“This beef can bite man,” said Elias, with the air of having made a discovery.
Andraia was at last persuaded, since he had the longest arm, to put his hand back in the hole and drag out the beef by force, but not before he and Elias had had a long and shrill altercation with each other in Banyangi, and accusations of cowardice had been made and indignantly denied. Andraia lay down on his tummy in six inches of water and insinuated his hand into the bowels of the earth, explaining all the time how clever he was to do this. Then there was a short silence, broken only by his frenzied grunts in his efforts to reach the beast. Suddenly he gave a yell of triumph, scrambled to his feet dripping with water, and holding the beast by its tail.
Now, up to that moment, I had been convinced that we were attempting the capture of yet another baby crocodile, so as I gazed at the creature which now hung from his hand I received a considerable shock. For there, dangling in the torchlight, sleek and angry, hissing like a snake out of a quivering maze of whiskers, was a full-grown Giant Water Shrew, an animal that I had never expected to find. I could do nothing intelligent, I just stood there gazing at this fabulous creature with my mouth open. The shrew, however, got tired of hanging by his tail, so he turned and climbed up his own body with sinewy grace, and buried his teeth in Andraia’s thumb. The proud hunter leapt wildly into the air and uttered an ear-splitting scream of pain: “Ow! . . . Ow! . . . Ow! . . ” he screamed, wagging his hand in an effort to dislodge the shrew. “Oh, Elias, Elias, get it off. . . . Ow! My JESUSCRI . . . it done kill me. . . . Ow! . . . Ow! . . . Ow! . . . Elias, quickly!” Elias and I struggled with the shrew to make it let go, but it seemed quite content to hang there, occasionally tightening its jaws to show it was still taking part in the contest. After prolonged effort, during which Andraia nearly deafened us with his cries of pain and calls for aid to the Almighty, we succeeded in prising the shrew loose, and dropped it, hissing and wriggling, into a canvas bag. Then I examined Andraia’s hand: the whole first joint of his thumb was a mass of blood, and when I had washed this away I found that he had been badly mangled by the creature’s teeth. It had bitten through the ball of his thumb right down to the bone, the flesh was hanging off in strips, and the wounds were bleeding profusely. I decided that we should return home, partly owing to Andraia’s thumb, which must have been exceedingly painful, and also because I wanted to get my new specimen into a decent cage as soon as possible. So we walked swiftly back to the village, the groans emitted by Amos and Andraia giving the whole trek the air of a funeral procession rather than a triumphant homecoming.
While I changed out of my wet clothes Elias went down to the village and roused the Carpenter from his bed, and then we set to work to fashion a cage fine enough to house this rarity. The sky was a pale green flecked with the red of coming dawn as we drove in the last nail, then I tenderly undid the sack and gently shook the Giant Water Shrew into his new home. He sat there for a minute, wiffling his mass of whiskers, and then slid swiftly through the hole into his darkened bedroom. I could hear him rustle round once or twice among the dry banana leaves inside, and then came a deep sigh and silence. The Water Shrew was taking his capture very quietly. I did not emulate him: the entire staff was marshalled to go down to the river and catch me fish, frogs, water- snakes, and crabs; and two carriers were hastily dispatched into Mamfe to procure an empty drum to act as a swimming pool for the Shrew. While all this was taking place I kept creeping back to his cage every five minutes to see if there was any sign of life. Soon I had a basket full of crabs, six frogs, ten fish, and a rather anaemic-looking water-snake. Arranging all these within easy reach I started to feed the Shrew.
After my banging on his bedroom door for a bit he condescended to come out into the open part of his cage, and as the sun was now up I had my first real good look at him. He was nearly two feet long, of which more than half was composed of his tail. This strong muscular member was not flattened from top to bottom as an otter’s is, but from side to side like a tadpole’s. The hair on it was so short and sleek that it looked as though the whole tail was made out of polished black leather. All the top half of the animal was black, but paws, belly, throat and chest were pure white. The body was small and dumpy, and the head curiously flattened. Its muzzle and parts of its cheeks near the nose were swollen and enlarged, and from this bristled a forest of stiff white whiskers. From on top, the Shrew’s head looked not unlike the head of a hammer. Its feet were small and neat, and its eyes were microscopic pin-points of glinting jet buried in the fur.
I opened the door of its cage and threw the snake in. The Shrew approached it, preceded by its quivering mass of whisken. The snake made a slight movement, the Shrew sniffed, and then backed rapidly away, hissing furiously in the same way I had noticed before. I removed the snake and tried a frog, with the same results. Then I tried a fish which, according to the earliest reports on this animal, is its only food, and the Shrew refused that as well. He was rapidly getting bored with these proceedings, and was casting hopeful looks at his bedroom, when I threw in a large crab. He approached, sniffed, and then, before the crab had time to get his pincers ready, the Shrew had overturned it and delivered a sharp bite through the underside, almost cutting the crab in two with one bite. Having done this, he then settled down and finished off his meal with great rapidity, scrunching loudly and quivering his whiskers. Within half an hour he had polished off four crabs, and so his feeding problem was settled for the moment.
The next day the carriers returned from Mamfe staggering under the weight of a huge petrol drum. This had to be cut in half, lengthways, all the rust scraped out, and any trace of oil removed by boiling water in it for twenty-four hours. Then the Shrew was removed from his cage while a sliding door was fitted in the bottom. The whole cage was then placed on top of the half petrol drum; thus, by opening and closing the sliding door I could let the Shrew in and out of his private bathing pool. He enjoyed this immensely, and every night made the most resounding hisses and grunts in its hollow interior while in pursuit of his crab dinner. I found that the water fouled very quickly, so that it had to be changed three times a day, much to the water-boy’s annoyance.
The Shrew, now adequately housed and with access to water, settled down very well and proceeded to demolish twenty or twenty-five crabs a day, which proved lucrative for the small boys who collected them.
The Giant Water Shrew is perhaps one of the most interesting animals to be found in West Africa. It is, to all intents and purposes, a living prehistoric creature, a warm-blooded, breathing, biting fossil. Potomagale velox, as it is called scientifically, was first discovered by Du Chaillu, the gentleman who brought such discredit upon himself by his lurid accounts of gorilla-hunting in the eighteen- hundreds. Owing to his penchant for colouring his material with the aid of a fertile imagination, Du Chaillu’s every statement or discovery became suspect in the eyes of zoologists. However, in the case of Potomagale he seems to have contented himself with repeating just what the natives told him, and so in his original description he endows it with habits and a choice of food which appear to be completely wrong.
The animal has no relatives in the world, except a small mouse-like creature called Geogale, which lives in Madagascar. As it is unknown in fossil form it is impossible to say exactly how old an animal Potomagale is, but we do know that it comes from an ancient lineage, for ages ago in the earth’s history, at a time known to geologists as the Cretaceous Period, there lived an animal which is called by the jaw-breaking name of Palaeoryctes. It is the earliest insectivore known to science, and must have been a forerunner of the Potomagale’s family, for their teeth are almost identical, except that the Potomagale’s are much larger. So the Giant Water Shrew can trace his family back to a period in the world’s history before man was even known, in his present shape, on earth. He has also one other peculiarity which makes him distinct from all other insectivores, and thus more aristocratically sure of his uniqueness: he does not have collar-bones!