Born Wild

by Tony Fitzjohn

  We decided not to immobilize the lions. We didn’t have any experience of using anaesthetics – even now a very hit-and-miss science – and we were frightened we might kill a lion by getting it wrong. It fell upon me therefore to convince the lions, using my hands and my voice, that what I was doing was for their own good, and persuade them that it was the right thing to do. The first lion we collared was Leakey, who was a big boy now – standing above our waists and weighing close to three hundred pounds – but had a gentle character and was very easy-going. George stood in front of him with a stick for him to chew and I moved towards him holding the collar in front of me. It was important to be very calm, relaxed and firm. ’This is good for you and needs to be done,’ I said, as I moved towards him. I put the collar round his neck in one fluid movement, pushed through the bolts, put on the lock washers and nuts, then tightened them with a spanner. God, I loved it. I loved the fact that I could do it.

  I don’t know what it was about George and me that the lions allowed us to do this. We had conquered our fear and honed our understanding of them by practising on the likes of Christian and Lisa, but over the years we became able to co-exist alongside entirely wild lions without them attacking us or running away – indeed, we were only ever attacked by our ‘own’ lions. When I fitted the collars, I was putting my hand into the lion’s maw and they understood and allowed me to do it. It felt great. And I had to keep on doing it, too. We did Freddie, Arusha and Gigi next, and after that we had to adjust the collars every few months for a couple of years. There was something magical about being able to communicate with the lions at such a level that I could get away with putting collars on them. And there was something magical, too, about what the collars did for our lives. It took a few weeks to discover what all the squawks and beeps meant on the headphones but once I’d figured it out our daily routine moved on to another plane. Instead of scratching about in the dust looking for tracks we could find the lions pretty much at will. George would drive the Land Rover while I stood on the back, holding the aerial and searching for spoor: we must have looked like a mad professor and his brainwashed disciple.

  In mid-1975, after years of exemplary motherhood, Juma seemed to decide she was fed up with it. She had brought up her own cubs and Lisa’s two with quiet competence and startling success. She had taught them how to hunt and look after themselves. They were now as efficient a bunch of killers as you could hope to meet. Then one day she crossed the Rubicon towards Meru and never returned. Independent and wild as the cubs were, George and I still had a paternalistic interest in their welfare. We didn’t want them to get into trouble by eating domestic stock or straying too near villages. This was one of our worst fears as they were less scared of humans than a wild lion should be because we had babysat them as cubs and they had always lived near our camp. Nevertheless, they were completely wild so there was no way we could collar them without using an immobilizing drug and we wanted to avoid doing that if at all possible.

  Leakey, the gormless but lovable lion who at two and a half was their age, was our best hope. Despite being a very slow learner, he was brilliant at making friends, a bullshitter of note who turned out to have more balls than we had ever imagined. George and I decided on a risky strategy to introduce Juma’s older and more streetwise offspring to him, the Switzerland of the leonine world. We put out a camel carcass from Asako when we knew that the now big sub-adults were on their way to camp and allowed Leakey to get well installed on it. We held our breath as the four cubs swaggered up to camp and stopped dead, tails twitching as they stared at him. Instead of turning tail as we had feared, Leakey let out an earth-shattering roar at which the cubs came over all submissive. Then he invited them on to the carcass. This spectacular display of chutzpah worked. Leakey became firm buddies with Juma’s cubs and they quickly taught him how to hunt and accepted him as one of their own. Now with Leakey’s radio collar, as long as he was with them, we could always find them and steer them away from the ever-increasing dangers of Kora. As the prides grew to include wild lions, cautious lions and self-sufficient lions, there were always a few we knew well enough to collar without calling in the boys with the dart guns and the certificates.

  The collars took a great load off our shoulders but there was a lot to be concerned about. We bumped into illegal grazers ever more frequently and there were no rhinos left. At the same time we had more surprise visitors as George’s fame continued to grow. Among others, Ali MacGraw – then hugely famous following the success of 1970’s Love Story – stopped over when the American tennis player Stan Singer was with us. They helped us to understand fundraising for the first time. They showed us what we should do to make sure the project didn’t wither away. Stan went back to the States and set up the Kora Trust, the direct ancestor of the Tony Fitzjohn/George Adamson Wildlife Trust. Ali is still its president.

