Baby Rhino Rescued From a Dangerous Wildlife Water Tank Collapse

A wildlife water tank at a South African reserve is a piece of desert arithmetic made steel: a great, elevated storage tank, holding thousands of litres against the dry season, feeding the troughs and wallows of a landscape where water is the difference between a reserve and a memorial. This tank had stood above its service area for years — a riveted, painted, entirely unremarkable monument — until the season’s corrosion, working in the invisible way of such things at a seam near its base, reached its conclusion in a single morning: the seam split. Not a leak: a rupture, a long, tearing failure along the tank’s lower wall, and the water it had been keeping took the opening with the force of its whole stored height, blasting out of the tank in a white, debris-carrying torrent and down, by the ground’s own arrangement, into the low earth channel that ran below the tank’s apron — a drainage channel, a shallow, usually dry watercourse of packed earth and stone that the torrent converted, in minutes, into a fast, muddy, thigh-deep-on-a-calf river running between its banks with a current entirely out of proportion to its size. And the rhino calf, who had been in the service area that morning in the course of the reserve’s ordinary management — a baby rhinoceros, months old, a tonne’s promise in a quarter-tonne’s body, grey as the landscape’s own stone — had been caught by the outburst’s geography: startled by the rupture’s noise into the channel’s line, slipping on its wet bank, and delivered by the slope and the water together into the channel itself, where the torrent, at its first force, had knocked the calf’s footing from under it and set it, in the channel’s deepest section, in the predicament that the arriving team found: a baby rhino in a flooded earth channel, braced against the current with all four legs splayed, the water at its belly and running hard, its footing mud over hardpan that its own efforts were churning to grease, its massive young head low against the flow, unable to climb either bank — the near bank too steep and slick, the far bank the tank’s apron and the rupture’s own outfall — while the tank, above, continued to empty its season’s water through the split seam in a white, roaring, diminishing but still formidable cataract.

A rhino calf in a flooded channel is in danger from the water’s simplest property: it does not tire. The calf’s strength, immense for its age in the way of its kind, was being spent at the rate that standing in a current demands — which is to say, continuously, without rest, on a surface that its own weight and scrabbling were making worse by the minute — and a rhino that goes down in a channel, in belly-deep moving water and mud, is a lifting problem that grows by the tonne in the imagination of everyone who has ever moved one. The team’s work therefore began with the water: technicians climbed to the tank — by its ladder, in its own spray — and closed the system’s valves, isolating the ruptured tank from the reserve’s main and shutting off every feed that could prolong the flood, so that the torrent became a known, finite quantity: what was already out, draining, diminishing by the minute, its force in the channel falling as the level fell. Then, and only then, the calf’s own operation: the support straps — the wide, padded harness of webbing that rhino work is done with — were taken down into the channel by the team’s specialists, worked under and around the calf’s body in the water, in the mud, against the animal’s braced, splayed resistance, until the harness sat on the calf as it is designed to sit: bearing on the body, clear of the legs’ working, its lines running up the channel’s far end to the one piece of geography the whole plan hung on — a short ramp. The team built it where the channel’s bank ran lowest: an excavated, reinforced incline of earth, matting, and timber, a rhino-sized road cut into the bank’s face, from the channel’s floor to the high ground above, its surface textured against the mud on the calf’s own feet. The straps would not drag the calf; nothing drags a rhino. The straps would support, steady, and assist — taking a share of the weight, holding the balance’s account — while the calf’s own legs, on the ramp’s prepared surface, did the climbing that the channel’s banks had refused them, guided by the specialists in the water at its shoulder and its quarters, in the manner that the species’ reserves have refined into an art.

The bodycam POV stood in the channel itself, in the current, and the frame was filled with the tank’s diminishing violence: the rupture’s white outfall still pouring at the apron’s edge, the channel’s muddy water hurrying past at belly height on a rhino calf, foam and debris in procession, the banks’ wet earth shining — and the calf, at the frame’s centre, an island of grey in the brown water: splayed, braced, its skin mud-plastered to the belly line, its ears rotating in their famous independent surveillance, its small eyes — a rhino’s eyes being, famously, the least of its equipment — fixed on the specialists in its water with an expression composed, in about equal parts, of exhaustion and of the deep, ancestral conviction that whatever happened next was going to be the people’s idea and the people could therefore do the work. Its breathing, audible over the water, was the heavy, blowing respiration of a large animal that has been standing against a river and is ready, in principle, for a better offer.

The lead specialist, in the channel at the calf’s shoulder with the mud taking his boots at every step and a strap line in his hand, kept his voice in the low, unhurried, almost conversational register that rhino calves are worked in — rhinos read tone and intention through channels older than eyesight, and a calm man at a calf’s shoulder is information its whole body can use.

“Hey, big baby… I see you standing in all this water. Tank’s shut off, water’s dropping. Straps are on you, ramp’s built right there — we’re walking you up it, you and us together.”

