What Does It Mean to See an Okapi?                                                                                                                                    Charles Hood

 

 

 

Brown horse-sized antelope, related to the giraffe. You can see it in the shape of the head. Okapi, a-not-bad-for-amateurs phonetic transcription of the indigenous name. Tongues so long they can lick their own eyes. Zebra stripes on the hind legs, what in mammals is called pelage. When they first meet, females chuffle. Wikipedia claims “an examination of okapi feces has revealed that the charcoal from trees burnt by lightning is consumed as well.” Some grad student got an extra serving of dessert for figuring that one out.

 

Common enough—even the Berlin Zoo has one. San Diego has at least two. In 1960, if the forest tribes caught one alive, a baby okapi was worth 500 francs, or about a hundred bucks today, which is a heck of a lot of money for a 1960s subsistence-level hunter-gatherer. Play behavior includes “gambols and capers, the pooky, and lie-and-rise.” If you were to keep one as a pet, to satisfy its preference for dicotyledonous plant matter (for the moment, let’s leave aside the lighting thing), just feed your okapi store-bought alfalfa, put out a salt block or two, scatter down supplemental protein pellets. Easier than llamas: in captivity, other than the fact that they’re prone to diarrhea, the okapi is generally placid, even tranquil.

 

That is captivity. Ah, but the wild, now there is something else. Wild is always better. I have friends who have seen ocelots and koalas and snow leopards and Longman’s beaked whales, but I don’t know anybody who has seen an okapi that was not already in a museum diorama or chewing its cud in a zoo. That’s because in nature all the okapi are native only to the Congo, which is to say, they are found in the horror show of rape, AIDS, bribes, leprosy, chopped-off arms, and the entire socio-political legacy of King Leopold that most Americans find so upsetting we don’t even want to think about it.

 

Can we study nature without studying history? It would be like trying to wade across a river without getting wet. Even I, with denial built into everything I do, have sidled up close to okapi habitat, then thought better of it and backed off. One day just on the edge of their range, on a pleasant afternoon in Uganda, beside a river on the border, eating lunch with my Ugandan bird guide, I stared longingly, covetously, into the forest on the other bank. Not so far away, really. One could make a raft, pole across in a few minutes. “Yes,” he told me, “Easy to cross. No guards here, no visa.” He was a tall man, erect, with a bearing like an exiled prince. British accent. He pointed in a broad way, as if inviting me to be as stupid as I wanted to be, help myself, more where that came from. “Walk three weeks straight that way, that’s where the okapi are. You will be killed in less than two days. But if not dead, keep walking.”

 

Good plan for life. If not dead, keep walking. Overheard the same day, about poached antelope: “We found the bodies downstream. They had been dead for two weeks or more. The meat was so blue even the dogs would not eat of it.”

 

How though I jones to see an okapi in the wild. Like junky bad I mean, heroin bad. Yet if I were to go to the Congo and not get killed and raped and chopped up, I go and I see this thing, see an okapi in the wild, am I really so naive as to think it would end there? In Botswana once I finally saw an aardwolf, which wins triple points for the name alone. Basically it’s a hyena that specializes in termites. Yet I am still browned off that all these trips to Africa, seven total, and I have not yet seen an aardvark. Aardwolf, yes; aardvark, no. So close, yet so far. I was in the Kalahari, and these aardvarks, they were right around there somewhere, I could taste it, feel it. So close. It aches like a bad tooth. Need, want, desire, and greed—all of which, when satiated, take us back around to need, want, desire, and greed.

 

I said antelope but if so it’s also a kind of whale. Not in the symbolic sense, but straight up taxonomy. From an email—yes, true, I get odd mail—this update: “New anatomical and DNA evidence on the relationship between Artiodactyla (even-toed ungulates) and Cetacea (whales and dolphins) recently led to a merging of the two orders into a new group, Cetartiodactyla.”

 

One whale and hence one God, or so implies Melville. Ahab as cautionary tale in matters of the heart. And not just this singular, recognizable species that Ahab burned so hard about—Big Head, Spermaceti, Cachalot—but the most singular and recognizable individual manifestation of the species, the white whale, perfect and elusive. Not so much a symbol as much as an unknowable God; a rock worth wrecking against; the model for every dream taken not just too far, but so far past far you can’t see the horizon, even with a periscope. Yes, I read the book and saw the movie: I know better than to let the okapi wrap me up too tight, lest the ship go down with all hands. Is this the hidden secret to being human? We like to go too far; we yearn for it. There are way more highway signs limiting the top end of speed than there are ones saying “speed up, slowpoke.” Our egos rev the throttle and peel out every chance we get. With citations and high car insurance, society tries to keep our velocities under a thousand miles an hour.

 

In Civil War slang, “to see the elephant” meant to have done a big thing—seen a big battle, been someplace new, gone to hell and back to accomplish some strange and magnificent task. We feel that way still. For every thousand addicts and lunkheads and barmaids who go home with bad boys and tattoos, there’s the one human whose crazy ass notions pay off, as he (let’s say it’s a he) surprises even himself by painting like van Gogh or inventing Facebook or walking on the moon. Not that I think there’s a single iota of itty bitty chance that me adding okapi or any other species to my ever-growing list of animals seen will cure cancer or even make me a more pleasant fellow. Not in the least. It’s the bad side of hunger and don’t I know it.

 

But it’s the hunger itself that I acknowledge, not what I do with it. The meat has to be pretty far gone before we say no. Usually we bolt it all down, ask for more, and then howl at the sky, announcing satisfaction to the four winds. What does it mean to see an okapi in the Congo? Everything and nothing, and nobody will give me a prize if I do it, nor much care, when I get back—not even my family, if I have one left by then. But still—

 

you look out across the river, into that perfect, tempting, unknowable forest.

 

It waits, calling, calling.