Born Wild Page 11
In spring 1976 I went to visit Bill Woodley in Mweiga on the slopes of the Aberdares where he was warden of the Mountain Parks, which included the Aberdares and Mount Kenya. He told me poachers were moving into Tsavo. Jack Barrah told us that further down the Tana from us, the Somali poachers were following ’a policy of total extinction’. Poaching on a major scale had not yet come to Bill’s Mount Kenya National Park but he was having a problem with people getting lost or injured when climbing the mountain. He took me on a mountain rescue and discussed his plans for setting up a real mountain rescue team. As we were hurtling down a gorge in his Piper Super Cub he asked me if I wanted another lioness. ’Of course,’ I replied, and returned to Kora a few days later with Jojo, who had been orphaned in the Masai Mara.
Kaunda, who had come to us from the Nairobi orphanage, joined Jojo as the newest recruits. We now had three separate prides. Daniel, Oscar and Kora were thriving without Shyman and Juma. We still tracked them and saw them occasionally but they were completely independent. Freddie, Arusha, Growlie and Gigi were moving around together and had started interacting with each other and with wild lions. Leakey continued his shuttle diplomacy, bouncing between the three groups and helping us to keep tabs on them with his collar. Keeping track of them all was exhausting work, particularly when George was away. George would get ill occasionally – pneumonia and malaria usually – and I felt a huge responsibility not to let any harm come to his lions while he was out of camp. In retrospect we probably had too many and I should have taken a break but I loved it so.
My life was totally, utterly and completely absorbed in Kampi ya Simba. I felt no need to go abroad: I loved Kenya, I loved George and I loved the job. And, of course, I adored the lions. It was startlingly hard work, though, and very intense. Determining how the groups would behave, bringing them together or keeping them apart as we saw fit, required a lot of thought and then arduous work to put into practice. We were incredibly lucky to have Leakey’s help with the diplomacy – we could always use him as an emissary between the groups.
Friends came and went, brought supplies and were fascinated by the lions and our relationships with them. We had to be very careful not to involve them with the lions: they were used to us but always got a bit twitchy when strangers were around. People used to drive hundreds of kilometres to see George with the lions and then be furious that we made them stay in the cage or, as we often had to do, pretended we didn’t know where the lions were.We were lucky that Arusha was around when Jack Barrah arrived one day with two planes and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Although she had a habit of knocking over George, she was incredibly friendly and easy to get along with. We fed the prince on corned beef and tinned fruit but he was so enthralled by Arusha that he didn’t seem to mind the rather basic food.
After lunch we climbed up on to Kora Rock to look at the sky. It was blood red. A massive dust storm had blown up in Tsavo and stained the sky from horizon to horizon. George treated the prince just as he would anyone else and was astonished when he made an enormous unsolicited donation to help develop Kora. His money allowed Jack Barrah to start the rangers’ base in Asako and man it for years. Donors who have vision enough to fund the boring things, like ranger lines, drains and roads, are rare indeed. Later that year, Frankfurt Zoo’s tractor, another unglamorous but invaluable donation that Terence had been using daily, at last broke through to the Kyuso road on the main drag to Mwingi. The job would have taken years without it.
As ever, the lions were our raison d’être and we wanted to make that journey to Nairobi as seldom as possible. Adrian House, who was George’s editor and biographer, came out at about this time to help George write My Pride and Joy. He asked me to work out the linkages between the different lions from which scrappy piece of paper he created the meticulous family trees (see the Kora Family Tree, page 318). I think we had done pretty well. By the end of 1976, Daniel, Oscar and Kora were living proof that returning lions to the wild was possible and sustainable. We hardly saw them but we knew they were still around. Arusha was pregnant again, having had an earlier miscarriage. Freddie and Leakey were increasingly independent and the cubs were growing up. On Boxing Day 1976, George and I took the cubs down to the river for the first time. It was wonderful to see their faces light up when they came through the forest and saw the Tana in all its glory. We were happy that Christmas.
