Quite unexpectedly a long-forgotten question is brought to mind. In my early childhood I lived in a village in south Bedfordshire, surrounded by sprout fields and piggeries which gave the air a permanent faecal tang. To this generally agreeable, porky aroma would be added once a week the stomach-churning waft of the ‘lavender lorry’ on its round of the cesspits. Sometimes this malodorous vehicle would be so overfilled that it would spill over and mark its passage with a glistening trail of brown along the road. It was not this, however, that pricked my curiosity. The only mystery about sewage was why people called it ‘night soil’. It was, rather, the dogs, which back then in the 1950s used to speckle the pavements with faeces of pure white. Being accustomed to this, we boys saw nothing odd in it and called it ‘dog chalk’. Until now this distant phenomenon had slipped from my memory, and so I had failed to wonder why modern dogs do things so differently. But now I think I may have an answer.
To find it I have had to make a journey of some 4,500 miles from my home in eastern England to a parched high plateau beneath the misted peaks of Mount Kenya. In the dog-chalk days this was a world I knew only from the limpid grey images of Armand and Michaela Denis, glimpsed through my parents’ veneered Ekco television. Then it seemed impossibly far away, exotic and bathed in dangerous glamour. Now it has to be filtered through more than half a century of televisual over-familiarity. It worries me. Perhaps a life in environmental journalism has left me incapable of surprise. Will I rediscover my hidden naïf?
My visit to Kenya has coincided with a leaf-storm of articles hailing Africa’s ‘new economic miracle’. A writer in Kenya Airways’ in-flight magazine complains about ‘knee-jerk journalism’, by which he means the reflexive habit of referring to Africa as an economic basket case, and of sanctimonious hand-wringing about poverty, violence and corruption. There may indeed be a new spirit of entrepreneurism, and it may be true that more African-run companies are earning profits and enriching a new middle class. In the leafy Nairobi suburb of Karen you could easily believe it. Here, spread across the former coffee farm once owned by Karen Blixen of Out of Africa fame, vast mansions stand in gated five-acre plots. Wealth drips like honeydew from the trees. As you would expect in this subtropical simulacrum of Surrey, there is a Country Club with ornamental lakes and a championship-standard golf course.
But to reach it you have to brave the linear snakepit of the Mombasa road, a just-about-moving tailback of ancient Japanese saloons trailing petticoats of rust and hassled by the even more rackety private minibuses – the notorious matatus – which are as close as Nairobi gets to public transport, and whose unsignalled lane-switching could hardly be more alarming if the drivers wore blindfolds. On your right as you crawl out of the city, a vast rust-coloured stain spreads as far as you can see – the Kibera slum, whose tin-roofed shanties according to wildly varying estimates are home to between 235,000 and one million people, crammed in at a density of perhaps 200,000 per hectare, living in conditions that would struggle to be called medieval. A long-term slum-clearance scheme is under way, but the average man on the matatu would boggle at any thought of an economic miracle.
Out in the country things are not much different. From Nairobi’s local airport, Wilson (named after Mrs Florence Kerr Wilson, a feisty widow who set up Kenya’s very first airline in 1928 with a two-seater Gypsy Moth), I am bounced around various dusty, miles-from-anywhere airstrips before touching down eventually at Nanyuki, in Laikipia county. Here I am met by Andrew Odhiambo, from Kicheche Camp, an hour away at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, who will be my guide for the week. Being exactly on the equator, we are constantly dodging back and forth between hemispheres, defining Latitude Zero with a rooster-tail of grit. This is such hard country that you could say it’s an economic miracle that anyone scratches a living from it at all. There are many flimsy churches and evidence of prayers in urgent need of answer. Shopping centres are dirt roads edged with tumbledown dukas, more like sheds than shops, which are approached through a moonscape of axle-deep potholes. Arable fields bear scrawny remnants of wheat, or sun-scorched grass forlornly scoured by a few ribby cows, sheep and goats (this is the end of the dry season, when the entire country gasps for rain). A community of Maasai pastoralists occupies a row of huts that would not look out of place in Kibera. Miracle of tenacity and last-ditch human resourcefulness? Yes, probably. Economic miracle? I don’t think so. Not here. Not yet.
