Ghosts of Tsavo Read online

  Our treasure hunt yesterday netted three lions—a healthy lioness and two subadults, one male, one female, who occupied an unscenic feature, an abandoned gravel pit. They were quite shy and wouldn’t allow us to approach closer than 50 yards before they moved. Finally, they pulled a Tsavo vanishing act.

  Now, with Sammy driving, Peyton, Ogeto, and I are off to try to find them again, hoping a male is with them (though Peyton speculates that the lioness is a loner who left her pride after a takeover to protect her then-young cubs from infanticide by the new resident male). In dawn twilight, retracing yesterday’s trek, we pass the strangest feature in Tsavo, the Shaitani lava beds. Shetani means “devil” in Swahili. It’s derived from the Arabic El Sheitan, the root for the English word “Satan.” Lava ridges 20 to 30 feet high run down the hillsides, with scrubby bushes sprouting from the sharp, black rocks. Lava flows, devoid of all vegetation, cover hundreds of acres, as if some mad contractor with an abundance of asphalt decided to pave the whole place over. It’s a stark, barren, unsettling thing to look at it, and the cataclysm that produced it occurred only 200 years ago, when the Earth yawned and spewed fire and smoke and molten rock, burying villages and shambas, killing untold numbers of people. It must have seemed like the end of the world to the survivors, the wrath of some malignant demon. Legends persist that the people interred beneath the lava beds can be heard on certain nights making plaintive cries. Local people steal into the park, leaving food offerings to appease the restless spirits, lest they haunt the living. Shetani is thus a kind of vast, natural religious site, accursed, yet revered. That puts me in mind of Isak Dinesen’s comment, in Out of Africa, that the African in his native creeds makes no distinctions between God and the devil; the two are one co-eternal majesty before whom man must submit. In exchange for his submission, the demon-deity allows the African to stay afloat in the continent’s treacherous waters, while the Westerner, with his divided views of good and evil, thrashes, struggles, and ultimately drowns.

  And that idea shunts my thoughts back to Matthiessen, which in turn leads me to inflict on Peyton and Ogeto my views about faith and science, about the “worshipful or religious attitude” toward nature versus the empirical. This is not the first time Peyton has heard this from me, and, though she listens patiently, I sense she’s getting a little sick of it. Then, just at sunrise, we climb a rise through a notch in the hills and are presented a sight that shuts me up, stuns us all into a reverent silence.

  Seventy-five miles away, across the oceanic expanse of the northern Serengeti plains, Kilimanjaro rises into a sinless sky. The veil of cloud that normally conceals its peak has lifted, and the snow and ice crowning the mythic mountain glimmers pale rose in the new day. Two layers of cloud, stretched for miles, obscure the middle and lower elevations, so that the summit and the slopes just below appear to rest on a gray and vaporous reef. Immediately before us, the grassy hillside flows down to the plains, sweeping away and away toward the base of the mountain and around it into what looks like eternity. To the north and northwest, more plains reach for an extinct volcano and, farther on, the foot of the Chyulu Hills. The wind blows as the wind blows at sea. The sun clears the hills behind us, and a flood tide of light washes over the dun grasslands specked with islands of acacia, and Kilimanjaro’s peak grows ever brighter, becoming a white fire burning almost four miles high. A solitary wildebeest, dark hide painted beige by the sun, wanders southward toward the dry Serengeti sea, and a Cape buffalo bull stands stock still, turned to face us, his crescent horns gleaming.

  In all the lands I’ve traveled, I’ve never seen anything anywhere to match this. Kilimanjaro towering above the African savanna, cradle of the human race. We sit on the Land Rover’s roof and look without talking for half an hour, as wonderstruck as the first explorers and missionaries who beheld ice and snow on the Equator.

  “I don’t care what happens the rest of the day,” Peyton says, breaking the silence. “There it is, looking down at us with all our little thoughts and petty insecurities. They don’t seem to mean very much.”

