Cameroon

An imperfect detail

Dervla Murphy

The success of an expedition depends mainly upon the perfection of the details where animals are employed for transport.

Francis Galion (1872) Thudding hooves woke me at 1.30 a.m. Egbert passed so close to our sleeping-bags that his panic-stricken snorting was audible — and infectious. Simultaneously I heard the eerie wailing and grunting of a family of agitated bush-pigs (parents and four young) whom we had earlier observed settling down for the night in a patch of nearby forest. Scrambling out of my sleeping-bag, I saw several tree-tops mov- ing irregularly against the starry sky; the local colobus monkey colony had also been alarmed.

My daughter Rachel failed to react when I exclaimed, 'Something's wrong! Egbert's broken his tether!' Eighteen-year-olds sleep soundly, especially after a 23-mile walk. So I kicked her awake just as Egbert, frightened by the bush-pigs' aggressive pandemonium, swung around and again galloped past us, going towards his tether- ing site. Before following him we had to put on our boots: an unbreakable rule, whatever the crisis. During this brief delay the bush-pigs maintained their cacopho- nous protest and we could hear no Egbert- noises.

Our camp was on a level, grassy moun- tain ledge, some 200 yards long and fifty yards wide. Egbert had been tethered to a solitary sapling where the grazing was best. As quickly as was prudent by starlight, we approached the edge of the ledge. A few days previously, in the last village on our route, a crafty merchant had sold us two apparently new but in fact dud torch batteries. Already one had expired and the other was producing only a faint glimmer. Slowly walking along the edge, we shone this inadequate light over the very rough, very steep slope beneath us. Suddenly it picked out two eyes. 'There he is!' said Rachel. But at once the eyes vanished without any of the sounds one would expect if a horse were moving away. We conferred. Beyond our campsite the terrain was dramatically chaotic for many miles around. We had no idea where the nearest human habitation might be and the nearest hospital was hundreds of miles away. Common sense therefore suggested that we should not risk a broken leg or ankle; to have left that ledge by starlight, in pursuit of a dark bay horse, would have been to invite an even greater disaster than the loss of Egbert.

Returning to our sleeping-bags — the night was so fine we hadn't bothered to put up the tent — we noted that Egbert had bolted with wholly uncharacteristic force, breaking the sapling and taking with him 20 yards of rope.

I lay looking up at the stars and hoping — with the sort of desperate intensity which feels like a physical effort — that the dawn would reveal Egbert placidly grazing nearby. This was not an unreasonable hope. We had then been trekking together, in sometimes testing circumstances, for exactly five weeks and had established an entirely satisfactory relationship based on mutual trust. After the first week or so Egbert had been left untethered at night unless we were within (his) reach of crops. He would not have been tethered to that sapling but for his addiction to donkey mares. He was of course a stallion — the Fulbe never geld their horses — and in Rachel's view a bit kinky; while taking only a mild interest in mares of his own sort, however elegant, he was at once turned on by even a distant glimpse of a donkey mare. And during that fateful afternoon of 29 April we had passed a small herd of donkeys, including two winsome mares. . . .

By 5.20 a.m., when the stars began to fade and the blackness became grey, I was expectantly patrolling the edge of the ledge. Cameroon's near-equatorial dawns come swiftly and as the light strengthened my hope ebbed. Egbert's tendency, when left untethered, was to move closer and closer to our camp during the night. But now he was nowhere to be seen. On the previous day we had been exhilarated by the challenging magnificence of this deso- late region — by its deep forested ravines, its isolated mountains of smooth sheer silver rock, its flat expanses of grassland across which bounded tiny russet deer, its long, steep, scrubby ridges from which many baboon surveyed us with their pecul- iar brand of supercilious curiosity, its twisting narrow valleys where clear cool streams were overhung by mighty, ancient trees, its immense cliffs (directly above our campsite) where two jackals were glimpsed at dusk amidst a scattering of massive boulders: As we lit our fire that evening I remarked to Rachel, 'This must be the very bestest campsite in Cameroon!' Twelve hours later I was remarking to myself,

TRAVEL

`This must be the very worstest place in the world to lose a horse!' Anxiety kills the appetite and we didn't even think of breakfasting before beginning our search by returning to the donkey herd.

