Great-aunt Hilda was the sort of
woman who had trouble negotiating carpets without tripping over in flurry of
cashmere scarves, high heels, and a scream that no deranged wolfhound could
hope to aspire.
I
had gone to live with her as an orphan, after my parents had died tragically in
one of those page nine accidents of the New York Times, of a collision with a
revolving door and the family Dalmatian. The dog was rescued by the ASPCA, but
as the Waldorf-Astoria could not afford to have them as a permanent fixture in
their lobby, my parents were put down. Therefore, it was decided by powers more
incomprehensible than astrophysics, I was to lodge with my great-aunt Hilda.
When I first met her, I noticed
she was a large woman, in that antarctic mammal sense of lying about rocky
beaches and barking at the waves.
She took one look at me.
“You’ll have to go.”
“But I just got here?” I
protested.
“Accidents happen in even the
best-regulated families, but it is preferred that nephews not happen at all, so
I see no reason for your existing in the first place. I am a respectable woman,
whereas you are a formative child, which are the worst kind. Therefore I am
sending you to your Uncle Tobias in India who is also in the formative state.
Well, I think he is in India, or was it Africa? One of the two, and regardless
of the continent, you have to go.”
“But grand-aunt,” I attempted
futilely.
“Don’t grand-aunt me,” she wagged
a finger that was more bone than flesh, “I haven’t seen such unreasonable
behaviour since the time young Teddy Roosevelt tried to wash a bear skin in my
bath.”
“Please,” I begged.
She looked at me as if I was some
vague antediluvian creature that forgotten how to swim. “Never fight fair with
a great-aunt, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.”
So it was, that without even
unpacking my Boys Own Adventures, I was whisked off to my own adventure with an
uncle I had never heard of, to a land responsible for curried chicken, and an
art’s scene more uncertain than the Hoboken amateur drama hour.
Uncle Tobias was one of those
fabulous relics of the English Raj that refused to accept the end of Empire,
and constantly referred to those times as if they were yesterday. If it weren’t
for the fact he was fabulously wealthy, and had taken the art of bribery to
such a high level of sophistication that it made modern economics seem
positively quaint, he would have been thrown out of sub-continent long ago.
He met me at the train station,
for I had arrived on one of those slow lumbering steam engines, that just like
Uncle Tobias could remember be driven by Lady Edwina Mountbatten. The steam
escaped with the dying shriek of an elephant and the engine simply fell apart
on the track. Through the fog strode a tall man carrying, appropriately enough,
a gun with a barrel so wide you could have fit a plate down it. He had the
martial bearing of someone who knew how to give orders but not know how to take
them, in much the same way the Charge of the Light Brigade is still famous.
“We are going hunting,” he said
emphatically.
“But I just got here?” I whined.
“None of that, here is your gun.”
I fell over.
“Ah,” he said, “I imagined you
would be taller.”
“I am only seven.”
“That’s no excuse for not being
able to shoot a gazelle at one hundred yards.”
“The gun weighs more than I do.”
“It’s not size that matters,” he
fixed with me with eyes so blue I thought they were sapphires, “it’s the speed
of the bullet.”
Knowing less of ballistics than I
did of steam locomotion, I was inclined to believe him.
“Old man,” he lifted me up, “we
are going on safari.”
Instantly I cheered up. It was one
thing to lose your parents in a bizarre accident at the Waldorf-Astoria and be
thrown to the other side of the world, but it is a completely different thing
to go hunting with an insane uncle in the middle of an Indian jungle.
“What are we shooting? Tigers?
Elephants? Water Buffalo?” letting my imagination run away with me.
“Rats,” he said simply and I
thought he was swearing.
Because of bans on the
international trafficking in endangered animals, Uncle Tobias had been forced
to shoot progressively smaller and smaller game, and was ultimately reduced to
firing off the odd shot at cane rats. These rats however were large, so large,
that at first I thought they were small dogs, admittedly dogs that could run up
trees, leap through the air and viscously try to bite your lips and nose, but
nevertheless they looked to me like very angry Pomeranians.
“Shoot between the eyes, old man!”
Uncle Tobias encouraged me, as I flew back through the air from the recoil of
the shotgun. “It’s all to do with slowly following the beast with the sight and
squeezing the trigger, like so.”
I fired off another shot and
almost did a backwards somersault.
