Ghosts of Tsavo

by Philip Caputo

  We pass Mudanda Rock, which thrusts up out of the level landscape above a big water hole formed by a natural dam. Finch-Hatton was killed near Mudanda in May 1931, when his plane crashed after running into a vulture, but the rock is more noted for its water hole, which draws hundreds of elephants during the dry season. A small herd is there as we pass by, dipping their trunks into the muddy water, shuffling about, their hides coated in Tsavo dust so that they are more red than gray. They cross the road in front of us with a lovely, gliding stride, and one old bull, to protest our presence, turns to face us, flares its ears, and trumpets before moving on into the trees.

  I am thrilled—they’re the first elephants I have seen in the wild. The sight inspires Iain to rhapsodize about the elephant, which is his favorite animal. It, not the lion, is emblematic of Tsavo: “The true king of beasts,” he says—a highly intelligent, social creature that controls the fate of the environment, sometimes in subtle ways. Fifteen years ago, when the park’s elephants were poached nearly to extinction, the Kenya Wildlife Service observed a big increase in the numbers of dik-dik in the park. The tiny, delicate antelope, which weigh an average of 12 pounds, had grown in population because the trees and brush cropped by elephant had proliferated to the point that the eagles that prey on dik-dik could not see them through the dense foliage. Tsavo’s elephant herd has roughly doubled, to about 10,000 animals, since the Conference on International Trade in Endangered Species, known as CITES, imposed a worldwide ban on ivory sales in 1989. That was far more effective in ending poaching than the efforts of Leakey’s rangers, with their helicopter gunships and authorization to shoot poachers on sight. As for the future of Tsavo’s elephants, Iain can be described as cautiously pessimistic: So far, the ban is working, but powerful forces are at work to undermine it. Zimbabwe and Botswana, which periodically cull their elephant herds to control their numbers (Kenya does not allow culling), have been lobbying hard to get CITES to partially lift the ban so they can sell their ivory. Once ivory gets into the market, no one will be able to tell which country it came from or distinguish between poached ivory and culled ivory, so Iain worries that even a partial lifting will bring the highly skilled, well-equipped, and well-armed Somali gangs back to Tsavo to resume the slaughter.

  We turn east onto another dirt road, then onto a vague two-track that takes us across the Voi River, waterless now in the dry season, its sandy bed printed with animal tracks. On the other side is Iain’s tent camp. Like most American outdoorsmen and women, Leslie and I are accustomed to doing things for ourselves; we pitch our own tents, cook our own food, scrub our own pots, make our own beds, and lie in them. That isn’t the style in Kenya, or anywhere in Africa. Iain is a firm believer in the axiom that you don’t have to practice being miserable. His safaris hark back to the stylish roughing-it of a bygone age—commodious wall tents with cots, blankets, mattresses, and canvas camp chairs; outdoor showers; portable privies in canvas enclosures; laundry service; and a competent, six-man staff to do all the cooking and camp chores. We are promised that Kahiu, the cook, will do meals over an open fire equal to anything served in the best Nairobi restaurant, and we will wash them down with South African and Italian wines, making us feel pretty pukka-sahib.

  We settle in, meaning that we drop our duffel bags in our tents, while Iain and Clive issue a few orders in a Swahili that bears the peremptory tones of the old White Highlands. In the capital, the Caucasian Kenyan has to keep his opinions to himself, but it’s obvious that he’s still the bwana makuba out here. Iain tells us that we will spend four days at this camp and look for lions on game drives, then we will strike camp and move to another on the Galana River, some 30 miles to the north. From there, we will go on foot into the Northern Area, an immense sweep of semiarid savanna. It is the wildest region of the park, and because the KWS is underfunded and undermanned, it is lightly patrolled and therefore closed to the general public. Only authorized walking parties are allowed into it, and they must be accompanied by armed rangers to protect them from bipedal as well as four-footed predators. In other words, shifta, as Somali bandits are called. That sits well with us; travel without an element of danger is mere sight-seeing.

