THE RHINOCEROS 



neither animated by the implacable man-destroying 

 passion ascribed to him by the amateur hunter, nor 

 is he so purposeless and haphazard in his rushes as 

 some would have us believe. On being disturbed 

 his instinct is to get away. He generally tries to 

 get away in the direction of the disturbance, or up- 

 wind, as the case may be. If he catches sight of the 

 cause of disturbance he is apt to try to trample and 

 gore it, whatever it is. As his sight is short, he 

 will sometimes so inflict punishment on unoffending 

 bushes. In doing this he is probably not animated 

 by a consuming destructive blind rage, but by a 

 naturally pugnacious desire to eliminate sources of 

 annoyance. Missing a definite object, he thunders 

 right through and disappears without trying again 

 to discover what has aroused him. 



This first rush is not a charge in the sense that 

 it is an attack on a definite object. It may not, 

 and probably will not, amount to a charge at all, for 

 the beast will blunder through without ever defining 

 more clearly the object of his blind dash. That 

 dash is likely, however, at any moment, to turn into 

 a definite charge should the rhinoceros happen to 

 catch sight of his disturber. Whether the impelling 

 motive would then be a mistaken notion that on the 

 part of the beast he was so close he had to fight, or 

 just plain malice, would not matter. At such times 



301 



