Ghosts of Tsavo

by Philip Caputo

  His eyes popped open on instinct. Buekes and Cloete were standing, motioning to him to get up. He jumped to his feet and peered through the blind’s firing window.

  “See him? He’s behind the tree!” Cloete whispered, meaning the tree from which the bait was hung.

  Hosek at first saw nothing, because the lion was approaching in a straight line with the tree. When Hosek did catch a glimpse, he noticed that he wasn’t moving at a casual pace, but at a quick stride, almost a trot, and was using the tree trunk to mask himself. Despite all the careful plans and preparations, the cat had once again sensed that something wasn’t right and was taking every precaution. Buekes’s characterization of him as crafty did not suffer one bit, but when he stepped out from behind the tree and the three men got their first good look at him, Buekes’s earlier description, “He’s big,” did suffer. The lion wasn’t merely big, he was enormous, his tawny hide paled by the fading light. Ignoring the bait, he turned to face the blind and snarled, absolute confirmation that he knew the men were there. As Buekes had forecast, he wasn’t going to allow them to see him standing still. He picked up speed, now at a full trot, and his one mistake was to offer Hosek a full broadside view of his body. Resting the .375 on the firing slit, the American put the scope on his stomach, jumped the crosshairs to below and just back of his shoulder, a perfect sight picture. Sweeping the scope to keep pace with the lion, he could not allow himself to think about what he was doing; it had to be all experience and training and instinct now, as he followed the marksman’s ancient formula: Breathe, aim, squeeze the trigger as you let out the breath. The rifle seemed to go off by itself just as the man-eater extended his legs to go into a full run. Hosek heard the solid thunk of the bullet striking home and, in the same instant, caught the orange flash from Buekes’s .458 delivering the follow-up. A .458 makes a tremendous blast, yet Hosek didn’t hear it. The whole world went silent as he jacked a fresh round into the chamber and watched the lion sprint with greyhound speed into the grass, too quickly for him to get off a second shot. Now his hearing returned. The sound of the lion crashing through the grass was distinct, and sickening. Somehow, neither he nor Buekes had fired a fatal shot. A moment later, they were grateful to hear a low gurgling sound and then something like a sigh and then a welcome silence.

  Buekes and Cloete, however, weren’t ready to concede that the Man-eater of Mfuwe was finished. For all they knew, this intelligent cat had faked the sounds of its own death.

  “We’re going to check him; you stay here,” Buekes said. This was in accordance with the one great commandment of African big-game guides. When a dangerous animal is wounded, the guide must go in after him first. Getting a client killed is very bad for business and also could result in the loss of a professional hunter’s license.

  Shortly, Buekes called back that the lion was dead. Hosek stood trying to savor the moment, but his heart remained in the state it had been in when he fired—devoid of emotion except for a residue of fear.

  The trackers drove up in the Land Rover. They’d heard the shots from the nearby village and had come immediately, not knowing what had happened. They went past Hosek to where Buekes and Cloete stood, some 40 yards from where the lion had been hit. Gilbert looked down at the carcass and began singing a haunting melody in a strong clear voice. Hosek would later learn that it was called the “Kunda Lion Song.” “Moto-moto anamata, Nkalam sa funna nkondo—Fire, fire young man, The Lion does not want a war.” Gilbert’s operatic bass reached the village. The people there knew its meaning, for the song is sung only when a lion has been slain. The Kunda believe that if it’s sung when a lion has not been killed, whoever sings it will be killed by a lion. Very soon, a flickering orange light rose in the near distance. The villagers were lighting bonfires in celebration, and they too began to sing and shout and beat drums, signaling to their neighbors that this man-eater’s reign of terror had ended. In the outside world, wars were being fought, parliaments debated, the Earth’s billions went about their ordinary days, but in that remote corner of the Luangwa Valley, September 9, 1991, was a day that would be remembered. It was an unforgettable moment for Hosek as well. The scene was something out of the earliest ages of the human race—drumbeats, a chorus of celebratory voices, dancing figures silhouetted by bonfires leaping in the darkness against the backdrop of the tall grass on the skyline.