“By George!” Uncle Tobias
shrieked, “You bagged one.”
I got up with some surprise as I
had been merely attempting to lift the barrel; actually shooting a rat was
positively amazing. This, however, was not the case, as I found one of the
beaters was holding his behind, shrieking in pain, and I soon discovered I had
shot the poor fellow in the posterior.
“Ah, sorry about that,” I
struggled lamely, as the poor man gave me a look of utmost disgust.
“None of that, my boy,” Uncle
Tobias explained as he tapped his nose and grinned, “they get paid for this,
danger money, hush-hush, you know.”
Several hours later with a bagful
of splattered rats and half a dozen weeping beaters, we arrived back at the
hotel. This hotel turned out to be one half of a deserted temple where Uncle
Tobias was living as a supplicant.
“The thing you have to watch out
for here, my boy, are the monkeys,” he smoked a pipe, “and these aren’t just
are any monkeys. No, these chaps are your temple-shrieking monkeys. Whatever
you do, don’t show any fear, or they’ll be on your in a flash.”
Almost instantly, monkeys covered
me and began picking through my hair, looking for flecks of salt or whatever
the little beasts look for in foreign hairstyles. I froze and stared face to
face with a wild eye monkey who, if he so disposed to it, was large enough to
tear me to pieces.
“Do not show fear,” Uncle Tobias
repeated. “Remember, the little blighters live by the Law of the Jungle.”
“What’s the Law of the Jungle?” I
whispered.
“Bite or be bitten,” he said.
At that moment, the Law of the
Jungle expressed itself in no uncertain terms, as the lord of the temple bit me
on the nose and raced up one of the columns.
“Oh dear,” Uncle Tobias tutted, as
he held the finest Thomas Ferguson’s Irish linen handkerchief to the small
gusher on my nose. “Lucky he didn’t go for the eyes, you wouldn’t believe how
hard it is to get a used retina out here.”
I was inconsolable, as my nose was
the only thing left I had of my parents, and to lose that was to forgo my
birthright. The Monro clan is blessed with a particularly large species of
Scottish proboscis, the sort that gave a fellow a sense of nobility or first
place in a foot race. It was not, if one cared, the sort of thing one lost to a
belligerent temple ape.
“Tomorrow, we go hunting,” said
Uncle Tobias as he promptly forgot about the nose, “this time – big game.”
“More rats?”
“Much, much bigger,” he fixed me
once more with those glittering sapphires he had for eyes.
I thought of all the geography
lessons I had been forced to sit through.
“Indian Wolf, Bengal Fox,
Macaques, Nilgai, Gaur, or the Dhole?” I rattled off with an alacrity that
surprised me.
“Spiders!” he grinned as his
picked up the temple leavings.
“How big can they be?”
It was too late, as my Uncle had
turned his attention to bowl of cinnamon rice he had been given by the local villagers.
It was not that the villagers looked upon him with any reverence; rather it was
a bribe to make sure he never went hunting near their huts out of Monsoon
season.
The spiders turned out to be huge.
As the Idiops bombayensis was a trapdoor spider so large it could
comfortably compete with a corgi when it came to playing fetch. Its normal prey
was, not surprisingly, the very same rats we had been hunting the day before.
It achieved this by laying grains of rice outside its webbed trap door, leaping
out and driving two inch fangs into the pelts before dragging them squealing
back into its den. How evolution had conspired to create such an evil and
twisted malarthropodism was yet another reason for me to believe in intelligent
design.
“You’ll need one of these,” Uncle
Tobias gave me a trident spear with forks so sharp they sliced the air.
“No guns?” I looked worriedly at
my new toy.
“Guns?” Uncle Tobias grinned,
“Great Scott no, there would be no trophies if we used guns. No, tridents are
the way to go my boy, we pin the beasts to the ground and pull out their
fangs.”
“Are they poisonous?”
“Only in the sense they carry a
neurotoxin, but not to worry, I’ve brought along a bottle of gin. Juniper does
wonders for spider bite, assuming of course the bite isn’t too deep.”
“Of course,” I nodded my head
vigorously and wondered how thin the skin at my age was meant to be. “What are
we looking for?”
“They live in underground burrows
with many exits,” Uncle Tobias poked about the bamboo forest excitedly, “you
never know where they are going leap at you from.”
“Leap?”
“Great Scott yes, the little
beasties are known to leap twenty feet.”
