Stepping into the rear of the canoe, I tightened the strap of my wide-brimmed cotton hat. Being on the river in a canoe alters your perspective, so you re gazing up at herds of Cape buffalo clustered atop the riverbank or are at eye level with wading storks, tiny brilliant malachite kingfishers and snowy white egrets. Then there were the hippos. It is amazing how quickly hippos lose their novelty and simply become annoying, beefy land mines blocking our path. I asked how many hippos live in these parts.
Victor knows hippos.
He has seen them as 100-pound newborns and later as adults that eat 100 pounds of grass a day, and he can sense their aggression by reading how they bring their heads back or flare their ears. Just after noon we pulled over beneath a grove of Natal mahogany trees for a long, leisurely lunch of cold cuts and salads, followed by a siesta. I grab a mat and head off for a siesta in the shade, snoozing lightly. When I awoke, a group of waterbuck was grazing less than 20 feet away, oblivious to my presence. By 4 P.M. the wind had died and the day had begun to cool.