What It Feels Like to Be Attacked by a Hippopotamus

It was my birthday, December 1, 2018. My husband, Ryan, and I had done a couple of long days of an African safari, so our tour group decided to do a nice relaxing canoe ride on the Zambezi River. We’ll have lunch, maybe, and get a different perspective for photos, as we’d be lower on the water and hopefully see something along the waterside. The tour guides said the canoes were easy enough for 10-year-olds, no problem—relaxing, nothing to worry about.

We had our Columbia pants on because we didn’t want to be in the sun too long and get burnt. We had our safari hats, sunglasses, everything. They gave us the quick spiel: If you fall out, swim to the closest shoreline. And we’re like, yeah okay, we’re from Odessa, Florida—this is cake to us. We’re not going to fall out of an inflatable, wet-bottom canoe, basically a floating ring with a layer on the bottom so your feet don’t dangle into the water.

Ryan and I were in one raft, and there was one behind us and in front of us, with guides and other tourists. I was in the front of ours. The canoe was stable because it’s like a big inner tube. Not even a couple minutes after we launched, Ryan said he saw in his binoculars a group of hippos ahead on the right, the same side that we launched from. So we started paddling towards the middle of the river. This was the low-water season, so bits of the river bottom stuck out kind of like islands. We almost made it to one of them when I glanced to the right to see what Ryan was talking about. I didn’t see a group of anything—all I saw was the back of a hippo submerge. It just looked like a big boulder. We just kept paddling toward the bank, and then that’s when it hit us from underneath.

It lifted the entire canoe out of the water, and then we dropped back down. Imagine going over a boulder when you’re whitewater rafting: You hit it, thud it, and bounce up quickly. But instead of us running into it, it came from under us and toppled the canoe sideways. We didn’t have the stability to stay in anymore. Ryan fell one direction towards the back, and when the canoe plopped back down, I fell forward, out the front.

I thought, Okay, we’ve got to start swimming to the rocks immediately. I got maybe one stroke in, and that’s when it grabbed my leg and dragged me down.

In a split second, I thought, Keep your hands up to try to see how close you are to the surface. But the hippo pulled me down and started thrashing, shaking me by my right leg. I didn’t feel a forceful impact of the bite. I didn’t feel any pain, no crunch. I just felt a big pressure and a downward pull.

My left leg and the rest of my body were free. As soon as I could no longer reach the surface of the water over my head, I curled up into a ball around its face. That way, I hoped, my body wouldn’t be thrashed further, back and forth, back and forth.

Most people say, Oh, just poke its eyes. And my answer is, I didn’t know where its eyes were. I coudn’t really see anything. It’s dark, dingy water. I don’t even think my eyes were open. But I did know where its mouth was—on my leg—so I knew I could try to grab at that. Obviously, I wasn’t strong enough to pry it off, but I wanted to attempt to do something.

Its skin felt like a slimy piece of leather. With whiskers.

I grabbed forcefully at its mouth. But even during all the thrashing, I stayed calm because I was trying to reserve my air. I knew I was getting low, and I was doing that re-swallowing thing, like when you’re in the pool as kids playing who can stay down longer. I don’t know if it works or not. It seemed to when I was a kid, so that’s what my instinct was—to swallow and see if that helped with air consumption. I estimated that I was about fifteen feet underwater, based on an adult hippo’s size and height, their mouth span, and finding out later that Ryan didn’t see any movement on the surface of the water while I was being thrashed around underneath.

People have asked, Did something flash before your eyes? Did you have this big afterlife experience? No. I’m a logical person. I took my life experiences and applied them to that moment. Hold your breath. Screaming underwater is not going to save you. Do what you can to try to get yourself out of the situation. That, to me, meant grabbing at it and trying to pry it off or scratch at it or get at it any way I could.

I didn’t know if it was ever going to let me go, but shortly after I grabbed at its face, it did. I popped back up to the surface, buoyed by my life jacket. I’m fairly sure I was down for 45 seconds because I was almost out of air. Ryan was just climbing out of the last bit of the water onto the shoreline.

I’ve always been an athlete, so I instinctively turned over and backstroked the few strokes that I needed to get to the rocks. Everyone told me to reach for the canoe paddles they held out for me, and they pulled me in the rest of the way. That’s when I got to the shore and saw that my leg was totally ripped open.

It looked like a Bodies exhibit. The top layer of skin and fat were essentially ripped apart and open. It’s called de-gloving, like a glove being taken off, except it’s the muscle sliding off the bone. It was like a huge C-shape of my skin was lifted up and hung on the side of my leg. You could see my entire muscle, everything. There was one chunk about the size of a golf ball, hanging by a thread, that its tusk punctured through. I wasn’t bleeding much, but I couldn’t move my leg.

I only lost one flip flop. The one that stayed on was on the leg that got bit.