The Hunt for the Golden Mole (22 page)

As museums across the continent began to wise up and strengthen their nocturnal security, so the criminals abandoned the burglar's stealth in favour of smash and grab. With the alarms switched off and replaced by unarmed attendants not famous for their muscularity, galleries looked a softer touch in the daytime than they did at night. At Drusillas Animal Park, near Alfriston in Sussex, between four fifteen and four thirty on a late-summer afternoon, raiders broke into a display cabinet and made off with the horn of a black rhino on loan from Brighton's Booth Museum of Natural History. Ironically, the horn was part of an educational display about CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), which outlaws international trade in rare animals. The items in the cabinet were all things that people were urged not to buy, including ivory, coral, seashells, furs, turtle-shell, snake and crocodile skins as well as rhino horn. To avoid its becoming a criminal rather than educational resource, the display had to be removed.

Everywhere the thieves grew bolder and more contemptuous of security. In a lunchtime attack on the Museum of Hunting
and Nature in the Marais district of Paris, two men used what police described as a ‘paralysing gas' to subdue guards and help them get away with the horn of a rare South African white rhinoceros. Tear gas was also used in a raid at the zoological museum in Liège, Belgium. On a Saturday morning at the Museum of Natural History at Gothenburg in Sweden, men armed apparently with an electric saw smashed a glass case and lopped off the horn of a stuffed rhino. In March 2012 a British man was held on suspicion by German police after what they described as an ‘unbelievably audacious' raid in Offenburg, during which two people distracted museum staff while others climbed on a display case, took down a rhino head from the wall and smashed off its horn with a sledgehammer. By the end of that month there had been fifty-eight thefts from fifteen European countries, involving seventy-two separate horns, eight entire heads with sixteen horns between them, eleven replicas and three carved rhino-horn ‘libation cups'. Germany was the most popular target, with thirteen thefts and one failed attempt; France second, with eleven thefts and four attempts, and England – five thefts, one attempt – third, just ahead of Austria with four and two. Victims in Italy, I learned, included the Museum of Natural History in Florence, possible resting-place of the Somali golden mole, whose trail I would soon pick up again.

Museum exhibits, of course, were a finite resource, and curators were soon removing genuine horns and replacing them with replicas made of glass fibre or resin. As thieves tended not to be expert zoologists, this did not always put them off. In a predawn raid in August 2011, a gang smashed through the front door of the Natural History Museum's Hertfordshire outpost at Tring, and hammered off the horns from a stuffed Indian rhino, originally from Cooch Behar, and the head of a white
rhino from the former North East Mashonaland, now Zimbabwe. Both were collected around 1900 and had been in the museum since 1939, and both had been fitted with valueless horns moulded in resin.

White rhinos at Ol Pejeta – they have been dehorned to deter poachers

With the supply from museums now depleted, concern began to switch to zoos. So far as I could discover, no rhinos had been killed in European zoos, but there was clearly a risk. In October 2011 an antiques dealer was jailed for twelve months by Manchester Crown Court for trying to smuggle two rhino horns, hidden inside a fake bronze sculpture of a bird on a log, on to a flight to China. DNA tests traced the horns back to a forty-one-year-old white rhino which had died two years earlier at Colchester Zoo in Essex. In accordance with CITES, the animal's body had been sent for incineration at an abattoir, where it was stolen and later sold into the criminal supply chain for £400. The defendant's lawyer told the court that his client was ‘just a link in the chain', but there was no doubt about what he had
stood to gain. In China the horns would have been worth at least £400,000 and probably more. This prompted the UK police National Wildlife Crime Unit, based in West Lothian, to warn all British zoos to be on the alert. Colchester, which still had six adult rhinos and a calf, introduced a ring-of-steel security system involving night patrols and an alarmed fence connected directly to the police.

