sight, the rhinoceros doesn't miss many chances of using his nose-horn. He doesn't try to avoid trouble as the more timid hippopotamus does.
The rhinoceros is a grazing animal, too, but does not find his food in the water. He feeds by night on wooded hillsides, in the brush or on swamps, and uses his nose-horn to pry up roots and his horse teeth to bite off grass. During the heat of the day he often takes a cool bath and rolls in the mud. Very likely he goes into the water many times for the same reason as the elephant. He is tormented by flies and stinging insects. Like the elephant he, too, has a feathered friend. Isn't it odd that the rhinoceros bird should also have a nose-horn? He is Mr. Horn Bill. This bird travels around on the animal's back and picks the insects out of the folds of skin. He has that choice feeding ground all to himself, for the rhinoceros baby doesn't ride on its mama's back. Papa pushes the baby along in front of him with his horn, as if he were in a baby cab, on wheels.
The rhinoceros can hear and smell well, but, like the hippopotamus, his small eyes are very dim. The bird on his back often gives him the first warning of danger by uttering a loud cry. At that the animal plunges into the brush or makes for the nearest water. He can out-run a horse, but he doesn't run away, as a rule. He merely chooses his own place to fight. He runs into a pool or river, rolls over in the water, and heaves up, his huge, black, armored sides dripping.
Ten feet long and seven high, with a dagger-like curved weapon three or four feet long on his nose, the bull rhinoceros is a monster. He tosses his huge, horned nose, sniffs and snorts and lowers his head for the charge like a wild boar. Knowing that he sees badly and charges straight, a skilled horseman can dodge him. A lion leaps over him, tucks his tail between his legs and sneaks away. An elephant that stands twice as high, often weighs but very little more, and is no match at all for this big brute. The rhinoceros can run his nose under the elephant's body and kill him with one stroke of his dagger horn.
Here is something about the rhinoceros that is very interesting. Thousands and thousands of years ago enormous hairy rhinoceroses with two nose-horns and shaggy manes, roamed over all the colder parts of Europe and America with the giant hairy elephant. The bones of a great many of them have been dug up on the banks of the Upper Missouri River. Just think! Enormous two-horned and
