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pushing the envelope on travel distance in their
attempt to impress us and as a result it was getting pretty late. We had at
minimum an hour drive over heavily rutted roads to look forward to so we
huddled down in the bed of the truck behind the cab. One of the rangers we were
riding with was talking to the other in Swahili when he said something that
captured Ulric's attention. Ulric interrupted asked if he was speaking of mulokalay .
Both rangers looked at him expressionless without response.
    I wasn’t surprised at their
reaction. On many occasions I had heard the term. The translation, Night
Dancer, I understood as a mythical made up thing; a strategy mothers used to
keep their children close and in at night. Sometimes people, drunk or mad with
fever were pointed out as night dancers. One story told to me by a great
grandma described them as drugged cannibals. Another pegged them as magical
creatures akin to werewolves.
    I was always frustrated by the
stories because each scenario played out the same time and time again. Some
Ugandans would be talking, they would forget that the Americans were listening, they would mention the night dancers. When asked
what a night dancers were, there was the deadpan stare again. The subject was
dodged with platitudes and feigned language barrier. I had long since given up
on trying to figure out what the hell a night dancer was, so when these two
rangers froze in mid sentence and looked back at Ulric with that typical expression, I was ready for a long quiet ride home.
    But Ulric looked at them and said that he knew about Night Dancers and that he had seen
some at Katonga . He told them that he knew that Night
Dancers were real and they did not need to worry about us thinking strangely of
them. To my amazement, the rangers told us about an incident that had occurred
the previous night in a distant part of the park.
    There was a fishing village along
the lake near the park boundary. Some fisherman had stayed out too long fishing
and ended up beaching on a small island for the night. According to the
rangers, Night Dancers came into their camp and killed them all. Six fishermen
were found the next morning torn to pieces. Four were missing.
    “Could it have been lions?” Ulric asked. But both rangers were adamant that they had
seen lion kills too many times and that these men were not killed by lions.
Then they told us that the bodies had shown signs of having been eaten. At the
time, I was a bit cynical about the Ugandan tendency to try to scare us about
life in Africa. Ulric , on the other hand, continued
to grill the two men about the incident. He seemed obsessed with the gory
details.
    The next evening after class, Ulric was a million miles away. At Dinner I asked him what
was up. He told me that he was thinking of sneaking out later to try and locate
the Night Dancers. His plan was to steal a boat from the village and paddle up
the channel to the island.
    “You’re nuts,” I said. African
waterways at night are not safe places. If you were to take a poll of a
thousand Americans and asked them what the most dangerous animal in Africa is,
most of them would say lions, or hyenas, or leopards. Very few would know that
the most dangerous animal title is a tie between the Cape buffalo and the
hippopotamus.
    The Kazinga Channel was world famous for its hippo populations. Hippos are notoriously
territorial and aggressive. Bulls sport canine teeth that are as big around as
you forearm and as long. I had personally witnessed a bull hippo attack and
bite a metal boat. He punched two large round tooth holes in the bottom of the
boat and it almost sunk. The idea of paddling a wooden canoe up the channel in
the dark sounded pretty stupid.
    But twenty minutes of Ulric talking his magic and I was transformed into a
willing accomplice. Ulric convinced me that Hippos
come to shore at night to graze so being out on the channel would, in
actuality, be the safest place to be when it came to hippos. I