The New Noah (18 page)

One of the loveliest snakes we caught was the hooded snake. This reptile looks as though it has been cast in a mould of deep bronze with blackish markings round the edge of the body. It has the
curious habit, when angry, of being able to extend the skin of the neck, so that it appears extraordinarily like a hooded cobra in a rage. It is only a mildly poisonous kind of reptile and is one
of the rear-fanged group, living on frogs and small rodents, with possibly an occasional bird. The hooded snake does not require a great deal of poison to subdue his prey, and so, though he looks
very deadly, his bite, which can be extremely painful, is not fatal.

Perhaps the most beautiful snakes found in the Chaco are the coral snakes. These are very deadly little reptiles, but by their coloration they warn you in advance of what they can do. They
measure perhaps eighteen inches or two feet in length and are banded from head to tail with rings of cream, coal-black, and pink or pillar-box red.

Then, of course, there is the giant anaconda, the huge water-snake that is a relative of the python of Africa, and who catches and crushes his prey in the same way. Now, there have been a great
many stories written about them, most of which are entirely untrue. The largest specimen on record is twenty-five feet long, which is not really long as these snakes go, for a Malayan python may
grow to thirty feet or over. Like all these giant snakes, the anaconda is not vicious and he will not go out of his way to attack you if you leave him alone. If cornered, however, this reptile
might manage to sink his teeth into you and throw a couple of coils around you, and a large specimen could prove a very nasty customer.

In the flooded areas of the Chaco there were quite a number of these anacondas, and one day a local farmer came and told me that the previous night one of them had raided his chicken-run and
stolen two chickens. He had followed the trail of crushed grass and weed made by the snake into the swamp behind his farm, and said that he knew the place where the creature was lying up to digest
his meal. He went on to say that he would lead me to the spot if I would like to try to catch the reptile. We set off on horseback and circled through the swamp towards the place where he said the
snake was resting. In spite of our cautious approach, however, the anaconda caught sight of us before we arrived at the spot and all that could be seen were the ripples as he swam away rapidly
through the water. It was impossible to follow fast enough on horseback in that depth of water, so the only thing to do was to follow him on foot. I jumped off the horse, grabbed a sack that we had
brought with us, and ran as quickly as I could in the direction that the snake had taken. I found that he was wriggling towards the edge of the swamp, in order to try to escape into the dense
undergrowth there and thus evade us, but he was so bloated with his chicken dinner that he could not travel at any speed, and I caught him up in the short grass at the edge of the bank long before
he reached the bushes.

Now, to catch one of these big snakes is very easy: you seize him by the tail, pull him out and then try to get a good grip on the back of his head. This is exactly what I did, and I hauled the
angry reptile out of the undergrowth and grabbed him behind the head before he could turn and strike me. He was about nine feet long, and so was quite safe to handle by myself. To cope with
anything over that length would have required two people. Once I had a good grip on the back of his neck, I simply held him down in the grass until my companion joined me, when, with his help, I
managed to get the wriggling and hissing, and extremely annoyed, anaconda into the bag.

It is necessary when catching a snake of any sort, even one like this anaconda, to examine it as soon as you reach your camp. There are several reasons for this. First, however carefully it is
captured, there is a risk that you might break one of the very fragile ribs which snakes possess, and a broken rib can give a great deal of trouble. Secondly, you look for ticks. A snake can be
simply covered in ticks and can do very little to get rid of them. They fasten themselves on the thin skin between the scales, sometimes in such numbers that the scales drop off and an ugly bare
patch of roughened skin is left, so it is very important to remove the ticks, otherwise the appearance of your snake may be ruined.

Now you just can’t pull a tick off. If you do, its mouth parts will be left imbedded beneath the surface of the skin and create a tiny sore which might turn into a nasty ulcer. The best
way to remove ticks is with a little paraffin, or failing that, by touching them with a lighted cigarette, whereupon they will loosen their grip and fall off.

