THE next morning-my last sortie with Maurice-we went to the far end of the reserve, hoping to see some of the nine other species of lemur at Perinet. Very soon, we didtwo eastern bamboo lemurs, gray, cat size, with long, curly tails, sitting on their haunches at the edge of a bamboo grove, eating young shoots. They saw us and bounded into the darkness of the grove.

       In the course of the day, we left the reserve briefly, and came upon a bearded man in a brimless straw hat. He was a Betsimisaraka. The Betsimisaraka, who are the Bezanozano's neighbors, are the second-largest ethnic group on the island. They occupy a four-hundred-mile-long strip of the eastern coast which extends inland twenty to fifty miles, and are heavily involved in the production of spicesvanilla, cloves-and coffee. I asked Maurice to ask him if it was fady to eat the indri. (The man spoke only Malagasy.) Maurice translated his answer: "Once upon a time, some Bezanozano went into the forest to get some honey. They climbed a vine right into the treetops, but then the vine broke and there was no way back down. The indri came and took them down on their backs. Since then, the Bezanozano tell their children, 'If you eat the indri, all the Bezanozano will die.' "

       "What about the aye-aye?" I asked. The aye-aye is the rarest, and weirdest, of the lemurs-indeed, one of the rarest, weirdest animals in the world. It is small, solitary, nocturnal, and ghoulish in appearance, with bat ears, bug eyes, and a long skeletal third finger, with which it taps trees to see if they are hollow, and extracts insects from decaying wood. Until a few years ago, there were thought to be only fifty aye-aye left, but now there were indications that they might be more numerous. Two holes thought to have been gnawed by an aye-aye had recently been found in a tree on the reserve.

       "The aye-aye is a kind of man," the bearded man said. "He has different kinds of hair-human, a dog's, a chicken's, a pig's, a cow's. He is like a god. He has much power. Some people here find an aye-aye and kill him with a stick, then they go down the road a few yards, and the aye-aye comes back to life and follows them. If the sorcerer of the attackers is not strong, the aye-aye and his attackers change places: the attackers die, and the ayeaye lives." The word he used for sorcerer was marvellous: mpanaofanafody. "When you hunt the aye-aye, or immediately afterward, to avoid its power, crush a tobacco leaf and rub the juice on your face," he advised. "There are still many aye-aye. You find their nests in the cut-over scrub."

       "Can you show us one?" I asked. "Without a sorcerer it is fady to look upon them."
       "Can you take us to a sorcerer?" "That can be arranged," he said, with a faint smile.
        "Well, then, come on-let's go," I said, getting up excitedly.
       Both he and Maurice were smiling now, enjoying a little joke. "He is the sorcerer ," Maurice finally explained.
        The next communication from the bearded man came as no surprise.
       "He needs a hundred and fifty francs for tafy-medicine," Maurice translated. "The aye-aye is the enemy of the sorcerer."

       I handed the man the money, and we went into his hut-a tiny one, about eight feet by eight, with a ceiling so low I couldn't stand up. The sorcerer's wife left the room, and the sorcerer took down a modern medicine cannister from a shelf. On the cannister was "Polyvinylpyrrolidine, twenty pills."

       "What's that for?" I asked.
       "He doesn't know. He found it on the road," Maurice relayed.

       The sorcerer opened the cannister and poured out a few dozen hard black beans and, picking up a handful, scattered them on a table. Then, as the three of us crowded around, he sorted the beans into two vertical rows, in groups of 2, 2,1,1,2,1,2 and 2, 2,1,1,2, 1, 1. Then he asked my name. I gave it. He added two beans to the last group in each row, and pondered the result. Finally, he announced,' "We will see the nest but not the animal."
       "Why?" I asked.
       "Because he left during the night and is now far away."
       "What is the nest like?" I asked. "Like a bird's, but very big, with many branches in the form of a bed." "How did you find the nest?"
        "The beans have told me where it is, and now I will tell you," the sorcerer said. "I have never seen it myself."
       "Where is it?" "Near."

        We went into the next hut, a store, and he bought some tobacco. "I need rum, for the prayer," he said, through Maurice.
Another three hundred francs.
       Then he led us down a road. I asked Maurice if he thought the sorcerer was tricking us.
       "C' est un sorcier pour faire le mauvais, pas pour faire le vrai," he told me. "There are better sorcerers on the coast."