The climb began in the channel’s own order: the specialists at shoulder and quarters, the strap lines taken up by the team stationed up the ramp and on the high bank, the calf encouraged forward — by voice, by the harness’s gentle, directional pressure, by a hand’s guidance at its shoulder — out of its braced stance in the deep section, its great feet finding, step by deliberate step, the channel floor’s shallowing line toward the ramp’s foot. The water fought its rearguard action at every step, tugging at legs and belly, the mud sucking at feet that weighed, each, like a man’s whole leg — but the current was falling as the tank’s last volume drained, and the calf, sensing the ramp’s incline under its forequarters and the high ground’s smell above it, committed to the climb in the way of its kind: not gracefully, not quickly, but entirely, its whole quarter-tonne arranged behind the proposition that up was the way, its legs driving on the ramp’s textured surface in the slow, immense, unhurried power that has made its family the landscape’s landlords for fifty million years. Forequarters up; belly clear of the water; the ramp’s midsection reached, the straps’ lines singing with their share of the load, the specialists in the channel reduced to guidance at its quarters as the bank team took the climb’s direction — and the high ground, the dry earth above the channel, a body’s length away, the calf’s head already above the bank’s level, its front feet on the ramp’s last, firmest section.

And the channel delivered its final argument at the climb’s final step: the tank’s last gathered volume — the water that had ponded behind debris at the apron, released as the drainage shifted — came down the channel in a last, muscular surge, a knee-high, mud-brown wave that struck the ramp’s foot and the calf’s hindquarters together, at the precise moment when the calf’s weight was committed forward and its right hind foot stood, alone of its four, on the ramp’s lowest, slickest section — the section the morning’s mud had polished despite the matting. The surge’s push and the mud’s treachery arrived in the same instant: the hind foot slipped, sliding back off its purchase in a spray of mud and water, the calf’s hindquarter dropping toward the channel in the beginning of a fall that would have returned a quarter-tonne of rhino to the water it had just climbed out of, at the ramp’s very foot, in the surge’s own current. The response was the harness’s whole reason for existing, executed by people who had placed it for exactly this second: the strap lines, from singing, went to bearing — the bank team taking the calf’s dropping quarter’s weight into the wide webbing in a single, coordinated heave, not lifting the rhino, which no line team attempts, but holding its geography, arresting the fall at its first hand’s width, converting a slide into a supported crouch — while the specialists in the water, one at the slipped leg’s side, drove the ramp’s spare matting under the scrabbling hind foot with their hands, giving the leg a new purchase in the mud’s own territory, and the calf — feeling its quarter held by the straps and its foot find, suddenly, a surface that answered — did the rest itself, in the manner of rhinos since the world’s youth: it drove, with its hind legs’ whole immense, mud-assisted power, up out of the channel’s last argument, its slipped foot planting on the matting, its quarters rising on the straps’ assistance and its own engine together, its body coming up the ramp’s final section in a single, continuous, earth-shaking commitment — and its hind feet, both of them, left the water and the mud and stood, with its forequarters, on the high bank’s dry earth, above the channel, above the surge, above the whole morning, a baby rhinoceros entire and upright on the ground that its species owns, blowing like a steam engine and already, with its ears, conducting a census of the people responsible.

“Surge’s hit her back end — hind foot’s gone! Straps, take her weight! Matting under that foot — drive, big baby, drive — she’s up! All the way up!”

She stood on the high bank in the South African sun — for the weather, with a reserve’s irony, had cleared over the tank’s emptying, and the light was now the hard, bright light of the highveld morning — mud to her belly line, water streaming off her grey flanks, her harness being slipped clear by hands that had earned the right, while the specialists conducted the closing check in the order her kind requires: legs first, the slipped hind above all — fetlock, foot, the great column’s soundness attested by her own weight-bearing as she shifted, unimpressed, from foot to foot; body, for the channel’s testimony; breathing, settling from the climb’s steam-engine toward a rhino’s ordinary, monumental calm; and her demeanour, which pronounced its own verdict, as she turned her massive young head toward the service area’s trough — the one fed by the reserve’s other tank — and expressed, in the universal language of large young animals after exertion, an interest in water of the drinking kind, at her own pace, from a bank, like a landowner.

“There you go… out of that flooded channel, big baby. Safe now, all four feet on high ground. Let’s get you checked, and get you a proper drink.”

The tank would be drained, stripped, and its seam’s failure given to the engineers; the channel, drying in the sun by afternoon, would return to its career as a dry line in the earth, its morning as a river filed in the reserve’s memory; and the team’s report recorded the doctrine that the calf, drinking at her trough with her mud drying to a grey crust in the sun, had spent the morning demonstrating from the inside: shut the water off before you rig the animal, build the ramp before you ask for the climb, harness for the slip you cannot schedule — because the channel’s last surge will arrive at the final step as reliably as if it had an appointment, and a rhino calf’s hind foot, on polished mud, at the top of its whole rescue, is not a detail but the entire ballgame, won this morning by wide straps, quick matting, and a quarter-tonne of ancient, mud-powered determination that met its rescuers, as it always intended to, considerably more than halfway.