Living in England, I am no stranger to wide discrepancies between rich and poor. But poverty in Britain is relative, not absolute. There is a loss of dignity, self-esteem, opportunity and enjoyment, for which liberal opinion can feel ashamed, but there is not usually a threat to survival. The contrast with Africa is stark. The incongruity of so much of the world’s anxiety, including my own, being focused on the well-being of animals is a searching test of moral perspective. Right now I am struggling to cope – just as Alfred Russel Wallace and Julian Huxley must have done – with a blitzkrieg of the senses. As I said, I am no kind of Africa hand. I am not even a very competent traveller, being unable to shake off anxieties about missed connections, lost baggage, misread timetables and sniffer dogs (on a previous trip, one of these nailed me at Johannesburg for carrying piri-piri in my luggage). In the tropics I fret about malaria pills, sunblock, insect repellent and how I’m going to get home again. At Ol Pejeta, all that evaporates like spit on a barbecue. At the penultimate airstrip in my sequence of low aerial hops, a herd of elephants was stripping the trees next to the runway. As the horizon breaks open at Ol Pejeta, the first thing I see is a giraffe, lolling through the acacias with that strange Anglepoise gait that it shares with camels. And suddenly, right here, the opposing worlds of the mundane and the imagined merge into a single moving frame. I am struck daft, as if by a bolt from boyhood. A real giraffe in real Africa! Like hundreds, thousands, millions before me, I am overwhelmed. My scepticism withers and is forgotten; the naïf steps blinking into the sunlight.
And dog chalk? Andrew is a brilliant naturalist who will not leave the smallest detail unexplained. Even as he drives, his eyes are scanning the horizon, the tree-line, the very dust in the road where the imprints of hoof and paw tell the story of the day. One morning we stop by the bleached skull of a buffalo ill-met by lions. Not far away is what looks like a pile of dog chalk. ‘Hyena,’ he says, crumbling it with his shoe. The hyena is a remarkable animal which deserves better than its pejorative reputation as scavenger and thief. It is a skilful hunter in its own right. What it lacks in speed it makes up for in stamina, running for miles in pursuit of prey that might at first outpace it. A zebra, for example, will be run to exhaustion until it stands defenceless and surrenders to its fate. It has to be said that the fate is not a good one. Unlike lions, which kill usually by suffocation, hyenas begin their meal while the dish is still on its feet. The power of their jaws is terrifying. If there were any nutritional value in granite, then they would sink their teeth into it. As it is, every part of the victim is ground up and swallowed. The faeces are white, Andrew explains, because of the powdered bone in them, and it is now that I am reminded of my Bedfordshire childhood. Back then, long before supermarket aisles were lined with tinned gravy dinners, dogs were given bones to chew. The chalky pavements are explained.
Bedfordshire, however, does not stay long in the mind when you’ve got wild Africa in your face. It seems almost absurd to have so much dished up at once – so over the top that it makes me laugh, like a child at a fairground. How can this be real? There are fences around the conservancy, but the area within them is huge, 350 square kilometres, and they are there to channel the movement of wildlife, not to obstruct it. Well-used corridors through the fencing allow animals to move freely in and out, while steering them away from villages and farms. This crucially prevents the ‘island effect’, a weakness of nature reserves isolated from their surroundings which leads to the local extinction of some species and over-population of others. As its chief executive, Richard Vigne, will explain, Ol Pejeta accommodates wildlife. It doesn’t farm it. What I am seeing therefore is recognisably the same place that Alfred Russel Wallace saw in the 1870s. In fact, I am very likely seeing even more then Russel Wallace did. Unlike him, I have an expert guide at the wheel of a Toyota Land Cruiser, an indefatigable, go-anywhere hyena on wheels in which Andrew can deliver me into close proximity with almost any animal of my choosing. But that ‘almost’, I now confess, means the sad exclusion of golden moles. Truthfully, deep down, I have always known I wouldn’t see one and so have delayed the question until after my arrival. In that rather cowardly way I have kept alive a slender thread of hope and justified a thirty-hour journey to the middle of Africa. But I block the thought. The mole, I guiltily acknowledge, was always an excuse – a detail, seductive but arbitrary, that would draw me into the bigger picture. And now here it is, a picture so enormous that I can’t take it all in. Calcochloris tytonis and its tribe can wait a bit longer. In any case, I feel it is here in spirit, represented in its absence by myriad tiny scurriers and burrowers that only civets, hawks and owls can see. At breakfast one morning a tiny striped mouse boldly darts out to feed on a handful of muesli – the smallest animal I see, and my mole by proxy. The economic principle of Fritz Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful may now be derided by the more macho kind of free-marketeer, but it holds good in nature. Small is not only beautiful but, as my pursuit of the mole will make abundantly clear, it is also essential.
