Somewhere East of Eden

by Michael McKeown

  “Gorillas,” he whispered tersely.

  “My heartbeat raced in overdrive and I gazed around me with almost demented eagerness as though expecting some immense shaggy black figure to suddenly emerge from the dense foliage. My hopes were as quickly dashed however as Jason gave a disparaging shrug of his shoulders. The imprints indicated they had been here several hours ago. By now the gorillas could be thirty or forty miles away. To say I was crestfallen hardly hints at my state of mind. To have come so close to one of the Holy Grails of the natural world was almost unsupportable. But even as I railed against my ill luck I reminded myself that it was exactly this uncertainty that was part of the fascination of observing wildlife. Because they were wild, free and untamed, they were unpredictable. And over time, I had learned as Kipling wrote in If, to treat both triumph and disaster just the same.

  Undeterred by our misfortune, Jason struck off purposefully down the path the gorillas had taken earlier. From time to time he would stop to draw my attention to a particular tree or plant, or the footprint of an animal, sometimes so minute that even with the help of his pointing finger it took me a minute or so to decipher it. At one point, as we stood up from examining a large, oyster-coloured snail I asked him about snakes and was at once all ears to learn that there were as many as forty-two known species in the park including the lethally venomous Gabon viper.

  “In most cases snakes avoid humans unless they feel threatened. In which case….” he shrugged and raised his eyes fatalistically. We continued on our way and I pondered this piece of advice with no great confidence. Counting on good luck to avoid being bitten by some lethally venomous snake seemed rather arbitrary but I philosophised it away as being part of rainforest lore.

  By now the forest had become progressively dense, almost menacing. Giant three hundred feet high trees towered up to their unseen canopies, guardians of a closed and secret world. It required no great imagination to understand why the true forest people who lived here believed in a spirit world, in which trees, plants, rocks, rivers and waterfalls were inhabited by spirits who were themselves presided over by an all-knowing supreme spirit.

  “It’s all nonsense, of course,” a Catholic missionary in Enugu had informed me once. “A lot of heathen mumbo-jumbo.”

  I asked him why. For the forest dwellers, nature and all wild things were fused into a spiritual symbiosis with humans. They lived in a highly-evolved state of harmony developed over centuries with all things in the forest. How could this be dismissed as rubbish?

  The missionary had looked hot and uncomfortable but he was unable to provide a coherent answer.

  By the time we returned to the land-cruiser, the weather had changed. Sheet lightening flickered over the rainforest and bruised purple thunderheads were massing menacingly over the Sankwala Mountains in the north. Already the light was becoming appreciably darker. Thunder reverberated in the valley like an artillery battery.

  Jason pulled a resigned face. “We better be heading back. This looks as if it might be building up into something big.”

  He was right. For the next two days, the rain fell vertically and incessantly, hammering down relentlessly on the corrugated iron roof of the lodge, turning the driveway and garden into an expanding mini-lake that formed tributaries clogging already water-filled culverts. Tall casuarina trees waved and flailed like revellers at a New Year party in the accompanying wind. It was like living in Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Day it Rained Forever. I resumed my reading of Mary Kingsley’s remarkable journeys, played cards with Jason and submitted myself with growing relish to Custard’s gooey, viscous puddings. By the time I left for Calabar on the third day, my belt required an adjustment of at least two notches and I had vowed myself to gastronomic abstinence for the next week.

  In the end, I never did see gorillas, nor am I likely to unless I go to the Virunga National Park in Rwanda. But I suspect that the long trek involved in reaching their remote habitat in the afro-montane forest that rises to over 3000 metres would be beyond the reach of my, by then, creaking and ageing limbs. Still, the journey was special for so many reasons – for the unforgettable sights, sounds and the sensory richness of the rainforest, the chimpanzees, Kristine’s unfailing enthusiasm, High Tech Corner and, of course, Custard’s unsuspected talent for replicating Mrs Beeton’s puddings.

