Snowdrop, the hippopotamus

ARTHUR WEICALL

■ The textbooks state that the hippopotamus is a semi-aquatic, non-ruminating, quadrupedal, artiodactyle, ungulate mammal; and after consulting the dictionary, I have to admit that it is all too true. Indeed, it is an understatement. The hippopotamus is a denizen of darkest Africa; he belongs to the pig-family; he weighs about four tons when full grown, and measures fourteen feet from nose to tail; he has the largest mouth of any existing animal: his stomach can comfortably hold -ix bushels of food; and his teeth root things up like a plough, and are so hard that when you are getting the ivory from a carcass you use an axe, and the sparks fly out at every stroke.

Also, he sweats blood at least, his skin, which is two inches thick, exudes a red fluid when he is excited. It isn't really blood, but it makes him look like a massacre.

An English friend of mine and his wife, who lived on the upper reaches of the Nile, kept a pet hippopotamus to play with their children; and it is about this particular one that I am going to write, for he is really the only hippopotamus I have known at all intimately. They called him Snowdrop.

His parents lived farther south, at no great distance from the equator; and when my friend first saw him, he was a pink-skinned baby, about the size of a pig, and was standing on bis mother's back as she floated in deep water. There were twenty or thirty others some of them youngsters— also floating about, with their eves, ears, and nostrils above the surface, and their backs awash; but this was the only baby, and my friend determined there and then to kidnap him.

Presently, however, as lie watched them from between the leafy branches of a tree, the mother took it into her head to submerge, which she did, like all her kind, by closing her nostrils and sinking backward, her nose disappearing last of all. The baby looked very startled and uttered a bleat like a sheep, but somehow be managed to keep his position and to sink too; and when his mother came up again about a couple of minutes later he was still on her back, breathless and blinking, but very pleased with himself.

Each day, after this, the would-be kidnaper crept down to the river's edge to study the habits of the herd, and he found that in the late afternoons they used to foregather on a certain steaming-hot mudbank which jutted out from the shadow of the overhanging trees into the sun-blazed water. They came up out of the river by twos and threes, snorting and flicking their small, erect ears; and when the first few had settled themselves in a compact group, the others flopped down practically on top of them. In fact, they were so anxious to use each other as cushions that the young ones hardly dared to lie down for fear of being sat upon and squashed.

From time to time a shrill scream would announce that a veteran's four tons' weight had descended upon somebody's half-ton child; and then there would be a lot of wriggling and tugging while the infant extricated itself, the veteran meanwhile grunting his surprise at the disturbance but doing nothing whatsoever about it.

Snowdrop's mother evidently realized the danger, for she kept away from the others and sometimes came ashore, scrambling up to the top of the ten-foot cliffs of earth and tree-roots which bordered the river, and settling herself down in the thick bushes, with her baby by her side. There was a sort of lane or gangway leading steeply up from the mudbank to the top, made by the constant trampling of the whole herd on its nightly expeditions ashore; but this mother and child seemed to be the only ones to venture so far from the safety of the water by day.

One afternoon my friend, who was concealed up a tree, nearly fell out of his nest, owing to the breaking of a branch, and made such a noise in saving himself that the mother-hippopotamus dashed out of the clump of bushes below him and jumped straight off the top of the cliff into the water, which she struck with a deafening bang, sending a regular tidal-wave up onto the mudbank. A moment later little Snowdrop leapt after her. hurtling through the air with his four legs pointing stiffly downward, his big nose pointing upward, and his eyes tight shut.

The entire herd thereupon scrambled to their feet in alarm, hurried into the water, and disappeared. They did not swim out and then dive: they simply walked out of sight and continued to walk about the bed of the river for the next six or eight minutes, until their breath was exhausted, after which they came up in midstream, blowing and spouting like whales.

That is the curious thing about them— they can stay down below, not swimming, but walking or running or even galloping about the bottom, until, by some trick of levitation which nobody understands, they float rapidly up to the surface like balloons and then, after taking a few deep breaths which you would think would make them even more buoyant, they sink to the bottom again like lumps of lead and stay down there without any effort at all. Moreover, they can float on the surface either with their backs well out of water, in which case you often see a group of them lazily resting their ponderous heads across each other's shoulders, or else they can submerge themselves, except for their eyes and nostrils, and remain motionless like that for as long as they choose.