A few days ago I heard on the radio a natural scientist say that connecting with nature made him feel ‘blessed'. This is not a word I would apply to myself – having no connection with any extraneous spiritual entity, I have no source of blessings – but I understood what he was driving at. The American geneticist Dean Hamer has hypothesised a specific human gene, called VMAT2, which conveys a propensity for spirituality. In some individuals this would declare itself in religious faith; in others through different forms of spiritual expression, most obviously in the experience of music, art and poetry. To these I would add the beauty of the physical world. At any ‘beauty spot' on a fine day you will see people silenced by the view. Our feeling of smallness in wild places, the aura we ascribe to the place itself, is what we mean by the ‘sublime'. The word is there in my African notebook, turned into spider-scrawl by the jolting of the Land Cruiser but still legible in mad-looking capital letters. Further down the page is the word ‘surreal'. One longs for the verbal palette of a Wordsworth, but under pressure of enthralment this is the best I can manage.
Surreal
because, to a northern European used to being thrilled by the sight of a hare, wild Africa is the animation of a dreamscape. It is a sublime moment when I find myself, the voyaging dreamer, nose to horn with a black rhinoceros in its element. I am silenced as if before some great artwork, drawn into the other's space.
I wonder what the rhinoceros knows or feels. To what extent is it self-aware? Who or what does it think I am? How does it think of others of its own species? Does it understand its own power?

I enjoy a similar moment with elephants. One glorious afternoon we find a maternal group grazing in the bush – I hear the rhythmic, toneless sound of leaves being torn even before I see what is causing it. Andrew works out the family relationships – mothers, grown-up daughters helping with their younger siblings, the tiniest of calves. One young female strolls towards us, trunk upraised but not threatening, so close that my pocket camera cannot contain her head. It is like poking a lens into prehistory.

Early in the book I mentioned the West Runton Elephant, the 600,000-year-old skeleton of a huge steppe mammoth found in cliffs not far from where I live. It roamed in Norfolk 350,000 years before the woolly mammoth appeared, yet in terms of elephant history it was an upstart. Among the Royal Society's
Biology Letters
in February 2012 was a paper bearing the kind of typically off-putting title that keeps the general reader at bay: ‘Early Evidence for Complex Social Structure in Proboscidea from a Late Miocene Trackway Site in the United Arab Emirates'. But it revealed a brilliant piece of archaeological research by an international team from Germany, France, the USA and the UAE. What they had found was a fossil trackway bearing the footprints of elephants that passed along it seven million years ago. It is another of those big numbers that you have to stop and think about.
Seven million years
. The group contained at least thirteen animals of varying sizes from calf to adult, and the prints showed that they were sexually segregated, just like the herds I am seeing at Ol Pejeta. They took this route, at Mleisa in western Abu Dhabi, 6.4
million years before the West Runton Elephant lived and died, and 6.8 million years before elephants in Africa first enjoyed the company of that evolutionary johnny-come-lately,
Homo sapiens
.

So here I am, a blatant example of human intrusion, keeping close company with the so-called Big Five – buffalo, lion, leopard, elephant, rhinoceros – and comprehensively dwarfed by what scientists call
megafauna
, meaning species larger than man. It would be hard to imagine better luck. At the reasonable cost of writing a travel article for
The Sunday Times
, I am being accommodated at Ol Pejeta's very luxurious Kicheche Camp. My ‘tent' is a large bungalow with veranda and all mod cons, including flushing lavatory and hot shower – tent only in the sense that the walls are made of canvas. Barely 100 metres from the balcony is an enormous waterhole – really a lake – to which come buffalo, waterbuck, giraffe, lion and elephant to wallow or drink. Meals are almost paralysingly sumptuous, and each evening while I'm enjoying my supper some kind soul pops a hot-water bottle into my very comfortable bed (as Brian Jackman warned, nights at this altitude are chilly). For safety's sake, and adding a little frisson of drama, I am not allowed to move around in the dark without a guard (and I do hear big beasts at night). The reason for this paragraph is not just to say thank you to those who put me up. It is rather to make the point that tourism in Africa has a value that stretches way beyond the privilege granted to visitors and the profits earned by tour operators. As we shall see, the tourist is a vital link in the chain of virtue that keeps animals alive and strengthens local communities.

