Ghosts of Tsavo

by Philip Caputo

  ACT TWO

  CHASING THE CHIMERA

  Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold; Thou hast no speculation in those eyes Which thou dost glare with…

  —Macbeth

  May 16, 2001—Kanderi Camp, Tsavo East

  I WAKE UP just before six, roused out of a nightmare by the sound of a camp attendant pouring hot water into the bucket outside my tent. The nightmare was one of those quasi-hallucinatory narratives induced by Lariam. In literary terms, Lariam dreams are pre- rather than postmodern, having a logical structure—beginning, middle, end. As soon as my eyes open, the story flees my mind. All I can remember is that I was locked in a spiritual battle with some vague satanic force, and that I won. Despite the triumph, a sense of an evil presence lingers as I splash smoke-scented water on my face, dress, and watch the morning stars vanish one by one.

  The creepy-crawlies leave me as I eat breakfast in the mess tent with the rest of the cast: Dr. Craig Packer and his protégée Peyton West from the University of Minnesota; Ogeto Mwebi, a soft-spoken Kenyan who heads the osteology department at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi; zoologist Dennis King and his companion, Sarah Hamilton; our safari outfitter, Verity Williams; and photographer Bob Caputo, who is no relation to me, as evidenced by the disparity in our stature: Close to six five, he’s got me by nine or ten inches.

  The meal is a rushed, dietetic affair—a slice of toast, a bowl of cereal, coffee. We need to get into the field before the day turns hot and sends the lions into hiding. We divide up into teams, with each assigned a destination, and drive out of our camp at the edges of the Kanderi swamp. Peyton and I are in the Land Rover that she and Craig brought up from Tanzania. We head west, toward a place called Ndololo, where we’ve been told a lion pride has taken up residence. The vehicle has seen hard use, and looks it. Peyton handles it skillfully and is at ease with the right-hand steering, which isn’t surprising. She’s spent the better part of the past few years piloting this battered box of steel and rubber around the Serengeti, seeking to discover why lions grow manes. She will be in Tsavo for the next 23 days investigating the question from the opposite angle: Why do the lions here not grow manes?

  Beyond that, she and Craig will try to determine if Tsavo lions really are different by studying their behavior, and they’re going to do that by subjecting them to a series of experiments using two life-size dummy lions that were employed for the same purpose in Tanzania. The dummies are Craig’s innovation. They were made in Hong Kong, according to his specifications, and each lion can be coiffed with one of four imitation manes sewn in different lengths and colors. To make sure the colors were authentic, Craig had supplied the Hong Kong manufacturers with mane hairs taken from real lions. Thus, each dummy can assume one of four identities. Craig had dubbed them: Fabio (a long blond mane), Julio (long and black), Romeo (short and black), and Lothario (short and blond).

  The two scientists have come equipped with an arsenal of other tools: a FLIR, an infrared camera that measures body heat and converts the measurements to digital images, to test levels of heat stress; GPS, to mark locations of prides; night vision scopes; and tape recordings of various animal calls, to summon lions from their lairs.

  I’d heard Craig Packer’s name frequently during my research; he’s considered the world’s foremost expert on the Serengeti lion, an heir to George Schaller. After contacting him at the University of Minnesota, I learned that Tsavo had intrigued him for some time. His friend, documentary filmmaker Simon Trevor, had been urging him to go there to study its unusual lions. It seemed to me that we had mutual interests, and we discussed teaming up. Following several conversations, by phone and e-mail, Packer worked up a plan for a three-week expedition. Meanwhile, I sought funding. Thus, the project came to fruition, with a lot of help from Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans, who generously “loaned” their Tsavo research permit to Craig and Peyton.

  Our agendas mesh, with some differences in nuance. Peyton is here to round out her research, so that, when she returns to Minneapolis next month, she will be able to begin writing her dissertation and eventually become Dr. Peyton West. Craig is here to advise her and to get a firsthand look at Tsavo and its lions. And I am here hoping that their work will shed some light on the Tsavo mystery.

