Ghosts of Tsavo Read online

  In the village called Ngozo, where the woman Jesleen had lived, the men got up-to-date information on their quarry. The villagers, belonging to the Kunda tribe, told a frightening tale—the day after devouring Jesleen, the lion walked into Ngozo in broad daylight, entered Jesleen’s house, and came out with her white canvas tote bag, filled with some of her possessions. He then paraded through the village, roaring and playing with the bag as a house cat does with cat-nip. The villagers shouted, banged sticks together, and pounded on pots and pans, but the lion went on with his fun and didn’t leave until he was good and ready, carrying the bag in his jaws.

  The next day, several women went down to the Lupande River, a tributary of the Luangwa, to do the family wash. The Lupande was dry, as were most of the smaller rivers, and the women intended to do their laundry by digging until they found water. Wash day, however, would have to be put off, for they saw the lion, contentedly toying with Jesleen’s bag in the sandy riverbed. The following day, villagers cautiously approached the spot. The bag was gone, but paw prints led to its rediscovery a few hundred yards upstream. The morning after, the villagers found the bag in a new location, and then the lion reappeared with it in the middle of town, roaring once again, batting his plaything back and forth. He seemed to delight in tormenting the people with his bold, bizarre behavior. One man inadvertently came within yards of the cat as it cavorted in the riverbed. The lion paid no attention to him, obsessed with Jesleen’s bag. The village elders counseled among themselves and concluded that the bag must be bewitched to so captivate the man-eater, which they told Hosek, Buekes, and Cloete was possessed by a demon, if not a demon itself. Hosek recalled the words from The Man-Eaters of Tsavo: “Watch out, brothers! The devil is coming!” The parallels between his experience and Patterson’s 93 years before were more than a little disturbing.

  A game scout from the Luangwa Game Reserve offered some information, reporting that he’d seen the man-eater stalking through the long, golden grass near Ngozo. He confirmed that it was a male and without a mane. The scout then led the three hunters and their trackers to the Lupande to show them Jesleen’s tote bag. He pointed to it from the riverbank, but would go no farther; like the rest of the villagers, the scout was convinced that the bag was bewitched and refused to get near it. Hosek and Buekes, guns at the ready, went down into the riverbed for a look, and it was then that the American realized he was becoming “Africanized” even though he’d been on the continent less than a week. Myth and reality had become so fused he could barely distinguish between the two; as he looked at it, the white bag seemed to cast a spell over him. His blood drained from his body, congealing at this feet, his stomach dropped, and he shivered despite the 100° heat. If that was what was meant by one’s blood running cold, then, Hosek thought, “I want to keep warm forever.” His resolve and confidence deserted him, fleeing out of his mouth with each breath. He cradled his .375 Holland & Holland and wondered what had made him think that he, Wayne Hosek, an estate planner by profession, was ready for a venture like this.

  The professional hunters and the trackers were meanwhile studying the pugmarks (footprints) in the sand. Shaped like scalloped saucers, they led down the riverbed and then into the tall grass alongside. Everyone was frowning, tight-lipped, and their somber mood seemed to thicken the air itself, an atmosphere that overpowered Hosek’s thoughts and emotions except for one: fear. He asked Cloete where he thought the lion might be.

  “Could be there,” Cloete said, pointing at the shrub-shrouded riverbank a few yards away. “Could be five miles away. No telling.”

  Gilbert would not look Hosek in the eye, and Boniface and Ken wouldn’t speak to him; it was as if the trackers resented him for getting them into this. Buekes, his huge .458 Winchester at his side, gazed down at the paw prints, mesmerized. “He’s big, he’s big,” he murmured, almost to himself.

  No one yet realized that Buekes had just uttered the understatement of the year.

