so tortuously that, although the three of us were riding almost nose to tail, we frequently lost sight of each other, and if it had not been for Luna's voice raised in song behind me, and the occasional oaths from Helmuth when his horse stumbled, I could have been riding alone. We had been riding this way for an hour or so, occasionally shouting comments or questions to each other, when I heard a roar of rage from Helmuth, who was a fair distance ahead. Rounding the corner I saw what was causing his rage.

The path at this point had widened, and along one side of it ran a rock-lined ravine, some six feet deep. Into this one of our pack horses had managed to fall, by some extraordinary means known only to itself, for the path at this point was more than wide enough to avoid such a catastrophe. The horse was standing, looking rattier smug I thought, in the bottom of the ravine, while our wild-looking hunters had dismounted and were trying to make it climb up on to the path again. The whole of one side of the horse was covered with a scarlet substance that dripped macabrely,[401] and the animal was standing in what appeared to be an ever-widening pool of blood. My first thought was to wonder, incredulously, how the creature had managed to hurt itself so badly with such a simple fall, and then I realised that the pack that the horse was carrying contained, among other things, part of our wine supply. The gooey[402] mess and Helmuth's rage were explained. We eventually got the horse back up to path, and Helmuth peered into the wine-stained sack, uttering moans of anguish.

"Bloody horse," he said, "why couldn't it fall on the other side, where the meat is?"

"Anything left?" I asked. "No," said Helmuth, giving me an anguished look, "every bottle broken. Do you know what that means, eh?"

"No," I said truthfully. "It means we have only twenty-five bottles of wine to last us," said Helmuth. Subdued by this tragedy we proceeded on our way slowly. Even Luna seemed affected by our loss, and sang only the more mournful songs in his extensive repertoire.

We rode on and on and on, the path getting steeper and steeper. At noon we dismounted by a small, tumbling stream, our shirts black with sweat, bathed our-selves and had a light meal of raw garlic, bread and wine. This, to the fastidious, may sound revolting, but when you are hungry there is no finer combination of tastes. We rested for an hour, to let our sweat-striped horses dry off, and then mounted again and rode on throughout the afternoon. At last, when the evening shadows were lengthening and we could see glimmers of a golden sunset through tiny gaps in the trees above, the path suddenly flattened out, and we rode into a flat, fairly clear area of forest. Here we found that our hunters had already dismounted and unsaddled the horses, while one of them had gathered dry brushwood and lighted a fire. We dismounted stiffly, unsaddled our horses and then, using our saddles and woolly sheepskin saddle-cloth, called a recado, as back-rests we relaxed round the fire for ten minutes, while the hunters dragged out some of the unsavoury-looking meat from the sacks and set it to roast on wooden spits.

Presently, feeling a bit less stiff, and as there was still enough light left, I decided to have a walk round the forest in the immediate area of our camp. Very soon the gruff voices of the hunters were lost among the leaves as I ducked and twisted my way[403] through the tangled, sunset-lit undergrowth. Overhead an occasional humming-bird flipped and purred in front of a flower for a last-night drink, and small groups of toukans[404] flapped from tree to tree, yapping like puppies, or contemplating me with heads on one side; wheezing like rusty hinges. But it was not the birds that interested me so much as the extraordinary variety of fungi[405] that I saw around me. I have never, in any part of the world, seen such a variety of mushrooms and toadstools littering the forest floor, the fallen tree-trunks, and the trees themselves. They were in all colours, from wine-red to black, from yellow to grey, and in a fantastic variety of shapes. I walked slowly for about fifteen minutes in the forest, and in that time I must have covered an area of about an acre. Yet in that short time, and in such a limited space, I filled my hat with twenty-five different species of fungi. Some were scarlet, shaped like goblets of Venetian glass[406] on delicate stems; others were filigreed with holes, so that they were like little carved ivory tables in yellow and white; others were like great, smooth blobs of tar or lava, black and hard, spreading over the rotting logs, and others appeared to have been carved out of polished chocolate, branched and twisted like clumps of miniature stag's antlers. Others stood in rows, like red or yellow or brown buttons on the shirt-fronts of the fallen trees, and others, like old yellow sponges, bung from the branches, dripping evil yellow liquid. It was a Macbeth witches' landscape,[407] and at any moment you expected to see some crouched and wrinkled old hag with a basket gathering this rich haul of what looked like potentially poisonous fungi.

Soon, it became too dark to see properly between the trees, and I made my way back to camp, spread out my fungi in rows, and examined them by the firelight. The unsavoury-looking meat had by now turned into the most delicious steaks, brown and bubbling, and we each with our own knife kept leaning forward cutting any delicate slivers away from the steaks, dunking them in Helmuth's sauce (a bottle of which he had thoughtfully brought with him) and popping the fragrant result into our mouths. Except for an occasional belch the silence was complete. The wine was passed silently, and occasionally someone would lean forward and softly rearrange the logs on the fire, so that the flames flapped upwards more brightly, and the remains of the steaks sizzled briefly, like a nest of sleepy wasps. At last, surfeited with food, we lay back against the comfortable hummocks of our saddles, and Luna, after taking a deep pull at the wine bottle, picked up his guitar and started to strum softly. Presently, very gently, he started to sing, his voice scarcely travelling beyond the circle of firelight, and the hunters joined him in a deep, rich chorus. I put on my poncho (that invaluable garment like a blanket with a hole in the middle), wrapped myself tightly in it – with one hand free to accept the wine bottle as it drifted round the circle – rolled my sheepskin recado into a warm, comfortable pillow and lay back, listening to the haunting songs, and watching a white moon edge its way very slowly through the black fretwork of branches above our heads. Then, suddenly, without any preliminary drowsiness, I was deeply asleep.

I awoke, still staring up into the sky, which was now a pale blue, suffused with gold. Turning on my side I saw the hunters already up, the fire lit, and more strips of meat hung to cook. Helmuth was crouching by the fire drinking a huge mug of steaming coffee, and he grinned at me as I yawned.

"Look at Luna," he said., gesturing with his cup, "snoring like a pig."

Luna lay near me, completely invisible under his poncho. I extricated my leg from my own poncho and licked vigorously at what I thought was probably Luna's rear end. It was, and a yelp greeted my cruelty. This was followed by a giggle and a burst of song as Luna's head appeared through the hole in his poncho, making him look ridiculously like a singing tortoise emerging from its shell. Presently, warmed by coffee and steaks, we saddled up and rode off into the forest, damp and fragrant with dew, and alive with ringing bird-calls.

As we rode my mind was occupied with the subject of vampire bats. I realised that, in the short time at our disposal up the mountains, we had little chance of catching any really spectacular beasts, but I knew that our destination was infested with these bats. At one time an attempt had been made to start a coffee plantation up where we were going, but no horses could be kept because of the vampires, and so the project had been abandoned. Now, I was extremely keen to meet a vampire on its home ground, so to speak, and, if possible, to catch some and take them back to Europe with me, feeding them on chicken's blood, or, if necessary, my own or that of any volunteers I could raise. As far as I knew they had never been taken back to any European zoo, though some had been kept successfully in the United States. I only hoped that, after being so long neglected, all the vampires at the coffee farm had not moved on to more lucrative pastures.

Our destination, when we reached it an hour or so later, proved to be a dilapidated one-roomed hut, with a small covered verandah running along one side. I gave it approximately another six months before it quietly disintegrated and became part of the forest: we had obviously only just arrived in time. All the hunters, Helmuth and Luna, treated this hut as though it was some luxury hotel, and eagerly dragged their saddles inside and argued amicably over who should sleep in which corner of the worm-eaten floor. I chose to sleep out on the verandah, not only because I felt it would be a trifle more hygienic, but from there I could keep an eye on the tree to which the horses were tethered, for it was on them that I expected the bats to make their first attack.

