Two in the Bush (20 page)

‘That’s why the farmers don’t like emus, either,’ said Harry, ‘they do the hell of a lot of damage to the fences.’

We progressed for about another quarter of an hour, then suddenly heard Bevan honking his horn. Looking over, we saw a flock of about ten grey kangaroos sitting stock-still at the edge of a
little wood, staring at us with their ears pricked. Harry swerved violently round a tree to correct our course and we headed straight for the kangaroos, while Bevan drove out further to prevent
them from breaking back. As we drew close to them they started hopping off in a rather nonchalant fashion, but as the vehicles accelerated the kangaroos panicked and started running away in real
earnest. It was fascinating to watch them taking those prodigious leaps, using their tails purely as a balancing organ. Soon we had chivvied them round so that they were lolloping along the length
of the fence towards the trap, and here both vehicles suddenly put on a burst of speed. I would not have thought it was possible to drive through that sort of country at fifty miles an hour, but we
did it. Not only did you have to cling to your seat to prevent being thrown out through the top of the roof or through the windscreen, but you also had to be prepared for the violent swerves that
had to be made to circumnavigate the many small trees that dotted the grassland. The kangaroos were by now thoroughly panic-stricken, and although some of them stopped and made an attempt to leap
the fence, we always managed to prevent them by putting on another burst of speed. At last, the trap came into sight. A final burst of speed from the two Land-Rovers and the panic-stricken
kangaroos raced down the funnel and found themselves at a dead end. We clamped on our brakes, leapt out of the Land-Rovers and raced down the fence into the trap amongst the milling mob of
kangaroos. There is only one way to catch a kangaroo successfully and that is to avoid, at all costs, his massive and potentially lethal hind legs, and grasp him firmly by the tail. He then
proceeds to bounce in front of you until he is exhausted or until someone else comes to your rescue and grabs other parts of his anatomy. This we proceeded to do until we had all the kangaroos
firmly hogtied. Under the baking sun, the poor things were panting and sweating with the exertion and the heat. Carefully each one was dressed up in a neat, celluloid collar in different colours
and with a different number on each, and we then took them, one by one, outside the trap and let them go. Most of them hopped away rapidly and with obvious relief, but there was one small one who,
when placed on the ground, remained standing stock-still, staring into space. Harry went up behind it and patted it gently on the rump, whereupon the kangaroo turned on him ferociously, and an
extremely amusing boxing match took place, with Harry endeavouring to shoo the kangaroo away and the kangaroo endeavouring to get its own back on Harry. As the kangaroo only measured about three
feet high and Harry was a good six feet, the marsupial’s attacks on him had all the temerity of David’s encounter with Goliath. At last, however, it decided that its desire to
disembowel Harry was doomed to failure and so, with a certain amount of reluctance, it hopped off to join the others.

It was now getting near the time when we could expect the birth and so we took up residence in a motel, conveniently situated about half a mile down the road from the laboratories. This was when
Pamela decided that she was going to give us a run for our money. For three days she designed a series of false alarms for us, and she timed these so cleverly that they did the maximum amount of
damage to our nervous systems. Suddenly, as we were in the middle of lunch, or in the bath, or just drifting cosily off to sleep, there would be a frantic telephone message from Geoff to say that
he thought, from Pamela’s behaviour, that the birth was imminent. If we happened to be bathing or sleeping it meant a frantic scramble into our clothes, a wild gallop out into the courtyard
with our equipment, and we would pile into the Land-Rover and drive off with a deafening roar. Our rather curious actions seemed to mystify the owner of the motel, as well as the other guests, and
they started giving us such peculiar looks that, in self-defence, we had to explain what we were trying to achieve, whereupon they all took an intense interest in the whole matter and would rush to
the windows to cheer us on our way as we galloped towards the Land-Rover, dropping bits of equipment and tripping each other up in our haste. Every time we got down to the yards, however, Pamela
would be munching some delicacy and would look up with a faintly surprised air that we should have bothered to pay her yet another visit.

