The Bafut Beagles

Every day after that I would put the toads out near to the place where Pavlova was tied, and she would watch them wandering about. She would give occasional cries of amazement at the sight of them, or else stroke them gently until they lay there in a semi-hypnotized condition. If ever they wandered too far away and were in danger of disappearing into the thick undergrowth at the edge of the compound, Pavlova would get very excited and call me with shrill screams to let me know that her charges were escaping, and I would hurry down and bring them back to her. One day she called me when the toads had wandered too far afield, but I did not hear her, and when I went down some time later Pavlova was dancing hysterically at the end of her string, screaming furiously, and the Brow-leafs were nowhere to be seen. I undid the monkey's leash, and she at once led me towards the thick bushes at the edge of the compound, and within a very short time she had found the runaways and had fallen on them with loud purring cries of joy. Pavlova really got terribly fond of these fat toads, and it was quite touching to see how eagerly she greeted them in the morning, gently stroking and patting them, and how worried she got when they wandered too far away. A thing that she found very difficult to understand was why the toads were not clad in fur, as another monkey would be. She would touch their smooth skins with her fingers, endeavouring to part the nonexistent fur, a worried expression on her little black face; occasionally she would bend down and lick their backs in a thoughtful sort of way. Eventually she ceased to worry over their baldness, and treated them with the same gentleness and affection she would have displayed towards offspring of her own. The toads, in their own curious way, seemed to become quite fond of her as well, though she sometimes upset their dignity, which annoyed them. I remember one morning I had just given them both a bath, which they thoroughly enjoyed, and on walking across the compound they got various bits of stick and dirt stuck to their wet tummies. This worried Pavlova, for she liked her proteges to be clean and neat. I found her sitting in the sunshine, her feet resting on the back of one Brow-leaf as though he were a footstool, while the other one dangled in the most undignified fashion from her hand. As he slowly revolved in mid-air, Pavlova solemnly picked all the bits of rubbish from his tummy, talking to him all the time in a series of squeaks and trills. When she had finished with him she put him on the ground, where he sat looking very crestfallen, while his partner was hoisted up into the air and forced to undergo the same indignity. The poor Browleafs had no chance of being superior and pompous when Pavlova was around.

CHAPTER TWO The Bafut Beagles

In order to hunt for the various members of the Bafut fauna, I employed, as well as the four hunters the Fon had supplied, a pack of six thin and ungainly mongrels, who, their owners assured me, were the finest hunting dogs in West Africa. I called this untidy ensemble of men and dogs the Bafut Beagles. Although the hunters did not understand the meaning of this title they grew extremely proud of it, and I once heard a hunter, when arguing with a neighbour, proclaim in shrill and indignant tones, you no go shout me like dat, ma friend. You no saway dat I be Bafut Beagle?

Our hunting method was as follows: we would walk out to some remote hillside or valley, and then choose a thick patch of grass and bushes. At a suitable point we would spread the nets in a half-moon shape; then, with the dogs, we would walk through the undergrowth, driving whatever creatures we found there into the nets. Each dog wore round its neck a little wooden bell, so that when the pack disappeared into the long grass we could still keep a track on their whereabouts by the loud clonking noise from these ornaments. The advantage of this method of hunting was that I was on the spot to handle the creatures from the very moment of capture, and they could be hastily transported back to Bafut and placed in decent cages with the minimum of delay. We transported our captures in bags with special air holes, ringed with brass, let into the sides; for the bigger and tougher creatures the bags were of canvas or hessian, and for the more delicate beasts they were made out of soft cloth. Once in the darkness of the bag the captives generally ceased to struggle* and lay quite quiet until we got them home again; the most frightening part of the process from the animals point of view was disentangling them from the net, but after a bit of practice we got this down to a fine art, and an animal could be caught, removed from the net, and placed in a bag within the space of two minutes.