After a meal we set off on foot into the forest, but, although we saw numerous tracks of tapir arid jaguar and lesser beasts, the creatures themselves remained invisible. I did manage, however, by turning over every rotten log we came across, to capture two nice little toads, a tree-frog and a baby coral snake, the latter much to everyone's horror. These I stowed away carefully in the linen bags brought for the purpose when we returned to our hut for the evening meal. When we had finished we sat round the glowing remains of the fire, and Luna, as usual, sang to us. Then the rest of them retired into the hut, carefully closing the window and the door so that not a breath of deadly night air should creep in and kill them (though they had slept out in it quite happily the night before), and I made up my bed on the verandah, propped up so that I could get a good view of the horses, silvered with moonlight, tethered some twenty feet away. I settled myself comfortably, lit a cigarette, and then sat there straining my eyes into the moonlight for the very first sign of a bat anywhere near our horses. I sat like this for two hours before, against my will, dropping off to sleep.

I awoke at dawn, and furious with myself for having slept, I struggled out of my poncho and went to inspect the horses: I discovered, to my intense irritation, that two of them had been attacked by vampires while I lay snoring twenty feet away. They had both been bitten in exactly the same place, on the neck about a hand's length from the withers. The bites themselves consisted of two slits, each about half an inch long and quite shallow. But the effect of these small bites was quite gruesome, for the blood (as in all vampire bites) had not clotted after the bat had finished licking up its grisly meal and flown off, for the vampire's saliva contains an anticoagulant.[408] So, when the bloated bat had left its perch on the horses' necks, the wounds had continued to bleed, and now the horses' necks were striped with great bands of clotted blood, out of all proportion to the size of the bites. Again I noticed that the bites, as well as being in identical positions on each horse, were also on the same side of the body, the right side of the animal if you were sitting on it, and there was no sign of a bite or an attempted bite on the left side of either horse. Both animals seemed quite unaffected by the interest I was taking in them.

After breakfast; determined that the vampire bats must be lurking somewhere nearby, I organised the rest of the party in a search. We spread out and hunted through the forest in a circle round the hut, going about a quarter of a mile deep into the forest, looking for hollow trees or small caves where the vampires might be lurking. We continued in this fruitless task until lunch-time, and when we reassembled at the hut the only living specimens we could really be said to have acquired were some three hundred and forty black ticks[409] of varying ages and sizes, who, out of all of us, seemed to have preferred the smell of Luna and Helmuth, and so had converged on them. They had to go down to the stream nearby and strip; then, having washed the more tenacious ticks off their bodies, they set about the task of removing the others from the folds and crannies of their clothing, both of them perched naked on the rocks picking at their clothes like a couple of baboons.

"Curious things, ticks," I said conversationally, when I went down to the stream to tell them that food was ready, "parasites of great perception. It's a well-known natural history fact that they always attack the more unpleasant people of the party… usually the drunks, or the ones of very low mentality or morals."

Luna and Helmuth glared at me.

"Would you," inquired Helmuth interestedly, "like Luna and me to throw you over that waterfall? "

"You must admit it's a bit peculiar. None of our hunters got ticks, and they are all fairly good parasite-bait, I would have thought. I didn't get ticks. You two were the only ones. You know the old English proverb about parasites?"

"What old English proverb?" asked Helmuth suspiciously.

"Birds of a feather flock together "[410] I said, and hurried back to camp before they could get their shoes on and follow me.

The sun was so blindingly hot in the clearing when we had finished eating that everyone stretched out on the minute verandah and had a siesta. While the others were all snoring like a covey of pigs, I found I could not sleep. My head was still full of vampires. I was annoyed that we had not found their hideout, which I felt sure must be somewhere fairly near. Of course, as I realised, there may have been only one or two bats, in which case looking for their hideout in the local forest was three times as difficult as the usual imbecile occupation of looking for needles in haystacks. It was not until the others had woken, with grunts and yawns, that an idea suddenly occurred to me. I jumped to my feet and went inside the hut. Looking up I saw, to my delight, that the single room had a wooden ceiling, which meant that there must be some sort of loft between the apex of the roof and the ceiling. I hurried outside and there, sure enough, was a square opening which obviously led into the space between roof and ceiling. I was now convinced that I should find the loft simply stuffed with vampire bats, and so I waited impatiently while the hunters fashioned a rough ladder out of saplings and hoisted it up to the hole. Then I sped up it, armed with a bag to put my captures in and a cloth to catch them with without being bitten. I was followed by Helmuth who was going to guard the opening with an old shirt of mine. Eagerly, holding a torch in my mouth, I wriggled into the loft. The first discovery I made was that the wooden ceiling on which I was perched was insecure in the extreme, and so I had to spread myself out like a starfish to distribute my weight, unless I wanted the whole thing to crash into the room below, with me on it. So, progressing on my stomach in the manner of a stalking Red Indian,[411] I set out to explore the loft.

The first sign of life was a long, slender tree-snake,[412] which shot past me towards the hole that Helmuth was guarding. When I informed him of this and asked him to try and catch it he greeted this request in the most unfriendly manner, interspersed with a number of rich Austrian oaths. Luckily for him, the snake found a crack in the ceiling and disappeared through that, and we did not see him again. I crawled on doggedly, disturbing three small scorpions, who immediately rushed into the nearest holes, and eight large and revolting spiders of the more hirsute variety, who merely shifted slightly when the torch beam hit them, and crouched there meditatively. But there was not the faintest sign of a bat, not even so much as a bat dropping[413] to encourage me. I was just beginning to feel very bitter about bats in general and vampire bats in particular, when my torch-beam picked out something sitting sedately on a cross-beam, glaring at me ferociously, and I immediately forgot all about vampires.

Squatting there in the puddle of torchlight was a pigmy owl, a bird little bigger than a sparrow, with round yellow eyes that glared at me with all the silent indignation of a vicar who, in the middle of the service, has discovered that the organist is drunk. Now, I have a passion for owls of all sorts, but these pigmy owls are probably my favourites. I think it is their diminutive size combined with their utter fearlessness that attracts me; at any rate I determined to add the one perching above me to my collection, or die in the attempt. Keeping the torch beam firmly fixed on his eyes, so that he could not see what I was doing, I gently brought up my other hand and then, with a quick movement, I threw the cloth I carried over him, and grabbed. He uttered a squeak of indignation, and fluttered wildly, sinking his small but sharp talons into my fingers through the cloth. Placing the torch on the floor I wrapped him up tightly in the cloth and then put the whole bundle inside my shirt and buttoned it up for further safely. Then, having made quite sure once more that there was not a bat in the loft, I started to make my way back to the entrance. This was, to say the least, difficult, for the owl was reposing against my chest, so I had to travel on my back. This gave me a wonderful view of the spiders overhead, all of which now seemed to be the size of soup-plates and each ready to drop on me if I made a false move. Fascinating as I find spiders, I prefer to keep the larger and more hairy varieties at a distance. At last I reached the opening and levered myself out into the sunshine.

To my surprise the hunters were excited and delighted with my capture of the pigmy owl. I was puzzled by this, until they explained that it was a common belief in Argentina that if you possessed one of these little birds you would be lucky in love. This answered a question that had been puzzling me for some time. When I had been in Buenos Aires I had found one of these owls in a cage in the local bird market. The owner had asked a price that was so fantastic that I had treated it with ridicule, until I realised that he meant it. He refused to bargain, and was quite unmoved when I left without buying the bird. Three days later I had returned, thinking that by now the man would be more amenable to bargaining, only to find that he had sold the owl at the price he had asked for. This had seemed to me incredible, and I could not for the life of me think of a satisfactory explanation. But now I realised I had been outbid by some lovesick swain;[414] I could only hope that the owl brought him luck.

