ADVENTURES IN NEPAL - Wrestling with a Rhino

ADVENTURES IN NEPAL - Wrestling with a Rhino

Posted to OHE on 10 December 2001 by Jay Feldman for author John Hall 

History

Not all of Nepal is mountainous. Along the southern border of the country is a 20 mile-wide strip of land called the Terai, which lies at low elevation (about 600 feet) and is actually a part of the north Gangetic Plain. Nepal acquired this as a gift from the British at the time when it was a malarial jungle, inhabited only by a few tribesmen who were relatively resistant to malaria, but otherwise generally useless and unwanted by anyone else. 

The British, once they had established a foothold in India, found it hard to resist the temptation to acquire more and more of the country. Whatever parcel they held was always bordered by other lands in which troublesome people lived, who would launch raids across the border, or harbor refugees from British Justice, or create problems in some other way. So finally, the British were always forced to invade that neighboring territory and bring it under their benign jurisdiction, only to find that they had thusly established a new border across which the same problems developed. So it was that little by little they engrossed more and more of the country until all of India was under their rule. They would have encompassed Nepal as well, if it were not for those malarial jungles along its southern borders, and the ferocity of the Gurkhas who ruled that country and who were (and are) notoriously savage fighters, and who, in addition, had the decided advantage of holding the high ground. After a few futile attempts at invading the country, and loosing many troops to malaria and making little headway against the ardent defenders ensconced in their hills, the British decided that the conquest of Nepal was not worth the cost, and so, instead, they turned their efforts to trying to make friends of the King of Nepal by showering him with gifts and honors. This was so successful that when the Great Mutiny occurred, with the Black Hole of Calcutta and all that (I may have two different wars confused here, I will have to check my history), the King sent troops to help the British subdue the mutineers and restore order to India. In gratitude, the British gave the King the Terai, an ideal gift in the best tradition of international diplomacy, since the British could not be said to actually own the Terai in the first place, and it was totally useless to anyone in the second, but, since every nation and empire always craves more land, it was still received with enthusiasm by the Nepalis. And, in fact, once malaria was controlled, at least temporarily, after World War II, the Terai became a valuable frontier on which to settle villagers from the over-populated mountains of Nepal.  

Chitwan  

A portion of the Terai, Chitwan National Park, was set aside as a game preserve. This is one of the world's great game parks, less well known than those of East Africa, but rivalling them in the abundance and variety of animals. Here are found tigers, the great one-horned Indian rhinoceros, pythons, leopards, Mugger crocodiles, gharial crocodiles, Gangetic dolphins, storks, vultures, owls, and a wide variety of bears, deer, pigs, smaller cats, and other birds and animals. The Park is situated at the foot of the hills of Nepal, on the upper boundaries of the Gangetic Plain, and, as mentioned above, is about 600 feet above sea level. Several major rivers meet in the area, and their flood plains support a growth of tall grasses, which form a dense thicket as tall as the head of a man on elephant back. Above these river flats are found forests of sizeable trees and brush. This "jungle" was rather dry and dusty when we were there in January, 1979. Most of the tourists who visit the Park stay at Tiger Tops, then the largest inn in the Park, and the place where a buffalo or some similar offering, is regularly staked out to lure a tiger, so that the guests often have a chance to see this fabulous beast. We stayed at Gaida (Rhinoceros) Camp instead, which was more primitive and cheaper, not realizing that tigers would be more difficult to see there. As Gaylien said later, it was probably a good thing that I wasn't able to find a tiger to play with. Gaida Camp was a small camp, playing host to no more than 20 or 30 guests at a time. It consisted of a circular lodge on the banks of the Dungray River, just inside the Park. The lodge contained a kitchen and bar, and a large room that doubled as a dining hall and lounge. It had a large fireplace in the center which was lit in the evenings and whose fire would have been most welcome at that time of the year had not the damp logs that the elephants brought in to feed it required constant stoking with kindling to sustain a feeble and smoky blaze, that offered us rather little warmth. Around the lodge was a semi-circle of tents and tiny cabins in which the visitors stayed. Six or seven cabins had been finished and the semi-circle was completed with a similar number of large, canvass tents and a wash room. The wild bees of the neighborhood seemed to find the cabins particularly attractive, as practically every one had a large dewlap of honeycomb swarming with bees suspended from one or more of its eaves. We paid about $40 a night for a tent. This seemed pretty high at the time, for a battered old piece of army-surplus canvass, although the money also covered the plain but adequate meals, elephant and canoe rides, airfare to and from Kathmandu, and ground transportation from the airport to the site, a 2 hour ride by landrover, and, as it turned out, anything else that was necessary.  