  As Hosek started toward the lion’s body, illuminated by the Land Rover’s headlights, the trackers ran up to him and hugged and kissed him. Over and over, Ken said, “I say today you get your lion.” Hosek now allowed himself to feel joy, mixed with enormous relief that he and the others had not had to track the man-eater’s blood trail in the middle of the night.

  When he was about 25 feet from the dead lion, he stopped. Something, some force or power, would not allow him to go any farther. He couldn’t get near the carcass in any case. Children poured out of the village and swarmed around it, and Hosek was astonished to see them spitting on the beast that had tormented them for so long, beating it with sticks, casting out their fear and rage. More people arrived, one an old woman with a cane. She went up to Buekes, who was leaning against the Land Rover, and asked who had shot the lion. He gestured at Hosek. The old woman approached the American, looked at him with a fierce expression, and squeezed his hand. “Zikomo kwambli,” she said. “Thank you very, very much.” Hosek would later learn that she was held in high esteem by the villagers and that to receive her deepest thanks was a high honor. After her recognition of his achievement, dozens of other people, men and women, old and young, jubilantly crowded around him, touching him, offering their hands in thanks. He might have been Beowulf after slaying Grendel, but Hosek did not see himself in any such heroic light. He was a hunter who had shot a lion, though it was no ordinary lion. Even in death, it seemed to bewitch him. Looking at it, lying as if asleep, except for the blood-rimmed hole behind its shoulder and the chunk taken out of its left rear leg by Buekes’s snap follow-up, Hosek continued to feel the strange paralysis.

  The celebration continued. More songs were sung, speeches made, thanks given. An assistant school principal who’d been held hostage in his house for a day and a half because the lion was prowling nearby praised Hosek’s mother for giving birth to him. Villagers carried him around on their shoulders, and someone told him he could spend the night with any woman he chose, married or single, for among the Kunda, as among the Masai and Turkana and Samburu, it is an honor for a woman to make love to a man who has killed a lion. Hosek declined the offer.

  Now he gathered the nerve to approach the lion, going up to it from behind. He tentatively touched its muscled haunch and then stepped back. Buekes, recalling that Hosek’s camera had broken, said he would take a picture with his, but it also failed to function, for no reason except the one neither man could voice.

  It took six strong men to drag the cat to the Land Rover and load it on board. Hosek and his guides and trackers returned to camp, where the skinners opened the man-eater’s stomach to see if any identifiable human remains could be found. This gruesome operation was as ceremonial as it was forensic, because the Kunda believe that the body parts of a person devoured by a predator must be given a proper burial; otherwise, the deceased will not enter heaven. Unfortunately for the souls of the hapless Jesleen and the lion’s other victims, no remains were discovered. Jesleen’s white bag, however, was left undisturbed in the riverbed, as a sign of respect.

  Buekes took out his measuring tape, extending it from the lion’s nose to the tip of its outstretched tail. Ten feet six inches. He measured its shoulder height, four feet even, half an inch taller than the bigger of Patterson’s two man-eaters. No scales were available to weigh Hosek’s lion, but much later, experts from the Field Museum in Chicago estimated that the lion went upward of 550 pounds. Indeed, the Man-eater of Mfuwe would turn out to be the biggest man-eating lion ever recorded, a fact that would come to light seven years later, when, following the script of Patterson’s saga, Hosek donat
ed the lion’s mount to the Museum.

  The camp staff were in as festive a mood as the villagers. Hosek, riding on the excitement, stayed up till past midnight. Some six hours after shooting the lion, he approached it again and was able to bring himself to touch its huge, maneless head.

  The next morning, at breakfast, Cloete, smiling broadly, made a confession.

  “Y’know, I’d made up my mind to never put my head down or doze off, because I was afraid. This lion, being a man-eater, just might decide to creep up and suddenly come into the blind.”