That night was to be our last spent in the mountains, and I was grimly determined that I was going to catch a vampire bat if one showed so much as a wing-tip that night. I had even decided that I would use myself as bait. Not only would it bring the bats within catching range, but I was interested to see if the bite was really as painless as it was reputed to be. So, when the others had retired to their airless boudoir,[415] I made up my bed as near to the horses as I felt I could get without frightening off the bats, wrapped myself up in my poncho but left one of my feet sticking out, for vampires, I had read, were particularly fond of human extremities, especially the big toe. Anyway, it was the only extremity[416] I was prepared to sacrifice for the sake of Science.

I lay there in the moonlight, glaring at the horses, while my foot got colder and colder. I wondered if vampires like frozen human big toe.[417] Faintly from the dark forest around came the night sounds, a million crickets doing endless carpentry work in the undergrowth, hammering and sawing, forging miniature horseshoes, practising the trombone, tuning harps, and learning how to use tiny pneumatic drills. From the tree-tops frogs cleared their throats huskily, like a male chorus getting ready for a concert. Everything was brilliantly lit by moonlight, including my big toe, but there was not a bat to be seen.

Eventually, my left foot began to feel like something that had gone with Scott[418] to the Pole, and had been left there, so I drew it into the warmth of the poncho and extended my right foot as a sacrifice. The horses, with drooping heads, stood quite still in the moonlight, very occasionally shifting their weight from one pair of legs to another. Presently, in order to get some feeling back into my feet, I went and hobbled round the horses, inspecting them with the aid of a torch. None of them had been attacked. I went back and continued my self-imposed torture. I did a variety of things to keep myself awake: I smoked endless cigarettes under cover of the poncho, I made mental lists of all the South American animals I could think of, working through the alphabet, and, when these failed and I started to feel sleepy, I thought about my overdraft.[419] This last is the most successful sleep eradicator I know. By the time dawn had started to drain the blackness out of the sky, I was wide awake and feeling as though I was solely responsible for the National Debt.[420] As soon as it became light enough to see without a torch I hobbled over to inspect the horses, more as a matter of form than anything. I could hardly believe my eyes for two of them were painted with gory ribbons of blood down their necks. Now, I had been watching those horses – in brilliant moonlight – throughout the night, and I would have staked my life that not a bat of any description had come within a hundred yards of them. Yet two of them had been feasted upon, as it were, before my very eyes. To say that I was chagrined is putting it mildly. I had feet that felt as if they would fall off at a touch, a splitting headache, and felt generally rather like a dormouse that had been pulled out of its nest in mid-October.

Luna and Helmuth, of course, when I woke them up, were very amused, and thought this was sufficient revenge for my rude remarks the previous day about parasites. It was not until I had finished my breakfast in a moody and semi-somnambulistic state, and was starting on my third mug of coffee, that I remembered something that startled me considerably. In my enthusiasm to catch a vampire bat, and to be bitten by one to see what it felt like, I had completely forgotten the rather unpleasant fact that they can be rabies[421] carriers, so being bitten by one might have had some interesting repercussions, to say the least. I remembered that the rabies vaccine (which, with the usual ghoulish medical relish, they inject into your stomach) is extremely painful, and you have to have a vast quantity of the stuff pumped into you before you are out of danger. Whether this is necessary, or simply because the doctors get a rake-off[422] from the vaccine manufacturers, I don't know, but I do know – from people that have had it – that it is not an experience to be welcomed. The chances of getting rabies from a bat in that particular area would be extremely slight, I should have thought, but even so, had I been bitten, I would have had to undergo the injections as a precautionary measure; anyone who has ever read a description of the last stages of a person suffering from rabies would be only too happy to rush to the nearest hospital.

So, without bats or bites, and with my precious pigmy owl slung round my neck in a tiny bamboo cage, we set off down the mountains back to Calilegua. By the time we reached the cane fields it was green twilight, and we were all tired and aching. Even Luna, riding ahead, was singing more and more softly. At length we saw the glow of lights from Helmuth's flat, and when we dismounted, stiff, sweaty and dirty, and made our way inside, there was Edna, fresh and lovely, and by her side a table on which stood three very large ice-cold gin-and-tonics.

Chapter Eight A WAGON-LOAD OF BICHOS

By now my collection of creatures had grown to such an extent that it was a whole-time job[423] looking after it. No longer could I go off for three or four days at a time and leave poor Edna to cherish my creatures. Also I was busy building cages for those tame animals, which, up until now, had either been at complete liberty, or spent their time tethered, but on leashes. I had originally intended to fly my collection back to Buenos Aires, but the air freight estimate, when it arrived, looked as if it had been worked out by the Astronomer Royal in light-years.[424]

There was nothing for it,[425] I would have to go by train, a two-day and three-night journey that I did not relish, but there was no alternative. Charles arranged the whole thing for me with a speed and efficiency that was typical of him. This in spite of the fact that he had his own work to do, as well as being extremely worried over his wife Joan, who was ill in hospital. So I hammered and sawed in the garden, getting cages ready for my train-journey, and keeping a stern eye on those animals, which were still loose and therefore liable to get up to mischief.

The biggest of the still un-caged animals were the coatimundis, Martha and Mathias, who, on collars and chains, wore tethered under the trees. I am fond of coatimundis, though they are not everyone's idea of the most charming of animals. But I find something very appealing about their long, rubbery, tip-tilted noses, their pigeon-toed,[426] bear-like walk, and the way they hold their long, ringed tails straight up in the air when they move, like furry exclamation marks. In the wild state they are gregarious, travelling through the forest in quite large parties, uprooting logs and stones, snuffling in every nook and cranny with their vacuum-cleaner-like noses for their prey, which may range from beetles to birds and from fruit to mushrooms. Like most small, gregarious mammals they have quite an extensive vocabulary, and the conversation of a troup of coatimundis would, I am sure, repay investigation. Mathias would converse with me by the hour[427] in a series of birdlike squeaks and trills; if, when investigating a rotten log or a stone, he thought he was nearing a succulent beetle or slug, the sounds would turn to snuffling grunts, pitched in different keys, and interspersed with a strange champing noise made by chattering his teeth together at great speed. When in a rage he would chitter violently, his whole body shaking as if with ague, and give prolonged, piercing whistling cries that would almost burst your ear drums.

Both the coatimundis had fairly long leashes, which were attached to a convenient tree. When they had uprooted and investigated every log and stone within the circle of the leash, they were moved to a fresh tree. Every time this happened, Mathias would spend ten minutes or so marking out his circle of territory with the scent gland[428] at the base of his tail. He would solemnly shuffle his way round in a circle, a look of immense concentration on his face, squatting down at intervals to rub his hindquarters on a convenient rock or stick. Having thus, as it were, hoisted the coatimundi equivalent of the flag,[429] he would relax and settle down to the task of beetle-hunting with a clear conscience. If any of the local dogs were so misguided as to approach his territory they never did it a second time. He would walk slowly towards them, champing his teeth alarmingly, his tail erect, stiff as a poker, and puffed up to twice its normal size. Having got within range[430] he would suddenly dart forward in a curious, rolling run, uttering his piercing ear-splitting screams. This ghastly noise had the effect of undermining the morale of any but the bravest dog, and, when they had hurriedly retreated, Mathias, quietly chattering and trilling to himself, would wend his way round in a circle, re-marking his entire territory. During all this, Martha would be sitting at the extreme limit of her chain, watching Mathias with adoring eyes, and uttering tiny squeaks of encouragement.

