Ghosts of Tsavo Read online

  As we drive toward another meeting with Samuel on the Voi, the smaller of the elephants stages a mock charge, gliding rapidly toward us with shrill trumpets, his ears spread; then he turns abruptly and trots away, leaving a fog of dust in his wake. Iain states that it’s unusual to see elephants of that size in Tsavo, the big ones having been destroyed by poachers. Not many elephants in the park are much over 15 years old, and those that are are in effect shell-shocked and unable to tolerate the proximity of human beings. The one that charged us had probably seen its mates slaughtered, spent years evading the paltry, upright apes with the sticks that spat fire and death. He has every reason to hate people.

  Another drive with Samuel fails to produce a lion. We do hear baboons barking and shrieking in the trees. Clive opines that a leopard is nearby. Listening to the frantic howls, I picture the solitary cat, serene and confident in his skills as a lone hunter, and feel some contempt for the baboons. I also imagine some higher being—an angel, say—feeling the same about the villagers in Ngozo, shouting and banging pots and pans as the Man-eater of Mfuwe parades by, Jesleen’s tote bag in his mouth.

  The campfire coals glow, sparks fly toward the stars. Over by the cook tent, in the light of kerosene lamps, David and Kamal are washing the dinner dishes. Iain sips a beer and tells a tale to refute a comment I have made, gleaned from my research into animal behavior, that lions usually attack Cape buffalo that have been abandoned by the herd. The remark seems to have impugned the buffalo’s capacity for loyalty and compassion toward its own kind, and Iain rises to its defense.

  “I was taking a safari through the Masai Mara when I saw a coalition of seven young male lions leap on a buff, an old bull. Seven of them! They’d partially eviscerated him and had badly chewed up one foreleg before he went down. But before the lions could finish him, the rest of the herd charged and drove them off into the scrub. Some others formed a circle around the wounded buffalo, and for the next hour the most heartbreaking scene took place as the buffalo took turns licking the old bull’s mangled foreleg. Literally licking his wounds. Sometimes the lions would creep out of the bushes for another go at him—they never gave up, they were hungry—but the biggest bulls would charge and drive them back. After a while, you could tell that the herd knew the wounded bull was hopeless. They began to move away, but as they did, he bellowed pitifully and they returned to his side and licked his wounds again. I had three clients with me, and they were in tears watching this. Well, I’ll be damned if, after an hour, that bull didn’t get to his feet, and when the herd got moving, he went with them, his intestines trailing out of the back of his belly, his bloody leg flopping. You knew he wouldn’t last the night, but he’d been spared from those seven lions.”

  ROUSED AT 4:30 A.M. by David’s “Jambo,” we breakfast under the Southern Cross and drive north again, to the buffalo herd on the Hatulo Bisani. While we’re gone, the staff will strike the tents and move them to our walking safari campsite at a place called Durusikale, on the Galana. I am eager to get out of the damned Land Rover, even though that will diminish our chances of seeing the cats that have already proved difficult enough to find. I guess I’m seeking to do something more than pursue Tsavo’s mysterious lions; I’m after a certain quality of experience that’s undermined by confinement to a vehicle. The Africa of Dinesen and Finch-Hatton, of Ruark and Hemingway is what I want, and the best way to get it is on shank’s mare; “safari,” after all, is a Swahili word derived from the Arabic for “to travel on foot.”

  The sunrise is electric. Once more, I’m mesmerized by the supernatural white of the egrets, standing vigil in the swaths of sedge, and by the goliath herons, rising up on eight-foot wingspans. Ahead, a vast, black smear fills the riverbed. It would look like mud except that it’s moving, and as our vehicle approaches, heads lift up and look in our direction. Before Iain can stop, the buffalo hear the engine, and a hundred animals break in alarm, scrambling up and over the steep riverbank. They’re followed by the entire herd, 600 animals, maybe a thousand, bolting as one great mass of tossing horns, heaving backs, and lunging legs that in its upward surge resembles an avalanche in reverse. The buffalo thunder across the road into the sere scrub beyond, where the stampede stops. They mill around, cows and calves in the middle, the dominant bulls turning to glare at us through the risen dust, their flanks slathered in river mud, wet noses glistening, thick horns bent like grappling hooks. Those on one of the larger bulls are so curved, so symmetrical as to form a figure eight lying on its side.

