The hippo eats grass. That's the whole diet — sixty pounds of it a night, torn up by a jaw that can also close on a canoe and not notice the difference. Nobody warns you about the vegetarian. That's the joke evolution's been telling for four million years.

The teeth aren't for chewing. They're tusks, up to two feet of curved ivory grown purely for arguments with other hippos, and the loser sometimes doesn't walk home. It can't really swim — it runs along riverbeds, weightless and furious, three tons of it moving like a held breath. On land it still outruns a man.

The Egyptians made a goddess of it, Taweret, guardian of childbirth, and then carved their god of chaos wearing its face. They never picked a side. Its sweat runs red, thick as a wound, and for centuries people swore it bled through its skin. It doesn't. It's sunscreen. The blood was never real. The reputation was.

You've met this before, in someone quiet who ate the same lunch every day for a decade and once ended a bar fight without standing up. Grass-fed. Still the most dangerous thing in the water.