Black Rhinoceros (Gayle Boss)
Excerpt from Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing by Gayle Boss. With permission from Paraclete Press, All Creation is honored to post an entire entry from the beautiful, moving Lenten devotional book Wild Hope (available here). This excerpt comes from Week Five, which coincides this year with the week of the Spring Equinox, and our issue on “Interconnectedness.” Boss’ portrayals of endangered creatures and the humans working to save them truly speak to our connection to each other and to hope. (Illustration by David G. Klein.)
The promise of Lent is that something will be born of the ruin, something so astoundingly better than the present that we cannot imagine it. - Gayle Boss from the Introduction to Wild Hope.
Black Rhinoceros
He sits in the shade of a mopane tree, looking up at its butterfly-shaped leaves. Rest, his boss told him. But he remembers: It’s his first day as a national park ranger and his trainer is showing him pictures. White rhino, black rhino—same shade of gray. Look at the lip, he learns—black rhino’s is hooked. That two kinds of rhinoceros range South Africa surprises him. Growing up on the park’s edge, he avoided the bush and its beasts. Life was precarious enough. This good job is going to ask a lot of him.
Sooner than he likes they’re crouching in the bush. The training ranger has chosen a particular black rhino bull to follow, one he knows has spent the night nearby. Six months ago, he was on the team that tranquilized and felled the massive animal. Drilling a hole in the bull’s smaller back horn, they embedded a radio transmitter to pulse its whereabouts—on or off its rightful owner. Before injecting the antidote, the team vet patched the hole beyond detection.
Following a path of trampled grass, the two men sight the rhino napping beneath a great mopane tree, a red-billed oxpecker perched and picking ticks from the thick wrinkles of his neck. The ranger points to a smaller tree ahead. Careful to stay downwind, they creep forward. Chee-cheee, the oxpecker warns her host. The men lunge into the tree as the creature heaves his bulk up and trots toward them—then stops, peering into the tall grass. The small dark marbles of his eyes see the men as merely another shadow on the savannah. Compensating, his calla lily-shaped ears swivel almost full circle. To the novice’s horror, the senior ranger snorts in pitch- perfect rhino. The swiveling ears snap forward, locking on their target. Then the behemoth charges, his thundering hooves sending spears of panic through the new ranger’s heart. He hears himself shout, Shoot, shoot!
Eight feet from their tree, finally able to see who roused him, the rhino brakes. He is twice as long as the young man is tall and twenty times his weight, and he is pawing the ground, snorting explosively. See the delicate feathers fringing his ears, the beaky upper lip, the battle scars? his superior instructs. Gazing at each other, both species calm. Smiling, the senior ranger drops his hat. The rhino sniffs it, then catches it on his long front horn and tosses it over his back. With a dexterity defying the physics of his size, he spins and races away, huffing like a steam engine.
Washed with relief, the young ranger laughs and laughs. Such speed and agility and impishness! He names the rhino Rasta, after his favorite rugby player. In the weeks that follow he sees that far from being sulky loners and bullies, each black rhino is, like Rasta, a unique personality.
On nights of the full moon he works overtime, assigned to an area plagued by poachers slinking across the border from Mozambique. Black rhinos are extinct there. Of the one hundred thousand that roamed Africa in 1960, only 2,500 were left on the continent two decades ago. Now he’s proud of all that South Africa has done to help double that number. But demand from Southeast Asia for the small number of rhino horns left on Earth—and their black-market price—has surged. The promised wealth wrecks many ordinary citizens’ inner restraint.
To everyone’s relief, this full-moon night passes with no detected violence. He naps and is reporting for his day shift when word comes from radio control that a horn is moving rapidly—too rapidly for a rhino—toward the park border. An armed unit speeds off to intercept the pulsing horn and its violators. He and a dog-ranger team are sent to find the carcass. The radio officer confirms they are looking for Rasta.
The dog lunges, pulling the men to a pool of blood. But no body. Running on, the dog suddenly stops, ears pricked. Inching forward they see Rasta in a field, wobbling, heaving. Each breath spurts blood from two holes in his skull. With a dose of opioids potent enough to fell him but not kill him, poachers butchered his face and left him. Cursing viciously, the young ranger sights Rasta’s massive beautiful mutilated head. And puts three bullets in it. Then he leans against a thorn tree and sobs.
He is given time off, told to rest—then abruptly called back. His boss insists he visit Zambia with the project director of the North Luangwa Conservation Programme. As she drives, the director tells the ranger the story of five black rhinos arriving at Luangwa on a Hercules aircraft in 2003, gifts from his park to resurrect Zambia’s extinct population. Almost fifty strong now, not one has fallen to a poacher.
He is silent, then says, The killers, the syndicate kingpins, the people who think horn cures them, the men who carry it to look important—I hate them all.
I know, she says. After a long pause she adds, They have never been in a rhino’s presence.
He remembers: neither had he, before Rasta.
When they arrive, the project director introduces him to a smiling Zambian man about to board a bus with twenty squealing schoolchildren for a three-day field trip into the park. The Zambian sketches his story: A local farmer, he became a ranger at Luangwa, then started teaching children about rhinos in schoolrooms. Which I still do, he says. But the rhinos are our best teachers. We bring children into their presence.
