Swiss army knives – his own Victorinox clipped safely to his belt
Binoculars
Insect repellent
Snake bite kits
First aid kits
Head torches
Micro cameras
Macro lenses
Fold-up microscopes
Mosquito nets
Frog-catching tubes
Notebooks and pencils stuffed into every available pocket
An iPad. “You never know – there might be wireless reception,” his father had said. Fat chance of that when you couldn’t even get radio signals.
And a solar battery charger for the iPad. “Just in case!” Fat chance of that either as there wasn’t any sun.
And not forgetting his father’s prize possession – the newly acquired Nikon D3X with its sound recording device and its Garmin eTrex unit for tracking the GPS coordinates of each photograph.
Malingu walked ahead swishing a lethal machete from side to side to clear a path. But it didn’t make much difference. Behind them, the forest sprung back as quickly and thickly as before, leaving no trail or trace of where they’d walked.
Trickles of sweat ran down Ollie’s neck and soaked into his sodden shirt. He peered up through the green gloom. High above the snarl of leaves and branches, the sun had given up any chance of reaching the ground. Below the tangled mesh it was as murky and dank as an old haunted house.
It felt like being inside a body that panted and breathed with a thousand plants and creatures. Curls of ferns shot up like green toothpaste squeezed out of a giant tube. Clusters of white flowers looped and trailed and choked the air with heavy perfume. Leaves brushed his face like wet rags. Coils of slippery roots tripped him up. The ground was squelchy with leaf mould and rotting roots and pools of dark water which could be hiding anything – even a Nile crocodile. And the air was full of noises, eerie sounds that weren’t human. Insects whining. Creatures tapping and tinkering as loudly as in a blacksmith’s yard.
Everything about the forest seemed designed to confuse, muddle and mislead him.
A giant, turquoise chameleon was the size of a rat.
Slimy land-snails were bigger than his fist.
Birds with beaks the colour of tropical sea.
Geckoes looking like leaves.
Leaves looking like geckoes.
Mammoth lunar moths with wings emblazoned with shapes like huge eyes.
Furry moths the size of pigeons, flapping against his face.
Caterpillars doing fast loops, shooting off poisonous hairs.
Snakes looking like branches.
Branches looking like snakes.
Snakes! Oh no! Before he left Tooting in London, he’d searched on Google for ‘Snakes of Madagascar’. There were more than eighty species – eighty! None of which were overtly dangerous to humans.
Overtly! What was “overtly” supposed to mean?
The island has no adders, no cobras, no mambas, pythons or vipers. Only boas and lesser snakes.
Only boas. Was that supposed to be reassuring?
All venomous snakes of Madagascar are back-fanged which means they have to get a real grip on you to be able to inject the venom which will cause swelling and possibly paralysis.
Paralysis! Great!
And then there is the harmless tree snake that drops tail first from trees while stiffening its body like a spear.
Harmless? A snake that falls down like a spear ready to stab you – harmless?
And in the sea there are two non-aggressive but highly poisonous sea snakes.
Highly poisonous but non-aggressive? And it went on:
Which means you have very little to fear when walking through the bush of Madagascar.
Hah! Little to fear? And as an afterthought the article had said:
It’s remarkable to find boas in Madagascar, seeing that the closest relatives live so far away in the forests of the Amazon.
He didn’t care. A boa was a boa – whether it lived in the Amazon or Madagascar. It was still a constrictor. And constrictors strangled their prey.
As if to prove it, under the article was a picture of a man who’d been swallowed in the Amazon. The gross, hugely swollen boa had been cut open. The man’s head and half his body were still inside the snake while his bottom half protruded through the slit. There wasn’t even a rip in his shorts and his boots were still on the end of his legs. But the man was dead. Dead as can be.
Ollie felt something against his arm. Two white, tube-like, squishy things were crawling and looping over his skin.
He flicked at them but one had already attached itself to him. “What are these?”
“Leeches. You’ll get used to them.”
“Yrggh!” he shuddered and swiped the other one away before it could take hold.
His father laughed. “It’s a good sign, Ollie. It shows there are warm-blooded creatures in the forest. Zinzi’s mum will be happy. She’s looking for lemurs. If there are no blood suckers, there are no warm-blooded mammals.”
He tripped across a root and reached out to steady himself on a branch. There was something squelchy under his hand. He pulled back and found a bright green-and-orange creature staring back at him – a tiny, tailless, horned dragon-creature. Frog? Chameleon? Gecko? He wasn’t sure.
His father peered over his shoulder. “Have you ever seen such a colour? It’s a green climbing mantella. Mantella laevigata.”
But Ollie was unimpressed. Even if frogs were quite startling with their jewel colours as toxic as their poisons, blowing and ballooning as they breathed, making tink tink tink sounds like elfin silversmiths beating against anvils, he still didn’t care.
The frog perched for a moment on the tip of his father’s finger, then leapt away – as luminous green as a highlighter pen. “That little fellow is not what I’m after. We won’t find the golden mantella as easily as this. It’s too endangered.” He glanced up from his binoculars. There was a leech attached to his eyeball.
“Dad! Quick! Get the tweezers. You’re about to lose your eyeball to a leech! It must’ve been on the lens of your binoculars.”
Malingu shrugged. “Tweezers are hopeless. If you try to pull, the head will stay behind and cause an infection. You have to rinse it out.”
“Don’t worry. I’m used to this.” His father grabbed a salt solution from the first aid kit and began rinsing his eye. “Done this before.”
Finally the leech let go and fell out, fat, squashy and sluggish, onto his cheek.
Now he knew why his friends back in London hadn’t been encouraging when he told them he was going to Madagascar.
“What? The movie?”
“No. The country!”
“You’ll get eaten by a crocodile.”
“Or sucked in by a meat-eating plant.”
“Or die of malaria.”
No one had mentioned leeches but