Ghosts of Tsavo

by Philip Caputo

  Even a layman should not anthropomorphize, but to me, the stallions seemed to be saying, “You’ve had enough, get a move on, we don’t have much time.” In a way, I identified with them. They were lion prey, and out there, so was I; but that recognition did not offend my sense of human dignity. The offense was to my human pride. Nothing wrong with pride, except when it becomes excessive and denies others, whether men or beasts, the right to their pride and dignity. If I had been in Colonel Patterson’s boots, I would have pursued the lions with as much determination—after all, his first responsibility was to finish the bridge and protect his workmen’s lives—but I like to think I would have respected the lions and avoided regarding them as savage brutes violating some law of heaven.

  I had learned little about Tsavo’s lions, but I had learned something about myself. To realize that I shared something with the wary, anxious zebras was not degrading, but merely acknowledged my true place in nature where nature is wild, the stage on which the drama of predator and prey is played out.

  INTERMISSION

  A TRIP TO THE MUSEUM

  THE MAN-EATERS WERE GONE, moved from Stanley Field Hall to an exhibit room off a side corridor, and the Masai morani had been banished to a basement storage room, where I pictured them frozen in eternal combat with two-fanged adversaries that no longer faced them. That image struck me as emblematic of modern Masai, confined to ever shrinking reserves, with no lions to fight, posing for photographs snapped by the pale those-who-confine-their-farts, their long-bladed spears now mere symbols, like the halberds carried by the beefeaters at the Tower of London. The only familiar exhibit remaining in the hall was the elephants, though they were dwarfed by the new attraction that had drawn swarms of visitors to the Field Museum on this splendid June morning: the re-created skeleton of a 42-foot Tyrannosaurus Rex named Sue. The lines extended from the turnstiles inside the hall, out through the doors, and down the steps into the street. Wearing a special badge that had allowed me to jump the queues, I waited for Tom Gnoske and gazed around, pleased that the grand structure hadn’t lost its power to evoke wonder and that I, just two days shy of my 59th birthday, hadn’t lost a capacity for wonder. The museum had recently undergone an extensive refurbishment; it was better lighted than I remembered, and the newly scrubbed stone and marble gleamed like a Roman palace. The renovations were part of a huge public works project commissioned by Mayor Richard M. Daley, son of the sometimes famous, sometimes infamous Mayor Richard J. Daley, late boss of the late Chicago political machine. The museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium now formed a campus joined by broad, tree-shaded walkways and surrounded by parks and flower gardens. Eastward, the slate green expanse of Lake Michigan provided an illusion of ocean. To the south were the McCormick Place Convention Center and Soldier Field, where the Bears continued to wage gladiatorial contests in rain, snow, and mud. A domed, climate-controlled stadium might be appropriate for Dallas or Houston, but not for the City of the Big Shoulders. To the north, the towers of the Loop and Michigan Boulevard rose into an unblemished sky, creating a skyline as spectacular as Manhattan’s, and maybe more so because it was a less congested, less aggressive tyranny of brick and concrete.

  In appearance and atmosphere, as well as geographically, it was all very far from Tsavo, yet a thread of shared history tied the great midwestern city to the sere and distant landscapes where Indian laborers had cried out, on those fearful nights in 1898, “Watch out, brother, the devil is coming!” As Julian Kerbis Peterhans had told me on the phone: “The story of the Tsavo lions is a Chicago story.”

  Pursuit of that story had brought me back to Chicago from my home in Connecticut, some four months after returning from Africa. Kerbis Peterhans and Gnoske were planning an expedition that would take them up the Tana River in eastern Kenya. From there, they would fly to Uganda and the Kyambura Gorge, then on to the Luangwa Valley in Zambia, hunting ground for the man-eater killed by Wayne Hosek. The objective would be to do field surveys of lion populations, gathering sufficient evidence to document their thesis that there isn’t one, but two species of lion in Africa, and one is a direct descendant of a lion that lived when woolly mammoths roamed the Earth.