Another thing you have to look for is any old wounds that the reptile might have received and which may be in need of attention. When a snake sheds its skin, which occurs regularly throughout
the year, it leaves a perfect transparent replica of itself behind, even to the two scales that look like minute watch-glasses that cover its lidless eyes. Occasionally, however, as the creature
wriggles through thorn bushes or rocks in an effort to work the skin loose, it will tear, and though the reptile usually gets rid of the whole of the skin it may be left with the two watch-glass
scales still covering the eyes. This causes partial blindness, and if the scales are left on for too long, the creature may become permanently blind. So with a newly caught snake you must always
examine its eyes to see if the last time it shed its skin its eyes were freed from the two watch-glass scales.

There are not a great many kinds of monkey found in Chaco, but while we were there we were fortunate enough to obtain a specimen of one of the rarer ones, and what must be one
of the strangest monkeys in the world. It is called the douroucouli and is the only nocturnal monkey known. It has enormous eyes, rather like an owl’s, and is coloured silver-grey on its back
with a lemon-coloured tummy and chest. During the day, these monkeys sleep in hollow trees, or some other dark place, and as soon as it begins to grow dark they venture out and spend the whole
night wandering in large parties through the forest, searching for food, such as fruit, insects, tree frogs, or birds’ eggs.

Now, when we first caught Cai, as we called her, she was very thin and miserable-looking, but a few weeks on a good diet with plenty of milk and cod-liver oil soon put her right. Cai was a very
charming little animal and though she was very tame, she was extremely nervous, and so you could not treat her in quite the same way as any other sort of monkey. I built her a nice cage, in the top
of which was a square bedroom for her sleeping quarters. Cai, being like all monkeys very inquisitive, could not bear not to know all that was going on around her, so during the day she would lie
half in and half out of her bedroom door, her head nodding as she dozed, but waking instantly and chirruping with curiosity should anything happen in the camp.

She refused all food except milk, hard-boiled eggs, and bananas, though she would occasionally take a lizard. She seemed, however, to be quite frightened of insects, and when I gave her a tree
frog she took it in her hand, smelt it, dropped it with an expression of disgust, and then wiped her hand vigorously on the side of the cage. Towards evening, she would become very lively and be
quite ready for a game, bounding up and down in her cage, her big eyes shining and reminding me of the galagos that I had collected in West Africa. She displayed a great deal of jealousy towards
the other animals if we took any notice of them, and particularly to a crab-eating racoon, called Pooh.

Pooh was a strange little creature with great big flat paws, and a black mark across his eyes made him look not unlike a giant panda. Pooh always wore a very dismal expression and looked as if
everything depressed him, but it was his large hands with their long thin fingers that we had to watch, for he could push them between the bars of his cage and steal anything within reach with the
greatest of ease, and he was so curious that he would do his very best to get hold of almost anything. He would lie for hours on his back in the corner of his cage, plucking in a thoughtful sort of
way at the hairs on his large tummy. When he grew tame, we could put our hands inside the cage and play with him. He used to love these games, pretending to bite, rolling over and kicking his big
paws in the air.

When he grew very tame, we made him a little collar and used to let him out on a very long rope tied to a stick in the middle of the camp clearing. We had another stick farther along, to which
Cai, the monkey, was tied. The very first thing in the morning, when Pooh saw the food basket arriving, he would start uttering his loud complaining screams for food, and in sheer desperation we
would have to give him something to keep him quiet. If we did this, Cai would become jealous, and when it came to her turn to be fed she would sulk, turning her back on us and refusing the
food.

Strangely enough, Cai was rather afraid of Pooh, though she did not at all mind a pair of baby deer whose little pen was near to her stick, and she would frequently go and lie quite close to the
bars while the deer sniffed at her in an astonished sort of manner. Another thing that she was frightened of was snakes. When I brought back the anaconda, whose capture I mentioned in a previous
chapter, and took him out of his sack to examine him, Cai, who was sitting in the bottom of her cage, took one look and fled up to her bedroom, much to our amusement, where she sat, peering timidly
round the door and uttering horrified twittering noises.

