Born Wild Page 14

  6. Assistant No More

  It was agonizing. For the second time in a year I was watching my hero cry. And it was hard to be of real support to him when he knew how I felt about Joy. She had been an extraordinarily difficult woman – indeed, a recent study has shown that she may well have had Asperger’s syndrome – and we had never got on. There was no way I could suddenly pretend otherwise. Nevertheless, I had always admired her. She and George together had transformed the way the world felt about conservation, about keeping animals in captivity and about looking after the environment. Even when she was at her most tricky her courage impressed me. We shared many of the same views but she had adopted them first, distilled them into a coherent argument and had stood by them against a largely hostile world.

  When George and Joy met in 1942, Joy was already on her second husband, but he had seen past her racy image to the raw woman – a woman who could keep up with him on his travels, who could look after herself in the bush, walk as far as him, endure hardship like him and care as much as him. She was truly remarkable in that respect. Her whole life through, she went on long safaris alone, in remote and dangerous areas. And by alone I mean not just without other Europeans – as ‘alone’ was defined in those days – but also without the vast staff that people took on safari with them and which tended not to get mentioned in travellers’ tales. Even when George and she were still living together, Joy spent months in the most Spartan camps while he was on patrol for the Game Department. And she had shown her commitment to animals again and again. She reintegrated Elsa the lioness, Penny the leopard and Pippa the cheetah and gave almost all the earnings from her books towards their welfare. It seemed ironic beyond measure that she should have been killed by a lion. And, indeed, it soon turned out not to be true. As more news began to filter through, it emerged that Joy had not been killed by the animals she had devoted her life to protecting. She had been murdered by her least favourite species: man.

  At Kampi ya Simba George soon dried his tears, pulled himself together and came out of his hut. Racked by guilt that he had not been there to protect Joy, he knew that he must now go to Nairobi and make sure that, in death, her wishes were complied with. He left Terence and me at the camp to look after the lions and flew to town with our good friend and supporter Fritz Strahammer, who had kindly come to tell him the terrible news in person. A few months later George asked me to visit Shaba, where Joy had been killed, to make sure that the police investigation had reached the truth – never a foregone conclusion in the murky world of Kenyan police inquiries. George felt uneasy about several parts of the story and wanted to know as many of the facts as possible.

  Joy’s death, in I980, was a personal tragedy for George but it was a public-relations disaster for Kenya. Then, as now, Kenya’s two biggest sources of income were foreign aid and tourism. Kenya’s is a small economy, fragile and subject to big shocks caused by the smallest of incidents. In such a context Joy’s death was anything but a small incident. She was a poster girl for Kenyan tourism, her work with lions was known all over the world and her books had been multi-million-copy bestsellers. For Joy to be murdered in a national reserve was the last thing the new and fragile government of Daniel arap Moi needed.

  It took me a whole day to get to Shaba, most of it driving in the wrong direction because there simply aren’t any roads between the two. I first went to Isiolo, Shaba’s nearest town, where I was lucky to find that an old police inspector friend from Garissa was involved in the investigation. He opened up immediately, told me the facts of the case, then added his own interpretation. Joy’s body, he said, had been discovered by Peter Mawson, her South African assistant, who had gone out to search for her when she hadn’t returned from her evening walk. He had picked up the body and driven it by a circuitous route to Isiolo where her death was certified and reported. Mawson told the police he thought she had been killed by a lion. Over the next few days her corpse was transferred to Nairobi for post-mortem examinations where it was immediately discovered that she had been killed with a sharp weapon rather than by a lion. This tallied with investigations at Shaba, where suspicion had fallen upon Mawson and a former staff member called Paul Ekai, who had disappeared. My friend had never thought Joy had been killed by a lion and found it hard to understand how anyone could believe it.