       After half a mile, the sorcerer took a faint path up a steep slope to a tree. Fifteen feet up in the tree was a tangle of vines with a mass of leaves in it. He thrust a pole up at it. "That's it," he said.

       "That's it?" I asked. It looked dubious. Leaves could have got caught among the vines of themselves, without help from an animal. The sorcerer uncorked the rum and sprinkled some on the base of the tree. Then he steeled himself with a healthy swig and, trembling with fear, with tears of fright forming in his eyes, he looked up at the nest and prayed for the ayeaye and for our health.
       "He was very sincere," I said to Maurice after we left him and were doubling back into the reserve. "He believed."
 

      WE could hear the stutter of axes and the steady tear of a saw. Soon we came upon seven woodmen. Two of them were up on a makeshift scaffold sawing the trunk of a Ravenala with an eight-foot crosscut saw for a M. George of Tamatava, a big city on the coast. M. George had a logging permit from Eaux et Forets, and he could choose from forty commercial species. Each of the woodmen received two boxes of rice and less than two dollars a day. They slept in a little hut of pandanus leaves; the pandanus, an agavelike plant, sprouted here and there on the forest floor.

       "Seen any lemurs?" I asked. "Yes, the brown one," one of them said.
       "Do you hunt them?"
       "No, but only because I don't have a gun."

       A mile farther along, we came on a lemur trap, right on the path. It was for the black-and-white ruffed lemur, Maurice said. He showed me how it worked: in comes the lemur, enticed by the fruit of a melastomej he trips the wire, and down comes the door-it's as simple as that. The cage was made of stakes planted in the ground and lashed with bark cord. "The penalty for poaching is five years in the prison at Moramanga, but there are only two guards for the reserve. C'est qa Ie
probleme malgache," Maurice said sadly. "Almost everybody in the forest poaches, because people have no money to buy meat in the market. They either eat the lemurs or sell them to the Chinese who are working on the Nouvelle Route Nationale Numero Deux or to the rich. That's why it's hard to see the other species." One of the officials of the Commune Rurale, he said, was a known lemur eater. Maurice tore the trap from the ground -and flung it into the bush.

       Half a mile on, we reached the camp of some other woodmen. Maurice suspected that they had made the trap. Half a dozen men were sitting under a thatch roof raised on poles, and one was pounding a red-hot hammer into shape on an anvil. "It might be interesting for you to talk to them," Maurice said.

       I asked if they had seen any lemurs.
        "None right here, but far away there are some still," one of them answered. "c' est qa Ie probleme, M onsieur," Maurice said in an aside while he was translating.
       "Which kind?"
        "Babakoto, simpona [the diademedsifaka], kotrika [the sportive lemur], bokombolo [the bamboo lemur], varika [the brown lemur], tsidy [the mouse lemur], ampongy [the eastern woolly lemur ]."
       "Do you eat them all?"
       "Yes."
       "Even the indri?"
       "Yes."
        "They know indri is an ancestor, but they eat him anyway," Maurice explained.
       "Why? Isn't it fady?" I asked. "In the old days, it was very fady," the spokesman for the woodmen went on. "As fady as marrying your sister."
       "So why do you eat indri?" I repeated.

       "Because they are fat and because today there is a shortage of protein. We have to eat. A kilo of beef costs a thousand francs in the market at Andasibe. A lemur may weigh eight kilos, and we can sell it for fifteen hundred francs a kilo."
        "Don't you get punished with sick ness for violating the fady?"

        "Others get sick, even die, because of their belief," the spokesman said.
        "These men don't have the belief deeply," Maurice explained.

        "How do you kill them?" I asked.
        Maurice's translation of the answer was "Avec une fleche."

       I thought this meant an arrow shot from a bow or a dart from a blowpipe, but when I asked to see a fleche one of them showed me a slingshot with a thong cut from an inner tube, picked up a pebble from the ground, and fired it through a nearby banana leaf.

       Five hundred yards later, we came out on the Nouvelle Route N ationale N umero Deux. "This is the end of the reserve," Maurice said. Across the road, a charred wasteland, acres and acres of smoldering devastation, spread as far as the eye could see. "That is the country of the Betsimisaraka," Maurice said.

       We bought coffee and roasted sweet potatoes that a Betsimisaraka woman was selling in a hut along the road, and sat on the curb eating and drinking. A baby was crying in another hut, and in the distance some indri were wailing. Their cries seemed even sadder now that I realized how seriously threatened the animals are. These were the cries of the last indri.

                     -ALEX SHOUMATOFF