Andrew is a great talker. He explains the byzantine intricacies of African politics and tribalism – he is of the Luo tribe, though the people of the district are mostly Maasai and Kikuyu – and he has an insatiable appetite for news. Who did I think would win the Republican primaries currently being fought in the USA? Mitt Romney, I say, and he agrees, but he wants to know what a Republican victory would mean for American minorities. I wish I could tell him. Andrew’s passion for wildlife matches even that of my old friend (and genuine Africa hand) Brian Jackman, on whose advice I am carrying a new pair of 10x42 binoculars and a fleece to keep off the evening chill. Being on a plateau I get no sense of elevation, but we are actually 2,000 metres above sea level, slung between the northern slopes of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares. I do at least manage to astonish my guide by showing him what Europe looks like at this altitude. The photographs on my camera were taken from a ski station high in the Swiss Alps at Verbier, in mid summer but still hemmed in by snow-capped peaks.
I learn soon to abandon my own swivel-eyed scouring of the plains and rely on Andrew’s seemingly supernatural ability to read nuances of light and shade. He has sharper senses than any other human I have ever met, including even Jackman and the angling writer Brian Clarke, who once pointed at a ripple on the River Test and predicted to within a few ounces the weight of the trout that was causing it. Andrew has wraparound eyes and ears. Distant pinpricks, invisible even to my 10x42s, turn into rare Jackson’s hartebeests. Faraway murmurs swell into waterbuck. Time and again, quietly and carefully, he plants me within a how-do-you-do of elephant, buffalo, rhino, giraffe, eland and their supporting casts of jackals and hyenas. On one memorable afternoon he ushers me into the presence of a hippopotamus. Cheetah and leopard require more luck than comes our way (though both are here in numbers); otherwise nothing escapes him. A jackal trots past with something in its jaws – the head of a baby hyena, Andrew says, ‘very unusual’. A dot of sky blue becomes the scrotum of a vervet monkey (the colour is what separates the men from the boys – adolescents display an immature shade of green). Young baboons lark and dart through a fever tree, playing a kind of Kenyan roulette with gravity while their elders hunch in the branches like giant rooks.
One morning we set out at six fifteen to look for lions. For the first couple of hours we have no luck – or, rather, our luck is of a different kind. Serendipitously in the dawn light we find a black rhinoceros and her calf standing rock-still in the bush. There are giraffes wallpapered against the lightening sky, buffaloes trudging head-down across the plain, a group of oryx. We meet elephants, warthogs, a hyena carrying the leg of a gazelle, eagles, ostriches and uncountable zebra. But no lions, and we are getting hungry. On a curve of the Uaso Nyiro River, away from the trees, Andrew sets up the table for breakfast. Red checked cloth, cereals, yogurt, sausages and bacon, vegetable pies, pickles and preserves, fruit, tea, coffee . . . This time we have no need of Andrew’s enhanced sensory perceptions. The sudden deep, guttural cough, Wugh!, is no distant murmur. It is nearby, urgent and loud. Twenty metres away a lioness pads out of the trees, glances at us without interest and lopes off along the river.