5. Trial by Simba
A radio call came through on New Year’s Day 1977 announcing the death of Gloria Lowe. A good friend and one of our staunchest supporters, she had campaigned for us at National Park Headquarters with Chryssee Bradley Martin and together they had made sure that the orphanage sent lions our way. It had been at Gloria’s urging that we took on Leakey, a mark of official approval we sorely needed at the time. We then went on to prove the efficacy of our methods by reintegrating him successfully. It was a sad start to the year and, although we didn’t see it at the time, Gloria’s death stands out as a signpost of things to come.
On the rocks above Kampi ya Simba we toasted our departed friend and assessed how the lion programme was going. As we sat on the striated gneiss rocks, the view emphasized our isolation. The camp lies in the lee of three spectacular inselbergs, rising from a sea of thick bush: the huge rock outcrops soaring three hundred feet from the flat bush give parts of Kora the look of Monument Valley, where John Ford filmed all those old Westerns. From the rocks, the view stretched for hundreds of miles in which it was impossible to see anything man-made that we hadn’t built ourselves. Even so, the wider world was beginning to encroach upon the idyllic life we led at Kora; the most apparent change was the smell. The stench of death was beginning to pervade every corner of the reserve. Drawn south by the lure of horn, the Somali poachers had wiped out all the rhino and were now setting their sights on Kora’s elephant population. Given that they were AK47 sights it wasn’t going to take them long. Many nights we were awoken by the sound of shooting and the first thing we saw from the rocks in the mornings would be teetering towers of vultures, spiralling down on to the latest victim. Nowadays there are few vultures left – they have all eaten poisoned carcasses left out by herders to deter predators.
There is something obscene and wasteful about the slaughter of a vast elephant, its tusks hacked out with axes, an enormous cadaver left to rot in the sun. In Kenya that year – as in most years – people were starving. The price of meat had soared 75 per cent; staples were less severely affected but the whole nation was suffering. The wasted elephant meat was particularly grotesque: if they were going to kill the animals, they could at least have used their carcasses efficiently. This was indicative of a larger change in the Somalis. Traditionally the herders had always dug wells in the dry riverbeds as they moved with their stock. Whenever they did this, they would always dig another well a few hundred yards away for the wild animals and never use it themselves. Custom and the example of the elders who led them dictated this. George, who had worked in the north of Kenya for decades, was well known to the elders: sometimes in person, always by renown. They respected his right to be in Kora. But the poachers and herders coming to Kora now cared naught for the Old Man, not a jot for the animals and nothing for the environment.
They were not pastoralists from northern Kenya, grazing their own animals; increasingly they were from Kismayu on the eastern Somali coast, Bosasso in the north of Somalia and all points between. A Western-primed population explosion was laying waste to East Africa. Young Somali men were herding for livestock barons, vast unsustainable herds that had to roam many hundreds of miles in search of forage and grazing. Simultaneously they established themselves to be the heart of the domestic and export markets for cattle throughout Kenya. Now, we noticed, there were no elders accompanying the young men and fewer families too. The herders never dug an extra well for the wild animals as they used to: they took only the most valuable parts of the animals they killed; they left poisoned bait in wide circles around their camps and burnt extravagantly wherever they
went. The ancient doum palms, Tana river poplars and Acacia eliator that lined the banks of the river were being burnt by pyromaniac youths, merely for the hell of it – hundreds of years of growth destroyed in a matter of minutes. Such wanton destruction would never have been allowed under the elder system with which George had worked throughout his time as a game warden. And there wasn’t much we could do to halt it. The forces of law and order in Kora consisted of George, myself and Terence. The warden and rangers confined themselves to Asako. We chased after the poachers with hunting rifles when we stumbled upon them but they played with us, always keeping one step ahead and, if we got too close, shooting over our heads with their modern automatic weapons. Bizarrely they never tried to kill us but neither would they go away. It was incredibly frustrating.