  Around the time that we were first using the radio collars there was an example of how faithful and trustworthy the lions could be. But they were still lions. We always slept under the stars at Kora but we each had our own hut outside which we would hang our mosquito nets. One beautiful morning March I woke up early. The bloom of green that the rains had brought to Kora made it especially beautiful that year. I’m a desert man but it felt good to be alive as the desert came out of hibernation. I was very annoying in those days. Incredibly fit, I always woke up full of energy and raring to get on with the day. George hadn’t surfaced so I put on my flip-flops, picked up my stick and ran with the lions the mile or so down to the lugga, across it and up the 300-foot Boy’s Rock on the other side. I had reached the top and was enjoying the sight of the sun strengthening over Kora when I saw George coming up the hill behind me.

  He started to play a game with Arusha who had been lagging behind. George hid behind a rock, poking his head out every now and then. Arusha pricked up her ears, went bounding down the rocks and jumped on to his back. She knocked him over and he fell awkwardly. Immediately I saw something was wrong and came barrelling down the rocks with Freddie and Gigi chasing after me. It didn’t look good. George was lying on his back with Arusha on top of him. With the strength of panic, I grabbed Arusha and flipped her over but she came straight back at George. She was playing but something was wrong. She didn’t have her claws out and she wasn’t biting George but she wasn’t backing off either. George was still on the ground, groaning in obvious pain, when Arusha took another lunge at him. I saw red and threw her over my shoulder before punching and biting her. I gave her everything I could, which, given that she was almost a full-grown lioness, made little physical impact but she did understand how angry I was. She submitted to me as to a dominant male and slunk off into the bush. I put George over my shoulders and began to walk down the rocks but it was too painful for him; he had to lie down every few yards. I couldn’t leave him there with Arusha prowling about and I couldn’t carry him either. He had broken his pelvis and was in agony. I didn’t know how I was going to get him back to the camp.

  When there’s a fight or a kill or some other kind of commotion, lions usually get very antsy and twitchy. It’s not as extreme but it’s a bit like sharks in a feeding frenzy: something instinctive and primeval takes over. Arusha had obviously been stimulated by George falling over, thus losing his dominant status, but with Freddie, the opposite happened. He knew George and I were in trouble and was keen to help. It was as if Freddie knew exactly what was going on and was talking to me. He sat down calmly by George and said, ’Don’t worry. I’ll look after the Old Man.’ I believed him and I was right to do so. I ran back to camp and got the Land Rover and a bottle of whisky. On my return Freddie was still guarding the Old Man, and had already lashed out at Arusha a couple of times. I got some whisky into George, before the pain got too bad, and our old friend Jack Barrah managed to get the Flying Doctors up later in the day to take him to hospital. I don’t know what I’d have done without Freddie. I’m sure I’d have worked it out eventually, but there had been an amazing moment of co
mmunication between us. I’d known it was safe to leave George because Freddie had told me it was.

  The Flying Doctors, as ever, were fabulous and had George in hospital within hours. He was away for weeks and I was left on my own with the lions. I spent happy drawn-out days, working out how to use the new equipment and going on long walks with my pride. I milked every minute of sunlight, then slept the clock round before repeating the process. I soon became quite expert with the tracking equipment and could tell not only which direction the lions had gone in but also whether they were on high ground, in dense bush or nearby. Terence’s new tracks, cut with the help of the Frankfurt Zoo tractor, made it easy for me to slip across by road to the closest point, pick up the lions’ spoor, then follow them on foot.

