Snorting Towards Ectasy

After a week or so, the animals that had inhabited our camp during our absence (see previous post) began to notice a pattern: these humans spend most of the day here, and they don't appear to be leaving. Perturbed as they were by this grave inconvenience, most of the animals soon slithered, scampered, crawled, or trotted away to make their homes elsewhere.

That said, the camp was in the middle of the bush, so animal encounters were still rather frequent. Each night, spotted hyenas roamed the camp (often immediately beneath my elevated deck) looking for morsels of food that we might have left lying about. On occasion, elephants lumbered through the camp, casually ripping branches off the trees (and whipping the resident vervet monkeys into a screeching, branch-shaking frenzy). Since all of these visits were nocturnal, however, I was rarely awake to witness them. So, given that I was aware of them, I preferred the daytime wildlife visits.

One afternoon, I trudged to my tent (which I'd long since abandoned in favor of my elevated deck), only to find my favorite animal - the incomparably ugly warthog - standing in my path. The warthog wasn't nearly as smitten to see me as I was to see him, so he immediately high-tailed it in the opposite direction. When I say "high-tailed it," I mean it quite literally; when alarmed, warthogs flee with their tails vertical in order to alert other warthogs of danger. The vertical tail has the added benefit of making the warthog even less attractive, and thereby more endearing.

Naturally, the warthog's flee sequence was accompanied with several snorts of disapproval. Honestly though, the warthog rarely expresses disapproval in any other way. The snort is, of course, the warthog's primary form of self-expression. With humans, self-expression comes in countless forms, be it through speech, song, writing, or (at least among the least credible human specimens) "interpretive dance." With warthogs, however, it's just the snort. I've personally witnessed snorts of disapproval, snorts of fear, snorts of trepidation, snorts of contentment, and, on at least one occasion, a snort of confusion. I imagine that the universe of snorts is far larger, however; there must be snorts of glee, snorts of surprise, and possibly snorts of love. In short, a snort for every emotion and an emotion for every snort.

It's fortunate that warthogs can't read this blog, or else I'd likely hear a snort of boredom.