But Brian is a survivor if ever there was one. He’s soon to take a job managing a wildlife conservancy project in the Trans-Mara, land of the Masai.
At the Norfolk, I say good-bye to him and Peyton, struck, as I always am, by the transience of the relationships writers develop. People come into your life, you into theirs, you get to know each other and it almost seems like friendship, but in the end it’s a simulacrum of friendship. You go your way, they go theirs.
Having ended two acquaintanceships, I enter the lobby and renew another. Tom Gnoske is there, just arrived from Chicago and preparing to leave for Tsavo day after tomorrow.
He’s cranked up, excited about running the transect from the Chyulu down to the plains, and he chain smokes as he outlines the project.* He interrupts himself to ask what was learned on the Packer-West expedition. When I tell him that they have ruled out any relationship between Tsavo lions and Asian and primitive lions, he shakes his head.
“What Peyton doesn’t understand is that Asian lions and maneless lions, or lions with variable manes, have the same proportion of head to body size as Paleolithic lions, which could mean that these lions represent the ancestral condition of the lion.”
There follows a long dissertation that I, tired and having drunk too much wine, have a hard time following. Ratio of cranial size to shoulder bone, Serengeti males have huge skulls, relatively short shoulder bones, Paleolithic lions have a longer ratio, as do hunting lions, that is, lions who do more hunting than fighting. Something along those lines.
Reluctant to get caught in a dispute among scientists, I steer him back to his upcoming project, and when he tells me that he and his team will be working mostly at night, when they’ll be more likely to see lions hunting and killing buffalo, I’m briefly tempted to join him, for I’m still under the spell Kilimanjaro cast on me two days ago.
But only briefly. The truth is, I don’t want to learn anything more about lions but am content to allow the mystery to remain, content to keep some blank spots blank; after all, those are what excite the imagination. I haven’t captured the chimera. Rather, it’s captured me, and so I cling to the image of Othello and Prince Hal, roaring under the slivered moon, beautiful in some terrible way, incarnations of all that’s left in our world of the wild, the unknown.
EPILOGUE
WHY THE MAN-EATERS DID WHAT THEY DID
When we camped for the night we were obliged to form a hedge of thorn-bushes and circle the encampment with huge bonfires to keep the wild beasts from attacking us. It was terrifying to hear the continuous roar of lions resounding on all sides…and to see the glare of hyena eyes in the darkness of the umbrageous surroundings. A sense of abject helplessness momentarily possessed me.
—from an account of an 1892 journey
through Tsavo by M. French-Sheldon
AS RURAL TOWNS in Kenya go, Voi is fairly large and prosperous, boasting a modern bank, two large gas stations, bars, a busy marketplace, a couple of hotels, the Tsavo and the Red Elephant, an auto repair shop with a hip name, the Boyz-in-the-Hood Garage, even a shop run by an Indian couple where you can send e-mail and log on to the Net. Still, it’s got plenty of the Third World blues: open sewers, run-down buildings, unpaved streets, a general look of disrepair that you know is going to stay that way. The most attractive feature in town is a small, fenced cemetery that lies just off the road leading to the park’s Voi Gate. British soldiers who died fighting Germans in Tanzania (then Tanganyika) during the First World War are buried there, along with Indians and Africans who served in the colonial army (some killed by lions while on sentry duty). They lie under simple headstones with their names and the names of regiments. One marker, however, is of the grander sort. It bears this inscription: “To the Sacred Memory of John William O’Hara, of Madras, India. Killed by a lion on the road to Taveta, East Africa. 11 March 1899, aged 35 Years. Erected by His Loving Wife.”
O’Hara was an engineer in charge of building a road between Voi and the mission station at Taveta. With his wife and two small children, he was encamped in the Taita Hills, some 12 miles west of Voi. On the night of March 11, the family were sleeping in their tent, O’Hara and his wife in one bed, the children in the other. The younger, a baby daughter, was feverish and restless, and Mrs. O’Hara got up to get her something to drink. As she was doing so, she thought she heard a lion prowling around the tent and woke her husband, who got up immediately and went outside with his rifle. He saw nothing and spoke to an askari who’d been standing watch by a campfire a short distance away. The askari reported that all he’d seen was a donkey. O’Hara returned to the tent and told his wife not to worry; she’d only heard a donkey.
