The Aye-Aye and I by Gerald Durrell
By now, Verity had become very tame and each evening Lee would go and feed him by hand. Feeding by hand is not strictly necessary but does help to give you an accurate idea of how much food the animal is taking. Left to themselves, animals tend to throw food about and trample it to bits so that when you clean out the cage in the morning it is extremely difficult to find out what its intake has been. Verity loved his honey balls, each the size of a ping-pong ball, with their nutritious contents of honey, egg and bread. Then he would have his revolting, fat, beetle grubs, which he scrunched up with relish. As an aye-aye’s massive teeth are constantly growing, it is essential for the animal to have something hard to gnaw on, to prevent its teeth from turning into tusks. The answer, of course, was lots of rotting logs, coconuts in their husks and sticks of sugar cane. These and the beetle grubs were provided by Marc, who had been foreman on our building work, a short, stocky, cheerful figure, who became deeply devoted to Lee, but would insist on calling her ‘Mama’, to her annoyance.
It was fascinating to watch Verity’s various methods of approach to each foodstuff. The honey balls were soft and so he used his middle finger like a fork to carry bits to his mouth. The same treatment was meted out to the fat grubs, but he generally bit their heads off as a preliminary, so they writhed there, disgorging various parts of their internal organs and deflating like rather repulsive balloons. The sugar cane he bit into between the joints with his enormous teeth, stripping away the tough outside skin until he could get at the softer, juicy pith inside. When each piece of sugar cane had been treated in this way they looked like weird medieval instruments, a curious sort of basset horn, perhaps, or some kind of archaic flute.
The coconut (almost as large as he was) presented different problems. First, the thick, shiny green husk had to be torn away with his chisel-like teeth. When he judged that enough had been removed for his purpose, he could start work on the nut, now partially exposed. He went through this like a circular saw, producing a hole about two and a half inches in diameter. These, of course, were young nuts with the ‘milk’ still in them – so Verity once again used his finger, dipping it through the hole into the liquid and then bringing it to his mouth with incredible speed and dexterity. At this stage of its development, the meat of the coconut has not congealed as in the nuts we get in Europe. It is like a semi-transparent whitish jelly, faintly sweet and with a coconut flavour. Having exposed this delicacy, Verity would now use his versatile digit – the magic finger – to hook the jelly out with great rapidity. When he had obtained all the jelly he could reach, there was a pause while the hole was enlarged and then his finger came into play again. This third finger is not longer than normal, but it looks it because it is so attenuated and bony.
When given a rotten log, he would inspect it carefully, whiskers aquiver, ears turning to catch the faintest whisper of a fat grub gnawing in the interior of the wood. Then he would attack the log with his teeth to expose the tunnel, insert the finger as delicately as a surgeon’s probe, spike the grub on the nail and deftly pull it from its subterranean home. Madagascar, curiously enough, has no woodpeckers and it has been suggested that the aye-aye takes the role of the bird in the ecological framework of the forest.
The only sound he made – if he was suddenly disturbed – was a loud sniff. Q described it perfectly as sounding like someone trying to stifle a gigantic sneeze. One night, Mickey heard him calling, a sound rather like a lovesick cat, and such was his devotion to duty that he got out his equipment, crept up to the animal house and recorded him, facing the attacks of a million joyful and hungry mosquitoes. From watching Verity and others of his kind, I got the very strong impression that they were tough animals, survivors if you like, and possessed of a greater intelligence than other lemurs I had hitherto come into contact with.
Settling into camp proved to be a process as complex as moving into a new house. Anguished cries from one or other of us demanding to know the whereabouts of anything from a screw to a tin of sardines, a compass to a bottle of beer, were always answered by Graham’s placid voice. By some sixth sense, like water-divining as yet unexplained by science, Graham had imprinted on his mind a sort of map of our possessions which, computer-like, he could track down. Once, in a casual way, I wondered where Lee had got to. Without even looking up from the book he was reading, he gave me a quick run-down of her activities since she had risen that morning, ending up with the information that she had just gone up to the village for a moment, probably to see about sugar cane. Graham was a sort of expedition replica of Jeeves and without him we all became as disorientated as a Pavlovian dog with no bell.
Meanwhile, the hunts continued, with John, Q and Julian going out nearly every night and coming back empty-handed.
Once, they spotted an aye-aye and Julian, with his incredible speed and agility, shinned up the tree and caught the animal by the tail. Not surprisingly, affronted by this indignity, the aye-aye turned and sank its incredible teeth into Julian’s hand. Luckily, before it could really get down to amputation, Julian let go, but it still left its mark. Needless to say, when they got back, the camp resounded with cries, ‘Graham, where’s the sticking plaster?’; ‘Graham, where’s the tube of antibiotic ointment?’ Graham’s soothing voice would direct our endeavours like a Harley Street specialist.