  Rob Howard, a dark-haired guy, 36 years old, with the looks and enthusiasm of someone 10 years younger, shoulders his arsenal of cameras and lenses and we set off in the Land Rover. It is late afternoon, the golden hour in East Africa. The light is like liquid butter. We meet Andanje, co-discoverer of the man-eaters’ den, at a place called Aruba, where an earthen dam built decades ago has created a water hole the size of a small lake. The landscape here resembles the Serengeti, level breadths of brown grass drawn out to the horizon, the occasional acacia standing sentinel. Samuel, in a white Land Rover, with the name of the Royal Zoological Society painted on its doors, scans the emptiness with binoculars. He is now a research associate with the KWS and is studying lions and other game on a grant from the Society. He spends his nights locating the cats by their roars and his days tracking them in his vehicle. As we approach, he climbs out, an athletic six-footer with a round face and bright, easy smile, greets Iain and Clive, and tells them a group of lions is feeding on a freshly killed buffalo nearby. They belong to a pride of 23 lions, he says, pointing to a low ridge a hundred yards from the lake. I don’t see anything at first; then I catch the flick of a triangular ear and make out a long beige body lying in grass that perfectly matches its color. A head rises up, then another. A pair of females. Our first look at the lions of Tsavo. Rob and I get our cameras ready, both equipped with fast 300-millimeter lenses half as long as rocket-launchers. Iain eases the Land Rover off road and slowly approaches to within 40 feet of the pair lazing in the sun, their bellies swollen with buffalo meat (A lion will consume anywhere from 45 to 75 pounds of meat at a single sitting. For comparison’s sake, imagine yourself eating, say, 50 porterhouses in one meal.) As we poke our heads through the roof hatches and begin taking pictures, amber eyes gaze at us with supreme indifference. In fact, they don’t look at us so much as through us. In an undertone, Iain says we are very lucky. The lions of Tsavo are “wilder” than those in Kenya and Tanzania, which have become habituated to tourists, and will hide from people in the dense saltbush thickets bordering rivers and luggas (dry riverbeds) or in the clumps of commiphora. Although Tsavo is under increasing pressure from visitors—roughly 200,000 a year—the numbers don’t match those in other parks and game reserves. Were we now in the Serengeti or Amboseli, we would be surrounded by at least a dozen other vehicles. Ours is the only one in sight. Even if Tsavo were as popular as its sister parks, it’s so vast that a lion could pass most of its life without seeing more than a handful of people. This pair, inhabiting one of the few open stretches in Tsavo, don’t have anywhere to hide; and it’s possible that they’ve encountered enough minibuses full of gawkers not to be disturbed by us.

  Their tolerance depends on our remaining in the Land Rover. A human being on foot, if seen by a lion, will trigger one of two instinctive responses: It will either attack or flee. A vehicle, which it may think is some sort of creature unto itself, neither threat nor prey, makes it feel as safe from you as you from it—a fact that has led some unscrupulous, cowardly hunters to shoot lions from cars.

  A movement off to the left reveals the presence of a third lioness. How camouflaged she is; if you were walking around out here, you could step on her before you saw her, and I imagine that would be the last step you ever took and the last thing you ever saw, for she is bigger than the other two, a fully mature female, the alpha girl, perhaps 300 pounds. There is another movement from behind a low bush farther to our left. Iain puts the Land Rover in gear and creeps in that direction. It’s the male, the leader of the pride, and he is awesome. Awesomely big, every ounce of 450 pounds, and awesomely ugly, with sparse, dark side whiskers and a short crest for a mane—not a photogenic, Oscar de la Hoya sort of lion, but a Jake LaMotta lion, his face and hide scarred from the thorny country he lives in, from battles with rival lio
ns, from the kicks of the zebra and buffalo he kills for food. He lies in the shade of the bush, only 25 feet away, eyes partly shut, breathing heavily beside the carcass of the Cape buffalo. Around him, two more young lionesses loll in the short yellow grass, well fed and yawning. Two cubs lick and nibble the buffalo’s hindquarters, the ragged strips of meat in the hollowed-out cavity showing a bright, shocking red under the black skin. Nothing else remains of the animal, except for the horned head, the front hoofs, and a few scattered bones.