Colonel Patterson, who was in Voi at the time and helped bury the engineer, interviewed his widow and records her description of what happened next in The Man-Eaters of Tsavo.
“The night being very hot, my husband threw back the tent door and lay down again beside me,” Mrs. O’Hara (he doesn’t give her first name) told Patterson. “After a while I dozed off, but was suddenly roused by a feeling as if the pillow were being pulled away from under my head. On looking round I found that my husband was gone. I jumped up and called him loudly, but got no answer. Just then I heard a noise among the boxes outside the door, so I rushed out and saw my poor husband lying between the boxes. I ran up to him and tried to lift him, but I could not do so. I then called to the askari to come and help me, but he refused, saying that there was a lion standing beside me. I looked up and saw the huge beast glowering at me, not more than two yards away. At this moment, the askari fired his rifle, and this fortunately frightened the lion, for it at once jumped off into the bush.”
“All four askaris then came forward and lifted my husband back onto the bed. He was quite dead. We had hardly got back into the tent before the lion returned and prowled about in front of the door, showing every intention of springing in to recover his prey. The askaris fired at him, but did no damage beyond frightening him away again for a moment or two. He soon came back and continued to walk round the tent until daylight, growling and purring, and it was only by firing through the tent every now and then that we kept him out. At daybreak he disappeared and I had my husband’s body carried here, while I followed with the children until I met you.”
A physician named Dr. Rose was in Voi at the time and gave a sedative to Mrs. O’Hara. While she rested, he conducted an autopsy and was able to tell the widow the next day that her husband died instantly and painlessly. Dr. Rose concluded that O’Hara had been lying on his back, and that the lion seized his head in its mouth and drove its fangs through his temples into his brain.
The lion was killed a few weeks later by a poisoned arrow shot from a tree by a Taita hunter. Patterson doesn’t give a description of the animal, whether male or female, maned or unmaned; but its attack on O’Hara showed that the deaths of the two man-eaters more than two months earlier wasn’t the last word from Tsavo’s lions.
In forensic medicine, a procedure known as a psychological autopsy is used to determine the motives of suicides who don’t leave notes and of mass murderers who either kill themselves or are killed by police before anyone can ask them the reasons for their crimes.
The Field Museum’s Tom Gnoske and Julian Kerbis Peterhans have conducted an analogous procedure with the Man-eaters of Tsavo, which were mass killers of human beings, though not, of course, mass murderers. Why people and why so many? Early in this book, I presented the conjectures and assumptions that have been offered in the more than 100 years since the so-called reign of terror, but no one has answered the questions in a methodical way until Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans completed a study in late 2001. They went about the task by reviewing the natural history of the lions, the first time that was done, by poring over hundreds of historical accounts, scientific texts, reports, and monographs, and by examining the lions’ remains, chiefly their skulls and teeth. They planned to publish their findings in a lengthy article, “Causes of ‘Man-eating’ among lion
s (Panthera leo) with a discussion of the natural history of the ‘Man-eaters of Tsavo’” in the Journal of the East African Natural History Society.
The study attempts to lay to rest the two most persistent myths about man-eaters, whether lions, leopards, or tigers: They’re outlaws, behaving unnaturally, and they turn to people when they’re too old, injured, or malnourished to catch “normal” prey. It turns out that we may be normal prey; there is nothing aberrant about eating us. As Kerbis Peterhans told me back in Chicago, big cats eat primates and we are primates. At an anthropological site in South Africa, it was discovered that Australopithecus robustus, one of our early ancestors, was the most common prey for prehistoric leopards. Detailed records of man-eating weren’t kept till modern times, so we have to skip over two-odd million years of human evolution before we find facts and figures (those who continue to think that we’re not on pantherid menus will not be encouraged) :
-In India in the mid-1920s, 7,000 people were killed by tigers.
–Man-eating lions killed 128 people in southwest Uganda in 1927 and 1928.
