The New Noah (14 page)

‘Dis place is slaughterhouse,’ he said, ‘dis place is for cowses. I don’t tink rodents allowed here.’

In the end, however, I managed to persuade him that capybaras were really like ‘cowses’, only smaller, and it would not ruin the slaughterhouse to keep the creature for me for one
night. With that settled, we walked back to our boarding-house to fetch the beast. There, the moonlit garden was silent and serene, and, on looking into the cage, we saw the culprit curled up in
the corner asleep, snoring gently to himself. So we left him, and he slumbered on and did not awaken that night. We came down the next morning, feeling quite exhausted after our nocturnal efforts
to obtain a temporary abode for the animal, to find the capybara looking very fit and not the slightest bit tired.

There are found in Guiana several species of animals called opossums, which are chiefly remarkable for the fact that they are the only animals outside Australia which carry their young as a
kangaroo does, in a pouch. The opossums in South America all look rather like rats with long, shaggy fur and long, naked tails, though the different species vary in size, some being as big as a cat
and others as small as the smallest mouse. As I say, they look very rat-like; it is when you see them climbing about in the trees that you realize they are really nothing like rats at all. Not only
can they climb as skilfully as monkeys, using their hands and feet, but they can also use their tail to help them as well, and it twists and turns its way around the branches like a snake: indeed,
its grip is so strong that, even if they should lose their hold with their hands and feet, they could hang suspended by their tail and save themselves from falling to the ground.

The most attractive of the Guianese opossums was one of the smaller varieties. The people in Guiana call the opossums ‘unwaries’, and this particular kind they called the
‘moonshine unwarie’, because they said it only came out when the moon was full. They were really quite pretty little animals with dark charcoal-black upper parts; a lemon-yellow tummy;
pink tail, feet, and ears; and two thick, white eyebrows of fur, similar to coloured bananas over their dark eyes. They were about the size of an ordinary rat, although their faces were much more
pointed and their tails much longer.

The first moonshine unwarie I obtained was brought to me by a little East Indian boy who had caught it in his garden late one night. He came with the animal dangling on the end of a piece of
string just as I was about to leave that particular village to travel back to our base camp in Georgetown. The ferry-boat was waiting to take me down the river, and I really had not a moment to
lose.

Half-way down the road towards the quay I remembered that I had no cage on board the ferry in which to house the little opossum. So I decided that I had better return to the shop in the village
and buy a box which could be made into a cage on our journey down river. My companion ran ahead to hold up the ferry-boat until I arrived; and and so, carrying the irritated little animal dangling
on the end of his string, I rushed madly back down the road to the village shop and breathlessly asked the man behind the counter if he could let me have a box.

He tipped out a whole lot of tins on the floor and silently handed me the box in which they had been. Grasping it in my hand and gasping out a word of thanks I dashed back along the road. The
little East Indian boy accompanied me, and as we ran he took the box from my hands and carried it skilfully on his head. Running down the dusty road in the hot sun was very exhausting, and each
time I paused for breath I could hear a loud, peevish hoot from the river ferry, which would spur me on, and at last I reached the quay just as their patience was exhausted and they were about to
remove the gangway.

On board the boat, and after recovering my breath, I set about preparing a cage for my opossum, and when this was ready I had the unpleasant task of untying the string round the animal’s
waist. By this time it was not in a very good temper and hissed at me like a snake and bit savagely at my fingers, but I succeeded in cutting the cord. As I did so, I noticed a strange
sausage-shaped swelling in the skin of its stomach between its hind legs. I thought it possible that the little animal had been damaged internally. While I was gently feeling this peculiar lump,
however, my fingers parted the fur and I found myself looking into a long shallow pocket in the opossum’s skin in which were four minute quivering pink babies.

This was the reason for the strange swelling, and not some injury that she had received. The mother was very indignant at my looking at her pouch without permission, and she screamed loudly and
snapped at me. When I put her into the cage, the first thing she did was to sit up on her hind legs, open her pouch, and make sure that all the babies were there. Then she combed her fur into place
and set about eating the fruit with which I had provided her.

