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Rick Bass
$25.00
H i g h e r i n C anada

Rick Bass

© A NTONIN B URGE A U D
From one of our most gifted writers
on the natural world comes a stunning
exploration of a unique landscape
and the improbable and endangered
Praise for R ic k B a s s animal that makes its home there.

R
“Probably no American writer since Hemingway has written about i c k B a s s f i r st m ad e a n a m e fo r
man in nature more beautifully or powerfully than Rick Bass.” himself as a writer and seeker of
— Dallas Morning News rare, iconic animals, including
the grizzlies and wolves of the

The Black
American West. Now he’s off on a new, far-flung
“In Bass’s chest beats the hearts of both the poet and the hunter;
R ICK B ASS is the author of many he is lyrical and unsentimental, and that rare combination whets a Searching adventure in the Namib of southwest Africa, on

Rhinos
the trail of another fascinating, vulnerable spe-

of  Namibia
The Black Rhinos
sharp edge on his prose.”
acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. His for Survivors cies. The black rhino is a three-thousand-pound,
fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous — Chicago Sun-Times squinty-eyed giant that sports three-foot-long
Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute in the African
of  Namibia
dagger horns, lives off poisonous plants, and goes
of Letters, and fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim
“Bass captures quiet human truths amidst his astonishing portraits Desert for days without water.
Human intervention and cutting-edge con-
of life in the wilderness.”
Foundation, among others. Recently, his mem- servation have saved the rhinos — for now — from
oir Why I Came West was a finalist for a National — People
the brink of extinction, brought on by poaching
Book Critics Circle Award and his novel Nash-
© Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

and war. Against the backdrop of one of the most

ville Chrome was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times “If any writer can awaken a taste for the outdoors, Bass can.” ancient and harshest terrains on earth, Bass, with
Book Prize. Another narrative of Africa, In My his characteristic insight and grace, probes the
— Detroit Free Press
Home There Is No More Sorrow, about Bass’s time complex relationship between humans and na-
teaching writing in Rwanda, is forthcoming ture, and meditates on our role as both destroyer
from McSweeney’s. and savior.
In the tradition of Peter Matthiessen’s The Tree
J ac k e t p h o t o g ra p h s : d e s e r t © F o t o f e e l i n g / W e s t e n d 6 1 / C o r b i s ,
Where Man Was Born, Bass captures a haunting
R h i n o © P e t e r L i l l i e / G e t t y I mag e s slice of Africa, especially of the “black” rhinos
J ac k e t d e s i g n b y P at r i c k B a r ry & k ay l e i g h m c ca n n that glow ghostly white in the gleaming sun.
$25.00 HIGHER IN CANADA

ISBN 978-0-547-05521-3

houghton mifflin harcourt

www.hmhbooks.com 1036575 0812
 The
BLACK R HINOS
of NA MIBIA

Searching for Survivors in

the African Desert

RICK BASS

H ou g h ton M i f f l i n H arcourt
Boston • New York • 2012

Bass_BLACK RHINOS_int_F.indd v 5/17/12 1:42 PM

 Copyright © 2012 by Rick Bass
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bass, Rick, date.
The black rhinos of Namibia : searching for survivors in the
African desert / Rick Bass.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-547-05521-3
1. Black rhinoceros — Namibia. 2. Bass, Rick, date.—Travel — Namibia.
3. Namibia — Description and travel. 4. Wildlife conservation. I. Title.
QL737.U63B37 2012
599.66'8 — dc23
2011051598

Book design by Melissa Lotfy

Map by Jacques Chazaud
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Bass_BLACK RHINOS_int_F.indd vi 6/13/12 4:17 PM

 Contents

Map ix
Prologue xi

Pa rt I: Pastoral 1
Pa rt I I: Wild 77
Pa rt I I I: Dust 197

Epilogue 241
Acknowledgments 271

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Bass_BLACK RHINOS_int_F.indd ix 5/17/12 1:42 PM
 Prologue

I had been apprehensive about traveling to Africa, not yet un-

derstanding, as I do now, that the world is Africa: that Africa has
been at the back of the world’s curve for so long that it is now
nearing the front again; that the rest of the world, which came
from Africa, is becoming Africa again, as if the secret yearnings
of an older, more original world are beginning to stir once more,
desiring and now seeking reunification by whatever means pos-
sible — perhaps subtly, or perhaps in a grandiose way.
There is less and less a line, invisible or otherwise, between
Africa and the world. And rather than arousing alarm — or is this
my imagination? — it seems possible that as Africa’s long woes
and experiences become increasingly familiar to the larger world
— radiating, as the origin and then expansion of certain species,
including our own, is said to have radiated from Africa, into the
larger or farther and newer world — we are turning to Africa not
with quite so much colonial patronizing, but with greater respect,
partnership.
There are those elsewhere in the world recognizing now that
although Africa cannot by certain measurements be said to have
prospered, it has, after all, survived — while many in the United
States, for instance, exponentially less tested, are already buck-
ling and fragmenting, falling apart at the seams. I am not saying