Camp routine was now getting under way. Marc came every day, bringing coconuts and sugar cane for Verity. Children came in wide-eyed, timid groups bringing obese beetle grubs, and we employed two buxom girls from the village to bring us water, wash up and wash our clothes. For some reason, cooking became a team affair. Captain Bob, we discovered, had a magical way with rice, producing it al dente with great skill. We also sent him into Mananara to do shopping, for we discovered that the Captain was not only King Rice but had an extraordinary instinct for finding things in that one-horse town, with its tiny sprinkling of emporia. Like a magician, he would unearth the most bizarre foodstuffs from the most unlikely little food shops. He would set off cheerfully with our list and generally, to our surprise, return with everything we had asked for. Frank and I hatched a plot that one day we were going to give him a list containing things like caviar and quails’ eggs and see what happened. We never did, however, I think partly out of a vague fear that he would produce them. We did suggest that he changed his name by deed poll to Mr Fortnum Mason, an idea which, for some churlish reason, he would not agree to adopt.
Tim, we discovered, before taking up the gentle art of cine photography, was planning to be a chef and take the taste buds of the world by storm. In a misguided moment, he implied that he considered desserts to be his natural forte. Immediately, a clamour for exotic desserts arose on all sides. Suggestions ranging from treacle tart to profiteroles came from us. Deftly, like a skilful matador, he simply avoided our greedy attack by saying he could and, indeed, would have produced all these delicacies, including spotted dick and roly-poly pudding, but where were the ingredients? He was told that we had bananas and sugar and condensed milk, that if he could not produce something with these humble ingredients he had no right to claim any gastronomic virtues and that, in fact, we would consider that our suspicions that he had never seen the inside of a kitchen – and, even if pressed, would have extreme difficulty in boiling water – would be justified. Stung by our comprehensive execrations, he attacked the bananas, the sugar and the milk and, to our delighted astonishment, proceeded to conjure from these unlikely ingredients more different, delicious desserts than I would have believed possible.
For some reason (probably in a weak moment we had implied that we liked cooking) Frank and I were given the main dish to conjure up. Corned beef and sardines on rice did not meet with the hushed reverence that we had hoped for. Sardines on toast, followed by corned beef fritters, were treated in an extremely uncouth manner. Curried corned beef with sardines failed lamentably to meet with the cries of joy that our cooking normally evoked. I was forced to agree with Frank’s assessment of the situation, that we were dealing with
Frank took unfair advantage of me by slipping into town and cornering the market on some fresh zebu meat. Normally, this delicacy has all the dietetic appeal of the sole of a shoe of a foot soldier in Napoleon’s army, but Frank lived up to his Middle European ancestry and, by some miraculous means, produced a delicious goulash containing beautifully tender meat. Determined not to be outdone, I paid a visit to the market to see if I could find something to titillate the palates of the team with. Lying on the floor in one corner – everything was on the floor in this market – were some very curious items which attracted my attention. They looked, at first glance, like Victorian Easter bonnets in pink and grey with long ribbons attached. When I say Easter bonnets, of course, I am being charitable. They looked like Easter bonnets that had never had the benefit of soap and water, that had been run over a number of times by an exceedingly heavy steamroller, buried in a rich and fragrant compost heap for several months and then disinterred to take their place as a food item in the market. Close and detailed inspection of these strange artefacts led me to the conclusion that they were, in fact, octopuses to which something terrible had happened, so that they no longer resembled the shy-eyed, glossy octopuses I had been used to from my childhood. They looked, in fact, as though, if you accidentally hit someone over the head with one, it would not only fracture their skull but cause possibly fatal brain damage. However, my curiosity has always been easy to arouse and I work on the principle that you should always try everything once, so I bought two of these mummified cephalopods and took them back to camp.
Here, in the utmost secrecy, I showed them to Frank. When he had recovered from the shock I asked him how he thought they ought to be prepared.
‘We must resuscitate them,’ he said, after some thought.
‘Not me,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m not giving mouth-to-mouth respiration to an octopus that has been dead for two hundred years.’
‘No, no. I mean soak them in water,’ said Frank. ‘They’re dehydrated. They need rehydration.’
So we put them in a bowl of water. If anything, they looked slightly more macabre than before. We left them for a couple of hours and then peeped at them. To our astonishment, they had absorbed a lot of water and were beginning to bear a faint resemblance to the octopus we knew and loved. By evening they were beginning to look quite plump, slimy and friendly. We chopped them up into small chunks, basted them in oil, added every condiment at our disposal, together with a handful of the hot, delicious, aromatic, Malagasy black pepper and set them to simmer, hoping that by supper-time everyone, exhausted and hungry from their day’s labours, would fall on this with rapture. This was not quite what happened but everyone agreed that the final result was edible – if a bit on the chewy side. I said the roughage was good for the digestion and the chewiness good for the teeth.
‘Yes, bungs you up and extracts your teeth at the same time,’ said Frank.