  Above all however, I had been reminded at first hand that life cannot exist without plants. Without them we wouldn’t be able to breathe. For all seven billion of us they provide us with clean air and water as well as over half of our food chain in the form of fruit, vegetables and grains. It seems a simple enough fact to recognise but one which, as we continue to slash down our rainforests, poison our rivers and pollute our oceans, we seem unable, or unwilling, to grasp.

  RUN RHINO RUN

  Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.

  - Albert Schweitzer

  Few places in Africa afford a finer view from where to enjoy an early morning cup of coffee than the veranda of the Outspan Hotel in Nyeri, Kenya. Opposite me the twin snaggle-toothed peaks of Mt Kenya, its glaciers streaked with snow, thrust themselves into a crystalline blue sky. Tiny carmine breasted malachite sunbirds sipped at nectar filled flowers with their downward curving beaks. It was a scene of crisp, spell-binding perfection that made me want to inflate my chest and launch myself into an aria by one those fatally-flawed, tragic heroes in a Puccini opera. Only the memory of the utter ignominy that had followed my last endeavor retrained me. The occasion was the wedding reception of a longstanding friend at which to everyone’s astonishment, including my own, I had suddenly burst into an impromptu rendering of O Solo Mio. The effect was show-stopping, rather as if Cruella de Vil had entered the garden with a bucketful of drowning kittens. Children glanced apprehensively towards their parents, clutching their hands for reassurance and the neighbourhood dogs howled dismally in unison.

  Contenting myself with a tuneless rendering of Climb Every Mountain, I made my way to the breakfast room. Scrambled eggs, freshly baked rolls, dark mountain honey and two cups of Kenya coffee worked their magic and I set out on the short drive north to the nearby Rhino Watch Lodge where the Outspan through its contacts had arranged for a guide to accompany me on a half day safari in the Solio Game Reserve, the world’s first private rhino sanctuary.

  Covering 19,000 acres of green grasslands and Alpine moorland in a valley between Mt Kenya and the Aberdare Mountains range, the reserve, named after a famous Maasai chief, was started in the 1970’s when Courtland Parfet, the owner of Solio cattle ranch, fenced off a large section of the land and dedicated it to conservation. Since then the reserve has played a major part in the protection and breeding of rhinos as well as the stocking of rhinos in several other African game reserves.

  Midway through the 1970’s, the poaching of rhino for its horn was starting to reach epidemic proportions throughout Africa. In a twenty-year period, the continental rhino population was to plummet by ninety-five per cent. Ironically this loss was due to one of the most groundless of medical myths, namely that its phallic shaped horn possesses aphrodisiac and medical properties. This belief, which had been rooted in traditional Chinese medicines for thousands of years, as a treatment for fevers, liver problems, impotence and other ills, now suddenly became reinvented as a fashionable health supplement to boost the libido of the increasingly affluent population in China and Vietnam. Matters worsened when in 2010 rumours began to circulate on social media that a top government minister had been successfully treated for terminal cancer with powdered rhino horn. Overnight, the price of horn soared, along with the numbers of slaughtered rhinos. In South Africa, for instance, where just thirteen had been killed in 2007, the number rose to well over one thousand by 2015. With a population of around four and a half thousand remaining, it requires no special numerical skills to see where the species is heading if the present trend continue.

  For the rhino, mankind’s flawed
belief in its medical benefits has been disastrous. The horn, which is now as expensive, gram for gram as gold or cocaine, is composed of keratin, the very same material that comprises human hair or fingernails. You might as well chew your fingernails for all the good it will do you. But in a country where cancer cases are rising rapidly the myth has taken hold.

  Juma, my guide, was waiting at the main gate. A softly spoken, immediately likeable man in his mid-thirties, wearing a broad-banded felt hat, he gave me a quick run-down of the reserve’s topography and its flora and fauna before walking with me to one of the ranch’s olive-green land rovers parked in the shade of a towering cedar tree. Just as I was about to climb in, he put a restraining hand on my arm.

  “You have signed the company no-claims waiver?”

