^Yes,’ said Dave, ‘you know, like pigeons or conde.’
‘Birds?’ said ‘Mr Big’. ^Yes, sometimes I am seeing birds and sometimes hearing birds too, singing.’
‘Do you ever see a small hawk, a kestrel?’ asked Dave, ‘the thing they call the “Mangeur de Poule”?’
‘Mr Big’ looked at Dave and then at the American kestrel, preening herself some three feet away. He closed his eyes briefly and licked his lips, then opened his eyes and looked at Dave and the kestrel again.
‘Hawk?’ he said, uncertainly.
‘Yeah, we’re looking for one,’ Dave explained, oblivious.
‘You are looking for a small hawk?’ asked ‘Mr Big’, determined to get it right.
^Yes,’ said Dave, ‘the Mangeur de Poule.’
Again ‘Mr Big’ carefully examined Dave and the kestrel in close proximity. He closed his eyes again and then opened them, obviously hoping that the hawk could have vanished — it hadn’t.
He was in a quandary. Was the hawk a figment of his marijuana- inflamed imagination? In which case, should he draw attention to it? If, on the other hand, it was real, why could not these people, who presumably had parents in London and Birmingham too, see the bird? The whole thing was very difficult, too difficult for him to manage. He gazed round desperately. We tried not to catch each others’ eyes for fear of laughing. At last ‘Mr Big’ found the solution to the problem.
‘Goodbye,’ he said, and taking off his hat, he bowed, stepped over our recumbent forms and made his way uncertainly down the path.
An hour later, when we made our way down to the main ride, we suddenly came upon ‘Mr Big’ sitting on the ground with his back against a tree, reading a book and consuming a large sandwich.
‘You have finished your walking?’ he asked, jovially, getting to his feet and brushing some crumbs from his lap.
^Yes, we are going home now,’ said Dave.
To London?’ asked ‘Mr Big’, surprised.
‘No, Black River,’ said Dave.
Well, goodbye,’ said ‘Mr Big’, ‘I must be waiting for my friends.’
We got into the car and ‘Mr Big’ waved us a cheerful farewell.
‘Did you see what he was reading?’ asked Ann.
‘No, I was dying to look,’ I said. ‘What was it?’
‘Othello, in English,’ she replied.
I decided I was going to like Mauritius very much.
CHAPTER TWO
PINK PIGEON PALAVER
The day on which we decided to go and hunt Pink pigeons dawned (if this is not too strong a word for such a dismal birth) and it appeared that the entire Indian Ocean from beginning to end was covered with a malevolent, swirling layer of thick cloud. In due course, this regurgitated floods of rain whose most noticeable attribute was that they were served at bath temperature. We gazed at the sky and cursed. This sort of weather was particularly annoying from two points of view.
Firstly, this was the only night in that week that we could receive the vital help of the Mauritian Special Mobile Force, the island’s answer to the British Commandos and the American Marines, a stalwart body of men who, under their English Commanding Officer, Major Glazebrook, were to assist us in pigeon spotting and tree climbing, searchlight carrying and, eventually, we hoped, Pink pigeon capturing. Secondly, if this deluge of rain kept up, it would make any venture into the dripping and slippery forest futile in the extreme.
To our relief, mid-afternoon saw the break-up of the solid roof of cloud and blue patches started to appear like bits of a jigsaw on a dirty woollen shawl. By four o’clock, there was not a cloud in the sky and, in the warm air, the earth steamed gently. The blazing sun picked out all the raindrops trapped on the leaves and flowers so that they gleamed like some fallen galaxy of stars among the greens of the shrubs and trees. The Flamboyant trees that lined the road up towards the Pink pigeon forest had been battered by the fierce downpour and now each tree, aflame with scarlet and yellow blossom, stood in a great circle of mashed flowers as if rooted in a pool of its own blood.
In high spirits, we drove up the winding road towards the mountains. It was a road that curved and twisted as it climbed, now showing a wonderful vista of forest, its edges lapped by cane fields appearing as smooth and as bright as a billiard table from this height, and now and then showing us great shining sections of sea in halcyon array of blues with the reef, like a white garland of foam flowers, laid carelessly upon it. In the glittering bushes by the road, flocks of black and white bulbuls, with pointed crests and scarlet checks, fed among the leaves, sighing melodiously to each other; occasionally one would face another, raise its wings over its back like a tombstone angel, and flutter them gently in a delicate gesture of love. Sometimes, a mongoose would cross the road, slim, brindled, brisk, with a predatory Mafia gleam in its tiny eyes, nose to the ground as it snuffed its way to some blood-letting. We rounded one comer and came unexpectedly upon a troop of eight Macaque monkeys, sitting at the side of the road, their piggy eyes and air of untrustworthy arrogance making them look exactly like a board meeting of one of the less reliable consortiums in the City of London. The old male ‘yaahed’ out a staccato warning, the females gathered their megalocephalic Oliver Twist-thin babies to their breasts and the whole troop melted into the wall of Chinese guava that lined the road and disappeared with miraculous suddenness.
Eventually, we reached the Forestry Department’s nursery of small trees and swung off the main highway on to a rough but serviceable track. Half a mile down this, and we saw Dave’s car and the Army Land-Rover parked by the side of the track. Dave came bouncing over to greet us as we drew up.
‘Hi,’ he said, ‘did you ever see such weather? Black as a mole’s behind one minute, and blue as a monkey’s backside the next. I really thought, with all that rain, we’d have to call the damn operation off. As it is, it’ll be as wet as a well down there in the valley, but that’s OK, we’ll make out. Come and meet the guys.’
We decanted ourselves and our equipment from the car and followed him over to the Land-Rover. Standing by it, very smart in their green uniforms and berets, stood a group of soldiers, each as glossy as newly minted chocolate and of Herculean proportions. Their arms and legs were twice lifesize, their chests like firkins, their hands big enough to uproot whole trees, their smiles as wide and as glittering as any concert grand; yet, for all their Brobdingnagian proportions, they moved slowly and benignly, like Shire horses, beaming down at us lesser mortals from their exalted height. I decided, as they engulfed our puny hands in their gigantic, gentle paws, that I would rather have them on my side than against me. Their Commanding Officer, though not small by any standard, somehow looked slightly puny beside them.
Our military force had brought with them, as well as torches, nets and a portable searchlight, an enormous milk churn of tea, without which — as history relates — no British soldier or soldier trained by the British can possibly function smoothly and efficiently in outwitting and defeating the enemy. Making sure we all had our strange equipment, we set off in single file along a narrow path through the waist-high scrub, so laden with rain that we were soaked to the skin within a hundred yards.
Presently, the path dipped down into the valley and we were walking through a jungle of straight Chinese guava stems, interspersed here and there with a twisted, black ebony tree, or a group of Traveller’s palms, like neat eighteenth-century fans whose handles had been stuck in the ground. The path was steep and knotted across it lay roots like varicose veins. The whole was drenched in rain so the water gleamed at every footstep in the mud, like a splintered mirror, and the mud itself turned into a caramel-coloured, sticky slide that, conspiring with the roots, could break a leg or an ankle as one would snap a stick of charcoal. The sun was starting to sink and shadows slanted across the path, which added further to the hazards. As we slid and tripped our way down into the valley, the air grew heavy and warm, and sweat was now added to make our condition even more aquatic. Presently we slid down a precipitous slope and the forest changed from a mixed assortment of plants to groves of cryptomeria trees, at first glance looking rather like a prickly species of pine tree, dark green with heavy bunches of needles.