Born Wild Read online

  The shifta and poaching wars were getting ever more intense as the days went by and the wildlife community was already losing faith in the newly formed WCMD. Ian Hughes had resigned from the old Game Department and given up his antipoaching patrols a few years back. He felt that the government didn’t give him the support it should – in fact, quite the opposite – and that he was being asked to risk the lives of his men for window dressing. This opinion was becoming ever more widely held as it grew increasingly apparent that some of Kenya’s elite were more than involved in poaching: they were managing it.

  Great men remained at the forefront of the anti-poaching effort but they received no support whatsoever. Ted Goss had recently flown into camp and taken me to see the powers that now prevailed in Garissa. We met the new police chief, then my friend Mohammed Aden at Anti-poaching and some of the provincial authorities. Most were brave men, fighting the growing insecurity with almost no assistance. Ted told me that the entire country was receiving only $6,000 a month for anti-poaching and I’d learnt a few weeks earlier that now game wardens had to fuel their own vehicles or give up patrolling. And poaching was only part of the problem: poachers were branching out into ambush and extortion. At the end of April they ambushed a WCMD truck full of armed rangers in the middle of Kora. They very nearly killed a good man called Sergeant Longoji and would have succeeded if I had been unable to get hold of the Flying Doctors. As usual, the Flying Doctors braved the insecurity and bad weather and saved another life. We were reminded again that George, Terence and I would have died years earlier without their courage and commitment.

  Catastrophic as most of the news from the WCMD was, there were occasional rays of sunshine, like when the authorities told us they had plenty of leopards at the orphanage and we could have as many as we liked. There was a problem, though: they were all female, old and unsuitable for reintroduction. Squeaks really needed a partner. Without one she couldn’t move on to the next stage of her reintegration: mating. We had always said with the lions that they needed to be able to hunt, carve out a territory and mate with wild animals before we had succeeded at reintegrating them. Attila had gone a long way from Kampi ya Chui, and although we had reports of him occasionally or picked up the signal from his collar, we didn’t know whether he had found a mate. With Squeaks, I knew. There were no mates around. She kept coming into season and throwing herself at me in the absence of a better option. This was scary stuff as she would work herself up into a frenzy, throw herself around, jump all over me and scratch me with her teeth and claws out. Flattering though it was, I had to be careful – leopard claws are notorious for passing on infections. Squeaks was also intensely jealous of anyone who came to camp so we had to spend a lot of time reinforcing the cages and building tunnels to protect our visitors.

  My two main helpers were Mohammed Maro and Ali Tukuna, known as Ali Oil Can. Both from Asako village, they knew the area well and were hard workers without whom I would have had great difficulty juggling everything. Two other people helped me too – Patrick ‘Bunter’ Corbally-Stourton, a tubby little Catholic on his year off who took everything I threw at him, and Pete Silvester. Pete is one of the world’s best guides and used to stay with me between safaris, helping to rebuild the cars, erect huts and do all the work that Terence did at Kampi ya Simba when he was in better health. A brilliant businessman, far-sighted conservationist and top-end safari operator, Pete is now one of our trustees and remains a great friend. Patrick, like so many others in this story, died in a plane crash a few years ago.

  Observers seldom appreciate the amount of work required to look after animals. The boring behind-the-scenes work far outweighs the exciting stuff you see on the National Geographic TV channel. Throughout this period, I usually spent five days a week maintaining the vehicles at both camps, fixing the huts and building new holding cages. The other two days would be spent on administration, writing letters to donors or doing supply runs. Only at night and in the early mornings would I get down to the exciting work with leopards and lions, work that always amazed my friends.

