Ghosts of Tsavo

by Philip Caputo

  That is not a bedtime story to tell in lion country. Or maybe it is: When Leslie and I go to our tent, we not only secure the flaps, we zip up the covers to the mesh ventilation windows—and can barely breathe the stifling air. As I lie beside my beautiful lady, listening to the muffled roars, I’m not reassured by Iain’s claim that lions don’t like entering dark, enclosed places. Didn’t the Man-eaters of Tsavo barge into the tents of the construction crews to grab their meals? Maybe the workmen didn’t close the flaps, I think. But what about the lion that killed C. H. Ryall? It opened the door to an unlighted railway carriage, opened the door, for Christ’s sake. My sole armament is a K-bar, the ten-inch fighting knife issued to me when I was in the Marine Corps in Vietnam. I have heroic fantasies of defending Leslie from a predatory attack and recall the statue of the young Masai in the Field Museum, kneeling behind his shield, hand on the hilt of his simi. I think of stories I’ve read about brave men killing lions with knives or other edged weapons. There was Lord Delamere, an early English settler in Kenya, knocked off his horse by a man-eater. As he lay stunned, the lion, supposing him dead, seized him by a shoulder and trotted off with him, presumably toward a suitable dining area. Coming to, Lord Delamere drew his knife and plunged it into the lion’s heart. Peter Capstick, while tracking a man-eater in the same area as Hosek, the Luangwa Valley, was ambushed by a lion, which knocked him down and sent his rifle spinning off into the underbrush. The huge male then charged Capstick’s tracker, who was armed only with a spear. Slapping the spear aside with a forepaw, the lion leaped on the man and commenced to maul him. He saved himself from instant death by shoving his arm into the lion’s mouth. Capstick recovered, and, unable to find his rifle, snatched the spear by its broken shaft and drove it into the lion’s neck, severing its spinal cord. It collapsed as if it had been shot in the brain. In The Shadow of Kilimanjaro, Rick Ridgeway tells of a Kamba hunter and tracker, Elui, who wore two lion hair balls (like domestic cats, lions lick themselves clean and vomit up hair balls that result from their grooming) on leather thongs tied around his upper arms. The Wakamba, who inhabited Tsavo before it became a peopleless park, believe that the ornament gives a man the strength of a lion. Quoting Danny Woodley, the son of the Tsavo game warden, Ridgeway describes how Elui acquired his:

  “One day Elui was at a water hole when he was pounced on by a lion. He gave the lion his arm, pulled his knife, and stabbed him in the aorta. The lion collapsed and spit up the hair ball onto Elui, who from then on wore it around his bicep. Later he killed a female lion and so he had that hair ball on his other arm.”

  Not one, but two lions. With a knife. If Elui could do it, then so can I, if I have to. I will defend Leslie with all my strength and courage, to the last breath. I touch the ridged haft of the K-bar, resting in its leather sheath on the night table next to my cot, but it seems to me that the best thing I can do with it in the event of a lion attack will be to fall on it and save the lion the trouble.

  “JAMBO,” DAVID, ONE of the camp staff, calls softly from outside our tent. Jambo means “hello” in Swahili.

  “Jambo,” we answer and get up and dress by lantern light as David fills the canvas sinks with hot water. I splash some on my face. It smells wonderfully of campfire smoke. After breakfast, and with light erasing the last morning stars, we roll out to the Aruba dam to look for Scarface and his family. Along the way, we spot baboons—fellow primates!—squatting in their night perches in the trees, and an African fish eagle, white-headed, black-winged, resembling the American bald eagle, roosting in a branch. Sand grouse flush from the roadside, a hornbill sails from a bush, letting out a plaintive cry.

  The lions are not where we had left them. We drive slowly, looking for pugmarks in the soft, rust-colored earth, until we hear a deep, bass groan that ends in a chesty cough. Scarface. The sound he makes is so loud we think he’s only 50 yards away. Leaving the road, we set off in the direction of the roar, bouncing over a prairie of short, dry grass tinted pale gold by the early morning sun, Clive, Rob, and I standing on the seats with our heads poking out of the roof hatches.

  “Ah, there he is,” says Iain, at the wheel.

  “Him, all right,” Clive seconds.

  I spend a lot of time hiking and bird hunting in the woods and am not bad at spotting game, but I have no idea what they’re talking about.