xi

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 P r o l o g u e

our country yet has a whiff or taste of Africa’s troubles — but I

am suggesting that perhaps our own little sag is creating a space
within us for something other than arrogance, and maybe even
something other than inattention.
One country in Africa, Namibia, is fixing one problem — and
I will not label it a small, medium, or large problem — with cre-
ativity and resolve. That’s one problem solved, with a near eter-
nity of problems still remaining. But it’s a start.
We in the United States, on the other hand, are moving back-
wards: removing nothing from our checklist of either social or
environmental woes — still proceeding, with the absurd premise
that there is a wall between the two — and, in fact, adding to our
lengthy checklist of unsolved problems and crises. Often we cre-
ate new problems as we go, trudging into the next century with
considerable unease, as if not only poorly sighted but possessing
none of the other sensors at all, compassion included. Moving
forward into the twenty-first century, but backwards into time
and history, while some countries in Africa (and elsewhere) inch
forward.
What is the individual’s duty in a time of war — ecological
and otherwise?
What is the individual’s duty in a time of world war?
Always, the two most time-tested answers seem to arise: to
bear witness, and to love the world more fully and in the moment,
as it becomes increasingly suspect that future such moments will
be compromised, or perhaps nonexistent.
And yet: one would be a fool to come away silently from the
Namib Desert, having seen what I’ve seen — people in a nearly
waterless land continuing to dream and try new solutions that are
land- and community-based, and who move forward with pride

xii

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 P r o l o g u e

and vigor and, perhaps rarest and most valuable of all these days,
the vitality of hope.
The rhino — guardian of this hard edge of the world, pushed
here to the precipice — is giving them hope.

xiii

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 H aving always been somewhat clumsy in the world,
and growing more so as I begin to age, I agreed to travel to Af-
rica with my friend Dennis with some apprehension. Dennis,
a burly fellow whose presence in the world — having had his
arm nearly whacked off at the shoulder by a float plane pro-
peller, and having been charged and knocked down by grizzly
bears, enthusiastic rugby players, and others — is still, even af-
ter a half century, sometimes extremely exuberant. He tends to
see only the positive lights of the world — the bounty over the
next rise — whereas I am a practical worrier. And knowing of
my clumsiness, I worried that I might make mistakes — simple
errors in local customs, out in the bush — that would conspire
then to be our undoing. I wasn’t so concerned for myself, but
was keenly aware of my responsibilities as a parent, of the need
to stick around for my girls.
And yet: I wanted to see a rhino. And not just any old rhino.
The white rhinos of South Africa were at that time prosper-
ing, inhabiting the brush and veldt country, gigantic and mythic
creatures whose appearance, sudden or otherwise, amid the leafy,
thorny scrub, or seen grazing at dawn on the pastoral green of a

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 t h e b l a c k r h i n o s o f n a m i b i a

bedewed meadow, should have pleased the desires of any middle-

aged man beginning to wonder at what he might not yet have
seen or known in the world.
But a white rhino evidently wasn’t good enough. Dennis and
the staff and students of his Round River Conservation Studies
— a nonprofit group he founded about twenty years ago — were
participating in a study of black rhinos. They are rarer and more
estranged from the world, you could say, inhabiting the edge of
the spooky and surreal Namib Desert, caught between the un-
inhabitable superheated giant sand dunes (some nearly two hun-
dred feet high) that plunge down into the South Atlantic Ocean,
and the scrabbling swell of human communities that cluster far-
ther inland.
In this space between humankind and the uninhabitable abyss
lived, and live, the last of the black rhinos, and the first of the
black rhinos — the recolonizing stock, if the black rhinos are to
ever be restored to the world they once strode in almost unimag-
inable numbers and with what must have once seemed like al-
most limitless distribution.
There is perhaps no greater animal that has been relegated
and confined to so small and finite a space. Surely it would be an
amazing sight to any traveler to witness, like a voyeur, the grace,
elegance, and dignity with which these last rhinos inhabit the
austere country that the world has bequeathed to them.
The Namib Desert is one of the oldest unchanged landscapes
on earth. A meandering contour of basalt prairie that rests like
the fuzzy light between dream and wakefulness, in this ribbon
of land between the ocean’s dunes and the last of the human
communities — the out-flung, hardscrabble goat-herding villages
— the rhino’s desert, known informally in recent times as Dama-