  Like the scientific expeditions of a bygone age, the one Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans were proposing would be a red-blooded adventure with a purpose. Most adventures these days are Evel Knievel stunts (the first man to jump a motorcycle over the Snake River) in which someone overcomes artificial obstacles and braves manufactured dangers to achieve some pointless goal. A quest that intended to add to the sum of human knowledge interested me a great deal. I hoped to write about the two men as they took risks and endured hardships to make a new discovery, and had come to Chicago to meet them and discuss the chances of my joining them. But first I had to assure myself that they weren’t pursuing a mythological beast, some sort of leonine yeti that existed in their imaginations. After all, the best minds in the business had been saying for decades that all African lions belonged to the same species; the only known subspecies was the rare Asiatic lion, of which roughly 300 survived in the fastness of the Gir Forest in northern India. Who were these two guys to say different?

  Gnoske spotted me waiting at the information booth. Dressed in jeans and a faded blue shirt, he was a stocky, broad-faced man of about five feet ten, with wispy, light brown hair, a mustache, intense, gray-blue eyes, and a ready smile. Introductions, handshakes, and I recognized immediately that he was, like me, a native of Chicago’s blue-collar neighborhoods. The accent gave him away—that broad, nasal “a’s,” and the habit of turning “o’s”s into “a’s”s, so that the name of the city isn’t pronounced the way Frank Sinatra sang it—“My kind of town, Chicawgo is”—but comes out the way Boss Daley used to say it—“Chicahga.”

  Gnoske escorted me past Sue, with her rib cage like the frame of a small ship, to an elevator that carried us to the third floor. That was where the museum’s sausages got made, and it wasn’t pretty: long corridors as dimly lit as mine galleries ran under exposed pipes past cubbyhole offices and research rooms and specimen lockers and preparation rooms smelling of mothballs and preservatives. There was something about the quasi-industrial atmosphere that appealed: Real work is done here, it said. If the marbled hall below was the showroom, this was the shop floor.

  Gnoske’s office, in the Bird Division, looked like a stage set for a period drama, except for a couple of computer terminals. Ergonomically correct chairs were absent. There were wooden desks of a kind I hadn’t seen since grammar school, and they’d looked like antiques then; glassed-in bookcases filled with dusty volumes in the no-nonsense bindings of yesteryear; field trunks stenciled with the names of expeditions and the countries where they’d taken place; black-and-white photographs showing long-dead scientists and explorers in former terrae incognitae that can be reached today in 24 hours by commercial jet. One of the pictures showed Carl Akeley standing beside the strung-up carcass of an 80-pound leopard. Akeley, a renowned naturalist and taxidermist who’d collected and mounted many African animals for U.S. museums, had wounded the leopard slightly on an expedition in the late 1920s. At 80 pounds, the cat was only half full-grown size, but 80 pounds of injured, enraged leopard is not the same as 80 pounds of, say, golden retriever. It sprang on Akeley, who managed to kill it with his bare hands, wrestling it onto its back and then crushing its ribs between his knees, puncturing its lung. A remarkable feat of self-preservation, considering that he wasn’t a particularly powerful man. He took his licks, however. In the photo, Akeley appears to be wearing a pair of white boxing gloves—after the fight, his hands looked like they’d had a brush with a chipper-shredder.

  “Lucky he’d put a bullet in that cat,” Gnoske remarked. “Slowed it down. Otherwise, I don’t think Akeley would have made it.”

  We segued from leopards to lions and to Gnoske’s fascination—obsession would be a better word—with the latter.

  It began only a few months after he was born in Andersonville, a
mostly Swedish neighborhood on Chicago’s mid-north side. Gnoske fell in love with a stuffed toy lion and would not go anywhere without it. For the next four years, he refused to talk to anyone except it and, now and then, his mother. The shy child was captivated by wild animals, especially lions and tigers, and watched Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, narrated by Marlin Perkins, every Sunday night before he started kindergarten.

  Around that time, his father, to encourage his interest in the natural world, took him to the Field Museum. He toured the highlights—dinosaurs, the elephants, Bushmen, the 500-pound gorilla who had lived at the Lincoln Park Zoo. By that time—1969—the man-eaters of Tsavo had been moved from where I’d seen them 17 years earlier to a dim, mysterious exhibit hall devoted to large African animals. While walking through it, young Gnoske spotted the lions, whose maneless heads, lifelike eyes, and great size seized his attention. As he stared at them, his father told him the same story I’d heard from my father and that Hosek had heard from his. The tale terrified him, and he never forgot it.

