Ghosts of Tsavo Read online

  I couldn’t say it was a philosophy I opposed. By definition, a wilderness should be a wild place, not an open-air laboratory. Still, I was a little disappointed that the Field Museum team, better than halfway through the project, did not know as much as I’d hoped they would. The difference between science and journalism, I suppose: The former is patient, the latter anything but.

  My disappointment, however, was leavened with some excitement about a novel idea that Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans were developing independent of Patterson. Their conjecture—it was too nascent to be called a hypothesis, much less a theory—took the possibility of genetic variation a step further. Tsavo lions could be a feline “missing link” between modern lions and the unmaned cave lions of the Pleistocene (Panthera leo spelaea), which went extinct somewhere between 8,000 and 25,000 years ago. Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans were suggesting that Panthera leo is the most evolved of the species—the latest model, so to speak—whereas certain morphological differences in Tsavo lions indicate that they are closest to the primitive ancestor of all lions. If they were right, then the commonly held belief that all African lions belong to the same species would be disproved. The continent would be home to two distinct breeds of cat, the modern lion of the plains and a lion that is something close to a living fossil.

  Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans weren’t ready to go public with their, well, let’s call it a hypothesis. Further work would be needed, much of it involving measurements of lion skulls and other such morphological matters; but they promised that they soon would have the data to support it. The idea struck me as not totally outlandish: Geneticists studying African elephants, I’d learned, were on the verge of declaring that the continent’s reclusive forest elephants were as distinct from the herds that roam the savannas as lions are from leopards. Two separate species of elephant, why not two species of lion? Anyhow, I found the unorthodoxy of Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans’s research appealing. The romantic in me cast them as renegades, running off the scientific reservation on a quest that would either lead to a startling new discovery or to ridicule by their peers.

  I was particularly captivated by how their idea related to man-eating among lions.

  Conflict between humans and big cats is one of the fields Kerbis Peterhans specializes in. It’s almost axiomatic among naturalists and scientists that lions turn to man-eating only when injuries or old age prevents them from pursuing their normal prey. However, a colleague of the two researchers had come up with tantalizing hints that there may be some lions with a predisposition to prey on humans, even when strong and healthy enough to bring down a zebra or buffalo. The explanation for this behavior would then subtly but significantly shift from the pathological to the Darwinian: Conditions in a lion’s environment, as much as changes in its physiology, can drive it to hunt people.

  Still, such a beast poses a mystery, and the key to that mystery may be found in the lions of Tsavo. Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans seconded some of Iain’s observations. Tsavo males, in addition to absent or abbreviated manes, are distinguished from male plains lions by their size. The latter average three feet at the shoulder and weigh between 385 and 410 pounds; the former are up to a foot taller and can tip the scales at about 460 to 520 pounds, giving you a cat the size of a small grizzly bear. Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans said there are reasons for the Tsavo lion’s greater bulk: thin prey base and smaller prides. Males share in the hunting and may do most of it, not only because they lack sufficiently large harems but also because the predominant herd animal in Tsavo is the Cape buffalo. One of the largest, strongest, meanest creatures on Earth, the Cape buffalo grows up to 1,800 pounds and is armed with curved horns like sharpened concrete. As many as half a dozen lionesses would be required to bring down a mature buffalo, and a couple of them would most likely be killed or badly injured in the process. That’s why, said Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans, Tsavo’s males are such bruisers; their massive shoulders and fore-bodies are suited to grappling with prey that weighs as much as a small car.

  Even so, they stand a good chance of suffering a broken jaw or some other serious wound. It’s true that plains lions also prey on buffalo, but they generally don’t have to, what with zebra and wildebeest herds in such abundance. Tsavo lions don’t have that choice. Fighting with buffalo much more often than their Serengeti counterparts, they are that much more likely to get hurt, and therefore more likely to go after domestic cattle and people as a result of injuries incurred. That fits in with prevailing explanations, but with this twist: A lion that becomes a man-eater because it’s injured doesn’t go back to its traditional prey even after it recovers. It has discovered, Gnoske told me in a phone interview, that eating people “is an easy way to make a living.”

