Ghosts of Tsavo Read online

  “Ohhhh, shit,” Peyton said. That was becoming the watchword of the day.

  We tried the lights. They didn’t work. Peyton turned on the radio to tell our companions about our predicament, assuming the VHF could reach them. No matter. The radio didn’t work.

  “That bump must’ve knocked a battery cable loose,” she speculated.

  We had a stalled car on a steep incline deep in the bush, with a herd of temperamental elephants and a pride of 14 lions close by. I didn’t relish climbing out to check the battery, but relished much less the idea of walking over four miles back to camp.

  “Okay, pop the hood hatch and I’ll have a look,” I said.

  “It’s under your seat.”

  We got out and pulled off the seat. Everything had been direct-wired to the battery—the GPS, the electronic altimeter, and the radio, along with several other gizmos, and I looked down at a linguini of wires. After detaching them and the cables, we cleaned the battery posts and reattached everything and again tried to start the car. The silence told us that a long, hot, dangerous hike was probably in our immediate future. Wishing to avoid that with all my heart, I looked down the riverbank, which formed a ramp some 60 to 75 feet long to the riverbed. I made a suggestion: While I dug out the ridge blocking the right wheel, Peyton would stay in the driver’s seat, keeping a lookout for lions, elephants, or any other dangerous wildlife. I would then push the Land Rover, and, as it rolled downhill, she would try to jump-start the engine.

  I untied the shovel from the roof rack, took a long, careful look around, and got to work. Ten minutes and a gallon of sweat later, we were ready to try. I got behind the vehicle and pushed with all my strength. The Land Rover wouldn’t budge. More shovel work followed, with Peyton lending a hand by chopping at the ridge with the jack handle (although I would have preferred she stick to her sentry duties). I tried once more, really putting my shoulder to it. How heavy was a Land Rover anyway? It was as if I were trying to push a semitrailer.

  “Parking brake off?” I called.

  She said it was, and then suggested that she get out and help me push. I pointed out that if the vehicle ran away on us, we would lose our only chance to get it started again; so I pushed a third time and maybe got two inches of forward motion out of it. Peyton joined me, stating that the incline didn’t look too steep; if we left both doors open, we could jump in as the car rolled gently down, and then she would try the jump start. She could not have weighed more than 115 or 120 pounds, but she was stronger than she looked, because, with her shoving on the right side and me on the left, the stubborn thing started to roll. We’d misjudged the degree of incline, however. The Land Rover sped toward the river bottom, both of us dashing after it. I made quite the hero of myself by tripping and falling when my sandal wedged into an exposed tree root. Just as I hit dirt, I heard Peyton hoot like a cowgirl and glimpsed her leaping onto the running board and swinging herself inside. The vehicle bounced into the riverbed. A lovely puff of oily smoke burst from the tailpipe, and I heard the still lovelier rattle of a running diesel.

  “You are quite the young lady,” I said when I got back in.

  “Major bush girl.” She flexed a bicep, then graciously added, “But it was a team effort,” then let out a laugh. “That was just totally awesome!”

  There is nothing so stimulating as to be shot at without effect, Winston Churchill had written while covering the Boer War. Tsavo had just shot at us without effect, and Peyton was stimulated. I wasn’t—deeply relieved, rather. I guess that’s one of the differences between being 32 and 59.

  May 25

  BABY HUEY HAS somehow won Melinda over from Burr Boy. The pair are mating on the berm of the Aruba dam. Lion mating is lascivious, quick, and savage, each copulation lasting but a few seconds and ending with jaw-snapping snarls from the female. Male lions have a barb on their penis, which is thought to stimulate ovulation but which apparently hurts the lioness. Baby Huey dismounts and lies down beside her. The loving couple stare out into space for a while, then Melinda crouches, her tail raised, and Baby Huey mounts her again, with swift thrusts. She grunts and snarls once more and tries to bite him, but he leaps away at the last second. This is to human love as ripping out a wildebeest’s windpipe is to fine dining. As the couple rest from their reproductive labors, Meathead, some hundred yards away, is engaged in a drama with four buffalo bulls, guardians of a herd 200 strong. The bulls are not pleased to have five lions so near (Burr Boy and Fur Boy are also in the vicinity), and advance on Meathead at a slow, deliberate pace. Instead of slinking away, the lion stands his ground and gives the buffalo what for with two rumbling roars. The bulls halt, as if surprised by his temerity. A Mexican standoff ensues, the golden lion bravely—or stupidly—confronting four sets of massive horns backed up by a total of, say, 5,000 or 6,000 pounds of muscle and bone. After a minute of silent staring, Meathead advances on the bulls and roars again, as if to tell them that he meant what he said the first time. The buffalos turn and trot off, but seem to think there’s something wrong with that picture, and turn again to once more plod toward the lion. Finally, he backs off, though he doesn’t flee—merely makes a graceful retreat. What else from the king of beasts?