Five hours away in Garissa there was more formidable opposition but the poachers were well aware of its capabilities. My friend Noor Abdi Ogle and his anti-poaching teams did a grand job. I’m sure it was because of our friendship with him that the poaching gangs didn’t just kill us outright. The police, General Service Unit (GSU) and army all fought brave battles against the invaders but they were neither equipped nor authorized to fight what was in effect an all-out war. The Kenyan authorities had to tread extremely carefully as the Somali government had ambitions upon Kenyan territory that they had no wish to provoke. Protecting us and the lions was not high on their list of priorities when held against maintaining peace among their neighbours in 1970s East Africa. These were tough days and they would only get tougher.
Nonetheless, despite all the poaching and the price rises, looking after the lions was so all-encompassing that it was only when we glanced over the parapet that we noticed such things. As always, our every waking hour was devoted to the care of our growing family of lions. Arusha, Growlie and Gigi were pretty independent by this time, coming and going at will but still bringing their cubs to show them off to us. Jojo and Kaunda were beginning their integration back into the wild and in January spent their first night out alone. We hadn’t seen Daniel, Oscar and Kora for a couple of months. Freddie and Leakey, we accepted, were long gone – off to the other side of the river where game was plentiful among the open spaces and heavenly herds in Meru National Park.
Arusha was desperate for a mate after the failure of her first pregnancy and competed with the gunfire to keep us awake at night, roaring her availability from the rocks just outside camp. There is a peculiar note in a lioness’s call when she is looking for a mate and it can be heard for miles. Many were the nights we listened to the wild lions scrapping over her, then mating endlessly as we three men lay on our camp beds thinking of England. It didn’t stop at night either. I once walked up on to Kora Rock to find Arusha and a wild lion having a post-coital nap that I should never have interrupted. The male looked utterly outraged but was so shocked that, when I charged him, he backed down and slunk off into the bush. Luckily Arusha didn’t expect me to take his place.
Even with Gloria gone, more lions continued to come our way and, like children in a sweet factory, we were unable to say no. And when Gigi gave birth we called the cubs Glowe and Growe in honour of Gloria and her husband Graham Lowe. Our vet friend Aart Visee was staying in camp when we received a radio call saying that Galana had a couple of lion cubs for us. We patched up the holding pen and set off to Malindi on the coast for some fun. I had been staying with PA and Agneta in Malindi when I first received George’s call so I knew it well; Aart and I had a great couple of days, surfing, catching up with friends and lounging on the beach. It was the first proper time off I had enjoyed since Shyman had attacked me. After the harsh, dry heat of Kora, it was wonderful to be in the water, playing in the surf and diving on the reef. We made midnight excursions to the Gedi ruins and sailed up to Lamu with some easily impressed holidaymakers. It’s hard taking a break when you’re completely consumed by something you love and I had failed to do so for almost a year. As soon as I arrived, I could feel the tension in my back drifting away as I swam out to the break, opening my shoulders and powering through the surf. Our holiday was too short.
At eight months, the cubs were a little larger and a lot more rambunctious than we had expected so we stayed at Galana for a few hours while its wildlife manager, Ken Clarke, modified our capture cage to keep the two cubs separated on the journey back to Kora. He remade them as crush cages so that the lions would be held tight and wouldn’t be able to injure themselves when the tranquillizers Aart administered wore off. Ken told us about the poaching problems he was facing on the million-acre ranch where elephant carcasses were turning up almost every day. Galana – like Kora – was being overrun by Somalis, keen to kill all of its rhino and elephant. The ranch was the last buffer zone left between the poachers and Tsavo National Park, the vast area whose elephant population would soon be left wide open to incursions from the north. Galana was a very successful operation so Ken had the financial muscle to run anti-poaching patrols by land and air but even then he felt he was receiving hindrance rather than assistance from the authorities and was probably fighting a losing battle. It was becoming increasingly apparent to him that, while the rhino poaching was mainly a foreign affair, the elephant poaching had local backing. It dawned on none of us then that the poaching could get any worse. But, in fact, it was about to enter a more industrial phase: this was the last time we would see Ken alive.
As Aart and I drove off towards Garissa, the lions turned right around in the tight crush cages Ken had made for them.
