`The what?’
`The kakapo. It’s the world’s largest, fattest and least-able-to-fly parrot. It lives in New Zealand. It’s the strangest bird I know of and will probably be as famous as the dodo if it goes extinct.’
`How many of them are there??
‘Forty and falling. Do you know about the Yangtze river dolphin?
No.
`The Komodo dragon? The Rodrigues fruitbat?’
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ I said. I went into the but and rummaged around in the ants for one of the monkey’s most prized achievements. It consisted of a lot of twigs mashed up to a pulp and flattened out into sheets and then held together with something that had previously held a cow together. I took my Filofax outside and flipped through it while the sun streamed through the trees behind me from which some ruffed lemurs were calling to each other.
`Well,’ I said, sitting down on the step again, ‘I’ve just got a couple of novels to write, but, er, what are you doing in 1988?
Here Be Chickens
The first animal we went to look for, three years later, was the Komodo dragon lizard. This was an animal, like most of the animals we were going to see, about which I knew very little. What little I did know was hard to like.
They are man-eaters. That is not so bad in itself. Lions and tigers are man-eaters, and though we may be intensely wary of them and treat them with respectful fear we nevertheless have an instinctive admiration for them. We don’t actually like to be eaten by them, but we don’t resent the very idea. The reason, probably, is that we are mammals and so are they. There’s a kind of unreconstructed species prejudice at work: a lion is one of us but a lizard is not. And neither, for that matter is a fish, which is why we have such an unholy terror of sharks.
The Komodo lizards are also big. Very big. There’s one on Komodo at the moment which is over twelve feet long and stands about a yard high, which you can’t help but feel is entirely the wrong size for a lizard to be, particularly if it’s a man-eater and you’re about to go and share an island with it.
Though they are man-eaters they don’t get to eat man very often, and more generally their diet consists of goats, pigs and deer and such like, but they will only kill these animals if they can’t find something that’s dead already, because they are, at heart, scavengers. They like their meat bad and smelly. We don’t like our meat like that and tend to be leery of things that do. I was definitely leery of these lizards.
Mark had spent part of the intervening three years planning and researching the expeditions we were to make, writing letters, telephoning, but most often telexing to naturalists working in the field in remote parts of the world, organising schedules, letters of introduction and maps. He also arranged all the visas, flights and boats and accommodation, and then had to arrange them all over again when it turned out that I hadn’t quite finished the novels yet.
At last they were done. I left my house in the hands of the builders, who claimed they only had three more weeks’ work to do, and set off to fulfil my one last commitment – an author tour of Australia. I’m always very sympathetic when I hear people complaining that all they ever get on television or radio chat shows is authors honking on about their latest book. It does, on the other hand, get us out of the house and spare our families the trial of hearing us honking on about our latest book.
Finally that, too, was over and we could start looking for giant lizards.
We met up in a hotel room in Melbourne and examined our array of expeditionary equipment. ‘We’ were Mark, myself and Gaynor Shutte, a radio producer who was going to be recording our exploits for the BBC. Our equipment was a vast array of cameras, tape recorders, tents, sleeping bags, medical supplies, mosquito coils, unidentifiable things made of canvas and nylon with metal eyelets and plastic hooks, cagoules, boots, penknives, torches and a cricket bat.