Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [45]
“But rhinos are perfectly safe?”
“Oh, more or less. I’d be a bit wary of black rhinos if I was on foot. They have got a reputation for unprovoked aggression which I suppose they’ve pretty much earned themselves. One black rhino in Kenya caught me off guard once, and severely dented a friend’s car, which I’d borrowed for the day. He’d only had it a few weeks. His previous car, which I had borrowed for the weekend, had been written off by a buffalo. It was all very embarrassing. Hello, have we found something.”
Charles had brought the Land Rover to a halt and was peering at the horizon through his binoculars.
“Okay,” he said. “I think I can see one. About two miles away.”
We each looked through our own binoculars, following his directions. The early-morning air was still cool, and there was no heat haze frying the horizon. Once I had worked out which group of trees in front of a tussocky hill it was we were meant to be looking just to the left and slightly in front of, I eventually found myself looking at something that looked suspiciously like the termite hill we had almost killed ourselves tracking down two days earlier. It was very still.
“Sure it’s a rhino?” I asked politely.
“Yup,” said Charles. “Dead sure. We’ll stay parked here. They have very keen hearing and the noise of the Land Rover would send it away if we drove any closer. So we walk.”
We gathered our cameras together and walked.
“Quietly,” said Charles.
We walked more quietly.
It was difficult to be that quiet struggling through a wide, marsh-filled gully, with our boots and even our knees farting and belching in the mud. Mark entertained us by whispering interesting facts to us.
“Did you know,” he said, “that bilharzia is the second most common disease in the world after tooth decay?”
“No, really,” I said.
“It’s very interesting,” said Mark. “It’s a disease you get from wading through infected water. Tiny snails breed in the water and they act as hosts to tiny parasitic worms that latch on to your skin. When the water evaporates, the worms burrow in and attack your bladder and intestines. You’ll know if you’ve got it, because it’s like really bad flu with diarrhea, and you also piss blood.”
“I think we’re meant to be keeping quiet,” I said.
Once we were on the other side of the gully, we regrouped again behind some trees and Charles checked on the wind direction and gave us some further instructions.
“You need to know something about the way that a rhino sees his world before we go barging into it,” he whispered to us. “They’re pretty mild and inoffensive creatures for all their size and horns and everything. His eyesight is very poor and he only relies on it for pretty basic information. If he sees five animals like us approaching him, he’ll get nervous and run off. So we have to keep close together in single file. Then he’ll think we’re just one animal and he’ll be less worried.”
“A pretty big animal,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter. He’s not afraid of big animals, but numbers bother him. We also have to stay downwind of him, which means that from here we’re going to have to make a wide circle around him. His sense of smell is very acute indeed. In fact, it’s his most important sense. His whole world picture is made up of smells. He ‘sees’ in smells. His nasal passages are in fact bigger than his brain.”
From here it was at last possible to discern the creature with the naked eye. We were a bit more than half a mile from it. It was standing out in the open, looking, at moments when it was completely still, like a