The last thing John Hare meant to be was the camel obsessive he became—the man who tracked down the fast-vanishing wild Bactrian camels of the Gobi desert and made sure they survived
But there was another side to camels, which he saw when he was posted to northern Nigeria. He went there in 1957 for the Colonial Administrative Service, the last man in, as he saw himself, to act for Britain on the eve of independence. His area was Mambilla, a remote mountain region without roads, where he oversaw 83,000 tribesmen on horseback or on foot. On one expedition, south of Lake Chad, he used camels and was impressed.
By a chain of amazingly fortuitous events, camels took him there. At a reception in Moscow in 1992, where he had gone to curate aexhibition, a man in an ill-fitting brown suit and with a Stalin-style moustache turned out to be the leader of a Russian expedition to the Mongolian Gobi. They could not take this eager Englishman unless he had scientific qualifications or technical skill, and he had neither.
He also found his wild camels at last. They were notably different from domesticated Bactrians, extremely shy, with flatter heads, hairier kneecaps and humps set wider apart. They could also drink water that was saltier than the sea’s, and had survived 43 nuclear tests with no ill effects. Perhaps 1,000 were left in all, and their numbers had plunged in a decade. Their chief enemies now were hunters and miners illegally prospecting for gold.
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