  “It’s the ears, you look for the ears sticking above the grass when you’re looking for lion,” Iain instructs, and drives on, and then I see them, two triangles that could be mistaken for knots in a stump, except they move. We’re 20 or 30 yards away when he stands up, with a movement fluid and unhurried. Ugly-handsome Scarface proceeds down an elephant trail at the leonine version of a stroll, then up over a rise and down toward a marsh. We stay with him all the way, keeping a respectful distance, cameras clicking away. Looking at him broadside, I wonder if my earlier estimate of his weight was conservative. One big boy, all right, and if he were a man-eater, he would kill you in one of three ways: bite to your head, piercing your temples with his canines (this is preferable, as death is instantaneous); break your neck (death in a few seconds); or bite into your chest, driving his tusks into your lungs or heart (definitely not your first choice, as it may take you a while to die, and it’s possible he’ll start to devour you before your soul has departed for a better place; there are horrifying records in Africa of lions eating people alive). As far as the actual dining goes, the lion will first flay off your skin with his tongue, which is covered with small spines that give it the texture of coarse-grained sandpaper and are used to bring nutritious blood to the surface; bite into your abdomen, open you up, and scoop out your entrails and internal organs and consume them because they are rich in protein, your liver especially; his incisors will tear into your meatiest parts, thighs and buttocks, followed by your arms, shoulders, and calves, and then he’ll crack open the smaller bones for their marrow. He will not eat your stomach, but bury it. Lions don’t consume the stomachs of their prey, though no one knows the reason for this. Your larger bones will be left for the hyenas, which have stronger jaws. Vultures and jackals will dispose of your face and scalp and whatever scraps of flesh remain, so that, a few hours after your sudden demise, it will be as though you had never existed. There is a terrible thoroughness to the mechanics of death in Africa, and we are not exempt.

  Scarface leads us right to his harem, and then, after posing on a knoll, he moves off into the marsh, the lionesses and cubs following soon after.

  “That’s that for now,” says Iain. “Have to come back in the late afternoon. Let’s look up Sam and try to find the rest of this pride.”

  We drive toward Sattao Camp, a safari lodge, and find Andanje standing atop his Land Rover, sweeping the horizon with binoculars. He says he’ll take us to where he’d last seen the pride. We follow him along a remote stretch of the Voi, through the spiked commiphora scrub. I mention the bomas Colonel Patterson’s laborers had constructed out of that stuff, and how the lions had found ways through them, with the canniness of trained guerrillas infiltrating an enemy’s barbed wire. Four-footed killers with above-average IQs. A brain weighing only half a pound can do more than you might think.

  “I don’t doubt but that they had the whole thing totally wired,” Iain remarks. “The difference between people and animals is that we can see the big picture and figure out how to survive in any environment, but within their area of specialization, most animals are as smart as we are, maybe smarter.” He pauses, chewing over a further thought. “Take a look at this country…. I’m convinced that they have territories they know as well as you know your backyard, with their ambush places all staked out. They’re clever. They know where to be and when.”

  An interesting observation, I think. It reminds me of something I’d read, to the effect that because a human being’s one big advantage over a predator is intelligence, the lion that hunts man has to sharpen its wits rather than its claws to be successful. But the lions that Patterson encountered
may have had keen wits to begin with to survive in their environment and honed them further as they grew more experienced, stalking their big-brained, bipedal quarry.

  Capstick noted: “The brazen dedication of the experienced man-eating lion to his art can be spine-chilling. Just as a normal lion learns techniques of killing and hunting animal prey in specific manners, so does the man-eater develop modus operandi for catching humans. The fact that a man-eating feline is the most difficult animal in the world to hunt can be explained by the cat’s ability to learn well and quickly.”

  Waterbuck freeze and stare at our vehicles before bounding off, their rumps with white circles resembling bull’s-eyes on a target. Elegant Grant’s gazelle, long-legged, fawn-colored hides glossy as rubbed leather, the males’ horns shaped like lyres, graze in the distance. Farther on, we come upon a large herd of Cape buffalo, tar black, baleful looking, the old bulls incredibly massive—I can’t imagine even a team of lions bringing one of them down. And indeed, a buffalo often kills the lion or lions that try to kill it. Samuel tells us that he saw a male stomped to death by a buffalo only last week. Far off, a lone elephant browses amid the branches of a tall tree, but there are no lions in sight, and by half past ten the quest is hopeless. It’s close to 100°, and the cats are laid up, deep within the thickets.

