by Mark Bowden
In addition to these shortcomings, many of those involved with the antipoaching project are dismayed by the apparent indifference of Zambia’s judges in dealing with poachers. Most penalties are so mild they just encourage more poaching. Chronic offenders are often fined the equivalent of sixty dollars to one hundred twenty dollars, less than what they earn on one poaching trip. Since Zambians arrested for minor crimes can be jailed only for one day after being charged, accused poachers have been known to head directly back into the bush upon release. It is the easiest way to raise money for the anticipated fine.
A notorious example of such lenience is the case of Dingiswayo Banda, the former minister of labor and social services. In 1980 a Lusaka policeman, acting on a tip, stopped then-Minister Banda in his official government limousine, flags flying from the hood, at a roadblock. Searching the trunk, the policeman found six pairs of poached elephant tusks. Elephant hunting is illegal in Zambia without a permit, and the ivory trade is banned.
Banda lost his government job and was eventually fined five hundred kwachas ($610). He appealed the fine, and a sterner appellate judge lifted it but substituted a twelve-month jail term at hard labor. But Zambia’s Supreme Court reduced Banda’s sentence to a fine of about one hundred twenty-two dollars, far less than the black-market value of one elephant tusk. Then the court decided to return Banda’s confiscated elephant rifle.
A case closer to the antipoaching unit involved Partson Mjobvu, one of Berry’s game scouts, who was arrested by Zambian police and charged with murder after killing a poacher in an exchange of gunfire in the valley. Murder? So far as Berry and his men are concerned, there is a war going on in the valley. They are not eager to exchange fire with poaching gangs, who usually are better armed, but they maintain that they would hardly be taken seriously if they did not return fire when it came. Mjobvu languished for months in a Chipata jail before the Rhino Trust succeeded in having the charge reduced to manslaughter.
This lack of government support for their efforts was demoralizing to the extreme for Abraham Phiri and the other game scouts.
“It’s damn discouraging,” said one Lusaka conservation activist.
Early in the afternoon of the second day, after the patrol had stopped to lunch and rest between noon and 2 p.m., the hottest hours of the day, Abraham spotted a poacher’s footprint. Just a single footprint, unmistakably human, implanted on the short downslope of a gully about a mile south of the Luwi riverbed. The patrol had turned away from the Luwi toward the hills after its break, and the ground underfoot had turned from sand to hard brown soil. There were clumps of trees and rocks, and the terrain was uneven. There was a mild scent now of blossoms in the air. Most of the walking was uphill.
Abraham’s face under the crooked brim of his hat grew stern as he bent for a closer look. The other scouts fanned out around him looking for more prints. In an instant the group had been shaken out of its walking reverie. Now the mood was crisp, tense, exciting.
“Poachers here two days ago,” Abraham said, to no one in particular.
When no other footprints could be found, the patrol began walking again, but the tension remained. These men knew that poachers were always moving in the valley, but spotting recent evidence put a new edge on that knowledge. Their marching seemed to grow quieter. Each man listened intently to the valley’s quiet sounds: the distant screech of a hawk, the honk of a hornbill, the sound of the patrol’s footsteps and breathing, the wind in the thorn bushes.
They passed trees growing from the tops of huge anthills, ancient anthills whose formation predated the trees. Here and there in the open stood a huge, solitary baobab tree with a wide, wide trunk that looked like the flexed thigh of some giant weight lifter.
There were more insects that afternoon, their annoying buzz growing louder around the ears before the sharp prick of their bite. There was the danger of contracting sleeping sickness from the tsetse fly, or malaria from the bite of a mosquito. Now and then there was a sharp slap as one of the men lashed out at a bug on his arm or the back of his neck. Berry had sent along enough chloroquine (antimalarial) tablets to wipe out the chills and sore joints that presage the onset of malaria. Most of the men would want doses that night at camp.
As the patrol moved ahead, David Mulanga occasionally fell behind to pick edible berries from the bushes he knew by name. He would hastily grab a handful and then sprint back to his place in line, popping the treats, which tasted like sour candy, into his mouth one by one.