  Paul Ekai was tracked down by the police and soon confessed to killing Joy with a short sword or simi. He said he had murdered her not because she had fired him for theft a few weeks earlier but because when she had paid him off she had bilked him out of fifty Kenyan shillings. It was a tragic and sordid end for a woman who had done so much for African wildlife, yet also a sadly predictable one: she had treated people badly – husbands, friends and staff alike. The authorities made rather a mess of the whole affair and it was two years, with much press speculation about Peter Mawson’s involvement, before Ekai was convicted and jailed. By that time he had revoked his confession, but since he had previously led police to the murder weapon, it is generally assumed that the crime was a simple one and that Ekai had indeed committed it. I reported back to George that Paul Ekai had been correctly accused: I think it put his mind at rest.

  Joy was cremated in Nairobi but she had requested that her ashes be scattered in Meru where she had lived with George and Elsa. On 24 January Meru’s warden, Peter Jenkins, flew into Kora to pick up George for the ceremony. Pete had thrown George and his lions out of the park ten years earlier, after Boy had bitten Pete’s son in the arm. He was one of George’s oldest friends but had fought a spirited campaign to have George banned from reintegrating lions anywhere in Kenya. They hadn’t spoken for a decade.

  That day I took George to the airstrip. Pete got out of his Cessna i8o, took his pipe out of his mouth and said, ‘Hello, George.’

  George walked towards the plane, took his pipe out of his mouth and said, ‘Hello, Pete.’

  Pete said, ‘Well, shall we go, then?’

  George said, ‘Yes, let’s go.’

  This time it was me who was crying.

  When George got back, we didn’t really talk about the funeral or the ceremony in Meru. He obviously wanted to get on and would talk when he felt he could. We went off tracking the lions together and spent a couple of days quietly catching up with our camp chores. On the second night back, George sat on a rickety chair at his tiny table outside the mess. Made from a piece of quarter-inch ply with local poles and half a dozen nails, it was always falling apart. He chuckled away to himself a few times and eventually I asked: ‘George, what is it?’

  ’Oh, nothing really,’ he said.

  ’Go on, tell me.’

  So he told me this story.

  ‘If anyone drove Pete Jenkins to distraction it was Joy,’ said George. ‘When we arrived in Meru Park the other day, Pete drove us all over to Pippa’s burial site [Pippa was the cheetah Joy had brought up in Meru]. A few words were said and I scattered half of Joy’s ashes over the grave. Then we all got back in the car and set off to Elsa’s grave by the river. The road was overgrown and Pete was very apologetic, explaining he had so little money to keep the roads up. It was very hot and we eventually found Elsa’s burial mound by pushing through some overgrown bush. I opened the canister and threw the rest of Joy’s ashes onto Elsa’s grave. Just at that minute, a dust devil whipped up. It blew Joy’s remains all over Pete. He leapt about like a marionette, dusting the ash off his jacket as if he was on fire. As usual, Joy had the final word.’

  Joy had left a very little money to George in the form of a yearly income from one of her trusts. It added to his pension and the small amount we received through the Kora Trust that Bob Marshall-Andrews had helped me to set up. Even then it almost doubled the money we spent on Kora. We really needed it because Kenya’s newly formed Wildlife Conservation and Management Department (WCMD) certainly wasn’t spending any money on the reserve, and as the years went by matters only got worse. The Treasury took the money from game park receipts and gave little out to preserve
the country’s parks and reserves. Rangers and anti-poaching patrols sometimes went for months without payment and often had to buy their own ammunition. It’s not surprising that a few swapped sides and became poachers.

  Kora became increasingly busy. For a while a section of the Anti-poaching Unit was based close to Kampi ya Simba, but it received few supplies and no back-up so they seldom ventured out on patrol. They would often accompany us to the water point or come up to camp to ask us for food or fuel but we soon reached the opinion that we were more likely to be shot by them in error than we were by the shifta on purpose. In March we received news that we were too complacent: seventeen shifta had come to Asako and set an ambush ready to attack us when we next went for meat. However, they had got bored after two days and moved off. Increasingly the shifta were aiming at people rather than animals; they had killed most of the animals and, if the instructions of the new WCMD were anything to go by, they would soon be allowed to move further afield. In March, a command was issued to all rangers that they must under no circumstances risk their lives. This soon became known to the poachers, who now carried out their grisly work with impunity in the sure knowledge that their opponents were under orders not to intervene.

