Last Chance to See

arrange for us. This was where our hut was, and this was where we spent night after night thrashing through the rain forest in torrential rain carrying tiny feeble torches (the big powerful ones we’d brought on the plane stayed with the “surplus” baggage we’d dumped in the Antananarivo Hilton) until … we found the aye-aye.
    That was the extraordinary thing. We actually did find the creature. We only caught a glimpse of it for a few seconds, slowly edging its way along a branch a couple of feet above our heads and looking down at us through the rain with a sort of serene incomprehension as to what kind of things we might possibly be, but it was the kind of moment about which it is hard not to feel completely dizzy.
    Why?
    Because, I realised later, I was a monkey looking at a lemur.
    By flying from New York and Paris to Antananarivo by 747 jet, up to Diégo-Suarez in an old prop plane, driving to the port of Maroantsetra in an even older truck, crossing to Nosy Mangabé in a boat that was so old and dilapidated it was almost indistinguishable from driftwood, and finally walking by night into the ancient rain forest, we were almost making a time journey back through all the stages of our experiments in twig technology to the environment from which we had originally ousted the lemurs. And here was one of the very last of them, looking at me with, as I say, serene incomprehension.
    The following day, Mark and I sat on the steps of the hut in the morning sunshine making notes and discussing ideas for the article I would write for the
Observer
about the expedition. He had explained to me in detail the history of lemurs and I said that I thought there was an irony to it.Madagascar had been a monkey-free refuge for the lemurs off the coast of mainland Africa, and now Nosy Mangabé had to be a monkey-free refuge off the coast of mainland Madagascar. The refuges were getting smaller and smaller, and the monkeys were already here on this one, sitting making notes about it.
    “The difference,” said Mark, “is that the first monkey-free refuge was set up by chance. The second was actually set up by the monkeys.”
    “So I suppose it’s fair to say that as our intelligence has increased, it has given us not only greater power, but also an understanding of the consequences of using that power. It has given us the ability to control our environment, but also the ability to control ourselves.”
    “Well, up to a point,” said Mark, “up to a point. There are twenty-one species of lemur on Madagascar now, of which the aye-aye is thought to be the rarest, which just means that it’s the one that’s currently closest to the edge. At one time there were over forty. Nearly half of them have been pushed over the edge already. And that’s just the lemurs. Virtually everything that lives in the Madagascan rain forest doesn’t live anywhere else at all, and there’s only about ten percent of that left. And that’s just Madagascar. Have you ever been to mainland Africa?”
    “No.”
    “One species after another is on the way out. And they’re really major animals. There are less than twenty northern white rhino left, and there’s a desperate battle going on to save them from the poachers. They’re in Zaïre. And the mountain gorillas too—they’re one of man’s closest living relatives, but we’ve almost killed them off this century. And it’s happening throughout the rest of the world as well. Do you know about the kakapo?”
    “The what?”
    “The kakapo. It’s the world’s largest, fattest, and least-able-to-flyparrot. It lives in New Zealand. It’s the strangest bird I know of and will probably be as famous as the dodo when it goes extinct.”
    “How many of them are there?”
    “Forty and falling. Do you know about the Yangtze river dolphin?”
    “No.”
    “The Komodo dragon? The Rodrigues fruit bat?”
    “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. I went into the hut and rummaged around in the ants for one of the monkey’s most prized achievements. It consisted of a lot of twigs mashed up to a pulp, flattened out into sheets, and then held together with something that had previously held a cow together. I took my Filofax outside and flipped through it while the sun streamed through the trees behind me from which some ruffed lemurs were calling to one another.
    “Well,” I said, sitting down on the step again, “I’ve just got a couple of novels to write, but, er, what are you doing in