Wild Ducks Flying Backward by Tom Robbins Read Free Book Online

butterflies, some as tiny and yellow as buttercup petals, others as big as pie tins and colored like Shanghai silk. There are also a great many bees. They’re not killer bees, but we haven’t learned that yet, and it is while fending off one of these buzzers that Flo falls, cameras and all, into a warthog burrow.
    Warthogs aren’t killers, either, except maybe when cornered, but with their curved tusks and flatiron faces, they look like the nightmares of a lapsed Jew who’s just had his first bite of ham. The steel-wool warthog, not pink Porky, is the pig that ought to have the job of announcing “That’s all, folks!” Who’d argue? On another game walk, a week later, seven of these fearsome swine suddenly came barreling, one by one, out of a deep burrow that we were innocently passing, nearly knocking the pins from under a startled Yvonne and planting the fear of the Ultimate Bacon in each of us. On our calendars, that day became known as The Day the Earth Spit Warthogs, and Yvonne, for one, will probably devote January 21 to prayer and fasting for the rest of her life.
    On this, our first day in the bush, there are no pigs at home, however, and nothing is bruised except Flo’s dignity. It is while she’s brushing herself off that J’nanga sights a herd of buffalo.
    There are about two hundred of them, weighing in at three tons each (and it doesn’t take Ronald McDonald’s calculator to figure that that’s a whole lot of McBuffalo burgers). Fortunately, we’re downwind of the herd, so we’re able to move within forty yards of it before we’re noticed.
    There’s a large fallen tree in our vicinity, and J’nanga directs us into its dead branches. We watch the buffalo and they watch us. It’s difficult to tell who’s more nervous. The mature bulls station themselves at the perimeter of the herd, glowering with almost tangible menace. They paw the ground and snort short Hemingway sentences, resonant with ill will.
    J’nanga is thinking he might have made a mistake. The Cape buffalo, rotten-tempered, heavy of hoof and horn, is among Africa’s most dangerous animals, and here he’s gone and got a half-dozen honkies treed by a herd that could reduce Grand Central Station to gravel. The buffalo are indisposed to retreat, and we seem to have lost that option.
    Jim, an environmentalist cowboy attorney accustomed to stalking Sierra sheep, grinds happily away with his video camera while J’nanga ponders the situation. In Jim’s ear, I whisper,
“Hatari!”
I suspect Jim has seen more John Wayne movies than I, but if he remembers Wayne’s 1962 film and recognizes the Swahili word for “danger,” he doesn’t let on. “Big
hatari
!” I whisper. He goes on videoing.
    It’s hot enough in our tree to broil escargot, and even our daredevil guides are beginning to see mirages. Over there to the left: is that a grove of thorn trees or a Club Med swimming pool? Perhaps J’nanga is getting light-headed, too. He commences to whistle, shrilly, through his fingers, as if at a babe in a bikini. At the sound, the buffalo stage a semistampede. They thunder to a spot beyond the phantom tanning beds, a good eighty yards away, before stopping to resume their Cold War diplomacy.
    Taking immediate advantage of this partial withdrawal, J’nanga hustles us out of the tree and, covering us with his rifle, dispatches us toward a low hill—on the opposite side of which, a few minutes later, we are charged by an adolescent elephant.
    Between meals, as well as at table, Africa is, indeed, an adventure in meat.

    The next morning, the real fun begins. Bleary-eyed from the insomnolent effects of hyena serenade, we put our rafts in the water and paddle into the Selous. For the next two weeks, we’ll see no other humans, just animals, birds, fang-snapping reptiles—and, of course, the gods of the river.
    Sobek employees are quite familiar with river gods. Anybody who does much rafting gets to recognize the invisible deities who