  It was sad that when my father, Leslie, came out to visit Squeaks was on one of her rare walkabouts but it was great to see him in Africa, which he hadn’t visited since he’d fought across it in the Second World War. I was proud to be able to show him what I had achieved. As ever, we didn’t talk much but it was great to spend some time with him after so many years. My mother couldn’t come and died soon after Dad returned home, but I hope that he was able to convey some of the wonder of my life in Kora to her. I know he understood what we had never been able to put into words to each other: I had found a home in this harsh corner of Africa with two taciturn old men and an ever-growing group of wild animals and in doing so I had come to appreciate what Leslie and Hilda had done for me. They had provided me with a loving home I could abandon, and got me into a good school, but that was only part of a much wider background that had formed me and allowed me to achieve what I have today. At Mum’s funeral in Cockfosters later that year, I sat in church with Dad, Margaret and the Hat Brigade, wondering at how my life had changed. I wish I had been able to show Kora to them both but at least I showed it to Dad and I know he ‘got it’ because, years later, my sister told me so. The choir was as bad as ever.

  The work never slowed when guests were around and it was purely a matter of luck how much time we would be able to spend with them – when Dad was around we went on a short safari, looking for Squeaks. Sometimes people would turn up when we scarcely had time to speak to them. Palle and Caroline Rune were in camp when we were suddenly given a male leopard by the orphanage. We were thrown into an insane round of compound building and reinforcement. He was huge, with enormous teeth, and although it was hoped he would mate with Squeaks and let my sorely scarred thighs recover from her endless attentions, he needed to acclimatize before we could bring the two together. Palle and Caroline saw so little of me that I named the newcomer Palle as a peace-offering. Another was named Khalid because he came from Ol Pejeta, Khalid’s ranch at the foot of Mount Kenya. Up at Kampi ya Simba, Koretta and Naja had five more cubs between them but they were sadly poisoned by illegal grazers before we could even think of names for them.

  Squeaks, too, was poisoned but by a snake rather than a Somali herder. She very nearly died. Oil Can and I found her in a cave near camp in a catatonic state and she growled at us to tell us to stay away. Twelve hours later she limped into camp in the evening with a most terrible wound on her right foreleg. All the skin and flesh had been eaten away as if it had been dipped in acid. I could see her bone. It was such a horrifying sight that I locked her in a compound, jumped in the car and drove through the night to Palle’s farm in Thika. He gave me some cortisone and penicillin and I drove straight back to administer it, arriving at lunchtime. George was very worried when I returned, warning me that she was no better and in terrible pain.

  Jock Rutherford had come back with me to help out at Kampi ya Chui. He was a godsend, a retired farmer who had followed myriad different careers, including one as a giraffaroo when he had lassoed Rothschild’s giraffe on horseback for Rick Anderson’s family, the Leslie-Melvilles, who had set up a sanctuary for them in Nairobi. He had also worked with Joy in her final years at Shaba and because of this knew a lot about leopards. Jock seconded Palle’s course of medicine, as did the vet, Dieter Rottcher, when at last we got hold of him on the radio.

  I went into Squeaks’s compound with a great deal of trepidation. She was almost out of her mind with pain and the monstrous hole on her leg was getting worse as the flesh dissolved away. I gave her two huge injections and hoped for the best. She allowed me to do it but she wasn’t happy and when I poked around in the wound to see if her nerves had been destroyed I soon discovered that they hadn’t. As quick as a cobra she had my whole hand in her mouth, her teeth just about to rip and tear before she realized her mistake and let me go with a growl. I held out little hope for her leg but, amazingly, the injections worked. Gradually the flesh rega
ined its hold on her shin bone and was covered once more by skin. In time she made a full recovery.

  The insecurity never stopped because we were busy or one of the cats was missing or sick; the illegal grazing and perimeter poisoning was becoming institutionalized. The WCMD was falling to pieces and didn’t even try to stop the poachers, and the police no longer did anything to deter illegal grazing. It was obvious that they had been told from above to turn a blind eye. Indeed, the grazers, when questioned, always claimed that they had permission to graze from one of the local MPs; before Ted Goss eventually gave up and resigned, he told us stories of tanker trucks full of ivory being allowed to pass through checkpoints because the owners knew the right people. The country was becoming ever more lawless and there was little anyone could do to change it. We hated the destruction the Somalis did to Kenya with their stock but they were poorly provided for and, at times, it was hard not to sympathize with them. In early 1984 there was a massacre at the Wagalla airstrip near Wajir, the dry northern area where Freddie the lion had come from. To this day no one knows the full details or what the provocation was but it is thought that more than a thousand Kenyan Somalis were shot by the security forces there and in surrounding manyattas.

