Ghosts of Tsavo Read online

  While Bob and I have lunch at camp, Craig and Peyton look at Dennis’s photographs. One is of a lion with a full, black mane, a “problem animal,” i.e., a cattle killer, that had been relocated to the park. Two of that lion’s possible sons, Dennis says, have short, abbreviated manes. At any rate, Dennis confirms that maned lions can be found in the park (like the beauty I saw under the palms near Sobo Rocks), but he doesn’t know if they’re imports or natives. This leads to a round of speculation, Craig and Peyton venturing that our story could evolve in one of two ways. If maned and unmaned lions are part of the same indigenous population, then the maneless variety would represent a “morph” of the species, and that would be stunning because it would be the first documented case of morphing among mammals. Highly, highly unlikely, Craig says. And so to the second possibility: If fully maned lions in Tsavo are imports and native males are maneless, due to adaptation to the heat or some other environmental factor, it would represent what Craig terms “an interesting example of variation within a species.” Which is to say (though neither he nor Peyton says it) Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans may not be completely off base.

  Our two scientists, however, remain infidels when it comes to manelessness, convinced that the bald or crew-cut males we’re all seeing are youthful nomads, waiting to grow up so they can take over a pride. Once again, I bring up Scarface, saying that I’ll lead them to the place near the Aruba dam where I’d seen him. Good luck, Dennis chimes in. His name for that same lion was “Orion,” and he’d observed him and his pride (or group, as Dennis would prefer to say) for a long time. Four months ago, they vanished, never to be seen again. He has no idea why. Another Tsavo mystery.

  Nevertheless, we set off, on the chance that Scarface, a.k.a Orion, will reappear. We wander all over the area, circling the lake, from which open-billed storks rise in swarms thick as locusts, and then over the plains to the swamp, and see giraffes and elephants and gazelles and that’s all. A long drive toward Voi also nets us nothing except a real African moment when the sun dips below the Taita Hills, casting blades of light that kindle a golden fire across the dun-colored grasslands below and glint off the horns of Cape buffalos crossing the road in front of us while elephants trumpet in the distance.

  May 18

  PEYTON LAUGHS. “He looks so retarded,” she says of the male lion who lies under a tree a short distance north of Aruba lake. I’ve come to feel a bit proprietary about Tsavo lions, and silently bristle at her remark, as if she’s insulted a dear friend. The trouble is, he does look retarded, his eyes slitted, his tongue hanging out as he pants in the heat, his hide peppered with burrs, which also mat a short, scruffy mane that looks like it’s been trimmed by a barber with a bad case of amphetamine nerves. A lioness dozes under a shrub nearby. Beside the male is a partially devoured buffalo carcass, its eyes pecked out by vultures, its legs, stiff as posts, splayed out, its bloody body cavity abuzz with flies and aswarm with maggots, and the whole thing stinking in the south wind like a gigantic overripe Limburger. Bob, in the other vehicle, gets on the radio and suggests I write a sequel to Colonel Patterson’s book and call it The Maggot-Eaters of Tsavo. Again, I feel personally offended. My Tsavo lions, creatures of terrifying legend, are becoming objects of ridicule.

  On the other hand, the fellow in front of us qualifies as maneless; the color of his nose indicates adulthood, but Peyton wants proof positive and imitates a hyena whoop in an attempt to make the lion get up so she can have a look at his testicles. He doesn’t buy her mimicry and remains stationary, his long tufted tail whisking at flies. We wait.

  Burr Boy, as Peyton has christened the male, at last gets up to snack on the buffalo. He methodically gnaws on the shoulder, ripping at the red, glistening meat, and then, in an impressive show of strength, bites down on a joint and drags the 800-pound carcass several yards to a more advantageous position. On the radio, Craig asks, “What do his balls look like?” Though Burr Boy is only 15 yards away, Peyton raises the binoculars for a close look. “Uh, large and pendulous,” she replies. There is an interval of silence, and then Craig says, “Well, this is what we came to see,” meaning an adult male with a restricted mane. I feel vindicated, but get the impression that this lone example isn’t enough to convert the two scientists. Back and forth on the radio, they discuss mane growth, while I reflect on yesterday’s “Packer Lecture.” That’s what Bob and I call Craig’s daily disquisitions on biology, evolution, and animal behavior. They’re concise and clear, even brilliant. They must be if I understand them, although I forget them if I don’t play the good pupil and take notes; but that’s my fault, not Craig’s. I took notes on yesterday’s tutorial, which began with Craig’s declaration that Darwin has his vote as the Man of the Millennium.