The tent was floored with grass and had 3 cots in it. Gayle and the children put two of these together and slept cross-wise on them. I was too tall to do this, and had the third to myself. It was very cold and it took me 3 days to talk the camp employees into giving me enough blankets to stay warm at night - they had to wait until some other tourists left, I think. Although Chitwan is near the tropics and at a low altitude, it is cold in early January. The tourist brochure had suggested that a sweater might be needed. I wished that I'd brought my down jacket and pants. It was comfortable from about 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM in jeans, flannel shirt and sweater, but earlier or later, I found it necessary to put on all the clothes I had brought with me - thermal underwear tops and bottoms, two pairs of jeans, flannel shirt, wool sweater, and a cotton shirt. Later I was very glad to be so well padded.  

Wildlife is abundant in Chitwan. The day we arrived a few of our party walked down the river path from camp and saw a leopard, not a quarter of a mile from the lodge. There were about 300 rhinos in the park, and many of them must congregate in the vicinity of Gaida Camp, since they seemed as thick around the area as cattle on a ranch. The rhinos often roamed quite close to camp and we could hear them crashing and snorting in the brush when we retired to sleep at night. The camp workers left lighted kerosene lamps in front of each tent all night long to keep the animals away. We were there about 4 days, and in the mornings, we'd usually spend a couple of hours on elephant back, two or three visitors to an elephant plus the driver, walking the forests and grass flats. The "saddle" was a roughly flat sheet of canvass covering some kind of padding, and was about the size of a kitchen table-top. It was pretty awkward to sit on, especially if one is not designed to sit cross-legged comfortably, and there was little in the way of a harness to hold on to. On these strolls we saw numerous rhinos and chital or axis deer, and occasionally spotted a wild boar or shy sambar deer. There were many birds on the river and in the trees - storks, herons, ducks, iridescent rollers, woodpeckers, owls, tree pies, lovely rose-ringed parakeets, vultures, and many others. Once we saw a small family of monkeys. One day we drifted down the river in a dug-out canoe, watching the ruddy sheldrakes and other ducks, the swallows, and saw a Mugger crocodile napping on the shore. Nepali families with high-wheeled wooden ox carts were bringing loads of the long grass across the shallow river. The villagers are allowed to harvest this grass in the park for thatch a few weeks every winter. After lunch on shore, we were met by the elephants and rode back, startling a small, nimble barking deer, which quickly vanished into the undergrowth, and disturbing a large sleepy python, coiled up in a clump of grass, in the process, no doubt, of digesting his last meal.  

Encounter  

On our last day at Chitwan, I went out before breakfast to look for birds and animals. We had been cautioned not to leave camp without a native escort, but only one or two of the staff spoke English, and if one did ask for an escort, they would tell you to wait for an hour while they got an elephant ready, so most visitors simply ignored this rule and strolled along the river trails as they pleased when they wanted to view the wildlife. In the thick bush a quarter of a mile from camp, I heard some sounds, and approaching cautiously, found two adult rhinos a few yards apart, one of them accompanied by a small calf. I climbed a tree and watched as mother and calf browsed beneath me. The animals were breaking off branches an inch in diameter from the bushes, and chewing them up, producing considerable noise in the process, rather like a pair of giants munching on huge stalks of celery. They looked very peaceful and bovine, or perhaps more like enormous, ugly, but docile, sows. They wandered on, and I descended from my tree and returned to camp for breakfast.  

