Ghosts of Tsavo

by Philip Caputo

  The wind falls off as we retire for the night. What little breeze there is blows out of the south, and it’s stifling inside the tent. I lie awake, my hand resting on my useless K-bar, and reflect on Iain’s tale and on the theory, hypothesis, whatever it is, that the lions of Tsavo have an inherited tendency to hunt people. I need to get my mind onto something else. Much has been written about the eroticism of African safaris, and I consider a conjugal romp on the tent floor, but my fears rule that out. Eventually, I fall asleep.

  At two in the morning, I wake out of a hideous nightmare probably induced by the anti-malaria drug I’m taking, Lariam. The list of its side effects, as long as a column in the Manhattan phone directory, covers a gamut of physical and psychological reactions, the most common are vivid, bizarre dreams. I cannot recall the details of mine, but its terror remains inside me. I hear something splashing in the river, then a loud rustling in the undergrowth. My 21st-century side tells me it’s a hippo, but the puny hominid in me says it’s a lion. Leslie’s breathing becomes a lion, panting with hunger just outside our tent. Every crack of a branch, every little sound becomes the pad of a stalking cat. I picture him creeping up on the thin canvas that separates us from him, and I know that he isn’t there out of curiosity or because he’s smelled the food in the cook’s tent or because he’s winded a zebra herd beyond camp and is only passing through, but because he’s scented us and we are what he’s after. Deep into paranoid delusion now, I imagine the horror of what it’s like to feel him bite down on my ankle or shoulder with his strong jaws and then drag me out and run off with me, wonderful, indispensable me, apple of my mother’s eye, and me screaming and scratching and kicking and punching, all to no avail, until he releases his grip to free his jaws to crush my windpipe, snap my neck, or drive his tusks through my skull, and the last sensation I’ll have is of his warm breath on my face.

  Such are my waking nightmares. I’m not sure how, in the span of a few hours, I have gone from feeling sorry for a real lion to being in abject terror of an imaginary one. At two in the morning, the higher brain doesn’t function as well as it does at two in the afternoon, and you start thinking with the older brain, that cess of primeval dreads.

  Dangers imagined are always worse than dangers confronted. I am in high spirits this morning and have a good laugh at Rob’s expense. His tent is splattered with shit. Gobs of it stick to the roof and walls or run down in streaks, so that the canvas looks a little like a scatological Jackson Pollock. The hippo I heard last night was responsible, spraying feces all over his tent to mark it as his—or her—territory. Hippos do this, we are informed by Clive, by twirling their tails while they defecate. Literally a case of the shit hitting the fan.

  The plan for the morning’s hike is a no-brainer: walk upstream some ten miles to the Sobo Rocks, where Simon, the driver, will pick us up. I am actually looking forward to facing a lion on foot, if for no other reason than to conquer my fear. Still, in the event of such an encounter, I hope that Adan and Hassan will not imitate the behavior of the Masai in Iain’s story. If they do, we won’t have much in the way of self-defense—my trusty K-bar, Iain’s Gurkha kris, a souvenir from a trek in the Himalaya, and Clive’s Masai simi, backed up by a Masai war club. It’s made of some sort of hardwood and is about as long as a baseball bat, with a slender handle and a knob at its business end. A nicely balanced weapon, and Clive says he could break a lion’s spine with one blow from it. Of course, that would require the lion to stand passively and allow itself to be whacked across the back.

  Lions, however, aren’t the only dangerous game we might encounter. The saltbush forests easily conceal elephant, Cape buffalo, and the hippopotamus, which kills more people in Africa than any other animal. Since Tropical Ice started running safaris in 1979, Iain’s guards have rarely had to fire over the heads of elephant and never shot a lion, but they have had to kill six hippos, which are very territorial and very aggressive. On one safari, a woman in his party was bitten by an angry hippo, losing half her buttock. A satellite-phone call brought an evacuation helicopter to her rescue; otherwise, she would have died from loss of blood.