One day, there was great jubilation because Captain Bob returned from town with a bundle of chickens. When the feathers were off they were a disappointment. They were those strange Malagasy fowls that look like long-legged Old English fighting cocks, magnificently coloured and with eyes as fierce as a cockatrice, but remove their plumage and you find they have practically no breast, and thighs like a ballet dancer suffering from anorexia. Whatever loving culinary care we lavished on them made no difference, they simply became tougher and tougher.
One of these enormous, glittering birds, strutting like a belligerent avian pearly king, used to come down from the village each morning with a harem of drab hens. Our tent had been pitched right in the middle of his territory, a situation that he viewed with much disapproval. As the mist lifted off the river and the coucals started their beautiful, burbling, liquid calls, this great cockerel would come swaggering up to the entrance of the tent and fix us with his fierce golden eyes, his head twitching to and fro as he viewed us with first one eye and then the other, apparently finding us equally obnoxious from either optic. Then he would throw back his head and give a prolonged, harsh and unmusical crow. Having, he felt, intimidated us into submission, he would enter the tent and start scratching about among our possessions with his huge feet, for he was convinced that most of our equipment was edible. A well-aimed shoe would soon disabuse him of this and he would stalk out with offended dignity to beat the hell out of one of his submissive wives, to show what a fine fellow he was.
The cockerel’s visit and his raucous greeting would banish sleep. The coucals would continue their dawn chorus. The eaves from the breadfruit tree that shaded the tent would fall, landing on the roof with a scrunch and then, with a secretive rustle, slide down the tent to the ground. When the leaves dried they looked like enormous brown arthritic hands, which scrunched like biscuits under my feet as I made my way down to the first cup of tea, wondering if today was the day we would be successful and get our magic-fingered aye-aye.
Chapter Eight
The Soothsayer’s Apprentices
Since Madagascar is filled with sorcerers, magicians and soothsayers of one sort or another, Frank thought we ought to have one in our film. Marc was duly informed that we wanted a soothsayer to tell us, for a modest fee, what our chances of catching aye-aye were and whether we were going about it the right way. Marc said he knew of an excellent soothsayer and would contact him as soon as possible. I said we did not want any old run-of-the-mill one, but someone in the forecasting line who would be even better than Macbeth’s trio of witches. Marc said that this man’s credentials were impeccable and he was much in demand far and wide. So Marc sent messages to this paragon and, inevitably, we heard nothing.
The hunts went on by night and day, and Q and John began to look more and more jaded and dispirited. Time was against us. We had been searching for nearly four weeks and soon the team would have to leave and go back to Jersey. True, we had Verity, but this meant that we would not be able to include in the film all the thrills of an actual capture in the wild, and this, of course, was what they had come so far (and at considerable expense) to film. However (as I had told everyone until they were sick of hearing it), they could put Lee and me under contract and we would do what we were told, but they couldn’t do the same to the aye-aye. This was true, of course, but did not make the situation any happier. We were all starting to feel twitchy, not only because of the film, which was important enough, but because the capture of the aye-aye was the whole point and purpose of the expedition in which both I and the Trust had invested a considerable amount of money. Mealtimes were getting gloomy.
‘Have you heard anything about the soothsayer?’ asked Frank.
‘Yes,’ said Lee, ‘I mean, no I haven’t heard anything, but Marc knows what you want.’
‘Well, jockey him along a bit,’ I said. ‘At least we can film the soothsayer.’
‘Perhaps I should black up and do it myself?’ Frank suggested.
‘An excellent idea,’ I said, heartily. ‘How’s your Malagasy coming along? We could always make it mysterious, so all you would have to do is to mumble a few words like “Ambatondrazaka” or “misaotra tompoko”. How do you look in a loincloth?’
Frank gave it some thought.
‘Expert,’ he said at length.
We were not, however, driven to those extremes, for the next morning Marc announced triumphantly that the soothsayer would be with us that very evening.
He arrived just as it got dark, a well-built man, tall for a Malagasy and with an interesting, rather imposing-looking face. Somewhat to our astonishment, he was accompanied by his mother, his wife and their four-month-old child. These, he explained, were his assistants. The baby, we asked? No, just the mother and wife. The baby was merely a spectator. It would, however, we assumed, pick up a few tips even at that age.
They all sat on the ground, smiling and talking quietly. The wife handed the baby over to its grandmother where it lay plac
Naturally, the first question we asked was whether or not, in the ancestor’s estimation, we would meet with any luck in our hunt. The ancestor took another draught of beer and another drag at his cigarette and said, at great length and with all the sonorousness of Sir Henry Irving in a speech from The Bells, that of course we were welcome if our motives were pure and not simply a cover for a colonial takeover.
At the time, this seemed to me laughable and to have more than a hint of a political speech about it. However, we were informed earnestly that country people were in constant fear that the vazaha would return and once more wrench their land from them. We assured the ancestor, therefore, that taking over Madagascar by force was the last thing we wanted to do and that we were merely interested in acquiring some of the country’s remarkable animals to take home to show other vazahas what a wonderful country Madagascar was and what wonderful creatures inhabited it.