One morning, as we were cleaning out the cages, a young Indian came into the camp and asked if we would like to buy an animal off him. We asked him what sort of an animal it was and he explained
that it was a baby fox. We thought it might be interesting to take a look at it, so we told him to bring it along later in the day. As he did not turn up, we thought he had forgotten all about it,
and that we wouldn’t get our baby fox after all. To our surprise though, just before luncheon the following day, he came into the camp, dragging a small creature behind him. This was our
long-promised baby fox. In appearance he was very like an Alsatian puppy, and he was so frightened that he was inclined to snap. We put him into a cage and gave him a plateful of meat and milk, and
left him to calm down. We then sat back and watched him very carefully. The thing that seemed to interest Foxey was to see which of our tamer animals that came near to his cage he could get hold
of. Although he was bloated with food he was constantly on the lookout for an even tastier dish. We had a number of tame birds at that time which were allowed to wander freely round the camp, but
we soon had to alter this as every now and then we would hear squawks and have to rush to the rescue of some bird which had approached too closely to the fox’s cage. Later on, as he became
tamer, we also had him out on a lead with Pooh and Cai, but with large distances between them.

To our astonishment, he used to act in exactly the same way as a dog, for when we arrived in the morning he would whine excitedly until we went to talk to him, whereupon he would dance round and
round our legs and wag his tail vigorously, a most unfox like thing to do.

Amongst the specimens we brought back to camp from one of our trips were three large green parrots, all very talkative and full of mischief. At first, we put them all in one cage, thinking that
they would be perfectly all right together. Almost immediately the three parrots began to fight, and the noise was so great that we were forced to take out the ringleader and put him in a separate
cage. We thought this would create a better atmosphere in the camp once more. We had reckoned without one of the other two. He apparently spent all his spare time gnawing frantically at the wire on
the front of his cage, and one day there was a terrific burst of chattering and the bird flew off. We made great efforts to capture it, but he was too quick for us and flapped away over the trees,
screaming excitedly.

That, we thought, was the end of our parrot. When we got up the following morning, we were amazed to see the parrot back again, sitting on top of his cage, talking to his companion through the
wire. When we opened the door, he hurriedly went into the cage again. He had obviously decided that the amount of food he was getting with us made captivity a better proposition than living in the
forest.

Shortly before we left Paraguay to return to England, an Indian brought in what turned out to be our most delightful specimen. It was a baby giant ant-eater which could only have been a few days
old. We christened her Sarah Huggersack because at that age she would spend all her time clinging to her mother’s back, and so when she came to us she wanted to cling on to us all the time,
or hug a sack. Sarah had to feel she was holding on to something, and if you put her on the ground she would stagger after you, making loud protesting honking noises, and as soon as you stopped she
would scramble up until she was in her favourite position lying across your shoulders. Owing to the fact that she had such long sharp claws and also that she could grip so hard with them, this was
a very painful procedure.

We had to feed Sarah on a bottle. She would take four bottles of milk during the day and very soon learnt how to suck from them. While she was drinking, she would allow her long, sticky,
snake-like tongue to protrude, so that it dangled down alongside the bottle.

She grew quite rapidly and soon looked upon us as her adopted parents and would have great games with us after taking her food. Sarah liked to be rolled on her back and have her stomach
scratched. If you lifted her up and tickled her under the armpits, she would lift both her paws and clasp them over her head, like a boxer who has just won his fight. At other times, if you pulled
her tail or tickled her ribs, she would rear up on to her hind legs and fall on you, uttering loud snuffling noises of pleasure.

When I eventually arrived back in England, Sarah was one of the first to go with Pooh and Cai to live at Paignton Zoo, where she became a great character The last time I saw Sarah was a few
weeks later I was giving a lecture at the Festival Hall on animal collecting, and showing the colour film of the trip to Paraguay and Argentina. As Sarah was one of the stars of the film, I wrote
to Paignton Zoo and asked if it would be possible for her to come up and appear with me on the stage. The authorities kindly consented to this, and so on the morning of the lecture Sarah
Huggersack, accompanied by her keeper, travelled up on the train from Devon.