We follow in the Land Cruiser for as far as we can, before she melts into the bush still calling for her lost companions. Encounters in Africa, I gather, are often like this. Plains game you can guarantee, any time of day or night. Zebra, Thomson’s and Grant’s gazelles, warthog, giraffe – you can’t avoid them. Lions, however, are different. You can improve your chances by knowing where to look, but you still need a bit of luck. A couple of days later Andrew stacks the odds in our favour. Using a radio tracking device, he locks on to a collared lioness lying somewhere deep in the bush. Even so, in thick undergrowth she is not easy to find, and I congratulate myself – the only time it happens – for spotting her before Andrew does. She is hidden in deep shade beneath a tree, together with another lioness and two well-grown cubs. Like the breakfast lioness they only cursorily note our arrival. Four heads pop up at the sound of the engine, then flop back down again to doze. Their bellies are full; their eyelids heavy, hunger forgotten. Barely a hundred metres away, an impala skips across a clearing, upwind and unaware of its luck.
Uninvited guest – the lioness brought a sudden end to breakfast
Another day, we rumble across the plain to the conservancy’s airstrip. It is heavily grazed and, at ground level, difficult to distinguish from the land around it. A small Cessna has touched down and is parked among a group of gazelles. Down from the cockpit steps Richard Lamprey, Fauna & Flora International’s technical specialist for Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, who has flown up from Nairobi to meet me. FFI’s fingerprints are all over Ol Pejeta. The land was once a 40,000-hectare ranch owned by the mining and farming conglomerate Lonrho, which was put up for sale in 2004. Conventional cattle ranching by then had become difficult. Controlling wild animals had been made all but impossible by a hunting ban, and by an influx of elephants from the drier country to the north which had destroyed most of the fencing. Decreasing productivity and rising costs were driving ranchers into insolvency.
For wildlife, and for the conservationists who cared for it, it was a situation that presented both danger and opportunity. The danger was that the land would be sliced up into plots. As movement through the area was vital to the flow of animals across the plateau, this would have critically reduced its value for wildlife. The opportunity was to buy and save the land for wildlife, and at the same time to grow the local economy. This is the twin-track approach upon which the future of endangered species ultimately must depend. The late Christopher Hitchens pointed out an oddity of the English psyche – evidenced by involvements in places like Greece and Spain – which leads the queen’s subjects to show more enthusiasm for other people’s patriotism than they do for their own. For conservationists in particular, this has tended to extend not just to other peoples but to other species, whose ‘rights’ are promoted over man’s. But there is a fatal flaw in this. Animals are killed or displaced for a reason. Their persecutors expect to profit by it, and conservation is not popular where communities feel their interests are secondary to those of the wildlife. The substitution of the word ‘poaching’ for ‘hunting’ in the language of the law is a perfect example of conflicted priorities. I am reminded of the two prisoners in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park who were punished for shooting a warthog. It is a simple fact. Conservation cannot succeed without popular support, and people as well as animals need to see the benefit.
As Richard Lamprey explains, FFI is not in the business of owning land. It is in the business of encouraging purchases where land is of value to wildlife. At Ol Pejeta it managed to secure funding from the Arcus Foundation, a private charity set up by an American philanthropist, John Lloyd Stryker. Stryker had a particular passion for great apes – importantly for him, Ol Pejeta already had a refuge for chimpanzees – but he shared FFI’s broader vision and wanted to help. So it was that by late 2004 Ol Pejeta belonged to FFI, though its ownership would be short-lived. By the end of 2005 the land had been transferred to a locally based non-profit company, the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, staffed and run largely by Kenyans, though FFI would remain an active partner. Richard Lamprey is a frequent and welcome visitor.
