Ghosts of Tsavo

by Philip Caputo

  The three need names. Peyton presides, dubbing the largest Baby Huey, the second Meathead (because his dropped lower jaw gives him a stupid expression), and the third Fur Boy, because he has the most mane hair. Meanwhile, I become the beneficiary of another Packer Lecture, but I have trouble following his train of thought. Something about red pandas being closer to raccoons genetically, giant pandas closer to bears. Eventually, he comes to the three lions, though I’m not clear about the connection between them and pandas, giant or otherwise.

  “We may have here a lion adapted to its environment,” he declares. “Asian lions also have short manes.”

  I bring up Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans. They say that the Tsavo lion and the Asian lion have a common ancestor; the abbreviated mane, therefore, is an ancestral trait.

  “No, no,” Craig responds. “It makes more sense to say that these are African lions who’ve adapted to a hotter climate.”

  And why does that make more sense?

  “Because the other animals I’ve seen in Tsavo, like jackals and gazelles, look different than the ones I’ve seen on the Serengeti. They have shorter hair. So it’s simplest to say that these short manes are not ancestral but an adaptation.”

  When she’s finished thermal imaging, Peyton decides to run an experiment developed in the Serengeti: A recording of a female lion’s roar is played to two or more males, to see if the lion with the thicker or thickest mane is the first to respond, the first to get to the female. Peyton’s previous work has shown that such is almost always the case, indicating a correlation between a luxuriant mane and masculine vigor. Neither she nor Craig, however, expects the same results today; Fur Boy may have the most hair, but he is also the smallest and is probably six months to a year younger than his buddies.

  While Craig, Bob, and I remain in place, she and Ogeto drive off about a hundred yards, where Peyton—rather bravely, I think—gets out of the Land Rover and mounts a speaker on the roof. She climbs back in and inserts a cassette into a tape recorder. A deep, throaty grunt followed by a roar echoes through the growing dusk. Instantly, all three males go from torpid to alert, Meathead raising his head, followed by Baby Huey; but to everyone’s surprise, Fur Boy is the first to spring to his feet, and he looks intently in the direction of the roar, which comes again, a scary sound, even though I know it’s only a recording. Fur Boy sets off at a determined walk, while the other two stand side by side, some distance behind; then they start forward and catch up. Fur Boy picks up the pace and, striding briskly, easily wins the race to the Land Rover. The poor guy, expecting to find an amorous lioness, finds only a vehicle occupied by a female of the wrong species. “Where are you, girl?” he seems to be asking as, a little confused, he paces around, sniffing the air. He makes an arresting sight, “pussy footing” through the short grass by raising a forepaw, holding it in midair for a moment before slowly setting it down without a sound, his oval pupils dilated in the waning light. Craig giggles.

  “He thinks we’re hiding the female. He’s going to liberate this lioness. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long tail. Or lift it up.”

  Finally, Fur Boy gives up. As we leave, all three lions lie down alongside the road, exactly as Craig and I found them in the morning.

  They’d behaved in the same way Serengeti lions would have in similar circumstances—a small indication that Tsavo lions may not be as different as Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans believe they are. Craig and Peyton are pleased with the success of the experiment.

  “That’s the thing about our science,” he tells me as we return to camp in darkness. “We can make things happen. It would have taken years, observing things as they happen naturally, to see what we did tonight in minutes.”

  May 20

  GALDESSA CAMP is a safari camp for the diamonds-and-Ferrari set on the banks of the Galana River. Its large, airy, thatch-roof bandas, domiciles of rustic elegance with showers and flush toilets, sprawl along the river’s south bank for a quarter of a mile, linked by well-marked paths through the saltbush, the paths converging on a dining hall as big as a restaurant, splendidly furnished with cushioned chairs and tables built of native hardwoods, and decorated with buffalo horns and skulls that give the place the atmosphere of some heathen temple dedicated to animal worship.

