“
Has Ibu seen the animal in the bathroom?” Wayan asked.
It was an interesting question. Binatang, the word we used for animal, could refer to anything from a scorpion to a python. But because I was in the next room and hadn’t heard anything dramatic, I was confident the creature would be benign. Wayan’s vocalizations tend to escalate upon encountering large reptiles or rodents.
I grabbed my camera and went to the bathroom, where she had cornered an outstanding beetle of enormous proportions, nicely marked in yellow. I photographed it for posterity, released it into the garden and went back to work.
Half an hour later there was another wildlife call, this one much more exciting. “Iboooooooo!!” called Wayan from a far corner of the garden. “Ibu! Ada naga!” Reaching for my camera once again, I was halfway across the yard before I remembered that naga meant dragon. The dogs, wildly excited, were racing back and forth along the fence line. It took us a few minutes to catch them and lock them up, but the dragon obligingly waited for my return.
It was a magnificent specimen of a water monitor lizard, over a meter long. It must have climbed a tree near the fence and fallen into the yard and now couldn’t find its way out. A perfect shade of camouflage grey, it sported a generous dusting of big yellow freckles. Anxiously it paced the base of the wire fence, its prehistoric body lumbering awkwardly.
I had never seen Wayan so excited. She telephoned Nyoman, who was helping a friend move house, and a few minutes later the whole moving team had arrived. None of them had ever seen a big naga. Inevitably the discussion soon turned to how they could catch it, an option I firmly squashed. I didn’t want the poor reptile to end up in a pot being rendered for obat and besides, it would be dangerous to catch. I pointed out its carrion-eating teeth, long sharp claws and powerful tail. While this discussion was going on, the monitor finally grasped the concept of climbing a wire fence and crashed off down the undercliff.
As I related this adventure to a friend, he told me how he had once gone to the loo in the dark reaches of the night. Seated sleepily on the throne, he suddenly realized that there was a monitor in the bathtub. It was still there in the morning, when an enterprising neighbour dropped a sarong over it and released it in the rice fields. “It was only a little one,” he pointed out, leaving the mind to boggle at the implications of a large dragon in the bath.
Another friend in Ubud told me how a monitor had somehow fallen through her roof. It was only discovered when it came strolling down the stairs and out the front door as she was having tea on the porch.
The musang is another animal that haunts the undercliff and sometimes wanders into my garden. This civet-like creature looks like a cross between a cat and a dog with a smooth dark coat and long delicate muzzle. Its tail is as long as its body and its powerful short legs end in large, padded feet. I’ve had the opportunity to observe this creature closely because my dogs have killed two in the garden. Sadly I buried them under the trees.
But my sympathy for this species disappeared the morning I found my small flock of ducks dead in their paddock. Wayan, Nyoman and Pak Mangku joined me at the post mortem. The ducks hadn’t been eaten, only their heads had been bitten off. I was shocked at the senseless slaughter; surely only my own species killed needlessly. “Biasa,” the Balinese assured me. This was typical of the musang. Nyoman, who is frugal, decided that since the ducks had been freshly killed we might as well eat them. He butchered them carefully and Wayan cooked them with herbs and spices from the garden. The stew smelled heavenly, but none of us could bring ourselves to eat it. It ended up going to the dogs.
What else lurked in the river below my house? Nyoman drew me a picture of what was indisputably a porcupine. I thought this unlikely, but found it in the Indonesian dictionary. They are not particularly rare. The Balinese eat them, of course.
Both my staff have changed a lot in their attitude towards binatang over the past two years. They roll their eyes less often these days when I suggest that we try to live in harmony with the creatures who share the garden. Despite their doubts they have to admit that, apart from one scorpion bite, none of us have come to any harm from the snakes, lizards and other animals that increasingly inhabit the edible jungle I’m planting around the house. Nyoman no longer automatically kills everything he encounters, but brings it for me to look at.
Wayan, too, has overcome much of her distrust of wildlife. She used to scream lustily at the sight of a snake, however small. Yesterday I heard an unusual squeak in the front garden and looking out the window saw her frozen on the path with a big papaya in each hand. “What it is?” I asked. “Snake, Ibu,” she said casually. “But it was only a little one.”
