Excerpt from "Animal Kitabu"

The Jinja Golf Course in Uganda, close to Ripon Falls and Lake Victoria Nyanza, is a favorite hang-out for the local hippo population. They trek from green to green during the night, happily mowing the grass while leaving sets of parallel tracks that look like ruts impressed by broad-tired cart wheels. Golfers raved and cursed until Jinja club officials made a new ground-rule: If your ball lands in a hippo's footprint, you may remove the ball and drop it on adjacent turf without being penalized.

At the Rwindi Camp in the Congo's Albert National Park, the hippos sometimes used to come on moonlit nights, walking a full mile from the Rwindi River, just to stand outside the restaurant and watch the tourists eating, drinking, chattering, and playing cards. During the day, the tourists went to the river and watched the hippos.

Other roving "river horses" throughout East, West, Central, and South Africa, invade the natives' cultivated fields of millet, maize, rice, or sugar cane, where they do more damage than Cape buffalo or elephants. The boldest venture into town, where they explore garbage pails and demolish flowerbeds. Once, in the South African city of Durban, a hippo named Huberta raided fruit stands on the main street and came close to entering a theater where a Judy Garland film was playing. Huberta roamed across a thousand miles of Natal Province and the Transvaal, averaging a mile a day while she visited villages, farms, cities, churchyards, Hindu temples, and a Buddhist monastery where she lived for three days, browsing the garden bare of shrubs and flowers.

These reports will come as news to the zoo-going citizens of the Western world. They visit the hippo pool and peer at a vast shadowy form lurking on the bottom. After a few minutes, it surfaces. They catch a glimpse of turreted eyes and slit-like nostrils on a bulging snout. It submerges. Then they leave the hippo pool, convinced that the fat, stodgy-looking animal spends his entire lifetime in the water. At best, they feel, he may creep along the shore. The mere thought of hippos ambling through a golf course or a churchyard strikes them as a Disney-style cartoon or an LSD-inspired hallucination.

Kiboko may be fat, but he is far from stodgy. Aside from his proficiency in water sports, he is surprisingly agile on the land, where he roams from dusk to dawn and even ventures forth on cloudy days. On longer treks, when his skin begins to grow too dry, subcutaneous glands secrete a sort of "suntan lotion," a reddish oily liquid that soothes and lubricates his skin, and has led men to believe ever since Biblical times that hippos "sweat blood."

To explain his odd double life, aquatic by day and terrestrial by night, native story-tellers of the Congo spin a host of legends. Most of them are quite indelicate, but so is fat Kiboko--his thumping, rollicking Swahili name summoning up the real hippo rather than a phony Grecian "river horse."

Once upon a time, according to Azande legend, Kiboko used to live day and night upon the broad savannahs. Then the dry season came, the scorching winds blew, the lightning struck, and the grass burst into crackling flames. Poor Kiboko, singed and terrified, plunged into the nearest lake, landing with a giant splash among the flabbergasted fish. "This is our territory," they protested. "Take those gaping jaws and big tusks out of here! You're not going to gulp us down or eat our babies."

"Let me stay," the hippo pleaded. "I swear I won't eat you. I'll go ashore every night and fill my belly up with grass."

"Easily said," scoffed the wary fish. "How do we know you won't cheat?"

The hippo pondered desperately. "There's only one way to prove my good faith," he finally suggested. "Every time I dung, I'll switch my tail back and forth to break up the turds. You can look at all the little pieces but you'll never find a single fish bone."

Kiboko does, indeed, perform this strange ceremony both in water and on land, but hardly for the benefit of skeptical fish. It is the hippo's homely method of staking out territory; and he stakes it out so thoroughly, switching his tail like a frantic pendulum, that zoo hippo pools must be drained and refilled every day. Odder still, if one hippo dares or chances to invade another's territory, the rivals stage a weird duel: they "shoot" each other, not with guns but with bowels, whisking their tails to send the dung flying. The intruder then retreats, but for some obscure reason both parties feel that honor has been satisfied. If a younger bull is, however, bent on issuing a serious challenge to an older one's established territorial rights--especially in overcrowded areas--the two of them will really fight, booming and splashing half the night while they gash each other's hides with their tusks and sharp incisor teeth.

It is an epic battle, for mature hippos may reach twelve or fourteen feet in length, measuring five feet tall at the shoulder and weighing over three tons. Some bulls may even exceed eight thousand pounds, far outweighing the taller and longer white rhino which is usually accepted as the world's second largest land mammal. The question could be argued endlessly, but I don't see any need for it. Let the rhino be second and Kiboko can be third largest, with a special consolation prize--the newly created title "world's fattest land mammal."

