138 THE ODYSSEY OF AN ANIMAL COLLECTOR 
awakened by a slight rattling of pots in the kitchen. This was an 
open-sided outhouse facing our bedroom. On a previous occasion 
I had been disturbed by the fluttering of my birds which were 
kept on the veranda, and on rushing out I had seen a wild cat 
trying to get at them. It made off at great speed. This time I was 
more prepared. Holding my electric torch to the level of my eyes, 
I pointed it through the window in the direction of the kitchen 
and switched on for a second only. There was an immediate flash- 
back of two gleaming eyes. Ferrand was sleeping under the 
window so | had to wake him gently and whisper, “I’m going to 
fire”; raising a twelve-bore to the firing position, and grasping the 
torch and barrel with my left hand, I switched on again and fired 
instantly at the glaring eyes before they disappeared. The gun 
was only two feet above poor Ferrand’s head, and being only half 
awake he had not the faintest idea what it was all about. He was 
visibly alarmed but regained his composure when I returned a 
few moments later with a really large male wild Black-footed Cat. 
The most terrifying things to my mind are the Siafu, or march- 
ing ants. An army of these will arrive silently in the night, killing 
everything before it that is unable to escape. Strangely enough, 
captive birds seem to accept the inevitable without a struggle, so 
there is no warning disturbance or alarm call. Broody hens and 
puppies were victims at Amani, and once forty-two turkeys con- 
fined in a shed succumbed to their attack. It is not an uncommon 
thing for an employee and his wife to flee from their beds in the 
middle of the night and stay with a neighbor until a Siafu inva- 
sion has passed. These amazing creatures bite and hang on with 
the tenacity of a bulldog and are in such incredible numbers that 
even human beings find it safer to flee than to attempt to stem 
the tide. 
In an aviary I had fifteen chameleons—some of them the very 
large Meller’s Chameleon—and one morning I found them all 
overwhelmed and smothered so thickly with ants that not a por- 
tion of any could be seen. When I beat off the ants with a long 
stick, little more than the skeletons remained. The aviary was 
well provided with branches and bushes to act as perching places 
for the chameleons, so all must have been attacked at some height 
from the ground. The Siafu ants can smell out anything that is 