  Meals are served on china, wine poured into stemware, and no plastic, thank you. There is also a bar and a lounge, where people who can afford the rates—$600 (U.S.) per day—can drink their gins and listen to leopards and lions roar and elephants blare. Entering these swish surroundings, Peyton and I feel as residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant would on a drive through Greenwich, Connecticut. Our digs on the Kanderi swamp are comfortable enough, and Verity’s company, Ker and Downey, is one of the most experienced in Kenya—they outfitted Hemingway’s last safari. But because we’re on a tight budget, we can’t afford anywhere near the full Ker and Downey treatment and must put up with certain inconveniences such as open-air latrines and tents with zippers that don’t work properly (which has caused me some anxiety, recalling Iain’s warnings to keep a tent zipped up in lion country).

  Brown-haired, brown-eyed, with a clean-shaven face that looks younger than his 43 years, Marcus Russell greets us, accompanied by his four-year-old son, Blade, a kid so cute you want to steal him, and Marcus’s right-hand man and chief tracker, Saitoti, a six-foot-two-inch Masai who is got up in full Masai regalia—robe, cloak, bead necklaces, copper bracelets—and has muscles that look like mooring lines. Marcus manages Galdessa Camp. He is one of the twin sons of Bill Russell, a noted Tsavo warden, and has spent his entire life in the bush, serving for a while as an intelligence scout for Leakey’s anti-poaching units. We’ve been told he’s a font of Tsavo lore, which is why we’ve come to meet him. We plan to do some surveys in this neck of the woods, and Marcus knows it intimately.

  “There’s plenty of maned lions here in Tsavo,” he says in his Anglo-Kenyan accent as we sit down in the dining room. “Plenty. I’ve seen ’em, photographed ’em, here. Look.”

  Out comes a photo album showing lions with black, blond, even auburn manes. Although none would meet Serengeti standards, they’re fuller than anything I’ve seen this time out. Could these have been problem animals translocated to the park?

  “Never heard of a problem lion being dropped here. Problem leopards, yeah, but don’t know of any problem lions. Problem lions are shot, poisoned on the ranches near the park.”

  So both types exist side by side?

  “You’ll see prides with three resident males and two will be maned and one not. Got four males behind camp, all maneless, and we’ve got two with big blond manes.” Marcus’s hands gesture with Mediterranean extravagance, and he speaks so rapidly, with such compulsiveness, that I wonder if he sugars his breakfast cereal with cocaine. “Maned lion seen in camp recently. Go back to the records in the man-eaters of Tsavo days, go back to when I was a kid, maned and unmaned lions and females seen to mate with both. But I’ve seen more maneless than maned. I’d say it’s a 60–40 split. Why maneless? I don’t know. Heat? Maybe, but other hot places have got maned lions. Wait-a-bit thorns? Other places have thorns and maned lions. I’ve talked to Masai herdsmen from west of Tsavo West and they’ve told me they’ve got maneless lions there. Ask Saitoti…” He breaks off, fires the question in Masai, and Saitoti answers. “There you have it, yeah? Unmaned lions. I’ll tell you what. These Tsavo lions are different. It’s genetics, you ask me. There’s a genetic difference.”

  Peyton begs to differ.

  “How’d you explain it, then?”

  “There are a lot of factors that could explain…”

  “Nah, it’s genetics,” Marcus interrupts, the words coming like machine-gun bullets. “They’re bigger. There’s a pride of 16 lions on the Hatulo Bisani, lot of buffalo there, and they follow the buffalo. Three males in the pride, two blond-maned, but the brigadier is a bloody great black-maned lion. Biggest bloody lion I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen millions. I was raised in Tsavo. He stood t
his high.” Marcus leaps to his feet, holding his hand a few inches above his waist. “And he had the bulk to go with it, oh, he had it all. Sixteen. Him, the other two adult males, seven cubs, six lionesses. Yesterday, saw two other females on the Hatulo Bisani. Don’t think they were from his pride. Farther away, down by Buffalo Wallows. Feeding on a dead buff, scrawny, lethargic, both in a bad nick. Bad nick. See, lions here have a much tougher life, and therefore you get a tougher lion. They’re more aggressive here. Not too long ago, I was walking along the river”—his hand flings at the Galana, glittering through the ranks of bordering doum palm—“Lioness on the other side roars at me. Next thing, she jumps into the bloody river, trying to get at me. Another time, I was driving along with two clients, couple of pretty ladies like you, Peyton, when the Land Rover stalled right near a couple of lions. I got out and walked in front of the Land Rover and clapped my hands—lions don’t like that sound, and they’ll usually run off—clapped my hands and said, “All right, run along, now.” I was showing off, yeah? Well, those lions turned around and came right at me and didn’t I get back in quick. What you don’t want to do is get near a Tsavo lion when he’s mating. Did that once, and he attacked the Land Rover. Bit the tires.”