Both are exceeded by the elephant, but the three giant heavyweights are not related. The lofty elephant has distant ties with dugongs, manatees, extinct sea-cows, and the tiny hyraxes or "conies," while the rhino is allied to horses, and the hippo finds his closest kin among the warthogs, wild swine, and domesticated pigs.

The pygmy hippopotamus is a living testimonial to that relationship. Unlike the "pygmy elephant" he is no legend, and although anatomy relates him much more closely to the full-sized hippo, he resembles wild forest swine in size and habits. Six feet long and three feet tall, he weighs a pig-sized four hundred pounds and wanders through the swamps and forests of West Africa where he neither lives in herds nor dwells in rivers.

Kiboko's place in nature was clearly understood in ancient Egypt where they named the hippo "river swine." Then the Greeks transformed them into "river horses," and the Dutch, arriving ages later, converted them to seekoei, or "sea-cows." Meanwhile, the Arabs used a name that means, of all things, "water buffalo," while the Arabs' native converts liked to call the hippo "fish." According to Islamic laws, which parallel the Mosaic Code of Orthodox Hebrews, meat becomes unclean unless the animals' throats are cut while they are still alive. Fish, however, show by their slit-like gills the "knife-marks of the Prophet" and are thus exempt. Cutting the throat of a living three-ton animal presents some problems, but the hippo spends half of his lifetime in the water, so, conveniently, he becomes a kosher-style fish.

Attempting to resolve the contradictions, early nineteenth-century zoologists only made a bad situation worse. They called hippos pachyderms or "thick-skins," lumping them with elephants and rhinos in an artificial family. That error, long ago corrected, still survives among the general public and in circus rings where elephants are introduced, in P. T. Barnum's classic style, as ponderous pachyderms. But another adjective is always used, by all who see him, to portray the good-natured, roly-poly hippo: they cry out in horror and revulsion that Kiboko is, as they describe him, "ugly," if not the ugliest of all animals.

That word, I feel, is rather superficial and misleading. I would rather call the hippo joli-laid--a very useful French expression meaning "lovely-ugly," which is sometimes used to describe people so extremely homely that they have a richly human beauty all their own. Fernandel, France's horse-faced comedian, was superbly joli-laid. So were George Arliss, Charles Laughton, Wallace Beery, W. C. Fields, and other great actors or comedians of the past. I should like to suggest that hippos, warthogs, rhinos, vultures, crocodiles, hyenas, and all the so-called ugly beasts are instead the animal world's great characters or comics. To know it for a fact, all you have to do is watch them.

Kiboko looks like an up-ended barrel covered with slate-colored, nearly hairless skin. His girth is nearly equal to his length, so his pinkish belly barely clears the ground while he goes galumphing forward on his stubby little legs. Port and starboard sides move independently in a rather sprightly pacing gait, preceded by his huge box-shaped head and followed by his foolish eighteen-inch tail. His rounded ears, placed at the very summit of his head, are equally minute but never stop twitching. His eyes, close beneath them, are set in periscopic turrets like the eyes of crocodiles and frogs, so that he can watch the passing scene while the rest of him is underneath the water. His squared-off muzzle, two feet broad, is tipped with bristling hairs and crowned at its highest point by two slit-like nostrils; like his ears, they seal completely at his will, enabling him to dive, swim, walk, or even sleep beneath the surface.

To submerge, he has two separate and distinctive styles: if he decides to dive while already in the water, he lets his rear end sink slowly while his front end follows after; but if startled while he is standing on a high bank, he launches himself headlong--like the first-created hippo of Azande legend--landing among the fish with a gargantuan belly-whopping splash. When he surfaces he spouts a column of water, blowing air through his nostrils with a loud snorting noise.

That description fits Kiboko when his mouth is closed. When opened to the widest, whether he is merely yawning or challenging an enemy in water or on land, his entire head appears to split apart. His gaping mouth, some three feet from jaw to jaw, looks like a huge red cavern edged with ivory stalactites and stalagmites.

He has fourteen pairs of molars and premolars, all of them grinding away daily at some two to four hundred pounds of grass and ground forage plus the few water plants he eats as tidbits, mostly lotuses and water lilies. The slightly curved incisors, two pairs of them in either jaw, are long and sharp. The tusks, unlike the elephant's, are really canine teeth and there are four of them, an opposed pair at either angle of his jaws. The curving lower tusks are much longer, growing up to thirty inches or more in a big bull hippo. If either upper tusk should break, the lower one has nothing to oppose it and keeps growing, like the tusks of swine, reaching lengths of four or even five feet.

Tusks and incisors, all composed of fine-quality, extremely hard ivory, are not used in feeding. Hippos clip grass with their heavy lips, trimming it as closely as a flock of sheep. The front teeth are employed for fighting and usually among themselves, since no animal predator will attack a full-grown hippo, not even twenty-foot Nile crocodiles who may weigh a ton.

