Really tired today. Starting to think about Mexican food
(what else is new, right?). No hippo still, alas…They seem to have completely
disappeared! We were having sign every day or every other day, and
now…absolutely positively nothing. It’s like a press release went out to the
hippos and they all ran away to Liberia. I would love to tell them “Hey,
hippos, we have a good deal for you. If you just fall in our trap, you get a
nice nap with some special cocktail of fun drugs, earrings, a new necklace, a
free health check, and lots of people admiring you, for free! You’ll be
famous!” But they aren’t listening.
Yesterday Bobor constructed several home-made flutes that he
said would call all the animals. But then he went and asked the elders and they
told him only duikers would come. I had a nice image for a while of Bobor
acting as a little pied piper, calling all the hippos in with his magical
bamboo flute. Oh and on the magic note, as we have no hippos, Mr. Magic is out
1 million Leones. I bet he is lamenting right now. Some of the guys are saying
they will never believe in magic again, and others of course are rationalizing,
saying that guy in particular was
lying to them but they know others who really do have magic. It’s funny how a
lot of them were advocating going to a magic man, to the point all us “pumwis”
were exasperated, and now everybody is muttering “We knew it wouldn’t work.
Some of these men are just liars.”
Patrick, one of the Gola guys, was telling a story yesterday
about how when he was in school, he put his school fees into his shoe that he
never wore, and forgot about it. Then he went looking for the money and forgot
where he’d put it, and thought it was stolen, and so an inquiry was called. He
had been sharing a room with his best friend, who was like a brother to him.
They brought the magic man in to test to see who was the thief. He had a needle
that would only hurt the guilty person and an iron that would only burn the
thief (sound like Salem witch trials, etc, to anybody else???). The magic
man…(oops sorry got interrupted when we got a crested guineafowl in one of our
traps!)…then put his tests on Patrick’s friend and of course the friend came
off guilty because the magic man knew that Patrick’s friend shared the same
room with him. The boy was expelled from school, and the friendship was not the
same, until one day Patrick found the money in his shoe, showed the money to
everybody, and then everything was OK. But he never really believed the magic
people again after that.
So today was semi-interesting. Oh, yesterday Sakpa got stung
by some bees, which is not good of course. We’d heard some chimps calling around
the area before, so maybe they were eating the honey and making the bees mad?
Hearing chimps call in the forest is amazing,
by the way. Well we caught a crested guineafowl so now we have something to
practice telemetry on that is real, rather than just Alusine walking slowly
through the forest making hippo like movements. We taught the guys about the
sun, earth and moon and how it can be daylight in Africa by night in the United
States, and how the earth goes around the sun in one year’s time, etc. Yesterday
we watched the Blue Planet documentary and the guys were very impressed by the
whales (though they keep calling them waves). Today they got to see a bird of
paradise in another documentary, and the ensuing imitation was quite hilarious.
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