Ghosts of Tsavo

by Philip Caputo

  “Probably an old bull, alone,” concludes Iain. “The lions were down in the lugga, behind that big bush, two to three of them. They sprang at the buffalo from the side, just as he was about to come down the bank.”

  But that is all we see of lions. We slip off our boots in preparation to wade the Galana to the point where Simon will pick us up. As I slide down the bank, I discover, too late, that the clasp to my knife scabbard has been cut by thorn bushes. My K-bar falls out into the water. It’s more than a mere knife to me—a souvenir of Vietnam, the only one I’ve got besides my pair of cracked, battered jungle boots. I search for it, pawing the muddy river bottom, but can’t find it. Adan volunteers to find it for me. Poking with his bare feet for a minute or two, he says, “Ah!” bends down, and comes up with it. I thank him profusely, maybe too profusely, because when I ask if there’s anything I can do for him, he replies, “Yes. Please buy a car for me. A Mercedes.” I glance at him to see if he’s having a bit of fun with the mzungu from America. He’s not. Absolutely serious. I tell him a Mercedes is out of the question, so he switches to a Volkswagen. Informed that a Volkswagen is also out of the question, he asks if I will send him a new TV set, and promises to give me his address when we get back to camp. I refrain from asking if he prefers a Sony, an RCA, or some other brand.

  Simon arrives in the Land Cruiser (it has replaced the ailing Land Rover; Tsavo is tough on trucks, too) and returns us to camp. On the drive back, he tells us that we need not have walked eight miles to find lions; they had found us. Only 45 minutes after we left on our walk, four males appeared on the north side of the river, almost directly across from camp. Simon thinks they have since moved off.

  I nap after lunch, make some notes, and sit shirtless and shoeless in front of our tent, my baked brain a perfect tabula rasa. Iain approaches, walking fast over the Bermuda grass. Gesturing, he whispers to follow him to his tent and to be quiet. The four lions have reappeared.

  With cameras and binoculars, we run on tiptoe and squat down. Across the river, between 200 and 300 yards down-current, two of the four crouch on the bank, drinking. Their hides so match the sand and beige rock that they seem to be made of the same stuff. I put the binoculars on them. They lack manes, and I would think they were females, but their size suggests otherwise. Thirst slaked, one turns and pads up the bank, displaying pendulous testicles. He disappears into a clump of doum palm; the second drinks a while longer, then joins his friend. A moment later, the first lion emerges to walk slowly into the saltbush behind the palms, the other following shortly afterward, and then a third—a band of nomadic males, hunting brothers, mature in size but still too young to challenge an old lion like Scarface for leadership of a pride.

  “See how relaxed they are?” says Iain, softly. “They’re not acting as if they’re aware we’re here. If they are, and they’re this casual about it, we may have some major problems tonight.”

  Black-faced vervet monkeys hop from the trees nearby, scamper warily to the river’s edge to drink. Are our primate brothers and sisters aware of what is on the other side? Maybe they’re too small for a lion to bother with, I think out loud. Iain shakes his head, repeating that Tsavo lions will attack and eat anything they can catch. Encouraging.

  Now the fourth lion shows up, just as I get out of my seat to fetch my field notes from my tent. Leonine eyesight is as keen as our own, and he catches the movement and stops, turning his head to face in our direction. I ease back down, carefully raise the binoculars, and have the unsettling impression that I’m staring into the lion’s face, and he into mine, from a distance of, say, ten yards. Crouched low, the joints of his bent forelegs forming triangles, his shoulders a mound of muscle, sinews, and tendons twisting like aircraft cable under his skin, he is so still that he could be a carving. Like the others, he has no mane.

  I ponder the two riddles—no one knows why Tsavo males lack manes because no one knows why other lions have them. Considering how thoroughly Serengeti lions have been studied for the past 35 years, beginning with George Schaller’s pioneering work in the 1960s, you would think the latter question would have been answered long ago. Another intriguing point of the Gnoske-Kerbis Peterhans hypothesis comes to mind. The two researchers believe they have identified a historical trend in man-eating, which can be traced geographically to environments like Tsavo’s. If that’s correct, then, yes, maneless lions could be more likely to prey on humans.

