Ghosts of Tsavo

by Philip Caputo

  Other titles by Philip Caputo

  A Rumor of War

  Horn of Africa

  Delcorso’s Gallery

  Indian Country

  Means of Escape

  Equation for Evil

  Exiles: Three Short Novels

  The Voyage

  GHOSTS OF TSAVO

  Published by the National Geographic Society

  Copyright © 2002 Philip Caputo

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  ISBN: 978-1-4262-0621-4

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  To the memory of my mother,

  Marie Ylonda Caputo

  April 30, 1915 - August 9, 2001

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  THE MAN-EATER OF MFUWE

  ACT ONE

  LEGENDS

  INTERMISSION

  A TRIP TO THE MUSEUM

  ACT TWO

  CHASING THE CHIMERA

  EPILOGUE

  WHY THE MAN-EATERS DID WHAT THEY DID

  PROLOGUE

  THE MAN-EATER OF MFUWE*

  The old inhabitants of Europe, or of Assyria, or Asia Minor…looked to the King or chief, or some champion, to kill these monsters for them. It was not the sport but the duty of Kings, and was in itself a title to be a ruler of men. Theseus, who cleared the roads of beasts and robbers; Hercules, the lion killer; St. George, the dragon-slayer, and all the rest of their class owed to this their everlasting fame.

  —from The Spectator, March 3, 1900

  IT WAS THE FACE of the new Africa that made him decide to kill the lion. He didn’t decide by weighing pros and cons before arriving at a conclusion; rather, he answered a summons that announced itself as he lay on his cot one afternoon, in a tented safari camp in the Luangwa Valley of eastern Zambia. Wayne Hosek was a man of faith, and the words that ran through his mind had the ring of a religious imperative: “To him who knows good and doesn’t do it is sin.” A lean man of average height, with receding brown hair, Hosek was three days into a two-week hunting safari, something he’d dreamed of doing since he was a boy. So far he’d bagged a large kudu, a Cookeson’s wildebeest, and a Sharpes grysbok, but he wasn’t thinking about them as he rested through the hottest part of the day, his mosquito net furled above him and the tent’s front flaps rolled back so that he could see the Luangwa River and the village beyond, where the lion had killed a woman named Jesleen three nights ago. He’d heard about this killer cat on his first day in camp, and although he intended to hunt lion, he’d wanted no part of tracking down a man-eater. Now, he was reconsidering. Jesleen was the lion’s sixth victim in two months, and the people in her village and in several others up and down the Luangwa were terrified in a way Hosek’s neighbors in California could never fathom, because in their America of shopping malls and theme parks and supermarkets and endless suburbs linked by freeways posted with signs directing you to FOOD GAS LODGING and sometimes the nearest hospital, a predator that devoured humans was a threat even more remote than famine or plague, pretty much on the same level of possibility as an invasion by extraterrestrials. If they could imagine what life would be like if a psychopath were roaming their neighborhood, killing at random, they would get an idea of what these Zambian villagers were enduring. Hosek recalled the stories the villagers had told him about the man-eater’s raids. Mostly, he thought about the children he’d met, suffering from bilharzia, malaria, guinea worm, and malnutrition. Theirs was the collective face of the Africa never shown in travel books and tourist brochures, in movies and TV travel documentaries, cameras panning over the symphonic landscapes of the old Africa of Isak Dinesen, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Ruark.

  Considering all their daily afflictions, it seemed, well, wrong, for the villagers to be tyrannized by a man-eating lion, and a compulsion to intervene swept over Hosek, like the sear dry-season wind blowing through camp. “To him who knows good and doesn’t do it is sin,” might sound like bullshit, dressing up blood sport in altruism’s frills. But Hosek’s feelings were sincere.

  He got up and walked across camp and told his guides, Charl Buekes and Willie Cloete, that he was going after the man-eater. He had confidence in them and in their three Zambian trackers, Gilbert, Boniface, and Ken. He was also confident of his own shooting abilities. Still, he felt that he was taking a step into the unknown; a man-eating lion was a different thing altogether from a kudu or wildebeest or grysbok.

  If Buekes and Cloete were surprised by his announcement, they didn’t show it. Nor did they try to talk him out of it. Explaining his decision wasn’t necessary, but he explained it regardless, pointing out the lion’s virtues as a trophy—it had been described by some villagers as a large male with a huge mane—and adding that killing it also would be a sort of public service. The two professional hunters (the term “white hunter” long ago fell out of usage because of its colonial connotations) agreed on the second point but expressed doubts about the first. They suspected that the lion’s impressive mane was a fantasy concocted by a few locals to lure trophy hunters into the Luangwa Valley. The more people they could draw into pursuing the lion, the greater the chances that someone would rid them of it. Under the circumstances, the deceptive advertising was understandable, but Buekes and Cloete were sure the man-eater was not fully maned, if it was maned at all; eyewitnesses they considered reliable had described it as maneless, which had led to the mistaken belief that it was a female, which in turn had led game rangers and professional hunters to kill six lionesses since the attacks began. The lionesses’ deaths had been a pointless waste; the attacks continued. That fact, combined with the reported size of the cat—it was said to be huge—had convinced Buekes and Cloete that the marauder was an unmaned male.