  We observe and photograph the male for several minutes. I am thinking of Hamlet, and Shakespeare’s paean to Homo sapiens: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!” It seems to me that the lion deserves a hosanna or two. How powerful in body, its bone mass light, its muscles heavy! Its forebody the strongest of all the cats, its forepaws able to break a zebra’s neck with one blow! How adapted are its eyes to hunt at night, coated to reflect even moonlight, with a white circle beneath each to reflect more light into them and improve their vision in darkness! How fearsome and efficient are its teeth for killing! The canines spaced so they can slip between the cervical vertebrae of their favorite prey! How astonishing is its two-piece hyoid bone that gives it the power to roar! And how terrifying that roar, forceful enough to raise clouds of dust! How vigorous in sexuality, mating as often as 40 times a day when the female is in estrus!

  The question I’m pondering is, Does the big fellow in front of us—I’ve decided to call him Scarface—belong to a subspecies of the Serengeti lion, Panthera leo massaicus? Am I looking at a living fossil that has walked into the modern age from the Stone Age? Is the bobbed, scruffy mane the result of genetic variation? Other questions about the Gnoske-Kerbis Peterhans hypothesis creep in. This is no leonine nuclear family—8 animals altogether, only part of a pride of 23 according to Samuel’s count. How would the researchers explain that? Perhaps this part of Tsavo, with its savanna-like sweep, permits large prides to develop. But then, why doesn’t Scarface sport a luxuriant mane? Nor can I tell if Scarface follows the Gnoske-Kerbis Peterhans scenario by doing most of the hunting. He may have killed the buffalo, but it was a young animal, judging from the span of horn and the size of the hindquarters, and may have been taken down by the lionesses. Or it could have been scavenged. Lions obtain a good deal of their food—as much as 40 percent in some circumstances—by stealing it from other predators, hyenas being the most frequent victim of lion larceny. I wish I had an expert field biologist to turn to for perspective and insight. With my long lens braced on the Land Rover’s roof, I feel that I’m no seeker of facts or truth, but a glorified tourist.

  I run out of film and drop through the roof hatch to fetch another roll from my camera bag. Rob, deciding he needs a better angle, boosts himself through the hatch and stands up. Immediately, the drowsy, indifferent expression goes out of Scarface’s eyes that glow like brass in firelight as they focus on Rob with absolute concentration. Rob’s camera continues to whirr and click, and I wonder if he’s noticed that he’s disturbed the lion. Now, with its stare still fixed on him, it grunts out of one side of its mouth, then the other, gathering its forepaws into itself and raising its haunches. The long, black-tufted tail switches in the grass.

  “Say, Rob, might be a good idea to sit down again,” Iain advises quietly. “Move slowly, though.”

  He barely finishes this instruction when the lion makes a noise like a man clearing his throat, only a good deal louder, and lunges across half the distance between us and him, swatting the air with one paw before he stops. Rob tumbles through the hatch, almost landing on top of me in a clatter of camera equipment, a flailing of arms and legs.

  “Jesus Christ!” he says, obviously impressed. Scarface settles down again, though his tail continues to sweep back and forth.

  “The short, happy life of Rob Howard,” I wisecrack. “It’s embarrassing to see a man lose his nerve like that.”

  A bit of bravado on my part. We are going to be on foot in four days, and if we are charged then, how will my own nerve hold up? Perhaps Rob is wondering the same thing about himself. He asks what he’d done to provoke the lion.

  “Standing up like that. It was the silhouette of the bipod,” answers Clive, in one of his habitual malapropisms. “Lions have learned to fear and hate the bipod.”

  “Would he have jumped up on the roof?” Rob asks, his expression telling us that he’s formed a mental picture of the appalling results.

  “Could have, but he wouldn’t have,” Iain replies, a vague smile cracking across his rough, sun-reddened face. “That was just a demonstration, to let you know the rules. Of course, you had no way of knowing that.”

  Shortly after the male teaches Rob the rules, the females, with the cubs in tow, move off toward the lake to drink. They make a fine sight in the golden afternoon light, walking slowly through the dun-colored grass with movements that suggest water flowing. Scarface remains behind to guard the buffalo carcass from jackals and hyenas. As the sun lowers, the lake becomes a wildlife magnet. Two hippos wallow in the middle. On one side, a dozen elephants, creased hides reddened by dried mud, drink through the great straws of their trunks while a herd of about 30, in the far distance, shamble toward the lake. Along the shore where the lionesses and cubs crouch, their tongues lapping, sacred ibises peck the mud with their long, curved beaks: a bird of simple colors, black and white, sharply delineated, and called sacred because it symbolized the Egyptian god Thoth, who toted up the Pharaoh’s good and evil deeds in the Book of the Dead.