  Darwin’s law of natural selection states that raw self-interest rules the natural world. Altruism is less known there than on the floor of the commodities exchange. On the face of it, lion society appears to negate this principle. Lions are cooperative. Females hunt in coordination, form creches of sisters and aunts, and help to raise one another’s young. If there is more than one male in the pride, the dominant one gets the girls, but the others pitch in to defend the pride against outside threats. Years of study have persuaded Craig that when a cubless lioness helps raise her sisters’ progeny, she is not just being nice; if young with similar genes survive, then indirectly, her genes survive as well. The same goes for males. They are not like soldiers in wartime, nobly putting their lives on the line for some ideal or cause, but to make sure that those with shared genes live on. In sum, cooperative lion behavior is consistent with Darwin’s law of natural selection; lions act together and in support of one another, yet self-interest—the survival of the pride’s gene pool—is the reason why.

  Professor Packer then proceeded to Part Two, the title of which, “The Peacock’s Tail,” sounded like a Sherlock Holmes mystery. Certain species develop traits that at first glance appear to be liabilities, and in some senses are. The male peacock’s long, cumbersome tail makes it more vulnerable to predators, but it’s useful in attracting females. A peacock with an exceptionally long, flamboyant tail gets more chances to mate and pass on his genes, compensating for the shorter life span it will probably have because of its vulnerability to predators. The male lion’s mane falls into the category of an ornament that’s both a liability and an advantage. Although no one is yet sure what a fully developed mane costs a lion, Peyton and Craig are sure that its primary purpose is to attract females, its secondary purpose to cause rival males to pause and reflect before challenging its owner. Why does a luxuriant mane set lioness hearts aflutter? One beguiling theory holds that females of certain species, and female lions are one, have a built-in aesthetic sense, preferring males who display one trait over those who don’t have it, or in whom it’s less developed. But aesthetics cannot tell the whole story, leading to two possible explanations for the rest of the tale. The trait, in this case a mane, signals good genes, or it’s a sign that the particular male, although he may or may not have superior genes, is healthy and well-fed, that is, a good provider and protector with whom it will be advantageous for the female to mate.

  Peyton’s experiments in the Serengeti (which will be repeated here in Tsavo) indicate that lionesses prefer dark manes to light (blonds don’t have more fun) and that challenging males are most intimidated by long, black manes, least by short, light ones. To test the good-gene idea, Peyton has collected hair samples from Serengeti lions to be assayed for testosterone levels.

  So we come to Burr Boy in Tsavo, an adult without much of a mane but with a girlfriend. Does the heat in Tsavo, whose elevation is considerably lower than the Serengeti’s, cause the mane’s liabilities to outweigh its advantages? Peyton breaks the infrared camera out of its metal case and trains it on Burr Boy. After a few minutes, she hands it to me. Burr Boy appears in a mottle of bright colors. The readings show a dramatic temperature difference between his upper and lower parts, 3°C, roughly 5.5°F. That suggests
, Peyton says—doesn’t prove but suggests—that he’s stressed by the heat and must work harder to keep his underparts cool.

  Burr Boy, finished with his snack, lies down again, slobbering, his chin whiskers scarlet with blood. Melinda, as the lioness has been dubbed, ambles over to the carcass, but forsakes the juicy shoulder meat for some reason and instead concentrates on gnawing off an ear. It’s tough, and in her frustration, she chomps down and drags the carcass several feet, another display of leonine power: Melinda appears to weigh about 250 pounds, the size of your average NFL linebacker, but let’s see one of them pull 800 pounds with his teeth. She finally succeeds in severing the ear, samples it, and spits it out before returning to her rest.

