With all your nets in position you have to deal with the problem of the fire: this, contrary to all proverbial expectations, has to be all smoke and no fire, unless you want your specimens roasted. First, a small pile of dry twigs is laid in the opening, soaked with kerosene and set alight. As soon as it is ablaze you lay a handful of green leaves on top, and keep replenishing them. The burning of these green leaves produces scarcely any flame, but vast quantities of pungent smoke, which is immediately sucked up into the hollow of the tree. Your next problem is to make sure that there is not too much smoke; for if you are not careful you can quite easily asphyxiate your specimens before they can rush out of the tree. The idea is to strike that happy medium between roasting and suffocation of your quarry. Once the fire has been lit and piled with green leaves, it generally takes about three minutes (depending on the size of the tree) before the smoke percolates to every part and the animals start to break cover.
We smoked our first tree, and all we got out of it was a large and indignant moth. We took down the nets, put out the fire, and continued on our way. The next tree that the hunters had marked was half a mile away, and when we reached it we went through the same procedure. This time it was slightly more exciting, for, although there were no Idiurus in the trunk, there was some life: the first thing to break cover was a small gecko, beautifully banded in chocolate and ash-grey. These little lizards are quite plentiful in the deep forest, and you generally find two or three in any hollow tree you smoke. Following hard on the gecko's tail came three creatures which looked, as they crawled hastily out of the smoke, like large brown sausages with a fringe of undulating legs along each side: they were giant millipedes, large, stupid, and completely harmless beasts that are very common all over the forest. The inside of hollow trees is their favourite abode, for their diet is rotten wood. This, it seemed, was the entire contents of the tree. We took down the nets, put out the fire, and went on. The next tree was completely empty, as were the three that followed it. The seventh tree produced a small colony of bats, all of which flew frantically out of a hole at the top as soon as Peter tried to climb the tree.
This laborious process of setting up the nets, smoking the tree, taking down the nets, and moving on to the next tree was repeated fifteen times that day, and towards evening we were sore and smarting from a thousand cuts and bruises, and our throats were rough from breathing in lungfuls of smoke. We were all in the deepest depths of depression, for not only had we caught no Idiurus, but we had caught nothing else of any value either. By the time we reached the last tree that we would have time to smoke before it got dark I was so tired that I really felt I did not care whether there were any Idiurus in its trunk or not. I squatted on the ground, smoking a cigarette and watching the hunters as they made the preparations. The tree was smoked and nothing whatsoever appeared from inside. The hunters looked at me.
'Take down the nets; we go back for Eshobi,' I said wearily.
Jacob was busily disentangling the net from the trunk, when he paused and peered at something that lay inside the tree. He bent, picked it up, and came towards me.
'Masa want dis kind of beef ?' he inquired diffidently.
I glanced up, and received a considerable shock, for there, dangling from his fingers by its long feathery tail, its eyes closed and its sides heaving, was an Idiurus. He deposited the mouse-sized creature in my cupped hands, and I peered at it: it was quite unconscious, apparently almost asphyxiated by the smoke.
'Quick, quick, Jacob!' I yelped, in an agony of fear, 'bring me small box for put um … No, no, not that one, a good one. Now put small leaf for inside… small leaf, you moron, not half a tree… There, that's right.' I placed the Idiurus reverently inside the box, and took another look at him. He lay there quite limp and unconscious, his chest heaving and his tiny pink paws twitching. He looked to me to be on the verge of death; frantically seizing a huge bunch of leaves I fanned him vigorously. A quarter of an hour of this peculiar form of artificial respiration and, to my delight, he started to recover. His eyes opened in a bleary fashion, he rolled on to his stomach and lay there looking miserable. I fanned him for a while longer, and then carefully closed the lid of the box.
While I had been trying to revive theldiurus, the hunters had been grouped round me in a silent and sorrowful circle; now that they saw the creature regain its faculties, they gave broad grins of delight. We hastily searched the inside of the tree to see if there were any more lying about, but we found nothing. This puzzled me considerably, forldiurus was supposed to live in large colonies. To find a solitary one, therefore, would be unusual. I sincerely hoped that the textbooks were not wrong; to catch some specimens from a colony of animals is infinitely easier than trying to track down and capture individuals. However, I could not stop to worry about it then; I wanted to get the precious creature back to the village and out of the small travelling box he was in. We packed up the nets and set off through the twilit forest as speedily as we could. I carried the box containing Idiurus in my cupped hands as delicately as if it contained eggs, and at intervals I would fan the creature through the wire gauze top.
When I was safely back in the village dance-hall, I prepared a larger cage for the precious beast, and then moved him into it. This was not so easy, for he had fully recovered from the smoke by now, and scuttled about with considerable speed. At last, without letting him escape, or getting myself bitten, I succeeded in manoeuvring him into the new cage, and then I placed my strongest light next to it in order to have a good look at him.
He was about the size of a common House Mouse, and very similar to it in general shape. The first thing that caught your attention was his taiclass="underline" it was very long (almost twice as long as his body), and down each side of it grew a fringe of long, wavy hairs, so the whole tail looked like a bedraggled feather. His head was large, and rather domed, with small, pixie-pointed ears. His eyes were pitch black, small, and rather prominent. His rodent teeth, a pair of great bright orange incisors, protruded from his mouth in a gentle curve, so that from the side it gave him a most extraordinarily supercilious expression. Perhaps the most curious part about him was the 'flying' membrane, which stretched along each side of his body. This was a long, fine flap of skin, which was attached to his ankles, and to a long, slightly curved, cartilaginous shaft that grew out from his arm, just behind the elbow. When at rest, his membrane was curled and rucked along the side of his body like a curtain pelmet; when he launched himself into the air, however, the legs were stretched out straight, and the membrane thus drawn taut, so that it acted like the wings of a glider. Later I was to discover just how skilfulIdiurus could be in the air with this primitive gliding apparatus.
When I had gone to bed that night and switched off the light, I could hear my new specimen rustling and scuttling round his cage, and I imagined what a feast he was making on the variety of foods I had put in there for him. But when dawn came and I crawled sleepily out of bed to have a look, I discovered that he had not eaten anything. I was not unduly worried by this, for some creatures when newly caught refuse to eat until they have settled down in captivity. The length of time this takes varies not only with the species, but with the individual animal. I felt that some time during the day Idiurus would come down from the top of the cage, where he was clinging, and eat his fill.