Bagoma fishermen from Lake Tanganyika, where crocodiles and hippos both abound, have their own way of explaining why an apparent armistice exists between these two enormous animals who share together Africa's rivers and lakes.

"A long time ago," they told me, "the crocodile made a treaty with Kiboko. 'In water you are stronger,' he informed the Fat One. 'But I, and I alone, am master of the shore. If you want to cross the river bank to graze upon the land, I will not let you pass until you promise me a service.' 'What is it?' asked Kiboko. 'Swear that you will watch for fishermen's canoes and always overturn them. Then I can be sure of my dinner.' 'Agreed,' the hippo answered. Since that evil day, he has worked as the crocodile's friend and sworn partner, helping him to murder men."

The Bagoma tale states, very simply, the fact that Kiboko and the crocodile do not compete for food, since the herbivorous hippo grazes on the land while the carnivorous crocodile seeks his dinner in the water. For this reason, and because their great bulk makes them very confident, hippos usually ignore or calmly watch their crocodile neighbors unless hippo babies are around. Then the wary mother will attack any crocodile who invades the neighborhood, knowing him for what he is--a would-be baby-snatcher. The crocodiles beat a quick retreat; even a small-brained reptile knows better than to pit his narrow jaws against a huge squared-off barrel of a beast, very much at home in the water, who is quite capable of biting him in half.

Hippo cows, when accompanied by babies, will sometimes launch a furious attack upon canoes, but despite native legend, they are not trying to send Care packages to crocodiles. They regard any large object with hysterical suspicion, fearing a possible threat to their young; in fact, they may even mistake the canoe for the basically canoe-like shape of a cruising crocodile. On other occasions, surfacing hippos accidentally collide with canoes and overturn them. Startled and frightened by an unexpected bump on the back, they usually dive like sounding whales for the bottom. But since few native fishermen know how to swim, even those who spend half their lifetimes on the water, passing crocodiles may profit from the collision, dragging poor swimmers underwater or hauling away the bodies of already drowned men.

The natives may be naïve in their interpretation, but early African explorers were very little wiser. Dr. Livingstone, Henry Morton, Stanley, Sir Richard Burton, John Speke, Paul Du Chaillu, and Sir Samuel Baker all had boating troubles with devoted hippo mothers, and all described the hippo as a wantonly malicious beast who attacked boats in its boundless lust to kill men.

Baker, one of poor Kiboko's harshest critics, was traveling in a paddle-wheeled steamer on the White Nile when a panic-stricken hippo attacked a whirling paddle, breaking off several floats. Its intentions were, however, far less predatory than his own: Sir Samuel, a passionate gourmet, described with great relish how he ate the flesh and stewed the feet of young hippo calves, then made soup from their skins. It tasted like turtle soup, he claimed, but even better. He was, in fact, so fond of it that he renamed turtle soup itself, calling it, with witty contempt, "mock hippo."

Now I would much rather see a man eat his kill than hang it on the wall, but I don't like to hear animals reviled for not lying down on the platter, and I especially dislike the style of "game gourmets." Sir Samuel at least did some exploring, but many present-day Europeans go to Africa, taking their spice racks with them, for what I call "Cordon Bleu safaris." They have very little interest in the ordinary game, like bushbuck and impala, which White Hunters shoot for the pot, but insist upon klipspringer, the most delicious-tasting antelope of all. Some lust for baby porcupine, filleted python or even broiled monitor lizard, and all cook the meat themselves, brandishing shakers of oregano or marjoram with ostentatious gestures while their native "boys" watch in wonder. Then they go back to Paris, Rome, or London to compare their latest taste sensations with the other connoisseurs.

Less adventurous types stay at home, receiving from specially hired White Hunters shipments of the most delicious treat that Africa can offer: smoked hundred-pound hippo hams. Steam-fried in sherry with brown sugar, it is praised as peacock tongues were once praised by the Romans.

Meanwhile, the White Hunters who have sold Kiboko's hams to the game gourmets are probably disposing of his other end to the sportsmen. No one has ever been silly enough to rank the hippopotamus among the Big Five, but a head with two fifty-inch tusks is still worth as much as a thousand dollars to a status-seeking hunter. The motives of a man who secretly buys a Cape buffalo head are at least comprehensible: he wants to advertise a fraudulent triumph over somewhat dangerous prey. But it seems ludicrous that anyone would want to brag about a victory, real or fictitious, over an animal who doesn't have to be tracked or stalked but lies about in shallow water during broad daylight, exposing himself to slaughter.

