Last Chance to See

writing pad. That was a bit more effective, but it meant that I was trying to write between dozens of smeared mosquito corpses for the next few days. I hung the net up again and went to bed. It was still full of mosquitoes, all of which were now in a vigorous biting mood. They buzzed and zizzed around me in an excited rage.
    Right.
    I took the net down. I laid it on the floor and I jumped on it. I continued jumping on it for a good ten minutes, till I was certain that every square centimetre of the thing had been jumped on at least six times, and then I jumped on it some more. Then I found a book and smacked it with the book all over. Then I jumped on it some more, smacked it with the book again, took it outside, shook it out, took it back in, hung it up, and climbed into bed underneath it. The net was full of very angry mosquitoes. It was by now about four in the morning, and by the time Mark came to wake me at about six to go looking for rhinoceroses, I was not in the mood for wildlife, and said so. He laughed in his cheery kindof way and offered me half of a tinned sausage for breakfast. I took that and a mug of powdered coffee, and walked down to the riverbank, which was about fifty yards away. I stood ankle deep in the cool, quietly flowing water, listening to the early-morning noises of the birds and insects, and biting the sausage, and after a while began to be revived by the dawning realisation of how absurd I must look.
    Charles arrived in the Land Rover along with Annette Lanjouw and we piled our stuff for the day into it and set off.
    As we bumped and rattled our way out into the savannah once more, deep into the area where we had seen the rhino the previous day from the plane, I asked in a very casual, matter-of-fact, just-out-of-interest kind of way whether or not rhino were actually dangerous.
    Mark grinned and shook his head. He said we’d be very unlucky indeed to be hurt by a rhino. This didn’t seem to me entirely to answer the question, but I didn’t like to press the point. I was only asking out of mild curiosity.
    Mark went on anyway.
    “You hear a lot of stuff that simply isn’t true,” he said, “or at least is blown up out of all proportion, just because it sounds dramatic. It really irritates me when people pretend that animals they meet are dangerous, just so it makes them seem brave or intrepid. It’s like fishermen’s tales. A lot of early explorers were really terrible exaggerators. They would double or quadruple the length of the snakes they saw. Perfectly innocent anacondas became sixty-foot monsters that lay in wait to crush people to death. All complete rubbish. But the anaconda’s reputation has been damaged for good.”
    “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