  Interestingly, one of the Tsavo man-eaters had a severely broken canine tooth with an exposed root. The tooth was well worn and polished, and the entire skull had undergone “cranial remodeling” in response to the trauma, indicating that the injury was an old one. Colonel Patterson’s book and Miller’s The Lunatic Express record that at least one man-eater had been prowling about Tsavo before Patterson arrived with his bridge-building gangs, in April 1898. A railroad surveyor, O. R. Preston, lost several members of his crew to a man-eater near the Tsavo River early in 1897. When Preston and his men searched for remains, they found the skulls and bones of individuals who had been killed earlier. There is no proof that an injury was the lion’s “motive” for turning man-eater, but it’s a plausible explanation. He might have been kicked in the jaw by a buffalo and lost a tooth and stuck to preying on humans after the injury healed, having found out how safe and convenient it was. The arrival of the railroad workers, packed into tent camps, must have struck him as manna from leonine heaven.

  But what about his partner, who was in prime health? The researchers speculated that an epidemic of rinderpest disease, a deadly virus that attacks cattle, may have played a role. In the early 1890s, the disease, likely to have been spread by cattle imported from India, all but wiped out domestic cattle and buffalo in parts of East Africa. With its usual prey eliminated, the starving lion had to look to villages and construction camps.

  Another, more disquieting explanation lay elsewhere, with the elephants of Tsavo. Slaughtering them for their ivory is a very old story, going back as far as ancient times. Caravans once passed through Tsavo laden with tusks. They carried other “goods” as well: slaves who’d been captured in the interior for sale in the slave markets of Zanzibar and the Swahili coast.

  Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans’s colleague, Chap Kusimba, grew up in Kenya with the story of the man-eaters and Colonel Patterson’s epic hunt for them. Kusimba, whose specialty is ancient Swahili cultures, studied the traditional caravan routes and learned that the Tsavo River was an important stop where the traders rested their camels, refreshed themselves, and restocked their water supplies before moving on. However, Kusimba believes they disposed of unnecessary cargo—captives too sick or weak to travel farther—first, abandoning them to die.

  Spinning off from that, Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans wove another thread into their tapestry of assumptions. With so many corpses around, scavengers in the vicinity had an abundance to feed on. The scavenging most likely started with hyenas and then was taken up by lions. From there, it wasn’t a big step for the cats to go after living people. That possibly explains the myths about “evil spirits” the men who mysteriously disappeared from the caravans’ campsites had been seized not by devils but by lions. The slave and ivory caravans had passed through Tsavo for centuries, and that leads to the disturbing aspect of the theory. The lion is a social animal, capable of adopting cultural traditions that are passed on from generation to generation. If a lioness is hunting people, her young will grow to regard them as a normal part of their diet and pass that knowledge on to their young. The upshot is that Patterson’s man-eaters may have done what they did not because they were handicapped by injuries or because their traditional prey had been wiped out, but because they came from a man
-eating lineage so long that an appetite for human flesh was ingrained in them. Stalking and devouring the paragon of animals wasn’t the exception, but the rule.

  Hypotheses and theories require verification through the process that’s known as peer review: A researcher’s assertions must be tested and examined by other scientists before they are accepted as true. Confirming evidence from amateurs, no matter how knowledgeable or gifted, is generally dismissed, but in support of Gnoske, Kerbis-Peterhans, and Kusimba, I offer the following in all humility. It comes from Peter Hathaway Capstick who had years of experience in Africa. In Death in the Long Grass, Capstick presents a table compiled by one Peter Turnbull-Kemp, a South African game ranger, on the age and condition of 89 known man-eaters at death: 91 percent of the killers were in either “good” or “fair” condition; 13.3 percent were old but uninjured; and a mere 4.4 percent were both aged and injured by any cause, including man.

  “Aside from those lions forced through injury to a life of homicide, there are many ways that normal lions may take up man-eating,” Capstick continues. “They may be the offspring of man-eating parents, weaned on human flesh and taught to hunt man as a normal activity….There are many natural catastrophes, such as plagues and epidemics that litter the bush with corpses, that may lead to lions’ learning to eat man….”