Then came the evening when, in the middle of dinner, the motel proprietor came galloping into the dining-room and informed us that Geoff Sharman had just phoned and said that
quite
definitely
Pamela was going to give birth at any minute. Knocking over a bottle of wine and leaving our napkins strewn across the floor like autumn leaves, we fled from the dining-room, pursued
by cheers and shouts of ‘Good luck’ from our fellow guests. Chris, in his eagerness, started the Land-Rover so quickly that I was left with one foot inside and one on the ground when he
was changing into top; with a fearful effort that almost dislocated my spine, I managed to scramble in, and we zoomed down the road to the laboratories.

‘She’s definitely going to do it this time,’ said Geoff. ‘I’m quite certain of it.’

She could not have picked a better time. It was pitch dark, bitterly cold, and everything was drenched in dew. Hastily we rigged up the arc lights and got the cameras in position. Pamela was
sitting, leaning against a fence and getting on with the good work of cleaning out her pouch. This she did very fastidiously, using her front paws. The pouch, when untenanted, tends to exude a waxy
substance similar to the wax in a human ear, and it was this that she was cleaning out, carefully combing the furry interior of the pouch with her claws. We filmed her doing this and then sat and
gazed at her expectantly. She continued cleaning her pouch out for about half an hour, stared round moodily, then hopped down to the far end of the paddock and started to eat.

‘I think we’ve got a little time to wait,’ said Geoff.

‘Are you quite sure that this isn’t another of her false alarms?’ I asked.

‘Oh no,’ said Geoff, ‘this is the real thing; she wouldn’t clean out her pouch as thoroughly as that if she wasn’t going to give birth.’

We sat in the freezing cold and stared at Pamela and she stared back at us, her jaws moving rhythmically.

‘Let’s go into the hut while we’re waiting,’ said Geoff, ‘it will be a little bit warmer. If your hands get too cold, you won’t be able to manipulate your
equipment.’

We crowded into the tiny shed, where I produced, to the delight of the assembled company, a bottle of whisky that I had had the foresight to bring with me. We took it in turns, between drinks,
to go out and peer hopefully in Pamela’s direction, but nothing happened.

‘Jolly experience, this,’ said Jim, ‘sitting up all night, sloshing whisky and waiting for a kangaroo to be born. Never had an experience like it.’

‘Well, you’ll be able to add it to your repertoire of unusual events that have taken place in your life,’ said Chris, ‘together with the hair drier and being sick on a
pontoon bridge.’

‘What,’ enquired Geoff, ‘is all this about hair driers and pontoon bridges?’

We explained that Jim was not a normal mortal and went through life involving himself in the most unlikely situations.

‘You should get him to tell you about the time he got a bicycle jammed in the chimney,’ I said.

‘What?’ said Geoff. ‘How on earth did he manage that?’

‘He’s lying,’ said Jim excitedly, ‘I never did anything of the sort.’

‘I definitely remember you telling me,’ I said. ‘I can’t recall the exact details but I remember it was a fascinating story.’

‘But how,’ said Geoff, his scientific interest deeply aroused, ‘did you get a bicycle jammed up a chimney?’

‘He’s lying, I tell you,’ said Jim, ‘I’ve never owned a bicycle, let alone got it jammed in a chimney.’

By now Geoff and all his co-workers were quite convinced that Jim
had
got a bicycle jammed in a chimney and was merely being modest about this achievement, and they spent the next hour
endeavouring to work out how he could have managed this feat, with Jim getting more and more irritable with each passing suggestion.

It came as somewhat of a relief to him when one of Geoff’s assistants appeared in the doorway of the hut and said, ‘Action stations, I think we’re off.’

We scrambled out of the hut and took up our positions. Pamela was moving about, looking rather uncomfortable. Presently, against the fence of the paddock, she dug a shallow hole in the ground
and then took up a position in it, with her tail sticking out between her hind legs and her back resting against the fence. She sat like this for a few minutes and then obviously started feeling
uncomfortable again, for she lay down on her side for a few seconds and then stood up and moved around for a bit. Then she went back to the hole she had dug and again sat with her tail sticking out
between her legs and her back against the fence. She was completely unperturbed by the fact that arc lights, two cine cameras and the eyes of about a dozen people were fixed on her.

‘You’d better start the cameras now,’ said Geoff.