  A maneless lion would be a remarkable creature to most people, accustomed to the gloriously crowned “king of beasts” that adorns countless African postcards and roars at audiences from the MGM screen, but Hosek had seen two such lions before, mounted as exhibits in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where he was born and raised. His father had taken him to the museum when he was in grammar school, more than 35 years ago. There, in Stanley Field Hall, he saw the stuffed replicas of the feline pair, poised on a slab of papier-mâché sandstone, one crouched, the other standing, right paw slightly raised, both looking intently toward the bronze castings of Masai warriors, one of whom had thrown a spear and missed. His weapon was stuck in the ground next to the standing lion, and the warrior was kneeling on one knee behind his buffalo-hide shield,
a hand on the short sword hanging from a cord around his waist. The printed legend at the base of the statue explained that the Masai hunted lions with spears, both as a manhood ritual and to protect their cattle herds, and that when a warrior’s cast missed its mark, he received the lion’s charge on his stout shield and battled it hand to claw with his sword while his comrades waded in with their spears. The young Hosek marveled at the courage and nerve of the Masai, but he was more captivated by their quarry.

  Those two lions, he discovered, had attained mythic status by literally stopping the British Empire in its tracks back in 1898, when they killed and ate some 135 Indian and African laborers building a railroad bridge over the Tsavo River, in what was then British East Africa, later the Republic of Kenya. Work on the bridge came to a halt, forcing the army engineer in charge of the project, Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson, to pursue the man-eaters. It took him nine months to track them down and kill them, a saga without equal in the annals of big-game hunting. Many years later, while lecturing in the United States, Patterson donated the lions’ skins and skulls to the Field Museum. A taxidermist turned the hides into life-size mounts, and they were put on exhibit in 1924, a source of grim fascination to countless visitors and notably to Hosek. The lions’ fearsome history was matched by their appearance; the absence of manes made them look more sinister than majestic; it was as if nature had dispensed with distracting ornamentation to show the beasts in their essence—stripped-down assemblies of muscle, teeth, and claws whose sole purpose was to kill. But it was their eyes that impressed most. They were glass facsimiles, yet they possessed a fixed, attentive, concentrated expression that must have been in the living eyes when they spotted human prey decades before, on the plains of Africa. Hosek stared at them, awestruck by their great size, by the power evident even in their lifeless imitations. The exhibit awakened in him a fascination with Africa and an ambition to go there, an ambition that would not be fulfilled until he was nearly 50 and that would lead him to almost repeat Patterson’s experience.

  Naturally, he had no way of knowing that in the mid-1950s. What he did know now, on this early September day in 1991, was that standing face to face with a taxidermist’s dummies was absolutely no preparation for the real thing. After announcing his decision to his PHs, he felt a range of conflicting emotions, excitement wrestling with dread. He’d read The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, the best-selling book Patterson published in 1907 about the lions’ deadly raids and the ordeal he went through hunting them. To call it sobering would be like calling Dracula interesting; it was a chilling account of two killer cats almost supernatural in their ability to overcome the defenses thrown up against them and to outsmart their pursuer.

  Working as a team, the pair sneaked into the construction camps at night, snatched men from their tents, and consumed them, often within the hearing of the victims’ fellow workers. Patterson, who’d had considerable experience hunting tigers in India, used every trick in the big-game hunter’s playbook and devised ingenious traps and ruses to bring the killers to bay. They outwitted him time and again, proving so crafty that the workmen—mostly contract laborers imported from India—came to believe ancient legends about body-snatching demons told by local tribesmen. They added an anti-imperial spin to the myth: The lions were the incarnate spirits of African chieftains angered by the building of a railroad through their ancestral lands. “Beware, brother! The devil is coming!” the men would call to each other on nights when the lions’ roars fell silent, for silence meant they had begun to stalk.

  Patterson’s description of the aftermath of one attack reads like a gothic novel. His Sikh jemadar, or servant, Ungan Singh, had been seized by one of the lions in the middle of the night. The next morning, Patterson found, “The ground all round was covered with blood and morsels of flesh and bones, but the unfortunate jemadar’s head had been left intact, save for the holes made by the lion’s tusks…. It was the most gruesome sight I had ever seen.”

  Singh was one of the lions’ early victims, and his ghastly death was what sent Patterson after the lions. He didn’t know what he was in for, but found out soon enough. The construction camps were scattered up and down the railroad right-of-way. The lions would strike at a particular camp one night and Patterson would stake it out the next night, waiting with his .303 rifle, but they always seemed to know where he was and would attack elsewhere.