  We pause for photographs—this is the closest we’ve come so far to Cape buffalo. Once again, I am trying to picture a lion strong enough and desperate enough to take one on.

  We proceed slowly, stopping to search with binoculars, sniffing the air for the stench of a rotting carcass. Nothing. At mid-morning, with the heat like a weight, we give up and head east, toward Durusikale, some 30 miles downstream. A small zebra herd forages on the savanna, beautiful creatures in the wild, and strong: A kick from a zebra’s hind legs can break a pursuing lion’s jaw. Two giraffes amble along, fanciful beasts; if they weren’t so graceful, they would appear one of nature’s contraptions.

  Partway to the new campsite, we stop to climb one of the Sobo rocks, a series of sandstone outcrops, to scan for game with binoculars and reconnoiter our route. The Galana, fed by melting snows on Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro, shows a brassy brown as it slides slowly between galleries of saltbush and doum palm toward its distant meeting with the Indian Ocean. Out on the scorched, rust-colored plains beyond the river, a procession of elephants are migrating to the river to drink and cool themselves in the midday heat. Postponing our lion quest for the moment, we return to the Land Rover and cut cross-country toward the herd, drawing close enough to count the animals—about 60 altogether, the calves trotting alongside their mothers, a huge matriarch out front, other old females guarding the flanks and rear.

  As I’ve said, Iain and Clive are elephant enthusiasts. Seeing the herd shambling toward the Galana, they decide to take us to a spot on the river where we’ll have a good chance of observing the animals at close hand. What the hell and why not? Can’t find lions, might as well do something.

  We picnic in the shade of a tamarind tree, with a broad, sandy beach in front of us. Half an hour later, the elephants arrive upwind, within a hundred yards of where we sit. They come down with a stiff-legged gait that looks deceptively slow—they’re actually covering ten or twelve feet in a single stride. The marvelous thing is how silent they are, passing through the saltbush with barely a rustle to enter the river. It seems to us that we are beholding Tsavo’s wild soul made flesh.

  With cat-burglar creeps, we position ourselves on the shore and watch and photograph for almost an hour. It’s a wondrous sight. The animals’ ears flap, big as a dinghy’s sails; tails switch, trunks bend into their mouths or back to spray their heads with water. An incredible organ, the elephant’s trunk, says Iain, taking over for Clive as information font. It contains 4,000 separate muscles and serves as the hand that feeds the elephant, as nose, drinking straw, built-in shower, and weapon, all in one.

  Matriarchs have taken up sentry positions, covering the four points of the compass. The calves are thoroughly captivating as they playfully roll in the river and submerge themselves. With the wind blowing into our faces, the herd is unaware of our presence, though the matriarch facing upriver sometimes appears to sense that something is out of the ordinary. She looks our way and raises her trunk overhead and swings it back and forth—an olfactory periscope scanning for scent of danger (elephants have poor eyesight, but their senses of smell and hearing are acute). She doesn’t act alarmed, and that’s good. Bull elephants make false charges, but when a matriarch comes at you, she usually means to carry the thing through. If this one does charge, she’ll be on us in about three seconds flat, and there is nowhere to run.

  “The usual way an elephant kills a human being is not to stick and stomp,” Iain says, “but to knock you down, then knee
l on one knee and lean its forehead into you and crush you to death.”

  I gather he does not want us to feel too charmed by these animals.

