The New Noah Read Online Free PDF Page A

away, and at that moment two things happened.
    First, the light, which no one had remembered to pump up in the excitement, went out; secondly, one of the shoes which I had borrowed off my friend, and which were too large for me, came off. So
there was I, standing at the bottom of a ten-foot deep pit, with no light and no shoe on one foot, surrounded by seven or eight deadly and extremely irritated Gaboon vipers. I have never been more
frightened. I had to wait in the dark, without daring to move, while my friends hauled the lamp out, pumped it up, relit it and lowered it into the pit again. Then I could see to retrieve my
shoe.
    With plenty of light and both shoes on, I felt much braver, and set about the task of catching the vipers. This was really simple enough. I had a forked stick in my hand, and with this I
approached each reptile, pinned it down with the fork and then picked it up by the back of the neck and put it into my snake bag. What I had to watch out for was that while I was busy catching one
snake, another might wriggle round behind me and I might step back on it. However, it all passed off without accident, and at the end of half an hour I had caught eight of the baby Gaboon
vipers.
    I thought that was quite enough to be going on with, and so my friends hauled me out of the pit. I decided, after that night, that collecting was only as dangerous as your own stupidity allowed
it to be, no more and no less.

In which Puff and Blow take over
    When the base camp was finished, it looked rather as though a circus had moved into the forest, and it looked even more like a circus when the camp had started filling up with
specimens we had captured. Along one side of the marquee was a line of cages in which I kept all the smaller animals, a great variety of creatures that ranged from mice to mongooses.
    The first cage in the row belonged to a couple of baby red river hogs which I had called Puff and Blow, and they were the most charming pair of babies imaginable. A full-grown red river hog is
about the most colourful and handsome of the pig family. Its fur is a rich orange-red colour and along its back and neck is a mane of pure white fur; on the tips of its long, pointed ears are two
dangling tufts of white hair. Puff and Blow, however, like all baby piglets, were striped; they were a dark chocolate brown, and their stripes were a light buttercup yellow, running from nose to
tail. This made them look like fat little wasps, as they trotted round their pen.
    Puff was the first one to arrive at the camp. He was brought in one morning, sitting rather sadly in a wicker basket balanced on the head of a native hunter. He had been captured in the forest,
and I soon discovered the reason for his doleful appearance was that he had eaten nothing for two days, a thing that was enough to make any self-respecting pig look down in the snout. The hunter
who had caught him had tried to feed him on bananas but Puff was far too young for that sort of food. What he wanted was milk, and plenty of it. So, as soon as I had paid for him, I mixed a big
bottleful of warm milk with sugar, and taking Puff on to my knees, I tried to make him drink. He was about the size of a pekinese, with very small hooves and a pair of sharp little tusks as well,
as I soon found out to my cost.
    Of course, he had never seen a feeding bottle before, and treated it with the gravest suspicion from the start. When I lifted him on to my knees and tried to put the rubber into his mouth, he
decided that this was some special kind of torture I had invented for him. He screamed and squealed, kicking me with his sharp little hooves and trying to stab me with his little tusks. After the
struggle between us had lasted for about five minutes, both Puff and I looked as though we had been bathed in milk, but not a single drop of it had gone down his throat.
    I filled another bottle and again grasped the squealing pig firmly between my knees, wedged his mouth open