During the meal, Wendi was complaining that she had not been able to get any good photos of the rhinos. She had only seen them from elephant back, and as the rhinos moved away from the elephants, all of her views had been of the rear end of the animals. I am not sure that a rhinoceros can be said to have a photogenic side, but certainly its back-side is not its most attractive feature. Thoughtlessly, I spoke up and said that I knew where there were some rhinos near by, and we could go out after breakfast and get some good pictures of them.  

We made our way cautiously through the bush, walking along the game-trail that paralleled the river, and moving as silently as possible while listening for the sounds of feeding that I had noticed on my earlier foray. Suddenly, there was a snort, not 10 yards ahead of us. I peered through the undergrowth and made out the forms of the female rhino and her calf. As I should have anticipated, the animals had finished feeding for the morning and were resting quietly in the bush. The female had detected our approach before we were aware of her. We quickly retreated and hid behind a large bush. Realizing that the bush would not hide both of us adequately, I darted across the game trail and got behind a large tree. As I looked around it, I saw the rhino standing in the trail beside the bush where Wendi was hiding. Foolishly, I was still not really worried and considered the possibilities of getting a picture. However, in the next instant the great beast charged around the tree towards me. The Great Indian Rhinoceros, of which this animal was a specimen, is the second largest of the rhinoceros species, being slightly smaller than the African White Rhino and slightly larger than the African Black. A record male was measured at 16 feet from tail to snout and weighed about 2 tons. I am sure that the female that attacked me was not a particularly large example of her kind, but when she came after me, she looked as large as a run-away semi-trailer truck!  

I leaped over a fallen log to dodge around the tree. Instead of following me, she backed up and came around the other side, forcing me to jump over the log once more. We repeated this dance step a few times. I feared that eventually I would trip on the log, and then she would surely trample me. I was also concerned that she might back over the bush where Wendi was concealed and endanger her. Therefore, when the rhino was in her original position again, I decided to run down the game trail, away from Wendi, and try to find a tree that I could climb quickly. I had run several marathons before going to Nepal, and although I had had some knee problems and was not in training at the time, I was wearing a pair of running shoes and the expensive orthotics I hoped would correct the knee troubles. As I started down the game trail, however, my feet felt like they were encased in lead boots - I could not lift them fast enough and they felt weighed down by these light shoes. Even though the shoes were laced up and tied normally, I was somehow able to step right out of them and leave them in the path, so before I knew it I was racing down the trail in my stockinged feet!  

I had only taken a few more steps, however, when I felt a violent shove from behind, and I knew I had lost the race. Rhinos are not distance runners, but reportedly can sprint as fast as 30 miles per hour for short distances. If I had had a few hundred meters head start on her, she would never have caught me, but alas, I had no such advantage. I was still on my feet at this point and it seemed that my only hope was to veer suddenly off the trail and hope that she would go on past. Supposedly, if one can dodge a charging rhino and then hide, the beast will be so far away by the time it stops and turns around, and is so near-sighted, that it will be unable to see you, and there will be a good chance to escape. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to duck to the side suddenly while running full tilt straight ahead. My attempt to side-step simply resulted in a gradual curving off into the brush, which Madame Le Rhino followed without difficulty, as I realized when a second powerful blow lifted me off my feet and sent me sprawling into the thicket. I had the dismal thought that I would probably not survive this little adventure. I hoped that Wendi would escape unharmed, and wondered how Gaylien and the children would get along without me. I felt that they would probably get by quite well.  

