Ghosts of Tsavo

by Philip Caputo

  After breakfast, Peyton and Ogeto decide to move on to the new campsite in Tsavo West, but I elect to remain in Galdessa for the rest of today and tomorrow morning. In my imagination, the chimera has taken the form of the lion Marcus keeps talking about, the black-maned monarch of the Hatulo Bisani pride, and I want to see him. That’s all. I don’t expect to learn anything new, just to set eyes on him and photograph him, if I can.

  I pass the heat of afternoon with Saitoti, who teaches me to throw a lion spear. Ever since early colonial days, Europeans, particularly the British, have carried on a love affair with the tall warriors and lion-killers of the Serengeti plains, and that’s led to a lot of romantic noble savage nonsense, including absurd legends that they are descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. The obsession with all things Masai has come to be called Masai-itis, and Marcus Russell may have a touch of it. The young moran came to him a couple of years ago, after he wandered out of Masai-land near the Tanzanian border to look for work. He found it at the Tsavo Hotel in Voi, where he swept floors and learned to wait on tables. Masai lack the obsequiousness required for service-industry employment. Russell visits the hotel fairly often. When Saitoti learned that the white man operated a bush camp, he begged him to hire him.

  “He told me,” Marcus said, “‘You’re a bush man and so am I. I want to be with you. I can’t stand living in town.’ So I took him on.”

  Marcus assigned him as a camp askari with two other Masai, Muyandet and Lumuwju, their role to guard guests from wild animals at night. When Blade is visiting, Saitoti serves as a kind of nanny cum-Scoutmaster, taking the boy fishing, teaching him tracking and other bushcraft. There is something almost comic-book retro about that picture—the young white boy with his faithful Masai companion—but both Blade and Saitoti seem happy with the arrangement.

  I catch a mild case of Masai-itis myself as Saitoti, in his robe and beads and long, tightly braided hair, hefts his spear to demonstrate how it’s thrown. Cocking his sinewy right arm at the elbow, hand palm up on the spear’s balance point, holding his left arm out in front, his left foot a little forward of the right, he is instantly transformed from a merely colorful figure into what a Masai moran is—an efficient killing machine, rather like a lion itself. Verity told me that lions are terrified by the sight of a long-limbed Masai, striding across the savanna with a spear. She recalled on one safari seeing two lionesses abort a zebra stalk when two morani appeared on a ridge a mile away.

  Saitoti now takes half a step forward and casts the spear at the target, a bush about 15 yards distant. For him, that’s short range: A skilled Masai can toss a spear three to four times as far. Obviously, the farther away you can stick a lion, the better.

  The missile arcs and stabs into the ground at the base of the bush, the shaft quivering. Now it’s my turn. I’m a little surprised by the spear’s weight. Five and a half feet in length, its business end consists of a yard-long steel blade about two inches wide, with two narrower blades ridged along both sides. It’s fitted by means of a metal cup into the hardwood shaft, which is roughly the thickness of a bat handle. At the other end is a long steel spike that balances the weapon and can be used in practice to avoid dulling the blade. I might point out that this spear is not the kind you’ll find in a Nairobi “native arts and crafts” shop, but the genuine article that’s been used in real combat with lions. The blade is razor sharp and there are teeth marks on it and the shaft, from the snaps wounded simba have taken at it. As I’ve mentioned before, Masai are prohibited from hunting lion, but the regulation is honored as much in the breach as in the observance. Craig told me that he once came upon three morani shortly after they’d killed one of his radio-collared lionesses in the Serengeti. They claimed she was a cattle killer, but Craig suspected they’d done it for other reasons: In Masai-land, a warrior who’s killed a lion is something like a rock star in the West; women throw themselves at him. One hopes that the trio were rewarded by Masai groupies, because the lioness put up quite a fight and made them pay a price; when Craig saw them, they looked as if they’d been close dancing with a power mower.

  Presenting, I’m sure, a considerably less lethal and graceful figure than Saitoti, I raise the spear as he’s shown me, palm facing up, the back end slightly higher than the front. My main concern is to not make a fool of myself. I take a half step forward and make the toss. The spear sails level, then drops like a head-shot duck and skids pathetically along the ground before sliding to an ignominious stop a yard short of the bush. If it were a lion, I would now resemble a plate of ropa vieja. Saitoti picks it up, mutters something in either Masai or Swahili that can’t be flattering, and gives me another demonstration. Although I don’t understand a word he’s saying, I see what I did wrong: I failed to raise my throwing arm just before making the cast.

