August 9
This was the day we loaded the fossa traps in Jardin Botanical B, a very scenic, pleasant area next to Lake Ravelobe. It had, however, a murderously steep part in the middle that always inspired successive feelings of dread, exertion, and relief.
That
day I was carrying two chickens, who I named George and Dick, so I wouldn't
get emotionally attached to them. True to his name, George shat on me. I made
sure to put him in a trap where I was told a large fossa named Caesar enjoyed
getting a free meal. This chicken was so dumb that after succeeding in escaping
from his cage, he actually wandered back in and trapped himself.
The fossa traps were pretty straightforward mechanical devices. The chicken went in the rear, and we inserted a number of sticks into the ground through the cage to keep it trapped there. If anything stepped on a metal plate in front of the sticks, the front of the cage would slam shut. Or, sometimes it would just slam shut on its own.
On our return from JBB, the whole team divided in two for a game of radio-collar hide-and-seek. Each team had to hide a radio collar somewhere around camp, and then the other team would look for it with one of the telemetry devices. These were hand-held units that, when pointed towards a working radio collar, would produce a steady beeping, which sped up if the collar was in motion. By triangulation, one can arrive at a good guess of a collar's location. My team lost the game, alas.
Later that day, after lunch, someone (two someones, really) had to take a couple of new, large fossa traps deep into JBB. Like a schmuck, I volunteered. Aside from being very heavy, the cages were unwieldy and made of wire that dug into our fingers viciously. Add to that a new route into the forest that sloped upward more steeply than any of the regular trails, and that errand became the most physically strenuous part of the entire trip for me. The up side, of course, was that next to that, everything else seemed easier. Slept like a stoned log all night.
