Tom Robbins - Wild Ducks Flying Backward

There’re plenty of crocodiles, chartreuse and ravenous, in the Rufiji as well, but like the CIA, the crocs are funded for covert actions only. Camouflaged and stealthy, crocs are masters of the sneak attack. The nastiness of hippos is magnificently blatant.

Apparently, among animals as among human beings, we entertain misconceptions about who are the good guys and who are the villains. The horned rhinoceros, for example, enjoys a public reputation equivalent to that, say, of a Hell’s Angel. “Lock up the children, Elizabeth! Big hatari !” The hippo, on the other hand, having been filmed in frilly tutus by Disney, its gross grin having been cutie-pied by a thousand greeting-card artists, is regarded as affectionately as a jovial fat boy.

Basically, however, the rhino is a quiet, shy, gentle creature. Sure, it will halfheartedly charge a Land Rover, but that’s because its eyesight is so poor it mistakes the vehicle for another rhino, with whom it would mate or spar. Like many a biker, the rhino is mainly just out for a good time. The hippo, on the other hand, is loud, hostile, and aggressive. Extremely territorial, it pursues with fury anything audacious enough to encroach upon its neighborhood. Nothing, neither lion nor leopard, python nor crocodile, will tangle with a hippo. The unattractive rhino is the victim of bad press. The cherubic hippo kills more people every year than any other animal in Africa.

When we discover rhino tracks one day, on a plain a few miles from Lake Tagalala, our native guides literally jump for joy. They had believed all rhinos gone from the Selous, destroyed by poachers, who market the powdered horn to Oriental businessmen with waning sex drives. Conversely, we paddle past a hundred hippos daily, not one of whom offers us anything but trouble.

Cries of “Hippo right!” or “Hippo left!” ring out every few minutes from the guides. Should one of the surprisingly swift monsters prove particularly threatening, a guide slaps the water with his paddle, making a resounding swak! that, being an unfamiliar sound, frequently will halt a charge, at least temporarily. Meanwhile, everybody else in the raft paddles as if his or her life depends on it.

When we put into shore for lunch or to camp for the night, we’re exhausted. Panting, arms aching, percolating in our own perspiration, we stumble from the rafts and flop down in the nearest shade. It’s Miller time, right? Wrong. No beer, no ice. The refreshment we’re served is Rufiji punch: raspberry Kool-Aid made with river water that has been purified via medicine kit. The water is eighty degrees, buzzing with silt, stinking of iodine, and no doubt heavily laced with crocodile drool and hippo pee. We welcome it as if it were French champagne.

Characteristically, hippopotamuses make a noise that is a cross between scales being run on an out-of-tune bassoon and the chortling of a mad Roman emperor. Throughout the night, we are treated to their ruckus. The guides say that the hippos, being nocturnal feeders, are protesting because we’ve set up our tents in their dining room. Personally, I think they’re making fun of us for the way we guzzle that punch.

Our food is a James Beard — size improvement over our beverage. Under very crude conditions our guides manage to turn out delicious spaghetti, chop suey, and, amazingly, banana crepes flambé. (Have the native guides any doubt that we Americans are crazy, it vanishes as they watch, eyes wide with horror, as Dave sets fire to a quantity of perfectly good rum.) True, toward the end of the journey, supplies running thin, we might fantasize about one of those little osterias where, with a smear of garlic and a squirt of wine, an Italian can make a dead fish sing like a nightingale. But we haven’t come to the Selous to eat and drink.

Even were there restaurants in the Selous, the cuisine of greater Tanzania consists primarily of ugali, a pasty dough that is torn into pieces with the fingers and dunked in sauce. Sauce d’impala, sauce de sable, sauce de dik-dik, sauce de flying termite. An adventure in meat. And although there are sweltering moments when I’d gladly trade my firstborn child for a frosty bottle of Safari Lager, that brand of beer, the only one available in Tanzania, is no gold-medal winner.

No, we haven’t come to the Selous to wine and dine, nor to sightsee and shop. We’ve come to seek an audience with the river gods, to show ourselves to them and accept their banishment or their boons. We’ve come to test ourselves against water dragons with ears like wads of hairy bubblegum and gaping yawns like a thousand cases of “sleeping sickness” rolled into one. We’ve come to the Selous to outrace the hippos.

Did I say that we are exhausted at the conclusion of our morning and afternoon paddles? True, we’re tired, but we’re also exhilarated. We’re so elated our bones are practically singing in their weary sockets, and, narrow escapes or not, it is with eagerness that we wrap ourselves against the homicidal sun and go out on the river again.

Because of the naughty habits of the crocodiles, we’re forced to bathe onshore, showering with buckets of muddy water drawn cautiously from the stream. Now, Chicago Eddie might whine that he’d rather be soaking in a marble tub in some fancy hotel, but nobody really believes him. The Rufiji pantheon, lurid of feather, strong of tooth, has tripped an ancient wire in Eddie’s cells, and, like the other seventeen of us, he broadcasts secret signals of ecstasy — Radio Eden — as, gold chains swinging, he penetrates ever deeper into the Selous.

Perhaps it would be helpful could I inform you that the Selous is the size of Rhode Island with a crust of Connecticut tossed in. Unfortunately, such facts are not at my disposal. My East African guidebook contained that sort of information, but I lent it to a fellow rafter and it was never returned. She hints that when our supplies ran low, she’d boiled it for breakfast; talk about your adventure in meat. That same woman also claims to be watched over by the ghost of her recently deceased dog, Juliet, and that it’s this spectral poodle, rather than guides and gods, who’s steering us safely through the hippos. That’s the kind of lady Kitty is, and I, for one, am happy she’s along.

All I can report is that the Selous is extensive, its wildlife density is astonishing, and if its heart (a heart of brightness, to contradict Conrad) is invaded by other than scattered poachers, the annual Sobek expeditions, and an infrequent government inspection team, the evidence is missing. We meet strange insects here, including a sort of miniature science-fiction flying fortress as glossy black as Darth Vader’s mascara, with long, thick, school-bus-yellow antennae, but there isn’t a trace of litterbug.

The Selous is savanna: short-grass, middle-grass, and tall-grass savanna. Some of the plains seem almost manicured, so meticulously have they been mowed by the mouths of munching herds. The green hills roll like surf into a distance, where they turn slowly to purple. From Tagalala on to the sea, elegant palms line the various banks of the river. Occasionally we come upon a Tarzan-esque glade, complete with pool and vines.

Johnny Weissmuller, the consummate movie Tarzan, was the tallest hero of my boyhood, and more often during my life than is socially acceptable I’ve been moved to imitate his famous yell. To some, the Tarzan yodel is corny, campy, childish, and vulgar. To me, it’s more stirring than the bravest battle cry, more glorious than the loftiest operatic aria, more profound than the most silvery outpouring of oratory. The Tarzan yell is the exultant cry of man the innocent, man the free. It warbles back and forth across the boundary between human and beast, expressing in its extremes and convolutions all the unrestrained and holy joy of ultimate aliveness.