Ghosts of Tsavo Read online

  “One of the things that mitigates against wise management of wildlife is mythology,” Dennis responds. “But people don’t want to give up on the mythology. One myth is of the rogue beast, the cattle-killer, the man-eater. I am so sick of this man-eater business. Colonel Patterson made a helluva lot of money off that book of his, and so have a lot of writers since.” (I’m not sure if this remark is directed at me.) “Lions in Tsavo aren’t more likely to turn to people for food than lions anywhere else.”

  We skirt the Aruba water hole, its shores stalked by purple herons and sacred ibises, and find Burr Boy and Melinda, still noshing on the buffalo carcass, which is by now so rotten that vultures would reject it. We observe for a few moments, and then get a surprise. Baby Huey rises out of the grass, followed by Meathead and Fur Boy. They are a good 10 to 12 miles from where I first saw them on the Ndara Plains. That isn’t the surprising part—lions can travel much greater distances in a single day—but, rather, that they and Burr Boy appear to form a masculine coalition that may have taken over from Orion, alias Scarface. Big and tough as he was, he could not have prevailed against this gang. But where is his pride? Was Melinda one of the young lionesses I had seen 16 months ago?

  We return to camp and report our find, discovering that Peyton had come upon the five lions just before us. She reports that she observed Melinda “wasping” in front of the three younger males. Wasping is phonetic for “walks sinuously past,” the flirtatious walk females adopt when they’re in heat. Meathead responded, Peyton tells us, but it appeared that Burr Boy had prior claim. With a roar and a charge, he ended Meathead’s romantic fantasies.

  As far as a takeover goes, Craig says that a coup d’état in lion society “raises all kinds of hell.” Scarface’s pride may have broken up. The adult lionesses and their subadult progeny may have gone off to stake out a new territory. With sufficient numbers, they could get buffalo, as females sometimes do on the Serengeti, where six to eight lionesses will gang up to hunt big prey. But I wonder about another, darker possibility: If Scarface was the primary breadwinner, the entire pride, or most of it, may have perished after losing him.

  May 23

  I AM WRITING this a little after midnight, by a headlamp’s light. I fell asleep around ten and woke up an hour ago, after another Lariam-mare. As usual, it left me with a residue of free-floating dread. I waited for it to pass, as it normally does within a few minutes, but it hasn’t yet. It seems to have taken up lodging in my brain or nervous system or both, bringing on a mild vertigo, a prickling sensation up and down my arms, and a hyper-alertness I haven’t experienced since I was in Vietnam listening in the vaultlike black of jungle nights for a rustle, a crack of a branch, the soft, metallic snick of a rifle bolt easing a round into the chamber. I feel as if I am going to lose my grip on reality at any moment. This anxiety that has no reason breeds an anxiety that I’m going nuts, so I write in this journal to discipline my mind. I am a kind of drill sergeant, whipping a mob of disordered thoughts into shape. I record yesterday’s experiment…

  Late in the afternoon, Craig and Peyton loaded the dummy lions on the trailer and drove them to Aruba, where Bob had spotted Melinda with another lioness earlier in the day. The males were not in sight. A pair of isolated females provided an ideal setup for Peyton to test one of her hypotheses. Turning hairdresser, she trimmed one dummy’s mane to look like a typical Tsavo male’s, and coiffed the other in the flowing mane of a traditional Serengeti lion. The point was to see which the females preferred. Her expectation, based on the work she’d done in Tanzania, was that the lionesses would go for the one with the more extravagant hairstyle.

  A stiff wind was blowing when we arrived at Aruba. Melinda and her friend were still there, bedded down in the thornbushes. While my car, with Dennis and Ogeto aboard, stayed near the females to keep an eye on them, the two scientists unloaded the dummies some 200 yards downwind so the lionesses wouldn’t be distracted by human scent, and then positioned them facing the lionesses and about 20 feet apart. Bob mounted a remote-controlled camera on a tripod between the two decoys. The loudspeaker was bolted to the Land Rover’s roof and hooked up to the tape recorder, which would play a recording of a dying wildebeest to get the lionesses’ attention. Once they were up and moving toward the sound, they would see what appeared to them to be two strange males guarding a kill. And we would see which the girls attached themselves to. If they followed the Serengeti script, it would be another indicator that one of a mane’s purposes is to attract females, even females accustomed to the bald males of their home range.

