FIVE
I write these words with an extremely heavy feeling weighing me down as yesterday late morning I found my darling Five hippo dead.
Five was the son of Blackface the only son she ever had in the nearly twenty years that I have lived with these hippos. I believe his father was Robin as both Blackface and Robin are what I call black hippos in their colouration, and Five was very much like his parents. When Blackface has mated with other bulls her offspring have never been as black as Five was, so I think it is highly likely that Robin was his father.
Five was born on the 30th December 2004 the fifth calf born to the Turgwe hippos in that year, which was why I called him Five. His mother Blackface being the most remarkable of all the female hippos as her character and behaviour have always stood out in many amazing ways.
Blackface was the only female who would continuously challenge human beings by charging them. Or even at times leaving the water to make her point. I think that before I came to live in this area some human did something terrible to her for she never lost her distrust of human beings.
Last October I went away for a couple of weeks and Jean-Roger remained here. He was gone for two days to take me up to Harare and on his return both Blackface and Five had disappeared from their normal pool by our house. Previously Blackface had been constantly beaten up by other hippos who were trying to attack Five and remove him from the pool. Being a young juvenile male the older male Kuchek and perhaps even Robin did not want Five to stay in the pool, as at a later stage in his life he would prove competion for them.
Blackface has always been one of the best mothers but normally with all of her daughters she weans them at an early age of around three years and then wants nothing more to do with them, chasing them away if they try to stay close to her and even attacking them if they did not get the message. In Five’s case due to him being a male her attitude was totally different and she never left his side, protecting him against any other hippo that looked like it was going to be aggressive towards her son.
So by October last year she had many cuts on her body none life threatening and Five only had a couple of very light cuts on his hindquarter area but she had taken the brunt of whichever hippo was getting annoyed. I had never during daylight hours seen any hippo attack Five or her for that matter but had my idea that it might be Kuchek who is nine years old this year and so much older than Five and very much aware of his male status.
So I left for a while and both these hippos disappeared. In the old days before land invasions if a hippo went missing nine times out of ten I believed it was due to moving to another area. Then a few years ago one of the white hunters here with a client murdered Zen a young male juvenile hippo. Using the excuse that Zen’s wounds (from another hippo attack) were so bad he had to be shot. Yet the client took my darling Zen’s skull back to the USA, which proved to me that this was just an excuse to kill him as the client paid to murder Zen. From that day I have always been afraid that the hunters around us could kill more hippos or have done and I have never found out. Human nature is such that we trust until trust is broken and then mistrust grows at an increasingly high rate.
So when hippos go missing, now I fear white hunters, then poachers, and lastly natural deaths, be it predator or fighting with each other. So since October I have been searching for both of these hippos. I had seen Five on four occasions, in January, February, April and June and at each time it was for one day and then he disappeared again. This made me believe that he was with his mother but they had found some area within the Turgwe River to hide up in and live in and which I had not managed to locate. This is highly possible as the Turgwe in the dry season has many tiny channels with reeds growing at the edge of them where one or two hippos could tuck up and not be seen. I came across tracks that easily could have been these two and because Five always looked in good shape I believed he was with his mother.
On June 23rd I bumped into him in daylight walking towards one of the cemented pans I have had built for the hippos. As soon as he saw me he turned around and headed back towards the thickly vegetated bush island that the hippos and elephants and sometimes a rhino live in.
He was nervous but looked in good condition so again I hoped with all my heart that he was with his mother and was just paying the area a visit as this is where he was born.
Jean-Roger and I on a few occasions had tried going into the island to search for the two of them but on every occasion it became rather fraught with possible problems. In that many times the elephants were living in there during the day and so made it impossible to search inside there with a herd of over 40 elephants with young calves using it as a refuge. Then on a few other occasions we bumped into Bobin another young juvenile male some six months older than Five and had to make a hasty retreat as its so thick in there he felt cornered by our presence and so could easily have charged.
I kept searching in other areas but upstream from Hippo Haven the Turgwe is thick with reeds and so it is totally difficult to get within the channels without the possibility of bumping into an old buffalo bull or a pride of lion. This happened on one occasion to Jean-Roger when on a snare patrol with the two game scouts.
So as is my way I kept hope, hope that both of my beloved hippos were alive. Now that I have found Five dead I fear that his mother must also be dead. The trouble is we have not found her carcass so I fear that there is a possibility that that white hunter who murdered Zen with his client may have killed her. Or she is dead hidden in reeds and I have not located her bones. I cannot believe now that she is alive for she would have been with her son.
The only other thing that would have kept her away from him would be if she has had a new calf. Yet when a hippo mother has given birth after staying away for a maximum of a month they always return to the family. She would have the choice of joining Robin and the family of hippos near to Hippo Haven. Or she could go to Tembia the younger bull some six kilometers upstream from us. She has joined neither.
So I fear for her as well, yet one cannot have closure until one is sure. If I find that another hunter has killed her I will not be responsible for my actions, so I pray with all my being that if she has died it is like Five naturally.
In Five’s case we could easily re-enact what had occurred. I had first noticed a shape in a tiny pool which is the only water in the Chichindwi River which joins the mouth of the Turgwe Channel. I saw the shape as a terrapin was sitting upon it. I then moved back for a closer look and realised that it was a hippo but as the terrapin moved into the water and the body did not move I began to fear the worst.
I got to within twenty feet of the back of the hippo but as it was in the middle of the pool I could not get any closer and its head was below the surface. I realised by then it was dead. I could not at that stage identify it but knew it was a juvenile which meant it could be one of five hippos that I had not seen that morning, Five being one of them.
