(11 of 18)
"Poor buggers!" says Merz, talking about her rhinos. Her eyes now flash bright indignation. "It is a sin and a crime that animals should be driven to the brink of extinction, especially by something as idiotic as a dagger handle!" The situation of the rhino is bleak. In 1970 there were 20,000 of them in Kenya. Now there are considerably fewer than 500. It strikes a visitor that Merz's rhinos live like a child kept in a germ-free bubble because of some defect in the immune system. The germs are the poachers. With rhino horns worth about $65,000 each now, to be sold for use as medicines in the Orient or as dagger handles in North Yemen, Anna Merz has about $1 million stomping around inside her fences.
Merz, an Englishwoman who has lived in Africa much of her life, began the refuge two years ago. A sign at the front gate reads ALL RIGHTS RESERVED FOR RHINOS. She is now raising an orphaned baby rhino named Samia, almost two years old and up to about 500 lbs. Merz tenderly caresses her and calls her "my darling." Samia, feeling frolicsome, knocks Merz over into the mud. Merz rises, muddy and laughing, and prehistoric Samia knocks her over again. Once again, Merz laughs.
A visitor thought of a passage of bully rhetoric in Theodore Roosevelt's African Game Trails, the record of his 1909 safari. The rhino, wrote Roosevelt, "seemed what he was, a monster surviving over from the world's past, from the days when the beasts of the prime ran riot in their strength, before man grew so cunning of brain and hand as to master them."
Hugh Lamprey, of the World Wildlife Fund, flies in to Merz's sanctuary that morning to ask her to accept another baby rhino, which was just orphaned by poachers in the Masai Mara. Lamprey is a mandarin who urbanely calls down apocalypse in a voice that sounds the way the finest, oldest brandy tastes. The visitor privately bestows a title upon him: the Duke of Extinction.
The duke speaks of many things African and animal, and warns at the end of each paragraph that such things should not be written about because publicity is fatal. Now you see the duke. Now you don't. He concludes with a flourish of suave obliteration, "If there was one species you could remove to the benefit of the earth, it would be man." Among the animal lovers, it is not unusual to encounter that misanthropic streak. The animal lovers seem to feel themselves to be just as besieged as the animals are.
Sometimes, when talking to the older Kenya whites, people who had been around in the colonial days and stayed on after independence, the visitor caught the vibration of a nostalgia so radical that it strained all the way back to the Pleistocene. They had no use for people anymore. They seemed to wish to cleanse the earth of the human stain, and restore it to preconscious innocence.
One night Moses announced a goat feast in honor of his visitors.
The goat was slaughtered outside the boma just after dusk. The visitor held the flashlight. Young Olentwala did the killing. He threw the goat on its side and seized it by the muzzle with his right hand and placed his knee against the goat's throat and thus strangled it. Joseph said this was the kindest way, but the American doubted it. It was done, anyway, rather tenderly. Joseph and Olentwala chatted easily in Ol' Maa as the goat spasmed and spasmed and spasmed, and at last expired.