The rhino battered me through the forest, using her snout in a rooting motion to toss me about and punish me. I went limp and resigned myself to the inevitable. Further attempts to escape seemed pointless as I felt like an ant in a dice cup - I had glimpses of sky followed by a snatch of bush or rhinoceros hide and then a hint of mud, a whirling panorama punctuated with thumps and abrupt changes in direction in a random, kaleidoscopic sequence. I could not fight her (even if I had had any way to do so) without enraging her further and could not hope to run when I scarcely knew up from down or side-ways. I tried to withdraw as much as possible from the unpleasant situation. I assume that she was trying to gore me with her horn, and I know that I must have been punctured by that or by the stubs of the broken bushes on which I fell. Yet, though I was well aware of the great force of her blows, I felt no pain and was not cognizant of being cut and torn. It felt as if a giant with a huge, but well-padded boxing glove was giving me a thorough pummeling. I don't know how long this lasted. It seemed like 15 minutes, but I'm sure it was not this long. At one point she paused. I was lying on my face in a slight depression, and I suddenly became aware of her huge knees pressing down on my back. I thought: "This is it.", and wondered why she did not just trample me. I hoped I would pass out before the pain became too intense. However, she stood up again before the pressure became too severe. Later I was told that rhinos and elephants have relatively delicate feet, and do not ordinarily trample their enemies unless they are really berserk. I suppose this is an evolutionary adaptation to prevent such large animals from slipping in the gore and falling, or perhaps to avoid puncturing their feet with the bone splinters. In any case, the forelegs of a rhino bend forward, and she was kneeling on my torso with the "knees" of these legs.  

She tossed me half-heartedly another time or two. I was now on my back, and she came around and picked up my right arm, near the shoulder, in her mouth. This was my worst moment - and I had a dandy selection to choose from! I almost panicked. The impulse to yank that arm out of her mouth before she bit down on it was nearly overpowering. I knew that if I tried, though, she would clamp down, as a dog will clamp down on a bone it is knawing when someone tries to take it away. I had seen the ease with which these animals could chew up inch-thick woody branches and I knew she could easily bite off an arm or a leg. It may have been the most difficult thing I have ever done, but, by the skin of my teeth, I mastered my fear sufficiently to remain limp and lay still. She gummed my arm thoughtfully, which was well padded, fortunately, because of all the clothes I was wearing. Like horses, rhinos have front teeth to nip off their fodder and massive rear teeth to grind it up, but there is a large gap with no teeth between these two dental batteries, and she held my arm in this gap. To my inexpressible relief, she mulled my arm about for a bit, as if uncertain about what it was or what to do with it, and then dropped it unharmed. Then she walked around me and picked up my left thigh in her mouth instead. Somehow, this was not nearly so terrifying. Partly, I think, because I was reassured by her treatment of my arm, but mainly because the thigh was so much further from my face, and seemed, somehow, less a part of me, less personal. She soon dropped the thigh also and paused a moment.  

I let myself hope that she was satisfied and would leave me. She sniffed at my limp body and seemed to be considering whether her duty was done, honor satisfied. My hopes were premature. I was suddenly lifted ten feet into the air and booted violently in mid-air as I came down again. A further flurry of powerful blows followed as her fury was suddenly renewed. Then she paused again. I was lying on one side and became conscious of a trickle of blood and vomit running from my mouth and down my chin.. She sniffed at me again, and after a pause, I heard her moving off through the brush. I waited a minute or two to be sure that she had really gone. I thought for a moment that perhaps I had escaped essentially unhurt, but as I rolled over onto my back, the grate of bones in my pelvis told me that something was broken there. There was the stub of a bush in the middle of my back and my left shoulder began to pain me so that I thought my shoulder blade was broken, but I could no longer move to a more comfortable position.  

I called for Wendi. About 5 minutes later I heard voices and 4 or 5 of the scrawny little Nepali camp workers surrounded me. They had no stretcher, but picked me up bodily and put me on their shoulders, and I was shortly jounced back to camp. A landrover had been backed up at the edge of camp with a thick foam pad on the floor, and I was laid on that. For 2 hours or more we negotiated a round-about route from Gaida Camp to the nearest town, Bharatpur, avoiding the more direct but rougher roads. I was in shock by this time and only dimly aware of what was happening. It was saturday, the Nepali day of rest, and only one of the usual 5 doctors was on duty in the local hospital. We arrived just as the victims of a bus accident began to stream in. The driver had swerved to avoid an old woman in the road and gone over an embankment. Sixty people were injured, some of them with compound fractures and looking as if they were in much worse shape than I was, Gayle said. (I was too muzzy to be aware of any of this.) Few people in Nepal can afford phones, so foot runners had to be dispatched to summon the medical staff.  