  About this time, we were told once again that we were not to continue the lion project and must start to run it down – something it was doing pretty much of its own accord. It wasn’t an order we could ignore. A few weeks earlier, Arusha and Growlie had left us and headed across the river upstream. Koretta and her new cubs were still around camp but we often didn’t see them for days on end. Gigi and her cubs, Glowe and Growe, were doing well. Jojo and her brood were thriving. By this time we were monitoring twenty-two lions at Kora but the original entrants were fully reintegrated and the ones that had been born in the wild were coping very well indeed. Knowing that we would get no more lions from the authorities, we started to think seriously about leopards. Jack Barrah and others in authority had gently hinted to us that this was the way to go. The problem was that we didn’t have any and we had been told firmly that we could work only with Kenyan animals. Leopards are notoriously hard to catch, and in those days if a farmer ever managed to do so, he would shoot it immediately. There were a few at the orphanage but most were too old and we were not in favour there following Terence’s incident.

  Towards the end of the year, I started building a camp for the fantasy leopard project at the foot of Komunyu Rock a few miles away from Kampi ya Simba, more to keep the project’s momentum going than because we had any real aim in sight. George despised sloth and always advised, ‘Keep going forward one step at a time.’ A few Scots Guards were staying with us at the time as part of their training. They had a long association with George: Boy and Girl, the lions from the film of Born Free, had previously been their regimental mascots. The Guards did an amazing job, helping me to build a leopard cave and a big compound surrounding a climbing tree. Whenever we were in Nairobi we would hear rumours that we had been given permission to start working with leopards but the all-important piece of paper never appeared. We began to get quite depressed. This was the ideal time to be bringing in new lions – Arusha, Growlie and Kaunda had moved on and the younger lions were doing fine on their own, but they were lingering too close to home when they should have been seeking pastures new. An injection of new blood for a new project would divert our preoccupation with them and they would get the message that they should get on with their own lives.

  I was spending a bit of time away from camp, working on fundraising for the future but sometimes having fun too. I had made a great new friend in Khalid Khashoggi, the son of Adnan, who was then one of the richest men in the world. Khalid used to fly into camp and whisk me off to ever more glamorous locations where we would behave very badly and have a great time. He was learning to fly and we would go off on flying trips with his long-suffering instructor Franz Lang. It wasn’t all play, however. I spent a lot of time working on the Trust, which we had now set up in Kenya as well. One of my most noble contributions to the Trust was playing Tarzan for a Japanese TV company. Thirty years after I had first read the book, here I was, at last, playing the part. They came up to Kora and filmed me bounding bare-chested across the rocks in very tight shorts and bare feet, doing lots of rough-housing with the lions and swimming in the river with crocodiles. Then they took me off to Naivasha where I had to run around with zebra, waterbuck and giraffe on the grassy plains by the lake. They were all terrified of the bush but had no qualms about telling me to perform the most absurd feats, which had all been dreamt up in Tokyo and bore no relation to animal behaviour. They maintained a rigid adherence to the script throughout months of filming.

  In the middle of the year we had to do some scenes down in Tsavo with Eleanor, an orphaned elephant. The night before the filming there was a huge party at Tsavo Headquarters to celebrate Bill Woodley’s forty years as a warden. Bill was one of my heroes and quite a drinker himself, so the next morning I was feeling extremely hung-over when the film crew dragged me from my bed to make the best of the early-morning light. The director sent Eleanor and me off into a thicket from which I was meant to emerge appearing manly and action-packed. As is usual on a film set nothing happened for ages and we were left hanging around in the thicket. A big bull elephant followed us in and didn’t like the look of me at all. Eleanor protected me from him with long swings of her enormous bottom while letting me shelter between her front legs. Discouraged, the bull elephant soon moved off and I was feeling so rough that I fell asleep, leaning against one of Eleanor’s big wrinkled legs.