  Which brings something else to mind, of a more personal, immediate nature.

  “What did you mean, if they know we’re here and are casual about it that we could be in for problems tonight?” I whisper to Iain.

  “They won’t attack, but they could come into camp.”

  He doesn’t say what leads him to make so confident a prediction, and I don’t ask.

  We sit around the nightly campfire, entertained by Clive, who turns out to be a yarn-spinner and a terrific mimic of Australian accents and British brogues. Garbed in a striped kikoy, he tells funny folk tales from the south of England, where he was born, and although the humor in these antiquated stories that go back to the 18th century doesn’t quite translate to a 21st-century mind, Clive’s vocalizations keep us laughing.

  Clive wraps up his act. Iain picks up the slack, talking rock groups with Rob, novels with Leslie and me. The author reviewed in this session is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I contribute to the discussion by asserting that the opening line to One Hundred Years of Solitude is the finest in all of Western literature: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” In the middle of this erudite discussion, the lions begin to roar from across the river. It’s a sound like no other, deep and resonant. Waaugh-waaugh-unh-unh-unh. “Your wit and brains don’t impress us,” it seems to say. “You’re meat to us. Meat-meat-meat.”

  THE FINISH LINE for yesterday’s walk is the jump-off point for today’s. Driving there, we see two of the male quartet on a beach, quite a ways off, but they’re soon gone. A crocodile suns itself on a sandbar, gray-green, plated body glistening in the early morning light. We begin trekking at eight, Adan at point, Iain having relieved the lackadaisical Hassan. It’s plain that Iain is unimpressed with both our askaris. He pines for the ranger who accompanied him on his epic march from Kilimanjaro to the sea, a six-foot-four-inch Turkana named Mohammad, a switched-on guy in whom Iain had absolute confidence. We walk another ten miles, all the way to the eastern border of the park at Sala Gate, seeing elephant and giraffe and carmine bee-eaters, a bird so gorgeous it stops your heart. We do not find the bachelor gang of four, nor the lean lioness we spied three days ago. Frustrated, I decide to postpone tomorrow’s interview with Chap Kusimba, the Field Museum anthropologist, and persuade Iain that we must make a concentrated effort to find lions. We have less than three full days left in Tsavo.

  On the first day of those three, we begin where the lioness crossed the Galana with her young, a broad bend a few miles downstream of Durusikale. Distinct pugmarks are printed in the fine sand near a stand of doum palm. The strong sundowners in Tsavo scour animal tracks pretty quickly, so the prints must have been made last night or early this morning. There are more on the sandbar, where the cubs cavorted with their mother, and on the opposite bank. One set of tracks lead us into the saltbush and to a lion’s day-bed—a patch of flattened grass and dirt—but we lose them farther on, where the earth is hard as pavement and covered with foot-high, yellow grass.

  “You can see why that dumb movie called them ghosts,” Iain murmurs. “They’re always in ambush mode. They stay hidden, come out to hunt and kill, then hide again. They are ghosts.”

  His commentary is borne out a little farther upriver, when we strike the track of the two males spotted from the car the previous day. Again we follow it, again we lose it. The lions could be anywhere or nowhere. As Adan pushes into the saltbush, his rifle at the ready, I compare Tsavo lions not to ghosts but to the Vie
t Cong: masters of concealment, of hit and run, showing themselves only when they choose. As Hosek did in Zambia, I’m beginning to appreciate what Colonel Patterson endured a century ago. It’s an adventure for me to track these lions, but I would not want to be charged with the task of finding and killing them, and all the while see to the building of a railroad bridge.

  We continue upriver, splitting up for a while, with Iain and Hassan tracking on the land side of the saltbush corridor, Clive, Adan, Leslie, and me on the river side. (Rob is at park headquarters, photographing Kusimba, Andanje, and the park’s collection of lion skulls.) The sand is almost white and crunches underfoot like snow on a sub-zero day. More lion tracks, vanishing on broad terraces of sandstone fissured so symmetrically they appeared to be man- made. Clive gives me a brief lecture on Tsavo geology and then, spotting a rock cairn seven feet high, on the Oromo people who wandered Tsavo hundreds of years ago, burying their dead in mounds like the one that rises up out of the saltbush and commiphora. Clive says he read about the Oromo in the library of the Royal Geographic Society, which he describes as a “great suppository of information.”