  Later, Hosek returned to the blind, which had been dismantled by the villagers, its grass thatch and bamboo poles saved as souvenirs. Hosek found a souvenir of his own—the spent cartridge from his rifle. It seemed to reflect his own mental and emotional condition. Looking around, he noticed how the landscape, so filled with menace just a short while ago, now appeared placid, dull, and lifeless, as if the absence of danger had somehow drained its vitality. He recalled a peculiar, poignant moment from the previous night, after he’d returned to camp. A young English woman, working as a wildlife researcher in the Luangwa Game Reserve, arrived to join in the festivities. Her name was Kathryn, she was from Oxford University, and she’d been in the bush for four years, sufficient time to learn that the rationalities of science are not all they’re cracked up to be, that there are forms of knowledge not to be acquired by the examination of evidence or the testing of theories and hypotheses but only by listening to the older voices in the human mind. Certainly there was no evidence of a scientific nature to support the notion that the lion possessed supernatural powers, but Kathryn acted as if it were as true as Newton’s laws of motion. Afflicted by the same spooky paralysis that had gripped Hosek, she looked at the animal from a distance, unable to draw closer. Hosek walked over to her and asked if she would like to inspect the lion, perhaps touch it. She said something odd—“I want to meet him…. No, not yet, but I will.” The American told her that she didn’t have time to wait; in a few minutes, the carcass was going to be skinned in preparation for the taxidermist. Kathryn remained motionless and kept murmuring “I will” as she stared at the lion. Finally Hosek asked if he could escort her, and she said, “OK.” But only after he took her hand in his would she step forward to “meet” the legendary beast.

  Man-eaters die hard, Hosek thought, slipping the cartridge case into his pocket. He drove back to camp, where Buekes presented him with the lion’s skull and some of its bones. Hosek had been “Africanized,” Buekes said, meaning that he’d discovered what it’s like to live with sudden danger, lethal threats, and constant uncertainty, and those bones were symbols of his Africanizing. Hosek held them and felt a familiar rush of adrenaline, as if the man-eater still lived. And in his mind, it always would.

  ACT ONE

  LEGENDS

  If the whole body of lion anecdote, from the days of the Assyrian Kings till the last year of the nineteenth century, were collated and brought together, it would not equal in tragedy or atrocity, in savageness or in sheer insolent contempt for man, armed or unarmed, white or black, the story of these two beasts…. To what a distance the whole story carries us back, and how impossible it becomes to account for the survival of primitive man against this kind of foe!

  —from The Spectator, March 3, 1900

  THERE ARE SOME similarities between Wayne Hosek’s background and mine. I am also Chicago born and raised. And one weekend when I was in grammar school my father brought me to the Field Museum, a long drive from the suburb where we lived, through the three-flat and brick-bungalow neighborhoods on the west side into the Loop’s shadowy canyons and the sunlit expanses of Grant Park beyond, then south down Lake Shore Drive to a vast, neoclassical building that, with its soaring Ionic columns and broad staircases, looked like the temples I’d seen in books or in Cecil B. DeMille’s epics: a magical structure promising all the wonder absent from my quotidian life amid the split-levels and new shopping centers sprawling into the Illinois prairies beyond the smoky city. The museum delivered on its promise. Stanley Field Hall was another world, where under a vaulted ceiling three stories high the mounts of two African elephants stood on a pedestal, ears flared, tusks curving like enormous scimitars, and the Masai warriors in their bronzed immobility awaited with upraised spears the charge of the two big lions poised on replicated rock on the opposite side of the hall. The Masai’s courage and the legend of the Tsavo man-eaters captivated me as much as they had the young Hosek and ignited a desire to someday go to that part of Africa on safari, a desire that was likewise not fulfilled until I was well into middle age, 58 years old, to be precise.

  I was also in pursuit of lions, but there the similarities end. I went armed with a camera and notebook instead of a rifle because my purpose was not to shoot a killer cat but to lift the veils of legend that had shrouded the lions of Tsavo ever since Colonel Patterson’s book made them notorious. Not to put too high a tone on it, my quest was to find out the truth about one of humankind’s oldest myths, the myth of the rogue beast, the man-eater.

  That word man-eater is profoundly disturbing. Instantly it dissolves hundreds of thousands of years of human progress and carries us back to our beginnings, when we were puny hominids, slouching across the African savanna where man was born, huddling in fireless caves, waiting for death to rush at us from the long grass. The thought of being devoured offends our sense of human dignity, subverts our cherished belief that we are higher beings—“the paragon of animals,” to borrow a line from Hamlet. The man-eater’s actions say to us, “I don’t care if you’re the President of the United States, the Queen of England, the inventor of the microchip, a bankable movie star, or an ordinary Joe or Jill, you’re no paragon in my book, but the same as a zebra or gazelle—a source of protein. In fact, I’d rather hunt you, because you’re slow and feeble.”

