Born Wild Page 4

  I remember thinking then that it was a long walk down to the river for a sixty-five-year-old, but George was the same age then as I am now and I, too, feel like I can take on the world when I get up in the morning. As we reached the river a large, shortmaned lion charged out of the bush and came bounding up to greet George.

  George turned to me. ‘Come and say hello to Christian,’ he said.

  I screwed up my courage and stepped out of the car. Christian took one look at me with his unreadable yellow eyes, growled loudly and crouched, ready to pounce.

  ‘I think you’d better get back in the vehicle,’ said George. ‘He’s a bit frisky today.’

  I obeyed his instructions, feeling somewhat ashamed as the Old Man talked to the three lions and sat down to smoke a pipe and watch the river with them. So this was the famous lion man whose attempts to reintroduce lions to the wild had been immortalized in Joy’s multi-million-selling book, Born Free. And this was the lion I had heard about that had been bought from Harrods as a cub by Ace Bourke and John Rendall, a couple of Australian hippies, and had lived on the King’s Road until he had become too big to handle. I looked at the fine young beast, not fully mature but still huge and powerful, his muscles rippling clearly under his loose skin. I found him hard to equate with the Chelsea furniture shop where he had been raised: a bull amid crockery would have been much easier to handle.

  Crocodiles lolled on the banks of the Tana while herons and egrets waded in the shady shallows as the heat of the sun built up. I looked across at the Old Man, who was already inspiring my loyalty. Shirtless, in a pair of tattered old shorts and Afghan chapli sandals, he held a rifle loosely in his right hand. His long white hair contrasted with the neat Vandyke beard that emphasized the point of his chin. His strong shoulders were a rich reddish brown after a lifetime spent in the sun – in India where he was born and in Kenya, to which he had devoted his adult life. There was a quality of peace and stillness about him that clearly put the lions at ease. Everything he did, he did competently, deliberately and calmly.

  I had just finished reading George’s book Bwana Game, which speaks of the years he spent patrolling the NFD, protecting its people and animals. George had tried his hands at many things – gold prospecting, road haulage, hunting and farming – before he joined the Game Department. He had led a solitary and independent life, even during his marriage to Joy, a twice-married Austrian painter with whom he had fallen hopelessly in love in 1942 when she was on a safari through Garissa, soon to be my home town. Theirs was a tempestuous relationship, whether they were living together or apart in a marriage that was so unlike its celluloid re-creation that it was a standing joke among their friends and acquaintances. The fact that George was one of the most famous people in the world at this time was the unlikely outcome of his shooting a lioness in 1956 when out in the bush with his successor and colleague as warden at Isiolo, Ken Smith. The film of Born Free (I966),Joy’s book about bringing up the lion cub he had orphaned and then returning her to the wild, had been a stunning success. Starring Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna, it had broken all sorts of box-office records, won two Oscars and made George, Joy and Elsa into household names. Since then people were always trying to meet George and asking him to speak at events: in vain. He was the most taciturn of men, who communicated mainly in grunts. His harrumphs, however, spoke volumes.

  I’ve only met one person who spoke less than George and that was his brother Terence. I think they must have gone weeks without talking before I arrived on the scene. He had a crumpled face with huge bags under his eyes and was much given to scowling. A perpetual rather than confirmed bachelor, Terence was one of the strangest men I have ever met. After a lifetime of building houses and working as a game warden in a subordinate rather than leading role, he had ended up at Kora, living with a brother who quietly and unconsciously dominated him. They camped miles from anywhere in an environment Terence himself had designed entirely for the welfare of his brother’s lions. Kampi ya Simba was split in two – one part for the humans, the other for the lions, with a simple system of gates and chain-link fences dividing the two. The lions’ comfort and safety always came first. When George first moved there with Christian and Boy all he had needed to say to Terence was ‘Build me a camp for my lions,’ then turn up when it was ready. The road system that Terence designed and his team of labourers hacked from the bush with machetes remains unchanged to this day: Kora would not function without it. The airstrip he sited ninety minutes away, paced out and cut, remained for years the only one for miles and was in the only place it could be: there was no other suitable ground. In short, without Terence, George and I would have been completely unable to do our work with the lions we both adored. Yet Terence would have absolutely nothing to do with them: he built a complicated infrastructure for them but actively disliked living with lions. He thought George and I were quite mad.

  George was easier to read. There was something about Kora and about George that gripped and inspired me. I couldn’t be him but from the moment I arrived I knew that this was it. This was how I wished to live my life. I want some of that, I thought. To get a part of it, though, I was going to have to prove myself first. I wasn’t going to be much use to George if I couldn’t even make friends with Christian. The next morning we followed the same routine – up before dawn, then the slow drive down to the river in George’s footsteps. There was Christian again, tail swishing, an unfathomable look in his eye. I thought, If the Old Man can do this, so can I. I walked straight across and said, ‘Hello, Christian, I’m Fitz.’ Christian got up, rubbed his head against me and just sat there on my feet while I scratched his head. It was the beginning of one of my life’s most valuable relationships.

