Adrenaline

Once, I was so close breeding rhinos I could have reached out and counted coup on their armored backs. The huge male stopped for an instant and shot me a myopic glare, sensing my fear and excusing my intrusion. He didn't have time to charge me, for mating rhinos generally have eyes for one thing and one thing only--each other. 

Don't take my word on rhino behavior, however. Close proximity to locomotive-sized animals--mating ones, no less--jolted me with such a healthy dose of adrenaline it still pulses through my veins. 

In an SMS from South Africa the other day, my friend Jenny says it's 39C--that's 102.2F to you and me. She's roasting her way across Kruger National Park; I'm freezing my ass off at home, where it's 11F and cold crystals glisten off the snow like coals in a fire. 

Jenny tells us in her ever-so-brief SMS, that she survived a black rhino charge one day ("scary") and an elephant stampede the next ("very scary"). She says nothing more, leaves no details. Nothing. 

I scratch through some of my own animal stories, wishing they could compare with an elephant charge.  Most the animals I encountered in three visits to South Africa were tepid, going about their own business in much better temper than pissed-off elephants.  The baboons scared me somewhat, until something made me brave. I certainly recognized danger in the lions, and a big snake, still unidentified, and the humungous spiders, and the hippos, when I saw how fast they could run. But the elephants grazed quietly through groves, never charging, barely aware we were there. 

We don't experience enough adrenaline in our society. We forget what it's for.

Once, late at night, I sat in a jeep with some other Americans and watched lions kill and devour a yearling wildebeest. We sat shocked into silence by the horrors illuminated by our red-filtered spotlights. The blood, the savagery, the snarling snapping quarrels held us transfixed until, in one single moment, the lionly squabbling subsided. In that open space of relative silence, a human sound erupted from the jeep. 

My stomach growled. 

Forget the urge to fight or fly, witnessing the slaughter made me hungry.