They gave me local anesthetic to stitch up the more obvious wounds, but they missed a major one behind my right shoulder which left the only obvious scar I retain from the encounter. Gaida Camp paid for the anesthetic. It was considered a non-essential part of treatment, and the poor Nepalis from the bus had their wounds sewn up without the benefit of such a luxury.  

I was placed on a stretcher when they took me into the hospital, and this would not fit in the landrover, so once again I was joggled along on a man-borne litter under the now blazing sun (and still bundled up in all my warm clothes) for a mile to the airport. They tore out a row of seats on one side of the aisle of the plane to accommodate my stretcher, and one of the teachers from Wendi's school, who happened to be on the flight, was kind enough to give up her seat so that the whole family could return to Kathmandu with me. I finally reached Shanta Bhawan Mission Hospital about 4:00 PM, about seven hours after my rendezvous with the rhinoceros. The date was January 6, 1979. I will never forget that, because it was Wendi's thirteenth birthday.  

Shanta Bhawan  

It turned out that both right rami of my pelvis and 7 ribs were broken. The bones were not displaced, however, and no cast, or even tape was needed. It was cold in Kathmandu and the hospital was unheated, so I was immobilized under many layers of blankets. I was bleeding internally and very weak, so I was not able to move. I felt like a fly embedded in amber. My hematocrit fell to 20% over the first 2 or 3 days. Fortunately, it stabilized before they found it necessary to open me up to locate the problem. Gaylien donated two pints of blood to me, one on each of two consecutive days. In blood type, at least, we are compatible. The western doctors were a little appalled that the Nepali technicians would take two pints from the same person in such a short time interval. Giving blood was not common in Nepal, however - donors were often recognized by brief articles in the newspaper - and the technicians probably did not realize how easy it would have been to find another donor from among the western community. Besides, why bother? They had a healthy, willing, and compatible donor, and it was no doubt her wifely duty to give as much blood as I needed. And it would be typical of the Nepali view of life to appreciate the advantages of using the same donor twice. It eliminated the need to cross-match a second sample of blood. Gaylien has always found any procedure involving blood most distasteful, however. I remember how she ran and hid (at least figuratively) on the several occasions when I came home with my knees streaming blood from falling off my bicycle onto gravel at the edge of the highway, and how I had to clean and bandage the wounds myself. It was truly noble of her to submit to the blood donation process twice, so willingly and without complaint.  

They did not allow me anything by mouth for several days. Apparently they wanted to wait until I had a spontaneous bowel movement to be sure that my plumbing was working satisfactorily before they would even allow me a drink of water. I was nourished in the meantime via an IV line. Periodically the nurse would inject a vile, yellowish-green, murky solution into it - some form of tetracycline, I was told. No doubt of Indian manufacture. I could taste it immediately after the injection.  

As I began to recover, the physical therapist came around and instructed me to practice breathing deeply every so often, so that my ribs would not heal in too constricted a position. The nurses were Nepali, and several of them spoke English. One in particular would come and talk with me at some length. Their lives were very hard. Despite being highly trained and dedicated to what we regard as a noble and humanitarian profession, these women are regarded in Nepal as being on the same level as prostitutes. No woman is considered to be able to retain her respectability if she is not sheltered and protected by a male relative in Nepal - father, brother, or husband, normally. A woman who leaves the protection of the family to seek a career almost automatically becomes an outcast, and indeed is considered fair game for any randy male. My friend had taken her nursing training in India. The dormitory for nurses was open to the doctors and male medical students of the adjacent college and hospital, and the nursing students were expected to serve the sexual needs of these men. Unfortunately, I never learned why these gentle and kindly young women who served so devotedly in the hospital had chosen this perilous and humiliating life. Perhaps some of them had been orphaned and having lost all their male protectors had had no choice. Others may have preferred it to being forced into an unacceptable marriage, or simply have had such rebellious and independent spirits that anything seemed better than the stifling restrictions of the normal, highly confined, life of the average middle-class Nepali woman. After I left the hospital, I ran across my friend once or twice while eating out in a restaurant in Kathmandu with my family. She was with a western man, and I suspect she was plying her "alternate profession" to supplement her income and perhaps more importantly, to relieve the terrible isolation that her own society had imposed on her.  