  “No-claim waiver?” I looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “And filled out your blood group? It’s standard procedure. It covers the company in the unlikely event of your being injured or killed by one of the rhinos.” It was a moment before I spotted the twinkle in his eyes.

  . For the first twenty minutes, we drove through rolling grasslands and open acacia trees in the direction of the southern sector of the park. Thomson gazelle and impala grazed amongst a herd of zebra and two waterbucks in their shaggy, tweed-like coats drank at a small stream. Suddenly Juma braked gently and pointed. Less than half a mile away was a group of black rhinos scattered across the short grasslands. After the deprivation that has been wrought in nearly all of Africa’s national parks this was like a door being opened into rhino heaven.

  Juma carefully edged the land rover forward in the direction of a small clump of spiky green bushes where one of the rhinos was quietly grazing. A light breeze came from the mountain range and blew the long, feather-headed grasses in rippling waves. Close up, the massive prehistoric-looking body and wrinkled skin was intimidating and I found myself reminded of Albrecht Durer’s famous woodcut of a rhinoceros executed in 1515, a work of such overpowering force as to be almost unparalleled. It is often pointed out that Durer’s rhino falls short in accurate representation, which is hardly surprising since he had never seen a rhinoceros and relied for his engraving on a sketch by an unknown artist of an Indian rhinoceros that had arrived in Lisbon as a gift for the King of Portugal – the first rhino to be seen in Europe since Roman times. What Durer incontestably captures however is the armour plated-like sheets that cover the animal’s body and its immense, forbidding power.

  Contemplating this singular creature with its almost comically short, stubby legs, I was overcome by an unwelcome feeling of melancholy, a sense of disbelief that a species which had evolved millions of years ago in the Miocene epoch was now on the brink of extinction because of a combination of human greed and ignorance. It is an evolutionary apocalypse that our consumer-saturated society should, and must, address. But when, as happened quite recently, a senior member of the British government went on record as saying that anything which is not of direct economic benefit to society should be jettisoned the likelihood of this occurring is clearly remote.

  I confided my gloomy thought to Juma who concurred.

  “The time of rhino living in the wild is over. The best we can hope for now is to keep them in places like Solio under a twenty-four-armed guard.”

  I nodded. It wasn’t perfect. But then things seldom are.

  A little further on, Juma pointed to an expanse of what looked like crusted grey mud by the side of the track and stopped for me to examine It was, he explained, called a midden, a dung heap whose odours rhinos use like social networking to exchange information through the secret language of smell. A male, for example, can discover if a female has come into season and is advertising her availability to mate. Courtship, I reflected, came in many shapes and guises.

  As the crow flies we were only twenty miles or so from another well-known conservatory ranch, Ol Pejeta, home to the last three remaining northern white rhinos in the world. This pathetic vestige of a once thriving subspecies comprised a male and two females, all of whom at forty years were past the age of being able to reproduce naturally. Which meant that unless a controversial plan by German, Italian and Japanese scientists to use advanced artificial reproductive techniques, including cell stem technology, to create embryos was successful, they were destined to be the last of their kind.

  Sudan, the male was three years old in 1975 when he was found abandoned after his mother had been killed and taken to the Dvür Králové Zoo in Czechoslovakia from where he was later moved to Ol Pejeta. At the time, there were two thousand, or more northern white rhino roaming across Chad, the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Even by then however, their numbers were starting to plunge precipitately as poachers bartered their horn for automatic weapons in the civil wars that swept the region. By 1990 their population had been reduced to fifteen, all of whom were to be found in the Garamba National Park, in the northeast section of the Democratic Republic of Congo. A plan was devised to relocate some of them to a conservancy breeding ranch in Kenya but at the last moment the Congolese government rejected it in a gesture of misplaced national pride, saying that the rhinos were a valuable part of the country’s heritage. A few years later they had all been killed and the northern white rhino was declared extinct in the wild. It was, as Richard Vigne, the chief executive of Ol Pejeta Conservancy observed, “a massive conservation failure.”