  There is a lull in the verbal barrage, then Marcus launches into another, an impassioned condemnation of the way the vast cattle ranches surrounding Tsavo (some are as big as a million acres) are managed. Not making any money, with beef prices down. Sold to Arabs, who hire Somalis to look after their livestock. Somalis! This close to Tsavo! Talk about letting the fox into the henhouse! Already been some instances of elephant poaching north of the Galana. Bloody Somalis put out poisoned baits to kill lions that wander out of the park. Kill anything else that eats them. Hyena. Vultures. That’s why you don’t see a lot of vultures in Tsavo. Poisoned.

  Whatever the merits of his theories about Tsavo lions, he is obviously an ardent conservationist, and he outlines an ambitious scheme to buy one of the ranches and build houses on it on large acreages and put them up for sale. It will be a privately owned game reserve, anyone with the money will be able to own his piece of an African paradise, and there’ll be rangers and guides…

  In the midst of this narrative, Blade snuggles up to Peyton, who takes immediately to the charming little boy with the mop of sandy brown hair.

  “Now, don’t bother the pretty lady,” Marcus admonishes.

  Peyton replies that she doesn’t mind, she loves children, and Marcus says he can see that and then, with a searching look at the blond scientist, volunteers that he and Blade’s mum are split up. Peyton says nothing, composes her expression into one of studied indifference, and Marcus resumes describing his plans. When, finally, he’s done, we mention that we hope to study the lions inhabiting the Galana corridor. With another look at Peyton, he invites us to stay at the camp. It’s the off season, and the camp will be closed for another couple of weeks, so we can stay on his invitation at a super-bargain rate, $50 (U.S.) per person per day.

  “Looks to me like Marcus is sweet on you,” I remark as we drive away, down the Hatulo Bisani road to look for the big, dark-maned lion.

  Peyton offers a slightly rueful smile.

  “I’ve run into all kinds of guys like him. Random dudes with big plans and ideas that won’t go anywhere.”

  I ask what she makes of Marcus’s commentaries. If maned and unmaned lions coexist and even interbreed in Tsavo, then why would some be crowned with hair and others not?

  She shrugs. It’s hard to assess the accuracy of the stories you hear about Tsavo; the legends have encrusted into fact. Peyton’s task is to peel away the mythological layers to get at some core of scientifically verifiable truth. She waxes philosophical for a moment, wondering aloud about the price we pay for knowledge; sometimes it comes at the cost of wonder, of mystery.

  Elephants graze in the Hatulo Bisani, scores of them, cropping the bright green sedge with their trunks, showering themselves with water drawn from the stream wending through the middle of the riverbed. Buffalo wallow while yellow-billed storks roost in the trees and egrets seek sign of fish or crab, long necks extended or coiled into an S that straightens suddenly as a head darts forward, a beak captures prey. The sky darkens and a light rain falls, dimpling the stream. The remains of the buffalo upon which the two mangy lionesses had been feeding lies on a slab of rock, the ribs like barrel staves, the hide rent into twisted rags, and the stench strong even from a distance. In a while, the clouds part and race on the south wind across the green rim of the Taita Hills, with the sun slicing through in glimmering planes. There is a sort of symbiosis in wild Africa between stunning beauty and violent death. The primeval grandeur of its landscapes would be diminished if they were not scene for daily struggles of life and death, daily dramas of pursuit and flight; but the grandeur somehow elevates all the hunting and killing, which would seem like so much ugly slaughter in a more mundane setting.

  May 21

  I LEARNED A HYENA was in camp late last night. It broke into the cook’s tent and made off with a box of scouring pads, so it will have very clean insides if it eats them. We had another visitor at around four this morning, a leopard. I heard its rasping, two-toned roar while I was taking a leak, and that sound caused me to finish up in a hurry and get back into my tent, where I lay listening to the roars diminish as the unseen cat moved on.