  The feeling of tranquillity and unity with nature that we experienced when we were out walking with the lions was a major part of why I loved my life so much. It was a feeling and code of behaviour that went entirely unexpressed, indeed would actually dissolve if I thought about it. Integral to everything we did was that the lions came before ourselves. We lived very simply and would go hungry rather than ration the lions; we wouldn’t sleep if we needed to watch out for them; we wouldn’t leave camp so that they were always protected. I had been living a pretty dissolute, aimless and selfish life since leaving England, yet within a few weeks of being at Kora I was a better human being. I felt spiritually and morally refreshed. That’s not to say I didn’t behave badly and have a lot of fun when I was away from camp but the core of my life now had some meaning.

  We lived a life of quiet routine at Kora, punctuated with memorably disgusting meals cooked by Hamisi, a Sudanese cook who had been with Terence for decades. We didn’t give him much to work with – tins of carrots, bits of goat and posho, Kenya’s staple maize meal – but even with better ingredients he was no Escoffier. Every morning George and I would take the lions for a walk down to the river. There was always something to do as we walked along – the lions would follow trails and George would show me what to watch out for and which tracks were made by what animal. He was a shower, not a teller, and by this method he taught me a huge amount very quickly. I soon recognized the songs of birds and the tracks of animals; it would be a while longer before I could recognize individual animals but it came with time. When we reached the river, the lions would lie down with explosive sighs and we would sit with them, shaded by the palms and giant figs, to watch the river go by. At eleven o’clock or thereabouts George would make himself a pipe and pull out his battered Stanley flask. Then we would have a cup of gin and Treetop orange squash before walking back to Kampi ya Simba for lunch.

  The camp Terence had built did the job but that was all. The fence kept the wild lions out and allowed those that needed a safe place to stay inside. Life for us revolved around the sand-floored mess hut, with its thatched roof and three cement-covered hessian walls. Where the fourth wall should have been, a sandy area led to the fence and, beyond it, the bush. George’s ancient typewriter sat on the table, much
as Ruark’s or Hemingway’s must have done, the litter of books, papers and objets trouvés that surrounded it shuffled to one side for meals. He was a great correspondent and was always writing to some old friend or dealing with the council or Game Department. Rough bookshelves housed his collection of photographs, novels and reference books and quite often a snake or two looking for a quiet place to rest. The sand floor displayed the spoor of George’s menagerie of guinea fowl, ravens and seed-eating birds, which to Terence’s disgust would beg at meals or at the very least clear up afterwards. I’m sure George did most of it to tease his brother, but he also had a definite St Francis of Assisi streak that allowed him to hand-feed even the shyest creatures, like the hornbills, ground squirrels, dik-dik and vervet monkeys. It was one of the reasons for his great success with the lions.

  The lions ate rather better than us. I bought them fresh meat in Asako, our nearest village. We usually lived off corned beef, camel, maize meal or rice and tinned vegetables. Pudding was tinned fruit and evaporated milk – just like school dinners back in Enfield. Because of this we didn’t usually linger over our meals. This left more time for a siesta in the brutal heat of the day, something I insist upon to this day. Little goes on at midday: the bush is still, sounds are dulled and only the most intrepid lizards move around. At about four o’clock we would get up, have a cup of tea, go out into the bush again and look for the lions. If they were nearby they would come to George’s call but if they were tired or had killed and eaten too much we would have to go and find them. This was hard work and not always fruitful. The baked earth around camp and the rocks were hard for tracking so we often had to cut through the nyika bush on buffalo paths to the narrow luggas (dried-up riverbeds) that ran down to the Tana and flowed only when it rained heavily every twenty years or so. Picking up tracks on the sand in the luggas was a much easier proposition and often met with success, particularly when the sun was not too high. Sometimes, though, the lions would cross rocky outcrops and we would have to circle through the thick bush at their base to see which way they had gone.

  Hard to believe now, we used to have to watch out for the numerous rhinos when we were tracking. They can go at quite a pace when riled, and relying on their poor eyesight is not always a successful tactic when trying to avoid them. If you literally have your nose to the ground, looking for small signs and indications of what has passed that way, it’s very easy to miss the large and obvious signs like the vast elephant leaning against a tree, dozing in the heat. We had many lucky scrapes on coming face to face with the larger wildlife but usually they were just as surprised as we were.

  The lions were all old enough to hunt a little but they still needed a lot of looking after and protection from the wild lions in the area so in those early days we still tried to keep them in camp at night. The bush was thick and the game wary, so the lions had to adapt to hunting by sound first, smell second and then a sighting when they were already in full pursuit. Christian, who was of a similar age to Lisa and Juma, was still learning to hunt well. Nevertheless, he was independent and would usually meet us down at the river from which we would try to coax all three back to camp to avoid encounters with older, smarter and already established wild lions.