  Many people are understandably confused at the difference between white and black rhinos which to the untrained eye appear remarkably the same. The white, square-lipped rhino is a grazer, eating ground vegetation whereas it’s so called black cousin is a browser, using its pointed, hooked lip to feed on the leaves of bushes and low branches. Why then is it called white when in fact it is quite clearly a dark grey? The misunderstanding came about when early English settlers to South Africa mistranslated the Afrikaner word wijd, meaning wide and used it to describe the animal’s wider mouth, as white. Fortunately, the white rhino happens to be a slightly lighter shade of grey than its black cousin thus preventing a potentially nasty outbreak of hostilities between taxonomists.

  Just then, a land rover pulled up beside us and its driver exchanged a few words with Juma. From the back seat a burly, red-faced Yorkshireman with a handkerchief knotted over his head leaned out of the window and addressed me.

  “Morning lad. Did you see that maiden back there?”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Midden, Arthur. It’s called a midden,” came a shrill voice from beside him

  “Midden, maiden, whatever lass,” Arthur continued, cheerfully ignoring her. “I’ve taken some photos to show our Margaret back home. She’s married to a farmer. Cows and sheep and all that kind of stuff.” he explained with a chuckle. “Still, I reckon she’s nowt seen anything as big that lot.”

  But before he could elaborate any further on comparisons between cow pats and middens, the driver decided it was time to move on and Arthur disappeared from my life in a vapour trail of fretful recriminations from his wife.

  Rhinos have a reputation for being irritable and short tempered. Partly, this is due to their weak eyesight which means they have difficulty in identifying objects from even a few metres and, as result, a tendency to make sudden, unpredictable attacks. I asked Juma which of the two species was more dangerous and he considered my question carefully.

  “Generally, it’s the black who are more excitable than white. But don’t count on it.”

  “Have you ever been charged by one?”

  “Only once.”

  “And?”

  “Once was enough,” he smiled.

  “What happened?”

  “It came at me from behind a clump of trees. It all happened in seconds. I threw myself to the left and the rhino went running straight on for a hundred yards or so and stopped.

  “You were lucky.”

  “I know. I ended up in a very spiky thorn bush but that was a small price to pay.”

  Over the course of my disc
ussions with him that day, it became abundantly clear that for Juma the protection and management of these rapidly dwindling creatures was far more than a means of livelihood. Since joining the Kenya Wildlife Services after leaving school, he had got to know them whilst working at the Ngulia rhino sanctuary in Tsavo national park before coming to work at Ol Solio where his feeling of attachment towards them had become something of a personal mission. He was clearly dismayed that the West had vacillated in imposing tougher legislation and at one point asked me with evident bewilderment why an animal that had been part of our ecosystems for more than forty million years should be allowed to disappear simply because of the greed and vanity of a small number of high status, super rich Chinese.

  Juma, I reflected as I bid him farewell, may not have been familiar with the current popular jargon which refers to rhinos as ‘charismatic mega-herbivores,’ but I was in no doubt as to how effective his calm, quiet and authoritative manner would on television and social media in raising awareness of the rhinos’ critical status.

  And this is the key if things are to change. For as with all the BIG QUESTIONS battling for our attention in today’s world like peace in the Middle East, refugees, the global banking crisis, climate change, the fate of the tiger, the gorilla or the lemurs, there is no one single, simple solution. But, so long as we go on questioning, asking and demanding the more the chances are that answers will be found. And we can. We have the means to now. Not just through massing together with banners in Time Square, Downing Street, the Place de la Concorde or Tiananmen Square but by sitting at home behind our laptops and iPhones. The advent of the Internet and with it social media in the form of Facebook and Twitter means that we can make our ideas and feelings known globally within minutes. Governments and monolithic multinational companies are now in our firing line and are, as is already happening, being forced to listen. Never mind that The Establishment and the right-wing media hate and distrust it. We are, if we wish to use it, a multimillion collective conscience.