  While this goes on, Baby Huey and Melinda have at it again. They could not care less about the buffalo, driven by a sexual imperative that leaves no room for distraction. You could say that when lions make love, they don’t take calls.

  Off to the right, Fur Boy leaps at Burr Boy, cuffing him. Burr Boy ambles away, and the younger lion chases him, making as if to bite him.

  “He’s play fighting,” says Craig as we observe. “I would have thought he’s too old for that.”

  Burr Boy certainly is, wants no part of Fur Boy’s antics, and swats at him angrily.

  Watching this, Craig begins to spin a hypothesis, which can be considered nothing more than a scientist’s yarn.

  Tsavo, he says, is a lot like Kruger in South Africa, a harsh, penurious environment. Lions in Kruger take far longer to grow up than do lions in the Serengeti. They attain full body size at the same rate, but males spend several years in nomadic bachelorhood, killing and eating buffalo, before they’re ready to assume leadership of a pride. On the Serengeti, where food is plentiful and the climate more temperate, the bachelor period is much shorter.

  Conditions in Tsavo, he goes on, are even tougher than in Kruger. It’s a hardscrabble place. Possibly, Tsavo males take even longer to grow up, and aren’t growing manes even though they’ve attained the physiques of mature lions. In other words, superannuated adolescents. The maned males we’ve seen or heard about very possibly didn’t sprout them until they were well on in years, and then the hot climate probably limited their growth.

  “It could be that conditions here are such that they won’t allow lions to express what’s in them genetically until they’re older.”

  The other possibility is the more exciting: Tsavo lions really are genetically different, though not, Craig hastens to add, so different as to constitute a distinct subspecies. The best way to resolve that would be to capture male cubs from Tsavo, Kruger, and the Serengeti, then raise them in captivity under identical conditions. If all grew manes at roughly the same rate, that would indicate that tough environments account for manelessness; if not, then we would have evidence suggesting genetic variation.

  I listen out of one ear, reluctant to allow the theorizing to detract from the magic of the scene: the fish eagle soaring on the thermals above Aruba lake, the two lions mating, the young lion cavorting with his older brother or friend, the fifth staring down the bull buffalo, the herd milling behind them out on the savanna in the morning sun.

  A short drive northward brings us to the second female, whom we call Granny because she’s old, her teeth rounded down to nubbins. She’s resting in thornbush shade after gnawing at an eland, its gutted, bloated, fly-covered carcass nearby.

  “Know what’s needed in Tsavo?” Craig asks rhetorically. “A two- to three-year
study. We define the lion by its mane, but here they don’t have them, but there are a lot of things of interest besides manes. Human-animal conflict on the park borders, the whole basic ecology of Tsavo. A lion census too. What they eat, what their ranges are. No one knows any of that for sure.”

  But Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans had already tried that, and park regulations prohibited them from completing their work.

  May 28

  CLOUDS LYING LOW on the eastern rim of the world part to form what looks like the door to a furnace, or perhaps the mouth of a huge cauldron, filled with molten gold: the biblical refiner’s fire.

  With Sammy at the wheel, Ogeto and I search for the Aruba pride, if six lions can be called a pride, but find no sign of them. From the branch of a leafless tree, a pale chanting goshawk surveys the plains for prey. We wander northward, following buffalo signs, in the hopes the lions have been trailing the herd. It’s all MMBA again, Ogeto and I passing the time with small talk. He’s 37, a warm, quiet, thoughtful man who is never happier than when picking up old bones. Buffalo bones, lion skulls, femurs of gazelle. Though his English is excellent, it’s hard to understand what he’s saying, his voice is so subdued. I constantly have to cock an ear, like some half-deaf geezer, and ask, “What’s that again?”