  We return to camp, have lunch, idle away the afternoon watching a Masai giraffe munch tree leaves on the far side of the riverbed. Moving from tree to tree, it looks like a crane in stately motion. A breeze springs up, relieving the dry-season heat, rustling through the coastal oaks, rattling the brown seed pods hanging tonguelike from the tamarinds. Bulbuls warble, a drab bird with a beguiling song, and superb starlings, aptly named for their stunning plumage—their crowns jet black, their backs and wings metallic blue blushed with green, their bellies chestnut—flit from shrub to shrub. Splendid, but I’m not here to bird-watch.

  In the late afternoon, we return to the marsh near the Aruba dam. There, Scarface’s harem lolls with the cubs on the grassy ridge overlooking the marsh, where a solitary bull elephant grazes contentedly. Iain parks a short distance from the lions and we begin observing and photographing. There isn’t much action. The cats do nothing but lie around, mouths half open, eyes half shut, ears flicking every now and then.

  “I’m afraid what you’re seeing now is typical lion behavior,” says Iain. “This is what they do 20 hours out of 24. Conserve energy.”

  The light is glorious, a rich copper that turns the savanna grass to a champagne color and sets the lions’ eyes on fire. Two of the females, young and lean, groom each other with their tongues. They are so at ease with our presence that they allow us into their midst. One lioness rests not five feet from the rear bumper. But I am getting restless, eager to get out into the bush on foot. There is a certain feeling of removal, observing wildlife from a vehicle, a certain absence of tension. It’s like looking at captive animals, though in this case, we are the captives, the Land Rover our cage.

  The sun drops below the Chyulu Hills and a blessed sundowner begins to blow. Away off to the west rises a hazy mountain where Iain found seven human skulls on a climb. It was a burial ground of the ancient Taita people. The lions stir. A small herd of Grant’s gazelle daintily walk down into the marsh to graze, and the biggest lioness, the dominant female, raises her head and fastens her gaze on them, exactly as our pet cat raises his head when he sees or hears a mouse crawling through our pachysandra beds. Twelve pounds or 250, a cat is a cat is a cat.

  “She’s looking for a slight limp in one of the gazelle,” Iain observes. “Any sign of weakness, but gazelle isn’t a lion’s favored prey. They’re so fast and there isn’t much meat on them, so it’s hardly worth the effort. Lions are lazy hunters.” Gesturing at the marsh, he returns to the theme of feline intelligence. “A lot of thought went into choosing this position, above the swamp and with most of it upwind, so they can see or scent almost anything that comes along. It’s perfect buffalo country. The sun’s lowering, they’re rested, and they’ll be getting hungry soon.”

  But a kill will happen, if it does, sometime after midnight, out of our sight. The lions begin to move, and the gazelle, winding them, bound off. A tawny eagle circles overhead, and a flock of storks or flamingos—I’m too heat-dazed to ask Clive what the birds are—loft out of the Aruba lake, thick as a swarm of bees.

  When we are about a quarter of a mile from camp, Iain and Clive spot the female that occupied the road junction the night before. She is with two very young cubs, hardly bigger than house cats. Her hide looks gray in the twilight, and she walks so quietly on her cushioned paws that she seems insubstantial, a wraith in the gathering night.

  The whole Aruba pride has vanished, and we can’t find sign of them anywhere in the neighborhood this morning. The one exception is a line of pugmarks in the road north of the lake, but those soon turn into the grass, where we lose them. Iain heads farther north, crossing a stark, monotonous plain toward the Galana River. Were we on a tourist safari, we would be delighted. A male lesser kudu, a fairly uncommon sight, bounds across the road in front of us, his brown flanks flashing thin white stripes, his twisting horns like a pair of serpents rising from his skull. He exudes a stunning power and energy and is so fast that we barely glimpse him; it’s as if we’ve seen a fleeting hallucination. Farther up, we encounter a few hartebeests, an animal that looks like one of nature’s failed experiments, seemingly cobbled together from the parts of other animals: a narrow, oblong head with ears too big and horns too short, sickle-shaped and confused about which way they should go; they curve forward, then backward, then outward. I’m not saying we aren’t pleased to see this wildlife, but our quarry is proving elusive to us. We’ve journeyed nearly 30 miles without spotting a single lion. On the plus side, we’ve seen only one minibus, though even that lone vehicle caused Iain to grumble. Too many of them showing up on Tsavo’s tracks, he muttered. A necessary evil—the fees they pay are needed to maintain the park. This leads him into a brief discourse on the dangers of anthropomorphizing animals too much. It gives rise to misanthropic feelings.

