Ghosts of Tsavo Read online

  I return to my tent and write down these jangled musings, not to make sense of them, but to get them out of my system. The pharmaceutical demons still prod me, but not as sharply as an hour ago. I lie down, and having tried the Psalms and Lakota centering, I browse through Seneca’s letters to Lucilius and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. The headlamp goes off, and I doze, to be roused only an hour later by the sound of water poured into the bucket outside, the glow of the kerosene lamp the man has lit for me. In that brief hour of untroubled sleep, I have made friends once again with Craig and Peyton, Gnoske, Kerbis Peterhans, and Darwin, though not with the bio-entrepreneurs. It’s impossible for me to see human beings as anything other than creatures who exist to find out, to seek, to add to the great edifice of knowledge, brick by brick, even if, as we used to say in Vietnam, it don’t mean nuthin’, don’t mean a thing. Still, I’m so tired I cannot get off my cot; then I recall the words Marcus Aurelius spoke to me just a little while ago: “When Thou risest reluctantly in the morning, let this thought be present: I am rising to do the work of a human being.”

  And that also answers the question, What am I doing here, under African skies?

  The morning comes cool and overcast, with promise of rain. With Sammy at the wheel, we head north out of camp. A striped hyena comes down the road, bounding with its weird, hopping gait. An hour later we stand atop Mudanda Rock, looking down at the water hole, where baboons convene, and out toward a vista that reaches all the way to the Yatta Escarpment. Mudanda itself is a kind of miniature version of Ayers Rock in Australia, a reddish beige uplift perhaps half a mile long, a hundred yards wide, and a hundred feet high at its highest, slanting down to 75 or 50 at its north end. We walk along it, looking for lion sign, Craig expounding on Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans’s ideas. He says he’s seen nothing so far to indicate that Tsavo lions are direct descendants of prehistoric cave lions. For that matter, there is no evidence he knows of showing that primitive lions lived in caves. Panthera leo spelaea is called spelaea because its image was found on cave walls, painted by cave men. (Homo sapiens spelaea?)

  Likewise, he says no to classifying buffalo lions as a unique breed. All lions hunt buffalo, he declares. On the Serengeti, buffalo are the main cause of death among lions. Yes, females form packs to hunt the great beasts when wildebeest and zebra are not abundant, but the job falls most often to males. He recalls one time when he observed a lioness studying a buffalo herd. After some time, she turned and gave a scolding grunt to the two pride males lounging in the shade. Time to get off your butts and bring home some bacon, she was saying, and the pair got up and commenced their stalk. (This, however, doesn’t deny that Tsavo lions are buffalo specialists.)

  No also to the assertion that Tsavo lions live in small prides. My own observations during both a dry and wet season confirm that. There was Scarface’s pride of 23, and so far on this trip, we’ve pegged 2 more prides—the Ndololo, with at least 11, and the Voi pride, another 11—and if we can take Marcus at his word, the Hatulo Bisani pride numbers 16.

  Craig does concede on two points. One is skull formation and skeletal dimensions. “They might be on to something interesting there,” he says, admitting that he isn’t well versed in matters morphological. The other is climate and elevation as the determining factors in mane growth. The Serengeti is considerably higher than Tsavo, so males there can grow big manes without paying too high a price in heat stress. Down here, besides Peyton’s thermal images, we’ve seen lions panting from heat, lying with their forepaws up on branches to aid circulation, or in shallow depressions pawed out of the ground to get at the cooler earth beneath. Yet there could be variations in Tsavo itself; the higher altitudes atop the Yatta Plateau or the Taita Hills could support greater numbers of maned males. (Tom Gnoske is in fact going to return to Tsavo soon to test that theory by running a transect from the Taita Hills, down along the Tsavo River to the Galana, then along the Galana into the low plains. It will be a scaled-back version of the aborted Tana River expedition.)