All the other creatures I had acquired were doing splendidly. Juanita, the peccary, grew fatter and more charming each day, and lorded it over the parrots.[431] My precious yellow-naped macaws had given me heart failure by appearing to go into a decline; I eventually discovered they were not ill but, for some obscure reason, wanted to sleep inside a box at night, a fact that I discovered quite by accident. As soon as they were supplied with a sleeping box their appetites revived and they started to do well. Among the cats the little Geoffrey's was now quite reconciled to captivity, and played such strenuous games of hide-and-seek with his tabby kitten companion, as well as a game they had invented which appeared to be called "Strangle Your Neighbour",[432] that I began to wonder if I would get them to Buenos Aires alive, let alone[433] Jersey. Luna the puma had tamed down a lot, and even condescended to allow me to scratch her behind the ears, while she rumbled contentedly deep in her throat. The poor half-starved ocelot was now fat and glossy. Having lost the apathy of starvation, she was now very full of herself and regarded the interior of her cage as sacred, so the process of cleaning her out or feeding her was fraught with danger. Thus are one's kindnesses sometimes repaid.

Among the new creatures which I had added to my collection were two of the most enchanting members of the monkey tribe, a pair of douroucoulis[434] which had been caught in the forest by an Indian hunter. He had been a very good hunter, but unfortunately I had paid him rather too lavishly for the monkeys, and, overcome by the size of the payment, he had retired to the village and stayed drunk ever since, so these were the last specimens I got from him. There is quite an art in paying the right amount for an animal, and by paying too much you can easily lose a good hunter, for between your camp and the forest always lies a series of gin-shops, and hunters are notoriously weak-willed.

Douroucoulis are the only nocturnal monkeys in the world, and from that point of view alone would be remarkable. But when you add to that the fact that they look like a cross between an owl and a clown, that they are the gentlest of monkeys, and that they spend a lot of time clasped in each other's arms exchanging the most human kisses, then douroucoulis become, so far as I am concerned, irresistible. They have the huge eyes, typical of a nocturnal creature, surrounded by a white facial mask edged with black. The shape of the mouth gives you the impression that they are just about to break into a rather sad, slightly pitying smile. Their hacks and tails are a pleasant shade of greenish-grey, and they possess great fluffy shirt-fronts that vary from pale yellow to deep orange, according to age. In the wilds these monkeys, like the coatimundis, are gregarious, travelling through the trees with silent leaps in troupes of ten to fifteen animals. The only time they make any sound is when feeding, and then they converse among themselves with loud, purring grunts which swell their throats up, or a series of bird-like tweets, cat-like mewing, pig-like snufflings and snake-like hissings. The first time I heard them feeding among the dark trees in the forest I identified them as each of these animals in turn, and then became so muddled I was convinced I had found something new to science. I used to dig large red beetles out of the rotting palm-trees for the douroucoulis, insects of which they were inordinately fond. They would watch my approach with the titbits their eyes wide, their hands held out beseechingly trembling slightly, uttering faint squeaks of excitement. They would clasp the wriggling beetles in their hands with the awkward grace of a young child accepting a stick of rock,[435] and chew and scrunch their way through them, pausing now and again to utter squeaks of joy. When the last piece had been chewed and swallowed, they would carefully examine their hands, both back and front, to make sure there was none left, and then examine each other for the same reason. Having convinced themselves that no fragment remained, they would clasp each other and kiss passionately for five minutes or so, in what appeared to be an orgy of mutual congratulation.

It was just after I had acquired these delightful monkeys that I had my encounter with a curious human being, and my introduction to him was due to Luna. He appeared one morning and said that business was to take him to a place a few miles away from Calilegua. In this village he had to visit he had heard rumours of a man who was interested in animals and even kept them as pets.

"All I can find out is that his name is Coco, and that everyone there says he is loco, Gerry," said Luna. "But you might like to come and see."

"All right," I said, nothing loath to leaving[436] my sweat-provoking carpentry for a while, "but can you wait until I've cleaned and fed the animals?"

"O. K.," said Luna, and lay patiently on the lawn scratching Juanita's stomach until I had finished my chores.

The village, when we reached it, proved to be a large, straggling one, with a curious dead air about it. Even the houses, constructed as usual with the off-cuts from tree-trunks, had an ill-kempt, dirty look. Everything looked scruffy and depressed. But everyone appeared to know Coco, for when we inquired in the local bar where he lived a forest of hands directed us, and everyone smiled and said, "Ah, yes, Coco," as if they were referring to the village idiot. Following directions we found his house easily enough.

It would have been very noticeable anyway, for in comparison to the rest of the village, it gleamed like a gem. It had been carefully whitewashed, so that it shone; its front garden was neatly tended and, incredibly, a real gravel path, neatly raked, led up to the house. I decided that if this was the house of the village idiot, then I very much wanted to meet him. In response to our clapping a slight, dark woman appeared, who looked as though she might be Italian. She admitted to being Coco's wife, but said that he was not at home: he worked during the day at the local saw-mill, which we could hear humming in the distance like all the bees in the universe having a conference. Luna explained my mission, and the wife's face lighted up.

"Oh," she said, "I will send one of the children to fetch him. He would never forgive me if he missed meeting you. Please come round to the back and wait… he will come in a few moments."

The garden at the back of the house was as well tended as the front, and, to my surprise, contained two well-constructed and spacious aviaries.[437] I peered into them hopefully, but they were both empty. We did not have to wait long for Coco's appearance. He appeared from the path leading to the saw-mill at a brisk trot, and arrived, breathing deeply, in front of us and doffed his straw hat. He was a short, well-built man with coal-black, curly hair and (unusual in Argentina) a thick black beard and moustache, carefully trimmed. His eyes were dark, and shone with eagerness as he held out a well-shaped brown hand to Luna and myself.

"Welcome, welcome," he said, "you must excuse, please, my English… she is not good for I have no chance to practise."

The fact that he could speak English at all amazed me.

"You have no idea what this means to me," he said eagerly, wringing my hand, "to speak with someone who has an interest in Nature… if my wife had not called me I would never have forgiven her… I could not believe it when my son told me… an Englishman to see me, and about animals, too."

He smiled at me, his face still slightly awe-stricken at this miracle that had happened. One would have thought that I had come to offer him the Presidency of Argentina. I was so overwhelmed at being greeted like a newly-descended angel that I was almost at a loss for words.

"Well," said Luna, having obviously decided that he had done his job by bringing one lunatic in contact with another, "I will go and do my work and see you later." He drifted off, humming to himself, while Coco seized my arm gently, as though it were a butterfly's wing that he might damage, and urged me up the steps and into the living-room of his house. Here his wife had produced wonderful lemonade from fresh lemons, heavily sweetened, and we sat at the table and drank this while Coco talked. He spoke quietly, stumbling occasionally in his English and saying a sentence in Spanish when he realised I knew enough of the language to follow. It was an extraordinary experience, like listening to a man who had been dumb for years suddenly recover the power of speech. He had been living for so long in a world of his own, for neither his wife, children nor anyone in the fly-blown[438] village could understand his interests. To him I was the incredible answer to a prayer, a man who had suddenly appeared from nowhere, a man who could understand what he meant when he said that a bird was beautiful, or an animal was interesting, someone, in fact, who could speak this language that had been so long locked up inside him, which no one around him comprehended. All the time he spoke he watched me with an embarrassing expression, a mixture of awe and fear – awe that I should be there at all, and fear that I might suddenly disappear like a mirage.

"It is the birds that I am particularly studying," he said. "I know the birds of Argentina are catalogued, but who knows anything about them? Who knows their courtship displays, their type of nests, how many eggs they lay, how many broods they have, if they migrate? Nothing is known of this, and this is the problem. In this field I am trying to help, as well as I can."

"This is the problem all over the world," I said, "we know what creatures exist – or most of them – but we know nothing of their private lives."