I was very lucky to get off so lightly. Seven people had been killed in the previous year by rhinos in the Park, and the paper said that 3 of every 4 people attacked are killed. Jean Charlton, an American Embassy nurse, a friend of ours, was in Chitwan a few months after our visit. While she was there a man was brought in who had been killed by rhinos. Apparently, he had been walking along one of the roads in the Park when he heard two male rhinos fighting. He tried to climb a tree, but they came out on the road and saw him before he got high enough, and one of them grabbed him by the thigh and pulled him down, biting a wedge out of his leg that looked like the wedge cut from a round of cheese, she said. They then attacked and disemboweled him. He lived long enough to tell his rescuers what had happened, but not much longer. As in this case, most of those attacked are Nepali villagers, and I doubt if I would have survived the kind of care an average villager is likely to get. There would be no way for him or her to get to a source of medical care; no antibiotics or sutures. I doubt if the average family could assemble enough blankets to keep a person in shock warm enough, and perhaps they would not have known enough even to try. From the Nepali Hindu point of view, this life is pretty miserable, and once you die you will be reincarnated to start another one. With luck, if you have been virtuous (and how many of us believe that we aren't?), you may be reborn with a higher status and level of comfort, so there is not much point in trying to prolong the present existence.  

I hold no grudge against the rhinoceros. She did what she had been programmed to do, in the course of evolution, to protect her calf. It was not until nearly 20 years after this episode that Wendi told me that the rhino had a fresh wound on her rump. The elephants had been out earlier that week, and possibly she had had some kind of a conflict with one and was still in a surly temper as a result. No such explanation is necessary, of course, since almost any female animal can be expected to react violently in defense of its young. It was foolish of me to chance such an encounter and to underestimate the well-known unpredictability of the beast - and doubly foolish to endanger Wendi as well. We have taken far too much habitat from the wild things of the world as it is, and when we venture into what little is left, whether it is rhino or lion or grizzly country, we trespass on their living space and must take our chances on their natural responses.  

I returned to my duties lecturing in microbiology after missing three weeks of school. I was somewhat hastened in my decision to return by a visit of the 5 young women who made up about one-third of the class. I was touched by their visit, thinking at first that they had come to see me out of concern for the welfare of their professor. I soon learned that they had an additional motive. I had assumed that my understudy, Sharma, who had been working with me for 5 months at that point, had taken over the class and continued the lectures that I was not able to give. They told me, however, that he had appeared only 3 times out of the 13 lecture sessions that had been scheduled. Since Nepali students sit in the lecture for the entire assigned period, be it an hour or hour and a half, waiting for the professor if he does not appear (unlike American students, who have a graded scale of minutes to wait, depending on the rank of the instructor - all of 10 minutes for a full professor, but shorter times for lesser beings), they had not only missed a portion of their education, but no doubt, had been excruciatingly bored as well. So it is no wonder that they were anxious to find out how soon I would be able to return to my duties!  

By April I was hiking the hills around Kathmandu again and bicycling the roads, and when the students went on strike and closed down the University (they were protesting the Government's policy of appointing paid informers to spy on other students and head all "student" organizations - these bullies were not expected to study, but never failed any courses, although I don't believe that they ever graduated either!) I took advantage of the enforced holiday to take Gayle's niece, Glennelle, and two other friends, on a two week trek up through the Sherpa country to the foot of Mt. Everest. Our highest camp was on Gokyo Lake at 15,500 feet. We got up at 3:00 AM to climb the shoulder of a mountain above the lake to the 17,500 foot level from which we had spectacular and lovely views of the dawn striking the surrounding peaks - all but Everest itself, which we only glimpsed occasionally, as it was shrouded in clouds.

Author:  John B. Hall <>