  We head back to get ready for this afternoon’s experiment. Bob has called on the radio to report that one of our quartet, Burr Boy, has separated himself from his mates at Aruba. This will give Peyton a chance to test her ideas on how a solitary male reacts to mane length in rival males. On the return drive, we spot a remarkable bird, the pintail whydah. Its forked tail, twice as long as its body, moves up and down in flight with a sinuous motion reminiscent of a dolphin’s swimming. A perfect example, says Craig, of a male ornament. The male whydah displays its tail only during breeding season, to attract females. What does it signify? Better genes, better health? Something else that appeals to the female’s sense of aesthetics?

  Marcus Russell, Blade, and Saitoti pay us a call at lunchtime. Marcus is once again voluble, a nonstop talker. After delivering another speech about Somali herdsmen poisoning lions, he tells us that he once maintained a camp where ours now is, but abandoned it because lions began to stalk his clients. Maybe he’s trying to persuade us to set up permanently at Galdessa. We firm up a date to visit his camp, and then Craig and Peyton go to prepare the dummies for their next performance.

  Just before we’re due to leave, I get into a brief but civil argument with Dennis, who doesn’t think the experiment should be performed and expects me to put a stop to it. I’ve no intention of doing anything of the sort and tell him so. Since we’re feeding him and Sarah, paying their expenses, and giving him material that will benefit his own work, he could be a little more gracious, or at least less prickly and obstructive.

  The dummies have been re-adorned as Lothario (short and blond) and Fabio (long and blond). Peyton had run this experiment seven times in Tanzania, and every time the real lion approached Lothario first, leading her to conclude that a lion sees a prominent mane as a sign of strength, a short one as a sign of weakness.

  We set up alongside Aruba lake, in the splendid light of a late East African afternoon, with a strong wind blowing. A hen plover and two chicks, each hardly bigger than a locust, peck grass seed at the shore. A sacred ibis flies low over the water, a winged spear of black and white, while a pair of hippopotamuses wallow, one giving a cavernous yawn—it looks as if you could park a Volkswagen in its jaws. In the far distance, an elephant herd files at a stately pace toward the water hole. The idyllic scene is shattered when Peyton switches on her call of hyenas on a kill. It sounds like hell’s own choir accompanied by a madhouse glee club: a demoniacal medley of groans, cackles, giggles, howls, and shrieks. As unpleasant as it is to human ears, the racket hyenas make when devouring prey is an irresistible summons to lions, telling them that there is food to be had, ready to eat. No stalking, running, springing, wrestling. Just drive the hyenas off and take the meat for yourself.

  The ghastly chorus wails for a few minutes. Burr Boy’s head appears above the berm of the Aruba dam. He starts forward boldly, but instead of finding a pack of hyenas and a more or less free meal, he sees what look like two invading males. His manner changes instantly. He approaches with utmost care, amber eyes riveted on his adversaries. A few steps, then stop and stare for three or four minutes, a few steps more, then stop and stare again, nostrils twitching to pick up a scent. Another advance. He licks his lips, signaling that he’s nervous. He crouches and creeps on, a mesmerizing sight, all that tawny muscle moving in tawny light, but I am not too impressed with leonine intelligence. I’ve seen ducks smart enough to recognize decoys from the real thing. In the Land Rover with Peyton, I whisper that even a lion ought to have figured out by now that the two creatures in front of him, scentless, motionless, and silent, are fakes.

  She points out that a confrontation with a rival male or males is the biggest event in a lion’s life; he can’t afford to be anything but extremely cautious, the consequences of rash action being so catastrophic: eviction from his pride, serious injury, even death.

  “If you were in a dark alley and some guy pointed an authentic-looking toy pistol at you and said, ‘Give me your wallet,�
�� what would you do, even if you suspected the gun was fake?”

  My hubris comes down a notch, one notch more, when I recall that slivered second last night when the dummies fooled me.

  Burr Boy is belly to the ground now, facing his adversaries. He remains motionless for 20 minutes, until dusk falls, and then pads forward ten more feet, pauses, creeps closer, pauses again, and creeps still closer, to within five yards of Lothario. He appears to have chosen the short-maned dummy to confront first, and that’s confirmed a moment later as he circles around Lothario to approach from the flank. Facing another male eyeball to eyeball is sure to provoke a fight, and Burr Boy wants to avoid that if he can.