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 P a s t o r a l

raland, is almost identical, meteorologically and geologically, to

how it was more than 130 million years ago.
Because it receives between only one and five inches of rain
per year — year in and year out, across the eons — there is little
vegetation that grows there, and, as with much of sub-Saharan
Africa, life revolves, like a tiny model of our earth, around the
presence of water. It is the nearly eternal absence of water that
has shaped and sculpted everything in this part of the world —
crafting each individual species, and then the movements of pop-
ulations and cultures, and the relationships between these things,
with such godlike intricacy and sophistication that it seems surely
some foreknowledge must exist: for surely such intricacy of fit
and design cannot be random or crafted on the fly, but instead was
laid out earlier, as if by some ancient and celestial cartographer.
But these are middle-aged traveler’s questions or musings, and
surely not the black rhino’s. I simply wanted to witness such a
ponderous beast out upon such a naked and seemingly unsup-
portive landscape, and to see new things, and learn new things.
I wanted to see the mesmerizing spill of wind-rounded basalt
cobbles scattered to the horizon, each stone blood red and time-
varnished with iridescent sheen similar to that of birds’ intestines,
nothing but Martian-red cobbles on that desert terrain for as far
as the eye could see, and farther — for as far as the imagination
could see.
Without quite understanding it at the time, I wanted to see
also the face or at least a glimpse of the world-to-come — to wit-
ness the utter signature of environmental paucity — one of the
largest species pushed to the maximum brink: the bitter edge
that so many of our own species are hurtling toward here in the
United States, and elsewhere in the world. How far away are

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 t h e b l a c k r h i n o s o f n a m i b i a

we, and so many of our endangered species — most notably, in

my world back in Montana, the grizzly bear — from that same
precipice?
Here, with the rhino, was a creature — the mythic made real
— that, better than almost any other mammal, could tolerate a
world of almost supernatural heat, and the extreme rarity of wa-
ter. How many short years before we, even in the flush United
States, might be entering such a future? Not just our grizzlies and
our salmon, our cranes and darters and tanagers, but we-the-peo-
ple, perhaps frailest and palest among the species? How far, that
future?
I wanted to see the real creature, and I wanted to see the
myth too. I wanted to see an animal so stolid in the world, even
at the edge of apocalypse. I wanted to see what one journalist
called “rhinos on the moon.” I wanted to wake up or — perhaps
the opposite — go to sleep, and enter another dream, and to then
stand as close as possible to the edge of the dream of that other
world, close enough to smell the dust and to bake in the dazzle
of heat, and to hear the click of hoofs, and even the shifting of
muscle.
I wanted to stand right at the edge of that world — no more
than one step away, so that I might even choose to enter it —
to witness the creatures that have perhaps lived far beyond their
time, as if even the rhinos, having survived and flourished in
their old world, have themselves come now to the edge of an-
other dream, one that they too must choose to step into and pass
through, and in so doing, be saved or lost.

If we cannot fully know the largest and most conspicuous things

— the full nature of giant rhinos, for instance, or the future path
of so studied a species as mankind, and our own relationship with

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 P a s t o r a l

the world — then how can we be expected to know or learn

anything?
This I think is one of the things that attract the eye and the
mind to the grand megafauna of the world. It is on the canvas
of rhinos, blue whales, elephants, and grizzly bears that our in-
creasingly benumbed eyes, and the rest of our stunned senses,
besieged by the amperage of this era, can still seek order and un-
derstanding — can still see the master strokes, the primary strokes,
of nature writ large. Certainly there is every bit as much beauty
in the intermolecular structure, the crystalline lattices, of snow-
flakes, or in the frozen blood-crystals of a hibernating salamander.
But the megafauna promise, sometimes, to make things simpler
for us. A glimpse, a glance, reveals much: although even behind
the veil of the obvious, or what seems obvious, there is surely
much that remains hidden, even among giants.
Big animals, with the broad strokes of their movements and
lives, can show us the world, and with those broad strokes lead
us further into imagination. They can teach us how to consider
small strokes as well. Sometimes when I ponder humans’ place
in the world, it seems to me that we are positioned eerily in the
middle of almost all things, by which I do not mean the radiant
center around which all of nature and order orbits, but rather, in
the linear middle; not as dramatic as rhinos, for instance, but pos-
sessing (in some ways only) a bit more drama than, say, a snow-
shoe hare, a lemur, or a Norway rat.
We are well positioned in the world to act as sentries or wit-
nesses from that midpoint and look back at the small while look-
ing forward to the grand. And from that curious midpoint too we
are able to see back into history, and through the tools of science,
able to see some distance into the future.

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