  We drive on, westward. A giraffe raises its head from behind a tree and ambles on, looking amid the stunted acacia like a long-necked bird amid garden shrubbery. A herd of buffalo bulls eye us cautiously from the roadside. By midmorning we’re driving through the deep forests along the Loosoito River, leopard rather than lion country, the green-barked fever trees overshadowing the river, and a crowned eagle, biggest of African eagles, perches in a branch, his crest feathers tipped in black.

  Climbing out of the river bottoms, we cross marshland and savanna, nearing the spot where we’d seen the lion trio. A fine specimen of an oryx watches us, and Peyton takes his picture—it’s the first one she’s seen in the wild, three years in Africa notwithstanding. Turning off the road onto a faint two-track bordering another river, we continue the hunt, though again the tamarind and fever trees spell leopard. A great pod of hippopotamuses allow us to get incredibly close; one, lumbering out of the wallows, almost bumps the Land Rover. We push on, the track growing ever fainter, and suddenly the right wheel plunges into a hidden pothole, damn near a crater, the vehicle stopping as if it’s struck a wall, my forehead meeting the rearview mirror with no damage to either. I swing my door open to see what sort of fix we’re in now.

  “Python!” shouts Ogeto from the backseat.

  A second later, I see the grass moving as the huge serpent writhes away, but I never see it. Must remember you’re in bloody Africa, Phil, where getting out of a car can have unpleasant consequences.

  Sammy throws the Land Rover into low range and manages to extricate us. As we head back for camp, Peyton is in high spirits.

  “Damn!” she says. “This is typical of Africa. Just when you feel that you’ve had enough of it and the bush and you can’t wait to get home again, you have a day like this and feel like you don’t ever want to leave.”

  I ask her if the expedition has been worthwhile. She nods and ticks off what it’s accomplished. Before coming to Tsavo, she had only one statistically significant story out of the dummy tests—that males are scared of larger-maned opponents. Here, in the test with Burr Boy at Aruba, she added an eighth example to the seven she’d obtained in Tanzania. Now that was a really strong result. Then she tested the effect of color. Before, she had no real story with color, merely strong hints that females preferred dark-maned males. In the Serengeti, she’d done only two color tests involving males. In Tsavo, she’d added two more, so now she had four cases that males avoid adversaries with black manes. That by itself, she continues, isn’t significant, but when added to the data from her tests with females, it gives her a story.

  She sees how I react to this recitation of statistically significant facts and regards me for a moment.

  “Phil, scientists don’t want to demystify nature,” she says. “We want just to clarify what the real mysteries are.”

  That strikes me as a wise statement; still, I feel divided, half of me hungry for scientific truth, the other half seeking to embrace the mythic. It occurs to me that I haven’t come close to solving the mystery of Tsavo’s lions, probably because my heart hasn’t been in it.

  June 6—Nairobi

  DURING OUR TIME in Tsavo, one name came up again and again. If you want to hear about Tsavo lions, talk to Brian Heath. Brian will tell you, Brian knows: He’s killed 500 of them. Talking to Heath was a piece of unfinished research business, so Peyton got hold of him when we returned here and arranged to have dinner with him.

  She taxis from Karen, where she’s staying with a friend of Craig’s, and meets me in the lobby of the Norfolk, where we wait for Brian. He shows up 15 minutes later. A little above average height, stockily built, with fine, light brown hair and pale eyes, he’s a soft-spoken man of 51 who neither looks nor acts like what you’d expect a formidable lion-killer to look and act like. No Hemingwayesque swagger, no boasting. He could be an accountant. Raised in Kenya, the son of up-country farmers, his main love has been wildlife, al
though, he adds with a vague smile, “you wouldn’t think it.”

  We proceed to the Tamarind, a seafood restaurant downtown, and Kenya’s ailing tourist industry is immediately apparent. We’re the only customers and waiters flock to us. After we’re seated, Brian tells us something else we never would have thought: Years ago, he worked for George and Joy Adamson, of Born Free fame, so no one can accuse him of being a man who enjoys shooting wild animals. It was his job, he says as drinks are brought. For 20 years, he worked for the Galana Ranch, which sprawls over 1.6 million acres east of Tsavo National Park, first as its game manager, later as its general manager. One of Brian’s duties was eliminating lions that wandered out of Tsavo onto the ranch and began killing livestock. His career total isn’t 500, but closer to 400 (which is still an awful lot of lions). He estimates that 300 were males in their prime—8 to 9 years old—and of those he can count the ones with manes on one hand.