"Would you like to see the place where I work?. I call it my study," he explained deprecatingly, "it is very small, but all I can afford…"

"I would love to see it," I said.

Eagerly he led me outside to where a sort of miniature wing had been built on to the side of the house. The door that led into this was heavily padlocked. As he pulled a key from his pocket to open this he smiled at me.

"I let no one in here," he explained simply, "they do not understand."

Up until then I had been greatly impressed with Coco, and with his obvious enthusiasm for animal life. But now, being led into his study, I was more than impressed. I was speechless.

His study was about eight feet long and six feet wide. In one corner was a cabinet[439] which housed, as he showed me, his collection of bird and small mammal skins, and various birds' eggs. Then there was a long, low bench on which he did his skinning, and nearby a rough bookcase containing some fourteen volumes on natural history, some in Spanish, some in English. Under the one small window stood an easel, and on it the half-finished water colour of a bird, whose corpse lay nearby on a box.

"Did you do that?" I asked incredulously.

"Yes," he said shyly, "you see, I could not afford a camera, and this was the only way to record their plum-age."

I gazed at the half-finished picture. It was beautifully done, with a fineness of line and colouring that was amazing. I say amazing because the drawing and painting of birds is one of the most difficult of subjects in the whole natural history field. Here was work that was almost up to the standards of some of the best modern bird painters I had seen. You could see that it was the work of an untrained person, but it was done with meticulous accuracy and love, and the bird glowed on the page. I had the dead specimen in my hand to compare the painting with, and I could see that this painting was far better than a lot I had seen published in bird books.

He pulled out a great folder and showed me his other work. He had some forty paintings of birds, generally in pairs if there was any sexual difference in the plumage, and they were all as good as the first one I had seen.

"But these are terribly good," I said, "You must do something with them."

"Do you think so?" he inquired doubtfully, peering at the paintings. "I have sent some to the man in charge of the Museum at Cordoba, and he liked them. He said we should have a small book printed when I have enough of them, but this I think is doubtful, for you know how costly a production would be."

"Well, I know the people in charge of the Museum at Buenos Aires," I said. "I will speak to them about you. I don't guarantee anything, but they might be able to help."

"That would be wonderful," he said, his eyes shining. "Tell me," I said, "do you like your work here in the saw-mill?"

"Like it?" he repeated incredulously, "like it? Senior, it is soul-destroying. But it provides me with enough to live on, and by careful saving I have enough left over to buy paints. Also I am saving to buy a small cine-camera, for however skilful you are as a painter there are certain things that birds do which can only be captured on film. But these cine-cameras are very expensive, and I am afraid it will be a long time before I can afford it."

He talked on for an hour or so, quickly, enthusiastically, telling me what he had accomplished and what he hoped to do. I had to keep reminding myself that this was a man – a peasant, if you prefer the term – who worked in a saw-mill and lived in a house which, though spotless, no so-called "worker" in England would be seen dead in. To have discovered Coco in the outskirts of Buenos Aires would not have been, perhaps, so incredible, but to find him here in this remote, unlikely spot, was like suddenly coming across a unicorn in the middle of Piccadilly.[440] And, although he explained to me the difficulties of saving enough money to buy paints, and enough to buy his dream cine-camera, there was never once the slightest suggestion that financial aid might be forthcoming from me. He was simply, with the naiveté of a child, discussing his problems with someone he felt would understand and appreciate what he was doing. To him I must have represented a millionaire, yet I knew that if I offered him money I would cease to be his friend, and become as the other inhabitants of the village, a person who did not understand. The most I could do was to promise to speak to the Museum in Buenos Aires (for good bird-painters are not two a penny[441]) and to give him my card, and tell him that if there was anything that he wanted from England which he could not obtain in Argentina, to let me know and I would send it to him. When, eventually, Luna reappeared and we simply had to leave, Coco said goodbye wistfully, rather like a child who had been allowed to play with a new toy, and then had it taken away. As we drove off he was standing in the centre of the dusty, rutted street, watching the car and turning my card over and over in his hands, as if it were some sort of talisman.

Unfortunately, on my way down to Buenos Aires I lost Coco's address, and I did not discover the loss until I got back to England. But he had mine, and I felt sure that he would write and ask me to send him a bird book or perhaps some paints, for such things are hard to get in Argentina. But there was no word from him. Then, when Christmas came, I sent him a card, and in it I reiterated my offer to send him anything he needed. I sent the card care of Charles,[442] at Calilegua, who kindly drove out and delivered it to Coco. Then Coco wrote to me, a charming letter, in which he apologised for his bad English, but he thought that, nevertheless, it was improving slightly. He gave me news of his birds and his painting. But there was not a single request in the letter. So, at the risk of offending him, I packed up a parcel of books that I thought would be of the greatest use to him, and shipped them off. And now, when I get disgruntled with my lot, when I get irritated because I can't afford some new animal, or a new book, or a new gadget for my camera, I remember Coco in his tiny study, working hard and enthusiastically with inadequate tools and money, and it has a salutary effect on me. On the way back to Calilegua Luna asked me what I had thought of Coco, since everyone in the village thought he was loco. I said he was, in my opinion, one of the sanest men I had ever met, and certainly one of the most remarkable. I hope that some day I have the privilege of meeting him again.

On the way back to Calilegua we stopped briefly at another village where Luna had heard a rumour that some bicho was being kept. To my delight it turned out to be a fully adult male peccary, ridiculously tame, and the perfect mate for Juanita. Ha was called, by his owner, Juan, and so we purchased him, and put him, grunting excitedly, into the back of the car and drove back to Calilegua in triumph. Juan, however, was so large, clumsy and eagerly tame that I felt he might, in all innocence, damage Juanita, who was only a quarter his size, and very fragile, so I was forced to cage them separately until Juanita had grown sufficiently. However, they touched noses through the bars, and seemed to be delighted with each other, so I had hope of eventually arranging a successful marriage.

At last the day came when I had to leave Calilegua. I did not want to leave a bit, for everyone had been too kind to me. Joan and Charles, Helmuth and Edna, and the human nightingale Luna, had accepted me, this complete stranger, into their lives, allowed me to disrupt their routine, showered me with kindness and done everything possible to help in my work. But, although I had been a stranger on arrival in Calilegua, such was the kindness shown to me that within a matter of hours I felt I had been there for years. To say that I was sorry to leave these friends was putting it mildly.

My journey was, in the first stages, slightly complicated. I had to take the collection on the small railway that ran from Calilegua to the nearest big town. Here everything had to be transshipped on to the Buenos Aires train. Charles, realising that I was worried about the transshipment side of the business, insisted that Luna travelled with me as far as the main town, and that he, Helmuth and Edna (for Joan was still ill) would drive into the town and meet us there, to sort out any difficulties. I protested at the amount of trouble this would put them to, but they shouted my protests down, and Edna said that if she was not allowed to see me off she would give me no more gin that evening. This frightful threat squashed my protests effectively.

So, on the morning of departure, a tractor dragging a giant flat cart arrived outside Charles's house, and the crates of animals were piled up on it and then driven slowly to the station. Here we stacked them on the platform, and awaited the arrival of the train. I felt distinctly less happy when I examined the railway lines. They were worn right down, obviously never having been replaced for years. In places the weight of the train had pushed both the sleeper[443] and the track so far into the ground that, from certain angles, they seemed to disappear altogether. There was such a riot of weeds and grass growing all over the track anyway, that it was difficult enough to see where the railway began and the undergrowth ended. I estimated that if the train travelled at anything more than five miles an hour on such a track we were going to have the train crash of the century.[444]

"This is nothing," said Charles proudly, when I protested at the state of the lines, "this is good compared to some parts of the track."