  A pair of jackals appear and approach cautiously from downwind. Melinda senses them regardless and sits up, her head thrust forward, her bright, brassy eyes focused on the scavengers. The concentration in a lion’s eyes can be unnerving sometimes. The jackals take the cue and pause. That’s not good enough for the lioness. With a coughing grunt, she springs from the shrub and sprints toward them, dust flying from her hind paws. The jackals turn and run off, though they don’t go too far. Melinda resumes her nap, while to the west, where the sun resembles a scarlet, neon eye glaring from atop the Chyulu Hills, a troop of baboons file across the savanna, its grass bent in the hissing wind. I feel that I’ve been returned to the time of Earth’s adolescence: The two great predators sleep alongside their prey’s gory carcass, the patient jackals waiting and baboons on the march across the windy plain.

  May 19

  WE ARE AWAKE before dawn, the Southern Cross shining brilliantly in a sky as black as when we’d gone to bed. Another quickie breakfast gulped by lantern light, and Craig and I are off in the Land Cruiser I’m renting from Verity Williams. The dusty road leading out of camp appears as a trail of white ash in the headlights, a pair of hyena eyes glow back at us from the underbrush crowding the roadside. We head east. The new day suggests itself on the horizon and arrives in an eruption of light as we turn south, heading for the bleak Ndara Plains. Except for his green bush hat, Craig looks like he’s dressed for a day of beachcombing: T-shirt, shorts, sandals. His 50 years have tarnished his jet-black beard with gray, but he has a high-pitched, boyish laugh and a sense of humor that can sometimes slice like a scalpel; you don’t realize you’ve been cut till you see the blood. The lanky Texan, born in Fort Worth, long ago abandoned his drawl for the neutral accents of the Midwest as he forsook pre-med at Stanford (his father is a doctor) to major in biology. Working for Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, in Tanzania’s Gombe National Forest, hooked him on studying wildlife. Graduate school at the University of Sussex in England brought him in contact with John Maynard Smith, the evolutionary biologist, and that became Craig’s specialty. In 1978, following a spell studying Japanese monkeys, he returned to Tanzania on invitation from old friends in Gombe to take over the Serengeti Lion Project, the research effort Schaller started in 1966.

  “At first I was wary,” he tells me, his dark eyes flitting from the road to the landscape and back. “I’d been studying primates, creatures with active, intelligent minds. That’s not lions. I thought that lions would be boring. They are boring to study. Sometimes I think the only thing more boring than studying lions is being a lion.”

  Nevertheless, he got into it, discovering that those who had gone before had determined what lions do, but not why.

  “That was Schaller. He got the basic parameters of what they do. I went after why. Schaller is a what man, I’m a why man.”

  We drive on. The Ndara Plains reach away, a disconsolate expanse that in its dusty, red flatness reminds me of the Australian outback, where I once spent ten weeks on assignment. Craig brings up Dennis, who, alternately defensive and arrogant, is beginning to annoy him and Peyton. His lack of professionalism is another irritant. Craig and Peyton have given him a stack of the data sheets they use in Tanzania because he has none of his own; ditto for the pre-printed cards with lions’ faces on them that aid in identifying individual animals. After four years in Tsavo, Dennis knows the locations of only a few prides and has only a vague idea how many lions are in each. In fact, he stubbornly refuses to accept prides as a concept, let alone a reality. An observant tourist could accumulate as much information as Dennis has, and in less time. To cap things off, he has begun to criticize Craig and Peyton for the way they’re going about their business, objecting to their excursions off-road, to the experiments they plan to conduct with the dummy lions.