  With Adan on point and Hassan as rear guard, we wade the warm, silty Galana to the north side, Iain instructing us to stay close together so we sound not like seven average-size things but like one big thing—an elephant—to deter crocodiles. We see one of the reptiles, a nine- or ten-footer, a quarter of an hour after we’ve forded. Alarmed by our approach, it crawls quickly away, its plated tail sweeping behind. We continue upriver toward the Sobo Rocks, following game trails blazed by elephant and hippo. It is still cool enough to hike comfortably, an overcast, breezy morning, with a fan of pale sunlight piercing the thin clouds. The saltbush is dense enough to conceal a dozen elephants or buffalo, so we must be alert as we pass through. Now we are out on the scrubby plain north of the river galleries, now we are back in the saltbush. A gerenuk appears in the distance, a delicately built gazelle with a glossy hide and giraffelike neck. I rather wish I’d taken courses in evolutionary biology so I’d have some resources to draw on to figure out what nature has in mind creating such animals. Sometimes, being anthropogenic, I like to think that she’s giving us a diverse and interesting world to live in, a notion that would elicit howls from evolutionists. Probably, nature has nothing in mind; like some retired craftsman tinkering in the workshop, she likes to mix that with this and see what she comes up with.

  A few Cape buffalo watch us from about 200 yards away. Although they are aggressive only when surprised or wounded, we keep our eyes on them as they do theirs on us. The difference between encountering buffalo on foot and in a vehicle is like the difference between flying a commercial airliner and hang gliding. There is a tingling in the scalp, a quickening in the blood; not fear but an alertness. The bends go out of the Galana for a while; the river looks artificially straightened. A few zebra stand on a ridge, completely still, gazing at the river with what seems to be longing. They are dying to come down to drink, but are afraid that die is what they’ll do; a croc or lion might be waiting for them at the riverbank, and so they stand frozen between the poles of fear and desire. A psychologist would call this an “approach- avoidance conflict.” Iain terms it “the paradox of survival.”

  He stops, squints.

  “Fringe-eared oryx.”

  The animal is close to 300 yards away, amid the zebra. I raise my binoculars and behold one of the most distinctive antelope in the world. A black stripe streaks horizontally along the lower flank, dividing white belly from brown hide. Its forelegs are banded in black; a black patch on the forehead almost touches another on the upper muzzle, contrasting with the white hairs on the lower muzzle. The ears stick straight out, tufted in black, and still more black stripes, one on each side of its face, a third extending under the chin and around the throat, provoke more wonder at nature’s diversity, her whimsical artistry. A pair of horns as long as spears make a deep V above its head. With them, Iain says, an oryx can wound or kill an attacking lion.

  Forgetting the mission for a moment, I begin a stalk, hoping to reach a bush roughly halfway between me and the oryx. From there, I should be able to get a decent photograph with the 300-millimeter lens. In the crosswind, I’m confident the oryx won’t scent me. Walking very slowly in a low crouch, then crawling, it takes me a quarter of an hour to cover the distance. When I get to the bush and raise the camera, I see that I’m still too far away, and drop into a low, infantryman’s crawl, the camera with its heavy, two-foot-long lens cradled in my elbows. After five minutes of this, I get into a sitting position, and rest both elbows on the insides of my spread knees, as you would a rifle, to steady the lens. A slight twitch would be all it would take to blur the picture. I frame the oryx and snap a photo, but I doubt it will capture the sharp contrasts of the animal’s fine markings. I start to crawl again, head raised to watch the oryx. It spots me, tenses for an instant, and trots off over a ridge.

  We walk on, and the morning passes from cool to
scorching in minutes. We take a break beside the river, where Adan, with his naked eye, spies a bull elephant almost a mile downstream. It’s invisible to Leslie and me. We need binoculars, and even then strain to see it, with its reddened hide camouflaged against the steep, red riverbank. Much closer to us are a dozen hippos, dark heads showing above the water, the high, protruding eyes watching us. Hippos spend most of the day partly submerged to avoid overheating. I wish we could—the searing air is reminiscent of Arizona in July. Rob and I creep forward for photographs, Iain warning us to be careful. The hippos tolerate our photographing them for a while, but when we edge closer, a big bull lunges from the water with astonishing speed for so cumbersome a creature, his cavernous mouth open and bellowing. Only a warning, which we heed by moving on.

