And they do. John and I spent most of our days together driving around and looking at them. The minivan had a kind of sunroof on legs that, instead of sliding out of the way, popped up to form a metal awning. Thus, while John drove, I would stand in the back and, holding the awning’s supports, be bounced and jiggled around like some idiot of the raj in a mechanical howdah. Then, John would shout things such as, “Elephant!” And I would shout, “No kidding!” because the elephant was twenty feet from us, walking across the road without so much as a sideways glance for traffic. It was an enormous solitary bull. His back was powdered with the dust that elephants fling over themselves to ward off bugs, a pink dust in this case, collecting in the deep gray wrinkles and making his hide look like an old actress betrayed by her pancake base. The bull’s tusks were as long as playground slides and thick beyond consideration of billiard rooms or piano keyboards. This fellow could have delivered ivory bowling balls if such a thing were thinkable nowadays. He was the most impressive living creature I’ve seen—for about a minute. Then he got more impressive, growing an immense erection for no reason. (I hoped it was for no reason. A mad infatuation with our minivan would have been unwelcome.) “Fifth leg,” said John. Africa is not the place to soothe insecurities. The elephant walked off into a forest to strip the bark from the legal-pad- colored fever trees and snap the branches off for snacks. Elephants leave a real mess in the woods. They leave a mess wherever they go. You can see how in a country supported by humble agricultural endeavors, the big browsing animals get killed. And not just by poachers. We love elephants in North America, where they never get into our tomato plants or herbaceous borders, much less destroy the equivalent of our fax machines and desktop computers. On the other side of the forest and keeping their distance from the tourist track were three more big browsers: black rhinos. There used to be thousands of rhinoceros in Tanzania. Now there are not. The poachers did get the rhinos, as they’ve gotten most of the rhinos in Africa, all because middle-aged men in Asia believe the powdered horn gives rise—as it were—to potency. Like the world needs middle-aged men with extra hard-ons. The Cape buffalo are still around in droves, however. Their horns don’t seem to do anything for Asians. And it’s harder to kill them. The Cape buffalo is just a cow, but a gigantic and furious one—the bovine as superhero, the thing that fantasizing Herefords wish would burst upon the scene between feedlot and
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