  I decide to leave it to Iain to correct the malapropism.

  Joining up again, we go on. I feel oddly comfortable in these strange surroundings, as if they are not so strange, and wonder if it’s a genetic memory, bequeathed by some upright ancestor who lived 10,000 generations ago.

  Still no lions, then Adan finds another set of prints.

  “These are very new,” whispers Iain, pointing at one. “This is now.”

  A dry wind hisses through the acacia, the palm fronds rattle. A sand grouse, flushing five feet away, makes me flinch. Great predators can make their presence known even when they aren’t seen or heard. When such monarchs are near, your senses heighten for the simple reason that your life may depend on it. I had experienced that keenness of perception every day in Vietnam, when the predator was a man with a rifle, and several times in Alaska, coming upon grizzly tracks, and once in Arizona, crossing the fresh prints of a cougar while I was quail hunting. But I’ve never experienced it as deeply as in these haunted thickets of Tsavo. There is something else as well. To walk unarmed in the lion’s kingdom demands a submission not unlike the submission required of us in the presence of the divine, and it graces those who walk there with a humility that is not humiliation. I am acutely aware of being in a place where I, as a man, do not hold dominion, but must cede to a thing grander, stronger, and more adept than I.

  Iain stops suddenly, wrinkles his nose, and asks, “Smell that?”

  I shake my head. My sense of smell is the one that has not been heightened; I suffer from allergies. In fact, my nose has started to run. One of the things I’m allergic to is cats.

  “A kill. There’s something dead, rotting in there.” Iain gestures at a thicket.

  Then the wind eddies a bit, and I catch a stink a little like skunk, a little like week-old garbage.

  Adan and Hassan push into the saltbush, while we who are unarmed wait in the open. When the two rangers emerge, they report they’ve found nothing except hyena and jackal tracks, indicating that the carcass, wherever it was, has been abandoned by the lions and is now the property of scavengers.

  Iain grows reflective.

  “I don’t believe the man-eaters of Tsavo were man-eaters per se. Like all Tsavo lions, they were opportunists who would snatch, grab, and eat whatever came their way.”

  “Sure,” Clive interjects. “Put 3,000 coolies out here, and of course the lions will go after them. They’d be bloody fools not to.”

  Iain, gazing upriver, continues his thought.

  “If one of us, right now, tried to walk back to camp alone, the odds are he wouldn’t make it. The lions would study you and see that you’re alone, and they would take you.”

  We resume walking and no one is taken and the trek ends at the palm grove across from camp, where the four males had laired up. A lot of pugmarks, dark stains in the sand where the lions had urinated, but nothing more.

  The next day is equally fruitless, as far as lions go, but we do see a black rhino, all by itself a quarter of a mile away. It’s the first one Iain has seen in the wild in 15 years, and he is joyful.

  Now it’s our final full day in Tsavo (for this trip anyway), and we tramp to the saltbush where the lioness had stashed her cubs. Hoping to spot her once again, we make our way through, not talking, watching where we step, looking for tracks, then enter a grove of old doum palm.

  “Make a perfect movie set, wouldn’t it?” Clive says in an undertone. The trunks of the high trees are worn smooth where elephants have rubbed up against them, and the lanes between the trees are like shadowy halls, some blocked by flood-wrack from the rainy season: barricades of logs and fronds, behind which a dozen lions could be lurking, unseen. We expect to hear a low, menacing growl at any moment, an expectation that is not fulfilled until, making a circle, we come out of the trees and reenter the saltbush. The sound isn’t a growl, however—more of a loud grunt or bellow.

