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 round back over them, descending as we did so, it felt as if we were participating in a problem of three-body physics, swinging round in the gravitational pull of the rhinos.
We took another pass over them, lower and slower, directly following their path, coining as close to them as we could, and this time the sense was of taking part in military manoeuvres in which we were giving air cover to some monstrous cavalry hurtling across the plain.
Shouting above the noise in the cockpit we asked Charles if it didn’t worry the rhinos having us flying so close to them.
`Not half as much as it worries you,’ he said. `No, it doesn’t bother them at all really. A rhino isn’t scared of anything very much and is only really interested in what things smell like. We fly down low over them pretty regularly to get a good look at them, identify them, see what they’re up to, check that they’re healthy and so on. We know them all pretty well, and we’d know if they were upset about anything.’
I was struck again by something that was becoming a truism on these travels, that seeing animals such as these in a zoo was absolutely no preparation for seeing them in the wild – great beasts moving through seemingly limitless space, utterly the masters of their own world.
Or almost the masters. The next rhino we found, a mile or so further on, was engaged in a stand-off with a hyena. The hyena was circling warily round the rhino while the rhino peered at it myopically over its lowered horns. A rhino’s eyesight is not particularly acute, and if it wants to get a good look at something it will tend to look at it first with one eye and then with the other – its eyes are on either side of its skull and it can’t see straight ahead. Charles pointed out as we flew over that this rhino had had problems with hyenas before: half of its tail was missing.
By now I was beginning to feel seriously airsick and we started to head back The purpose of the trip was just to find out where the rhinos were, and out of a total wild population of twenty-two rhinos, we had seen altogether eight. Tomorrow we would set out overland to see if we could get close to one on ground level.
One of the things that people who don’t know anything about white rhinoceroses find most interesting about them is their colour.
It isn’t white.
Not even remotely. It’s a rather handsome dark grey. Not even a sort of pale grey that might arguably pass as an off-white, just plain dark grey. People therefore assume that zoologists are either perverse or colour-blind, but it’s not that, it’s that they’re illiterate. `White’ is a mistranslation of the Afrikaans word ‘weit’ meaning `wide’, and it refers to the animal’s mouth, which is wider than that of the black rhino. By one of those lucky chances the white rhino is in fact a very slightly lighter shade of dark grey than the black rhino. If the white rhino had actually been darker than the black rhino people would just get cross, which would be a pity since there are many better things to get cross about regarding the white rhino than its colour, such as what happens to its horns.
There is a widespread myth about what people want rhino horns for – in fact two myths. The first myth is that ground rhino horn is an aphrodisiac. This, I think it’s safe to say, is just what it appears to be – superstition. It has little to do with any known medical fact, and probably a lot to do with the fact that a rhino’s horn is a big sticky-up hard thing.