The patrol came upon a herd of twenty elephants on the side of one hill. The men stopped cautiously because the herd, including a bull with tusks worth a year of poaching penalties, was downwind and certain to sense their presence. The elephants responded quickly and with alarm to the scent. “Big Tusks” trumpeted loudly, his cry echoing across the vale, and the whole herd fled as daintily as ladies caught at their bath. With remarkable speed they went high-stepping over the hilltop, ears fully extended and flapping, tails up.
It was mid-afternoon when Abraham saw the vultures circling high in the distance. He stopped the column abruptly.
“Dead animal,” he said, and without another word the group was off in that direction at a run.
Jumping down ravines, scrambling up the other side, rushing through the tall grass, all former caution disappeared in their haste to cover the mile or two uphill toward the circling scavengers. More vultures were visible now. They had found something big, a feast. The game scouts had their rifles in hand. The carriers, with their burdens, had fallen behind.
Again, Abraham jerked to a halt. In his haste at the head of the column he had burst upon two elephants, a large female with her nearly full-grown calf. The huge animals, only ten or twenty yards away, stared directly at the men, who had stopped running and who had begun to slowly back away. All eyes were on the elephants. Would they charge or run?
After agonizing minutes of standoff, the elephants abruptly turned and fled. The scouts began moving uphill again toward the circling birds.
Approaching the hilltop, they slowed again and moved forward, bending at the waist in the grass. The bolts of their rifles clicked as cartridges were moved into place. The scouts fanned out in the grass as they continued up the hill with rifles pointed and ready. John S. Phiri, a look of feral intensity on his face, rushed to be the first to enter the clearing. Prospa Myatwa was right behind. Matteo Mwanza had moved wide to one side, and David Mulanga to the other. Abraham stayed in the middle, directing the others with quick gestures. They braced to hear the first shot.
The silence broke, not with gunfire or the cries of startled poachers but with a sudden, awful chorus of whoosh and squawk as hundreds of big, black vultures jumped back into the sky, so many they cast a shadow over the patrol, whirling and crying in anger at being chased from their banquet. As if fanned by the flapping of their wings, the odor of their meal swept over the men all at once in a putrid wave.
“Elephant,” Abraham said.
He and the others now had their weapons at their sides and were standing upright. The poachers were long gone from this. The stench was so horrid it was nearly visible.
“Four days dead,” Abraham said.
Few animals in death could feed so many vultures. The three elephants lay together in a heap directly at the top of the hill, bodies bloated and thick round gray legs bent stiffly up in rigor mortis. As the scouts approached, millions of flies lifted like a shining blue drape and settled on the other side of the oozing carcasses, their collective sound a high-pitched whining engine.
The elephants’ heads had been chopped off and evidently carried down into thicker bush. It would be easier to remove the valuable tusks from the facial sockets after a few days. Discarded to one side were the amputated trunks, flaccid decaying lumps of flesh. The stretched gray skin of the huge bodies was coated with a dull sheen of dried blood. These three had all been dropped with the same burst of automatic rifle fire. Bullet entry wounds tracked across their sides, the dried holes
clogged with flies. A male, a female, and a calf. The vultures had already mostly devoured the calf. Bloodstained white ribs projected from the black pool of its entrails. In another day the calf would be eaten and the ripened bigger corpses would be ready. The earth underfoot was stained a deep brown by the dried blood.
Abraham stood leaning on one leg, rifle at his side. His men circled the scene, taking it in. He scowled.
“This is just careless,” is all he said.
Because the valley is so big, it takes a fortuitous collection of coincidences to catch poachers at work. When poachers are found in the valley, it usually is because paid informants have told the game scouts where to look. Berry considers it vital to maintain a constant presence in the valley itself, but his most effective antipoaching work is often done in the human communities around the park.
Inhabiting the northern hills of the escarpment are the Bisa people, a large, prosperous tribe whose hunters have been descending into the Luangwa Valley to hunt elephant and rhino for centuries. Bisa communities of small brick houses are more modern and comfortable than the grass-and mud-hut villages that typify the region.
