In Hemingway’s time, big game hunters went to Africa looking to bag the “Big Five”–elephant, rhino, lion, leopard and cape buffalo, and even though nowadays most people travel to Africa armed with cameras instead of carbines, the goal remains essentially the same: to “shoot” the Big Five. And then, of course, there’s Clyde.
This summer, while the rest of my family spent their days scanning the Serengeti for signs of wildlife, Clyde was content to limit his horizons to the back seat of the Land Rover. There he could usually be found playing happily with whatever he had managed to scrounge out of our bags that day, with his favorite being the handful of leftover euro coins from a European layover on the way to Tanzania.
“Clyde, look at the elephant!” we’d say, as an elephant passed so closely to our truck that we could feel the rumble of its chest; Clyde, however, would be too engrossed in some serious conversation his coins were having with each other to even bother looking up. (Question: what do euros talk about when they’re not at home? My first thought was that they would make smug little self-congratulatory remarks to each other about “coalitions of the willing” and “freedom fries,” but, as it turns out, they tended to talk about pretty much the same things all inanimate objects talk about in Clyde’s hands: who they’re going to fight.)
Clyde displayed the same utter lack of interest when we encountered cheetahs, giraffes, zebras and even lions. Finally, after I had begun to worry that the only way Clyde was ever going to view any wildlife on this trip would be if he was dragged along behind the truck as bait, Clyde’s interest in game spotting was unexpectedly piqued by the sight of an animal standing right outside the car window. Why “unexpectedly?” Because not only did Clyde make his sighting when the rest of us weren’t even looking for game (we were passing through a small village), but also because of the nature of the game he ended up spotting: it was a chicken.
“Did you see that?” Clyde asked us excitedly as we passed by someone’s yard. “A chicken!”
That was when we first realized that, unlike 99.9% of the tourists who go on safari, Clyde had set his sights a little bit lower than the coveted “Big Five”–Clyde was looking for the “Little Five.”
As far as we can tell, the little five is made up of chickens, cows, mice, toads, and those small, nondescript birds that birders the world over refer to as “LBJ’s,” or, “little brown jobbies.” However, despite the lack of glamour attached to his little five, Clyde’s commitment to finding them was so complete that, when we were especially desperate to get Clyde to look at something (say a cheetah stalking a gazelle 10 feet away), we would lie, telling Clyde to “look over there–a cow.” Of course, we had to be careful not to overuse this particular ploy, since Clyde soon became annoyed with our appallingly bad animal identifications. “That’s not a cow–it’s an elephant,” he would say, annoyed that we had tricked him into seeing yet another exotic animal standing a few feet away from his head.
Of course, to Clyde’s credit, he did stick with his version of game viewing much longer than the rest of us stuck with ours. In fact, even after the safari ended and we were at our next stop he remained completely focused on adding to his list. Which would explain why, in the picture I have taken of Clementine and Clyde standing in front of a windmill outside Amsterdam, you can only see half of Clyde: the other half of him is busy dashing out of the frame, in hot pursuit of–what else–a chicken.