Urban Dweller in Kenya

There was no mistaking the intent behind that glare, the blaze of a malicious death-ray.

We had inadvertently got between her, on the trail, and her baby on the riverbank, a regrettable error in the southern Kenya bush.

She scanned our little group, stolidly selecting the one she intended to grasp in those giant jaws and smash to death.

I thought I caught her bloodshot eye, and in that millisecond my universe shrank to a 25-foot bubble containing only our ten safari walkers, this steamed-up hippopotamus, and two Rigby .416 big-game rifles trained on her head.

Hippos are the stuff of childhood lore, of course.  We’ve cuddled them as jolly rotund bedtime toys, and tittered at them in their darling pink tutus, pirouetting to Dance of the Hours in Disney’s “Fantasia”.

But a hippo is neither adorable nor funny; it is 3500 pounds of pure evil-temper, with a 2-foot wide gape sporting foot-long tusks, and a 20-mph top speed.  Hippos are the most deadly animals in Africa, killing more humans per year than all other wild creatures combined.

Lajori and Ouashi, our keen Samburu spear-bearers, corralled us backward into the surrounding scrub.  Tiny wait-a-bit thorns and two-inch acacia spikes began redecorating my new vacation shirt, polka-dots of red leaking into yellow fabric.

I imagined I could hear a background roar… the muffled hammering of ten hearts on fight-or-flight alert.  My mouth had gone cotton-dry; I’d have given anything for one sip from my water bottle.

She had been glowering, seemingly forever, feet wide-spaced and head lowered.  Now she swayed slightly, about to step forward.  We heard soft clicks, as Iain and Muhammad released the safeties on those Rigbys.

Our whole world went silent.  The tropical sun broiled us.

I considered my bizarre time-space-warp.  Three days before, I had been playing with my Corgi in our Denver yard.  This morning I was standing 9000 miles east, at the Equator, beside a mildly-reeking cylinder of elephant dung the size of a stew-pot, anticipating some sort of cataclysm.  Oh, the miracles of modern travel!

The “river horse” blinked.

All that time she must have been calculating the odds. The fierce sun was becoming intolerable; natural red sunscreen oozed from her skin.  Her baby was grunting, softly, down by the water.  She decided it was too risky for her to try reducing these invaders to jelly.  So she shrugged and turned away toward safety.

I swear… that hippo shrugged.  After hitting the trail again, finally relaxing a couple of miles downstream, we felt reassured but not yet quite able to take it all in.  On an upbeat note, as we walked I couldn’t help but wonder (silently) how hippopotamus steak might taste.

That afternoon, rounding a clump of saltbush, we came upon a lone, 9-foot long, 400-pound, mane-less male Tsavo lion, posing regally, directly in our path… a heart-grabbing story for another time!

We’d traveled from civilization to one of the last places on earth where one can don boots and tramp a hundred miles through the bush.  The only vestiges of humanity were ancient burial mounds.  We were in the wildest of wilderness.  Even the path we trod was made not by human feet, but by elephants, cape buffalos, hippos, leopards. We were trekking game trails at the middle of the globe.  That’s freedom.

I felt profound gratitude walking that ground in much the same fashion as our most ancient human ancestors.  We’ve read it in history, anthropology or religious books, but we can’t know it until we’re standing under an acacia tree watching an elephant scratching his hide on a doum palm 40 yards away.  I was an urban dweller finding my origins.

The march included periodic breaks.  At each one, I surveyed the landscape’s wonders:  acacia trees and saltbush, teeming birds, multitudes of unrestrained wildlife.  I’d never felt this free, even though I was confined to a band of people under strict instructions to maintain quiet and order – no camera beeps, no talking, no sudden moves, please.

Those ‘ancients’ had walked in little bands too, but they were shrewd armed hunters and they knew how to survive.  I had no weapon; I was stripped bare as an infant in the primeval forest.  I was just grateful to go with a sunhat, water bottle, camera, and come out alive.

It had been a long first day of the Tsavo adventure.  I was 73 – the oldest person to have done this trip – and still a bit unfit for 10-mile-a-day hikes in the equatorial blast furnace.

But after eleven more days on the trail, I felt undeniably stronger — more alive, fit, and free.  I went home with fresh perspective on the world, with renewed purpose, and with hopes to someday re-visit Kenya’s breathtaking bush and its emboldening creatures.

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