When they are on land, they can climb about with gymnastic agility, in spite of the fact that they are often twelve or fourteen feet in girth and have such short legs that their stomachs nearly touch the ground. They can very fast, and can jump into the water nil a height of fifteen to eighteen feet or so.

It was this jumping incident which gave my friend an idea. He did not want to shoot the mother, and in fact the shot would have been a difficult one from his tree-top, for there are only two fatal shots—one horizontally, just under the eye. when the creature is facing l. and the other from behind the ear when its head is turned away. But he was wonderfully handy with a lasso, and it occurred to him that if he could get the noose around the baby just after the mother had jumped from the cliff, there would be time to escape with his prisoner before she could come back up the lane to the rescue.

On the following day he had no luck. The mother was teaching her child to submerge, and was too busy to come up into the bushes. She took him on her back out into deep water, and then sank beneath him; and it was evident that below the surface she shook him off, because he presently reappeared alone, looking very scared, while she herself came up some distance away. Then when he had found her and had climbed onto her back, she went down once more and again left him to come up by himself.

Next day, however, all went well. Mother and child came up the lane into the bushes beneath the tree where the kidnaper was hidden, and presently she rolled onto her side and lay there suckling the baby, as every good hippopotamus-mother does for the first six to nine months of the infant's life. There was an open space of two or three yards between the bushes and the edge of the cliff, and it was in this that he hoped to make his capture.

When she appeared to be asleep, lie climbed down the tree with infinite caution until he was close to the ground, and then he suddenly fired off his revolver. The poor lady jumped up in a great fright, and took a flying leap off the cliff, expecting her baby to do the same; but the lasso flew out unerringly, and in an instant Snowdrop was on his back.

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A towel was flung over his absurd head to stifle his squeals, and a moment later the kidnaper had him in his arms, and was dashing for the camp, which was on a high and impregnable knoll of rocks a few hundred yards away.

On the following afternoon my friend saw the bereaved mother moving about around the herd on the mudbank, looking for her lost baby, and trying to lever-up some of the old heavyweights with her nose to see if they were by any chance sitting on her child. In the end, however, she gave it up and went to sleep.

Snowdrop was fed with cow's milk, mixed with maize into a thin porridge, and he thrived on this during the journey down the river. He had a tank of water to himself, and by the end of the voyage he had taught himself to run about the bottom of it as quickly as he ran about the ship's deck—more quickly, in fact, for on the deck he used often to stumble onto his knees and bump his nose.

A young hippopotamus swims when he is no more than three or four hours old, but it is many weeks before he can run fast on dry land without a spill. His legs are short, and his feet are hard to manage at first, for he has four toes to each foot, and every toe has its own separate hoof—a fact which makes him liable to trip up. Perhaps that is why Nature has made his upper lip like a great bolster: no hump ever hurts him. and when he is in captivity his keeper will often kick him on the snout to tickle him into a

The house to which the kidnaped baby was taken faced the Nile, and had at one side a cutting or backwater leading to a disused boathouse. Part of this cutting and the ground on either side were carefully stockaded around for him, and he was given the run of the tumbled-down boathouse as well. He was sometimes allowed also to come into the garden, and even up onto the verandah where he would stand about, looking rather humble, or would try to efface himself as much as possible by getting behind the armchairs or under the table, only showing his mouth, which was held patiently open for gifts of food.

My friend had two little girls, then aged about six and eight; and it was they who called their new pet "Snowdrop," because he reminded them of a lady who had played the part of a fairy with that name, in a charity ballet in an English village where they once stayed with their grandmother. Snowdrop soon came to love these two children with all his heart, and he would follow them around like a dog. He was very gentle with them, but they had to be rather careful in their games with him, because he was liable to push them over, or, if they were sitting on the ground, to sit down on top of them.

When 1 went to slay at the house and made his acquaintance, he was some eight or nine months old, and was then about four feet long and two feet high. His smooth, polished hide was a mottled grey and pink; the inside of his enormous mouth was puttycolored; his teeth were little brown stumps like a worn-out wooden rake; and his eyes were grey and tender.