It is the Bisa, many of whom resent Zambian restrictions on what they consider their God-given way of life, who are Phil Berry’s biggest problem. No matter that the valley’s once-teeming wildlife are being killed off faster than they can reproduce. Cultural traditions are not easily argued away, even with the strong logic of numbers. Top Bisa hunters are still admired and respected in their communities. And though they are more likely today to be carrying sophisticated automatic rifles than spears or bows and arrows, they still are esteemed for bravery and skill.
In November, one of Berry’s patrols captured a Bisa poaching gang in the valley. After some forceful coercion, several of the poachers revealed the names of the Bisa’s foremost hunters. One of the names extorted from them was Brown Chiwantila Muchose, or simply Chiwantila. One of the poachers captured had been carrying many rounds of cartridges for a Soviet-made Kalashnikov automatic rifle, but no rifle was recovered. The man said he had been carrying the ammunition for Chiwantila. Berry’s men had just missed nabbing one of the biggest threats to rhinos and elephants in the valley.
“We started asking around about this Chiwantila bloke and even set a few traps for him,” Berry recalled. “But he was very cagey and he eluded capture on a number of occasions.”
But once he had learned the name, Berry was determined to catch his man. Aside from removing a potent poacher from the valley, he knew it could have a psychological effect. It would make a strong impression on the Bisa, perhaps stronger even than his presence in the valley warranted, if Berry could catch one of their top hunters and bring him to task. Eventually, the information Berry needed was pried from another captured poacher.
Chiwantila was arrested in bed, sleeping in one of the five residences he kept in the Bisa communities. This was in July. Berry had filled two of his Land Rovers with armed scouts, and from 11 p.m. until dawn they raided one community after another until they found him.
At first Chiwantila would say nothing. He denied owning the Kalashnikov rifle—a far more serious offense in Zambia than poaching—and he insisted he was not a hunter or a poacher. But Berry’s men were able to wrest information from him in time. Faced with the threat of prosecution for possessing an illegal weapon, Chiwantila admitted to having poached some elephants. Information he provided about the rifle enabled Berry’s men eventually to recover it. Zambian police were interested enough in the rifle to track down and arrest the dealer in Ndola who sold it. Now they are trying to trace the deal back one step further to find out who imported it.
Meanwhile, Chiwantila had become so helpful that he was pleasant to have around.
“These Bisa chaps are fatalists,” Berry explained. “Once you catch them, once they know they are at your mercy, they tend to just surrender completely.”
At a recent beer-making gathering in the game-scout village near Berry’s house, Chiwantila sat quietly and happily drinking with the men who had captured him. An oddly effeminate man to have such a fierce reputation, he had been living comfortably with the scouts while awaiting trial. He was older than the man the patrol had expected to catch. He looked about sixty, weathered and gray, a slight, windblown creature who appeared quite at home wherever he landed. Berry, in return for Chiwantila’s cooperation, had succeeded in having the weapons charge dropped, so all the Bisa hunter faced now was six months’ imprisonment and a fine. He was resigned to that.
Sipping the foul-smelling, brown milky mixture of home-brewed beer, a faded blue turban wrapped around his gray head, Chiwantila smiled and laughed. He fit right in. Dressed in a flimsy yellow short-sleeved shirt, dirty brown polyester slacks a bit short in the ankle, gray socks, and black leather shoes missing laces, he clapped as two of the game scouts reeled playfully to the band music from their portable radio.
Chiwantila spoke no English. Tryson Mwandila, the scout who had been held at gunpoint on the patrol two summers ago, translated Chiwantila’s Bisa dialect. The poacher evaded questions about his work. Yes, he was a hunter. This was followed by a big yellow-toothed smile, eyes averted from the questioner, limp-wristed hands folded on his knees. No, he never hunted rhino. Yes, perhaps he had killed elephant, but very few. Only the ones he had confessed to Bwana Berry. No, he did not make good money killing the animals.
Berry and his men laughed out loud at Chiwantila’s answers, and the poacher laughed with them. He was playing a comic scene. Yes, he knew the animals in the valley were being killed so fast none would be left, just as the bwana said. With a look of utmost sincerity, Chiwantila vowed he would never take up his rifle in the valley again. This elicited the most laughter of all.