  My second try is a little more like it, and on the fourth attempt, the spear makes a fine arc and buries itself in the earth, the spiked end waving like an antenna in the wind. Saitoti smiles and clasps my hand in congratulations, and I feel like a Little Leaguer with his first base hit.

  “Not bad. Now try that with a real lion in front of you.”

  It’s Marcus, coming up from his banda. Time to go look for the big male with the black mane.

  Our first stop is the ranger’s camp, a collection of mud-walled huts near the river. It could be a guerrilla fighter’s base camp, what with the rifle-toting rangers in their camouflage uniforms and the olive-drab truck parked outside. Inside one of the huts, the boys are cooking up a stew. Marcus attempts to persuade Lieutenant Oliver to allow me to accompany his men on a foot patrol the next morning. I’m tired of being cooped up in vehicles all day, eager for “foot-knowledge”—the intimacy with a place that can be acquired only by walking in it. Oliver isn’t keen on the idea. He makes various excuses why it will be difficult. Finally, pressed by Marcus and me, he confesses the real reason, which is that I lack written authorization from KWS headquarters in Nairobi to accompany a patrol on foot. If anything were to happen to me, Oliver would have to answer for it.

  He’s adamant, so we thank him for his time, and with Blade and Saitoti in the backseat of Marcus’s Land Rover we take off for the Hatulo Bisani, passing a female impala with two young. Along the way, Marcus teaches Blade and me some basic bushcraft, pointing out the tunnels Cape buffalo burrow into in the thickets of African toothbrush trees. He also shows me (apparently Blade already knows this) how to make a toothbrush from one: You break off a twig, strip the leaves, chew on the tip until you fray it into a brush, and then scrub your teeth. He has ten times the eye I do for spotting game and identifying tracks from a moving car. He spies three-day-old lion prints where I see only indistinct marks on the ground, and then the pugmarks of a big lion made sometime this morning. We follow them on foot for a while, Marcus pointing out that a lion’s front paw is always bigger than the hind, and then lose them amid the rocks of a lugga. No matter, he says, it wasn’t the black-maned male. That one would leave tracks like dessert plates—Marcus thinks he could go 500 pounds.

  All the rest of the afternoon we search. The Hatulo Bisani teems with elephant, one dragging a deformed hind leg, probably an injury that healed improperly. The elephants could be the reason why no lions are around. Heading back at dusk, Marcus really astonishes me when he picks out a male kudu and a harem of five females, half hidden in the scrub 200 yards away. I don’t see a thing until we draw much closer and the male bounds away with powerful lunges, his white-streaked flanks flashing through the shadows.

  Nightfall brings visitors to Galdessa (the name is the Waliangulu word for baboon, but “Galdessa Camp” sounds more welcoming than “Baboon Camp”). First, a hippo bashes through the saltbush, laughing and snorting. Later, two elephants pay a call and decide to stay. A hyena announces his presence with a whoop, followed by a leopard, whose ditonal roar raises gooseflesh on my back and arms. Although a leopard is the smallest of the big cats in Asia and Africa—the males weigh about as much as an averag
e-size man—they are incredibly fast and far more limber than lions and tigers, able to use their hind paws, much as a domestic cat does, to disembowel their prey. The dewclaws on their back legs are employed for that purpose.

  Because so much wildlife of the dangerous kind is present and the scrub in camp so thick, Saitoti and Lumuwju, spears in hand, appear at my banda to escort me to the mess for dinner. It’s a walk of some 200 yards, and as I go down the dark path behind the two askaris, their raised spear points catching moonlight, I can feel in an almost tactile way Africa tightening its grip on me. My life in suburban Connecticut is, well, suburban Connecticut. Called to the table from my studio behind the house, I cross a hundred feet of backyard prowled by, at worst, a skunk or raccoon. Here, the ordinary act of going to dinner becomes extraordinary, requiring spear-toting Masai guards and carrying the risk of being charged, stomped, or mauled, and I am giddy with the excitement of it. The thrill is somewhat undermined by the memory of a tale Craig told me a couple of weeks ago about two couples who were on safari in South Africa, staying at a luxury camp like Galdessa. After dinner, one of the women left the mess to go the bathroom. When she failed to return after perhaps 15 minutes, the others and their guide went looking for her. They found her eviscerated corpse lying beside the swimming pool. She’d been jumped by two lionesses barely 50 yards from the mess, and no one ever heard a sound because none was made, either by the lions (which never roar when they spring) or by their victim, her neck snapped before she could scream.

