People are improbable. I mean, I’ve never quite understood how something like us could have evolved. The “just so” story is that as the land got drier we adapted by swapping the ability to climb through the disappearing forest for the knack of walking upright for long distances in the blazing heat, with our expanding brains making up for the advantages that we had just forfeited. I can get how that could work now; now that we can make tools, start fires and communicate strategies, but there must have been a time when our brains weren’t much bigger than anything else’s, when we were the slowest, puniest species on the plains, with an absurdly low reproductive rate and no tree to climb. Surely a species like that could never have survived; there must have been something else to it.
Even for bipedal apes with no hair and lots of sweat glands, there isn’t a good time to walk along a dried river bed in forty degree heat. That’s maybe why there weren’t many takers for today’s trip, just Michael and me, plus the Danish polyglot and his French companion in search of a terrestrial Hippo. In Selous we had walked through green riverine forest where there wasn’t too much chance of encountering lions or anything else bigger than us, at least not until we approached the lake. In Ruaha the landscape was open and the sparse trees leafless, except for the ones along the banks of the sometime river, which had managed to get their roots to the underground water. This did have the advantage that we could see dangerous animals from quite some distance, but the disadvantage that we couldn’t have outran any of them to the nearest tree, even if we had been able to climb it, which we probably couldn’t any more (see above). The solution for us highly-evolved apes was therefore that the front of our short crocodile was led by a soldier from the nearest military camp with a gun that did actually look like it could stop a Hippo if it needed to; unlike the gun that the ranger carried in Selous, which looked like it might merely have annoyed one.
The dry, bare sand might have slowed us down but it did make finding animal signs a lot easier. I’d noticed that the guides at this camp had a tendency to “big-up” the wildlife for the tourists; the Hyena tracks that had encircled one of the tents overnight were elevated to the more dramatic sounding leopard, though in reality a hyena could crush your skull much more effectively. So when I found a large sun-baked pancake of what must once have been very liquid faeces, without hesitation it was declared to be Lion. I can’t say that it wasn’t but if so that must have been one dodgy zebra burger. I tend to go the other way. I can get that everyone wants to see the big five but it’s the little things that interest me more. At one point I found a dropping that consisted almost entirely of the segments from giant millipedes; classic Civet poo. Nobody said anything, but it was clear that I might just be the sole surviving member of the Civet poo appreciation society.
Perhaps it is our ability to function in the heat of the day that was our secret to success , rather than our gradually expanding brains, as we didn’t see the owners of the many footprints and droppings, who were presumably laid in whatever shade they could find, wishing they had evolved bipedalism and sweat glands. Except that is for a big, black blob in the distance, which as we got closer proved to be none other than a Hippo on land. I suppose technically the Hippo wasn’t on land; like us it was still in the river, it’s just that there wasn’t any water left, but it would have been a shame to deny the Frenchman his holy grail for the sake of pedantry.
Hippos are themselves a species that looks like it is stuck in transit. It turns out that their closest relatives are the whales and some taxonomists have lumped them together in a group known as the Whippomorpha (and I swear I didn’t make that up). Like whales they can communicate underwater. Unlike whales they haven’t learned to swim yet. (It might look like swimming but actually they are just pushing themselves off the bottom then floating). This might seem like something of a disadvantage for an aquatic species but I guess when you weigh three tons and can bite a crocodile in half (crocodiles consisting of a line of naked apes included) that kind of makes up for it and you can afford to wait another few million years to grow flippers.
The walk being understandably quite short, we went for a little drive near the camp in the early evening to make the most of the daylight. This was definitely to my taste; there were lots of small, African things for me to see; Mongooses, Hornbills and Squirrels. I asked our companion what the French for squirrel was. “Ecureuil”, he replied, adding, “Le mot le plus facile pour les Anglais”. I think we’d find “Hippopotame” even plus facile, Monseiur. For a brief moment I even thought I was seeing two angry rabbits with horns, which they locked together as they pushed each other back and forth up an embankment. Once I’d got my eye in they turned out not to be the fabled Jackalope, but Dik-diks. These are a type of tiny antelope, so small that I reckon the reason that there are no “rabbits with horns” is that Dik-diks have gotten to the, “tiny vegetarian with horns” evolutionary niche first. Hence the less well-known”just so” story, “How the rabbit didn’t get its horns”.
Chugging along a little further we passed a herd of elephants on the embankment to our right and stopped for a closer look. After Selous, I thought I understood elephants; they were calm, un-hurried, even downright polite. So when one started ambling towards us on top of the bank, I was just pleased to see one actually doing something a bit more active. This one looked a little out of the ordinary for an elephant, quite stockily-built and lacking tusks. I’d watched a documentary once on Indian elephants which said that a proportion of the bulls don’t have tusks but make up for what is a clear disadvantage in the ability to fight for the right to pass on their genes by being more muscular and aggressive. This one was female but it soon turned out that the same rules of tusklessness applied As it drew level with our vehicle, it came to a gentle slope which led down towards us and its mood went downhill as quickly as it did. As it started its charge the driver pulled forward a few metres then for some reason stopped again; I can only assume so we could get a photograph rather than as a somewhat dramatic way of handing in his notice. The elephant, on the other hand, wasn’t stopping. Now one of the facts that everyone knows about elephants is that they can only walk not run, but when something larger than a minibus, which shows every intention of wanting to kill you, is walking towards you faster than Usain Bolt can run, that does seem like something of a technicality. As you can imagine, the sight of a charging elephant is enough to turn your insides to liquid, but it’s nothing compared to the sound it makes. I can’t describe it, it was part sound, part seismic activity, but if you try and imagine a T-Rex crossed with a fighter jet, crossed with a woman scorned, you might just get a hint of the ferocity. As one voice, all four of us passengers screamed “go”; the ranger riding shot gun (though with his gun locked impotently in a box) screamed “go”. The driver, suddenly aware that this might be a problem, crunched the gears and just in time managed to get far enough ahead for the elephant to think we weren’t worth pursuing any more. In my version of the “just so” story, our ancestors came down out of the trees and started driving jeeps – I think it’s the only plausible explanation.
Raven on the Wing 