  Not long after George returned from hospital – and the stress of convalescing at Joy’s house – we had another disaster, one entirely of my making. I had spent a long day in Garissa, doing a resupply and meeting up with my game warden friend Noor Abdi Ogle. It was boiling hot at four in the afternoon and I didn’t look around as thoroughly as I should have. I had missed Freddie and the cubs so jumped out of the Land Rover to say hello to them as soon as I arrived. During the greeting Arusha killed a guinea fowl up against the fence. I went inside the fence to have a beer with George, who said he was having trouble getting the cubs in and was worried as he didn’t know where Leakey and the big lions were. I went outside again and was crouching on the ground talking to Fred, when I felt a tremendous force hit me between the shoulder-blades and on my head. A lion whose strength was way beyond that of the cubs was attacking me. It sank its teeth into my shoulder and shook me like a shark with a seal pup. You know what happened next – it’s how I started this book. The big lion got my head into his mouth and started to squeeze. There was nothing I could do and I blacked out for a moment; he was so powerful that everything I tried was fruitless. None of the fancy judo moves I had used on Arusha were any good to me now and I didn’t seem to have any strength at all. I just didn’t have the energy to fight him off.

  Then I saw Freddie coming for me and thought, Oh, no. An incredibly close relationship and when push comes to shove I’m just another bit of prey. But Freddie wasn’t coming for me at all. He was going for the big lion that had attacked me. The attacker must have been twice Freddie’s size but Freddie attacked again and again with extraordinary bravery and the same loyalty he had displayed when Arusha had set upon the Old Man. And hard up behind Freddie came the Old Man himself. Alerted by Erigumsa, he came out unarmed, waving a stick and shouting at the top of his lungs. Astonishingly it worked. I owe my life to two incredible bonds – one with an old man I loved and who loved me, another with a young lion who would have laid down his life for me. The experience was humbling in countless ways and determined how I have spent the rest of my life.

  I was incredibly lucky to survive. My attacker’s teeth had come within millimetres of both my carotid and jugular arteries. There were holes in my throat I could put a fist through – and did. I opened my hand inside and my fingers came out of the tooth holes at the back of my neck. George and Erigumsa dragged me back into camp where I lay, blood pouring from my neck and shoulder.

  ‘Atakufa,’ said Terence, when he saw me. He will die.

  This made me so angry that I started feeling better immediately. Terence poured neat Savlon on my wounds as George filled me up with whisky and veterinary Valium. It was a long wait before the Flying Doctors could collect me the next morning. People say you can’t remember pain. Utter rubbish. It was the worst night of my life – I was in excruciating agony and I wasn’t well psychologically either. I really thought I was going to die as I lay through the long night with George watching over me. And so did George, he told me later. On top of the pain, I kept thinking, What will happen now? Who will look after the Old Man? Will they close the project down? Who will raise the cubs?

  Daylight, and the promise of rescue, was a blessed relief but

  the long and bumpy drive to the airstrip was agonizing; it took George well over two hours going as carefully as he could. He had been working the radio during the night and had contacted Lindsay, my new girlfriend, in Nairobi. She had pulled every string she knew and had the Flying Doctors’ plane in the air as soon as possible; it was with us by ten a.m. The relief of seeing her (and taking the pethidine the nurse had brought) was quite phenomenal. Indeed, I was able to laugh when the stretcher didn’t fit into the brand new plane and they had to walk me in. From the moment Lindsay arrived, I was cosseted and comforted, cleaned up, then cured. It was testament to how healthy I was that I recovered so quickly. Thirteen days after being at death’s door, Nairobi Hospital threw me out for making too much of a disturbance.

  The lion had taken a chunk out of both my shoulders and bitten me in the waist. He had knocked out a tooth and ripped off one of my ears. I had scars all over my head where his claws had torn into me. All in all, however, I got off very lightly. When George had come charging on to the scene the battle had already been won: the lion had been dragging me off to eat me in the shade. As I walked out of hospital two weeks later, shaky but under my own steam, I saw John Mutinda coming in, a worried frown on his face.

  ‘Who are you coming to see?’ I asked.

  ‘You, Tony.’ He was lost for words at the sight of me, then smiled and said, ’I thought I told you to keep it safe.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, John. It was only me,’ I said.

  He smiled and helped me to the car. The lion project was safe for a while longer.

  I had to stay in Nairobi for at least a month as various complications from the attack kept cropping up. There was something wrong with my spleen and I had a massive malaria attack, brought on by general weakness.