  Marcus and I dine with four human visitors, two young Englishwomen and two young Englishmen who teach school in a village near Tsavo for an Anglican missionary organization. They’re taking a weekend holiday to see something of wild Africa. The girls, with their creamy complexions and healthy, British-milkmaid bodies, are attractive, and all four, devoutly religious, are refreshing in their youthful idealism. In a conversation about moral values, the women mention the importance of maintaining chastity before marriage. Marcus can’t resist playing the wild bushman and treats them to his own libertine opinions about love and sex, which he generously seasons with profanity. His audience is hip enough to see through the act and is more amused than shocked.

  June 2

  LAST NIGHT, WE again heard lions roaring near camp. Marcus thinks they’re trailing a big buffalo herd that grazes in the Hatulo Bisani, so we set off for it once more. I have only this morning to see the giant with the black mane, and I’m not optimistic. A male kudu, maybe the one we saw yesterday, bolts across the road in front of us, while down in the riverbed, spoonbills of purest white step gingerly through the grass on pink legs, sweeping their bills back and forth. A yellow-billed stork stands poised, unafraid of the elephants cooling themselves in river mud all around him. Overhead, a pair of bold drongoes, no bigger than sparrows, strafe a harrier hawk ten times their size to keep it away from their nested chicks. We come upon the buffalo, hundreds of them, resembling at a distance a field of enormous black boulders. Two big bulls stand sentry duty on our side of the riverbed. As we approach, they run off, Marcus heading off-road to follow on the chance that the lion is waiting in ambush. We jostle through thornbush and toothbrush, and then Marcus says, “Uh-oh, there’s the brigadier,” and we see a gigantic bull lurking in acacia shade. He’s at least the size of the one I saw with Dennis near Aruba, possibly bigger. In fact, he looks like a hippo with horns.

  “When you’re hunting buff, that is what you look for,” Marcus instructs both Blade and me. “A couple of them run off and you follow and you don’t see the brigadier hiding in the scrub until he charges out and hammers you.”

  Literally hammers you, from what I’ve read in Capstick. Hammers you with his horns and with his plate-size hooves until you resemble something that’s been repeatedly run over by a road grader.

  We hunt for two more hours, and my pessimism is not disappointed. The big lion will have to remain in my imagination. Sammy is in camp, waiting to take me to Tsavo West. I pay the tab, say good-bye to Marcus, Blade, and Saitoti, hoping to see them again but suspecting I won’t, and leave.

  June 3—Chyulu Camp, Tsavo West

  IT’S ANOTHER COUNTRY here, more hilly than Tsavo East, and cooler because it’s higher, and greener because the hills, the Chyulu and Taita and Ngulia, make weather and the weather brings rain. Clouds swirl on the crests, creating the illusion that those ancient volcanoes are still active, and the trees are thick on the slopes and great gneiss outcrops rise up through the trees and change color in the dawn, from coppery red to gold. The grass in the valleys and the reeds in the marshes show bright green, the acacia darker green, and baobab with bare gray trunks shaped like bottles stand here and there, throwing out stubby, leafless branches. The backs of buffalo hump out of the reeds below, and Peyton, Ogeto, and I scan with binoculars for lion but see none. Standing up through the roof hatches, it feels almost chilly enough for a sweater, an article of apparel I don’t associate with Tsavo.

  Yesterday, my two companions and Bob came upon three thin lionesses and four cubs near where we now are, above a broad round depression called Rhino Valley (a tourist-friendly name if I ever heard one). Peyton’s quest is to find the males to see if they have manes, and if they do, to image them with the infrared camera. We turn east, crossing a plain, while Bob, in his own car behind us, goes west, then south, paralleling the Ngulia Range.