  I am delighted to have captured wonderful shots of a lilac-breasted roller yesterday—the gorgeous bird was very cooperative, remaining still while I got close enough with my 105-millimeter lens. Dennis and Sarah have left, which delights me further. Yesterday, learning from Verity that our food bill was rising because so much was being consumed, I had to cut off their mess privileges. Later, I caught Dennis asking Sammy to go into the town of Voi to fill up his jerry cans with gas and informed him that Sammy was my driver and not his servant. Finally, Dennis apparently got into another disagreement with Peyton and Craig about another experiment involving the dummy lions—he objects because it involves too much off-road driving, which he seems to think is his right alone. Whatever happened, Peyton was upset, furious actually. She takes her work very seriously, and, by her lights, Dennis is not only obstructive, but a dilettante, playing at science. I empathized. She feels toward him what I feel whenever I’m forced into contact with phony wanna-be writers who have a great story to tell, if only they could find the time, and would I please look at what they’ve done so far and offer some advice? It was my task to serve the eviction papers, but I hadn’t spoken more than two or three words before Sarah took the cue and volunteered that they leave. I have begun to like her, a Scottish schoolteacher who quit to join Dennis in Africa, perhaps because she loved him, perhaps to put some adventure in her life, perhaps for both reasons, and I would not have been unhappy if she stayed. But where Dennis went, she went. The camp is a much happier place now, the oppressive cloud of mutual resentment lifted.

  Returning there, I call Leslie on the satellite phone. I left home more than two weeks ago, and though I’m an experienced nomad, accustomed to loneliness (at last count, I’ve lived, worked, traveled, and fought and covered wars in 48 countries on 4 continents), I miss her terribly; miss her face with morning light on it, and little domestic chores like making coffee and feeding Sage and our cat, Ditto: all the joys of the hearth.

  I’m old enough to remember wall phones, with their wooden boxes and brass bells and black Bakelite mouthpieces and earpieces: back in the late 1940s, we had them in the cabins we rented in northern Wisconsin, where my machinist father serviced canning factories. We were on a party line, with each party assigned a specific ring. Ours, if I remember right, was two shorts and a long.

  Being able to call Connecticut from the African wilds therefore strikes me as close to miraculous. It’s also expensive, sat-phone rates running about $8 a minute. The conversation is consequently brief, and the news from home isn’t good. My 85-year-old mother, suffering from vascular dementia for the past two years, was hospitalized two days ago with internal bleeding; stomach cancer has been diagnosed. Dementia’s symptoms are almost identical to those of Alzheimer’s: a slow, relentless destruction of the victim’s personality. It’s death by inches, death on the installment plan; everything that makes my mother who she is has been vanishing week by week, but her heart and lungs and kidneys and liver have not quit. She’s a living shell of herself, outside of time, lost in some inner world of childhood memories but unable to recall what happened five minutes ago and, sometimes, to recognize familiar faces, confusing me with one of her deceased brothers. Once she thought I was her father. The only saving grace is that she’s unaware of what’s happening to her. Her condition is hardest on my father, my sister, and me. Knowing that there isn’t a damn thing we can do to arrest, much less reverse, it, I’ve been praying that she die without suffering. Now, it seems that simple request won’t be granted. Stomach cancer, from what I know of it, is an agonizing death.

  Leslie assures me that the doctors will keep her out of pain, which is to say they’ll pump her full of drugs that will doubtless thicken the fog in her mind, making it impenetrable. No, there’s no need for me to rush home, Leslie says. The cancer isn’t going to be treated; at this stage, there would be no point to chemotherapy, radiation, operations. My mother is back home, under the care of the home health worker who’s been living with her and my father for more than a year. I am grateful that she isn’t in a nursing home; still, a shroud of gloom drops over me when I hang up. Now, I silently pray that my mother will die before the cancer gets to her.