At the conservancy’s somewhat ramshackle headquarters, known as ‘Control’, he introduces me to the research officers Samuel Mutisya and Nathan Gichohi, whose presentation is a statistical tour de force – breakdowns of animal populations by species, sex and age, breeding rates, causes of death, movements in and out of the conservancy. It builds into a minutely detailed portrait of a landscape exploding with life, and helps me remember why I am there. Forgetting golden moles, and setting aside the excitement of Andrew’s game drives, what brought me here was the rhinoceros. No animal is more charismatic, none has a higher bounty on its head or is in more desperate need of protection. Ol Pejeta in the last year or so has lost three of them to poachers, including a rare southern white found with seventeen bullets in its body. Rangers had already de-horned it as a precaution, but the poachers still hacked off its face to get the small amount that remained. There has been a human cost too. Six months before my visit, a poacher was shot dead and two others wounded in a firefight near the conservancy boundary. Now another rhino has been wounded by poachers and badly needs help. Rangers and vets will search for it next day, and Richard Lamprey and I will go with them.
The area of search is defined by the orbit of a spotter aircraft – a Piper Super Cub kept for just this kind of eventuality – which guides the team on the ground. Sensibly I’m kept away until a tranquilliser dart has done its stuff and the wounded monster has sunk belly-down with its legs folded beneath it. A green towel has been draped over its eyes and it snorts like a drunk in its sleep. Any living thing this big would be impressive, but the rhinoceros with all its primitive power is awesome, like a piece of living geology. It is not, however, immune to the high-velocity bullet. This one, by great good luck, was a misdirected shot that passed through the left foreleg, missing the bone but leaving the animal badly lamed. I wonder what Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming would have thought of such a scene. What would he have made of an age in which animals were so fiercely defended and men like him, whose preferred view of nature was across a gunsight, were vilified as criminals?
I can’t deny that I enjoyed Gordon-Cumming’s yarns. Had I discovered him earlier, he might even have been a boyhood hero. But his are not the eyes through which modern Africa can be viewed. The challenge for conservationists is to bring down the market, to make it literally true that a charismatic wild animal is worth more alive than dead. Standing there, surveying the fallen giant, I have a fantasy. If I could bring alive just one historical figure and share with him what I can see, it would be Albrecht Dürer, whose famous woodcut of a rhinoceros, made in 1515, is still the most beautiful ‘likeness’ of the animal ever made. ‘Likeness’ needs quotation marks because Dürer himself never saw a rhino, but made his drawing from a written description and a sketch by someone else. The image is recognisably of a one-horned Indian rhinoceros, but one that seems to be wearing something like medieval horse-armour, complete with rivets and tooled bodywork. Inaccurate it may be, but it brilliantly captures the monstrous strangeness and physical enormity of an animal that ancient bestiaries conflated with the unicorn. Five centuries of increasing familiarity have done nothing to reduce its impact, on the imagination or on the eye. The details may be awry, and the species may be wrong, but Dürer’s image distils to its essence the spirit of the collapsed behemoth that now lies before me. I am, I realise, the only one just standing and taking photographs. Everyone else is lending a hand, bracing themselves to heave the animal over so that the vets can reach the wounded leg.
Afterwards when they have cleaned the wound, administered slow-release antibiotics and the antidote to the tranquilliser, we watch from a distance as the patient lurches to its feet, remembers where it is and limps off into the acacias. Like every other rhino in the conservancy, it has a fortune on its face and will have to take its chances. At least in Gordon-Cumming’s day rhino horn was valued only as an exhibit. Now it is a commodity. Most of the specimens in European museums were collected in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, and for each institution one was usually enough. For the traditional medicine trades of China and south-east Asia, one is never enough. I am loath to correct Julian Huxley, but there is one thing that he seems to have got wrong in his influential pieces for the Observer in 1960 – a mistake since repeated by many others. It is not as an aphrodisiac that rhinoceros horn is prized. In fact, this seems to be the one benefit not to have occurred to the ancient herbalists whose word in these matters gives quackery its kernel of faith. In most horned animals, the horn has a bony core within a sheath of keratin (the same stuff from which hair, hooves and fingernails are made). Rhinos are different. There is no bony core, so the horn is solid keratin. Powdered and dissolved in water, it has magical properties sufficient to replace the entire stock of a western pharmacy (though if this is true, of course, it would make as much sense to chew your fingernails or eat your haircut).
