Animals: African Treasure

The standard African game-hunting expedition consists of several big, fearless men looking for lions and buffalo, and a battalion of black “boys” who wear their shirttails hanging outside and call their employers bwana. Ivan Sanderson, a young zoologist, broke all the rules when he went game hunting in Africa in 1932. At Cambridge he had decided it was necessary for anthropologists to know more about the neglected, obscure little animals whose places in evolution were uncertain and whose capture would have scientific rather than sporting importance. To help him collect them, he again broke the rules by selecting men who were not the usual great athletes and huntsmen, but barflies whose long hours in smoky night clubs, reasoned Zoologist Sanderson, had endowed them with the endurance required for life on the Dark Continent.

With two men of this mettle, Mr. Sanderson relates in a highly readable book published this week,* he set off for a section of West Africa called Mamfe. He chose it because while it was unsanitary, and disease-ridden, it was nevertheless teeming with the beasts he wanted. Hundreds of specimens collected by the Sanderson expedition had never been bagged before. One of the first animals he encountered was a horrible, smelly little creature named the shrew. It looks like a rat with a long snout and eats anything from snakes to other shrews. Other of Zoologist Sanderson’s beasts were no less odd. He captured several varieties of frogs that changed color and one that grew hair. He got into a fight with a herd of drills, which are a kind of baboon, and they threw rocks at each other until he scared them off with a series of Rugby calls.

What makes Ivan Sanderson’s account of his amiable expedition heart-warming is the fact that his sympathy toward animals is as rich as his eye for observed detail is acute and his prose style is limpid. Sample: ”Above me rose the immensity of the primeval forest, filtering the golden sunlight, as it has done since the dawn of terrestrial life. In the bowels of this woody giant scampered the trembling feet of little rats, furry squirrels, countless birds, and scaly lizards.

“So much I saw lying there. Deomys, a lanky rat with hind legs like springs, came bounding past in pairs, their sleek orange fur glistening in the half-light, their white bellies immaculate as snow. Bundles of purplish fur bobbed up and down amongst the water weeds, every now and then appearing on open patches of mud and sand, balanced on their pale, stilt-like supports and long, naked tails. A marsh rat (Malacomys) has much to do as darkness falls, searching out likely feeding grounds, cleaning his dense woolly coat, preening his immense whiskers, and apparently fraternizing with his kind.

“Never, until I watched this kaleidoscope of little life, did I realize how much rats cooperate and gossip.”

For the past year Mr. Sanderson has been doing in Haiti much the same thing he did in Africa. Last week he dazed his Manhattan agents with a cable announcing he was arriving with a broken nose and two dragons.

*ANIMAL TREASURE—Viking ($3). The September Book-of-the-Month-Club selection.