Native hunters, before the days of modern firearms, used to dig pitfalls or hang weighted spears in the trees bordering hippo trails or "tunnels," the paths that hippos push and beat through dense reeds and tall grass. The bravest hunted with harpoons whose attached lines permitted them to retrieve the carcass after the hippo sank, as dying hippos always do. They ate the meat with real gusto, not with gourmet gestures, especially relishing the fat. No antelope except the eland has any fat to speak of, but a good-sized hippo yields some two hundred pounds of the purest lard. The hide was cut into strips, then dried, trimmed, and hammered into round whips--the murderous, even lethal native fimbo or as South Africans later called it, sjambok. The finest quality sjamboks were, however, made from the dried and stretched penises of buffaloes and rhinos.

Whites who came with guns shot at hippos just to test their sights, potting away from their river steamers, or hunted them for sport. Then professionals took over, hunting hippos for their ivory. Besides being very hard, hippo ivory does not yellow like the ivory of the elephant and was thus in great demand for making artificial teeth, fetching as much as six dollars per pound. That market died away as dentistry progressed to porcelain and vinyl plastics, but hippo teeth are still carved into trinkets and remain, even if they fail to reach trophy size, a profit-making sideline for professional hunters.

Hippos learn from experience in heavily hunted areas to be extremely wary. They are no intellectual giants like the elephants, but they have excellent memories and like their smaller relatives, the pigs, they are far from stupid. Where they have been exposed to pits and weighted spears, they will watch suspiciously for hidden traps; where they have learned the meaning of harpoons or guns, they will try to hide their nostrils in a clump of water plants as they surface, taking quick breaths and diving out of sight. But all their wariness serves them little, for their conspicuous size, semi-aquatic habitat and, above all, the need to educate their young, expose them to the gaze and guns of men.

An established hippo herd usually consists of ten to forty individuals, the majority of whom dwell within a territory called the crèche--a word that means cradle or day nursery. The herd is a matriarchy run by fussy cows who are utterly obsessed with the care and feeding of their children. Ruling from a central bank or sand bar, they defend the crèche of babies from intruders, driving away bull hippos--who are sometimes evilly disposed toward their own offspring. When a boat invades the crèche, they look upon it as a group of human mothers might regard a flying saucer landing near a kindergarten. They don't trust it, and they don't wait around to determine whether the boat contains a native fisherman, a Christian missionary like the good Dr. Livingstone, or a hippo-soup addict like Sir Samuel Baker. They attack, and with utter disregard for their own safety.

Older bulls with high social status have their own territories near the outskirts of the crèche, while younger bulls have to live in ill-defined, outlying suburbs where they rarely have a chance to meet and mate with nubile cows. All male hippos are thus "rogues" in the sense that they must live outside the main body of the herd, and the usual prattle about embittered rogue hippos is a meaningless generalization based on the conduct of short-tempered individuals.

As the younger bulls grow more powerful and confident, they begin to challenge holders of the choicer real estate, engaging in the dung-shooting duels or the roaring, tusk-slashing battles. Whichever combatants succeed in capturing or holding down the territories near the crèche can, from their favorable locations, mate with the cows throughout the year as each comes into season.

Mating takes place in the water, with the bull mounting from the rear. Aside from a little minor foreplay--bobbing about and nuzzling--there is very little real courtship and nothing that at all resembles the elephants' sentimental honeymoons. The pregnant cow simply lives with other cows in the crèche and bears, after an eight-month gestation period, a single "calf" which looks more like a hundred-pound, big-headed, pink-spotted piglet.

Born in the water, in the safety of the crèche, the hippo calf suckles in the water, periodically coming up for air as he nurses. He must learn to hold his breath for longer and longer periods before he can stay beneath the surface as long as his mother. So, to watch over him, she must surface much more often than she needs to, and to protect him from the threat of crocodiles, she usually swims on the surface with the young calf riding on her neck, which he clutches with his little forefeet, or her back as he grows larger. When she takes him on the land, she seldom goes very far and moves with fanatical suspicion. When she naps in the shallows, she usually sprawls on the youngster's body, probably to shield him from unexpected dangers. Whole herds of hippo cows will do the same, seemingly squashing the half-buried babies who sometimes squeal but are never injured.

Maternal care and interest last for about two years; then, as the growing male calves begin to look more like menacing bulls than vulnerable babies, they are kicked out of the crèche to find a bachelor existence of their own. By that time, they have reached a size and power which discourages any and all crocodiles--even the twenty-footers--and need fear only man. Bulls and cows become sexually mature at age five, and their full span of life may exceed fifty years. They thrive in captivity despite its limitations, reproducing well and living much more happily than elephants, since their lesser intellect is satisfied with less diversion.

Those who judge Kiboko, Africa's fat, indelicate but immensely good-hearted proletarian, by a quick glance have called him vicious, stupid and, above all, ugly. That attitude was summed up, I suppose, by the famed English essayist, Thomas Babington Macaulay, who declared with self-assured pomposity: "I have seen the hippopotamus, both asleep and awake; and I can assure that, awake or asleep, he is the ugliest of the works of God."