  This slaughter came about, ironically enough, as a result of the hunting ban instituted in Kenya in 1977. When the Galana began operations in the 1960s, it domesticated wild herd animals like oryx, eland, and buffalo for sale as meat. With its vast size, the ranch also supported a hunting concession, which brought in considerable revenue from trophy hunters. After the ban, the Galana stopped raising oryx and eland and other hoofed animals because there was no way to distinguish their meat from the meat of beef cattle. With the departure of professional hunting guides, who helped police the enterprise, Somali poachers moved in, killing elephant for ivory, rhino for their horns. By the mid-1980s, according to Brian, the Galana’s elephant herd of 6,000 had been reduced to a few hundred, its 200 rhinoceroses wiped out.

  “Since the ban, there’s been a 50 percent decline in Kenya’s wildlife populations. The ban, which was put into effect to enhance Kenya’s image among certain international conservation organizations, has had absolutely no positive effect on wildlife here.”

  This is an argument Peyton has heard before, and, as if sensing that she might disagree, Brian regards her for a moment, inviting her to offer her opinions. She declines, and Brian continues.

  “Ken Clark was a ranch employee who tried to run photographic safaris on the property, but he found himself spending most of his time as a one-man anti-poaching unit. One night, on patrol with his tracker, he came upon two dead rhino with their horns removed. Driving farther on, he encountered a gang of shifta as they were cutting off the horn of a third rhino they’d shot just minutes before. Clark engaged them in a gun battle and killed three and then jumped back in his vehicle to pursue the rest of the gang, but they laid an ambush for him up the road and killed him instantly.”

  In the meantime, the consortium that owned the ranch turned to raising domestic cattle and was fairly successful at it. Nomadic lions, however, were killing an average of 250 to 300 head per year, that is, roughly one percent of its herd. That’s where Brian was called in.

  “The lions were wary of people because they’d been dealing with pastoralists for centuries, the Oromo people, herdsmen from the Tana River area who had hunted them with spears because they were a threat to their cattle.”

  The first course came and went, the main arrived, with a bottle of South African white. Brian made a few observations about his quarry.

  “I found that the lions knew they were doing wrong when they killed a cow. When a lion kills a wild animal, it eats on the spot, then lays up near the carcass until it’s hungry again and eats more. But a cattle killer will eat as much as it can and then leave, walking as far as ten kilometers, looking for a safe place to hide. You can see by the tracks that it inspects this bush and then that bush”—Brian mimics a lion peering into bushes—“until it finds the one it wants, usually the biggest bush around because it knows a man will be coming after it. If it isn’t found, it will return to the kill to feed again.”

  He used two methods to kill them. In the one, he and a tracker would cover the cow carcass to keep vultures off and tie it to a tree. In the early evening, they would return and set up a blind 25 to 30 yards away. Any closer, they’d learned, and the lions would become aware of their presence, coming right up to the blind to sniff it and then roar to warn the men off (echoes here of Wayne Hosek’s saga). Armed with a scoped .375 Holland & Holland and a spotlight, Brian and the tracker would wait. Almost every time, the lion or lions would show up around nine or ten at night. The tracker would switch on the light, freezing the marauders just long enough for Brian to shoot them. He says he didn’t like this method if there were more than two lions.

  “I could kill two easily, but it was difficult to kill three in such a short time, and if one survived, he became smarter and much more difficult to track down. And if you wounded him, you had real trouble.” He pauses, then adds in his understated, laconic way, “You don’t want to botch it. It’s very important to get your lion the first time.”

  Brian wounded only a handful of lions in those 20 years, often when he had to get off a snap shot at a running target. Killing it then required icy nerve and courage, pushing into thick scrub to shoot the beast at point-blank range. In those instances, he exchanged his .375 for a .458, a gun capable of dropping an elephant.

  The second method was the one he preferred.