  It happens all at once. A cloud of dust rises from behind a thicket, Adan whips around, leveling his rifle, and Iain shouts, “Get behind me!” to Leslie and me. Just as we do, certain that we’re about to be charged by a lion, an elephant appears not 20 yards to our right. It’s a young female of some two or three tons, shaking her head angrily, her ears flared. She stomps and scuffs the earth, then starts toward us. Adan fires a shot over her head to scare her off. She stands her ground and trumpets, her ears thrown out again, dust rising from her feet, dust spewing from her hide as she tosses her great head back and forth. Iain yells to Adan in Swahili. He fires again, and for an instant I think he’s shot her—some trick of light makes a puff of dust flying from her shoulder look like the impact of a bullet. In the next instant, as the female runs off, I realize that he’d put the second round over her head.

  Iain lights into Adan, all in Swahili, but it’s plain that the ranger is getting a royal dressing down. The close call has left me breathless. I’m grateful to Adan and can’t understand why Iain is so angry.

  “Rangers are supposed to know that you don’t have to shoot at an elephant to scare it off,” Iain explains. “That female was old enough, about 15, to have seen other elephants shot by poachers. You had to have been here in the ’80s to appreciate it. Elephants are traumatized by the sound of gunfire. They’re very intelligent animals, and it’s not necessary to fire over their heads. A hand clap will do it, or just waving your arms. That’s what Muhammad would have done. I’ve seen him do it. What we try to do on a foot safari is to observe without disturbing the animals and move on without them ever being aware that humans are around.”

  I am not yet out of Tsavo and I’m already nostalgic. Driving toward the Manyani Gate, I know I’m going to miss the soul-stretching expanses of its savannas and the elephant herds moving in the red dust and the brass-colored glint of the Galana and the late-afternoon African light that strikes my eye like a light it’s seen long ago, in some previous life. After ten days of observing or seeking them, the lions of Tsavo seem more enigmatic than when I came. I have learned nothing except how little I know—which is generally the first step toward knowledge.

  Before heading back to Nairobi, we make a pilgrimage to the “Man-Eaters’ Den.”

  When Rob was photographing at park headquarters, Kusimba told him that the result of his team’s excavation work had been a little disappointing. They never found the copper bracelets Patterson claimed to have seen, nor any human remains. Kusimba’s conclusion is that his first assumption was right: The legendary cave never was a lion’s den, nor any sort of den, but a Taita burial cave. He took Rob to it, and now Rob will show it to us. Entering the gate to Tsavo West, we drive less than a mile to an abandoned airstrip and park. Iain and Clive are as eager for a look as Leslie and I. So, with Rob in the lead, the two guides become the guided. After thrashing around for a while, we come to a ravine, one of many in the labyrinth of the Ngulia Hills. Rob sh
outs from up ahead, “Here it is!”

  And there it is—a corridor between two big boulders leading beneath an overhang and into a cavern. A fig tree spreads its branches above, its roots clinging like tentacles to one side of the entrance.

  “Well, I don’t think it looks so fearsome,” says Iain, recalling Patterson’s description. I sense that his opinion of the colonel hasn’t improved.

  I agree that the cool, shady spot is almost idyllic. But we’re not trying to build a bridge in the African wilderness and, at the same time, hunt down two clever cats that are using our workforce as fast food. To Patterson, with his memories of his worker’s screams, of his servant’s gruesome remains, of the tense, interminable nights waiting with his rifle, the cave would have appeared “fearsome.” And given the ignorance about lion behavior that prevailed in his time, it was understandable why he mistook a burial cave for a man-eater’s den. Imperial martinet or not, he did pretty damn well with what he had.

  That said, I do find Patterson’s characterization of his adversaries as brutes and outlaws objectionable. I recall our second to last day in Tsavo, after we finished the morning’s hike. As we sat in camp, we watched a zebra herd warily come down the far bank of the Galana to drink. They had been waiting on the ledge above the river for a long time, suffering from “the paradox of survival.” The animals were parched, but the whole herd stood still, gazing at the river with what seemed to us equal measures of longing and dread, until the desperation of their thirst overcame their fear of death. They did not rush down with abandon, but watered in orderly stages. A dozen or so animals would drink, while the others waited their turn and the stallions stood watch. Their heads bent, the ranks of their striped backs were a study in geometric beauty. If one group got greedy and took too long, the stallions would let out a series of loud, sharp brays. It was a strange, distressing sound, falling somewhere between a whinny and a bark.