  “The longer you spend with wildlife, the more you identify with them. But you can carry it just so far. After a while, you don’t like people all that much.”

  I myself have felt that dislike, bordering on a disgust with our ever proliferating species. The fields and prairies where I hunted pheasant and rabbit in high school are now buried under endless acres of shopping malls and corporate office parks surrounded by the unnatural green of chemically treated lawns. The two-lane blacktops I drove to farmhouses to ask permission to hunt are now four and even six lanes, teeming with traffic. It’s difficult, sometimes, to maintain belief in the worth and sacredness of each human life when there is so much of it. I recall the two long fishing and hunting trips I took in arctic Alaska in 1995 and 1996, when I saw so few people that I was actually happy to run into them or to come across signs of human presence, like the ashes of a campfire.

  On we go. MMBA, Iain calls the arid expanses—Miles and Miles of Bloody Africa. The country goes on like this, he adds, for 300 miles, all the way into Somalia. The Galana is a different world entirely. The wide, brownish river, coursing under the frown of the Yatta Escarpment, is lined with doum palm and saltbush. That verdant cord reminds me a little of the Nile Valley in Egypt: everything lush and green near the river, then, abruptly, desert. We search diligently for lions and find none. Elephants are abundant, along with giraffes, gazelles, impalas, waterbucks, baboons, and zebras. As we turn back south, down a road bordering a Galana tributary called the Hatulo Bisani (a Somali word, Clive chimes in; amazingly, he doesn’t know what it means), the bird life would keep the entire Audubon Society happy—from big tawny and Bateleur eagles to midsize hornbills to small golden pippets that fly from the bushes like dabs of butter with wings. The dry season has reduced the Hatulo Bisani to a mere stream; the exposed sedges of what will be river bottom in the rainy season are a startling green, against which fe
eding egrets look so white they seem to be the idea of whiteness incarnate. Two goliath herons, the largest bird in Africa, are intent on catching lunch, staring into the water with Zen-like focus. Sensing the Land Rover’s approach, their heads rise on long, russet necks—they must be five feet tall.

  Iain spots pugmarks at the roadside. We get out and follow them on foot for a few yards before they angle into the underbrush and vanish. Some distance ahead, and off to the left, a big buffalo herd grazes in the scrub. The backs of the animals show above the grass and through the scrub as a field of enormous black boulders.

  “Those tracks back down the road,” Iain says, musing aloud. “Could be a pride trailing this herd. They’ll be looking for an old one, a weak one. You can have two lions on either side of a buffalo herd, and they’ll be keyed in on each other, knowing which animal is the one to hunt. Could be a kill tonight. We’ll come back in the morning.”

  The long drive down rutted dirt tracks in 100° heat leaves us feeling like electroshocked mullets. Kahiu’s lunch partially restores us. Two hours before sunset, we’re off lion hunting again. A couple of bull elephants are browsing near camp. Either one would bring an adrenal quiver to an old-time trophy hunter and cause a Somali poacher to dream of replacing his mud-walled shack with a six-bedroom villa, and trading in his horses and camels for enough BMWs to fill the attached five-car garage. One elephant’s tusks almost touch the ground as he stands with his massive forehead braced against a tree trunk to give himself a break from carrying all that ivory. Iain estimates a hundred pounds for each tusk; the other elephant’s might be slightly less, say 90 pounds. Three hundred and eighty pounds works out to 172 kilos. In 1988, before the ivory ban went into effect, ivory was going for $6,000 (U.S.) per kilo. To a poacher or trader, those two elephants represented a gross profit of $1,032,000, in a part of the world where the average annual income wouldn’t cover an American family’s monthly grocery bill. No wonder the animals were almost annihilated.