The odd couple
Aidan Hartley
Ras Hatibu, Kenya
Iwish people would not try to turn animals into humans. I like animals, especially horses and cattle. Dogs are OK if they stay outside. Domestic cats are nasty things, and I once thought I’d be ill when I found frozen budgerigars in a gay New Yorker’s icebox. They were all in budgie coffins. I generally admire animals in Nature, where they are supposed to be. But even out here in East Africa people cannot stop dressing up chimpanzees in sailor suits. Every cute little story of this sort hides a darker one involving murder. Here from the very beach where I write comes the bloody tale of the orphaned hippo Owen and his ‘friend’ Mzee, a 130year-old giant tortoise from the Aldabra atoll. The PR version of the story has made the New York Times bestseller list and inspired plans for a Hollywood movie, but here is what truly happened.
Just north of us on the coast the river floods each year during seasonal rains. The phrase ‘riparian land policy’ simply does not compute here. Upstream, an exploding and hungry population has cultivated right up to the water’s edge. The forest is all but gone, and the last of the tropical glaciers are melting. Mere floods have become brown torrents bleeding upcountry Kenya’s fertility far out into the Indian Ocean.
During such spates, terrified hippopotami are often also swept out to sea. Here the beasts expire of dehydration or drown. Or they get washed up on our beach, where the wildlife rangers shoot them and hack them to bits. I know that somebody around here is eating hippo. My mother’s dogs keep bringing bits of them into the house.
On the day of the 2004 tsunami the river was in flood again, and it ejected two adult hippos and a baby out into the big blue. Ocean currents pushed them south. One adult quickly came ashore and was swiftly shot. To be fair, hippos are dangerous, but I am just saying what happened. The baby and the second adult, probably its mother, stayed out at sea until next morning when they both limped ashore at a place near Ras Hatibu. The Mummy hippo was shot and hacked to bits and eaten. I have what I assume to be her dried and hairy tail on the desk in front of me as I write this, because the dogs brought that in, too.
All alone now, the baby swam off into the ocean, where somehow it survived a second night. At dawn some local friends of mine found the baby at low tide. Amazed tourists in bikinis and Speedo swimming trunks gathered to gawp at the dying animal, once pinkish, now grey. There I believe it would have expired had my friends not run to town, gathered up a jarifa gill net and rushed back to catch it. About five of them, together with the wildlife rangers who by now had scrubbed their lunch plans, used the net to trap the baby hippo. They slung it into the back of a pickup, dowsed it with fresh water and raced to the Haller Wildlife Park near Mombasa.
Apparently, there was no spare pen for the baby hippo, which by now had acquired the name Owen after one of his ‘rescuers’. There was nothing for it but to put him in with Mzee — or old man — the giant Aldabran tortoise. Keepers were astonished to see Owen swiftly form an attachment to the tortoise, which in turn appeared to take a liking to the baby hippo. It was vaguely apocalyptic, as if the lion had lain down with the lamb. Scientists came to study the phenomenon, and hordes of visitors arrived to marvel at the sight. Somehow, Owen and Mzee had a lesson for us humans about how we all need a friend during trying times.
Well, you bet. Mzee was born midway through Queen Victoria’s reign and I understand he has never had sex. Maybe, just maybe, female tortoises look like baby hippos. As for Owen, my friend who had been among those wielding the jarifa net that day told me in Swahili, ‘That hippo would have made friends with a tractor tyre after what it had suffered.’ I went to Haller Park to see them for myself and was shown to the unlikely couple’s compound. There in the arboreal gloom I saw the truth of all relationships after the honeymoon period. Mzee had his scrawny chicken neck extended and he was wheezing like a smoker with stinking cabbage breath. Owen had ‘outgrown the relationship’ and was now several times bigger than his sexually frustrated Mummy. They were having a row. Their divorce is only a matter of time.
Previous page