  The workmen meanwhile surrounded their camps with high bomas, or protective fences, made from thorny commiphora shrubs. For a while, the attacks stopped. One night, a few workers figured it was safe to sleep outside their tent but inside the boma—a bad decision. One of the lions leaped over the fence (a lion can make a vertical jump of 12 feet) and grabbed a man. His friends threw stones and firebrands, but the lion calmly dragged its victim through the thorns. Outside, it was joined by its partner, and the two savored their meal within earshot of the dead man’s friends. Some were armed and fired at the lions through the fence, but the bullets missed, and the cats, not in the least disturbed by the gunshots, leisurely finished dinner.

  Perhaps Patterson’s worst memory was of the night when he was in a tree stand and both lions carried their most recent kill close to him. It was too dark to aim and fire. He sat up there, listening to the crunching of bones and to what he described as a contented “purring”—sounds that he could not get out of his head for days.

  The cats did not confine themselves to humans. In December 1898, they killed a donkey. Scared off by Patterson, they abandoned the carcass. Patterson, inspired by his tiger-hunting days in India, built a machan, or platform, with four poles and a wooden plank, from which he could shoot in relative safety. He used the partially eaten donkey as bait, lashing it with wire to a nearby tree stump. That night, Patterson stood vigil. Soon, he heard a twig snap and a lion sighing with hunger. It ignored the donkey, however, and began to stalk Patterson, circling around and around his rickety perch. All it had to do was knock out a pole or jump, and Patterson would have been a dead man. The lion growled, then moved in for the kill. Patterson fired. The lion snarled—it had been hit and ran into the bushes. Patterson blazed away into the brush; the snarls grew weaker and finally ceased. The first man-eater was dead.

  The next day, its body was recovered. Measuring nine feet, eight inches from its nose to the tip of its tail and forty-seven and a half inches at the shoulder, the male was so heavy it took eight men to carry it back to camp. (A lion of those dimensions would weigh an estimated 475 to 500 pounds, roughly 100 pounds more than average.)

  To dispatch the second lion, Patterson tried one of his tricks. After the cat killed a goat near the railroad inspector’s shanty, Patterson tied three live goats to a length of railroad track, then entered the shanty and waited. The lion came just before dawn, killed one of the goats, and began to carry it away, along with the other two goats and the 250-pound rail. Patterson fired, missing the lion but killing one of the goats.

  The rail left a trail easy to follow; the lion escaped nonetheless. The dogged Patterson stalked it for almost two weeks and finally managed to wound it. He and his gun bearer followed the blood spoor, or trail, for a quarter mile and at last spotted their quarry, glaring back at them with bared teeth. Patterson took careful aim and fired. The lion charged. A second shot bowled it over, but it got up and charged again. Patterson fired a third time without effect, reached for his second rifle, and saw that his gun bearer had fled into a tree. Patterson had no choice but to join him; if one of the bullets had not broken the lion’s hind leg, he never would have made it. Once in the tree, Patterson grabbed the rifle and shot the lion again. It fell heavily. Patterson foolishly climbed down—and was stunned to see the lion jump up and charge him again. He put a round in its chest and another in its head, and the lion went down for good, snapping at a branch even as it died.

  The second man-eater measured nine feet, six inches in length and forty-five inches at the shoulder, and its death ended the reign of terror. In a short time, the huge cats became
international celebrities, gaining the distinction of being the only lions ever to be referred to in the House of Lords, when the Prime Minister at that time, Lord Salisbury, made a speech describing the difficulties in building the Uganda Railway:

  “The whole of the works was put to a stop for three weeks because a party of man-eating lions appeared in the locality and conceived a most unfortunate taste for our porters. At last the labourers entirely declined to go on unless they were guarded by an iron entrenchment. Of course it is difficult to work a railway under these conditions, and until we found an enthusiastic sportsman to get rid of these lions, our enterprise was seriously hindered.”

  Now, nearly a century later, Hosek was aware that the “Man-eater of Mfuwe,” as it had come to be called, after a village where it had claimed its first victims, had displayed a cunning almost equal to that of the Man-eaters of Tsavo. One of its pursuers was a professional named Carr, who had made several attempts to get within rifle range of the lion, but it always managed to evade him. Another was a Japanese hunter and naturalist who had killed one of the lionesses, only to discover, after Jesleen was taken and eaten, that he’d shot the wrong animal. Buekes theorized that the females belonged to the man-eater’s pride and that witnessing their deaths had made him still more clever. He’d learned that human beings with weapons were dangerous.

  For two days, Hosek, Buekes, Cloete, and the trackers visited various villages, looking for signs of the lion, collecting descriptions of him and his activities—a kind of intelligence-gathering mission to build a picture of the man-eater’s patterns and range. They were going to war against a solitary, elusive foe, in terrain that favored their adversary. The Luangwa is a rift valley 350 miles long, running roughly parallel to the Tanzanian border between two low mountain formations, the Tern in the east and the Muchinga in the west. Most of Zambia is rolling, lightly wooded savanna, but the Luangwa is more densely vegetated—scrub brush thickets and mopane tree forests alternating with patches of grassland—and is cut up into a puzzle of ravines and gullies formed by the streams and rivers that flow into the Luangwa during the rainy season. The lion had its choice of hiding places, or of ambush sites should it decide to turn on the hunters.