Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams

That evening we went to have a meal at the house that Kes shares with her husband, Fraser, a park conservation manager. It is a house they built themselves, out in the bush on the edge of the river, and is a long, low, rambling structure, full of books and largely open to the weather—when it rains they lower tarpaulins over the spaces where the windows aren’t. For the two years it took them to build the house, they lived in a tiny mud hut with a dog, two cats, a pet mongoose that used to dig up the floor looking for worms—and a baby. Because their house is so open, it is regularly full of animals. A young hippo, for instance, frequently comes to chew on the pot plants in their living room. It often spends the night asleep in their bedroom with its head resting next to the (second) baby’s cot. There are snakes and elephants in the garden, rats which eat all their soap, and termites gradually nibbling away at the support poles of the house. The only animals that really worry them are the crocodiles, which live in the river at the bottom of the garden. Their dog was eaten by one. “It is a bit of a worry,” Kes told us. “But we just have to make our lives as comfortable as possible under the circumstances. If we lived in the city, we’d be just as concerned about the children getting run over by a bus or abducted as we are about them being attacked by a crocodile.”