The Bafut Beagles

na fine beef, I said. how you call um? for Bafut, said the Fon, we call um Shilling. you think sometimes my hunter men fit catch some? To-morrow you go have some, promised the Fon, but he would not tell me how they were to be captured, nor who was to do the capturing. We reached Bafut in the dusk, and when the Fon was respectably clothed once more he came and had a drink. As I said good night to him, I reminded him of his promise to get me some of the galagos.

yes, my friend, I no go forget, he said. I go get you some Shilling.

Four days passed, and I began to think that either the Fon had forgotten, or else the creatures were proving more difficult to capture than he had imagined. Then, on the fifth morning, my tea was brought in, and reposing on the tray was a small, highly-coloured raffia basket. I pulled off the lid and looked sleepily inside, and four pairs of enormous, liquid, innocent eyes peered up at me with expressions of gentle inquiry. It was a basketful of Shillings from the Fon.

CHAPTER SEVEN The Que-Vong-Goo

The grassland country was populated by a rich variety of reptile life, and most of it seemed easily caught. In the lowland forests you very rarely saw a snake of any description, even if you searched for them. There were snakes there, of course, but I think that they were more widely dispersed, and probably most of the species were tree-dwellers, which made them much more difficult to see and to capture. In the mountains, however, the grass was alive with small rodents and frogs, and the patches of mountain forest filled with birds, so it was a paradise for snakes. There were great black spitting cobras, green mambas, slim tree-snakes with enormous, innocent-looking eyes, the multi-coloured Gaboon viper, with a forked rhino-like horn on its nose, and a host of others. As well as snakes, there were plenty of frogs and toads; the frogs ranged in size from the Hairy Frog down to tiny tree-frogs the size of an acorn, some spotted and streaked with such a dazzling array of colours that they looked more like delicious sweets than amphibians. The toads, on the whole, were fairly drab, but they made up for this by being decorated with strange clusters of warts and protuberances on their bodies, and an astonishing variety of colouring in their eyes.

But the commonest of the reptiles were the lizards, which could be found everywhere; in the long herbage at the roadside scuttled fat skinks with stubby legs, fawn and silver and black in colour, and on the walls of the huts, in the road, and on the rocks the rainbow-coloured agamas pranced and nodded. Under the bark of trees or beneath stones you could find small geckos with great golden eyes, their bodies neatly and handsomely marked in chocolate and cream, and in the houses at night the ordinary house geckos, translucent and ghostly as .pink pearls, paraded across the ceiling.

All these reptiles were brought in to me at one time or another by the local population. Sometimes it would be a snake tied insecurely to the end of a stick, or a calabash full of gulping frogs. Sometimes the capture would be carefully wrapped in the hunter's hat or shirt, or dangling on the end of a fine string. By these haphazard and dangerous methods such things as cobras, mambas, and Gaboon vipers would be brought to me, and although their captors knew their deadliness they handled them with an offhand carelessness that amazed me. As a rule, the African is no fool over snakes and prefers to regard every species as poisonous, just to be on the safe side, so to find the Bafutians treating them with such casualness was surprising, to say the least. I found it even more surprising when I discovered that the one reptile they all feared intensely was completely harmless.

I was out with the Bafut Beagles one day, and during the course of the hunt we came to a wide grassy valley about half a mile from the village. The Beagles had wandered off to set the nets, and while waiting for them I sat down in the grass to enjoy a cigarette. Suddenly my attention was attracted by a -slight movement to my left, and on looking down I saw a reptile whose appearance made me gasp; hitherto I had been under the impression that the most colourful lizard in the grasslands was the agama, but, in comparison with the one that had crawled into view among the grass stems, the agama was as dull and colourless as a lump of putty. I sat there hardly daring to move, in case this wonderful creature dashed off into the herbage; as I remained quite still, it eventually decided that I was harmless, so slowly and luxuriously it slithered out into the sun and lay there contemplating me with its golden-flecked eyes. I could see that it was a skink of sorts, but one of the largest and most colourful skinks I had ever seen. It lay there quite still, basking in the early morning sun, so I had plenty of time to examine it.