Soul of the Rhino by Hemanta Mishra & Jim Ottaway

Author:Hemanta Mishra & Jim Ottaway
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781599216409
Publisher: Lyons Press

12

SCIENCE AND SHAMANISM

“Drinking from one end and pissing from the other,” I muttered. “Farting and shitting in between.” I wanted to relieve the tension. We had a long, hard day of capturing rhinos ahead.

My elephant driver laughed. I told him that elephants ate as much as two hundred pounds of food, drank up to fifty gallons of water, and produced about eleven gallons of urine and 170 pounds of dung every day. “No wonder they urinate and defecate frequently,” he giggled.

We had just reached the bank of the Dhungre River, hardly three minutes from our camp, and stopped to water the elephants before our long adventure ahead. We watched a convoy of twenty elephants drink water and urinate in the Dhungre River—almost simultaneously. Some elephants passed gas and some discharged dung. The oval-shaped elephant droppings, almost the size of soccer balls, bounced down the river in rhythm, carried by the ripples of the tumultuous river. The morning was cool and comfortable.

A chattering flock of emerald parakeets flew noisily from tree to tree, overriding the sounds and songs of other forest birds. Along the riverbank, a group of lapwings and plovers fluttered their wings as they hobnobbed among the egrets and herons. A group of langur, or black-faced, monkeys nervously gazed toward our camp from the top of a silk cotton tree.

The sound of a motor vehicle in our camp had made them jittery. The sound was from our tractor, our rhino-transportation vehicle. Kuber, our tractor driver, had to drive a mile upstream to cross the Dhungre. Unlike our elephants, his tractor could cross the river only at shallow sites upriver. Kuber and his tractor were vital to our being able to cart our first rhino, destined for an American zoo, back to the camp. That is, if we could catch it!

I started the morning at dawn with our camp wakeup call—a strident series of shrills that sounded like a mad woman shrieking in hysteria. The call came from no human but rather our resident brain-fever bird, the common hawk cuckoo. “Brain fever, brain fever, brain fever,” it continued, the noise of each shrill call doubling each time.

“Late to rest, early to rise, and dead at best,” I often cursed the cuckoo. “This nasty bird needs neither rhyme nor reason to disturb my sleep.” I generally hated this bird, but this morning was an exception. I was glad that the cuckoo had awoken me early, for I had a long day ahead hunting for our first rhino for the Fort Worth Zoo in Texas.

Our operations combined both shamanism and science, with shamanism topping the priority list, as it was part of the Tharu tradition and part of my own belief system. This ancient ritual required us to seek permission of the Ban Devi, the Goddess of the Forest, before venturing into the jungle to catch any wildlife. Badai, the chief Smithsonian elephant driver, performed this ceremony. He was content with this role and felt proud of his skills as a shaman.

He

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