  The experiment will be complete if he sniffs Lothario, but just as he’s about to, his nose barely three feet away, he’s attacked by a horde of gnats that so distracts him he trots off a distance and rolls in the dirt, snapping his jaws, swatting with his paws, flicking his tail. It’s good enough for Peyton and Craig. Burr Boy obviously wanted no part of Fabio. Peyton’s disappointment with the last experiment has been overcome; she’s quietly thrilled. Eight times in a row, the last time here in Tsavo, a lone male lion approached the dummy with the sparser mane first, calculating that it was the lesser of two evils. In two out of three situations, Tsavo lions have acted exactly as Serengeti lions would; insofar as behavior goes, the arrow is pointing toward a similarity, rather than a difference, between the two.

  May 24

  THE CAMPFIRE DANCES its welcome. Showered, changed into a fresh shirt, I sit beside it sipping a scotch, very happy that Peyton and I are not now slabs of road-burger or pâté in a lion’s belly. Today, we came close enough to becoming one or the other. I should have known better than to complain that lion research was often as exciting as putting up drywall. Hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer boredom, waiting for the indolent beasts to do something. This morning, I learned that the work can be otherwise.

  While our band of seekers fanned out for distant realms—Craig to the Ndara Plains with Ogeto, Bob to Aruba, Dennis and Sarah off to have a look at the Voi pride—Peyton and I stuck close to home, going in search of the Ndololo pride. Following a lightly used track that paralleled the Voi riverbed, Peyton looked for a spot where we could see for a distance, but there weren’t many such vantage points, the country a maze of brush and tamarind groves and thickets of the white-flowering shrub called Maeva triphilia. Finding a fairly good location, with a view of about a hundred yards right and left, she parked and climbed up on the roof. I handed the speaker to her, then she connected the wires, coiled around a spool in back, and got back in and put a cassette in the tape recorder. Once again, the hideous chorus of hyenas on a kill echoed across the landscape. We sat and sipped coffee from our thermos and glassed with binoculars. The noise got on my nerves. Every now and then the pack’s screeches and cackles paused, allowing one hyena to do a solo that sounded like the bellowing of a deranged cow. A hornbill lofted from a branch, and I wished I could hear its sweet, sad call. As I peered intently to the left side of the road, Peyton watched the right.

  “Ohhhhhh shit!” she shouted. “Holy shit!”

  In almost the same instant came the trumpet blasts of elephants. My head snapped round to see nine of them charging us from out of the scrub: three calves and two adolescents behind a phalanx of four matriarchs, coming on at a stiff-legged run, throwing up dust, ears flapping like barn doors in a gale, tusks glinting in the early light. Evidently, the racket had got on their nerves as well. They were a hundred yards away at most, a distance they halved in about two seconds, which was when the lead matriarch ceased trumpeting and lowered her head to let us know that the threat displays were over. This was the real thing. She came straight for us with a terrible singleness of purpose. Her tusks could easily pierce the Land Rover’s thin aluminum skin, and with a little help from her friends, maybe without it, she could overturn the vehicle and stomp on it until it looked like a flattened beer can and we looked like—well, I didn’t care to think about that. With admirable sangfroid, Peyton switched off the tape recorder and started the engine. We took off as fast as the road would allow, meaning not very fast, certainly not fast enough to suit the matriarch. We hadn’t gone far before she, followed by the rest, thundered through our parking spot. Eight of the elephants carried on, but the old girl, with astonishing agility, turned abruptly and chased us down the road. She was not about to let a good tantrum go to waste.

  Peyton stepped on the gas. The matriarch continued in hot pursuit. Finally, satisfied that we’d been well and properly seen off, she halted, and with a parting scream and a final toss of her great head, turned back to rejoin the others. The herd shambled off, now as calm as they’d been enraged—a beautiful and magisterial procession against an eastern sky going from bright orange to peach to primrose.

  After a silence, Peyton said, “I’m really scared of elephants. I’ve gotten to know lions so well that I don’t feel frightened of them. Maybe it’s a false sense of security, I don’t know, but I’m irrationally scared of elephants.”

  I assured her that in the moment just passed, her fears had been perfectly reasonable.