“He’s lying, of course,” Berry said. “He still has to be wary. His case hasn’t come up to trial yet and he’s counting on getting only those six months. He’s confessed to killing a few elephants and swears he’s learned his lesson. Don’t you believe it.”
Berry respected Chiwantila. He understood that hunting in the valley was part of the Bisa people’s life. He knew that Chiwantila was a brave man who had started hunting as a boy with a muzzle-loading rifle, a frightening device that, if overloaded, could easily blind the shooter or blow off his hands.
“They may have better weapons now, but hunting elephant and rhino in that valley is still a tricky and dangerous business,” Berry said. “In the old days a hunter would go off after an elephant only once every few months. Nowadays they’re at it day after day. They no longer hunt for meat, but for ivory and horn. It used to be that one elephant kill would provide enough meat to last a village for some time. But they are paid very little for tusks and horn, not like what the middlemen will make down the line. So they have to keep at it. It takes courage to stay out in the bush like that stalking dangerous animals. And for now they have me to contend with, too,” he added with a satisfied little smile.
Hunting and camping full-time in the valley is a way of life not altogether different from Berry’s own. He has real empathy for the men he hunts.
“I don’t know but if I were one of them I might be doing the same thing,” he said.
Before Berry left the village that afternoon, Chiwantila had a request. Mwandila approached Berry’s Land Rover to translate. The old hunter kept his eyes averted to the ground as the question was asked.
“He wants to know if you will give him a job when his six months in jail are up,” Mwandila said.
Berry grinned and shook his head with disbelief. “Oh, he’d like to work with us, all right,” he said. “He’d like to work with us so he could tell all of his friends about our movements. Tell Mr. Chiwantila that he will have to do better than that.” Berry hesitated for a moment, and then added, “Wait, tell him I will not have a full-time job for him but that we will employ him as an investigator. I will pay him for information: twenty-five kwachas for information that leads to the recovery of elephant tusks, fifty kwachas for inf
ormation leading to the arrest of poachers with rhino horn. Tell him that. But the information must be good. He will only be paid if we make the arrests.”
Mwandila turned to translate all this to Chiwantila, but the old man had already wandered back to the boiling kettle of beer.
On the third day of the patrol, near noon, the men found a young crocodile lying in a shallow pool on the wide, mostly dry bed of the Mushiyashi River. Prospa Myatwa and John S. Phiri yanked the snapping young croc, only two feet long, by the tail and capered around it happily, teasing. The little croc lunged at them in vain and tried to hide in the trickling stream of water.
Later on the same afternoon, the striding column of men nearly smacked headlong into a huge rhino hidden in shadow and tall grass. Stock-still, it stood directly facing the men, a one-ton specimen at least, only its horns and the round gray outline of its shoulders visible above the grass in direct sunlight. Though the patrol had come within twenty feet of it, the rhino had not spotted them. Sensing threat, but unable to precisely determine the direction of its approach, the rhino waited motionlessly, its head and horns held high. Abraham slowly backed the column away from this encounter, easing backward, downwind from the animal. The rhino never bothered to move.
On the last night of Abraham’s patrol, sixteen hours before the rendezvous with Berry, the men camped in a grove of trees near the Mushiyashi. The carriers dug holes in the sand for muddy water, which they boiled before drinking but which remained muddy. Though they had walked out of the hills, the night was cold again. Some of the carriers, who were not dressed as warmly as the scouts and whose job it was to keep the perimeter fires burning through the night anyway, forsook chilly slumber to sit around the flames until dawn.
It was a moonless August night, brilliant with stars. Up through the clear night shone not just the familiar constellations but sweeping milky bands of nebula, fuzzy swaths of interstellar gas and the arms of galaxies, accumulations of stars so numerous and distant as to defy imagining. The bright night chirped with insects and shook, from time to time, with the deep reverberant roar of a lion, a sound so primal it registers fear even before one is awake enough to know, consciously, what it is. The roar reaches deep into a sleeper’s dream and yanks him from it. He awakens to find himself sitting bolt upright, already alert to the undefined threat nearby.