  Simultaneous with the political unrest, a drought combined with an invasion of army-worms that ate all the crops still standing. In Ethiopia, where the weather was much more severe, the drought became the Live Aid famine. We didn’t have it so badly because there were good rains in the middle of the year but it was with relief and trepidation that I set off for Minnesota in the summer. Two visitors who had come to Kora over the years had got together to help me earn my flying licence. Larry Freels paid for my tuition, Bryan Moon paid for my accommodation and the company he worked for, Northwest Airlines, did the tickets. As I swotted under the summer thunderstorms of the Great Plains, I knew Squeaks was in the best of hands:Jock and George between them would keep everything safe and Jock knew exactly what to do with the new arrivals – two more illegally imported French leopard cubs from Michel Jeanniot! I would deal with that problem when I returned from America, refreshed and, I hoped, equipped with the wings I longed for and knew were essential to keeping our project alive.

  America was a shock and initially very frightening. I had spent the last eighteen years living in the bush and was now in the most developed nation on earth. As I was learning how to fly a tiny plane around the Great Lakes, NASA’s astronauts had recently mastered the Space Shuttle. Even so, these were the days before global positioning systems made flying easy and everything had to be done with maps and compasses. I was very glad that there were water towers all over the Midwest on which kindly local authorities had written the names of their towns for the benefit of passing pilots. I will always be grateful for having done my flying exams properly in the States. When I returned to Kenya and did my Kenyan exams, I was fully aware of my own limitations – an important bit of self-knowledge for any pilot.

  Bryan and his son Chris had spent much of the summer putting together a music-video-style presentation with slides for the Trust. Chris was in the music business – he had discovered the rock star Prince – and in those early days of MTV, it was a great boon for us to have such a snappy fundraising tool. They tested me out on some of their friends in LA and elsewhere and I was able to hone my skills as a fundraiser. A lot of people took me and our work seriously but many others didn’t. I was going to have to focus my mind and articulate my case if we were to persuade donors to part with their money to finance our dreams for African wildlife.

  I headed back to Kora via England where I had yet more terrifying challenges to face. Learning to speak in public had been almost as hair-raising as learning to fly, but nothing could have prepared me for Blue Peter, a television programme on which I had been raised as a child. It was a national institution. To be asked to appear on it live was, frankly, terrifying. After weeks of waiting I managed not to fluff too many of my lines.

  It had been a strange time to be away. Kenya had become ever more dangerous but it wasn’t alone. The IRA had bombed the Tory Party conference while I was in England and had very nearly succeeded in killing Margaret Thatcher. A month after my return Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her own bodyguards. In comparison to the outside world of Reagan’s Star Wars and Andropov’s death in the Kremlin, Kora seemed quite tame. It was full of illegal stock, some game rangers had just been caught with a load of ivory, and we heard poachers shooting on my first night back. It was great to be home.

  Jock had done a wonderful job in looking after the animals but there was a huge backlog of maintenance. The cars all needed servicing and fixing and the Bedford truck I had picked up at an auction had a host of problems. Mohammed Soba, one of the local MPs, visited soon after I returned and we talked about building a tourist lodge in Kora. An architect he brought with him had lots of exciting ideas, including one for building a bridge across the Tana, but sadly the lodge never took off. It might have forced the government to invest some manpower in protecting the area. The bridge was properly surveyed by an engineering team but was costed at a minimum of $200,000. Neither the government nor the Trust had that kind of money so that idea, too, was mothballed.

