Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [46]
We set off again, very quietly, constantly stopping, ducking, and shifting our position to try and stay downwind of the creature, while the wind, which didn’t care one way or the other, constantly shifted its position too. At last we made it to another small clump of trees about a hundred yards from the creature, which so far had seemed to be undisturbed by our approach. From here, though, it was just open ground between us and it. We stayed here for a few minutes to watch and photograph it. If any closer approach did in fact scare it off, then this was our last opportunity. The animal was turned slightly away from us, continuing gently to crop the grass. At last the wind was well established in our favour and, nervously, quietly, we set off again.
It was a little like that game we play as children, in which one child stands facing the wall while the others try to creep up behind and touch her. She will from time to time suddenly turn around, and anyone she catches moving has to go all the way to the back and start again. Generally she won’t be in a position to impale anyone she doesn’t like the look of on a three-foot-horn, but in other respects it was similar.
The animal is, of course, a herbivore. It lives by grazing. The closer we crept to it, and the more monstrously it loomed in front of us, the more incongruous its gentle activity seemed to be. It was like watching an excavating machine quietly getting on with a little weeding.
At about forty yards’ distance, the rhinoceros suddenly stopped eating and looked up. It turned slowly to look at us and regarded us with grave suspicion while we tried very hard to look like the smallest and most inoffensive animal we could possibly be. It watched us carefully but without apparent comprehension, its small black eyes peering dully at us from either side of its horn. You can’t help but try and follow an animal’s thought processes, and you can’t help, when faced with an animal like a three-ton rhinoceros with nasal passages bigger than its brain, but fail.
The world of smells is now virtually closed to modern man. Not that we haven’t got a sense of smell—we sniff our food or wine, we occasionally smell a flower, and can usually tell if there’s a gas leak—but generally it’s all a bit of a blur, and often an irrelevant or bothersome blur at that. When we read that Napoleon wrote to Josephine on one occasion, “Don’t wash—I’m coming home,” we are simply bemused and almost think of it as a deviant behaviour. We are so used to thinking of sight, closely followed by hearing, as the chief of the senses that we find it hard to visualise (the word itself is a giveaway) a world that declares itself primarily to the sense of smell. It’s not a world our mental processors can resolve—or, at least, they are no longer practiced in resolving it. For a great many animals, however, smell is the chief of the senses. It tells them what is good to eat and what is not (we go by what the packet tells us and the sell-by date). It guides them toward food that isn’t within line of sight (we already know where the shops are). It works at night (we turn on the light). It tells them of the presence and state of mind of other animals (we use language). It also tells them what other animals have been in the vicinity and doing what in the last day or two (we simply don’t know, unless they’ve left a note). Rhinoceroses declare their movements and their territory to other animals by stamping in their feces, and then leaving smell traces of themselves wherever they walk, which is the sort of note we would not appreciate being left.
When we smell something slightly unexpected, if we can’t immediately make sense of it and it isn’t particularly bothersome, we simply ignore it, and this is probably equivalent to the rhino’s reaction to seeing us. It appeared not to make any particular decision