–Between 1932 and 1947, in a 150-square-mile area of southern Tanzania, lions killed and ate an estimated 1,500 human beings, to date the all-Africa record.
–Tigers in the Kheri district of India killed 128 people between 1978 and 1984.
–Between 1975 and 1981, tigers in the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve in India devoured 318 people.
-Asian lions in the Gir forest attacked 193 people, killing 28, between 1977 and 1991.
Working from statistics compiled by Turnbull-Kemp, the South African game manager who showed that old and injured lions were in the minority among man-eaters, Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans have concluded that healthy male lions between four and nine years old (subadult to prime age) are most likely to become cattle-killers and man-eaters. Examining the incident log books of the Kenya Wildlife Service, the two researchers found that of 110 recorded attacks in Tsavo on people and livestock between 1994 and 1998, 112 were committed by lions, 61 by males, 51 by females. The male lions killed two people, one in October 1994, the other in July 1998, and threatened three, whereas the females killed none but mauled one person and threatened two. The skulls of 29 problem lions shot by the KWS problem animal control unit were analyzed; of those, 24 were found to be subadults or prime-age adults and only 5 were aged. Nineteen of the 29 were males. So if you’re in Tsavo, you’re most at risk from a young to mature male lion in the pink of health.
Ghost and Darkness were in the prime of their lives. Their skulls, catalogued in the Field Museum as FMNH 23970 (Ghost) and FMNH 23969 (Darkness), had lain around, hidden in the museum’s storage rooms, for decades until Gnoske rediscovered them in the late 1980s. He and Kerbis Peterhans, by studying the condition of their teeth, were able to determine that the lions were between six and eight years old. Gnoske was the one who first observed that Ghost had a severely broken canine and that his skull had undergone cranial remodeling, indicating that he’d suffered an injury early in life, possibly from the horns or hoofs of a buffalo or zebra. Although this impairment could have hindered his ability to take animal prey, it’s the least likely of his “motives” for turning to humans. Lions don’t necessarily use their canines to kill zebra and large bovines. Strong limbs and powerful jaws are more useful than good dentures, because lions more often break their prey’s neck by gripping the head with one forelimb while pushing the animal off its feet with the other; or they clamp down on its muzzle with a viselike grip and suffocate it. Neither method requires an impaling stab wound, like the kind that dispatched engineer O’Hara.
“Given that the two acted together,” the preliminary article states, “there was no reason why the severely damaged canine and remodeled skull of one of them turned them both into man-eaters. Their social bond, immense size, apparently healthy limbs, and mature age would allow them to tackle ‘normal’ prey. Indeed, this prediction has been confirmed with the species profile represented by hairs extracted from their broken canines.”
In a remarkable feat of forensic detective work, the two researchers extracted thousands of hairs lodged in the lions’ teeth for more than a century and analyzed them to find out what species they came from. Most turned out to be lion hairs, which had gotten into the canine vacuities during periods of grooming; the rest were hairs of prey species: zebra, buffalo, warthog, impala, eland, and oryx, which showed that the lions were by no means dedicated, obligatory man-eaters. No human hair has been found so far, curiously enough—maybe not so curiously. As the report notes in a gruesome aside, lions don’t like to eat our heads or pubes, preferring to rip our bellies open to get at viscera and internal organs, after which they consume buttocks and thighs.
So Ghost and Darkness didn’t do what they did because they were incapable of hunting four-footed prey. They had other reasons, good reasons; every condition known to cause man-eating was present in Tsavo in the late 1890s, and we’ll start with a lower life form, vegetation.
Tsavo then didn’t look anything like Tsavo now. Photographs in Patterson’s book show a nyika wilderness much more dense and extensive than today’s. This condition was indirectly caused by man: The quest for ivory had almost eliminated elephants from all of eastern Kenya, and from most of Tsavo, and, because elephants are an ecosystem’s gardeners, keeping undergrowth in check by browsing trees and shrubs, thorn thickets and woods proliferated. Thick cover favors ambush predators and, despite the pictures you see of lions bounding across open plains in pursuit of wildebeests, lions prefer to strike from ambush. Even on the expanses of the Serengeti, according to Schaller’s study, 75 percent of all lion kills occur near thickets or in tall grasses or in stands of trees. Because human beings have keen eyesight and walk upright, giving them a wide field of vision, cover is important to a lion that stalks people, and there was an abundance of it in Tsavo in Col. John H. Patterson’s time.
