Last Chance to See

propellers.
    These things had all happened very suddenly, he said. The Yangtze had remained unspoiled for millions of years, but over the last few years had changed very dramatically, and the dolphin had no habit of adaptation.
    The very existence of the dolphin had not been known of until relatively recently. Fishermen had always known of them, but fishermen did not often talk to zoologists, and there had been a recent painful period in China’s history, of course, when nobody talked to scientists of any kind, merely denounced them to the Party for wearing glasses.
    The dolphin was first discovered, in Dong Ting Lake, not in the Yangtze, in 1914 when a visiting American killed one and took it back to the Smithsonian. It was obviously a new species and genus of river dolphin, but little further interest was taken in it.
    Then, in the late Fifties, Professor Zhou returned from a field trip studying birds, to find an unlabeled skeleton waiting for him. It was the same species of dolphin, but this had been discovered, not in Dong Ting Lake, where they no longer existed, but in the river near Nanjing.
    He interviewed some local fishermen who said they did see them from time to time. Any that were accidentally caught were sold for food. The ones that got caught in the fishing lines had a bad time of it, because the lines the fishermen traditionally use along the banks of the Yangtze are baited with hundreds of large, bare hooks.
    Some studies were carried out around Nanjing, but for a while the Cultural Revolution put a stop to all that. Research picked up again in the Seventies, but the difficulties of communication within China were such that research was only local, and no one really had a feel for exactly how rare the animal was, or what kind of predicament it was in.
    That all changed in 1984.
    Some peasants found a baiji stranded in the shallows near Tongling, farther upriver. They reported it to the Agricultural Commission of the Tongling Municipal Government, who took an interest and sent someone along to take a look at it.
    This immediately began to flush out a whole lot of stuff.
    All sorts of people were suddenly popping up and saying that they had also seen a dolphin hit by a boat or caught in a net or washed up in a bloody mess somewhere.
    The picture that emerged from putting all these hitherto isolated incidents together was an alarming one. It was suddenly horribly apparent that this dolphin was not merely rare, it was in mortal danger.
    Professor Zhou was brought along from Nanjing to assess what should be done. Here the story took an unusual and dramatic turn, because once he had assessed what should be done … the people of Tongling did it.
    Within months a huge project was set up to build a dolphin protection reserve within the Yangtze itself, and now, five years later, it is almost complete.
    “You should go to see it,” said Professor Zhou. “It is very good. I will try my best to phone them to prepare for your arrival, so you may rest … what is the word?”
    I said that rest sounded fine to me. I was all for some rest.
    “Easily? Surely? Ah … assured. You may rest assured that they will not be expecting you. So I will give you a letter also.”
    For various reasons which had to do with making a diversion to see an alligator farm from which we then got chased by police on the grounds that we did not have the appropriate alligator permits, we ended up taking a taxi to Tongling, a mere 120 miles. We got a special deal on the taxi. Part of the special deal was that we didn’t have a very good taxi driver, or indeed a very good taxi, and we arrived in Tongling in a state of some nervous tension.
    Foreigners are not allowed to drive in China, and you can see why. The Chinese drive, or cycle, according to laws that are simply not apparent to an uninitiated observer, and I’m thinking not merely of the laws of the Highway Code, I’m thinking of the laws of physics. By the end of our stay in China, I had learned to accept that if you are driving along a two-lane road behind another car or truck, and there are two vehicles speeding toward you, one of which is overtaking the other, the immediate response of your driver will be to also pull out and overtake. Somehow, magically, it all works out in the end.
    What I could never get used to, however, was this situation: the vehicle in front of you is overtaking the vehicle infront of him, and your driver pulls out and
overtakes the overtaking