Last Chance to See

worms—and a baby.
    Because their house is so open, it is regularly full of animals. A young hippo, for instance, frequently comes to chew on the pot plants in their living room. It often spends the night asleep in their bedroom with its head resting next to the (second) baby’s cot. There are snakes and elephants in the garden, rats which eat all their soap, and termites gradually nibbling away at the support poles of the house.
    The only animals that really worry them are the crocodiles, which live in the river at the bottom of the garden. Their dog was eaten by one.
    “It is a bit of a worry,” Kes told us. “But we just have to make our lives as comfortable as possible under the circumstances. If we lived in the city, we’d be just as concerned about the children getting run over by a bus or abducted as we are about them being attacked by a crocodile.”
    After dinner they said that if we wanted to stand a hope in hell of actually seeing any rhino, then it would help considerably if we could find out where they actually were. They suggested that we ask Charles to take us up in the Cessna the next day, and then perhaps we could go out by Land Rover again the day after that and see how close we could get tothem. They contacted Charles over their battered old field radio and made the arrangements.
    Charles flies his plane the same way my mother drives her car around the country lanes in Dorset. If you didn’t know she had done it invincibly every day of her life for years, you would be hiding in the footwell gibbering with fear instead of just smiling glassily and humming “Abide With Me.”
    Charles is a thin and slightly intense man, and also rather shy. Sometimes you think you must have done something that has mightily offended him, but then you realise that the sudden silence is only because he can’t think of anything to say next and has given up. In the plane, though, there is so much to see that he is very talkative and also, of course, very hard to hear.
    He had to say it three times before I finally believed that I wasn’t dreaming it—he said he just wanted to count the eggs in the nest of a saddlebilled stork at the top of the tree we were fast approaching.
    He banked sharply over the top of the tree, and then appeared to put the hand brake on while he leaned out of the window and counted the eggs. The cockpit was thick with the sound of “Abide With Me” as the plane seemed slowly to start tumbling sideways out of the sky. Charles seemed to miscount twice before he was happy with the final tally, whereupon he hauled his head back through the window, turned to ask if we were doing all right, then turned back, refastened the window, and at last scooped the plane back up into the air moments before death.
    From the air, the savannah looks like ostrich skin stretched across the land. We passed a small group of elephants nodding and bowing their way across the plains. Charles shouted over his shoulder at us that they have a project in Garamba National Park for training elephants, and have achieved the first major success in this field since Hannibal. African elephantsare intelligent but notoriously difficult to train, and in the old Tarzan movies they used to use Indian elephants and stick bigger ears on them. The ultimate aim of this project is to use elephants on anti-poaching patrols, and also on tourist safaris. Once again, tourist revenue is seen as the one certain way of ensuring the survival of the threatened wildlife of the area.
    We wheeled around in ever-increasing circles, looking out for anything resembling a rhinoceros. From up here they would clearly be much easier to distinguish from termite hills, if only for the sheer speed with which they move.
    Suddenly there was one.
    And there, as we passed a screen of trees, was another.
    There, in fact, were another two: a mother and daughter, quite close to us, moving rapidly across the plain like trotting boulders. Even seen from a couple of hundred feet in the air, the sense of massive weight on the move is extraordinarily impressive. As we crossed the steady path the mother and daughter were keeping and wheeled around back over them, descending as we did so, it felt as if we were participating in a problem of three-body physics, swinging around in the gravitational pull of the rhinos.
    We took another pass over them, lower and slower, directly following their path, coming as close to them as we could, and this time the sense was of