“Such an environment encourages man-eating behavior,” Kerbis Peterhans and his colleague declare.
And in more ways than one. The “thornbush belt” in East Africa is scarce in prey in the best of times. As elephants diminished in Tsavo and its grasslands were overtaken by nyika, grazing animals like zebras and buffalos decreased, while browsing animals like dik-diks (too small for lions) and rhinoceroses (too big) increased. Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans reviewed the field journals in which Colonel Patterson carefully noted the numbers and species of animals he encountered in 1898 and 1899. He saw only four zebras and four hartebeests, and records seeing no Cape buffalo (though a few must have been around, as indicated from the buffalo hair taken from the man-eaters’ teeth).
Then as now the favored prey of Tsavo lions, buffalo had virtually disappeared from most of East Africa due to the devastating rinderpest epidemic. Buffalo are especially susceptible to rinderpest; their populations in British and German East Africa plummeted from hundreds of thousands to near extinction in the early 1890s. A few survived in Tsavo, but these holdouts were exterminated in another man-made disaster—the draining of swamps and wetlands to control malaria. Buffalo are highly dependent on marshes for graze, water, and mud in which to wallow and cool themselves.
Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans chronicle outbreaks of man-eating throughout Africa following rinderpest epidemics or other causes of prey depletion. Thirty-three people were killed in the Ankole region of Uganda during the first three months of 1924 after rinderpest swept through the country. The colonial government tried to eradicate the disease by destroying wild herd animals, aggravating the situation as far as lions were concerned. Deprived of their usual prey, they turned to cattle and man. One lion alone accounted for 84 people, another for 44.
Nobody learns from history. Only a few years later, authorities in Tanzania decided to establish a “game-free” corridor in the southern district of Njombe, again to protect livestock from rinderpest. A fence was constructed along 150 miles of the border with Zambia and teams of European hunters and African scouts ordered to shoot all game
within 5 miles of it. Thousands of zebras, antelopes, and buffalos were killed. The campaign was successful; livestock were spared rinderpest. It was the people who paid a price. The slaughter of grazing game animals led to the all-Africa record, when the lions in the region killed an estimated 1,500 men, women, and children over a 15-year period. They were so fixated on human flesh that they ignored cattle, seizing herd boys from kraals while leaving the livestock alone.
As the attacks persisted from 1931 to 1947, it is believed that three leonine generations were involved and that the later killers were born and bred to hunt man. And that leads to the spookiest part of the researchers’ findings. Lions can develop a “social tradition” of man-eating. They become specialists in hunting people, and pass their skills and knowledge on to their young. The Njombe lions had a lot to teach their progeny, having developed sophisticated techniques. Stalking people in a village beginning at sundown and taking advantage of cover, they would approach as close as possible before making a final rush. If two lions teamed up, two victims might be taken. Then, using relays, they would carry their prey up to a mile away. Much as Patterson’s pair avoided striking the same camp on successive nights, so the Njombe man-eaters avoided attacking the same village twice in a row; their next raid could be as far as 15 miles away.
Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans believe the Tsavo man-eaters grew up among lions accustomed to feeding on human flesh. The East African slave and ivory trades promoted consumption of people as dead or dying slaves and porters were left along the caravan routes that ran from the interiors of Kenya and Uganda to the coast. In 1874, a slave trader told a European traveler, one A. J. Swann, that any captive too weak to carry his load was abandoned or killed at once to discourage others from refusing to bear their burdens. Livingstone, in the mid-19th century, reported finding human remains all along the caravan tracks and estimated that only one in five slaves reached the coast alive. Working from rough figures of the number of slaves imported to Mombasa, Zanzibar, and other slave markets, Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans calculate that as many as 80,000 lives were lost along the caravan routes each year. And that represented a cost-free banquet to any carnivore ready to take advantage, and lions, being both hunters and scavengers, most certainly did.
Ghosts of Tsavo Page 23
