Born Wild

by Tony Fitzjohn

  The Land Rover’s worst enemy at Kora was a natural one: the vicious thorns that grew around the camp. Commiphora myrrh trees are very beautiful but the thorns that protect their buds and fresh shoots from rhino, elephant and other browsers are death to tyres. We had punctures the whole time and seemed to spend half our lives repairing them. When I first arrived at Kora, we didn’t have a proper workshop so mending a puncture was a major performance. First we would have to break the bead – the part where the rim meets the tyre. We did this by jacking the whole weight of the car on to the sidewall of the tyre. This had to be done very carefully so as not to damage the wall. Tyres were very expensive and we had no money. Bead broken, we took the tyre off the rim with a couple of tyre irons, pulled out the inner tube, located the hole in water and mended it with patches vulcanized to the tube. After levering the tyre back on to the rim came the fun part – forty-five minutes to an hour of hard work with a foot pump to get pressure back into the tyre. It was back-breaking labour, often required on drives to Asako, the small village twenty-six miles away.

  Kora lies a hundred miles to the east of Mount Kenya, the stately mountain that stands snow-covered and alone on the equator, its silhouette unmarred by foothills or ranges. Snow has never fallen on Kora’s yellow soil where the low altitude ensures that the temperature is always high. Waterbuck, lesser kudu, giraffe and eland were all common then, as were the predatory hyena and caracal. Elephant and rhino were ever-present and widespread – the rhino almost common. We always had to watch out for them on our walks, as we did for buffalo. There were also decent numbers of zebra and oryx, Grant’s gazelle and bushbuck. There were, however, no leopards: they had been hunted out when the fashion for leopardskin was at its height in the 1940s.

  Neighbouring Meru had suffered a similar fate – but it was a neighbour only on the map. There was no bridge between the two banks of the Tana river for hundreds of miles so for us to get to the other side opposite our camp it was a ten-hour drive. Because of this isolation Kora was more protected and did not fall victim to poachers until later than Meru, which became a notorious poachers’ lair in the years to come. That’s not to say there was no poaching at all.

  We had the occasional visitor. The Wakamba, who live in the area to the south of Kora, are famously good hunters and used to come into Kora whenever they wished. But they used poisonous acocanthera-smeared arrows to hunt elephant for ivory, and wire snares for the herbivores. They failed to make much of an impact on the elephant and rhino population: that privilege fell to the AK47-armed Somalis in the years to come.

  There was also licensed ‘sport’ hunting in Kora until it was banned in 1977 and often the commercial hunters would come and visit us if they were old friends of George’s or even if they weren’t. I can see little justification for game hunting today, but in those days there were many good people who had lived their lives in the bush, hunting on foot and to a certain extent protecting the wildlife as their livelihood. Many of the early game wardens, like David Sheldrick, Bill Woodley and George himself, had been hunters before joining the national parks or Game Department. These visits from hunters were often the only contact that we would have with the outside world for weeks at a time and they were usually welcome. Most who turned up at camp had done us the courtesy of learning our tastes so would bring supplies of whisky and beer with them – a sure-fire way to be invited back.

  Other than that, it was very quiet at Kora. Until Terence cut five hours off the journey by hacking a back road in, it was a nightmarish ten-hour journey to Kora from Nairobi unless you had a plane. This kept visitors at bay and ensured a peaceful camp. George would occasionally be dragged off to Naivasha by Joy, or to Hola, two hundred miles away, by the council – our landlords – leaving Terence and me in camp. Before Kora was made a national reserve it was a tribal trustland and George had to pay £750 a year to rent it. This didn’t leave much for Terence to pay his crews or for any of us to have any pocket money. We always did it for love. To this day, I have never managed to get the Trust to pay me – I live in Trust property and drive Trust cars but have nothing of my own. I feel genuinely privileged to have lived the life of my choice and find it much easier to fundraise because I can say that none of the money is spent on paying me.