  I awoke to the sound of very quiet shouting. ‘Tarzan-san, Tarzan-san,’ called the producers, trying to wake me up without annoying Eleanor, of whom they were in considerable awe. I woke, puffed out my chest, pulled in my stomach and bounded from the thicket, looking purposeful. I asked them afterwards if they had the footage of me sleeping between the legs of a fully grown elephant.

  ’No, Tarzan-san. Not in script,’ they blithely replied.

  Shortly after I returned to camp I celebrated my thirty-sixth birthday. It was a great day – one that I will never forget. We could hear Koretta mating with Blackantan near camp. Naja, one of Jojo’s daughters, was nearby. George and I were mending a gate when a plane flew low over the camp and I rushed off to the airstrip, thinking it was Khalid come to say happy birthday. Instead, out of the plane hopped Michel Jeanniot, an Air France pilot who had been visiting us for years. In his hand was a little wicker basket that I recognized from earlier visits. The gingham cloth that covered it was renowned for hiding the wonderful cheese and wine that Michel would bring from Paris in his Boeing 747.

  ’Tony. I ‘ave a present for you,’ he said, in his comedy French accent.

  I hungrily opened the basket hoping for a baguette and some Brie. Inside was something much better: two six-week-old leopards that Michel had just smuggled from Paris via Réunion, Antananarivo, in Madagascar, and Nairobi. I was overjoyed, elated and utterly astonished. Forget permits, we’d work that out later. As my vicar friend Mike Harries says when he preaches his famous Tony Fitzjohn sermon: ‘Tony is the kind of person who would rather ask for forgiveness than permission.’

  It turned out this was the best policy.

  The cubs were dehydrated and hungry after their long flight so George and I tried to feed them while Michel explained their origins. Michel, it emerged, had a friend called Jean-Louis who worked in a Paris bar. The bar’s main claim to glory was that at one end it had two leopards in a glass cage and at the other two cheetahs. Jean-Louis had become much attached to the cats and had been appalled when the bar closed and the owner sold the valuable animals to a circus. No cat likes to be kept captive but leopards hate it most; from that day Jean-Louis devoted himself to acquiring their freedom. It took him years to save up but eventually he earned enough money to buy them.

  He had taken them home and set them up in a large compound in his suburban garden, separating them whenever the female came on heat. It w
asn’t ideal but it was better than a circus. And he loved them. A romantic man, as soon as Michel had told him he knew a place where leopards and lions were rehabilitated by the famous George Adamson, Jean-Louis stopped separating the pair and the two angry little bundles George and I were trying to feed were the consequence.

  Young as they were, they refused to drink milk from the teated whisky bottles George and I offered them. Tired out, we put the cubs down and as soon as we left them alone they started lapping hungrily at the bowl we had left in their box. It was our first lesson in the difference between leopards and lions: lions are gregarious, leopards solitary.

  George was delighted with the leopards and with Michel’s story. But we were worried: the authorities were not going to like the cubs’ provenance.

  ’Oh, God, here we go again,’ said George. But he was smiling broadly for the first time in ages. Kora was back in business.

  We had done a lot of work on the leopard camp during the Scots Guards’ visit but progress had tailed off somewhat while I was away playing Tarzan. We threw ourselves into getting everything up and running, and within three weeks the leopards and I were ready to move. Kampi ya Chui (Camp of the Leopards) was about six miles from Kampi ya Simba, in the lee of another big inselberg that soared out of the commiphora bush a few miles back from the river. The camp was tight up under the rock, which climbed two hundred feet above it and was shaded by huge Acacia tortilis trees. It was entirely fit for habitation – by leopards. All I had, however, was a small hut with no door and a camp bed with a mosquito net until months later when we had time to build something more permanent. Nonetheless, after the first visit by the lions, I decided to put a door on the hut. When I could, I slept outside under the stars as it was so much easier to hear sounds at night.