  The campsite at Durusikale is idyllic, tents pitched in a meadow of Bermuda grass that looks as manicured as a country club fairway. It is shaded by doum palm and feathery tamarind and fronts the river. A hippopotamus wallows on the far side. On the low ridge above, zebras stand outlined against the bright sky. I marvel at the camp staff’s work; in just a few hours, they’ve dismantled the whole outfit, moved it 30 miles, and set it up again, so efficiently that the camp looks as if it’s been here for weeks. Two new members have been added, and we meet them, Sergeant Adan and Corporal Hassan, garbed in the green camise and beret of the Kenya Wildlife Service, armed with G-3 semiautomatic rifles, NATO caliber, 7.62-millimeter. They will be our guards on the foot safari into the Northern Area across the river. They are Borana tribesmen from northern Kenya, near the border with Ethiopia. The Borana are a Cushitic tribe, and Adan and Hassan have the handsome, well-defined features and wiry builds of Ethiopians, Adan much the taller of the two at six feet three. Standing about five feet eight in my hiking boots, I feel childlike beside him.

  But there will be no hiking until tomorrow morning. Car-bound once again, we head downriver, following a little-used sandy track, the Galana appearing and disappearing. At a broad bend in the river, Iain recounts a day when he saw a large male baboon squatting there on the rocks. In the next instant, it was dead; a lioness had leaped from the thick scrub behind him and killed him before he knew what hit him.

  “I love it here,” he rhapsodizes. “It’s raw and primitive, Africa without any fat on it. It doesn’t tolerate fools or forgive mistakes.”

  I take him to mean that the baboon was either a fool or had made a mistake. Maybe he was a fool because he made a mistake, though I’m unsure what he did wrong. Strayed from the troop, perhaps, sat out in the open presenting himself as a target, let his guard down for one critical second.

  The track winds, following the river’s course. We pass alongside thicket after thicket of saltbush. The stuff looks like cedar and grows to between ten and twenty feet high, with game paths running through like narrow, twisting corridors in a garden maze. Something creepy about those thickets, something that touches the old part of the brain, our inheritance from the puny hominid who quaked in the predator’s night, feared the dark coverts concealing sudden death. I am reminded a little of Vietnam and the long jungle patrols when our gazes would swivel right to left, left to right, turn up, turn down, seeking trip wires, snipers, ambushes, the glint or flicker of movement, the perception of which could mean the difference between spending another day aboveground or going home in a box, if there was enough left of you to fill one. “If I die in a combat zone / Box me up and ship me home.” We were both predator and prey, keen as hunters, wary as the hunted.

  The track makes a hairpin turn. True to the Tsavo’s mysterious ways, a lioness appears, with a suddenness that suggests she’s been conjured up by some sorcerer’s trick. She is walking purposefully down the road in front of us, and we swing off, driving parallel to her, Rob standing on the seat, his head through the roof hatch, his camera’s motor drive whirring. There is nothing beautiful about the lioness; old scratches and cuts mar her skin like sewn rips in a threadbare sofa, and her ribs show, though not in a way to spell starvation so much as a spare, sinewy toughness. If the sleek lions of the Serengeti are the haute bourgeoisie of the leonine world, Tsavo lions are the proletariat, blue-collar cats who have to work hard for a meager living. I recall Iain’s comment about Tsavo. This lioness is perfectly suited to her habitat. Certainly no fat on her; nor does she look tolerant or forgiving, but very focused.

  We trail her, but she shows no alarm. Now and then, she throws a sidelong glance at us, just to check on our distance or our behavior. If we edge too close, she angles away, maintaining a critical space of perhaps 15 yards. A lady with a mission, she goes through the saltbush and commiphora with the steady, unflagging pace of a veteran foot soldier.

  Half a mile, a mile, two. The lioness, pausing, begins to call with low grunts. We figure she’s trying to locate her pride, but if they answer, we don’t hear them. Another quarter of a mile, and she stops on a rise and calls more loudly—a sound that seems to come from her belly instead of her throat, part moan, part cough. Wa-uggh, wa-uggh. In a moment, two cubs, a male and a female, bound from a saltbush thicket a hundred yards away. They leap on their mother, licking face and flanks, and she licks theirs.

  “Oh, God, that’s adorable,” Leslie says.

  It’s not my custom to use words like “adorable,” but that’s what the scene is. I need to remind myself that if one of us were to get out of the Land Rover at this point, Her Leanness will quickly become something other than adorable.

  Cubs in tow, the lioness commences to retrace her steps, and we again follow. The wary cubs stop to stare or hiss at us, but their mother keeps walking without a break.

