MY WILD YOUTHFUL ADVENTURES BY SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH
WE’D BEEN warned against the Gran Chaco. Stretching hundreds of miles to the foothills of the Andes, it’s an arid wilderness that turns during the winter months into a gigantic, mosquito-ridden swamp. Everyone in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, had something to tell us about it. Most described hideous hardships, others gave us lists of essential equipment, others urged us to avoid it at all costs.
But despite all this my cameraman colleague Charles and I had made up our minds to spend the final days of our trip to South America exploring its harsh terrain. It was there we hoped to find the animal we most wanted to see and film: the giant armadillo or, as it’s known locally, the tatu carreta, or cart-sized armadillo.
In the middle of our preparations we bumped into Sandy, our guide and interpreter, in a bar in the centre of Asuncion. He usually worked in the city’s tourist office, but he was today obviously preparing himself to withstand weeks of drought in the Chaco.
‘By the way,’ he said after buying us a beer, ‘a chap came into the agency yesterday asking if it was true that there were some boys in town who were interested in armadillos. He said he had got a tatu carreta.’
I nearly choked on my drink. These animals are very rare — few people have ever seen a giant armadillo in the wild, and no naturalist or explorer had ever succeeded in bringing one to a British zoo.
‘Where is this man?’ ‘ What is he feeding it on?’ ‘Is it in good health?’ ‘ What does he want for it?’ Excitedly we bombarded Sandy with questions.
We rushed to the tourist office and found the clerk who had spoken to the man with the armadillo.
His name was Aquino, and he worked for a timber firm by the city’s docks.
In a fever of excitement we hailed a taxi and headed there. At the firm’s offices they told us Aquino had come from the riverside town of Concepcion 100 miles away. The armadillo must be there, but we couldn’t ask him, as he had left on a boat several hours ago.
It was imperative that we found him as soon as possible. I knew only too well from past experience that most people have no idea how to feed any animal they catch. It might well be that this rare creature was at this very moment starving to death somewhere in Concepcion.
We dashed to the airline office. A plane was leaving the next day, and there were two spare seats.
We decided Sandy and I should take them. CONCEPCION was a small town of dusty streets where everybody knew Aquino. He worked as a lorry driver and had recently been fetching timber from a logging camp owned by a German man 90 miles away on the Brazilian border. If he had a captive tatu carreta it would be there.
‘Can we hire a truck to take us there?’ I asked. Happily, this question was quickly answered, as there was only one man in Concepcion with a suitable vehicle. His name was Andreas, and a small boy was dispatched to find him.
Half an hour later we were on our way, our horn blaring.
our speedy progress was not maintained, however, as Andreas suddenly pulled up outside the local hospital. He explained that he had spent the night drinking with a sailor from Uruguay. His new friend made the mistake of offering a girl in the bar a drink, whereupon another man had stuck a knife in the sailor’s stomach.
Now the unfortunate man was in hospital, and Andreas was taking a couple of bottles of beer to put under his pillow for when the nurses weren’t looking.
Despite this unscheduled delay, we reached the lumber camp at five o’clock that evening — a large hut. My heart beat uncomfortably fast as we approached it. Was the giant armadillo alive?
With difficulty I prevented myself from running along the track to the building. The hut was deserted. We shouted, and Andreas sounded a fanfare on his horn. But no answering sounds came from the forest.
At six o’clock a man on horseback came round a bend in the road. It was the German owner. I ran towards him. ‘Tatu carreta?’ I said anxiously. He looked at me as though I were a raving lunatic.
Sandy extracted the full story. It turned out that a week earlier a Polish worker at the yard had met an American Indian man who told him he had recently enjoyed a magnificent feast at his village in which the main dish had been a giant armadillo — a tremendous delicacy.
The Polish man asked his American Indian hosts if they could catch another to show him. Aquino overheard the conversation, remembered the gossip he’d heard about Englishmen looking for armadillos, and made his offer in the tourist office, boosting his bargaining position by claiming he’d already captured the tatu carreta.
By the time we returned to Asuncion the next day I had almost recovered from the crushing disappointment and as I recounted the story to Charles I began to feel more optimistic. Although we had not actually set eyes on a giant armadillo, I told him, we had spoken to a man who employed a logger who had met a man who had eaten one. It was, I insisted, a narrow miss. We might get one yet. He looked unconvinced. CHARLES was right to be pessimistic. our weeks in the Chaco produced many beautiful creatures, but, to my huge regret, no giant armadillos. There was, however, a wonderful surprise in store that would almost compensate for our disappointment.
By the time we were due to leave South America on our homeward journey just about everybody in Paraguay seemed to have learned of our mission. As we made arrangements to transport the animals to London via Buenos Aires and New York, people from all over the country began converging with lastminute offerings of animals in gourds, boxes and string bags.
The rarest and most exciting of these was brought to us by a man I had met in Concepcion, who arrived at the house where we were staying one morning trundling a handcart.
on it, surrounded by a frail network of strips of wood and string, stood the most enormous wolf — an absolutely majestic beast with a long reddish coat, large furry triangular ears and long legs out of all proportion to its body.
This was the extremely rare maned wolf, a glorious creature which lives only in the Chaco and the northern part of Argentina. Its long legs enable it to run extremely swiftly and some people have claimed it is the fastest of all land animals, excelling even the cheetah.
I was overjoyed to have it, especially as we had recently received a message from London Zoo telling us they had acquired from a German zoo a male maned wolf, and asking if we could find a mate for him. By a stroke of luck, this one was a female.
Housing her presented us with a great problem. Not only was her present cage flimsy, but it was so small the poor creature was unable to turn round. She