"And I thought the plane I came in was dangerous enough," I said, "but this is pure suicide. You can't even call them railway lines, they're both so bent they look like a couple of drunken snakes."

"Well, we haven't had an accident yet," said Charles. And with this cheerful news I had to be content. When the train eventually came into view it was so startling that it drove all thoughts about the state of the track out of my head. The carriages were wooden, and looked like the ones you see in old Western films.[445] But it was the engine that was so remarkable. It was obviously an old one, again straight out of a Wild West film, with a gigantic cowcatcher[446] in front. But someone, obviously dissatisfied with its archaic appearance, had attempted to liven it up a bit, and had streamlined it with sheets of metal, painted in broad orange, yellow and scarlet stripes. It was, to say the least, the gayest engine I had ever seen; it looked as though it had just come straight from a carnival as it swept down towards us at a majestic twenty miles an hour, the overgrown track covering the rails so successfully that the thing looked as though it was coming straight across country. It roared into the station with a scream of brakes, and then proudly let out a huge cloud of pungent black smoke that enveloped us all. Hastily we pushed the animal crates into the guard's van, Luna and I went and got ourselves a wooden seat in the compartment next door, and then, with a great jerk and a shudder, the train was off.

For most of the way the road ran parallel with the railway, only separated by a tangle of grass and shrubs, and a low barbed-wire fence. So Charles, Helmuth and Edna, drove along parallel with our carriage, shouting insults and abuse at us, shaking their fists and accusing Luna and myself of a rich variety of crimes. The other passengers were at first puzzled, and then, when they realised the joke, they joined in heartily, even suggesting a few choice insults we could shout back. When Helmuth accused Luna of having a voice as sweet as that of a donkey suffering from laryngitis, the orange that Luna hurled out of the train window missed Helmuth's head by only a fraction of an inch. It was childish, but it was fun, and the whole train joined in. At each of the numerous little stations we had to stop at, the idiots in the car would drive on ahead, and be there on the platform to present me with a huge bouquet of wilting flowers, after which I would make a long and impassioned speech in modern Greek[447] out of the train window, to the complete mystification of the passengers who had only just joined the train, and obviously thought that I was some sort of visiting politician. So we enjoyed ourselves hugely until we reached the town where I was to change trains. Here we piled the collection carefully on the platform, posted a porter in charge to keep people from annoying the animals, and went to have a meal, for there were several hours to wait before the Buenos Aires train got in.

When we reassembled dusk had fallen, and the Buenos Aires train puffed and rumbled its way into the station in an impressive cloud of sparks and steam. But it was just an ordinary engine, and bore not the remotest resemblance to the vivid, lurching dragon that had transported us so nobly from Calilegua. Helmuth, Luna and I carefully stacked the animals into the van that I had hired, and which proved to be far smaller than I anticipated. Charles, meanwhile, had run my sleeping berth to earth,[448] and put my things inside. I was to share it with three other people, but none of them was present, and so I could only hope that they would be interesting. Then, with, nothing to do but wait for departure, I squatted on the steps leading from the carriage, while the others gathered in a group around me. Edna fumbled in her bag, and then held up something that glinted in the dim lights of the station. A bottle of gin.

"A parting present," she said, grinning at me wickedly, "I could not bear to think of you travelling all that way without any food."

"Helmuth," I said, as Luna went of in search of tonic water and glasses. "You have a wife in a million."

"Maybe" said Helmuth gloomily, "but she only does this for you, Gerry. She never gives me gin when I go away. She just tells me that I drink too much."

So, standing on the station, we toasted each other. I had just finished my drink when the guard's whistle squealed, and the train started to move. Still clutching their drinks the others ran alongside to shake my hand, and I nearly fell out of the train kissing Edna goodbye. The train gathered speed, and I saw them in a group under the dim station lights, holding up their glasses in a last toast, before they were lost to view, and I went gloomily to my compartment, carrying the remains of the gin.

The train journey was not quite as bad as I had anticipated, although, naturally, travelling on an Argentine train with forty-odd cages[449] of assorted livestock, is no picnic. My chief fear was that during the night (or day) at some station or other, they would shunt my carriage-load of animals into a aiding and forget to reattach it. This awful experience had once happened to an animal-collector friend of mine in South America, and by the time he had discovered his loss and raced back to the station in a hired car, nearly all his specimens were dead. So I was determined that, whenever we stopped, night or day, I was going to be out on the platform to make sure my precious cargo was safe. This extraordinary behaviour of leaping out of my bunk in the middle of the night puzzled my sleeping companions considerably. They were three young and charming footballers, returning from Chile where they had been playing. As soon as I explained my actions to them, however, they were full of concern at the amount of sleep I was losing, and insisted on taking turns with me during the night, which they did dutifully during the rest of the trip. To them the whole process must have appeared ludicrous in the extreme, but they treated the matter with great seriousness, and helped me considerably.

Another problem was that I could only get to my animals when the train was in a station, for their van was not connected by the corridor to the rest of the train. Here the sleeping car attendant came into his own.[450] He would warn me ten minutes before we got to a station, and tell me how long we were going to stay there. This gave me time to wend my way down the train until I reached the animal van, and when the train pulled up, to jump out and minister to their wants.

The three carriages I had to go through to reach the animal van were the third-class parts of the train, and on the wooden benches therein was a solid mass of humanity surrounded by babies, bottles of wine, mothers-in-law, goats, chickens, pigs, baskets of fruit, and other necessities of travel. When this gay, exuberant, garlic-breathing crowd learned the reason for my curious and constant peregrinations to the van at the back, they united in their efforts to help. As soon as the train stopped they would help me out on to the platform, find the nearest water-tap for me, send their children scuttling in all directions to buy me bananas or bread or whatever commodity was needed for the animals, and then, when I had finished my chores, they would hoist me lovingly on board the slowly-moving train, and make earnest inquiries as to the puma's health, or how the birds were standing up to the heat, and was it true that I had a parrot that said "Hijo de puta?" Then they would offer me sweetmeats, sandwiches, glasses of wine or pots of meat, show me their babies, their goats or chickens or pigs, sing songs for me, and generally treat me as one of the family. They were so charming and kind, so friendly, that when we eventually pulled slowly into the huge, echoing station at Buenos Aires, I was almost sorry the trip was over. The animals were piled into a lorry, my hand was wrung by a hundred people, and we roared off to take the creatures, all of whom had survived the journey remarkably well, to join the rest of the collection in the huge shed in the Museum grounds.

That evening, to my horror, I discovered that a good friend of mine was giving a cocktail party to celebrate my return to Buenos Aires. I hate cocktail parties, but could think of no way of refusing this one without causing offence. So, tired though we were, Sophie and I dolled up[451] and we went. The majority of people there had never met, and did not particularly want to, but there was sprinkling of old friends to make it worthwhile. I was standing quietly discussing things of mutual interest with a friend of mine when I was approached by a type that I detest. It is the typical Englishman that seems, like some awful weed, to flourish best in foreign climes. This particular one I had met before, and had not liked. Now he loomed over me, wearing, as if to irritate me still further, his Old School tie. He had a face empty of expression, like a badly-made death-mask, and the supercilious, drawling voice that is supposed to prove to the world that even if you have no brains you were well brought up.

"I hear," he said condescendingly, "that you've just got back from Jujuy".

"Yes," I said shortly.

"By train?" he inquired, with a faint look of distaste.

"Yes," I said.

"What sort of trip down did you have?" he asked.

"Very nice… very pleasant," I said.

