Wild Ducks Flying Backward by Tom Robbins Read Free Book Online Page A

rule each particular river, sometimes each particular rapid in a river. The very name “Sobek” is borrowed from the crocodile god of the Nile. It was chosen as both a charm and an homage.
    Rivers are the true highways of life. They transport the ancient tears of disappeared races, they propel the foams that will impregnate the millennium. In flood or in sullen repose, the river’s power cannot be overestimated, and only men modernized to the point of moronity will be surprised when rivers eventually take their revenge on those who dam and defile them. River gods, some muddy, others transparent, ride those highways, singing the world’s inexhaustible song.
    In terms of white water, the Rufiji, the river that drains the Selous, is a pussycat. Once free of the confines of Stiegler’s Gorge, it hums a barely audible refrain.
Ah,
but though the gods of the Rufiji are fairly silent gods, we are soon to learn that their mouths are open wide.
    Actually, the Rufiji is part of a river
system
. As it approaches the Indian Ocean it separates into channel after channel, forming a plexus of waterways so confusing no explorer has quite been able to map it. At one point it vanishes into the palm swamps of Lake Tagalala, only to slither out on the eastern side like a many-headed serpent.
    Through Stiegler’s Gorge, the Rufiji gives us a fine fast spin, comparable, say, to the waves of the Rogue, if not the Colorado. One rapid, in fact, is so rowdy that our cargo-rigged Avon rafts dare not challenge it; thus, less than an hour after we’ve put in, we’re involved in a laborious portage.
    A few miles downstream, the Rufiji takes its foot off the accelerator, never to speed again. It just grows lazier and slower until there’s virtually no current at all. Deprived of the luxury of drift, we’re forced to paddle the entire distance—forty-five steamy miles—to our take-out point. Moreover, the rafts are so heavily loaded with equipment (including Jim’s four video cameras) and supplies (including Chicago Eddie’s starched white tennis outfits and gold chains) that it requires a marathon of muscling to move them along.
    None of us passengers is an Olympic paddler, exactly, and the guides might have had to provide more than their share of the locomotion were it not for the impetus of hippopotamus. Every languorous labyrinth of the Rufiji is choked with hippos, and for a full fortnight those lardy torpedoes were to dominate our lives.
    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