  A fish eagle glides over the Galana. We have the whole immense wild to ourselves; most modern tourists are unwilling to walk miles in triple-digit temperatures and too timid to confront wild creatures on foot. What a difference to observe game on their own terms. To photograph them, we read the wind as the hunter does and practice stealth and keep our eyes peeled for the slightest motion. We stalk up close to a band of Cape buffalo and a small elephant herd and the experience is far more satisfying than driving up to them. Sweating, exercising caution and bushcraft, we earn the right to bag them on film.

  It’s like hunting, but it’s not hunting. Even afoot, observing game is passive. The photographer is still in the audience, whereas the hunter is a full participant in the dance of predator and prey, and that’s an experience of an altogether different quality. I’ve tried to explain this to friends who are nonhunters or anti-hunters, in futile attempts to get them to see why I hunt. My friend, novelist Jim Harrison, thinks I’m wasting my breath. When anyone asks him why he hunts, the question usually freighted with moral indignation, as if hunting were equivalent to, say, child molestation, Harrison responds, “I’m just less evolved than you are.” It’s his way of stating the old argument that the armed man is a predator, responding to a call that comes down to us from the Pleistocene, when hunting was the primary means by which man got his food. Jim and I in fact are meat-hunters, never killing anything we don’t intend to consume. I think most modern Americans and Europeans no longer realize that the chicken, beef, veal, and pork they buy in perfectly trimmed, plastic-wrapped pieces were once living creatures. The hunter at least knows where his meat comes from and is grateful. Of course, there’s more to it than that. Hunting grouse and woodcock in the Michigan and Vermont woods, I am more alert, more attuned to sound and movement than when I’m merely hiking. In hunting dangerous game, assuming it’s done ethically, you enter an entirely different universe, much as Wayne Hosek did in his pursuit of the Man-eater of Mfuwe. On an Alaskan big-game hunt, my friend Alan Richie brought down a big male grizzly with one shot from his .300 Magnum. The bear sprang up and crashed off into a willow thicket. Had Alan’s gun been a camera, we would have left and gone on to the next photo opportunity, but the hunter’s ethics demand that you never leave a wounded animal to suffer unnecessarily. Besides, we were living off the land on that trip and we wanted the bear’s meat—loin of grizzly bear is delicious, roasted over an open fire. We were virtually certain Alan had fired a killing shot, but virtual only counts in computer games; we had to make sure. Dusk was falling. Way off in the distance, a wolf had begun to howl, and in the dim light, rifles just off our shoulders, we pushed into the willows, both of us quivering inside from a surge of adrenaline. If the bear had been wounded, its charge would be ferocious and fast, giving us each a microsecond to fire before the grizzly was on us. It lay ahead of us, brown fur rippling in the breeze. We tossed a few rocks at the bear, and when it didn’t move, approached cautiously from behind it, then lay down our rifles and drew our skinning knives.

  I recall that experience, walking the Galana, and the remark Iain made a few days before, that the old-time Africa guides wanted nothing to do with photographic safaris. I can understand why: Something essential and elemental is missing, a certain tension, a certain danger, a certain seriousness, if you will. There is no moment of truth. It’s not quite the real thing. It’s play.

  Well, not quite…

  We are on the last mile of the trek when we find pugmarks in the sand, leading straight along the shore toward a grove of doum palm a couple of hundred yards away. The tracks are deep and well defined, that is, recent. Iain and I fall into a discussion as to how recent. Clive, looking ahead with the naked eye, says very, because two lions are laid up under the palms. Clive points, and Iain and I raise our binoculars.

  “It’s a log,” I say. “A big palm log.”

  Iain concurs.

  “I am telling you, lions,” Clive insists, peevishly. “Two bloody lions. One’s maned, too.”

  Then Adan says, “Lions! One hundred percent!” and the log lifts its head.

  My binoculars frame an atypical Tsavo lion, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion with a golden mane, lying in the shade with his companion and gazing straight back at us. With the palms overhead, the scene looks biblical.

  Well, this is curious, a deepening of the Tsavo mystery. Is the lion an immigrant from the plains? Or do two different types of lion live side by side in Tsavo, maned and unmaned? We’ll need photographs, but we’re much too far.