  George sent me a wonderful letter that I have treasured to this day, telling me what had gone on after I left.

  (George had a habit of mangling people’s names, so ‘Haragumsa’ is Erigumsa. And ‘Mad, Bad and Worse’ were resident fan-tailed ravens.) George explained that the lion that had got me had disappeared, but then returned to camp thirty- six hours later. It was Shyman, one of Juma’s now adult cubs. My blood was still all over his muzzle and paws; lions are just as obsessive about keeping clean as their domestic cousins so this was very unnatural behaviour, as was the attack itself. George studied him for a while and when Shyman drunkenly and nastily started going for the young lions with patently evil intent, he realized something was wrong, got between them and shot him in the brain. He was convinced that Shyman had been poisoned by the Somali poachers who were systematically killing all the rhinos in the reserve and poisoning the carcasses, an opinion informed by Shyman’s uncharacteristic behaviour and the fact that a rhino had been killed nearby a few nights previously.

  Shyman had always been a bit tricky compared to his brother Daniel and Lisa’s cubs, with whom he had grown up. He took after his shy and wary mother, Juma, but I had known him almost since the day of his birth and had never had a problem before. This was one of the reasons why the murderous attack was so shocking.

  When at last I got back to camp a couple of months later, I was nervous that things would not be as they were. I need not have worried. As soon as I arrived George and I went off to find the cubs. They looked at me with amazement, then hurled themselves at me. Arusha threw herself into my arms; Freddie, who had come off worst in a scrap with a wild lion, limped down from the camp rocks and hugged me; Gigi bounded up to join in and Growlie came close but was just too shy to say hello so sat down under a bush and forgot to growl. It was a great moment and allayed a lot of my fears. But, from the perspective of two months away, I could see that things were changing in Kora.

  The fact that Kora had become a national reserve was having scant effect on the poachers and illegal grazers. I would say that storm clouds were gathering but, in fact, we longed for them. Kenya was suffering from a terrible drought so the nomadic Somali and Orma people were travelling long distances to find grazing for their massi
ve herds. Occasionally the Somalis would move through Asako or one of our other neighbouring villages, daring the cowed inhabitants to protest. Their herds were like locusts, eating crops and fodder and anything else they could find. Kora wasn’t much good for grazing cattle but they could still strip it clean, hastening the process of desertification. And the riverine forest along the Tana was perfect browsing for camels and goats so they cut down hundred-year-old poplars for an hour’s feed. Lions and domestic stock do not make happy companions, however well-brought-up the lions, so the encroachment was of real concern. John Mutinda had told me to ’keep it safe’. He had allowed me to get away with being mauled myself but, as George had noted in his letter, if anything happened to an African – even one who was trespassing – there would be trouble. We owed it to John to make sure this didn’t happen but it was a constant struggle and involved a lot of driving to Garissa to beg Philip Kilonzo to keep the illegal grazers away from us. He did the best he could but it was far from easy and there was nothing anyone could do about the poachers. They were determined, motivated and armed to the teeth.

  As Esmond had discovered, the origins of the poaching problem lay in the increased demand for rhino horn from Yemen, but the supply was met by the Cold War. Kenya’s northern neighbours were fighting a particularly nasty war over a patch of grey bush that divides Ethiopia and Somalia. The war was made yet more unpleasant by the cynicism of the two countries’ backers. Until 1974 the United States had supported Haile Selassie in Ethiopia while the Russians had poured arms into Somalia. Ethiopia had become less strategically important and Haile Selassie’s successor claimed to be Communist, so when the Soviet Union started flirting with Ethiopia, the Americans swapped their support to Somalia overnight. During the war that followed, thousands of US-armed Somalis encroached into Kenya, looking first for rhino horn and then for elephant ivory. At Kora, we had none to spare but plenty of both. The ivory wars were in the future, but the rhino poaching was a clear and present danger. Early in 1976, we saw six Wakamba poachers with bows and arrows down on the river. By the end of that year, the Somalis were on the attack and the slaughter was gaining pace; we looked fondly back upon the Wakamba poachers as bucolic figures of a bygone era.