Born Wild Page 8

  We couldn’t work out what had happened. The cubs were very small and emaciated but they were alive and there was no way they could have looked after themselves and survived for almost a month on their own. We knew they hadn’t been with Juma because we’d been tracking her and her cubs. And they hadn’t been with Christian either. It was a mystery: one that remains unsolved as we never saw Lisa again and never found out what had happened to her.

  We were devastated. Lisa’s disappearance left a big hole in our lives. She was a lovely lioness – so friendly and trusting. But Juma was wonderful too, if in a different way. She immediately adopted Lisa’s cubs and looked after them from that day onwards. It was hard work for her. She was a brilliant hunter but it was much harder hunting without Lisa, and five cubs were a lot for her to bring up on her own. In a normal situation she would have been part of a pride and the extra burden shared between a group of lactating lionesses, but Juma was alone. We helped out with babysitting duties while she went hunting and also with a bit of meat and cod liver oil every now and then. Amazingly it worked. Lisette, the weakest of Lisa’s cubs, had a hernia and died young but the others grew up to be strong and resourceful.

  Whenever George got a bit of money – from his publishers, his pension or supporters of the lion programme – he would give some to Terence to hire people from Asako to cut more roads. Terence and Erigumsa Dirkicha were utterly tireless and their expansion of Kora’s road network was fast, efficient and longlasting. Terence could make a little money go a very long way. We all had to. We did most of our vehicle maintenance in the bush, sometimes making spare parts out of wood and used inner tubes. Keeping old cars working on bad roads is extremely hard work but the police and provincial commissioner’s workshops in Garissa were extraordinarily helpful. They would take our cars into their workshop when I was in town and let us cannibalize parts from their crashed vehicles or borrow parts until we could replace them.

  Police Superintendent Philip Kilonzo was a constant support when we had illegal grazing and would send in patrols to move the herds out of Kora whenever we needed him to. In return we would always help his patrols with food and fuel when they were moving through Kora. One such patrol came through when George and I had been out with the lions. They had set up their tents too close along the road near Kampi ya Simba. The fence was there for a reason: we returned to find all the men lined up behind their officer being inspected by a group of curious young lions. The officer in charge was insisting to his men, ‘ Don’t worry. Tony said these lions were really nice.’ We dispersed the lions and got the police inside the fence as quickly as we could.

  We were always invited to official celebrations in Garissa or Madogo, our District HQ, and made a point of attending them. I had to sit through many a sports day and even more speech days in the searing heat – once I was the only European at a district commissioner’s event to mark Independence Day. I made some great friendships then that lasted for many years. One such was with Noor Abdi Ogle, a young Kenyan-Somali, an assistant game warden. Over the years Noor and I had some terrifying adventures together. He would help us during the worst of times and I accompanied him on some fairly hair-raising anti-stock-theft and poaching patrols. He was incredibly tough and hard, one of the bravest men I’ve ever met. A couple of patrols I went on with him ended in heavy gunfire and Noor never ducked or even flinched. As a result his men would follow him anywhere. A few years later he was fired: twenty-three elephant tusks and sixteen prisoners in his custody had gone missing. He hadn’t been paid for six months. He survived the scandal to become an MP a few years later, but died young of diabetes, the curse of so many Africans. It was a great loss to me.

  Occasionally one of us would have to go to Nairobi for some administrative reason. Almost always it was me and I quite welcomed the break. George hated Nairobi and Terence was such a stick-in-the-mud that he only left Africa once in his entire life. I loved it in the bush at Kora but every now and then I liked to go to Nairobi for some fun. I loved Nairobi in those days but only for a short while. I would let errands stack up until a trip became necessary, then head off to the big smoke and indulge myself. After living such a quiet life on such a bland diet for so long, I invariably got sick after a few days of late nights and hard living. Changes in altitude can also bring on malaria so trips to Nairobi usually took much longer than they should have done. A lot of George’s money was spent at Cooper Motors where I would drop off a Land Rover for a bit of care and attention. There was never much left for beer.