  At Gordon Technical High School, a Roman Catholic boys school on the north side, Gnoske was a running back on the football team and developed an interest in painting birds and mammals. He entered Chicago’s Art Institute in 1984 on a partial scholarship, but dropped out after two years to study the anatomy of his subjects while working part-time in the Field Museum’s zoology department. Two years later, he accepted a full-time position as a preparator in the bird division. In his spare time, he became a self-taught authority on big cats, reading everything he could on them in the museum’s library, paying particular attention to historical accounts of lions, tigers, and leopards preying on human beings.

  “I got to be really good at preparing birds,” he said to me, there in his cluttered office. “Eventually, because curators have families and don’t like to spend too much time in the field, I got to go on bird-collecting expeditions.”

  On one such foray in Uganda’s Ruwenzori Mountains (Mountains of the Moon) in 1990, Gnoske took time off from his vocation to pursue his avocation. He traveled to Nairobi and hired a guide to take him to the Masai Mara, where he got his first good look at the classic lions of the African grasslands. Later that year, he again journeyed to the Ruwenzori, and there, in the mountains where the Nile begins, he made a couple of observations that would eventually send him off on his obsessive quest. The lions he spotted prowling the river and its tributary streams appeared to be traveling in much smaller prides than those he’d seen in the Masai Mara: one or two females with cubs instead of a harem. The males were maneless or had restricted manes. That would have been obvious to anyone, but another detail would have escaped notice. Gnoske’s artist’s eye, honed by his studies in anatomy, picked it up.

  “The males had narrow faces and smaller heads than the pride males I’d seen in Kenya, who had heads like basketballs. I said to myself ‘There’s something different about them, without question.’ I’m visual. Most scientists speak in terms of numbers, or in words, so I’m speaking a different language. I knew I would have to prove what I saw. I can’t just say that one lion has a smaller head than the other. I would have to show it by taking a lot of measurements to prove that my eyes weren’t fooling me.”

  He filed his perceptions in the back of his mind, returned to Chicago, and dug back into his research, looking for any reference to maneless lions in the literature. The pursuit took him backward in time from George Schaller’s monumental study, The Serengeti Lion, published in 1972, to the annals of early African exploration. It was there that he came upon a few lines in an account of David Livingstone’s journeys in 1849 into what is now Botswana. A few days after discovering Lake Ngami, the famed Scottish explorer and his companions shot two lions, one with worn teeth and blunt claws, the other with perfect teeth, and both, Livingstone wrote, “were destitute of a mane.” In 1896, a Field Museum curator named Daniel Elliot brought down a maneless lion in Somalia and noted in his report that rarely were lions found in Somalia “with even a fairly long mane.” Gnoske found another intriguing remark tucked away in a report of a 1913 expedition led by Edmund Heller, a zoologist who later became the museum’s assistant curator of mammals. Heller, who’d done extensive fieldwork on the Athi and Serengeti Plains and was very familiar with Panthera leo massaicus, declared the discovery of a new subspecies of lion from near the source of the Nile. He called it Panthera leo nyanzae, and noted that it had a disproportionately small head compared with its body size. Eleven years later, another scientist, J. A. Allen, of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, discovered another small-headed, big-bodied lion living along the upper reaches of the White Nile and named it Panthera leo azandicus.

  Aware that taxonomists no longer recognized subspecific differences among African lions, the artist turned amateur zoologist was puzzled and curious. Were maneless lions more common than was generally believed? If so, why did they lack manes? Could Heller and Allen have been right after all?

  Gnoske moved from his desk to a small table beside one of the glass-covered bookcases and pulled out several volumes from the shelves—Schaller’s tome and old, leather-bound editions with dried-out pages yellowed at the edges. Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa, by Frederick Selous, the hunter and explorer who became the first British governor of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Hollister’s East African Mammals. R. Cummings’s A Hunter’s Life.

  “Reading these old accounts and the observations I’d made in Africa, I felt that I had a discovery to make. My motivation was to prove that maneless lions weren’t all that uncommon. I thought it was a widespread phenomenon, but I kept it to myself until I felt sure I’d observed a real pattern of maneless lions.”

