Casting Off by Emma Bamford Page B

night.’
    Thus started Mission Elephant.
Blue Steel
went off and did their own thing.
Kingdom
stayed put and day after day, armed with a hand-held GPS, camera, sunhats and a cool box
loaded with drinks, we drifted along with the current in the dinghy for hours, searching out the shy creatures. But they were too elusive for us and we spotted neither grey hide nor whiskery hair
of them, even though we blasted eight miles up the river in the dinghy, further than we dared go in the yacht. During daylight hours the Kinabatangan was busy with tourist boats shooting back and
forth, the guides on board trying to locate the elephants for their clients. A couple of times we jumped into the dinghy and followed them but it led to nothing.
    Disappointment at the lack of elephant sightings aside, there was plenty in the jungle to marvel at. This was a habitat that had grown up over hundreds of thousands of years and it was teeming
with life. At night the frogs’ croaks were as loud as dogs’ barks. In the day the Laughing Policeman Bird was always chuckling away at something and the Orgasmic Bird’s fevered
cries rose to ecstatic heights. And, a couple of times a day, there was the call of the hornbill.
    The endangered hornbill is like a large toucan gone wrong. Imagine a black parrot but in place of its short, triangular beak it has a long bill, more like a pelican. It has a protuberance shaped
like an upward-curving banana on the top of its head, just above its eyes, that can be white, red or yellow. In appearance, it is exactly what a prehistoric jungle bird should be. It looks like it
is from the age of dinosaurs and it sounds like it, too; a hornbill’s cry is loud and jolting, almost like the supersonic boom given off by a jet when it breaks the sound barrier. The first
time I heard it I thought there were pterodactyls flying about above my head.
    Back in London, I used to cram so much into every day: 11 or 12 hours in the office, two hours of commuting, a trip to the gym or a run, cooking, cleaning, catching up with friends. Now a whole
day could easily pass by with me doing little more than going on a couple of outings to look for animals. Each day was luxuriously long – like that feeling you get a few days into a vacation
when you finally start to relax, but a more extreme version. The heat and humidity of the jungle sapped a lot of energy but that was OK – there was little to do anyway and nothing urgent.
Things between Steve and me had settled and I loved sleeping by myself in the forepeak, stretched out to try to expose as much of my skin as I could to the puff of the fan.
    I learned to drive the dinghy and we did drifts every day, switching off the engine, settling down in the bottom of the boat to be swept along by the current, our backs leaning against the
inflated rubber hull, just staring out at the jungle as it inched past. After a few non-events, I learned to recognise the kinds of trees monkeys like to live in and we discovered the best time to
go monkey-watching was just before dusk. The sound of crashing branches was the first sign we were in the right place. We’d hear noises and then look around the canopy until we saw leaves
moving. Then I would adjust my eyes, like you do for those 3D-image posters that were all the rage when I was about 13. Remember those? You let your eyes go out of focus and some of the meaningless
dots and swirls would recede or move forward until you could see the three-dimensional image of Jesus, or if you couldn’t see it you’d wait until your friend said something like,
‘I can see his beard!’ – and then you’d lie and pretend you could, too.
    The same thing applied to the monkeys except going boss-eyed didn’t help. What I had to do here was look for grey or brown patches among the leaves and watch them until they moved. Once
I’d got one monkey in my sights I could then see all of the others, like I’d passed some secret test. It seemed as if only