  In Dennis’s Land Rover, I am bouncing down an elephant path that leads almost as straight as a surveyed road through the scrub. The sunrise bookends yesterday’s sunset, so spectacular that we all take pictures of it, even Bob, for whom sunsets are the cliché of all clichés. Eastward, strato-cirrus arranged in layers, in wisps and sweeping curtains, change color by the minute, and when the sun bursts through, Dennis and I are blinded through our sunglasses. Craig was with him yesterday, and I guess it wasn’t an altogether pleasant experience. He said he wasn’t going to partner up with Dennis again, so I’ve volunteered, once again in the interest of keeping a happy ship. One on one, he’s more likeable than in a crowd (and I think a crowd to him is any more than three people), but he’s still a bit of a difficult character who appears to be difficult for the sake of it. I take out my notebook and ask his age, a routine journalistic question. With a sly smile peeking through his graying beard, he replies, “Depends on which reincarnation you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, come off it, Dennis.”

  “My birth records were lost during the First World War.”

  I concede, and having won that little skirmish, he volunteers that he was conceived in Scotland, where his soldier father was training for a diversionary operation for the D-day landing. I do some simple math and calculate that he’s around 57.

  Further interrogation yields a sketchy biography. He describes himself as a loner who got interested in wildlife in his childhood, somewhere in England. His parents didn’t require him to be home at night, so he stayed out, tracking badgers until midnight.

  “The parents of other kids, who did have curfews, wouldn’t let them go out with me.”

  He smiles again, as if to savor the memory of those solitary boyhood expeditions.

  A three-year hitch with the British army in the last outposts of the fading Empire was followed by night school at University College in London, where he gained a bachelor’s degree in zoology. Afterward, he was employed by the government nature conservancy, managing grouse habitat in Scotland. Restlessness drove him to Canada, where he spent 17 years wandering in British Columbia and the Canadian Arctic, studying bears, and became a Canadian citizen. In 1994, he went off to Australia, and three years later applied for Australian citizenship before returning to the United Kingdom for a visit.

  “I’m a professional emigrator,” he says. “In 1997, I was on my way back to Australia to fulfill a residency requirement, and I happened to be passing through Africa and I wanted to see it without being a tourist. I asked Kenya Wildlife Service officials if there was any work that needed doing, and they told me that very
little was known about Tsavo lions. That struck me as a glaring void in knowledge, and it needed to be filled if you wanted species like it to be here in the future. I got an overview, submitted a report to KWS, and they gave me permission to do research. I went back to Australia, got my citizenship, and then returned to Tsavo. I love Africa. The people are so gracious and warm.”

  I think of Marianne Fitzgerald’s employees, murdered by bandits, and the cruelties I saw or learned about in southern Sudan, but decide it’s best not to dispute Dennis’s assertion.

  As we continue east toward Aruba, a small herd of Thompson’s gazelles appears on the horizon. A few animals are “spronging,” leaping with all four feet off the ground. It used to be thought that gazelles did this to warn their herd-mates that danger was near, but subsequent research has turned that explanation into a sweet illusion. Darwinian selfishness wins again. Gazelle sprong not because they’re looking out for their fellow gazelle but to show an approaching predator that they’re in prime condition and will be very difficult to catch, thus turning its attention toward other animals in the herd. Truth is beauty and beauty truth? Not always, Mr. Keats.

  We swing down into a grassy bowl near Aruba Lake. A male oryx stands in the distance, tormented by flies, its ears beating the air like duck wings, its tail switching. I am once again captivated by the artistry of this animal’s markings, the black blaze on its nose, the black garters, the black stripe, like the racing stripe on a car, streaking along its buckskin flanks. A lone buffalo bull crosses our path. By now, I have seen more than 2,000 in Tsavo, and this one is the biggest yet, a Land Cruiser with horns, five and a half feet tall at its muscle-bunched shoulder, mud black, hoofs as big around as bread plates and sharp as mattocks. He pauses to give us a baleful glare, as if he’s contemplating whether to charge the strange, square, noisy thing lumbering through his pasture. I can’t imagine any lion, or any number of lions, capable of taking him on, but I guess they would if they were hungry enough. I bring up the theory that Tsavo lions are more likely to turn man-eater because they’re more likely to be injured, preying on buffalo.