Drifting towards slumber, I am disturbed by a riot of snarls and shrieks – a meeting of lions and hyenas, says Andrew in the morning. Another thought hinders my return to sleep. Not
knowing whether to be amused or appalled, I remember that the horn stolen in Ipswich from Rosie the rhino had been preserved with arsenic. I wonder whether the patient who swallows it will live long enough to register the shock.

CHAPTER NINE

The Virtuous Circle

D
isappointingly the striped mouse,
Rhabdomys pumilio
, does not return for a second breakfast. It is, apparently and surprisingly, the most common wild animal in southern Africa – a fact one must take entirely on trust. On the evidence of Ol Pejeta you could easily believe it was the zebra, of which I see uncountable numbers against just the single mouse. They are equals in beauty, though.
Rhabdomys
is about twice the size of a house-mouse and is named for the four dark stripes on its back. It is mostly vegetarian but not above eating insects. At home, my own regular breakfast is muesli, though at Kicheche I find I am not above sausage, bacon and eggs. In colonial times Kenya was British East Africa, so the appearance of a frying pan is no great surprise. Common as it may be, seeing
Rhabdomys pumilio
was pure luck. Not even Andrew could have found one to order. It cements my conviction that I shall never see a living golden mole. Even if they were here, right now, burrowing beneath my feet, how could I bring one to light? My English garden seethes with life – moles, voles, mice, shrews – which, I now reflect, I see only when they are caught by cats. I realise, too, that my knowledge of golden moles remains embarrassingly slight. People ask simple questions and I am stumped for an answer.
But you're supposed to be writing a book!
In my defence
I say that no one ever seems to have written very much about them. Later, looking for help, I will return yet again to the nineteenth century, to the portentously titled
British Cyclopaedia of Natural History: combining a scientific classification of animals, plants, & minerals. By authors eminent in their particular department. Arranged and ed. by Charles F. Partington
. This great work was published in three volumes from 1835 to 1837. On page forty of Volume Two (1836), I find this:

This species is a very small animal, considerably less than the common mole of Europe; in consequence of its subterranean habits it is not very frequently seen; and in respect of its colour it is as perplexing as the cameleon [sic]. We believe that the real colour, that is the colour as seen in the light which is not refracted, is brown; but, different from all the other mammalia, this small animal has the same metallic reflections in its fur which are observable in the feathers of many birds, the range of these colours being from a deep golden yellow, or rather a sort of bronze red, to a bronze green; and as all animals which have the metallic reflections lose them when dead and dried, the stuffed skin of this one conveys no idea of what the living animal is like . . .

From this I deduce it is most unlikely that the ‘authors eminent in their department' ever saw a living golden mole themselves. But it usefully reminds me that the object of my quest is not a live animal at all, just a minuscule hint at a species that might not even have existed. Somewhere in Florence, surely, must repose the crumbled remains of Professor Simonetta's Specimen No. MF4181, the only physical record of
Calcochloris tytonis
anywhere in the world. Even if I don't find it, I am substantially
in its debt. The unseen little creature has made me think. I realise, despite the Latin binomials littering my text, that I understand little more about the classification of species than could be gained by looking up Linnaeus in an encyclopaedia. What does it
mean
to say that aardvarks are related to cetaceans, or bats to primates, or golden moles to the marsupials of Australia? How might the evolutionary process respond to an epoch so altered by man that scientists are calling it the Anthropocene (from the Greek
anthropo-
, meaning ‘human', and
-cene
, meaning ‘new')? For how many species will it be survivable? What
is
the value of a species? I know that a lot of very big brains have travelled the ground ahead of me, but I know also that ignorance puts me in good company. Leafing through the scientific literature, the layman is as much struck by the holes in it as by the erudition. What sparked my curiosity was not some believe-it-or-not detail of animal behaviour or adaptation. It was turning the pages of
Mammal Species of the World
and finding that an entire species was ‘known only from a partially complete specimen in an owl-pellet'.
Fragment
would have been a better word.