The Black Rhinos of Namibia by Rick Bass

Author:Rick Bass [Bass, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In the morning, the nifty little refrigerator is broken, doubtless the result of Andreas’s mad cannon-ride run down off the red mountain, so Dennis and I are forced to eat steak and eggs for breakfast, and pork chops, too. We barbecue, grill, and pan-fry a dozen eggs, six little pork chops, and two big T-bones, and then eat them before they spoil, saving for lunch that which we cannot finish, but still feeling every inch the gluttonous Americans.

We finish with a cup of hot coffee in the already hot first light of day, and then gather our daypacks to go out into the heat to look for a rhino. It is overdramatic to say that I have lived forty-six years in search of one, but by the same token it is inaccurate on the low end of things to merely say that I’m forty-six and have never seen a rhino in the wild. The truth is somewhere in between, and as we prepare to go out and meet it, I’m a little bit anxious and excited: deliciously so. Having previously believed myself to occasionally have a somewhat robust imagination, I find myself now facing the possibility of something I have no ability to imagine—no preconception, no expectation, no reference—and the prospect is intoxicating, cleansing, liberating.

About our chances, Mike has said that they are good.

We strike out into the heat, riding standing up in the back of the truck with Mike, gripping the iron rails of the rack that’s bolted upright for that purpose, rhino watching. We swivel our heads in all directions, like ship’s mates high in the crow’s-nest, searching the horizon. The red desert, stippled with farther mountains to the north; the black distant reef of the Brandberg Massif to the south; more red desert back to the east; and more desert to the west as well, stretching down toward the coast, where, almost beyond the range of our vision, a thread of luminous silver marks the Skeleton Coast, the place where the sand and heat finally runs out and where the South Atlantic currents meet the shimmering heat of the dunes to give birth to that fog each morning: turgid cloudbanks looking for all the world like rain to the west, rain-a-coming, but never moving: vaporizing, vanishing, by midday.

“It’s cold out there,” Mike says, pointing to the little dream of clouds that hug the western skyline at the intersection of that curve of earth. He shivers. “Maybe the coldest place on earth. I’ve never been colder than on that coast. You never get warm there,” he says.

The heat penetrates, chases all images of chill from us, and we stand there a moment longer, soaking it in, as if to store up some reservoir of its warmth for possible release later, should we ever venture into such chill.

“Nothing here,” Mike calls out, and the drivers—Himba, Leslye, and Joseph—move on, with us gripping the rails once more, the truck bouncing and jouncing and squeaking over cobble and stone, and with the riders in back surveying the terrain both far away and near.

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