some ragamuffin: 2015

There is an adult male drill in camp. He's stealing things, chasing the kitchen girls, and generally being a highly evolved pain in our butts. As if that weren’t enough, this fanged 25-kilo monkey is a nasty biosecurity risk for reasons I won’t go into.

So I have a veterinary mission. Dart the drill. Problem is, he’s been at this for some time, knows what the dart gun and blowpipe look like, and is all sorts of savvy. Eugh.

His name is Aningeje, but the pronounciation sounds like Negligé, so that’s how I’ve come to think of him. Old wily Negligé, I will bag you if it’s the last thing I do.

First thing I discover is that the dart gun won’t hold air pressure. I scour the office, find the manual, RTFM (read the effing manual), start to take the gun apart, get scared of all the pieces and put it back together again, check all the O-rings, and fail to fix the problem.

The blowpipe is cool, but you have to be pretty close to your target.

I nonchalantly follow my target around all morning, waiting for him to get distracted for just a moment so I can snipe him. Not a chance. Negligé calmly goes through all his regular morning rituals without giving me one millisecond of a shot.

He knows I won’t dart him out of a tree, as I am not keen on running around underneath him, arms outstretched to cushion his fall as he loses consciousness and 25 kilos of dead-weight monkey hurtle towards the forest floor and a broken clavicle. For most of the morning, Negligé sits 3 meters up a tree, eating mangos and flashing ugly toothed smiles as he masturbates at me.

Infuriating. I will outsmart this monkey.

Eventually I get a shot and miss.

I figure out there is a pistol-type dart gun I can use and switch to that. I continue my pursuit of Negligé, and he continues to nonchalantly never gives me a clear shot, with the exception of when he catches me walking around without the gun, in which case he chases me.

As the days go by, I begin to notice what an unattractive drill Negligé is. Those beady close-set eyes and unimpressive colouring . Ugly. Mean. A menace to society. I stop feeling the least bit sorry about my numerous attempts to shoot him in the back.

I try to roofie him with valium to slow him down. He tastes the food, spits it out, picks it apart, and leaves it on the forest floor.

Eventually two Nigerian staff lure him with bananas into one of the forested enclosures while I am sick with malaria.

Fail.