  When everything was ready, we moved all three vehicles well behind the make-believe lions. The wildebeest moaned, a truly doleful sound that seemed to express the misery of death like nothing I’d ever heard. After five minutes, Melinda rose to her feet, followed by her friend. The two cautiously padded toward the mournful groans. They made an arresting picture, muscles in sinuous play; it was as if they were flowing through the grass. Then they spotted the two dummies, a contrived illusion, a scientist’s magic trick, and stopped. They were wary; females usually are when confronted by strange males, Craig whispered over the radio. This pair was especially shy. A few steps forward and stop. Forward again, stop again. Fifteen minutes passed and still they didn’t move. When they did, at last, it was only to slip away and hunker down under a bush. Craig counseled patience; it could take them an hour to overcome their caution. We would give them until dark, but when darkness came, the lionesses hadn’t stirred and the experiment was called off. It had failed, no one knew why.

  “Well, it looks like Tsavo remains a mystery within a riddle wrapped in an enigma,” Craig quipped, paraphrasing Winston Churchill’s commentary on Russia.

  Peyton didn’t take things quite so philosophically. It was her experiment and it hadn’t worked out and she was upset, although science is largely a record of a thousand failures before one success. Back at camp, she didn’t finish supper and went to bed early. I was afraid she’d overheard a a none-too-diplomatic remark Dennis had made to me: “What are you proving with these dummies? All that was proved tonight is that Tsavo females don’t like boys.”

  Queasy dread has not been overcome. I have heard that acute anxiety can be a side effect of Larium. Whether the demons are pharmaceutical or not, I read from the Psalms to excorcise them. The first—“And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper”—the 95th—“O come let us sing unto the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation”—and the 118th—“I called upon the Lord in distress; the Lord answered me, and set me in a large place. The Lord is at my side; I will not fear…”

  Those ancient and beautiful words help some, but not enough. I walk outside to look at the heavens, and the southern stars are a wonder. I recognize some constellations from my own hemisphere, Orion and Canis Major and Ursa Major, but most of the others are unknown, and that’s fine. I don’t need to know their names; their beauty is sufficient unto the day. In my mind’s eye, I draw lines from the pointer stars of the Southern Cross and from the “false cross” above, and mark where they intersect—that’s true south. The Dipper lies low on the horizon, and its pointers aim at Polaris, in Ursa Minor, also lower on the horizon than it is at home. True north. I turn, aligning myself between the two poles and extend my arms at right angles to my body. True east. True west. Thus I try to center myself, as the Lakota and Cheyenne and Ojibwa did when they turned to face the Four Sacred Directions. It might seem a little odd, mixing a shot of the Bible with a jigger of Native American religion, but when you are out in the African bush, 300 miles from the nearest doctor or hospital, and feel like you’re losing your mind, it’s not a bad cocktail. I walk around a bit to shake off my nervousness, and am startled for a millisecond when I practically bump into the two dummy lions. At night, they look all too real.

  Paul Simon sings in the ear of my mind:
r />   Joseph’s face was black as night,

  The pale yellow moon shone in his eyes.

  His path was marked by the stars of the Southern Hemisphere,

  And he walked his days under African skies.

