Last Chance to See

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 chiefof 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 about us, but merely to forget that it had a decision to make. The grass presented it with something infinitely richer and more interesting to its senses, and the animal returned to cropping it.
    We crept on closer. Eventually we got to within about twenty-five yards, and Charles signaled us to stop. We were close enough. Quite close enough. We were in fact astoundingly close to it.
    The animal measured about six feet high at its shoulders, and sloped down gradually toward its hindquarters and its rear legs, which were chubby with muscle. The sheer immensity of every part of it exercised a fearful magnetism on the mind. When the rhino moved a leg, just slightly, hugemuscles moved easily under its heavy skin like Volkswagens parking.
    The noise of our cameras seemed to distract it and it looked up again, but not in our direction. It appeared not to know what to think about this, and after a while returned to its grazing.
    The light breeze that was blowing toward us began to shift its direction, and we shifted with it, which brought us around more to the front of the rhino. This seemed to us, in our world dominated by vision, to be an odd thing to do, but so long as the rhino could not smell us, it could take or leave what we looked like. It then turned slightly toward us itself, so that we were suddenly crouched in full view of the beast. It seemed to chew a little more thoughtfully, but for a while paid us no more mind than that. We watched quietly for fully three or four minutes, and even the sound of our cameras ceased to bother the animal. After a few minutes we became a little more careless about noise, and started to talk to one another about our reactions, and now the rhino became a little more restive and uneasy. It stopped grazing, lifted its head, and looked at us steadily for about a minute, still uncertain what to do.
    Again, I imagine myself sitting here in my study writing this through the afternoon and gradually realising that a slight smell I had noticed earlier is still there, and beginning to wonder if I should start to look for other clues as to what it could be. I would start to
look
for something, something I could see: a bottle of something that’s fallen over, or something electrical that’s overheating. The smell is simply the clue that there’s something I should look for.
    For the rhino, the sight of us was simply a clue that there was something he should sniff for, and he began to sniff the air more carefully, and to move around in a slow, careful arc. At that moment the wind began to move around and gave us away completely. The rhino snapped to attention,turned away from us, and hurtled off across the plain like a nimble young tank.
    We had seen our northern white rhinoceros, and it was time to go home.
    The next day, Charles flew us back across the ostrich-skin savannah to Bunia airport, where we were due once more to pick up a missionary flight returning to Nairobi.