  Terence and I didn’t have much to say to each other, not that he ever said much to anyone. He was a grumpy old sod who disapproved of me and thought I encouraged George in his wilder schemes. He was right: I loved George’s wilder schemes. But I think the key problem between us was that we were both competing for George’s affection. A self-taught engineer, architect and road-builder, Terence didn’t drink or smoke. He loved elephants and knew a great deal about their habits, and he was brilliant on plants and regeneration cycles, but none of that made him any easier to live with. When we found ourselves in camp alone together I would go on long walks around Kora, ostensibly in search of the lions but really to get away from Terence and enjoy the bush. I bitterly regret it now. He was a good man and I should have treated him better.

  I would often climb to the top of Kora Rock, at 450 metres above sea level the highest point in Kora, from which you could see hundreds of square miles of real wilderness. The bush has a strange rusty hue that comes from iron in the ground. It can look dramatically red in the right light. The course of the river stands out as a slash of bright green in the distance with the far bank rising away to higher ground. George had asked Terence to build the camp at the foot of Kora Rock for a reason, not just for the view. He judged correctly that it was excellent lion country and easily defendable. If Christian could mate with wild lionesses, they could take control of the Rock, George thought, and it would make a great place to bring up a family. There were all sorts of nooks and crannies where cubs could be hidden safely, lairs where lions could hide and rest by day. I often took Christian up there on walks with Lisa and Juma as our relationship developed. It was obvious that the more we went there, the more he thought of it as his. He was not the only one. Mine was a strange life for a hot-blooded twenty-seven-year-old to be living but I knew it was the right one. I felt I was doing something useful at last. I was enormously stimulated and I was incredibly happy in those halcyon days at Kora.

  After I had been living at Kampi ya Simba for about three months, George and I set off for the river in the early morning as usual. The car was out of action so we walked down together and were soon sitting by the Tana drinking our gin from the flask. Christian, Lisa and, at a distance, Juma dozed quietly beside us. Suddenly Christian’s ears twitched up and his body tensed. We followed his gaze and saw a large herd of elephants emerging silently from the forest downstream. Crocodiles slipped into the muddy waters of the Tana to avoid their enormous feet, outraged hippos lurched out of the way, spraying shit with their tails. The elephants marched stolidly across the beach, waded through the shallows, then swam the hundred yards across the river to Meru, shepherding the younger ones and protecting them against the current. It was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen. George turned to me and said, ‘How long do you think you can stay?’

  ‘About ten or fifteen years,’ I replied.

  1 My thanks to Adrian House and Collins Harvill for permission to quote from The Great Safari. My Pride and Joy and The Great Safari were very helpful for checking the chronology of my life with George.

  3. One of the Pride

  From the moment Christian sat on my feet and licked my hand on my second day at Kora I was hooked for life. I soon discovered that if you treat lions with respect, understanding and love they respond with their trust and affection. Once they’ve given you that they don’t take it back and neither shpould you. I loved being with the lions like nothing I had ever before experienced. It wasn’t entirely from self-interest that I was enraged when, a few months after I’d arrived, Ken Smith came into camp and said he was closing George down. Ken was the warden of Garissa and one of George’s oldest friends. As such, I always felt that he should have given us more supp
ort than he did. He had helped George to find Kora for which George had given him some of the earnings from Christian the Lion so the fact that he always caved in to pressure irked us both. The problem was that he was white with a government job and, back then, very few Europeans dared rock the boat. We found over and over again that Europeans and white Kenyans would support us with words, but it was the black Kenyans who helped us with action. With this in mind, I headed for Nairobi to see John Mutinda, who had just been appointed chief game warden.

