Last Chance to See

can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.
    The fish were still hopping harmlessly up and down the tree. They were about three inches long, brown and black, with little bobble eyes set very close together on the top of their heads. They hopped along using their fins as crutches.
    “Mudskippers,” said Mark, who happened along at that moment. He squatted down to look at them.
    “What are they doing in the tree?” I asked.
    “You could say they were experimenting,” said Mark. “If they find they can make a better living on the land than in the water, then in the course of time and evolution they may come to stay on the land. They absorb a certain amount of oxygen through their skin at the moment, but they have to rush back into the sea from time to time for a mouthful of water, which they process through their gills. But that can change. It’s happened before.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, it’s probable that life on this planet started in the oceans, and that marine creatures migrated onto the land in search of new habitats. There’s one fish that existed about three hundred and fifty million years ago that was very like a mudskipper. It came up onto the land using its fins as crutches. It’s possible that it was the ancestor of all land-living vertebrates.”
    “Really? What was it called?”
    “I don’t think it had a name at the time.”
    “So this fish is what we were like three hundred and fifty million years ago?”
    “Quite possibly.”
    “So in three hundred and fifty million years’ time one of its descendants could be sitting on the beach here with a camera around its neck watching other fish hopping out of the sea?”
    “No idea. That’s for science-fiction novelists to think about. Zoologists can only say what we think has happened so far.”
    I suddenly felt, well, terribly
old
as I watched a mudskipper hopping along with what now seemed to me like a wonderful sense of hopeless, boundless naive optimism. It had such a terribly, terribly, terribly long way to go. I hoped that if its descendant was sitting here on this beach in 350 million years’ time with a camera around its neck, it would feel that the journey had been worth it. I hoped that it might have a clearer understanding of itself in relation to the world it lived in. I hoped that it wouldn’t be reduced to turning other creatures into horror circus shows in order to try and ensure them their survival. I hoped that if someone tried to feed the remote descendant of a goat to the remote descendant of a dragon for the sake of little more than a shudder of entertainment, that it would feel it was wrong.
    I hoped it wouldn’t be too chicken to say so.

L EOPARD- S KIN
P ILLBOX H AT
    WE STARTLED OURSELVES by arriving in Zaïre on a missionary flight, which had not been our original intention. All regular flights in and out of Kinshasa had been disrupted by an outbreak of vicious bickering between Zaïre and its ex-colonial masters, the Belgians, and only a series of nifty moves by Mark, telexing through the night from Godalming, had secured us this back-door route into the country via Nairobi.
    We had come to find rhinoceroses: northern white rhinoceroses, of which there were about twenty-two left in Zaïre, and eight in Czechoslovakia. The ones in Czechoslovakia are not in the wild, of course, and are only there because of the life’s work of a fanatical Czech northern white rhinoceros collector earlier in this century. There is also a small number in the San Diego Zoo in California. We had decided to go torhino country by a roundabout route in order to see some other things on the way.
    The aircraft was a sixteen-seater, filled by the three of us—Mark, Chris Muir (our BBC sound engineer), and myself—and thirteen missionaries. Well, not thirteen actual missionaries, but a mixture of missionaries, mission school teachers, and an elderly American couple who were merely very interested in mission work, and wore straw hats from Miami, cameras, and vacantly benign expressions which they bestowed on everyone indiscriminately, whether they wanted them or not.
    We had spent about two hours in the glaring sun creeping sleepily around the dilapidated customs and immigration offices in a remote corner of Nairobi’s Wilson airport, trying to spot which was to be our plane and who were to be our traveling companions. It’s hard to identify a missionary from first principles, but there was clearly something odd going