Being a vegetarian and living mainly on hay, grass, water-weeds, maizeporridge, cabbage-leaves, and carrots, his breath was as sweet as a cow's. He was very clean in his habits; and his shining skin fitted him like a glove —for the hippopotamus in this respect is totally unlike the rhinoceros, whose skin hangs in creases and folds and looks as though it had been made for somebody else.

Snowdrop seldom got himself dirty, except when he used to grub for weeds under the water and come up with earth and roots and strands of green dropping from his mouth. He would then stand munching, with mud and juice and saliva pouring out from between the untidy flaps of flesh which served him for lips; but generally when he was being fed by the children with crackers or crusts of bread he used to hold open a perfectly clean mouth, and they were always kissing him and embracing him.

They were devoted to him. of course, for not only was he a complete novelty in pets, but his disposition was really lovable. Personally, 1 found him a little too apologetic, too obviously the victim of an inferiority complex; but for this very reason he made a strong appeal to the children's maternal compassion. Unlike the rhinoceros again, which has a dangerous horn and a wild eye, the hippopotamus disarms criticism by its apparent defenselessness; and Snowdrop's bashful manners seemed to suggest an unceasing apology for being an awful monster left over by mistake from prehistory.

In his own country, a hippopotamus usually keeps quiet by day, and bellows and snarls defiantly at night; but Snowdrop was either too young to make much noise or else was ashamed to do so all alone. Such sounds as he did make were all rather restrained, and there was that same suggestion of apology in them—as though be knew his voice was terrible, and did not wish to draw attention to himself.

When the children first took me to visit him in bis stockade, he hid coyly behind them, and it was only when I pretended not to be looking that he came forward, leaned heavily against my leg, opened his huge mouth, and looked appealingly up at me with shy, soft eyes. One early morning, before I was up, my host brought him into my bedroom through the long windows which opened into the garden: and there he sat, on the tiled floor, squatting on his haunches as though he were pretending to he a dachshund, while my friend talked to me.

The children, he said, were going to be sent borne to school in England next year, and this would break Snowdrop's heart; and anyway he himself expected soon to be transferred to Khartoum, in which sophisticated city one positively could not keep a pet hippopotamus. Then, too, Snowdrop was growing bigger every day; and not only would his food soon become a considerable expense, but he might he a serious danger if he were to begin to throw his weight about.

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And in any case what was to become of Snowdrop in the far future? Nobody knows the age to which a hippopotamus lives; hut as the females are known to have babies after they are thirty it is to be presumed that the average span of life is more than fifty years. Sometimes you see a blearyeyed, brown-tusked old fellow who looks like a centenarian, and whose hones are so weary that he floats motionless for hours in the water, and on land has to rest his ohin on a rock or something, to relieve the strain on his

While these matters were being discussed, Snowdrop sat rather dejectedly beside my bed, shyly opening his mouth from time to time in the hope that 1 might have a few dozen carrots about me, or a barrow-load of hay, but too diffident to call attention to himself in any other way. Then, suddenly, he pricked up his small ears, uttered a love-cry like the creaking of a door, and galloped out into the garden. He had seen the children.

The problem of his future was indeed a very difficult one, and it was undecided when I left. A native servant, while I was there, suggested that the best tiling to do would be to kill and eat him. The flesh of a young hippopotamus is considered very good, and the fat under the skin is regarded as a delicacy, while the hide boils down into the best mock-turtle soup. But to eat Snowdrop was unthinkable.

Ultimately what happened was this. The children went away to school, and Snowdrop's heart seemed to break. He would hardly touch his food, and he spent most of the time standing in the boathouse, staring in front of him. Then one day my friend was unexpectedly ordered to go up by boat to investigate certain matters in the south, in the district from which the forlorn creature had originally come; and he at once decided to take him there.

Thus it came about that one hot. starlit night, when the steamer was moored in the wilds, and the sounds of bellowing and snorting could be heard in the near distance, my friend led Snowdrop out of his stable on deck, and. having removed the gangway-rail, invited him to take the plunge back into the dim realms of prehistory. For a full minute Snowdrop stood there, staring entranced at the water, and then suddenly he lifted his head, opened his enormous mouth, and uttered a raucous bellow—the first he had ever attempted, and almost the first sound he had ever made which had in it no note of shyness or apology.

A moment later he dived into the dark river.