  Although I’ve told her that I saw several maneless or restricted-mane lions 16 months ago, Peyton remains agnostic on the subject. “Frankly, I think it’s bull,” she told me last night as we sat by the campfire. She hastened to explain that she didn’t think I was lying or hallucinating, but that she believes bald male lions are adolescents mistaken for adults by amateur observers like me. That’s Craig’s opinion as well. I was no one to argue—Craig has studied lions in the Serengeti and Kruger National Park in South Africa for a quarter of a century—but I argued anyway, pointing out that the lions I’d observed had been too big to be teenagers and had dropped testicles—a sign of maturity. I was given to understand that he and Peyton would withhold judgment until they’d seen for themselves.

  A few yards ahead, francolin alarmed by the Land Rover’s approach scuttle along both sides of the road, the males wearing bright yellow bibs. They remain earthbound until we almost run them over; then they flush in a panic of brownish wings. Off in the distance, the checkered periscope of a giraffe’s neck rises out of nyika wilderness, nyika being the general term for the thorny scrublands of East Africa.

  Of all the questions currently confronting America and the world, why some lions have manes and others don’t doesn’t rank very high on the list. I am haunted by a conversation I had three nights ago in Nairobi with two friends, Wayne Long and his wife, Marianne Fitzgerald. I’d met them a little under a year ago, shortly after interviewing Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans, while I was doing a story on the United Nations airlift to aid the victims of the endless civil war in southern Sudan. Marianne, an Englishwoman who has lived in Kenya for years, is deeply committed to doing good works; she started a nongovernmental organization to bring food and medical care to Sudanese refugees in Kenya, as well as to drought-stricken Kenyans themselves.

  Renewing acquaintance at dinner, I told her and Wayne about what had brought me back to Africa, describing Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans’s theory and the upcoming expedition to Tsavo with Packer and West. Marianne, who’d just finished telling me that four employees of her organization, Samburu tribesmen, had been killed recently in ambush by Turkana bandits—looked at me with a mixture of incredulity and bitterness.

  “That’s the difference between the West and here. In the West, you have time to do things like observe lions and measure their skulls. Here, everyone is just trying to survive, day to day. It’s a little like ancient Athens. They had slaves to do the dirty work so Plato and Aristotle and that lot could sit and think.”

  Something of an overstatement, I supposed, but her remark awakened memories of the things I’d seen in southern Sudan—boys with legs blown off by land mines, a mission church blasted by a Sudanese air force cluster bomb, a mother who had walked through the bush for six days to bring her child, feverish with malaria, to the nearest clinic. I recalled that and the Newsweek cover I spotted in a newsstand in London’s Heathrow Airport as I was returning home. It showed a blond, porky American boy, his lips smeared with the icing of the cake he was stuffing into his mouth. Above his photo was the headline “Are We Too Fat?” That wasn’t an irrelevant question such as, “Why do lions have manes?” It was obscene when you placed it beside the emaciated wraiths wandering southern Sudan. Tsavo and the Serengeti are what tourists—and writers and scientists—want to see of Africa, but the real Africa is millions upon millions of people suffering through dismal poverty, AIDS, malaria, drought, famine, utterly corrupt regimes, overcrowded cities, intractable civil wars.

  I need to keep them in mind. This vast national park bears less resemblance to the Africa Africans have to live with than Yellowstone does to the Ventura Freeway at rush hour.

  And yet I cannot be insensible to its harsh be
auty. Under cumulus clouds sailing on a strong southerly wind, the land is greener than the first time I saw it; this is the season of the long rains, though they’ve been late and are sparser than normal, and the acacia are throwing forth pale yellow blossoms. Near Ndololo, we spot tracks in the road and climb out for a closer look, discovering that they’ve been made by hyena. A Kenya Wildlife Service ranger sees us and orders us to get back inside, telling us that there are nine lions nearby.