  The three men followed the lion’s spoor up the riverbed. Buekes and Cloete proposed laying a bait on the riverbank between a couple of mopane trees, some 50 or 60 yards from the bag, which they now called “the lion’s bag,” for it did belong to him and him alone. After studying the lay of the land, the PHs chose a site for a blind another 50 yards from the bait. That done, and with dusk approaching, everyone returned to camp for dinner. There was none of the lighthearted conviviality and small talk that marked previous meals; conversation focused on tactics and contingencies—if the lion does this, we’ll do that. When it was time to turn in, Buekes took Hosek aside and said, “Remember to follow up hard after you make your first shot,” meaning that he was not to linger even for an instant to see if the first shot had done the job; he was to chamber another round and fire immediately.

  Hosek retired to his tent, propped his rifle against a post, dropped the mosquito net over his bed, and tried to sleep. He barely noticed the night chorus of hyena whoops and elephant trumpets, of jackal laughter and a leopard’s two-toned roar, like a crosscut saw being drawn back and forth across a board. He fell asleep, woke up thinking about the lion, slept again, woke up again, and prayed. He dismissed all thoughts of backing out. He’d conferred upon himself a duty and an obligation that he could not ignore and still be able to face himself in the mirror. He dozed once more, then heard a voice outside his tent telling him it was time to wake up.

  In the morning, the trackers built a blind from bamboo poles and elephant grass cut by the villagers—their contribution to the effort. Buekes and Cloete shot a small hippo and cut off a haunch and laid it at the base of a fever tree near the riverbed and covered the haunch with branches. At half past three in the afternoon, they and Hosek entered the blind, knowing that they could not leave until the next morning. Like all cats, lions are primarily nocturnal, so there was no question of vacating the blind at night. Hosek settled in, observing that he had a clear field of fire to the bait through a corridor in the undergrowth 60 feet wide. He could see beyond to the opposite bank, where a swale of open grassland lay burnished by the afternoon light and ended in a patchwork of shrubs and thornbush.

  Nightfall in the tropics lacks the lingering twilit preambles of northern latitudes. It really does fall, suddenly, as if a shroud has dropped over the Earth. The hunters took turns on watch. Nothing happened until Hosek heard the laughter-like call of a hippo, grazing in the riverbed. He whispered a warning to Buekes and Cloete, who paid no attention until the hippo brushed against the blind and then, catching human scent, trotted noisily away. Bats flew into and out of the blind; insects buzzed, whined, hummed. Cloete saw a genet, an odd little creature with a long, striped tail and a body spotted like a leopard’s, visiting the bait, but that was all.

  The trio got a surprise in the morning, when the trackers, arriving in the Land Rover to pick them up, found fresh pugmarks only 50 feet from the blind. There were more a short distance from the bait, still more downriver around the white bag, which the lion had moved yet again. Hosek was amazed that the man-eater had come so close to the blind without his two experienced companions ever hearing or seeing it.

  A quick breakfast at camp, a morning spent hunting zebra as a kind of diversion, another strategy session over lunch. Buekes pointed out that rangers who’d attempted to kill the lion had laid baits in the Lupande; so had the Japanese hunter. The cat had his choice of dining spots. If there were only one, the chances of luring him in would be increased, so Buekes and Cloete decided to consolidate their bait with the others. They set off by vehicle, collected the baits, tied them to the rear bumper, dragged them down the riverbed past the “bewitched” carry bag to leave a trail of scent, and then placed them beside the hippo haunch to make a single pile of rancid meat. Once again, Hosek and the PHs settled into the blind at 3:30 p.m. Buekes and Cloete said they were sure that they would make contact tonight, a confidence Hosek did not share. “Is this really me doing this?” he thought, feeling as though he were watching himself in a movie.

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nbsp; The feeling of separation continued even in his sleep. His eyes were closed, his mind unconscious, and yet he’d acquired the ability to listen to every sound. He later recalled “it wasn’t a half sleep or a light sleep or any kind of sleep” he’d ever experienced. He seemed to be in two equal and opposite states at the same time—soldiers in combat know this sensation of being fully alert and fully asleep simultaneously.