  We composed ourselves and doubled back to see if the hyena call had stirred any lions out of hiding. I doubted we would see a one; if the call had drawn them in, they would have been scared off by the elephant charge.

  “Stop!” I yelled.

  There, 40,50 yards away on the riverbank, posed as if for a family portrait, was the Ndololo pride, 11 altogether, but once again, all females, cubs, and subadults. Peyton turned off-road and eased toward them. We recognized the old female and the lioness with the injured hip. They were not “tourist” lions, and before Peyton could identify the others, they nervously stole away across the dry riverbed. It was steep-sided, 20 to 30 feet deep. Looking for a drift so we could cross and follow them, we drove slowly along the near side, the Land Rover lurching into and out of hidden potholes. We spotted another lioness, who was pregnant, and followed at a discreet distance.

  “Look! The males!”

  Peyton pointed ahead. They lay in the grass, two of them, both maned—sparsely, but maned nonetheless—the one black, the other blond. The lioness vanished into the brush beside the riverbed in classic Tsavo fashion—she was there and then not there—but the males stayed put for a while, allowing Peyton to count their muzzle spots and make note of their ear notches (another point of identification). Then they rose and padded away, and both were by far the best-looking males we’d seen so far, fully mature and in prime condition, with sleek, tawny gray coats, deep chests, shoulders striated with muscle. Four hundred fifty pounds, each of them. We trailed them, bumping over deadfalls concealed in the grass, and found them resettled nearby; but they moved again, crossing the Voi to dissolve into the deep scrub beyond. We found a drift and crossed the riverbed, the Land Rover in low-range four-wheel drive and canted at a 45° angle, climbing the bank on the far side.

  The black-maned lion had found a cozy bed in the shade. Peyton focused her still camera and imitated a hyena’s whoop to get him to raise his head. It was then that I recalled the ranger’s story about the big male who’d attacked the minibus; the pregnant female must have been the lioness he’d been mating with, and recalling that black-maned lions tended to be dominant, I figured the culprit was the one in front of us. I hoped he didn’t object to having his picture taken. Another whoop, but the lion didn’t cooperate. Just then, two juvenile elephants appeared, browsing under a tamarind tree only yards away, on my side of the vehicle.

  “Guess what’s going to happen in a few seconds,” I whispered.

  Sure enough, Mom hove into view, probably one of the matriarchs who’d come at us like Hannibal’s cavalry. It was simply amazing and unsettling how something so big could show up so quickly, with barely a sound. She cast an ominous stare in our direction, flapped her ears and shook her head, and we didn’t need a translator to interpret her body language. Off-road, in close country, ther
e would be no escaping a charge now. Peyton put the car in gear and we left. The lion also wanted no part of the matriarch. As he vanished into the undergrowth, we saw, through a corridor in the ranks of Maeva triphilia, eight lionesses and cubs file past, like cars crossing an intersection. Then they disappeared. The entire pride had become invisible, cloaked in the thick greenery. We pressed on for another quarter of a mile. Apparently, Peyton meant it when she said she wasn’t afraid of lions. I was. The vegetation was so thick that branches screeched against the windows. The lions could have been anywhere from three feet to a mile away, but if the testy male was hiding in one of those thickets and decided to repeat his performance with the minibus, one of us would get a paw in the face before we saw it coming. I was all for calling it quits, but didn’t want to interfere in Peyton’s research and kept my anxieties to myself.

  We entered a lovely, shady grove of tamarind, trunks rust red and polished from elephants rubbing up against them. We’d both drunk too much coffee. Peyton got out to pee and asked me to keep a lookout for lions. When she was finished, she did the same for me, but fear overcame shame and shyness and I stood pissing right beside my door. It was now past nine and already hot, and Peyton decided it was time to call it a morning. Wonderful, I thought, but didn’t say it.

  Ten minutes of slow, cautious driving (there were pits in the ground two and three feet deep) brought us back to the drift. As we started down, the right wheel banged into a ridge of dried mud, hard as curbstone. Peyton’s foot was jarred off the clutch, killing the engine. She turned the key to restart it. Not even a click. Another turn and still nothing. It was like we were in a motorless car.