"I suppose there was a very ordinary crowd of chaps on the train," he said commiseratingly. I looked at him, his dough-like face, his empty eyes, and I remembered my train companions: the burly young footballers who had helped me with the night watches; the old man who had recited Martin Fierro[452] to me until, in self-defence, I had been forced to eat some garlic too, between the thirteenth and fourteenth stanzas; the dear old fat lady whom I had bumped into and who had fallen backwards into her basket of eggs, and who refused to let me pay for the damage because, as she explained, she had not laughed so much for years. I looked at this vapid representative of my kind, and I could not resist it.

"Yes," I said sorrowfully, "They were a very ordinary crowd of chaps. Do you know that only a few of them wore ties, and not one of them could speak English?"

Then I left him to get myself another drink. I felt I deserved it.

THE CUSTOMS OF THE COUNTRY

When you have a large collection of animals to transport from one end of the world to the other you cannot, as a lot of people seem to think, just hoist them aboard the nearest ship and set off with a gay wave of your hand. There is slightly more to it than this. Your first problem is to find a shipping company who will agree to carry animals. Most shipping people, when you mention the words "animal cargo" to them grow pale, and get vivid mental pictures of the Captain being eviscerated on the bridge by a jaguar, the First Officer being slowly crushed in the coils of some enormous snake, while the passengers are pursued from one end of the ship to the other by a host of repulsive and deadly beasts of various species. Shipping people, on the whole, seem to be under the impression you want to travel on one of their ships for the sole purpose of releasing all the creatures, which you have spent six hard months collecting.

Once, however, you have surmounted this psychological hurdle, there are still many problems. There are consultations with the Chief Steward as to how much refrigerator space you can have for your meat, fish and eggs, without starving the passengers in consequence; the Chief Officer and the Bosun[453] have to be consulted on where and how your cages are to be stacked, and how they are to be secured for rough weather, and how many ship's tarpaulins you can borrow. Then you pay a formal call on the Captain and, generally over a gin, you tell him (almost with tears in your eyes) you will be so little trouble aboard that he won't even notice you are there – a statement which neither he nor you believe. But, most important of all, you generally have to have your collection ready for embarkation a good ten days or so before the ship is scheduled to leave, for a number of things may happen in some ports that will put the sailing date forward, or, more irritatingly, backward, and you have to be on the spot to receive your orders. The end of a trip is, then, the most harrowing, frustrating, tiring and frightening part. When people ask me about the "dangers" of my trips I am always tempted to say that the "dangers" of the forest pale into insignificance[454] as compared with the dangers of being stranded in a remote part of the world with a collection of a hundred and fifty animals to feed, and your money running out.

However, we had now, it seemed, surmounted all these obstacles. A ship had been procured, consultations with the people on board had been satisfactory, food for the animals had been ordered, and everything appeared to be running smoothly. It was at this precise juncture that Juanita, the baby peccary, decided to liven up life for us by catching pneumonia.

The animals, as I have said, were now in a huge shed in the Museum grounds, which had no heating. While this did not appear to worry any of the other animals unduly (although it was the beginning of the Argentine winter and getting progressively colder) Juanita decided to be different. Without so much as a preliminary cough to warn us, Juanita succumbed. In the morning she was full of beans,[455] and devoured her food avidly; in the evening, when we went to cover the animals for the night, she looked decidedly queer. She was, for one thing, leaning against the side of her box as if for support, her eyes half-closed, her breathing rapid and rattling in her throat. Hastily I opened the door of the cage and called her. She made a tremendous effort, stood upright shakily, tottered out of the cage and collapsed in my arms. It was in the best cinematic tradition, but rather frightening. As I held her I could hear her breath wheezing and bubbling in her tiny chest, and her body lay in my arms limp and cold.

In order to husband[456] our rapidly decreasing money supplies two friends in Buenos Aires had rallied round and allowed Sophie and me to stay in their respective flats, in order to save on hotel bills. So, while Sophie was ensconced in the flat of Blondie Maitland-Harriot, I was occupying a camp-bed in the flat of one David Jones. At the moment when I discovered Juanita's condition David was with me. As I wrapped her up in my coat I did some rapid thinking. The animal had to have warmth, and plenty of it. But I knew we could not provide it in that great tin bam, even if we lit a bonfire like the Great Fire of London.[457] Blondie already had a sick parrot of mine meditatively chewing the wallpaper off the bathroom in her flat, and I felt it was really carrying friendship too far to ask if I could introduce a peccary as well into her beautifully appointed[458] flat. David had now returned at the double[459] from the Land-Rover whence he had gone to get a blanket to wrap the pig in. In one hand he was clasping a half-bottle of brandy.

"This any good?" he inquired, as I swaddled Juanita in the blanket.

"Yes, wonderful. Look, heat a drop of milk on the spirit stove and mix a teaspoonful of brandy with it, will you?"

While David did this, Juanita, almost invisible in her cocoon of blanket and coat, coughed alarmingly. Eventually, the brandy and milk were ready, and I managed to get two spoonfuls down her throat, though it was a hard job, for she was almost unconscious.

"Anything else we can do," said David hopefully, for, like me, he had grown tremendously fond of the little pig.

"Yes, she's got to have a whacking great shot[460] of penicillin and much warmth and fresh air as she can get."

I looked at him hopefully.

"Let's take her back to the flat," said David, as I had hoped he would. We wasted no more time. The Land-Rover sped through the rain-glistening streets at a dangerous pace, and how we arrived at the flat intact was a miracle. While I hurried upstairs with Juanita, David rushed round to Blondie's flat, for there Sophie had our medicine chest with the penicillin and the hypodermic syringes.

I laid the by now completely unconscious Juanita on David's sofa, and although the flat was warm with the central heating, I turned on the electric fire as well, and then opened all the windows that would not create draughts. David was back in an incredibly short space of time, and rapidly we boiled the hypodermic and then I gave Juanita the biggest dose of penicillin I dared. It was, almost, kill or cure,[461] for I had never used penicillin on a peccary before, and for all I knew[462] they might he allergic to it.[463] Then, for an hour, we sat and watched her. At the end of that time I persuaded myself that her breathing was a little easier, but she was still unconscious and I knew she was a very long way from recovery.

"Look," said David, when I had listened to Juanita's chest for the fourteen-hundredth time, "are we doing any good, just sitting here looking at her?"

"No," I said reluctantly, "I don't think we'll really see any change for about three or four hours, if then. She's right out[464] at the moment, but I think the brandy has a certain amount to do with that."

"Well," said David practically, "let's go and get something to eat at Olly's. I don't know about you, but I'm hungry. We needn't be more that three-quarters of an hour."

"O. K.," I said reluctantly, "I suppose you're right".

So, having made sure that Juanita was comfortable and that the electric fire could not set fire to her blankets, we drove down to Olly's Music Bar in 25 de Mayo, which is a street that runs along what used to be the old waterfront of Buenos Aires. It is a street lined with tiny clubs, some of which have the most delightful names like "My Desire", "The Blue Moon Hall of Beauties", and, perhaps slightly more mysteriously, "Joe's Terrific[465] Display".

It was not the sort of street a respectable man would be seen in, but I had long ceased to worry about respectability. With my various friends we had visited most of these tiny, dark, smoky bars, and drunk drinks of minute size and colossal price, and watched the female "hostesses"[466] at their age-old work. But, of all the bars, the one we liked best was Olly's Music Bar, and we always made this our port of call.[467] There were many reasons for liking Olly's. Firstly, was the walnut-wrinkled Olly himself and his lovely wife. Secondly, Olly not only gave you fair measure in your glass, but frequently stood you a drink[468] himself. Thirdly, his bar was well-lit, so that you could actually see your companions; in the other bars you would have had to be a bat or an owl to observe clearly. Fourthly, his hostesses were not allowed to irritate you by constantly suggesting you bought them drinks, and fifthly, there was a brother and sister with a guitar who sang and played delightfully. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I have seen the hostesses at Olly's, when their night's work was done, kiss Olly and his wife goodnight as tenderly as if they had been the girls' parents.