‘My God, did you see that?’ I said to Aart.
‘They’re cats, Tony,’ said the vet, with a condescending smile.
Sheba was a captivating lioness, similar to Lisa in temperament and very beautiful. Suleiman on the other hand was an awkward SOB. Ken had killed his mother when she was attacking a cattle boma at Galana and one of the bullets had passed through her and into Suleiman. It was encapsulated in fat so we left it there as it was causing no harm – but it was a reminder that Suleiman was the offspring of a wild stock-killer rather than a store-bought hippie, like Christian or Arusha. We put the pair into the holding pens at camp and hoped they would adjust, but from the very beginning they didn’t get on with the other lions at all – there were just too many. We weren’t sure what to do. Every time Arusha, Gigi and Growlie came near they would charge the fence with spectacular ferocity. I remember being nervous that one day the mesh might not hold.
We needed Leakey to do some diplomacy but he’d gone off with Freddie and we hadn’t seen either of them for ages. In the time being we kept walking Jojo and Kaunda and hoped that a solution would present itself as we immersed ourselves once more in the lions’ world. We stayed in touch with the other world by playing host to a slow trickle of visitors who would bring us supplies, gossip and news. Despite the growing insecurity of Kora and Kenya as a whole we still had a good many. Father Nicky Hennitty, a wonderfully hyperactive and dedicated Irish Catholic priest who lived in Kyuso, came over often. He had a sixth sense about us and used to load up his new Toyota Stout and resupply us with fuel, gas for the fridges, food and whisky when he judged we were getting thirsty. The fact that we no longer listened to the radio led to odd juxtapositions of news. Eras ended simultaneously. We learnt, for example, that Elvis had died and ‘sport’ hunting had been banned on the very same day. The latter was of rather more significance to us.
Although George and Terence had stopped hunting long before they began working for the Game Department, many of their friends – and, indeed, mine – were professional hunters or had been, so it was with mixed feelings that we heard of the destruction of our friends’ livelihoods. We had seen few hunters near Kora recently; the area had been famed for its elephants but elephant hunting had, of course, already been banned. Also, the bush around us was so thick that it was hard country for hunting anything smaller, and none of the licensed hunters would think of going after lions in the hunting block adjacent to us for fear of killing one of ours. However, the ban proved positiv
e for some affected by it: Ben Ng’anga, with whom Mike Wamalwa and I had been partners in the Mateus Rosé venture, came to run a new camp at Bisanadi, thirty miles away on the other side of the river. It was a long way to go for a drink but it was good to have such a close friend nearby. Ben had been one of the first professional black hunters but the ban meant his triumph hadn’t lasted for very long. Even today the safari business remains dominated by white Kenyans and expatriates, testament more to the racism of the clients than of the safari business itself. Visitors still want to be guided by Robert Redford in his Denys Finch Hatton role: black Kenyans just don’t attract the rich clients the way white ones do so Ben’s achievement had been significant. He was also worth every penny.
Former hunters always insist that their departure hastened the slaughter of the elephants and I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the truth. We were on the very front line and it was total war up there for a while. I can’t see how a few professional hunters could have stood up to the mechanized killing outfits sent down from the north, like Geronimo trying to stop the buffalo killing in the US. And I still find it hard to believe that you have to legalize something’s killing to protect it. It’s the old apartheid defence and it just doesn’t pass muster. Nevertheless, it must be said that as soon as game no longer had a value, people stopped investing in protecting it. On Galana, for example, the owners immediately squeezed funding to Ken Clarke’s anti-poaching teams. The results were shattering and immediate. The ranch was overrun by poachers. On 2 August, I heard the scratchy voice of Ken’s eighteen-year-old daughter Caroline on the radio. She was trying to get through to Nairobi Control but they couldn’t hear her because of a bad ’skip’. She had to relay her news through me. ’Daddy has been killed,’ she told me. The poor girl was in a terrible state, unable to call directly for help and stranded on Galana with her father’s bullet-torn body.