I rushed home to get help and Jean-Roger and the two game scouts and Silas came back with me. Jean and I waded into the pool which in one place was about three feet deep. There was a great possibility of crocodiles being in the water but I was so angry at that stage that I did not care. I am the kind of person that I normally either cry and then get angry or visa versa. At this moment I was angry as I was terrified we would find that this hippo had been killed by man, a poacher or a hunter.
When the Africans saw that we were both in the water they reluctantly joined us. Silas has done this before with me so he was not so worried, but the game scouts were not very happy to be in that pool.
Jean found the head of the hippo and tied a rope around it and we made the plan to try and tow him nearer to the waters edge. Although Five was only a juvenile he probably weighed about half a ton and as he had only been dead a matter of a few hours he was not water logged and still had air in his lungs. We believe he was killed around 5 to 7a.m and I found him at 10.30a.m.
I could not help pull him as I have in the last nine months had a series of ailments. I believe many of them are due to stress and worry over Blackface and Five, as both of these hippos were so important to me and Blackface in particular was my number one female hippo for me. One of my three of my problems is a cracked wrist due to my baboons tripping me up. This sounds funny but I had walked with them one day in the bush and they got a fright from a bushbuck that ran out of the bushes and so they dashed in front of me and tripped me. I fell onto the one arm and my copper African bangles hit a rock and cracked the left wrist. A doctor told me there was nothing to do for it so I have lived with that hassle, as fortunately I am right handed, but it hurts and I cannot put pressure on that hand and wrist. Then I also have a hernia on my stomach so cannot lift or pull. So all I could do was take photos and check for crocodiles as the four guys tried to pull the hippo closer to the edge of the pool. They managed to pull him a bit but it proved too difficult and so we decided the only way was to turn him onto his side and then upside down to try and see what killed him.
We found only two major cuts and both had been done by another hippo not man. There was a gash on his side of about six inches in length and went all the way down to the rib cage but we believe he could have survived that. You would be amazed at the wounds we have seen on wild animals that they survive, that no domestic animal or man for that matter could survive.
The wound though that killed my boy was a cut shorter in length of only about 2.5 inches but this was on the underside of his neck and had hit the jugular vein or the carotid artery. My darling had bled to death like my wonderful and much loved bull Bob back in 2003.The amazing thing was that Five’s eyes were closed. He is the first animal that I have ever known that has died that had its eyes closed afterwards. As Jean-Roger said to me he would literally have more or less gone to sleep in the pool from loss of blood and not woken up.
I found on the hippo all the marks that told me it was my boy Five. He had very recognisable white markings on his one front leg and behind the leg as well. He had an old scar on his head by his eye that was also a very tell tell sign. When a hippo has died it is sometimes very hard to know which hippo it is as death changes us. Yet I had known it was Five even before I saw the markings but I still had to confirm it to myself on coming home, by checking on all his photographs.
We retraced his last moments. Jean and I alone leaving the scouts and Silas behind as I did not want to take them into the hippos bush island and possibly frighten any animals in there. We found a line of blood that took us to a very thickly vegetated area and there we found his tracks and another much larger hippos and a huge pool of bright red blood which meant it was arterial blood. We found another smaller pool of blood nearby and then it lead us on Five’s last walk back to the pool.
He had not ran or in anyway stumbled so I believe that after being attacked he had got away from the other hippo and taken himself to the pool where he would have felt safer. All hippos automatically move to water when endangered that is to them their safe haven.
At the pool he would have died relatively quickly as he had lost so much blood in the bush island but he had made it back to water where he belonged. Although I was holding back all of my emotions and tears as one should never cry in front of the Africans, as then they loose respect for you. I am a woman and to remain in their eyes a strong woman I cannot in anyway show the pain that the death of Five gave to me.
Jean photographed me touching his body as in life I am never able to touch my hippos. It is a dream of mine to one day have one of them allow me physical contact, which could happen as Dizzy a young female is becoming friendlier and friendlier as she grows up.
Initially I had wanted to pull Five to the land so that lions could easily find him and he could help them in their constant quest for food, but we just could not drag him to land. We should possibly have cut his body to allow predators to dispose of him quickly but I could not bring myself to let Jean or the scouts cut him open. So eventually we have left him lying on his side nearer to the edge where he will either be found and eaten or slowly will decompose. I have set-up the borrowed camera trap nearby to see if any hippos investigate his body and also to see if any predators come along. Lastly to check that no poacher or hunter tries to remove his head or any part of his body, if they do I will catch it on the camera and locate them.
When he has finally decomposed I will try to bring his skull home to Hippo Haven. Poachers love collecting hippos’ skulls for their teeth and I do not want that to happen to Five, and so his skull will join all the other hippos that have died over the years. They rest in our bush garden in front of our home looking out over the Turgwe River and there they can rot safely without anyone taking their teeth as a souvenir.
Five only had two hippo parents both ladies who I classify as my personal friends. Hilary Johnson and Suzie Marsh. His other parents have only stayed with him for a year and then moved on. Hilary and Suzie loved Five and stayed supporting him. They too hurt and Hilary in particular wrote to me words that allowed my tears to flow but the pain never goes away. You just learn to live with it.
The only sustaining thing is that he died naturally but now I live in fear of what has happened to his mother Blackface. I must find her remains to have closure but I fear that she is no longer alive.
Five never made it to being a bull he died young and young deaths are in so many ways harder to live with than older deaths. No departure of a loved one is easy to live with but we have to make room in our hearts for the living and keep the memories of those that have moved on as something that will never leave us but that the living still need us in their lives.
Karen Paolillo, Hippo Haven, Save Valley Conservancy. July 18th 2010 Zimbabwe.