Victims of this historic scam swallow it to relieve themselves of fever, rheumatism, gout, typhoid, carbuncles, snakebite, headaches, nausea, hallucinations and daemonic possession. In Vietnam, where demand is rising fast, the list extends also to hangovers and cancer. Apart from a flagging libido, the only things it seems unable to cure are the credulity of its purchasers and the cupidity of those who keep them supplied. Huxley was right that rhino horn fetched more than ‘the best ivory’, but that was fifty years ago. Now it has exceeded even gold. On the day I checked (20 February 2012), the price of 24-carat on the London market was £35,165.70 per kilo. In China and Hong Kong, rhino horn was fetching £40,000, and there were reports of prices as high as £60,000. Look no further for the reason rhinos in Africa are an endangered species. Look no further for the reason African officialdom is so vulnerable to the outstretched palm. Who wouldn’t be tempted by such sums?
Like all successful industries, crime is in a perpetual state of development, forever alert to new opportunities. Coincidentally, at lunchtime on the very same day that I made my Hong Kong price-check, four thieves walked into the Castle Museum in Norwich, just 30 miles from my home, and tried to snatch the stuffed head of a black rhinoceros, complete with horns, that had been in a glass case there since 1911. In fact, a whole new crime wave was breaking out not just in Britain but right across Europe. In June 2011 the EU’s criminal intelligence agency, Europol, warned that an Irish crime group was diversifying from its already extensive criminal portfolio into the theft of rhino horns from museums. The gang-members were infamous hard nuts involved in fraud, robbery, money-laundering and drug-trafficking in North and South America, South Africa, China and Australia as well as Europe. And they’d had a brainwave.
Horn from African wild rhinos was one of the most valuable commodities on the international market – so valuable that men were prepared to risk their lives to get it. But why face all the dangers of a shooting war when museums throughout Europe were packed with stuffed specimens, including horns, in fragile and usually unguarded cabinets? In criminal terms it was a no-brainer. A fortune was there for the taking.
And take it they did. From Sweden in the north to Spain in the south, Portugal in the west to Hungary in the east, natural history museums were targeted like banks in the Wild West. By the time Europol issued its warning, there had already been two raids in the UK. In February of that year a stuffed rhino head had been burgled from an auctioneers at Stansted Mountfitchet in Essex. It was later found, minus its horn, in a ditch. Next to be hit, in May, was the Haslemere Educational Museum in Surrey, where thieves broke in at two o’clock on a Friday morning. The museum holds 240,000 specimens, one of the largest natural history collections in Britain, but only a single item was taken – the mounted head of a black rhino, with both horns intact, which had been brought to England from Kenya (then British East Africa) in 1913 and had been on display since 1929. A few days after the Europol warning, the thieves turned their attention to Ipswich in Suffolk. Their target was Rosie, a one-horned Indian rhino that last drew breath probably some time in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. She might have been shot in the wild, or died in a circus or zoo. No one knows. What’s certain is that in 1907 the Natural History Museum in London sent her to the Ipswich Museum in return for a stuffed pig and £16. She made the journey on a horse-drawn wagon from which it took ten men two hours to unload her. Over the years she became a local celebrity. The name Rosie was conferred after a competition in a newspaper, and a drawing of her by the artist Maggie Hambling became the museum’s definitive icon. For 104 years Rosie stood there, admired but unmolested. Then, in the middle of a July night, thieves broke in through the back door, wrenched off her horn, snatched an African two-horned black rhino’s skull from the top of a showcase and made off with them. Bearing all the hallmarks of well-rehearsed professionals, they were inside the building for just three minutes.