As the four babies grew larger, they soon found it a very tight fit inside that shallow pouch, and it was not long before only one of them would fit in it at a time. They would lie around on the
floor of the cage near their mother, but if anything frightened them, round they would turn and dash towards her in a mad race, for they knew that the one to get there first was the only one that
could crawl into the shelter of her pouch, and the others would have to stay outside and face whatever danger threatened. When she was moving about the cage, the mother opossum would make all her
babies climb on to her back, where they would cling tightly to her fur and twine their slender pink tails around their mother in a firm and loving embrace.

When I was in Guiana, I was very anxious to obtain some of the beautiful kinds of humming-birds which are to be found there. After some time, I happened to contact a hunter who
was particularly good at catching these minute birds, and about once a fortnight he would bring me a small cage with five or six inside, fluttering their wings so rapidly that it sounded more like
a cageful of bees. I had always been told that humming-birds were extremely difficult to look after, and was, therefore, very worried about the first four I acquired.

In the wild state they feed on the nectar from flowers, hovering in front of the blooms and sticking their long, fine beaks inside lapping up the substance with their fragile tongues. In
captivity they have to be taught to drink a mixture of honey and water with a small amount of Bovril and some Mellin’s food mixed with it. This mixture, in the heat of the tropics, goes sour
very quickly, and for this reason the hummingbirds have to be fed three times a day. The job was, of course, to teach them to feed out of a little glass pot, for they were used to getting their
meals from a highly coloured flower, and did not realize at first that the pots contained the nourishment they needed.

When they first arrived, I removed each one very carefully from the cage and, holding it in my hand, dipped its beak into a pot of honey and water, time and time again, until eventually it stuck
its tongue out, tasted the mixture and then began to suck it up greedily. When it had had a good feed, I put it in its new cage with one of the pots of food inside, and then plucked a scarlet
hibiscus flower and placed it inside the pot on the surface of the honey.

The humming bird, which was about the size of a bumblebee, sat on its perch and preened itself and uttered tiny little chirrups in a self-satisfied sort of way. Then it took off from the perch
and purred round and round the cage like a helicopter, its wings moving so fast that they were just simply a dim blur over its back. Eventually, as it was flying around, it caught sight of the
hibiscus flower lying in the pot, and swooped down and pushed its beak towards the bloom. When it had sucked all the nectar out of the flower, it continued stabbing with its beak and soon stuck it
between the petals and into the honey beneath, and started to drink rapidly, still hovering in mid-air.

Within twenty-four hours it had learnt by this means that the little glass pot hung on the wall of its cage contained a copious supply of the sweet honey, and from then onwards I did not have to
bother to give it a sign-post in the shape of a flower.

These tiny birds settled down very happily, and in two days they had become so tame that when I put my hand inside the cage with the pot of food, they would not wait for me to hang it on the
wire but would fly down and drink it as I was putting it in, occasionally perching on my fingers for a rest and to preen their glittering feathers.

There was generally something exciting happening at our base camp in Georgetown. You never knew at what hour of the day or night someone would arrive with some new specimens. It might be a man
carrying a monkey on his shoulder or a little boy with a wicker cage full of birds, or it might be one of the professional hunters turning up after a week’s journeying into the interior, with
a large horse-drawn cart piled high with cages full of different creatures.

I remember one day a very old Indian walked into the garden, carrying a raffia basket which he handed to me very courteously. I asked him what was inside it and he told me that it contained
rats. Well now, it is perfectly safe to take the lid off a basketful of rats, as, generally, they will simply crouch on the bottom and not attempt to move. I removed the lid of the basket and found
that it was not full of rats but full of marmosets, who leapt out with great speed and agility and fled in all directions. After a hectic chase that lasted about half an hour we managed to round
them all up and get them into a cage. But it taught me to be more cautious about opening baskets full of specimens that were brought in.

These little marmosets were about the size of a rat with a long, bushy tail and intelligent little black faces. Their fur was a deep black colour and their paws were a bright orange-red. We kept
them in a large cage where they had plenty of room to scuttle about, and gave them a box with a hole in it to act as their bedroom.