  John’s office was in one of those crazy old falling-down colonial buildings that never seemed to get repaired. Up on stilts with a warped veranda and a leaking corrugated-iron roof, it had a temporary air that belied its age. John was a Mkamba, a member of the tribe whose lands bordered Kora. An academic, he always seemed rather bemused by but fond of the old colonials he had inherited as game wardens. He presided over the Game Department’s later merger with the National Parks Authority but the resulting body’s passionate embrace of corruption did not occur on his watch. He had the power to close us down at any minute but instead, after only a little persuasion, he allowed us to continue with our controversial project to reintroduce lions to the wild. This was my first interaction with the wildlife authorities – and a rare good one. Beating the system and actually achieving anything would become harder and harder. Back then it was easy. John had a few words of warning for me as I left the Game Department: ‘ Just keep it safe, Tony,’ he said, as I skipped out of his office, like a schoolboy who’d been let off a detention.

  I went out and celebrated long into the night and was back on the road to Kora at dawn. I arrived home in triumph, eleven bone-shuddering hours later. George harrumphed his approval; Terence harrumphed his dismay. And we settled back into our routine as if nothing had happened.

  In Nairobi I had bought food and drink to last us a few weeks and was intent on getting better at tracking the lions. These were the days before radio collars and it was no easy task keeping tabs on them, even when we only had three – they could comfortably travel eight or nine miles between dusk and dawn. The key thing was getting up before the sun: the shadows in the early morning and evening help you to see faint impressions that you miss when the sun is overhead, and the slightest breeze, as the heat of the day starts to move the air, can rub out even the most distinct tracks. Once I was up it was just a matter of watching George. He never actually said anything but he would point at some bent grass or a patch of urine or gesture at his nose, encouraging me to smell.

  After a lifetime spent in the bush, George had the most extraordinary knowledge of animal behaviour. It was almost as if he knew what they would do before they knew it themselves. A great many ill-informed words are spoken by people who ‘ know it’s a mock charge because the elephant’s ears are waving’ or because the lion isn’t swishing its tail vigorously enough – words that are often wryly recalled at their hospital bedsides, or over the mahogany by friends at their funerals. George didn’t talk about it and he didn’t have any tried and tested rules but he knew. Always armed, he never had to shoot a charging animal in the entire time I knew him. And we were charged a lot. By the time I met George he always avoided killing animals: memories of shooting game by the thousand to feed the British Army during the Second World War haunted him. But it wasn’t just repugnance that put him off shooting charging beasts. He seemed to know what was going to happen and reacted accordingly. He seldom got it wrong.

  In my early years at Kora there were still a great many rhino and they charged us regularly. It’s quite easy to avoid rhinos if you keep your cool and you’re not hemmed in, not because it’s a mock charge but because they have lousy eyesight. George was a master at avoiding them with minimum effort but even he needed to see them first. When Christian’s playmates, Lisa and Juma, were out hunting and I was still very green, we were once out looking for them in thick bush when George held a finger to his mouth to hush me. He came back to me very quietly, then moved to one side and I stepped forward. I had a rifle but I didn’t have a bullet up the spout as it’s too dangerous when you’re walking in thick nyika bush behind a friend. We could hear a crunching sound so we thought Lisa and Juma had made a kill and were enjoying the spoils. We stopped and listened again because it’s always dangerous being around lions and their food, then I moved up once more. I came face to face with a two-ton rhino just six foot away from me. It snorted in shock. I snorted back, then turned and ran, holding the gun above my head to load it without snagging it on the ground. I turned to fire and, as I did, the rhino veered away from me and went straight for George. Everything happened very slowly and clearly as the adrenalin kicked in. Christ! I’ve killed the Old Man, I thought, as I watched the rhino thunder down upon him. I couldn’t shoot because the rhino was between George and me. I was utterly powerless. Horrified, I watched as George lowered his rifle, held it across his chest like a guardsman and jumped sideways two feet over a small bush. The rhino roared past him, followed at pace by a calf, and smashed away through the undergrowth. George looked up with a smile. ‘ Nice calf,’ he said, and carried on tracking the girls.

