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

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,