The cameras started to whirr and, as if on cue, the baby was born. It dropped out on to Pamela’s tail and lay there, a pinky-white, glistening blob no longer than the first joint of my
little finger.

Although I knew roughly what to expect, the whole performance was one of the most miraculous and incredible things that I have ever seen in all the years that I have been watching animals. The
baby was, to all intents and purposes, an embryo – it had, in fact, been born after a gestation period of only thirty-three days; it was blind and its hind legs, neatly crossed over each
other, were powerless; yet in this condition it had been expelled into the world. As if this was not enough of a handicap, it now had to climb up through the fur on Pamela’s stomach until it
found the entrance to the pouch. This was really the equivalent of a blind man, with both legs broken, crawling through thick forest to the top of Mount Everest, for the baby got absolutely no
assistance from Pamela at all. We noticed (and we have it on film to prove it) that the mother does
not
help the baby by licking a path through the fur, as is so commonly reported. The baby,
as soon as it was born, with a curious, almost fish-like wiggle, left the mother’s tail and started to struggle up through the fur. Pamela ignored it. She bent over and licked her nether
regions and her tail clean and then proceeded to clean her fur
behind
the baby as it was climbing, for it was obviously leaving a trail of moisture through her hair. Occasionally her tongue
passed over the baby, but I am certain that this was more by accident than design. Slowly and valiantly the pulsating little pink blob struggled on through the thick fur. From the moment it was
born to the moment it found the rim of the pouch took some ten minutes. That a creature weighing only a gramme (the weight of five or six pins) could have achieved this climb was a miracle in
itself, but, having got to the rim of the pouch, it had another task ahead of it. The pouch is approximately the size of a large, woman’s handbag. Into this the lilliputian kangaroo had to
crawl and then search the vast, furry area in order to find the teat; this search might take him anything up to twenty minutes. Having found the teat, he would then fasten on to it, whereupon it
would swell in his mouth, thus making him adhere to it firmly – so firmly, indeed, that if you try to pull a baby kangaroo off its mother’s teat, you will tear the soft mouth parts and
cause bleeding. This has given rise to the entirely erroneous idea that baby kangaroos are born on the teat, i.e. develop from the teat itself, like a sort of bud.

Finally the baby hauled itself over the edge of the rim of the pouch and disappeared into the interior, and we could switch off the cameras and the lights. We had got some remarkable and unique
film and both Chris and Jim were ecstatic. For me it had been an unforgettable experience, and I am sure that even the most hardened anti-kangaroo sheep farmer would have been impressed by the
baby’s grim determination to perform its herculean task. After being cast out into the world only half formed, and being made to undertake this prodigious climb, I felt that the baby kangaroo
thoroughly deserved his life in his fur-lined, centrally heated pram with its built-in milk bar. I hoped, very sincerely, that the work that was being done by Harry Frith, Geoff Sharman and the
other members of the team would find a way to preserve the largest of the marsupials from complete eradication.

PART THREE

The Arrival

I was sitting under a tree covered with huge scarlet flowers, and meditatively sipping a beer, when I heard the boat – I was seated high on an escarpment overlooking
several thousand miles of forest – a Persian carpet of greens, reds, golds and russets – and below me the Tembeling river wound its way between steep banks, brown and glinting as a
slow-worm – I was, in fact, sitting outside the rest house on the edge of Malaya’s biggest national park, an enormous block of forest that stretched away in every direction.

I took another sip of beer and listened to the stutter of the outboard engine growing louder and louder. I wondered who the new arrivals were. Presently the boat hove into view and headed for
the landing stage below me. As far as I could see it was crammed to the gills with an extremely convivial party of Sikhs who, to relieve the tedium of the journey up-river, had partaken heartily
– if unwisely – of some form of intoxicating liquid. I watched with interest as they landed uncertainly and wended their way, laughing and joking, up the hill. They passed me sitting in
solitary state under my tree, and waved extravagant greetings and bowed. I bowed and waved back, and they made their way towards another small rest house which stood a few hundred yards off among
the trees. The last of their party, who had stayed behind to give some rather incoherent instructions to the boatman, now came panting up the hill. He was a fine-looking man of about sixty with a
magnificent Father Christmas beard, and with his turban slightly askew.