If I were asked to specify my unhappiest experience, in quarter of a century's travelling, I would have to say `Egbert's loss'. It was a disaster on two levels, practical and emotional. How were we ever to get back to a village and food without an animal to carry our gear? Would we have to abandon much of it? If so, how were we to survive for the remain- ing six weeks of our trek? To me, however, those questions, though disturbing, were secondary. From the moment of our first meeting Egbert had endeared himself to me in a special way and as time passed I came to love him more than any other equine travelling-companion; which is saying a great deal, for on three continents I have been lucky with my pack-animals. Thus it was the loss of Egbert as a friend, rather than as a convenience, that truly devastated me. I knew my reaction was absurd; at the end of the trek we would have to part from him. But I was con- ditioned to that — and he would then be left (one hoped) in comfortable circum- stances with a kind owner. Losing him half-way through our trek was another sort of experience. And I was haunted by the implications of those 20 yards of rope. If we didn't find him, if the rope had ens- nared him. . . . All that day the vision of Egbert dying slowly of thirst gave me superhuman energy.

I needed it, as we searched high and low, non-stop, for the next 12 hours. From the donkey herd, whose female complement showed no signs of having been wooed by Egbert, we crossed a brutally steep grassy mountain in hopes of finding a compound where we might be able to enlist extra searchers (offering a substantial reward) and buy some milk. I knew a compound existed, somewhere in that direction, be- cause during the small hours I had heard cocks crowing. But when at last we found it — three tiny thatched huts, crouching near the wind-swept brink of an 8,000-foot ledge — the two women and innumerable children were too scared of us even to attempt to communicate in sign-language. They spoke only Fulbe and unfortunately their menfolk were away. This further complicated our encounter because, like most Cameroonians, they mistook me for a man, being unable to conceive of two women travelling unescorted. And we had long since learned that nicely brought up Fulbe women do not talk to strange men (or indeed any men) in their fathers'/ husbands' absence.

A few hours later Rachel was leading on a narrow dusty path around the edge of a tree-filled chasm. Abruptly she stopped, staring at the ground. `Some puss!' she noted laconically. Apart from their size, the leopard pug-marks were identical to those muddy paw-marks left by our own cats on clean pillow-slips. We followed them for some 20 yards: then they dis- appeared. To stiffen my upper lip I recal- led that leopards don't attack horses where fast-food dishes are abundant — baboon, antelope, bush-pig. `But,' Rachel pointed out, `a horse wouldn't know that. And I don't think those eyes we saw were Egbert's.'

By sunset we were physically and emotionally exhausted, though not yet despairing. More — much more — ground remained to be covered next day. And at least we hadn't found a corpse in any of the area's obvious death-traps.

During the following afternoon there were unexpected developments. A Knight in Shining Armour (i.e., a young man who spoke minimal French) rode to our rescue and the Egbert saga began to take on the character of an ingenious detective story. Hourly the plot thickened. Suspects multi- plied, motives were obscure and contradic- tory. Two village chiefs — a Goodie and a Baddie — became peripherally (or was it deeply?) involved. Hoofprints were found in inexplicable places. Letters were labor- iously written on our behalf in Arabic script. Eventually we left the scene of the crime, assisted by a donkey stallion of extraordinary intelligence — more intelli- gence than any horse (even Egbert) could ever claim. At that stage we were con- vinced (though lacking hard evidence) that our friend was alive and well — that he had, in fact, been horsenapped.

Four weeks later we were summoned back to the area by a letter, in French, from a Banyo vet whose practice included part of the Mba Range. 'Your horse has been found,' he informed us, `and the finder will give him to you on payment of 20,000 francs.' (That is, 400 French francs.) Self-respect compels me to draw a veil over my reunion with Egbert; travellers are supposed to be made of stern stuff. . . .

From the village of our reunion, high in the mountains, we did a forced march (87 miles in three days) to the little town of Mayo Dade where we had made three good friends: Jaqueline (a Dutch woman), John (her Irish husband) and a young Hausa named Yaya who loves horses. Our 90-day visa had almost expired and could not be renewed — hence the forced march. There was no time to find a suitably kind buyer for Egbert so we left him with our friends; the arrangement was that they would eventually sell him to the sort of person who deserved to own him. He had cost us £250 but we expected to retrieve no more than £50 — a normal disparity between `black price' and 'white price'.

In compensation for all we endured in the Mba Range, Egbert's story has a very happy ending. The most significant of our 1987 Christmas cards — the one that really made our Festive Season joyous — was a large photograph of Egbert taken by John in mid-November. He looked glossy and contented — almost complacent. A beam- ing Yaya and his two-year-old son Ibrahim were in the saddle and Jaqueline's letter reported:

As you can see, Egbert is still part of the family! Not so long after you left, Yaya fell in love with him and was praising his qualities and good-natured character every minute. So, guessing you would agree with me, I decided not to sell him but to leave him in Yaya's possession.