Every evening they would all come down and sit by the door, chattering and squeaking waiting for their supper. They would drink a potful of milk and then have five grasshoppers each, and, after
crunching up the very last morsel, off they would troop in a line, the oldest one leading, and solemnly climb into their box and all curl up in a solid ball at the bottom. How they were able to
sleep like this without suffocating, I have no idea, but apparently marmosets sleep in colonies in the wild state as well as in captivity.

One day, a tall Negro walked into the garden and trotting alongside him on a long string was a most extraordinary-looking animal. It was similar to a gigantic guinea-pig covered with great white
blotches. It had large dark eyes and a mass of white whiskers. It was, in fact, a paca and a near relation of the guinea-pig and also of the capybara. When we had agreed on the price that I was to
pay for this animal, I asked the Negro if it was tame, whereupon he picked it up, stroked it and talked to it and assured me that he had had it since it was a tiny baby, and that a more gentle
creature you could not wish to find. At that particular time I had received a large consignment of animals and was, therefore, short of cages. But since the paca was tame, I thought I would simply
just tie him up to a nearby stump. I did this and gave him some vegetables to eat, and promptly forgot all about him.

Some time later I was walking down the line of cages, taking out the water pots to wash them, when quite suddenly I heard a snarl that would have done credit to a tiger, and something flung
itself at my leg and buried its teeth in my shin. Needless to say, I leapt in the air and dropped all the water pots which I had been so carefully collecting. It was, of course, the paca which had
attacked me, though why he should have done so I cannot imagine, for he seemed perfectly tame when he arrived. My trousers were torn and my leg was bleeding. I was extremely angry with the animal,
and for the next week he was quite unapproachable; if anything went near him he would dash at them, gnashing his teeth and uttering his ferocious snarling grunt. Just as suddenly as his bad temper
had flared up, and for no apparent reason, so he became tame all over again and would allow you to scratch him behind the ears and tickle his tummy while he lay on his side. His behaviour
alternated in this manner all the time he was with me, and whenever I approached his cage it was with the uncertainty of not knowing whether he was going to greet me with signs of affection or a
savage bite from his large sharp teeth.

One of the most extraordinary specimens that we were brought while in Georgetown, was a small fish, some four or five inches long. A dear old Negress came to us one day with about five of them
in an old tin kettle. When I bought them, I tipped them out into a large bowl, and I realized at once that there was something peculiar about them, but for a few seconds I could not place what it
was. Then suddenly I noticed that there was something very strange about the fish’s eyes. I took one out of the bowl and put it in a glass jar, so that I could examine it more conveniently,
and then I saw what it was that had puzzled me: the fish had four eyes.

Its eyes were large, and situated so that they bulged above the surface of its head, rather like a hippo’s eyes. Each eyeball was neatly divided into two, with one eye on top of the other.
I discovered that this fish spends its life swimming along the surface of the sea, so one set of eyes looks downwards and keeps a watch for any large fish that may make an attack, while the other
pair keep a look-out along the surface of the water for food, and above in case of attack by a fish-eating bird. It was certainly one of the most amazing defences I have ever seen in an animal, and
certainly one of the most extraordinary fishes.

Guiana seems to go in for amazing forms of life. There, one of the most peculiar birds in the world is to be found, the hoatzin, or, as it is called in Guianese, the Stinking Anna, because of
its strong musky scent. This strange bird has a ‘thumb’ on its wing, armed with a hooked claw. A baby hoatzin, a few hours after hatching, can scramble out of its nest, and crawl about
in the trees like a monkey, using its thumb to get a grip on the twigs. The nests are built in thorn-bushes overhanging water, and a few hours after hatching, the babies think nothing, if any
danger threatens, of dropping ten feet into the water where they swim and dive like fish. When the danger has passed, they use their thumbs to climb the tree and get back into the nest. The hoatzin
is the only bird in the world able to do this, and the babies make a weird sight swinging among the thorns, or plopping into the water like little men clad in furry bathing-suits.