I coughed compulsively. “I may
have a chill.” I said.
“Nonsense,” said my Uncle hefting
his spear, “the monsoon doesn’t start for two weeks, too early to get
tuberculosis. Now the trick is to remember the second Law of the Jungle.”
“The second?” I asked with no
little trepidation. “There’s a second?”
“Always be sure where you place
your feet,” he threw the spear just for effect.
At that moment, my tiny
seven-year-old foot disappeared into the ground, as it discovered the main
entrance of an Idiops bombayensis trapdoor.
“Well done,” Uncle Tobias cried
retrieving his spear, “You’ve discovered the main door, now look for the other
exits, they will be popping up any moment now.”
“They?” I looked around in terror.
“Colony spiders, most unusual.”
I looked down at my foot and
wondered about the thickness of the sole, I could have sworn something was
scratching at it, when my Uncle yelled at me.
“Duck!”
I fell to the dirt, as a trident
flashed past my face and connected with what can only be described as eight
hairy legs surmounted by two enormous fangs and a bulbous body that was quite
possibly the size of my head.
“Excellent!” Uncle Tobias leapt
over me and pinned the beast to the ground. It thrashed about with a vigor that
would have done justice to a Bengal tiger. Then he pulled its fangs with a pair
of pliers. “Duck!”
Again the trident sliced the atoms
away from my face and impaled an even bigger spider into the side of a fig
tree. I felt a dull jab under my knee and looked down to discover what was for
all the world a Chihuahua with eight legs grinding its fangs into my leg.
“Uncle?” I queried as the world
began to go black.
“Blast! Man down!” Uncle Tobias
leapt over with a flask. With this he drank half a quart of gin and poured a
capful over my knee as I sank to the ground. “Well done my boy, you’ve bagged
your first head!”
I woke up the next day with the
vision of a dozen giant dead spiders hanging from the ceiling and my uncle
grinning like a Macaque.
“You’re alive! Well done, today we
hunt for Bascanichthys deraniyagalai, the deadly snake eels of the
sub-continent, and you thought the spiders were poisonous, wait till you get
bitten by one of these beauties.”
I realized I had to escape and any
attempt at civility was guaranteed a trip to the morgue. “Uncle,” I wiped the
very real sweat from my brow, “I think I may sit this one out for a couple of
weeks.”
“Nonsense, old man, once the monsoon
arrives we won’t have a chance of bagging the little blighters,” he pointed up
at the ceiling of the temple, where I suddenly noticed row after row of stuffed
insects, tiny marsupials and most paradoxically of all a life raft from the
Titanic. “Behold the work of a lifetime, every species of mammal and road side
kill you can imagine. Think old man, one day you too can have a trophy room
just like this.”
“I think I may be dying,” I
attempted and held up a gangrenous knee. “Honestly.”
Nothing worked, as Uncle Tobias
pulled down the mounted head of a sparrow. “Nonsense, that the smallest case of
gangrene I seen, since back in 43’ when the Japs tried to cut my leg off in
Burma. You want to have a head mounted as splendidly as this, don’t you?”
“Could I perhaps, go hunting next
week?” I whimpered and offered a bribe of marshmallows. “After all, this way
there will be more for you.”
“You’re learning fast,” he winked
as he took the bribe, “very well, we will go hunting after lunch. You may clean
the weapons while I’m down at the village arranging a suttee.”
He
handed me an oily rag, a copy of Guns and Extinction then exited with all the
poise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt running away after Eleanor discovered him
with the scullery maid. Seizing the opportunity, I also exited via the second
door, caught the last train to Bombay and the next plane to JFK. On the second
day I surprised great-aunt Hilda with a kiss and a bunch of limp blue lotuses.
She took one look at me, squinted
her eyes and said: “You’ll have to go.”
“But I just got back?” I
protested.
You are forgetting the Third Law of the Jungle,” raising an
eyebrow that could slice infinitives.
“Third?”
“Survival of the Fittest,” she
explained sternly and pointed at the door, “Nephews fit into the jungle, aunts
fit into drawing-rooms, that is the way it has always been and that is the way
it shall remain.”
“But why?”
“Nephews fit more easily into the jungle because they fit more
easily into carnivores. As I see it, that’s a win-win situation, now be off
with you.”
Copyright reserved by Jim O’Brien ©