  Iain speculates that she’d stashed the cubs in the saltbush to go hunting or scouting, probably in the company of another lioness, because it would be difficult for a lone female to tackle a zebra. She’s probably leading the cubs to the kill, if one’s been made, or back to the pride.

  It would be good if she leads us to the pride. If we can get an idea of where it is, we’ll have an objective tomorrow when we will be on foot. I love walking in the wild, but I love even more walking with a purpose.

  The lioness presses on with her journey, and then she and the cubs pull one of the vanishing acts that seem a Tsavo lion specialty. As swiftly as she first appeared, so do she and her young dissolve. Ten minutes pass, then Leslie calls out, “There they are!”

  She points, and we see them, wading across the river. They stop on a sandbar in midstream. There the cubs gambol for a while, one mounting its forepaws on its mother’s hindquarters and allowing her to pull it along as she looks for a spot to complete the crossing.

  “All we need now is background music from Born Free,” Iain remarks, but I think of Santiago’s dream in The Old Man and the Sea, his dream of lions on the beach.

  She plunges in and swims a deep, narrow channel, the cubs paddling after her. The three climb to the bank and then are swallowed by the saltbush. We are sorry to see the lioness go; for all her scruffy appearance, we’ve grown fond of her and her self-possessed air. Still, she looked awfully thin, and I say that I would feel better about her prospects if we’d seen her and the cubs reunited with their pride. I’d read that lionesses are sometimes evicted from prides, and when they are, their chances of survival are very low. Lions are social animals, after all, the only felines that are.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Iain assures me. “She knows exactly what she’s doing, she’s in complete command of her situation.”

  The preprandial campfire discussion turns to film and literature, Iain presiding. He is an avid fan of both and can speak about both, intelligently, for hours. I’m not too up on movies, but Rob is, and serves to keep the conversation from becoming a monologue. A shift of gears to books brings Leslie and me in. The subject ranges from Don DeLillo to Salman Rushdie, with whom I’m familiar, to Martin Amis and several new Indian novelists, with whom I’m not. Iain’s favorite book is Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. “A bit of a soap opera,” says the safari guide turned critic, “but it’s a damned well-written soap opera.”

  Kahiu’s dinner—grilled eggplant, pumpkin soup, and bread pudding with cream—is, as usual, terrific. Mealtime chitchat returns to wildlife, specifically to Panthera leo. It continues as we adjourn back to the campfire, where, over coffee, Iain tells another bedtime story.

  A Texas couple and their two sons were on safari with Tropical Ice. One midnight, Iain was awakened by the parents’ screams: “Iain! They’re here! They’re coming in!” He tumbled out of bed, unzipped his tent flap, and saw a lioness walk right past him. Worse, he could hear other lions in the underbrush near camp—and t
he crunching of bones. Iain shouted to his clients to get on the floor of their tents and cover themselves with their mattresses. More lions appeared, playfully batting the guylines of the couple’s tent, as if to tease the frightened occupants. Their two sons, scared witless but desperate to pee, filled their water bottles with urine. Iain, in the meantime, sought the help of his two armed Masai guards, who had managed to sleep through the commotion. As they approached the thicket in which Iain had heard the crunching noise, they were greeted by growls. The Masai did not live up to their reputation as fearless lion hunters; they fled in panic. It turned out that the lions were guarding their kill, which wasn’t a person but a warthog. Iain attempted to drive them away by clapping his hands—a sound that usually frightens lions because no other animal makes it. It had no effect on those lions, who eventually just sauntered away.

  The next day, the couple asked to leave the area. Iain agreed. Later, as he brought the Land Rover around, he saw what he termed “a horrifying sight.” A lioness was sauntering alongside the woman’s tent, which was open at one end. She was inside, packing. As calmly as he could, Iain told the woman to come out, but not to run, and get in the car. She had no sooner jumped in and shut the door than the lioness rounded the corner and walked into the tent. Had the woman still been inside, the lioness would have killed her. “Maybe not eaten her,” Iain adds, reassuringly, “but definitely killed her because she would have tried to run.”