  “We would find the carcass and then track the lion in the morning to wherever he’d gone to sleep. We would follow the tracks for anywhere from two to six hours, and we could always tell where the lion was looking for a place to sleep because we could see the tracks meandering from one bush to another. When we got to the one he’d picked, we’d shoot him when he was asleep, before he knew what was happening.”

  Not very sporting, but recall that Brian did this for a living.

  He pooh-poohs the myth of the ferocious, ever-dangerous king of beasts.

  “In killing over 400 lions at Galana, I never once had a close shave. An unwounded lion isn’t dangerous. I’ve seen Oromo herdsmen utterly fearless in the presence of lions, seen ’em track the lions into the bush and then part the branches to see where they were, staring right at them, face to face. The lion would do nothing or run away.”

  His close shaves came in the 1990s, when the Kenya Wildlife Service contracted him to kill lions that had been translocated to the Aberdares, where no lions had ever been before. The experiment was a disaster, as such experiments often are. The introduced lions went out of control, annihilating bongo and other indigenous animals, terrorizing tourists, two of whom were killed (indicating, I thought, that unwounded lions could be damned dangerous). Working in 6-week stretches, Brian went on a jihad against the offenders, and in 3 years reduced the lion population from 50 to a manageable 15.

  “One time, with a KWS ranger, we saw two lions sunning themselves and I shot both dead. A third jumped, and she was hit by the ranger. He’d wounded her, but his gun jammed. The lioness vanished in thick bush and we went in after her, the ranger still trying to free the gun jam. Right ahead of us, we heard a very loud growl and she sprang at the ranger. He turned and ran and I shot her, almost literally off his back. She wasn’t three, four yards from him when I killed her.”

  Dessert and espresso come to the table while Brian tries to think of another close call.

  “Oh, yeah. There was another time when I shot and wounded a large male. A running shot at a hundred yards. The guy I was with and I spent five hours crawling on our hands and knees through the scrub, following the blood spoor. Our nerves were ragged.” He describes this so phlegmatically that I wonder if he has any nerves to get ragged. “We took a break, then went back in. The lion had found the thickest bush he could hide in, and the guy I was with spotted it only two yards away. We’d sneaked up behind it, you see. As the guy pointed at it, the lion whirled around and growled and I shot it. We then called it a day. We’d had enough.”

  I ask about the lions of Tsavo. Does he think they’re somehow a different breed of cat?

  “Game is scarce there and the lions lead a hard life,” he replies, echoing Marcus Russe
ll, Iain Allan, and others. “Groups of males get together to kill big prey like giraffe and Cape buffalo because they can live off it for days.”

  And did tackling big prey make them more prone to injury and so more prone to turn man-eater?

  He shrugs, saying that in all his 20 years at Galana, he knew of only two cases of unwounded lions attacking people, and both instances were nothing like the terrifying, cunning raids of the man-eaters of Tsavo. In the first, an old, starving lioness with worn teeth jumped a ranch hand and clamped her jaws on his throat, but failed to kill him before she was driven off by his friends. He died two days later of septicemia from the bite. The second case was not without an element of black humor. A herdsman was charged, again by an aging lioness. He drew his knife to battle her hand to hand, but when she knocked him down, he accidentally stabbed himself in his femural artery and bled to death from the partly self-inflicted wound. His companion killed the lioness with a spear.

  I pay the tab and the maiître d’ calls a cab for us. Standing outside waiting for it at ten at night in downtown Nairobi may be the most dangerous thing Peyton and I have done on this trip. On the way back to the Norfolk, where Brian has parked his car, he laments the fate of the Galana Ranch.

  “The whole place has gone to seed. The roads are overgrown, buildings crumbling, machinery gone to rust. There’s about 4,000 head of cattle still on it, but it’s mostly gone back to bush, and the Oromo, the original inhabitants, have moved back in and are now poisoning the lions that raid their livestock.” He pauses and again echoes Marcus. “When you poison, you kill indiscriminately. Hyenas, jackals, and vultures die along with lions. That’s why you see few vultures in Tsavo. Thirty years ago, there were tons of vultures there.” He pauses again. “When it all ended at Galana, it was a huge blow to me because I’d invested my life in it.”