  Was that the case with the Man-eater of Mfuwe? I’d come across Wayne Hosek’s story while visiting the Field Museum’s website. Zambia’s Luangwa Valley is a thousand miles from Tsavo, but his lion was maneless, and also far bigger than average. I called Hosek in California, and he told me that some experts had found possible evidence of bone cancer in the lion’s jaw, but it was far from conclusive. Otherwise, there were no signs of injury or sickness, nor had any plagues depleted the numbers of its normal prey.

  Was there some linkage among manelessness, big body size, and a proclivity to prey on people? Could the lions of Tsavo be a throwback to primitive lions or some heretofore unknown subspecies? Could they tell us anything new about the king of beasts? Those questions, as much as a longing for an African adventure, were what prompted me to go to Tsavo.

  Not that I thought that I could even begin to answer them. If a whole team of professionals had been stumped, what chance was there for a writer who’d gotten a C in high school biology? I wanted to introduce myself to Tsavo and get in some face time with its lions as preparation for accompanying Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans on an expedition they planned to mount within the next year.

  I bounce a few of the above questions off Iain after we move outside to have tea and coffee. He is no big-cat biologist, but 28 years of leading safaris allow him to speak with the authority of direct experience. There, in a garden scented by frangipani and hibiscus, he says that there is no doubt in his mind that Tsavo lions are different. Though he can’t say if they have some built-in taste for human flesh, he does paint them in dark colors.

  “They’re total opportunists, all lean muscle, just killing machines that will attack and eat anything, even African hares,” he says, and, echoing Dr. Patterson, explains that Tsavo is a harsh, penurious place.

  “So these lions have to take what they can get. They’re also more cunning than plains lions, often killing from ambush instead of stalk and spring. There’s something sinister about them.”

  I mention Gnoske and Kerbis Peterhans’s observations that Tsavo males do most of the hunting.

  Iain nods and responds with a story, illustrative of the males’ strength as well as their cleverness.

  “I was walking along the Galana River recently and came on two big male lions attacking a buffalo. One would rush it from the front and, as it lowered its horns to meet the charge, the other would come in from behind and rake its haunches. When it whirled around to meet that threat, the first lion would leap at its back and tear open another wound. That went on for a while. Buffalo aren’t dumb. That one figured out what was going on and backed into thick thorn scrub to guard its rear. It was bleeding a lot. Lions aren’t dumb either. Those two simply ambled off and sat in the shade of a tree to wait for the buff to grow weak from loss of blood, which it did in about half an hour. When it was too weak to use its horns and its great black head lowered, the lions charged in and finished it off.”

  We adjourn for dinner at Carnivore, a popular tourist restaurant near Wilson Field, the airport from which Beryl Markham flew west with the night and Finch-Hatton took off in his biplane to hunt elephant. “Tell them I’ll be in Tsavo,” he would say, donning his goggles, “them” being his pals at the Muthaiga Country Club, the sanctum sanctorum of colonial settlers. Carnivore serves grilled game meats. Eland, gazelle, zebra, but I don’t see buffalo on the menu.

  I DON’T IMAGINE “tell them I’ll be in Tsavo” would sound quite so jaunty coming from me. I don’t have a gram of Denys’s aristocratic flair. I’m leaving Nairobi in a Land Rover, not an Avro Avian, and Tsavo is hardly the edge-of-the-Earth place it was in Denys’s day but accessible to any chubby day-tripper in a budget minibus.

