Glass Tiger

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The black rhino stopped browsing to throw back its massive head and snort. His scimitar horns, the front one five feet long, gleamed like dull carbon under the gibbous moon. He was big as a boulder, a ton-and-a-half of living fossil plunked down on the wet-season savanna. Since the devastating horn and ivory raids by Somali shifta poachers in the 1970s and ’80s, only this lone bull survived outside the game park’s pitifully small rhino recovery reserve.

The compact man three feet from the rhino’s left flank froze with one foot raised above the calf-high grass, one arm still outstretched. He was downwind, but his scent must have been carried by a vagrant night breeze. Rhinos’ keen sense of smell, coupled with dim eyesight, made them unpredictable and even deadly if you couldn’t get out of their way in time. The rhino snorted again, satisfied that all was well, and returned to stripping tender twigs and new leaves off the acacia bush with his delicate, beak-like mouth.

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