  So speaketh Clive, telling us that the sacred ibis can be seen on the hydroglyphs in Egypt.

  “Hieroglyphs, Clive,” corrects Iain.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  Over the years, they have developed a relationship that seems to combine war-buddy comradeship with the easy familiarity of an old married couple; they bicker now and then and needle each other, but beneath the bickering and needling, I sense an abiding bond knit on sheer rock faces and icy crags and long, hot tramps through the African bush.

  Clive’s disquisition on sacred ibis is followed by a series of throaty grunts from the male lion, which isn’t a commentary but a call to the females and cubs to return. As they pad soundlessly through the grass, we leave—it’ s growing dark—and come upon a lone lioness, lying at the junction of the road and the two-track that leads to camp. She doesn’t move as the Land Rover approaches, nor when we turn onto the two-track, passing within six feet of her. She’s a big girl, too, and seems to regard the intersection as hers, and of course it is.

  The big storks roosting in the branches of dead trees in the Voi riverbed look ominous in the twilight. Up ahead and across the river, the glow of kerosene lamps and a campfire make a more cheerful sight.

  After dinner, we sit around the campfire on folding chairs under the stars, and once, when the wind turns, we hear the lions roaring in the distance. The sound inspires Iain to offer a tale of his scariest encounter with a Tsavo lion.

  It happened on a safari the previous July. It was late in the afternoon, past the time when he usually checks in with his Nairobi office by satellite phone (nowadays, even safari guides cannot escape the tyranny of instant communications). Iain ambled down to the wide, sandy banks of the Galana River, where reception was better than it was in his tree-shrouded tent camp. As he chatted with his assistant, he observed a bushbuck poke its way through a saltbush thicket some distance upriver, then begin to drink. Suddenly, the animal raised its head and froze; an instant later, a lioness sprang from the saltbush still farther upriver, and the bushbuck bolted down the shore in Iain’s direction, the lioness in pursuit. When the lioness was about 50 yards from Iain, she veered off without breaking stride and headed straight for him, bursts of sand flying behind her. Iain tossed the phone away, and in a mi
crosecond that seemed like minutes, realized that he needn’t worry about her teeth and claws; he was going to be killed by the impact of 300 pounds of sinew and muscle smashing into him at a speed faster than an Olympic sprinter’s. When she was only 20 feet from where he stood, she veered again, kicked sand all over him, and vanished.

  Iain suspects that the lioness charged him because she was confused, annoyed, or curious.

  “That’s the closest I’ve ever come to getting killed,” he adds. “After she disappeared, I had the feeling that she’d run into camp, so I ran back and told my clients to get in their tents and zip them up, and warned the staff that a lion was in camp. Well, they looked at me as if to say that the old boy had had too much sun, and after I didn’t see the lioness for a while, I figured they were right. I was about to tell my clients that they could come on out of their tents, when I turned around and saw eight Africans running like hell for the Land Rover, with the lioness running among them—not after them, but right in the middle of them. The men leaped up to the roof in one bound. I think that old girl was very confused—she’d started off chasing a bushbuck, ended up in a camp full of people, tents, vehicles—things she’d never seen—and must have wondered, “How did I get into this mess?” She ran out, but stopped at the edge of camp and stayed there all day. Just sat there, like the lioness we saw a little while ago.”

  “What good did zipping up tent flaps do?” I ask. “She could have shredded an eighth of an inch of canvas if she wanted to.”

  “Lions don’t like entering dark, enclosed spaces,” Iain explains. “That’s why it’s important to keep the flaps closed at night. Only last August, in Zimbabwe, there was a young Englishman, son of an earl, on a camping safari. Seems there was a lot of drinking going on, and, after the party, he went into his tent and fell asleep without closing the flaps. Sometime during the night, a lioness got close to his tent. He woke up and, scared as hell, ran out. Lions like things that run, same as any cat. She chased him right into a mob of other lions, and when they got through with him, I don’t think there was anything left.”