  With a knack she had shown all her life, Squeaks had come back the day after I returned and jumped straight into my arms. Her leg had healed astonishingly well and you could hardly see where the gaping hole had been. Jock said she’d been away for ten days most recently but had been out for twenty-eight before that. It was great that she moved around so much but it was a problem that she was so attached to me. It wasn’t safe to have a jealous and fully grown leopard around any other people.

  The two new cubs had been named Chaka and Kazi. Collared and reintegrated, they had been eventually let go but they still came back to my call if I was in the right area. Palle, Khalid and Adnan were also doing well. The leopard programme was really coming into its own. On many days, friendly pilot permitting, we could pick up bleeps from five different animals on the radio. They were surviving! Their return to the wild was always fast compared to the lions’. Maybe I had been over-cautious in keeping them back for more months than was necessary but now they were out there thriving and doing their thing. I was truly proud of how the leopard programme had done so well against all the acquired wisdom and published theses.

  All was well at Kampi ya Simba too. On Christmas Eve 1984 Koretta, Naja and four new cubs turned up to say happy Christmas to George. He called me on the radio and over I went. We celebrated long into the night. Koretta had another litter in the middle of the year, but for me 1985 was all about leopards and flying. I was determined to make the most of having learnt to fly so, despite all the work I had to do on the vehicles, the lions and leopards, I kept swotting for my exams so that I could convert my American flying licence into a Kenyan one. Everybody has to do it but I had just faced my first exams for twenty years and doing it all again immediately was hard.

  I was able to throw myself at the leopards because of two wonderful coincidences. George and Terence were now showing their age – but we were in luck: a wonderful intensive-care nurse from Germany called Elke came and stayed at Kampi ya Simba where she kept a close eye on the ailing old men. And, more importantly, George had an operation on his eyes in Austria that almost completely restored his sight – he had been going blind for years and, although his health was bad, the restoration of his sight knocked years off him overnight.

  My dad came and stayed again at the start of the year and was able to meet Squeaks this time. We went on a safari to Mbalambala thirty-five miles away to try to find Chaka, whose radio signal had been picked up there. We didn’t find him but someone in Asako said they had seen a leopard with two cubs a few days earlier. This was true reintegration! I was thrilled – and so glad that Dad had come to Kora when the leopard project was going so well. We were inundated with leopards in the months to come, all from Dr Chaudry at the Nairobi orphanage – therefore with the coveted WCMD seal of approval
. Two females and a male were named Amina, Fatima and Ngoto. I had to build a new compound down at the river to house them all but our main problem was keeping Squeaks out. Her passion for me showed no signs of relenting and she would break into camp whenever she had the chance, scaring the life out of Mohammed and Oil Can and causing an ever-growing danger. Funny as it was, it was also unsafe and she seemed capable of penetrating almost anything I built to keep her out. It was particularly frustrating because her reintegration had otherwise been a great success. She had her own territory and she killed for herself, but she wouldn’t mate however hard I pimped for her. She shunned Palle, Adnan, Khalid and now Ngoto in favour of her abiding love for me.

  The only other male in which she showed any interest was, of all things, a lion. One of my ex-girlfriends found Bugsy near the water-holes in the Komunyu lugga, about a mile from camp, lying next to the dead body of his sister. The young male was tiny, three or four weeks old, and extremely sick. I grabbed him as he tried to run off and took him back to Kampi ya Chui. George came down with feeding bottles and we decided that it was better for me to look after Bugsy (properly named Lucifer) as I was better equipped than he was. Kampi ya Simba was crowded with too many people and had so many lions coming and going that George would have had to handle Bugsy on top of all that without me as back-up. Neither George nor I could work out who Bugsy’s parents were and we found no trace of them where the cubs were found. We were not at all sure he would survive but, fantastically, Dave Allen brought in a vet called Jenny Price who gave him a drip for blood plasma and did a blood test. She treated him with Vitamin B12, antibiotics and glucose, then sent us medication for hookworm when she got back to Nairobi. Without her, Bugsy would surely have died.