Ghosts of Tsavo Read online

  The Uganda Railway was built in part to discourage the slave trade. The emissaries of civilization and enlightenment thought it would make the ivory caravans obsolete, as, in fact, it did, though not as soon as they had hoped. The railroad was laid along a major caravan trail, which crossed the Tsavo River at a point two and a half miles from that river’s confluence with the Athi. The ford was used for centuries as a rest stop by slave and ivory traders. It’s obvious why. Even today, the rush of water and the deep shade of the doum palm groves is a welcome relief from the miles of surrounding scrub and arid thornbush wilderness. It must have looked paradisal to the caravaners and their slaves, both eager to camp under the palms with fresh water running alongside. The idyllic appearance was deceptive; come nightfall, nocturnal carnivores, hyenas, leopards, and lions, would approach, ravenous, keen of eye and smell. In the morning, some of the caravan’s human cargo would be gone without a trace. Legends grew that the place was haunted by body-snatching demons.

  That history is why Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans are certain that the area around the ford had been plagued by man-eating for a very long time. The ford also happened to be where Colonel Patterson built the Tsavo River bridge. The lions must have regarded the workers’ camps, crammed with thousands of men, as a caravan that didn’t move. As we’ve seen, instances of man-eating in and around Tsavo continued after Patterson dispatched the marauding pair, right down to the present day; but they also occurred before he got there, a strong indication that man-eating was established practice, a tradition, if you will, among the region’s lions. An expedition in 1891 lost a water carrier to lions. A party traveling through Tsavo in 1896 was warned by missionaries to stay out of one area because man-eaters were present; so the group, led by an explorer named A. J. Ansorge, detoured and camped on the banks of the Tsavo River. A porter was killed and carried off by a lion. Pursued by armed men, the animal dropped its prey and the man’s body was recovered; the lion then attacked a Kamba caravan half an hour away and took one of its members. Just months before Patterson’s arrival, railway surveyor O. R. Preston lost two workers to lions and found the remains of other people killed earlier.

  As Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans rather dryly note: “For a long-lived species with a long period of infant/juvenile dependency, any regularly practiced predatory behavior can become a cultural tradition, passed down from one generation to the next. To call such behavior ‘aberrant’ may be acceptable from an anthropogenic perspective but is normal behavior for the relevant predator.”

  Several other factors conspired to turn Colonel Patterson’s nine-month stay in Tsavo into a nightmare.

  One was the burial practices, or the lack of them, followed by indigenous peoples. The Taita of the Taita Hills inter their dead in the ground, but then dig them up and leave their skulls in rock shelters; the Kamba left the bodies of “peasants and women” out in the open and even tied the mortally sick to trees to be disposed of by hyenas. Of course, hyenas were not the only carnivores that did the disposing. At any rate, corpses lying exposed provided lions with ready-to-eat meals and accustomed them to human flesh.

  Natural disasters also played a role. In 1897, a local famine caused hundreds of Kamba to die of starvation. Once again, the dead and dying were not buried, but desperate Kamba also raided, slaughtering isolated railway construction gangs to steal their food, and those bodies, some 340 all told, were left lying beside the railroad right-of-way. A smallpox epidemic in 1898 and 1899 killed thousands throughout Kenya, and the corpses provided a perpetual feast for scavenging carnivores, particularly hyenas. The plague also showed how predators habituated to eating already dead humans can turn their attentions to the living; when the epidemic abated and the ready supply of corpses ran out, hyenas started taking children at dusk and even attacked adults as they slept.

  Finally, there was livestock raising, widely practiced in Tsavo during Patterson’s time, as it is today. The Gnoske-Kerbis Peterhans study traces throughout history a pattern of lions, tigers, and leopards making a transition from domestic stock depredations, to conflict with humans (herdsmen defending their goats and cattle from lion attack), to predation on humans. Once again, the primary culprits are male lions, most commonly nomadic young males that have left their mothers and siblings to forage on their own until they’re mature enough to lead a pride.

  So, when John H. Patterson arrived in Tsavo that spring of 1898, all the preconditions leading to the development of man-eating behavior were there, waiting for him and his unfortunate coolies. Insofar as lions went, the natural world was about to give them a lesson in Murphy’s Law: Everything that could go wrong was all set to go wrong, and it did.

  “Although the human toll at Tsavo was thought to exceed 100 individuals,” the researchers’ study concludes, “it seems the total could have easily been far higher. Given the circumstances at Tsavo in the 1890’s, instead of asking how so many humans could have been dispatched, we wonder why there weren’t more.”

  The African lion is not endangered, but its range is shrinking as human populations swell and expand into its territories, building towns, transforming wild lands into farmland and cattle pasture. Tsavo, vast and austere, has been spared because it’s unsuitable for agriculture or any other kind of human development. In the future, it could become one of the lion’s last refuges.

  As the Field Museum’s Dr. Bruce Patterson put it to an interviewer: “The habitat that robbed the lion of his majestic rank, the mane, may give him something even more precious, a future.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the scientists who made this book possible: Samuel Andanje, Thomas Gnoske, Dr. Julian Kerbis Peterhans, Ogeto Muwebi, Dr. Craig Packer, Dr. Bruce Patterson, and Peyton West. Thanks also to the staff of the Kenya Wildlife Service, to Wayne Hosek, and especially to my editor, Steve Byers, for all the angst and Sturm und Drang he endured on my behalf.

  * This account is based on interviews with Wayne Hosek and on a written narrative he supplied to the author.

  * Data from the transect was analyzed in 2002. It supported the theory that climate and elevation affect mane growth. Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans found that at elevations below 1,300 feet (400 meters), most lions were poorly maned or maneless. At mid elevations (600–800 meters), manes varied from horselike dorsals to sparse neck collars. Above 3,900 feet (1,200 meters), lions had thick manes.