My thought now turned to a very important matter: what was I going to give him to eat on the long voyage home? True, I could take a supply of live crabs with me, but even then these would run out eventually, and there was no supply of freshwater crabs in England that I knew of. The only thing was to get him on to a substitute food, and my heart sank at the thought. Then I remembered that the natives in the Cameroons catch the fresh-water shrimps, dry them in the sun, and sell them in the markets as a delicious addition to groundnut or palm oil chop, or, for that matter, any other dish. I decided that these would have to be the substitute for the crabs, so a member of the staff was sent to the nearest market to procure several pounds of this product. Using these small, biscuit-dry shrimps as a base, I mixed in raw egg and some finely chopped meat. Then I got two large crabs, killed them, scooped out their insides and proceeded to stuff them with this rather nauseating mess. Having prepared them I went to the Shrew’s cage and threw him a small, live, and unstuffed crab, which he soon demolished, and then started to look round for more. Then I threw in a stuffed crab, and he fell on it and proceeded to scrunch it avidly.
After the first few bites he paused, sniffed suspiciously (while I held my breath), and then stared at it for a minute. But, to my delight, he fell to again and demolished the lot.
Gradually I weaned him on to this new diet until he was eating it out of a dish, and having four or five crabs as dessert, and he thrived on it. I was getting prepared to show him off to John on arrival as Bakebe, and even making up boastful speeches on how easy it was to keep a Giant Water Shrew in captivity, when the object of my love suddenly died. He was fat, and in the best of spirits one night, and the next morning he was dead. As I sadly consigned his body to the formalin bottle I reflected that it was probably the only chance I would ever get of keeping one of these fascinating creatures alive.
Another one of the unwritten rules of collecting, however, seems to be that you may go to endless trouble to get your first specimen, but, once having got it, the others follow thick and fast. So, some time later, I was pleased, but not unduly surprised, when a youth wandered into the compound carrying a wicker fish-trap, inside of which crouched a lovely young Giant Water Shrew. It was a female and could not have been more than a few months old, for she measured about twelve inches with her tail, against the two feet of the adult I had captured. I was very elated with this arrival, for I thought that, being a young specimen, she would settle down to captivity and a substitute diet in a more satisfactory manner than an adult. I was perfectly right, for within twenty-four hours she was eating the substitute food, snorting like a grampus in her bathing pool, and even allowing me to scratch her behind the ears, a liberty I could not have taken with the adult. For a month she lived happily in her cage, feeding well, and growing rapidly. I was confident that she was to be the first Giant Water Shrew to arrive in England. But, as if to warn me against undue optimism, and to prove that collecting is not as easy as it sometimes seems, fate stepped in, and one morning on going to the cage I found my baby Shrew dead. She had apparently died in the same mysterious way as the adult, for she had seemed as lively as usual the night before, when I had fed her, and she had eaten a good meal.
The Giant Water Shrew was really the zenith of our night hunting results. Short of getting an Angwantibo (an animal which by now I was coming to look upon as an almost mythical beast!), we could not have beaten it as a capture. For weeks after every waterway for miles around was filled with hunters who, spurred on by the price I had offered, were determined to get me another Shrew. But they had no luck, and after two weeks of intensive night hunts, during which I wore myself out looking for Shrews and Angwantibos, I had to give up night hunting and confined my attentions to the camp, where the ever-growing collection provided me with quite enough work.
CHAPTER SIX
BEEF AND THE BRINGERS OF BEEF
THE camp site was a rectangular area hacked out of the thick undergrowth on the edge of the forest. Fifty feet away a small stream had carved itself a valley in the red clay; and it was on the edge of the valley that the camp was situated. My tent was covered with a palm-leaf roof for extra protection, and next door to this was the animal house, a fairly large building constructed out of palm-leaf mats on a framework of rough wood saplings, lashed together with forest creepers. Opposite was the smaller replica which served as a kitchen, and behind some large bushes was the hut in which the staff slept.
It had taken considerable time and effort to arrange this camp just as I wanted it. At one time there had been three separate gangs of men building different houses, and the noise and confusion was terrible. The whole area was knee deep in coiling creepers, palm mats, boxes of tinned food, wire traps, nets, cages, and other equipment. Africans were everywhere, wielding their machetes with great vigour and complete disregard for human life. Through this chaos came a steady trickle of women, some old and withered with flat dugs and closely shaven grey heads, smoking stubby black pipes; some young and plump with shining bodies and shrill voices. Some brought food to their husbands, some brought calabashes full of frogs, beetles, crabs, and catfish, specimens they had caught while down at the river, and which they thought I might buy.
“Masa . . . Masa,” they would call, waving a calabash full of clicking, bubble-blowing crabs, “Masa go buy dis ting? Masa want dis kind of beef?”
At first, with no cages ready for the reception of specimens, I was forced to refuse all the things they brought. I was afraid that, as I had to do this, they would become disgruntled and give up bringing animals; I need not have worried: some women returned with the same creatures three and four times a day to see if I had changed my mind.
Before accepting any creatures I wanted to get the camp site more or less organized, and then I had to get down to the construction of cages to house the animals. With this end in view I engaged a man who had once been a carpenter, and he squatted down with a great pile of broken boxes in the middle of the camp and proceeded to work quickly and well, undeterred by the noise and upheaval around him. Soon my stock of cages had grown, and I felt I was then in a position to deal with any eventuality, so the message went whispering around the village that Masa was now buying animals, and the trickle of beef bringers swelled into a flood, a flood that threatened to overwhelm both the carpenter and me. Sometimes we would be working by the light of hurricane lamps until two and three in the morning, hurrying to finish a cage, while near us, on the ground, would lie a row of sacks and bags, each heaving and twitching with the movement of its occupant.