  Another time Christian, George and I were walking down a sand lugga towards the river when George stopped and pointed in front of us all. The lion and I looked ahead, our eyes scanning the ground for tracks. We saw nothing. We then raised our eyes from the ground to see a huge cobra, its hood extended and much of its body raised, moving fast towards us at four foot above my head height. The look on my face and Christian’s kept George amused for weeks.

  One of the many things George taught me was to use my sense of smell. George smoked a filthy old pipe and I smoked filterless Roosters, but despite our healthy tobacco intake, smell was still one of our most useful senses. But it’s the sensory landscape that you construct with all your senses that allows you to become good at following spoor and finding animals. George had been doing this for fifty years so it was second nature to him to smell the air and recognize odd sounds. Christian and I were both from London so we had to learn it, although Christian was by far the quicker student. I managed it by trying to think like a lion, or if I was looking for a waterbuck, trying to think like a buck. Because Christian was the age he was and had been brought up under such strange conditions, we learnt together. He would assimilate things from me and I would acquire skills from him.

  Christian was developing well and he soon became very big. Not big enough, however. As Lisa and Juma became ever more attractive to the wild lions, Christian was obliged to make himself scarce if he wanted to avoid a fight. It took him a while to work this out and there were a good many tense nights when George and I had to help him fight them off but he gradually learnt, giving himself enough time to reach sexual maturity and grow even bigger. In July 1972, when Lisa and Juma came on heat, all hell broke loose. Christian was still too young to do anything about it but the two wild lions who claimed Kora as a distant outpost of their territory had been prowling around for months, waiting for the girls to show they were ready. Lionesses can decide when they want to come on heat but once a lion has decided he wants to mate they don’t have much choice in the matter: males are twice the size of females, particularly in Lisa’s case – she was tiny.

  Lions mate for days on end. The actual act itself is very quick – a couple of minutes at most – but each time the males ejaculate, they let out an earth-shattering roar, roll over and go to sleep. So far so human, but then they repeat the routine every half-hour for four or five days! The reproductive science behind this is: the males have barbed penises that must pierce the lioness’s vaginal wall, triggering ovulation. One particularly tatty-looking beast we named Scruffy was a big hit with both the girls. One afternoon George and I crept up when Scruffy and Lisa were mating and got to within ten yards of them before we lost our nerve. If distracting a lion while eating could prompt an attack, distracting one while he was on the job didn’t bear thinking about. And we knew Scruffy was a hard nut because he was always beating up Christ
ian.

  This constant violence against Christian brought about a dilemma for George and me. There came a point when Lisa and Juma were both pregnant and the wild lions became rather more territorial about our obscure corner of their range. Christian got the message and would spend days away from Kampi ya Simba but he would always come back, covered with scars after another assault. The scars were now on his shoulders but it was usually two against one so he was still taking a beating. It was hard for us to bear as he had done so well – he was hunting on his own now, not just with the girls, and George had seen him mating down by the river with one of the lionesses from across the Tana. Everything pointed towards his release into the wild being an unlikely success. Scruffy and his friend Shaggy’s attacks on Christian became ever more ferocious as the girls got closer to giving birth and we were terrified that they would either drive Christian away before he was quite ready to look after himself or kill him in a fight.

  George and I debated what to do for hours and hours and reluctantly decided that we had to let nature take its course. To go out and shoot a lion would be wholly unethical and against everything we stood for: Christian was on his own. It was a hard conclusion to stand by as we both loved Christian and he trusted us to look after him. By declining to defend him, had we just signed his death warrant? A few days later we walked up on to the rocks with Lisa and Juma to find Christian and Scruffy lying side by side, looking out over Kora towards Meru. They had made friends at last; the wild lion had accepted Christian and his weird relationship with the future mothers of Scruffy’s cubs. It was a great moment and a vote of confidence in our philosophy but it was also a warning for the future. Christian was accepted but there was no real place for him at Kora any more: he was going to have to find his own territory and maybe it would be on the other side of the river where we couldn’t reach him.