  He heard a sharp crack above his head, in the low trees beside the blind. Instantly, his brain processed where the sound had come from, and it told him to move very slowly as he turned his head to the right to see through the blind’s grass walls. He made out a pair of elephant legs, only six feet away, and raising his eyes, saw the whole great bulk of the creature, standing virtually over his head as it grazed on the tree branches, breaking them off with its trunk. With utmost care, Hosek shifted his glance to the left. Crouched, motionless, Buekes was pointing the .458 straight up at the tusker’s chest. The elephant fed for several minutes, then moved on in complete silence, as if its three or four tons were without substance.

  In the morning, the trackers again returned with the Land Rover to drive the three men back to camp. Gilbert, Ken, and Boniface had disquieting news: The lion had entered the village where they’d spent the night and killed and ate a bush pig. The hunters were silent for a minute or two, musing on the lion’s astonishing ability to elude them. “This one is crafty. He’s really a crafty lion,” Buekes remarked, staring at the ground. He looked up, straight into Hosek’s eyes, and added, in a tone of mingled dread and bewilderment, “He knows what we’re doing.”

  That morning’s breakfast was as cheerful as a post-funeral supper. Frustrated, worn out from two nights of fitful sleep, Hosek realized that in this danse macabre, the lion had become the dance master, choreographing his mood and the mood of his companions—and they had yet to see him. It was as if they were dealing with a presence rather than a creature of blood, bone, and muscle, an invisible menace that was carrying each of them to a spiritual plane none had visited before. The villager elders’ belief that the lion was a demon no longer seemed like superstition.

  Later, the men again went hunting lesser game, and their sport lifted them out of their gloom and apprehension and stimulated them to devise a new strategy. Since the lion appeared to know that the blind was a trap, they would set up a new blind in a different location, with fresh bait, and leave it vacant for two days to lull the cat into a false sense of security. If the deception worked, he would return to the bait on the third day, supposing the blind to be empty, but it wouldn’t be. Buekes chose the site; it was two and a half miles from the Lupande, between two water holes where the lion had been seen drinking in the recent past, and only a few hundred feet from a small village. That could also work to the hunters’ advantage—possibly, the lion would mistake the blind for a villager’s hut.

  While driving to the new spot, Hosek, out of curiosity, asked about the elephant of the previous night.

  “That was bad,” Buekes commented, offhandedly. “If he’d caught our scent, he would have stomped us to death.”

  Hosek was unfazed by what might have happened. Nothing mattered but the lion. He was their adversary, the center of their thoughts and actions, and all else was incidental.

  Buekes made a prediction: If the ruse failed and the lion sensed their presence, he would not permit the men to see him standing still. He would be moving. Hosek would have two to three seconds to make his shot.

  “He’ll be on the move,” Buekes repeated for emphasis, and gave his client a long, penetrating look. “You’ve got to make this shot, Wayne. No matter what you think of it, make it. I’ll be ready to follow up with the .458 regardless of any follow-up by you, but make the shot.”

  “I’ll make it,” Hosek replied, and his self-assurance wasn’t faked.

  The next day, Gilbert, Boniface, and Ken built the new blind and hung a zebra haunch from a tree about 60 yards away. While the three hunters observed the work, a group of village boys hung around, asking questions. Hosek photographed them and was much affected by the eldest, a 14-year-old boy missing one arm. It had probably been cut off in some accident or other, or had been amputated as a result of gangrene. Looking at him reminded the American of all the other barefoot, diseased, and crippled children he’d seen in the Luangwa Valley. From the village boys, he learned that one of their friends, also 14, had had a narrow escape only the day before. He’d been relieving himself in the bushes near his hut when he heard something moving in the undergrowth. Without a second’s hesitation, he ran full speed for home, with the lion charging after him. Somehow, he won the race, literally slamming the door in the lion’s face. The man-eater paced around the hut, looking for a way in while the boy’s neighbors, barricaded in their houses, shouted and made noises to drive him off. The tale aroused an outrage in Hosek. It represented a subtle but important shift in the emotions that had inspired him to go after the lion in the first place. In The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, Colonel Patterson often referred to his quarry as “brutes” and “outlaws,” as if they had violated some ordinance of nature by making prey of human beings. It had seemed a strange, almost juvenile characterization—those lions, after all, were obeying the fundamental law of nature, which is survival. But now, Hosek was inclined to sympathize with Patterson. In his mind, the Man-eater of Mfuwe came to embody all the hardships and sufferings the kids had to endure. He found himself thinking of the big cat as a “foul beast,” even as evil, as if it were deliberately victimizing the weak and downtrodden.