  Sharks and crocodiles attack and eat people. Among the big cats, leopards are more efficient killers of human beings than lions are, and as the citizens of rural India and Indonesia know very well, human flesh is a staple of the tiger’s diet, which isn’t believed to be true of the lion. Nevertheless, as a creator of primeval terror, the man-eating lion resonates most powerfully in our minds, probably because the lion figures so deeply in our folklore, going back to a time long before man began to write down the legends and tales grunted around the tribal fires: Images of lions were painted on the cave walls of Pleistocene Europe. Proceeding into recorded history, we read of Hercules subduing the Nemean lion in hand-to-hand combat to demonstrate his superhuman strength, of the prophet Daniel cast into a lion’s den, of the Psalmist who cries out, in the 22nd Psalm, “Save me from the lion’s mouth.”

  Viewed in this light, Colonel Patterson’s The Man-Eaters of Tsavo can be seen as a saga that welds myth and reality. It describes actual events, yet it reads like fiction, which may be why it has inspired two Hollywood fantasies, B’wana Devil in 1952, the first 3-D movie, and The Ghost and the Darkness in 1996. (Legend has it that those were the nicknames the Indian laborers had given the Tsavo man-eaters.) Today, 95 years after publication, it remains in print.

  I read it for the first time when I was 16, after paying another visit to the Field Museum. It gave me nightmares. I reread it 42 years later, before leaving for Kenya’s Tsavo National Park, and found that it had not lost its power to terrify, to seize my imagination. That seemed odd at first, for the prose in The Man-Eaters of Tsavo probably sounded a bit antiquated even in 1907, when Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were laying the foundations for the modernist movement in literature. To contemporary readers, its style is as far from the hip postmodernism of, say, Don DeLillo as ultraviolet is from the black end of the spectrum. It’s a Victorian drawing room of a book, scluttered with unnecessary adjectives, covered in the damask of dated figures of speech, darkened by the heavy drapery of melodramatic phrases. Yet that style, harking back to gothic tales like The Castle of Otranto or Frankenstein, partly accounts for its ability to scare the hell out of you and k
eep you turning the page.

  Partly. The action and the subject matter more fully explain the book’s appeal. It doesn’t give you a transitory fright, like a good ghost story or a movie about the occult, but stays with you, infiltrating your subconscious, because you know it isn’t a screenwriter’s make-believe. Those were real lions, their victims were real people, and, oh, how you can picture their legs thrashing as they’re dragged off into the darkness, just as helpless as a vole or mouse in the jaws of your pet cat; how you can hear their final screams as the lion crushes their skulls or delivers a thoracic bite, and then the sounds that Patterson listened to when he sat up in the tree: bones being crunched, the disgusting slurp of entrails ripped out and gulped down. The next morning, you gaze with Patterson at what’s left—a complex human being, with a unique identity, with hopes, ambitions, and desires just like yours, reduced by a creature with a brain slightly larger than your fist to nothing more than a few fragments of bone and a bloodstain on the grass, speckled with bits of flesh. Beyond nausea and horror, you suffer a kind of metaphysical shock. Are we really the paragon of animals if a cat, a cat, for Christ’s sake, can turn us into mere prey with so little effort? Or is our glorious self-image a delusion of our overblown egos? It’s an insult even to ask such questions, much less to answer them. And the belief that lions generally turn man-eater only when they’re too sick, old, or injured to pursue their normal prey adds to the insult. That is why Colonel Patterson referred to the marauding pair as brutes, savages, outlaws: They not only refused submission to man’s supremacy but also refused to acknowledge it, a notion that I suspect troubles us as much as it did him. In our postindustrial, hyper-technological, hyper-urbanized world, we are accustomed to being in control. It’s difficult to bend our minds around the idea that we can be part of the food chain—and not at the top, either—because we no longer see ourselves as part of nature. Indeed, we feel sorry for the natural world in a way, embarking on various projects to preserve it, penning it up in national parks and game reserves and wildlife sanctuaries, which is of course another way of exerting control.