  For some reason, a scene from my early childhood springs up from whatever vault it’s been buried in. It’s the summer of 1945, and we are living in one of those Wisconsin cabins, near a town called Chetek, on the Minnesota border. My father is off making his rounds of the canneries. My mother takes me in one hand and my two-year-old sister in the other for a short walk to a nearby general store to buy me a toy train. She’s wearing beige shorts and her chestnut hair is long and wavy, in the style of the 1940s. She looks utterly beautiful (and she was) as we walk a dirt road along a northern lake ringed by tall pine trees. That’s all I remember besides the train, its cars, caboose, and engine carved out of wood and painted in vivid primary colors. My mother would have been 30 years old then, younger than Peyton is now. Thirty. That somehow seems impossible, as that time when the war with Germany was won and the war with Japan still was on, when swing bands played on the radio and we lived in a cabin in the woods without indoor plumbing and with a crank-up wall phone, two shorts and a long ring, seems so distant that I can’t believe I lived in it.

  My thoughts inevitably turn to my own age—I will be 60 in two weeks, 60—and to my mortality. I was lucky to have come to terms with death in my early 20s—“Any day aboveground is a good day,” we used to say in Vietnam—but the prospect of dying young and violently possesses a certain romanticism that mitigates its horror, and there is always the hope that you’ll dodge the bullet and go on, which makes confronting that sort of death altogether different from facing old age and inevitable extinction.

  Last year, I became friends with a bush pilot, Heather Stewart, who flies a single-engine Cessna solo into southern Sudan four to five days a week, delivering food and medicine to victims of the civil war. Heather doesn’t give a thought to her age; sometimes, it seems as if she doesn’t even know she’s a 60-year-old grandmother. It’s paradoxical that here in Africa, where so many are dying daily in its terrible wars or from an army of diseases conquered long ago in the West, where prey animals fall to the fangs and claws of predators and the foul odor of rotting carcasses is borne on the wind, that I too have lost awareness of my age and haven’t dwelled on thoughts of death. In fact, I’ve felt younger than I do at home. Peyton seems like my contemporary rather than a woman who could be my daughter. I mentioned this to her the other day, and she commented that Africa is so dangerous that no one thinks about getting old or dying of old age. “Out here,” she said, “everyone’s the same age. You could go at any second.”

  This morning, while I was out with O
geto, she and Craig spotted the pair of Ndololo males again and tracked them a long way before losing them in the Kanderi swamp, within a mile of camp. The striking lions didn’t deserve the kind of charmingly condescending nicknames we’d given to the Aruba band (there was something juvenile and goofy about them), so we decided to call the black-maned lion Othello, the blond one Prince Hal. Peyton wanted to run another experiment with the dummies by dressing one with a long, dark wig, the other with a blond. Her work in Tanzania, involving two tests with differently colored manes, had given her strong hints that when threatened by invaders with dark and light manes, male lions choose to attack the latter. Two days ago, out at Aruba, she and Craig tried the experiment on Burr Boy and company, and they followed the Serengeti script, reinforcing her assumption that a black mane is a sign of strength, light of weakness. Othello and Prince Hal will provide ideal subjects to test the theory one more time in Tsavo, if we can call them up. They’ve shown themselves to be more wary, more “wild,” and less tolerant of human presence than other lions.

  Two hours before dusk, we set off into the Kanderi, Craig and Peyton in their Land Rover, Bob and Ogeto in another vehicle, I in the third driven by Sammy. Fabio and Julio are placed in the usual way, side by side, with 20-odd feet separating them. We park twice as far from them as we normally do to avoid alarming Othello and Prince Hal. A female lion’s roar blasts through the speaker. We wait. One the third try, the two males materialize; it’s as though the recording were an incantation, summoning up spirits. The lions stalk up from behind us in total silence, necks as big around as medium-size tree trunks, backs curved gracefully, thigh and shoulder muscles rippling beneath glossy, gray-brown coats. Spotting Fabio and Julio, they slant well off to the side. Their eyes are studies in concentration. Using every bit of cover and concealment they can find—the most highly trained Army rangers could not have matched them—they slip through the brush without a rustle, disappearing, reappearing, disappearing again. Every movement is sure and purposeful. The word that springs to mind is “professionals.” These two are the experienced masters of their pride and territory, and they inspire only awe and admiration.