  “I saw them just a little while ago, making quite a drama with some elephant,” he says, and when we inform him that we are on a lion research expedition, he leads us to them. Peyton calls Craig and Bob on the radio—they’re not far behind—and soon they join us and the ranger at a dried-up water hole, where the lions—ten altogether, females, subadults, and cubs—are gnawing on the remnants of a Cape buffalo that’s been dead for some time. The stench is revolting. Its huge rib cage, blackened with dry blood, resembles the tarred ribs of a small boat, and maggots spill by the hundreds from the thick hide, which one lioness is tearing at with single-minded purpose. Peyton breaks out a sketchpad and draws the number and pattern of spots on the lioness’s muzzles. Each lion possesses a unique number and pattern of muzzle spots—it’s a kind of leonine fingerprint. Peyton’s glance bounces quickly from the pad to the lions and back; her hand’s movements are hurried, like a sidewalk portrait artist with a queue of impatient customers.

  She is a slender, fair-skinned, blue-eyed blonde, 32 years old, and she came to the sciences by a circuitous route. After graduating from Yale with a degree in English, she went to work as a buyer for a New York City jewelry store and found herself working in a windowless room, sending expensive baubles to outlets around the country. Not for her.

  She quit and migrated to San Francisco, where she did editorial work for a literary magazine. She didn’t take to that either, but while volunteering at the San Francisco Zoo, she found that she was interested in wildlife. Although she’d never shone in her science courses, Peyton entertained the notion of becoming a field biologist or zoologist. The idea took root and sent her back to Yale, where she enrolled in science courses while working part-time in the university’s micro-biology lab and at zoos in Connecticut. After two years of classes, she’d found her calling—animal behavior—and began applying to the best schools in the country in that field.

  Eventually, Craig Packer accepted her as one of his students at the University of Minnesota, where he held the position of McKnight Distinguished Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior—a weighty title matched by his reputation. Peyton will always remember when she met him the first time.

  “I’d heard he was a hypochondriac who would run out of the room if a sick person was around. I had a cough and a temperature of 102°, so I put a cough drop in my mouth before going into his office. When I opened my mouth to introduce myself, the cough drop got stuck in my throat. I couldn’t swallow it, so I spit it up and it popped right into Craig’s lap.”

  Despite her contaminating him, Craig took Peyton into his graduate program, and she was soon in Africa, trying to figure out why lions have manes.

  The male or males who control this pride are nowhere to be seen, which may be just as well. The ranger informs us that a big male lion from around here attacked a minivan full of tourists recently. They had caught the lion in flagrante delicto, copulating with a lioness, and persuaded the driver to move closer. The lion rushed the van with a roar and smashed two windows with his forepaws before the terrified driver could put the van into gear and speed away. Considering the circumstances, the big fellow’s reaction was understandable, indeed admirable, but the attack added its little bit to the image of Tsavo lions as bad actors. After all, the “tourist” lions in the Masai Mara don’t object to being photographed while trysting. Perhaps the oglers in the van hadn’t read the latest edition of the Rough Guide to Kenya, which warns visitors to remember, “Tsavo’s lions have a reputation for ferocity.”

  Finished sketching, Peyton estimates the lions’ ages by noting the color of their noses. Leonine noses darken as they age, from pure pink in infancy to pure black at eight years old. Peyton’s guess is that all these adult lionesses are under eight, except for one with the atrophied chest muscles and rounded teeth that indicate old age. None of the lions look in very good shape; their ribs are prominent, their hides matted with burrs, and one, walking with an unsteady gait, appears to have an injured hip. She and three others amble to the water hole to drink from a shallow puddle in the middle. They are watched by sacred ibises in priestly vestments of black and white. The crippled lioness ventures a little too far and sinks up to her middle joints in red muck, struggles her way out, and hobbles off to rest in the shade of a bush decorated with white blossoms. Peyton drags the heavy FLIR from the back of the Land Rover onto the front seat, plugs it in, and trains it on the lioness to locate her injury. Injuries give off more heat. She lets me have a look, and I’m presented with a digitized image of a lion in a pastiche of colors: reds, yellows, blues, greens, and blacks, yellow being the hottest, black the coolest. The whirring camera disturbs the lioness briefly, but she soon goes back to snoozing, while the others continue to gnaw at the maggot-infested ruins of the buffalo.

  “I’ve never seen lions feeding on such disgusting stuff,” Craig says, his and Bob’s vehicle pulled alongside ours.

  I mention Iain’s observation that Tsavo lions are blue-collar cats who work hard for a living and take what they can get.