  Clad in his bush clothes—a stained, wide-brimmed hat, shorts, sneakers—Iain is at the wheel. Clive Ward, his number two and climbing partner, is in the passenger seat. Clive is a spare man, with short, graying hair, chiseled features, and a clipped way of speaking that sometimes leaves the words trapped in his mouth. He possesses an ascetic handsomeness that reminds me of a British officer in a war movie: the quiet one who dies with pointless heroism in some idiotic attack. Clive tells us that he led safaris in Namibia before coming to Kenya and mutters something about a land-mine explosion that lacerated one of his legs—an injury that hasn’t hindered him. Together, he and Iain have scaled most of the world’s major peaks, from Alaska to South America to the Himalaya, and they have led so many parties up Kilimanjaro that the ascent has become to them something akin to climbing a flight of stairs. Clive belongs to a class of Englishmen I’ve run into over the years: Restless and deracinated, they roam a post-imperial Earth, preferring the air of lost colonies to the air of home.

  We roll on down the Mombasa Highway, which parallels the tracks of the “Lunatic Express,” and pass slow trucks spewing what looks like volcanic ash. The road is narrow and bumpy, a slapdash strip of asphalt that runs across the Kapiti and Athi Plains, where Teddy Roosevelt hunted but no one hunts anymore, first because big-game hunting was outlawed in Kenya in 1977, and second because there isn’t much game left to shoot, thanks to poaching and the transformation of wildlands into farmland by Kenya’s ever-growing population.

  The hunting ban, Iain mentions, turned him from an employee into an entrepreneur.

  “I got to know Bill Woodley in the mid-’70s,” he says, mentioning a famed Tsavo game warden. “After talking things over, I realized I could do walking safaris like the old hunting safaris, except you shoot with cameras instead of guns. The old white hunters wanted nothing to do with photographic safaris, so I had the wide-open field to myself.”

  The biggest achievement of his career occurred in 1996, when he and Woodley’s two sons, Danny and Bongo, led a foot safari that was something out of the annals of early African exploration: a 250-mile trek from the summit of Kilimanjaro, down through Tsavo and the coastal plains to the shores of the Indian Ocean. They were accompanied by mountaineer Rick Ridgeway, who chronicled the adventure in The Shadow of Kilimanjaro.

  Continuing our drive southward, we enter the Kikwezi Plains, grasslands hemmed by knobby volcanic hills. A pale chanting goshawk perches on a telephone pole at the roadside, a black-shouldered kite on the wires. An exquisite bird with an iridescent blue breast flies past the windshield—a lilac-breasted roller. Iain glances at the landscape, gestures at the highway.

  “This was a dirt road back in the 1950s, and when we drove down to Mombasa, we used to make a game of counting the rhino.”

  Leslie reminds him of all the rhino she had seen on a safari nearly 30 years ago, and he grunts an affirmation that is also a kind of nonverbal elegy. It reminded me of why I wanted her with me
in Africa. She would provide more than companionship: I’d had no experience with East Africa and its wildlife; she’d had some, even though it was a long time ago. Except for a small herd in a rhino recovery reserve in Tsavo, the ugly, ponderous, yet somehow grand rhinoceros, a living relic of prehistoric times, has all but vanished from East Africa. About 400 black rhino survive in Kenya, and there are still fewer of the larger white rhino (the name doesn’t have anything to do with its color, but is a corruption of an Afrikaans word, “weit,” meaning “wide”—a reference to the width of the animal’s mouth). In the 1970s and 1980s, a new status symbol arose among Arabs rich on petro royalties: Yemeni daggers with handles and scabbards made from rhino horn. They were more popular than gold Rolexes. The demand fueled a vigorous poaching trade. Efficient gangs armed with assault rifles slaughtered rhino by the thousands, and whenever the dagger-handle market became saturated, the poachers fell back on the traditional sales to the Far East, where the horns were ground up into medicinal powders and aphrodisiacs. Looking out at cattle and spotted goats grazing on the old rhino range, at the swarms of humanity walking along the road or sitting in the shade of the trees selling papaya heaped in straw baskets, I contemplate a wildlife holocaust committed to satisfy a lust for ornamentation and to stiffen penises in Asia. A familiar depression settles over me. If Thoreau was right, that in wildness do we find our salvation, then I guess we are damned. All we can do is mourn the lost wonder and wildness of the world and fight rear-guard actions to save what’s left from ourselves. It isn’t the free market that’s at fault, or socialism or industrialism or any other ism; there are too many of us.