As museums across the continent began to wise up and strengthen their nocturnal security, so the criminals abandoned the burglar’s stealth in favour of smash and grab. With the alarms switched off and replaced by unarmed attendants not famous for their muscularity, galleries looked a softer touch in the daytime than they did at night. At Drusillas Animal Park, near Alfriston in Sussex, between four fifteen and four thirty on a late-summer afternoon, raiders broke into a display cabinet and made off with the horn of a black rhino on loan from Brighton’s Booth Museum of Natural History. Ironically, the horn was part of an educational display about CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), which outlaws international trade in rare animals. The items in the cabinet were all things that people were urged not to buy, including ivory, coral, seashells, furs, turtle-shell, snake and crocodile skins as well as rhino horn. To avoid its becoming a criminal rather than educational resource, the display had to be removed.
Everywhere the thieves grew bolder and more contemptuous of security. In a lunchtime attack on the Museum of Hunting and Nature in the Marais district of Paris, two men used what police described as a ‘paralysing gas’ to subdue guards and help them get away with the horn of a rare South African white rhinoceros. Tear gas was also used in a raid at the zoological museum in Liège, Belgium. On a Saturday morning at the Museum of Natural History at Gothenburg in Sweden, men armed apparently with an electric saw smashed a glass case and lopped off the horn of a stuffed rhino. In March 2012 a British man was held on suspicion by German police after what they described as an ‘unbelievably audacious’ raid in Offenburg, during which two people distracted museum staff while others climbed on a display case, took down a rhino head from the wall and smashed off its horn with a sledgehammer. By the end of that month there had been fifty-eight thefts from fifteen European countries, involving seventy-two separate horns, eight entire heads with sixteen horns between them, eleven replicas and three carved rhino-horn ‘libation cups’. Germany was the most popular target, with thirteen thefts and one failed attempt; France second, with eleven thefts and four attempts, and England – five thefts, one attempt – third, just ahead of Austria with four and two. Victims in Italy, I learned, included the Museum of Natural History in Florence, possible resting-place of the Somali golden mole, whose trail I would soon pick up again.
Museum exhibits, of course, were a finite resource, and curators were soon removing genuine horns and replacing them with replicas made of glass fibre or resin. As thieves tended not to be expert zoologists, this did not always put them off. In a predawn raid in August 2011, a gang smashed through the front door of the Natural History Museum’s Hertfordshire outpost at Tring, and hammered off the horns from a stuffed Indian rhino, originally from Cooch Behar, and the head of a white rhino from the former North East Mashonaland, now Zimbabwe. Both were collected around 1900 and had been in the museum since 1939, and both had been fitted with valueless horns moulded in resin.
White rhinos at Ol Pejeta – they have been dehorned to deter poachers
With the supply from museums now depleted, concern began to switch to zoos. So far as I could discover, no rhinos had been killed in European zoos, but there was clearly a risk. In October 2011 an antiques dealer was jailed for twelve months by Manchester Crown Court for trying to smuggle two rhino horns, hidden inside a fake bronze sculpture of a bird on a log, on to a flight to China. DNA tests traced the horns back to a forty-one-year-old white rhino which had died two years earlier at Colchester Zoo in Essex. In accordance with CITES, the animal’s body had been sent for incineration at an abattoir, where it was stolen and later sold into the criminal supply chain for £400. The defendant’s lawyer told the court that his client was ‘just a link in the chain’, but there was no doubt about what he had stood to gain. In China the horns would have been worth at least £400,000 and probably more. This prompted the UK police National Wildlife Crime Unit, based in West Lothian, to warn all British zoos to be on the alert. Colchester, which still had six adult rhinos and a calf, introduced a ring-of-steel security system involving night patrols and an alarmed fence connected directly to the police.