  Craig nods. “Yeah, a harsh environment, difficult prey…” He leaves the remark unfinished.

  We proceed on to park headquarters, a cluster of low, whitewashed bungalows near the Voi Gate, where we rendezvous with Dennis King. We ask the assistant warden for permission to conduct call-ups and to go off road (off-road driving is prohibited in Tsavo). We also sound him out about relaxing the park’s practice of discouraging radio-collaring and darting. King is an odd but familiar figure in Tsavo, which he’s wandered for the past four years in a knocked-up Land Rover with a flip-up wooden sign on its roof that reads “Research.” The sign is supposed to tell minivan drivers that King is on official business and not to follow him when he journeys cross-country; however, it’s not clear exactly what he’s researching. The KWS had given him permission to study Tsavo lions, since so little is known about them, but without backing from a university, museum, or international wildlife organization, he’s on his own, scratching by on what he calls “private grant money,” most of which appears currently to be coming from his girlfriend, Sarah. Consequently, King hasn’t added too many bricks to the unfinished edifice of knowledge about Tsavo lions. He’s teamed up with us to benefit from Craig’s and Peyton’s expertise. We’ve teamed up with him because he said he can lead us to lion prides, saving us a lot of time, but he’s already proved a little fuzzy on that score. He caused Craig’s and Peyton’s eyebrows to rise by declaring that he doesn’t think there is such a thing as a lion pride, anywhere; it’s just a word scientists use to describe groups of lions that come together, break apart, and come together again, like random atoms. A novel notion, to say the least.

  Verity, the safari outfitter, has warned that he can be a difficult, prickly character, and although we haven’t seen evidence of that yet, a certain resentfulness sometimes shines through in his faded blue eyes, as if we are interlopers on his turf. He’s another of those deracinated Englishmen I’ve run into over the years, like Clive Ward; but where Clive is cheerful and informative, Dennis is sullen and close-mouthed, offering, when asked a question, cryptic remarks or enigmatic smiles through his sandy, gray-streaked beard. But he can be candid in expressing his opinions. Last night at the campfire, I outlined Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans’s hypothesis and asked what he thought of it. “It’s complete bullshit,” he replied. That appears to be Craig and Peyton’s shared view as well, but they express it more politely, if for no other reason than that they’re in Tsavo on the Field Museum’s research permit. That’s
one of the reasons Ogeto Mwebi has joined us—he’s part of the museum’s team.

  The hope is that Dennis’s familiarity with park authorities will smooth the way, but the assistant warden, a man who listens patiently and says little, is noncommittal about off-road driving, more or less telling us that we are not to do it if tourist vehicles are anywhere near, lest the drivers get the idea that they can do it too. He’s adamant about not allowing radio collars or darting, despite Craig’s arguments that he’s anesthetized more than a hundred lions over four generations in the Serengeti without harmful effect.

  “It’s the bunny-huggers, it’s the Daphne factor,” Dennis mutters outside, after the meeting.

  This is an unkind reference to Daphne Sheldrick, wife of David Sheldrick, the founding warden of Tsavo East. She wields a great deal of influence over how the park is managed. She wants to keep it as wild as possible. Although she is fondest of elephants, its lions rank high in her esteem, precisely because they’re nasty. In The Shadow of Kilimanjaro, she tells Rick Ridgeway that “when you see a Tsavo lion, you see a real lion. It is not going to sit there with its legs in the air waiting to be photographed. It will probably want to eat you, because it is a lion that’s had to earn its keep.”

  Daphne’s philosophy is that radio collars and darts could eventually sandpaper the lions’ rough edges. I wish to learn all I can about them, but not at that price. I would not want to see some future Tsavo male tolerate people photographing him while he mates, but to come at them, roaring and raging. It isn’t necessary for us to know everything about everything. Maybe some things are best left cloaked in the mists of myth and mystery. So as Dennis and Craig grumble about “heartstring pullers with constituencies to raise money,” I give three silent cheers for Daphne Sheldrick, though I know she would despise me because I hunt and approve of hunting, so long as it’s done right. I would reply to her that hunters, real hunters, love the wild as much as she.