At length the Fon left us, and we watched him walking back across the great compound, occasionally blowing raspberries at his councillors, whereupon they all doubled up with laughter. Minnie, with the air of a society hostess after an exhausting dinner party, yawned loudly and then went over and lay down on her banana-leaf bed, covered herself carefully with the sack, put her cheek on her hand and went to sleep. Presently her snores reverberated along the verandah almost as loudly as her raspberries.
PART THREE. Coastwards and Zoowards
Mail by Hand
Sir,
I have the honour most respectfully beg to submit this letter to you stating as follows:
(1) I regret extremely at your leaving me, though not for bad but for good.
(2) At this juncture, I humbly and respectfully beg that you as my kind master should leave a good record of recommendation about me which will enable your successor to know all about me.
(3) Though I have worked with several Masters I have highly appreciated your ways then all.
Therefore should the Master leave some footprints behind on my behalf, I shall price that above all my dukedoms.
I have the honour to be, Sir,
Your obedient Servent,
Phillip Onaga (Cook)
Chapter Seven. A Zoo in Our Luggage
It was time for us to start making preparations to leave Bafut and travel the three-hundred-odd miles down to the coast. But there was a lot to be done before we could set out on the journey. In many ways this is the most harassing and dangerous part of a collecting trip. For one thing to load your animals on to lorries and take them that distance, over roads that resemble a tank-training ground more than anything else, is in itself a major undertaking. But there are many other vital things to arrange as well. Your food supply for the voyage must be waiting for you at the port, and here again you cannot afford to make any mistakes, for you cannot take two hundred and fifty animals on board a ship for three weeks unless you have an adequate supply of food. All your cages have to be carefully inspected and any defects caused by six months’ wear-and-tear have to be made good, because you cannot risk having an escape on board ship. So, cages have to be rewired, new fastenings fixed on doors, new bottoms fitted on to cages that show signs of deterioration, and a hundred and one other minor jobs.
So, taking all this into consideration, it is not surprising that you have to start making preparations for departure sometimes a month before you actually leave your base camp for the coast. Everything, it seems, conspires against you. The local population, horrified at the imminent loss of such a wonderful source of revenue, redouble their hunting efforts so as to make the maximum profit before you leave, and this means that you are not only renovating old cages, but constructing new ones as fast as you can to cope with this sudden influx of creatures. The local telegraph operator undergoes what appears to be a mental breakdown, so that the vital telegrams you send and receive are incomprehensible to both you and the recipient. When you are waiting anxiously for news of your food supplies for the voyage it is not soothing to the nerves to receive a telegram which states, ‘MESSAGE REPLIED REGRET CANNOTOB VARY GREEN BALAS WELL HALF PIPE DO?’ which, after considerable trouble and expense, you get translated as: MESSAGE RECEIVED REGRET CANNOT OBTAIN VERY GREEN BANANAS WILL HALF RIPE DO?
Needless to say, the animals soon became aware that something is in the wind and try to soothe your nerves in their own particular way: those that are sick get sicker, and look at you in such a frail and anaemic way you are quite sure they will never survive the journey down to the coast; all the rarest and most irreplaceable specimens try to escape, and if successful hang around taunting you with their presence and making you waste valuable time trying to catch them again; animals that had refused to live unless supplied with special food, whether avocado pear or sweet potato, suddenly decide that they do not like this particular food any more, so frantic telegrams have to be sent cancelling the vast quantities of the delicacies you had just ordered for the voyage. Altogether this part of a collecting trip is very harassing.
The fact that we were worried and jumpy, of course, made all of us do silly things that only added to the confusion. The case of the clawed toads is an example of what I mean. Anyone might be pardoned for thinking that clawed toads were frogs at first glance. They are smallish creatures with blunt, frog-like heads and a smooth, slippery skin which is most untoad-like. Also they are almost completely aquatic, another untoad-like characteristic. To my mind they are rather dull creatures who spend ninety per cent of their time floating in the water in various abandoned attitudes, occasionally shooting to the surface to take a quick gulp of air. But, for some reason which I could never ascertain, Bob was inordinately proud of these wretched toads. We had two hundred and fifty of them and we kept them in a gigantic plastic bath on the verandah. Whenever Bob was missing, one was almost sure to find him crouched over this great cauldron of wriggling toads, an expression of pride on his face. Then came the day of the great tragedy.
The wet season had just started and the brilliant sunshine of each day was being interrupted by heavy downpours of rain; they only lasted an hour or so, but during that hour the quantity of water that fell was quite prodigious. On this particular morning Bob had been crooning over his clawed toads and when it started to rain he thought that they would be grateful if he put their bowl out in it. So he carefully carried the toads’ bowl down the verandah and placed it on the top step, brilliantly positioned so that it not only received the rain itself but all the water that ran off the roof. Then he went away to do something else and forgot all about it. The rain continued to rain as if determined to uphold the Cameroons’ reputation for being one of the wettest places on earth, and gradually the bowl filled up. As the water level rose so the toads rose with it until they were peering over the plastic rim. Another ten minutes of rain and, whether they wanted to or not, they were swept out of the bowl by the overflow.
My attention was drawn to this instructive sight by Bob’s moan of anguish when he discovered the catastrophe, a long-drawn howl of emotion that brought us all running from wherever we were. On the top step stood the plastic bowl, now completely empty of toads. From it the water gushed down the steps carrying Bob’s precious amphibians. The steps were black with toads, slithering, hopping and rolling over and over in the water. In this Niagara of amphibians Bob, with a wild look in his eye, was leaping to and fro like an excited heron, picking up toads as fast as he could. Picking up a clawed toad is quite a feat. It is almost as difficult as trying to pick up a drop of quicksilver; apart from the fact that their bodies are incredibly slippery, the toads are very strong for their size and kick and wriggle with surprising energy. In addition their hind legs are armed with small, sharp claws and when they kick out with these muscular hind legs they are quite capable of inflicting a painful scratch. Bob, alternately moaning and cursing in anguish, was not in the calm collected mood that is necessary for catching clawed toads, and so every time he had scooped up a handful of the creatures and was bounding up the steps to return them to their bath, they would squeeze from between his fingers and fall back on to the steps, to be immediately swept downwards again by the water. In the end it took five of us three-quarters of an hour to collect all the toads and put them back in their bowl, and just as we had finished and were soaked to the skin it stopped raining.