Chapter 5

HUNTING THE HIPPO

Except once or twice in the Zoo, I never had seen a hippopotamus, and I was most anxious, before I left the Congo, to meet one. I wanted to look at him when he was free, and his own master, without iron bars or keepers; when he believed he was quite alone, and was enjoying his bath in peace and confidence. I also wanted to shoot him, and to hang in my ancestral halls his enormous head with the great jaws open and the inside of them painted pink and the small tusks hungrily protruding. I had this desire, in spite of the fact that for every hippo except the particular one whose head I coveted, I entertained the utmost good feeling.

As a lad, among other beasts the hippopotamus had appealed to my imagination. Collectively, I had always looked upon them as most charming people. They come of an ancient family. Two thousand four hundred years ago they were mentioned by Herodotus. And Herodotus to the animal kingdom is what Domesday Book is to the landed gentry. To exist beautifully for twenty-four hundred years without a single mésalliance, without having once stooped to trade, is certainly a strong title to nobility. Other animals by contact with man have become degraded. The lion, the "King of Beasts," now rides a bicycle, and growls, as previously rehearsed, at the young woman in spangles, of whom he is secretly afraid. And the elephant, the monarch of the jungle, and of a family as ancient and noble as that of the hippopotamus, the monarch of the river, has become a beast of burden and works for his living. You can see him in Phoenix Park dragging a road-roller, in Siam and India carrying logs, and at Coney Island he bends the knee to little girls from Brooklyn. The royal proboscis, that once uprooted trees, now begs for peanuts.

But, you never see a hippopotamus chained to a road-roller, or riding a bicycle. He is still the gentleman, the man of elegant leisure, the aristocrat of aristocrats, harming no one, and, in his ancestral river, living the simple life.

And yet, I sought to kill him. At least, one of him, but only one. And, that I did not kill even one, while a bitter disappointment, is still a source of satisfaction.

In the Congo River we saw only two hippos, and both of them were dead. They had been shot from a steamer. If the hippo is killed in the water, it is impossible to recover the body at once. It sinks and does not rise, some say, for an hour, others say for seven hours. As in an hour the current may have carried the body four miles below where it sank, the steamer does not wait, and the destruction of the big beast is simple murder. There should be a law in the Congo to prevent their destruction, and, no doubt, if the State thought it could make a few francs out of protecting the hippo, as it makes many million francs by preserving the elephant, which it does for the ivory, such a law would exist. We soon saw many hippos, but although we