First day at monastery

"You want to see jungle?" there was a boy peering through my open window and mosquito netting. I had not slept, las I was alone in a large stone veiling with the orchestra of the jungle to keep me company all night. At about two in the morning there had started a series of human shouts, like cry and response across an acre of land. They sounded quite urgent, and i imagined them coming my way, to do God knows what.

I had no idea who this boy was, but I did need to get out of that damp building.
"yep," I said, " I do wanna see jungle."

The. Kid hopped around in excitement until I got my boots on and joined him outside. The monks had told me to, under no circumstances, leaves the monastery grounds, but I knew there were rhinos out there and a big river that I was dying to swim in.
We went out and he told me his name was Ratna, I noticed his hair was caked with bright red Henna. I asked him about tthr rhinos and he pointed down to the mud we were slopping through. There were tracks there as big around as basketballs, a lot of them, and he
"rhinosauraus" the same way we would say stegosaurus.

I looked back and we were about forty feet away from the gate of the monastery. I understood the double row of razor wire around the grounds then, and calculated I had about 8 hours left before the monks returned with the other aspirants.

"dangerous?" I asked him,"rhino?
He shrugged in the fatalistic way you see in country people all over the world.
"if chase," he said,

The phrase trampled to death went through my mind, but by that time we had walked over a log and a clear stream on our way into the green wall of the jungle. Ratna reached up and picked a leech off my neck, flicked it into the bush, and asked me for a cigarette.
"What are you, like twelve?"
"Fourteen" he said, all wounded.

"Any tigers around here?" I asked him.to explain to me that the rhinos, too were considered pests. At night, they swim across the river and crush and feat in the carefully tended rice paddies. That's what I had been hearing last night, teams of farmers with torches and with smudge pots chasing a two ton rhino out of their crops. Ratna told me they used to just shoot them, but the education programs about endangered species had actually worked and changed the way these guys had been conducting themselves for hundreds of years.

I thought about how easy it is to be all upset about extinction until it's your food that's being eaten, but here these guys are, chasing them off instead of just shooting them.
" big problem," he said, "kill goats.". He went on