  George had discovered that walking with the lions was the best way to get them acquainted with the bush and ready for a selfreliant life. As we strolled along they would head off into the surrounding country as dogs do when you take them out, following scent trails and searching for excitement. We found that by watching the lions we observed much more than we would on a normal walk as their ever-watchful eyes scanned the bush like snipers’, their bodies stiffening as they spotted anything strange or unnatural. Christian, with whom I became ever more friendly, was particularly rewarding to watch. I think he saw similarities between Ace and John, who had loved him so much in England, and myself; it was very much as if we were growing up together. Soon he and Lisa began to bounce up and greet me as they did George, but Juma was always very wary of everyone – even the Old Man himself. We thought she had been mistreated on capture and she was never really able to look on humans with the warmth we felt from Christian and Lisa. At times she tried to be like the others, but it was too much for her. The damage had been done and she was always careful with Man.

  Every week or so I would drive for about an hour and a half to Asako, the closest village to our camp at Kora, and buy meat for the lions. Almost inevitably it would take longer – a leaf spring on the Land Rover would break, I would get stuck or have a puncture or two. The Trust that George and I created has done a lot of work in Asako over the last twenty years, but forty years ago there was nothing there except a few huts and some mangy livestock. There was no dispensary, no school, no security, no Land Rover ‘taxis’ to our main town Garissa, no shops even, just a crocodile-infested river crossing to Mbalambala on the far bank and three islands, famed for their enormous elephants. The people of Asako are from a small tribe called the Korokoro. No one really knows their ancestry. Terence was convinced they were the indigenous people of that area, others that they are a subset of the much more numerous Oromo people of Ethiopia. For years they had been subjected to raids from both the Oromo and the Somalis. Scattered throughout the length of Kora are large stone mounds, supposed to be thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Oromo, or Galla – an ancient tribe from the Ethiopian border – graves.

  The Maalim, or spiritual leader, of Asako was a great supporter of George and our lion project and, along with the village chief, would encourage his people to sell us livestock, which we would feed to the lions. This was an expensive way of doing things, but although we had permission to shoot for the pot outside the boundaries of Kora, we had all developed a distaste for killing wild animals – George and Terence after a lifetime spent working on game and predator control. Buying our meat from Asako had the advantage of providing the Korokoro villagers with a little extra money, which they desperately needed. The meat also helped a great deal in luring the lions back to camp in the evenings and meant that we could supplement their diets when they were learning how to hunt.

  Maalim Shora Dirkicha, to give him his full family name, would look around for likely cows for us. He still lives there today and, although pencil thin, can walk thirty miles a day in intense heat without batting an eyelid. We looked for beasts that would cost as little as possible. Even though they were for feeding to the lions, we always had them killed by the village in the Muslim way before taking them back to camp for butchering.

  Butchering was a messy process at which I soon became expert. First I would remove the skin from the cow and the meat from the bones. I chopped the meat into two-kilo chunks and the skin into squares, then hung the meat overnight. If the lions weren’t about we would put the carcass into the back of the Land Rover and drive around with it in the hope of attracting them. If they were near camp we tied it to a tree with all the guts and lungs hanging out, a strong chain through the pelvic girdle. This allowed us to have a good long look at the lions as they were interacting with each other and meant that wild lions were unable to steal the carcass. Over a very long period this had the effect of bringing the wild and introduced lions together. There’s nothing like meeting for a meal to kick-start a relationship.

  The meat went into the elderly propane gas fridge that we shared with the lions. Incredibly temperamental, gas fridges were the only way to keep things cool at Kora; thank God we have solar fridges today, which are so much easier to deal with. Each gas fridge has its own personality, seldom pleasant, and must be lit and fuelled with great care. As with the even more dangerous paraffin fridges, if you get it badly wrong, the fridge blows up and burns down your camp – this happened to Joy ten years later, when she was living in Shaba. More usually they allow your meat to go off or they freeze it solid. The lions used to lick the frozen chunks like lollipops, their sandpaper tongues gradually wearing down the flesh until it became chewable by their back molars.

  Over many years we found that fee
ding the lions like this did not – as many suspected – give them a taste for domestic stock and break down their fear of man, but it did give them a reason to come back to the safety of camp and encouraged a certain tolerance of man, which meant they didn’t attack humans. Although there were issues about them eating domestic stock, we never had a problem with them attacking people out in the wild in my whole eighteen years at Kora. Where we did have difficulty was around camp, the centre of their territory, where they were often hungry and expecting food. A hungry lion is an angry lion, as all three of us discovered over the years. We had to be very careful with the blocks of meat we gave them as a reward for coming back to camp. These often triggered an attack reflex, of which we had to be aware. The lions loved butchering days and they were always a cause for celebration with George, Terence and me. Our one concession to our own stomachs was to cut out the fillets and eat them ourselves rather than give them to the lions. When we changed to camels we had to forgo even that treat.