Critter Encounters Part 1

Friday, April 11, 2008

One of the advantages to living somewhere instead of just passing through is you have a much greater ability to see animals. They have no trouble hiding from you for a day, a week, or even a month. Yet as those months pile up it gets harder and harder to miss seeing your cohabitants.

They range from the mundane - a pet baboon on a chain - to the fascinating - ants that create a living tunnel with the soldiers' bodies to protect streams of workers within. Those soldiers are tiny, but as my colleague found out, they bite hard enough to draw blood.

Duuduu

Ant lions, from what I thought I knew about them, are both disappointing and phenomenal. They're a lot smaller than their name suggests. I first saw one when two bees were rolling around in a trap. I thought they were killing each other, but my homologue commented that one was so nice as to try to save the other. That piqued my interest, and I had to get closer to the action. One died in the trap, the other got away. I've experimented by dropping ants into the traps and rescuing them after about a minute.

I once managed to dig up an ant lion and toss it in a fellow lion's trap. The latter tried to eat the former, but in the end they both scuttled away and abandoned that trap. After I finish playing with them, they fix up their traps, flinging sand around until once more they're laying patiently at the apex of a slippery, inverted cone.

Koson

Just over a month ago I was collecting cow manure to fertilize a garden bed. It was normal agroforestry work; I rip chunks of manure up from the giant heap, smash them into small pieces, toss them into a bucket, and bike them back to the garden bed. I used to bring along my daba - a hoe-like tool - to chop up the pieces, but it kept falling apart and then off my bike. It was a bigger headache than help. Since abandoning it, I kick chunks loose, or else dive into the hardened mass with both hands to rip off larger chunks.

This fine day, I ripped up a particularly well-sized chunk and luckily staggered back to catch my balance as it came loose. A red scorpion scuttled from the new top of the chunk and into a hole on its side. My thirst for knowledge ever present, I flagged down a passing Guinean to ask him what the local name for scorpion is (koSON). His eyes widened nicely, but then he decided I should play with it. He broke off the stinger with a stick and started tossing it from hand to hand. I refused to touch it, and he finally disposed of it in the bush.

The entire day's lesson came to nothing for me. Several weeks later found me moving bricks from a pile in front of my hut into my enclosed backyard where I'm building a tower to smoke meat. As I hoisted the last few bricks, the kids who were helping me shouted "Koson!" By the time I remembered what that meant, it was too late, and it had stung me on the thumb.

I danced around hollering and cursing poisonous animals to the concerned amusement of the usual crowd of curious Guineans. Then I found the scorpion, obliterated it with a broken brick, and dug out my health manual. The wonderful advice therein said if I wasn't allergic, I wouldn't die. It recommended Aspirin and a papaya compress to denature the scorpion's toxin. Perhaps the papaya would have worked if I'd been able to either inject it or ask the scorpion to sting me through a layer of papaya, because I didn't feel any better after using it. The Guineans wanted me to put gasoline on it, but I decided one type of injury was enough for the moment. I did consent to a toothpaste poultice so they would feel helpful. I don't mind saying the toothpaste did not help.

While the pain was still fresh, I was able to think clearly enough to make an awful video (see post Videos 2) that does no justice to the eventual swelling of my hand, and shows industrious ants already carting off the remnants of the smear the scorpion had become. I thereafter devoured my remaining comfort food - I knew I was saving it for something good - and opened up a letter my mother had packed away for me before I ever even left the States.

Apparently I was supposed to have opened it on my second day in country, but whatever, I appreciated it a lot more while searching for something to take my mind off the pain.

I sang with my iPod, I tried to read a comfort book, then I gave up, sprawled on my bed, and tried to pretend I didn't have a right arm. I was up until three or four a.m. in intense pain, which spread through my shoulder and very slowly receded. Twenty-four hours later, the pain was confined to my thumb and I was able to pretend I was interested in work again.

Lee (those es sound like the e in egg, not like the jeans)

Muslims don't eat pork, but all the hunters here kill warthogs left and right. Being both numerous and a terror in every farmer's fields, they really can't expect much else.

After much searching, I finally was able to contact a hunter who had killed one and was willing to take me to it. It was straight out of The Lion King, except it weighed easily 200 pounds, had ticks, and didn't sing. Before we even began to butcher it, we were distracted by a nearby fire from some guys who were harvesting honey. They were chopping away at a tree, sticking smoking sticks into the hole, and withdrawing dripping chunks of honey comb. Sometimes they even pulled out chunks of brood comb (full of larvae, not honey). We watched them until they finished, they gave us some bee-covered honeycomb, and then they put out the fire and left us with our hog.

It took over two hours to cut up the hog and get it home. Then it took over two more hours to skin and butcher it. I stuck half of it into brine and set the other half aside for the only other non-Muslim in town. Unfortunately, what I learned after the fact, is that it's way too hot here to even think about curing ham in brine in Haute Guinea and all my meat, with the exception of some excellent ribs Nyari and I enjoyed the night I butchered it, rotted.

Since then, I have continued construction of the aforementioned smoking tower. I haven't yet gotten another hunter to bring me a warthog, but I did make a valiant effort to chase down four warthogs I saw while riding my bike last week. It's just as well that my water bottle fell, because my visions of jumping onto it like a rodeo-style calf tying competition probably wouldn't have ended well.