  At 7:30 a.m., he calls on the radio. He’s found a male and it is maned. No accidental discovery, either. Bob used a little bushcraft by following buffalo spoor and the pugmarks of a lion tracking the herd. We rendezvous with him and see the light-maned lion lying on his belly in thick scrub a few yards off the road, facing a crowded minibus with lordly indifference. Today is Kenya’s independence day and the park is full of tourists. The minibus partly blocks our view, making it impossible for Peyton to use the infrared. We have to settle for playing tourist ourselves and take pictures and watch. The lion’s mane is ragged, typical, Peyton says, of manes that have been ripped up by thorns and underbrush; but it’s fuller than the ones we’ve seen in Tsavo East, suggesting that maybe mane growth is affected by climate and altitude. Another male, black-maned, rises up out of a bush nearby, and then, having made himself visible, instantly becomes invisible again, slipping off into the scrub. The first lion, agitated by all the attention, follows him. Now you see ’em, now you don’t. This was the area where Colonel Patterson hunted the man-eaters, and one look at the tall grass and tangled thickets renews my appreciation of how tough that must have been.

  We push on, Bob southward, we eastward, and the road climbs between two hills, offering a vista of savanna and hills that practically sings. Water holes glitter below, the Kitani River shines through its bordering trees. We head down and follow the Kitani—Peyton and Ogeto had learned from a ranger that a pride of 11 live along it—but we don’t see them, nor much game of any sort. Two female eland, largest of all African antelope, big as Brahma cows, a handful of impala, a giraffe.

  We return to camp for a noontime brunch. Afterward, because Tsavo West is its own jurisdiction, Peyton and Ogeto go to headquarters to seek the warden’s permission to do call-ups. Restless and underexercised, I take a walk from camp to the Chyulu Gate, which is only half a mile down the road. That doesn’t mean it’s predator free. I don’t walk as I do in the defanged woods of Connecticut and Westchester County, running Sage to keep her in shape for bird season. There, I’m usually lost in thought, musing on something I’m writing, random ideas flitting through my head; here, alone and afoot in a land little changed from Pleistocene, I am instantly alert for the slightest movement, the faintest sound. It isn’t nerve-racking—stimulating, rather, as different from those tame woodland strolls as sleep from waking. I don’t want things to get too stimulating, however. On the return leg, remembering Verity’s comment about lions and the Masai, I pick up a long stick and carry it above my shoulder, parallel to the ground. A discerning lion would notice that my stocky profile bears no resemblance to a Mas
ai’s, but it might make him think twice.

  I have a visitor in my tent—a locust that comes straight out of the plagues of Egypt. It’s at least as big as a hummingbird and sits on the floor, still as a piece of wood, its bristling hind legs poised for takeoff.

  Picking up Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, I am struck by a line: “This worshipful or religious attitude is not impressed by scientific facts like figures of altitude, which are foremost in the mind of modern man.” Matthiessen is speaking about the way primitive cultures respond to the natural world and the wild things that inhabit it, but you could say the “worshipful or religious attitude” is fully present in some modern human beings. It is in me. Not that I’m unimpressed with scientific facts like figures of altitude; I seek to know as much as anyone else born to an advanced, industrialized civilization. Nonetheless, Matthiessen’s words reawaken my impatience and irritation with all the methods and paraphernalia with which Peyton and Craig are establishing scientific facts about the African lion. It strikes me as intrusive, setting up barriers between the animal and the human, closing off the part of our brains that might communicate with the beast, receive a message from it. And yeah, I know how silly that must sound. Yet that too is knowledge, albeit of a different kind.

  June 5

  OUR SECOND-TO-LAST day, and our final morning of work. Tomorrow will be devoted to striking camp. This afternoon, we’re going to toss a party for Peyton, celebrating the completion of her research. Two days from now she’ll be winging back to Minnesota to face the task of turning three years of observations, study, and data into a coherent thesis. Yesterday, she spoke of the drawbacks and attractions of her work:

  “You spend 10 or 12 hours a day in a Land Rover all by yourself, listening to static and waiting to hear the beep-beep of a radio collar. You go to the same places over and over, and when you come back, you talk to the same people, who are basically doing the same thing you are, so you talk about the same things over and over. A lot of the elements of the job conspire to drive you crazy, and you crave stimulation from the outside world. But I love it, riding through the bush by myself. Looking for lions is like a treasure hunt.”