This is also a true Rhino story. In the mid 90’s I was doing exploration in Kenya. We had a joint venture with a bunch of slimeballs from Europe. Their “man on the ground” was a Kenyan guy, a city slicker with not too many bush skills. He pretended a lot though.
We set him up in a camp in the Tsavo National park (the same one where a lion ate over a hundred labourers building the Mombasa-Nairobi railway at the turn of the century). He had a couple of tents, some labourers, a cook boy, a clothes washer, etc etc. Camping is done in a colonial style in East Africa. Tents are not the lightweight, synthetic tents we use for weekends away. These are proper tarpaulin tents, with beds and furniture inside. Each one weighs twice as much as a fat person and takes at least 8 people to erect. A typical tent would probably be at least 4m by 5m in size. His brief was to investigate mineralized zones in the park, and when I came down from Nairobi, he’d show me the most promising…
He was sitting in his tent (found out later that was about all he did), waiting for me to arrive, when this rhino wandered through the camp. The rest of the camp scattered, but he didn’t realize what had happened. The next moment the rhino stuck his head into the tent. Both of them got a hell of a fright. He screamed and dived under the back wall of the tent and ran for the bushes. The rhino charged, and suddenly found himself totally covered by a safari tent. I arrived there about 40 minutes later to witness a large, cream-coloured safari tent charging all over the camp sight, breaking everything in its path. The Rhino finally managed to extricate himself, trampled the tent a few times to make sure it was dead, and sauntered off into the bush.
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