  Although I consider myself merely a chronicler of this expedition and both scientists its leaders, in certain matters, mostly having to do with personal relations, it appears that I’m in charge, by default, not because I’m some D-League Eisenhower with a talent for managing complicated personalities. Some of the expenses are my responsibility; so is making sure that things run smoothly and that everyone gets along. I don’t want some Conradian scene of white people tearing at one another’s throats in the heart of darkness, but I’ll admit that Dennis is beginning to annoy me, too. I’ve given him $200 to cover his gas and other expenses and offered him and Sarah free access to our mess, and they’ve displayed such hearty appetites that Peyton was once left with a nearly empty plate. I was galled the other night when Dennis declined Bob’s offer of a shot from his bottle of blended scotch, expressing a preference for my single malt. “Macallan?” he said, grinning. “Now you’re talking.” A bit cheeky, no? Strange, how people thrown together in these circumstances can get on one another’s nerves, and petty irritations grow into major inflammations. I think of Conrad’s An Outpost of Progress, which carries things to the extreme: A trader isolated in the jungle ends up murdering his partner in an argument over a spoonful of sugar.

  No one is going to take an ax to Dennis, nor he to anyone else, but in the interests of maintaining a happy ship, I do a little psychologizing, pointing out that Dennis is probably “bushed,” a term that covers the atrophy of social skills that results when you are quarantined too long from human society. Of course, Dennis may prefer his quarantine. Craig and I wonder if he’s out here not to do science but simply to be out here, away from people, using “research” as a means to justify himself. We doubt he’s eager to make new discoveries that will be published in scholarly journals and bring him renown. He’s like a hermit prospector whose aim is not to find gold but to look for it.

  Miles and miles of bloody Africa. Except for a small herd of impala, the only signs of sentient life in the nyika are the francolin and sand grouse that flush constantly from the roadside scrub. My pointer, Sage, would be in heaven here, though I don’t suppose she’d be in this heaven more than half an hour before some ravenous carnivore sent her to the one in the sky. We go east again, then at a junction marked by a rock cairn south once more, pass a dry water hole pitted by buffalo hoofs and the great circular pads of elephants, and round a bend. Craig stomps on the brakes. Fifty feet away, three male lions lie by the road, two on one side, one on the other, all three almost as bald as females. Craig squints through the binoculars, noting the color of their noses, which are more black than pink. Around six years old, they are young adults, but adults.

  “This is wonderful!” Craig exclaims. “This is what we came to see! They really are maneless!”

  I do not feel vindicated. I feel, rather, the warm gratification of the missionary to whom the heathen declares, “I renounce my native gods and accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior.”

  Pole, pole—slowly—we proceed. The lions rise with lazy grace and amble off into the commiphora, and we follow a discreet distance behind. Two are stout lads, over 350, I guess, while the third, possibly younger, is at least 50 pounds lighter. Yet he sports the most hair, a furry, ocher bib and side whiskers. They lie down for a while, then the largest of the three gets up again and affectionately butts his mates, who rise and follow his leisurely stroll to the shade of a wide-spreading shrub. There they flop down once more. We watch them sleep, and soon, lion
observing being the electric spectator sport it is, fall asleep ourselves. Five males from two different species, dozing in the middle of nowhere. We wake up at eleven o’clock and see that the lions haven’t moved; they lie as still as three golden puddles in the sunlight.

  Driving the quarter mile back to the road, Craig has me tie ribbons of toilet paper to the shrub branches to mark the way in—we’ll be returning late this afternoon.

  “Dennis would probably object to this desecration,” he says.

  Once out to the road, we note two tall acacia on the east side for landmarks, then set the odometer to measure the distance to the junction. This dead-reckoning navigation points to how little is known about Tsavo lions. On the Serengeti, the locations of lion prides are almost like street addresses, and Craig knows the population of each one and their family history, going back to their great-grandparents.

  When we come back in a three-vehicle convoy, Peyton and Ogeto in one, Craig and I in another, and Bob in his Land Cruiser, a 600-millimeter lens mounted on a bracket on the door, we follow the toilet paper streamers and find the lions in the same spot. Peyton looks at them and joins the congregation of believers. It’s four o’clock, the magic hour, and the light is superb for photographing, although there isn’t much to take pictures of. The trio are studies in immobility and do not live up to the portrait Daphne Sheldrick painted for Rick Ridgeway. Flat on their backs, legs spread in shameless poses, we practically have to tap them with the bumpers to make them move so Bob can get photos and Peyton images with the infra-red camera. I wonder how lions maintain their muscular strength; if a human being were as inactive as a lion, he or she would soon be as toned as bowl of pudding.