  At the fire pit, embers glow faintly. A waterbuck snorts out in the Kanderi swamp. Far off, an elephant screams. What on Earth am I doing here? I think of Marianne. A little like ancient Athens…slaves to do the dirty work so Plato and Aristotle and that lot could sit and think. Eight days ago, Bob and I were driven to Tsavo from Nairobi by Verity’s driver, a short, stocky Kikuyu named Sammy. We stopped at the roadside and pitched into the cooler for sandwiches and a beer. A villager appeared, quite literally appeared out of nothing, like some wretched genie summoned from wherever genies spend their time. His belly was sunken, his glassy eyes haunted by hunger, his clothes ragged and filthy. He didn’t beg, didn’t speak a word, just stood there, his very presence a reproach. I couldn’t eat. I gave him my sandwich, an act of charity akin to giving aspirin to someone racked by deep bone pain. So what if some lions have manes and others don’t? Who cares why they do what they do? Isn’t this expedition pointless? Considering the conditions in this country, and in most of black Africa, doesn’t inquiring into all these fine points of animal behavior represent a form of decadence?

  His path was marked by the stars of the Southern Hemisphere,

  And he walked his days under African skies.

  Under these African skies at two in the morning, it is best to be candid with myself, since such candor cannot hurt anyone. I yearn for the poet’s, the songwriter’s response to the natural world. I’m a little weary of the empirical approach, all these infrared cameras and skull measurements and data sheets. Data. Data. Data. Art and science, that hoary chestnut of a conflict. Candidly speaking, Phil to Phil, some part of me resists Craig and Peyton and Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans and their theories and hypotheses, tests and experiments. I long for the company of a naturalist like John Muir, for whom the petal of each mountain flower was “a window through which we may see the Creator.”

  I believe that to be true, but I also believe that the theory of evolution is right, which is something of a tricky juggling act, because if you follow Darwinism to its logical conclusion, then you have to believe life on Earth isn’t here because God intended it to be, or that it’s evolved as it has because that’s how he planned it. It could just as easily have gone some other way or never come into being in the first place. It’s one vast accident, in so many words. Extending that thought from the animate to the inanimate, I have to conclude that all this around and above me, these stars of the Southern Hemisphere, is likewise accidental, unguided by a divine intelligence, without purpose. Yet we call it creation and creation implies a creator. We don’t look at, say, a 747 and assume that 200,000 individual moving parts just chanced to come together to form a machine that takes off, lands, and flies at 500 miles an hour. In Craig Packer’s own book, Into Africa, he states: “Zebras are bulk feeders, preferring mature grasses. Wildebeest seek any green grass. By mowing down the longer grasses, the two larger species create fresh swards of the short green grass preferred by the Thomson’s gazelle…. What are the advantages of migration?…The short grasses of the volcanic plains are much richer in protein, calcium, and phosphorous than the tall grasses of the northern woodlands. Mineral levels in the northern grasses are so low that nonmigratory grazers would suffer reduced fertility from phosphorous deficiency. Browsers can obtain ample minerals from tree leaves, but grazers must migrate south as soon as the rains permit.”

  In the margins, I have scrawled, “The design of it!” A design implies a designer. That’s what John Muir saw in the blossoms of the high Sierra.

  Astrophysicists, cosmologists, biologists, bioengineers, doctors, and cutting-edge medical researchers are the Aztec priests of our secularized civilization, speaking to us from atop the temples of science, leading us on to a future in which we shall all be liberated from our comforting illusions and submit to the reign of a ruthless rationalism. Maybe we’ll be better off, considering that one of those illusions, religious belief, has been and continues to be the source of so much bloodshed and misery. Nevertheless, I fear we’ll suffer from a spiritual impoverishment in that brave new world.

  It’s in the field of bioengineering that the high priests join hands with the ministers of globalization. Private companies with shares traded on the computerized floors of the world’s stock exchanges will extract stem cells from human embryos, will manipulate our genes and recombine our DNA, and all for the best of reasons: to cure diseases, save lives, repair defects in our natural makeup, give us children who will be superior in every way. Surely, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, you’ll want your child to have a genetic head start, things are so competitive these days, it will be well worth the investment…. Such miracles will not come cheap and will be bestowed on those who can afford them; the miracle makers will have to show a profit to the cyber-traders and shareholders. I don’t imagine the woman I met in southern Sudan, the one who had to walk six days under African skies to get her sick child to a clinic, will benefit. Darwinian economics won’t permit it.