A few days ago I heard on the radio a natural scientist say that connecting with nature made him feel ‘blessed’. This is not a word I would apply to myself – having no connection with any extraneous spiritual entity, I have no source of blessings – but I understood what he was driving at. The American geneticist Dean Hamer has hypothesised a specific human gene, called VMAT2, which conveys a propensity for spirituality. In some individuals this would declare itself in religious faith; in others through different forms of spiritual expression, most obviously in the experience of music, art and poetry. To these I would add the beauty of the physical world. At any ‘beauty spot’ on a fine day you will see people silenced by the view. Our feeling of smallness in wild places, the aura we ascribe to the place itself, is what we mean by the ‘sublime’. The word is there in my African notebook, turned into spider-scrawl by the jolting of the Land Cruiser but still legible in mad-looking capital letters. Further down the page is the word ‘surreal’. One longs for the verbal palette of a Wordsworth, but under pressure of enthralment this is the best I can manage. Surreal because, to a northern European used to being thrilled by the sight of a hare, wild Africa is the animation of a dreamscape. It is a sublime moment when I find myself, the voyaging dreamer, nose to horn with a black rhinoceros in its element. I am silenced as if before some great artwork, drawn into the other’s space. I wonder what the rhinoceros knows or feels. To what extent is it self-aware? Who or what does it think I am? How does it think of others of its own species? Does it understand its own power?
I enjoy a similar moment with elephants. One glorious afternoon we find a maternal group grazing in the bush – I hear the rhythmic, toneless sound of leaves being torn even before I see what is causing it. Andrew works out the family relationships – mothers, grown-up daughters helping with their younger siblings, the tiniest of calves. One young female strolls towards us, trunk upraised but not threatening, so close that my pocket camera cannot contain her head. It is like poking a lens into prehistory.
Early in the book I mentioned the West Runton Elephant, the 600,000-year-old skeleton of a huge steppe mammoth found in cliffs not far from where I live. It roamed in Norfolk 350,000 years before the woolly mammoth appeared, yet in terms of elephant history it was an upstart. Among the Royal Society’s Biology Letters in February 2012 was a paper bearing the kind of typically off-putting title that keeps the general reader at bay: ‘Early Evidence for Complex Social Structure in Proboscidea from a Late Miocene Trackway Site in the United Arab Emirates’. But it revealed a brilliant piece of archaeological research by an international team from Germany, France, the USA and the UAE. What they had found was a fossil trackway bearing the footprints of elephants that passed along it seven million years ago. It is another of those big numbers that you have to stop and think about. Seven million years. The group contained at least thirteen animals of varying sizes from calf to adult, and the prints showed that they were sexually segregated, just like the herds I am seeing at Ol Pejeta. They took this route, at Mleisa in western Abu Dhabi, 6.4 million years before the West Runton Elephant lived and died, and 6.8 million years before elephants in Africa first enjoyed the company of that evolutionary johnny-come-lately, Homo sapiens.
So here I am, a blatant example of human intrusion, keeping close company with the so-called Big Five – buffalo, lion, leopard, elephant, rhinoceros – and comprehensively dwarfed by what scientists call megafauna, meaning species larger than man. It would be hard to imagine better luck. At the reasonable cost of writing a travel article for The Sunday Times, I am being accommodated at Ol Pejeta’s very luxurious Kicheche Camp. My ‘tent’ is a large bungalow with veranda and all mod cons, including flushing lavatory and hot shower – tent only in the sense that the walls are made of canvas. Barely 100 metres from the balcony is an enormous waterhole – really a lake – to which come buffalo, waterbuck, giraffe, lion and elephant to wallow or drink. Meals are almost paralysingly sumptuous, and each evening while I’m enjoying my supper some kind soul pops a hot-water bottle into my very comfortable bed (as Brian Jackman warned, nights at this altitude are chilly). For safety’s sake, and adding a little frisson of drama, I am not allowed to move around in the dark without a guard (and I do hear big beasts at night). The reason for this paragraph is not just to say thank you to those who put me up. It is rather to make the point that tourism in Africa has a value that stretches way beyond the privilege granted to visitors and the profits earned by tour operators. As we shall see, the tourist is a vital link in the chain of virtue that keeps animals alive and strengthens local communities.
Drifting towards slumber, I am disturbed by a riot of snarls and shrieks – a meeting of lions and hyenas, says Andrew in the morning. Another thought hinders my return to sleep. Not knowing whether to be amused or appalled, I remember that the horn stolen in Ipswich from Rosie the rhino had been preserved with arsenic. I wonder whether the patient who swallows it will live long enough to register the shock.