  The easterly wind favors us. We begin a stalk, heading up over the embankment to approach the lions from above, Rob and I with our cameras ready, Adan with his rifle at low port, prepared to shoot if necessary. Hassan’s is braced on his shoulder, the muzzle pointing backward at the rest of us. Iain, directly behind him, pushes the rifle barrel aside. Hassan shifts the G3 to his crooked arms, holding it upside down as if he were cradling a baby, and saunters along like a man strolling in Hyde Park instead of in Tsavo with two big lions just ahead. A less than inspiring guard. I decide to grab his rifle if I have to.

  We file along a game trail between the saltbush and the riverbank, closing the distance. The idea is to capture an image of a maned lion where there aren’t supposed to be any, but something more is at work, at least inside myself, than documenting a feline anomaly: to photograph a lion up close and personal while on foot. What’s the difference between a picture taken from a car and one taken on foot? I don’t know, only that there seems to be a difference. Is it necessary? Is it stupid? What used to be called “manly courage” is considered atavistic, like a prehensile tailbone. The ancient Roman stoic Epictetus said: “Reflect that the chief source of all evils to man, and of baseness and cowardice, is not death, but the fear of death. Against this fear, then, I pray you, harden yourself; to this let all your reasonings, your exercises, your reading tend.” Still true, I’d say. The point of life is not success in e-commerce or in any sort of commerce; it is to be brave; it is to master fear of death, which is the genesis of all fears. And one of the exercises by which you steel yourself to that fear is to confront something that could break your neck with a swipe of its paw.

  None of us are trembling. We’re apprehensive instead, in the old sense of the word. We apprehend, in a state of heightened awareness, our senses quickened. Coming abreast of the palm grove, Iain walks in a crouch, and we follow suit, trailing him and Hassan over the lip of the embankment to look down into the pool of shade beneath the trees. Rob and I raise our cameras.

  The lions are gone. They must have fled at the sound of Adan’s voice, though we never saw them move. We search under the palms, along the riverbank, into the saltbush, but cannot find their tracks. It’s as though they’ve dematerialized. The ghosts of Tsavo.

  Tsavo. Tsavo. In the language of the tribes who inhabited these regions, the name refers to massacres committed by Masai raiding parties in the distant past. The Masai were not curiosities then, but feared as the Apache and Iroquois were once feared in North America. Parties of roving warriors called morani, haughty and tall, nourished on the milk and blood of their cattle, ranged out of their Serengeti strongholds plumed in ostrich feathers, metal jewelry clattering on their
wrists and ankles, spears banging against their buffalo-hide shields. They raided other tribes, sometimes for women, most times for cattle, the theft of which they considered reclamation of their property because they believed that God had given all the world’s cattle to the Masai. With the exception of the Zulu, there was probably no tribe in Africa as warlike, fired as they were by an overweening pride and a total scorn for everyone else, including the pale Europeans whom they called ilorida enjekat—“those who confine their farts.” The morani came to the thornbush flats where the Kamba and Waliangulu lived and killed them without quarter, and so the land came to be called Tsavo—“Place of Slaughter.”

  Masai raiders, slave caravans, man-eating lions—no wonder it was thought to be cursed. It looks cursed this morning as we trek downriver. It is a brighter morning than yesterday, and hotter. The dusty plains are empty, reaching to the horizon, where Sala Hill rises as abruptly as a pyramid from the desert. My shirt is soaked through, my eyeballs feel sunburned, but Hassan and Adan saunter along as I would on some fine spring day in New England. Adan tells me that on anti-poaching patrols he covers 25 miles a day. “To me, this isn’t even walking,” he boasts.

  Elephant skulls appear, remnants left by poachers. They are as big as boulders and spur-winged plovers have built nests in the eye sockets. Piles of fresh elephant dung dot the trail, giving Iain an occasion to lecture again on pachyderm ecology. Hornbills, he says, pluck seeds and grasses from the dung and spread them over the savanna, thus regenerating growth.

  The skull of a big buffalo lies above a lugga. Iain and Clive poke around, studying the area like homicide detectives.