  In the early 1990s, he made several trips to Uganda with Kerbis Peterhans, the only person in whom he’d confided. The two men had become friends in the 1980s when Kerbis Peterhans was doing doctoral research at the Museum.

  I met Kerbis Peterhans after Gnoske and I adjourned to the Shedd Aquarium cafeteria for lunch, and remarked to myself that they made an odd pair, different in every way. Gnoske was a son of the proletariat, Kerbis Peterhans, as his double-barreled name suggests, of the upper class, raised on Chicago’s gold coast, graduated from the exclusive Francis Parker prep school. Gnoske, the broad-shouldered ex-football player; Kerbis Peterhans, the lithely built tennis player. Gnoske, the art school dropout; Kerbis Peterhans, the professor of natural sciences at Roosevelt University, with degrees in biology and zoology and a doctorate from the University of Chicago in palaeoanthropology. Gnoske, 35 and single; Kerbis Peterhans married and 12 years older.

  What they had in common was a fascination with big cats. Kerbis Peterhans’s also arose early in life. He grew up across the street from the Lincoln Park Zoo, and there, in that most urban of environments, went to sleep to the same feline roars heard by children in remote African and Indian villages. His mother keeps a photograph of him in a childhood Halloween costume; he’s dressed in a lion suit and a mop head dyed brown.

  “My parents were divorced, and my mother was a professional, an architect,” he said. “I was a latchkey kid, so after school I would hang out at the zoo. I befriended the zookeepers, who let me feed the smaller animals with them. There were no restrictions then, no concerns about litigation and safety. That experience got me interested in zoology.”

  And the story of the Tsavo man-eaters got him interested in cats that prey on people. His doctoral research focused on bones from early human fossil sites, which he analyzed to find out if our ancestors were normal fare for primitive felines. His conclusion—yes, they were. Bones of Australopithecus uncovered in South Africa indicated that they were to leopards as mice are to domestic cats. Homo sapiens, larger, stronger, and above all smart enough to think ahead and develop weapons, was more successful at avoiding big-cat grocery lists; nevertheless, early man remained on the menu. In fact, Kerbis Peterhans had written in his doctoral thesis that palaeoanthropologists owe a vote of thanks to the genus Panthera: Mu
ch of the fossil evidence of early human evolution consists of leftovers—human bones deposited by large feline predators.

  “Lions and tigers eat people,” he said as I munched a club sandwich and fries. “Primates are part of their diet and we are primates. Until the advent of firearms, we were prey. To my mind, the question isn’t “Why did the Tsavo lions eat people?” but “Why don’t all lions eat people?”

  Ah, that dismal truth once again. The paragon of animals, creator of epic poems, of the Pyramids and Taj Mahal, of the airplane, automobile, and microchip, is to Panthera’s eyes a slow- moving, vulnerable biped. Easy meat.

  Gnoske’s ideas about maneless lions tantalized Kerbis-Peterhans. The preparator of birds could be on to something, and, possibly, that something had a bearing on his own work.

  Their journeys to Uganda focused on modern predation of humans by lions, and they encountered instances of peculiar behavior. In one region in the southwest of the country, a mature male lion had invented his own version of Meals-On-Wheels: He had staked out a road frequented by bicyclists. The lion would hide in the long grass, wait for an unsuspecting rider to pedal by, pounce on him, drag him off back into the grass, and devour him on the spot. In Queen Elizabeth National Park, a healthy lioness showed a preference for drunks. Her method was to lurk in the shadows near a village pub, keeping an eye out for an inebriated patron to come staggering outside. When he did, she would stalk him, spring on him from behind, and carry him off for consumption. That certainly made a good case for temperance. At the time Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans visited the village, 13 people had been claimed by the lioness, most of them frequenters of the pub. Nevertheless, the overindulgent continued to reel out of the establishment in the post-midnight hours, dinnertime for carnivores.

  Actually, the lions’ behavior might not have been all that bizarre, Kerbis Peterhans mentioned in an aside. When stalking four-footed prey, they look for abnormalities—limps, staggers, any sign of weakness or injury. It may have been that the “Meals-On-Wheels” lion regarded the labored movements of a cyclist pedaling on a rutted dirt road as not normal, whereas the lioness, like any big-city mugger, saw the stumbling drunks as easy marks.