  Just two months ago, I addressed the student body of the high school I graduated from in 1959: Fenwick, a Catholic prep school in Oak Park, Illinois. I told the young women in their dark skirts and uniform jackets, the young men in their blazers and ties that the great challenge that will confront their generation will be the one hurled by the bio-technocrats of our wired world. Someday, I said, in your lifetime, perhaps even in mine, a band of lab-coated geniuses, impatient with moral questions, are going to clone a human being. Humankind will then possess a power commensurate to the harnessing of the atom, and what will we do with it? This is going to happen, I told the students.

  No matter how many laws and regulations are passed prohibiting reproductive cloning, no matter how many objections are raised by priests and ministers and ethicists, it’s going to happen, and the bio-techs will get on television and in the soothing tones of practiced media-speak tell us that it’s a good thing that will bring the greatest good to the greatest number. It’s going to happen because the high priests of science are riding high these days, as are the cyber-capitalists, and they obey one commandment, not ten: If it can be done, it should be done, especially if there’s money in it. And once it’s done, you will be faced with ethical, political, and even metaphysical questions no one has faced before. If any man or woman can run off a Xerox of himself or herself, can we say that the facsimile possesses an immortal soul? Can we say that he or she is a sacred, unique individual, endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights? But can we say that if we are the creators? Can we say that when a clone, by definition, is not a unique individual? Human beings are fickle; values change with circumstances. What if, someday, it’s decided that we who gave the clone life now withdraw its rights to equal treatment under the law?

  Sometimes the post-industrial world’s rush into the future strikes me as mindless. It’s like Everest. We’re going there because it’s there. In my more paranoid moments, and I’m certainly in one now, standing here under African skies, the cold stars’ light in my eyes (the pale yellow moon has set, Paul), I think science is in a hurry to get there because it sees, glimmering on the temporal horizon, the final triumph over its old adversary, faith. There’s another hoary chestnut of a conflict. They’ve been at war ever since the church persecuted Galileo for stating that the Earth was not the center of creation. Cosmologists have reported, with a certain bleak glee, that the universe will expand forever, becoming an immense, cold, dark void in which protons will be separated by distances equal to those separating galaxies today; in other words, the universe is pointless, spinning toward oblivion.

  Contemporary research into the brain has found that our emotions, from love to rage, are the product of specific electrochemical reactions in the cranial soup, our capacity to think and reason not a reflection of the divine in our nature
s but functions of brain centers that can be observed with fast MRIs and PET scans. The hard-wired circuitry in the frontal lobe is the only path to knowledge. There is no room in this view of life for such fuzzy concepts as a poet’s inspiration much less a prophet’s divine revelation. We’re almost there, the future, and we’ll be there when man at last creates man out of his own skin, the soulless, identical copy, coming off the sterile assembly lines of Embryo, Inc., with genes that can be jiggered into whatever configuration may be desired. The paragon of animals will be shown to be mere matter, and science will do what logicians say is impossible, proving a negative: God is not the author of human life or any life. God provably does not exist. Sometimes, in these paranoid moments, I imagine myself beside Ted Kaczynski, there in the solitude of his madness and his Montana cabin, helping him make bombs to hurl against a future I want no part of.

  What am I doing here, thinking these thoughts under African skies? I am a novelist by calling; my fundamental reaction to the natural world comes from the belly, which somehow communicates to the spirit. Nothing rational about it. I can feel myself slipping away from information and data and the empirical method toward a romantic primitivism. I long to be a savage, “suckled in a creed outworn,” who stands in ignorant awe of creation and sees in the bursting volcano not geologic and thermal forces unleashed but the wrath of some malevolent deity; who dances to the shaman’s drum and listens to mythic tales grunted round the tribal fire and has no way to reproduce except by fucking.