So David and I made our way down the stairs into Olly's and were greeted with delight by Olly and his wife. The reason for our depression being explained the whole bar was full of commiseration; Olly stood us both a large vodka, and the hostesses gathered round us to tell us they were sure Juanita would get well, and generally tried to cheer us up. But, as we stood there eating hot sausages and sandwiches and consuming vodka, not even the gay carnavalitos[469] the brother and sister played and sang specially for us could cure my depression. I felt sure that Juanita was going to die, and I had grown absurdly fond of the little creature. Eventually, when we had eaten and drunk, we said goodbye and climbed the steps that led to the road.

"Come tomorrow and tell us how the animal is," called Olly.

"Si, si" said the hostesses, like a Greek chorus, "come tomorrow and tell us how the pobrecita[470] is."

By the time we had got back to David's flat I was convinced that we should find Juanita dead. When we went into the living-room I gazed at the pile of blankets on the sofa, and had to force myself to go and look. I lifted one corner of the blanket gently and a twinkling dark eye gazed up at me lovingly, while a pink plunger-shaped nose wiffled, and a faint, very faint, grunt of pleasure came from the invalid.

"Good God, she's better," said David incredulously.

"A bit," I said cautiously. "She's not out of danger yet, but I think there's a bit of hope."

As if to second this Juanita gave another grunt.

In order to make sure that Juanita did not kick off her blanket during the night and make her condition worse I took her to bed with me on the sofa. She lay very quietly across my chest and slept deeply. Though her breathing was still wheezy it had lost that awful rasping sound which you could hear with each breath she took to begin with. I was awoken the following morning by a cold, rubbery nose being pushed into my eye, and hearing Juanita's wheezy grunts of greeting, I unwrapped her and saw she was a different animal. Her eyes were bright, her temperature was normal, her breathing was still wheezy, but much more even, and, best of all, she even stood up for a brief, wobbly moment. From then she never looked back.[471] She got better by leaps and bounds,[472] but the better she felt the worse patient she made. As soon as she could walk without falling over every two steps, she insisted on spending the day trotting about the room, and was most indignant because I made her wear a small blanket, safety-pinned under her chin, like a cloak. She ate like a horse, and we showered delicacies on her. But it was during the nights that I found her particularly trying. She thought this business of sleeping with me a terrific idea, and, flattering though this was, I did not agree. We seemed to have different ideas about the purposes for which one went to bed. I went in order to sleep, while Juanita thought it was the best time of the day for a glorious romp. A baby peccary's tusks and hooves are extremely sharp, and their noses are hard, rubbery and moist, and to have all these three weapons applied to one's anatomy when one is trying to drift off into a peaceful sleep is trying, to put it mildly. Sometimes she would do a sort of porcine[473] tango with her sharp hooves along my stomach and chest, and at other times she would simply chase her tail round and round, until I began to fell like the unfortunate victim in The Pit and the Pendulum[474] She would occasionally break off her little dance in order to come and stick her wet nose into my eye, to see how I was enjoying it. At other times she would become obsessed with the idea that I had, concealed about my person somewhere, a rare delicacy. It may have been truffles for all know, but whatever it was she would make a thorough search with nose, tusks and hooves, grunting shrilly and peevishly when she couldn't find anything. Round about three a. m. she would sink into a deep, untroubled sleep. Then, at five-thirty, she would take a quick gallop up and down my body to make sure I woke up in good shape. This lasted for four soul-scaring nights, until I felt she was sufficiently recovered, and then I banished her to a box at night, to her intense and vocal indignation.

I had only just pulled Juanita round[475] in time, for no sooner was she better that we got a message to say that the ship was ready to leave. I would have hated to have undertaken a voyage with Juanita as sick as she had been, for I am sure she would have died.

So, on the appointed day, our two lorry-loads of equipment and animal-cages rolled down to the dock, followed by the Land-Rover, and then began the prolonged and exhausting business of hoisting the animals on board, and arranging the cages in their places on the hatch. This is always a nerve-racking time, for as the great nets, piled high with cages, soar into the air, you are always convinced that a rope is going to break and deposit your precious animals either into the sea or else in a mangled heap on the dockside. But, by the evening, the last cage was safely aboard, and the last piece of equipment stowed away in the hold, and we could relax.

All our friends were there to see us off, and, if in one or two people's eyes was a semi-repressed expression of relief, who was to blame them, for I had made martyrs of them all in one way or another. However, we were all exhausted but relaxed, ploughing our way through a series of bottles I had had the foresight to order in my cabin. Everything was on board, everything was safe, and now all we had to do was to have a farewell drink, for in an hour the ship was sailing. Just as I was replenishing everyone's glass for the fifth toast, a little man in Customs uniform appeared in the cabin doorway, rustling a sheaf of papers. I gazed at him fondly, without any premonition of danger.

"Señor Durrell?" he asked politely.

"Señor Garcia?" I inquired.

"Si," he said, flushing with pleasure that I should know his name, "I am Señor Garcia of the Aduana…"

It was Marie who scented danger.

"Is anything wrong?" she asked.

"Si, si, señorita, the señor's papers are all in order, but they have not been signed by a despachante."[476]

"What on earth's a despachante?" I asked.

"It is sort of man," said Marie worriedly, and turned back to the little Customs man, "But is this essential, senior?"

"Si, señorita" he said gravely, "without the despachante's signature we cannot let the animals be taken. They will have to be unloaded."

I felt as though someone had removed my entire stomach in one piece, for we had about three-quarters of an hour.

"But is there no despachante here who will sign it?" asked Marie.

"Señorita, it is late, they have all gone home," said Señor Garcia.

This is, of course, the sort of situation, which takes about twenty years off your life. I could imagine the shipping company's reaction if we now went to them and told them that, instead of gaily casting off for England in an hour's time, they would be delayed five hours or so while they unloaded all my animals from the hatch, and, what was worse, all my equipment and the Land-Rover which were deep in the bowels of the ship. But by now my friends, unfortunate creatures, were used to crises like this, and they immediately burst into activity. Mercedes, Josefina, Rafael and David went to argue with the Chief of Customs on duty, while Willie Anderson, another friend of ours, went off with Marie to the private home of a despachante he knew. This was on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, so they would have to drive like the devil to get back in time. The happy farewell party burst like a bomb and our friends all fled in different directions. Sophie and I could only wait and hope, while I mentally rehearsed how I would phrase the news to the Captain, without being seriously maimed, if we had to unload everything.

Presently the party who had been arguing with the Chief of Customs returned despondently.

"No use," said David, "he's adamant. No signature, no departure."

We had twenty minutes to go.[477] At that moment we heard a car screech to a halt on the docks outside. We piled out on to the deck, and there, coming up the gangway, smiling triumphantly, were Marie and Willie, waving the necessary documents, all beautifully signed by what must be the finest, noblest despachante in the business. So, with ten minutes to go we all had a drink. I even gave Señor Garcia one.

Then the steward poked his head in to say that we would be casting off in a moment, and we trooped on to the deck. We said our goodbyes, and our tribe of friends made their way down on to the quay. Ropes were cast off, and slowly the gap between the ship and the dock widened, so that we could see the shuddering reflection of the quay lights in the dark waters. Presently the ship gained speed, and soon our friends were lost to sight, and all we could see was the great heap of multicoloured lights that was Buenos Aries.

As we turned away from the rail and made our way to our cabins, I remembered Darwin's words, written a century before. When speaking of the travelling naturalist he said: "He will discover how many truly kind-hearted people there are with whom he had never before had, or ever again will have, any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him most disinterested assistance."