  Hosek confessed to Buekes that he was beginning to hate the lion. The professional looked at him with bloodshot eyes and nodded to say he understood.

  The pressure on the three men mounted during the next 48 hours. Local authorities imposed a 5 p.m. curfew on an area encompassing 65 square miles. Most of the villagers obeyed, but on the way back to camp that evening, Hosek observed that some were venturing out past curfew, either out of necessity or under the illusion that the lion would not attack them. Even so, ordinary life had almost halted; the whole region was in a thrall of fear, and hundreds of people were looking to him, Buekes, and Cloete to liberate them. Hosek could almost feel their eyes on him and his guides, pleading that they succeed where others had failed.

  He barely slept that night, anticipating the moment when he would again enter the blind with his rifle. How had Patterson endured so much tension and exhaustion for nine months?

  The first 24 hours of waiting passed. The trio once more stalked other game to give themselves an emotional break, as well as to convince themselves that the lion wasn’t controlling every moment of their lives. But of course he was. They couldn’t get their minds off him. No matter where they were—in camp, in the Land Rover, out in the field—the great cat seemed to be with them, watching them. At dinner, Hosek asked Cloete what would happen if the lion decided to attack them inside the blind, a distinct possibility if he thought it was a shelter for some helpless villager.

  “There will be three guns waiting for him and he’ll be killed,” Cloete answered, matter-of-factly. Hosek would later learn that the veteran professional hunter was not as sure of himself as he pretended to be.

  They scouted the new site after sunrise. The man-eater had come to the bait, torn off a chunk of meat, and devoured it a few yards away, on a footpath leading to a nearby creek. Hosek took out his camera to snap a photo of the pugmarks. Incredibly, the shutter froze. His view through it was black. He smacked the camera with his hand and shook it but could not get it to work. Buekes and Cloete were as astonished as he, but they refused to say a word about what had happened. They, like Hosek, seemed to accept the broken camera as an omen, though of what they didn’t know. Did it mean “lights out,” and if so, lights out for whom? One of them, all of them, or their quarry?

  On the appointed day, there was no talk of the coming afternoon’s work. In the future, thinking back, Hosek would be reminded of a baseball team’s dugout when their pitcher is
throwing a no-hitter. “Don’t talk about it, don’t even think about it.” Nevertheless, he did think about it, craving relief from the pall of oppression that had settled over him, from the fear and anger that constantly competed for his attention.

  At the usual hour of half past three, he entered the blind with Buekes and Cloete. The trackers instructed the villagers to remain in their huts to avoid distracting the lion from the bait as well as to protect themselves in case Hosek merely wounded him. If that happened, Gilbert, the chief tracker, would be in charge of following his blood spoor until, in pain and fury, the lion decided to attack his pursuers—an appalling prospect, but one they had to be prepared for—or became weak enough to allow Hosek or one of the PHs to put him down for good.

  They waited in the blind, speaking in the softest undertones. An oddly lighthearted mood had descended on them, but it ended less than an hour later. Buekes raised a finger to his lips. With hand signals, he indicated he’d spotted movement in the long grass. He peered through the walls and practically kissed Hosek’s ear, whispering that the lion was circling the blind, not more than 40 feet away. All three men turned themselves into statues. The mossy cliché from the literature of big-game hunting “We dared not breathe” suddenly did not seem quite so clichéd. A new terror visited Hosek. What if he or one of the others dozed off at a critical moment and began snoring? That seemed an outlandish possibility, what with the man-eater only yards away; but, dazed from lack of sleep and the relentless heat and the assault of powerful emotions, he found himself fighting off attacks of sleep. As the brief equatorial dusk enveloped the blind, he succumbed, passing out for a sliver of a second.