There was a resonant sort of thunk on the bottom of the boat, which was a trifle disconcerting, because it was a small boat and the hippopotamus was quite large.
The boat was a lightweight thing in metal, hence the resonance; the hippo was a heavyweight thing in flesh and blood.
But it was not an act of aggression; rather, it was a miscalculation in the middle of an act of evasion. The hippo wasn’t alarmed by the contact, which was just as well, because you don’t want an alarmed hippo any more than you want an aggressive one.
Hippos retreat to deep water when they are disturbed, which can be even more disconcerting, especially if you happen to be in a canoe. They will often run “away” towards you, if you happen to lie between them and the deep water.
They will make a mad charge, frothing the water into Guinness, straight at you — and then submerge, while you sit there hoping that they don’t come up right under the canoe.
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But this was a very sedate and almost controlled encounter, and we cruised on along the funkiest river on the face of the planet, one measured out in hippos and crocodiles. It’s the Luangwa River in Zambia, and faithful readers of this column will have read about it before. Quite often. After all, the Luangwa Valley is my favourite place on Earth.
A river for all seasons
I was there last weekend. I was in Zambia trying to set up a conservation project with the World Land Trust. We finished up with Norman Carr Safaris as a reward for all those meetings, and to remind us what we are trying to conserve and why.
Few places are better equipped to do this than the Luangwa Valley.
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I looked down at the place as we flew over the Muchinga escarpment in a light aircraft, to see this mad river threshing its way across the vast floodplain like a wounded snake.
It’s been doing this unchecked and untamed for uncounted millennia.
It was the end of the wet season, and the river was appropriately enormous, deep, fast and a good 400 yards across. This really is a bipolar, Jekyll-and-Hyde of a river; I have waded across it without getting my knees wet at the end of the dry season, keeping a good lookout for crocs as I did so — not that looking out is much help.
But now, in the benign bright emerald colours of what they want us to call the green season — so much less off-putting to visitors than the wet season or rainy season — the valley is a different place and the Luangwa is a different river.
It is a river heaving with fish. For that, thank the hippos. They feed on land, come back to the water and crap. This transfer of nutrients enriches the river and makes for a massive fish population. And, therefore, a massive crocodile population; both the crocs and the population of them are huge.
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And across the wide floodplain, green and gentle right now, the antelopes and the buffaloes come and graze, and the lions and the leopards make their living.
The light fantastic
Was I really there? Writing these words on a pleasant Suffolk spring day, it seems highly unlikely. A couple of those indelible Luangwa vignettes tell me that this really wasn’t fantasy: the astonishing green of the white-fronted bee-eaters as a colony exploded from the bank as if fired from a shotgun, reflecting the sun so brightly they almost hurt the eyes.
A long-crested eagle riding down the wind like a child on a slide.
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The cathedral forest of stately mopane trees, a cup of tea by a pond in a clearing, the pond surrounded by little hawker dragonflies. One alighted on my hand, showing off its dapper wing-spots.
Walking across the floodplain with my old friend Abraham Banda, entirely surrounded by elephants, but distantly, unthreateningly. As dusk fell, the frogs raised their voices in a tinkling orchestra of Chinese woodblocks. From the river and lagoon, the deep dirty-old-man guffawing of hippos.
Some scientists have suggested, backed up by genetic evidence, that hippos are more closely related to whales than they are to pigs, and that the whales and hippos share a common ancestor as recently as 50 million years ago. That would make whales hoofed mammals, which is a bit of a facer, but modern taxonomy routinely throws these counterintuitive notions at us.
Perhaps the fact that they are whale-relatives helps to explain why I have always had a problem understanding hippos. I have never been able to read hippos the way I do elephants and lions, impalas and leopards. Hippos have always seemed to move to an unfamiliar rhythm.
At night, a genet, caught in the spotlight, looking like a large spotted cat, although strictly speaking it’s not a cat at all (taxonomy again).
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I have stroked a friend’s pet genet — now returned to the wild of its own volition — and they are the loveliest of beasts. Years ago I left a piece of my heart in the Luangwa Valley: surely it’s only fair that I take a genet back home in exchange.