  When I was in town I would always meet up with Mike Wamalwa. A young professor at Nairobi University, he had been to the LSE and Cambridge. He was a scion of a very political family from western Kenya. Mike was a brilliant speaker, in public and private, and, married to the spectacularly beautiful daughter of Foreign Minister Njoroge Mungai, he was half of one of the great power couples of the time. Their marriage had been a terrible scandal as Gathoni, a member of the Kenyatta family, was Kikuyu royalty and he was Abaluhya. Intertribal marriage was almost as shocking as interracial marriage had been years before.

  Mike and I had a madcap idea in the mid-seventies: we would import that period icon Mateus Rose to Kenya. With another friend, Ben Ng’anga, we managed to bring in a shipment of the weirdly shaped bottles that everyone used to make into candlesticks and got it past Customs with the minimum of fuss. It wasn’t so easy to find a buyer, though, and we ended up drinking most of it before we could sell it. I used to take Mike to the Aero Club at Nairobi’s Wilson airport, which, in those days, was a bastion of white supremacy. In later years, after he had become one of Kenya’s youngest MPs, he would return the favour by taking me to Parliament where the only white face belonged to Richard Leakey’s brother, Philip. Once, Mike introduced me to the then vice president, Daniel arap Moi, in the restaurant at Parliament. Moi had a startling presence even then. He shook Mike’s hand, saying, ‘ And what are your plans, young man?’ Mike’s nickname was kijana, or young man, but he didn’t like being called it to his face. He held Moi’s hand, looked him straight in the eye, and said, ‘I’m after your job, sir.’

  In those days I slept on many people’s floors and was the most appalling houseguest. Kit and Sandy Dickinson put up with me for years before they temporarily threw me out after a particularly reprehensible evening when I brought back two young ladies who were in need of a place to rest. I was at least able to return a small part of their hospitality when Sandy and some friends came up to Kora to see the total eclipse. They crashed on the way but arrived on the night before the eclipse and set up camp within the wire. None of us had ever seen an eclipse before and were astounded by what we witnessed. Kora was always quiet and peaceful – particularly after the organ-bruising drive from Nairobi – but however quiet it is in the bush it’s never entirely silent. Crickets chirrup, babblers scuttle in the trees, superb starlings chatter to each other. There is always noise in the background even in the very dead of night.

  When the moon crossed the sun above Kora all that changed. Croakey and Crikey, George’s fan-tailed ravens, flew off to roost on Kora Rock’s sheer face. The hornbills took off for their night trees, and the vulturine guinea fowl flew up on to the roofs of the huts. Everything slowed down and stopped. All creatures were still. No one spoke for the duration – at more than seven minutes, it would be the longest eclipse for the next five hundred years.

  Jack Barrah had come into the Game Department a generation after George and was now a senior adviser at Wildlife HQ. He often came into camp in the early seventies and was invaluable to us in dealing with the authorities. A former colonial game warden, he was particularly valued by the new administration in the Game Department for his fairness, knowledge and integrity, and for his skill at getting the best out of often resentful and cantankerous Europeans. He had seen how Kora was being invaded ever more regularly by illegal herders and how the council did nothing about it. We couldn’t rely on having supportive police and army chiefs in Garissa for ever so he
pushed for Kora to be made into a game reserve. This would provide it with some protection, put the area on the map and de-gazette it as a hunting block. While still under the auspices of the distant Hola County Council, it would be given a warden and some rangers to show that it was an official wildlife area.

  This was a brilliant and necessary idea and much more than George and I could have hoped for but it needed a lot of work. In August Jack made two trips with council members, in very rough flying conditions, to sell the idea to them, and it was only after he had delivered them all back that he revealed to us he had had a bug flying around inside his skull all night. He was in agony as the creature crawled around his ear canal, buzzing like a benchsaw. I suggested I box his ears but ended up shining a torch into his ear and out flew the bug. Just like that!

  On 19 October 1974 his efforts and planning came to fruition and Kora was declared a game reserve, a change in its status that offered it much more protection than when it had merely been property rented from Hola County Council. It also gave us a bit more legitimacy that helped in attracting benefactors and freed us from paying the rent, which had gone up to £1,250 a year – a fortune for George at that time. The lions now had a real home that was recognized by the wildlife authorities – but there weren’t many of them left.

  Around the time that Lisa disappeared, Christian started going away for longer and longer periods. We were happy that he was finding his feet and daring to go on long walkabouts but were worried that he might stray towards human habitation or come across the increasingly frequent illegal grazers invading Kora from the north. I travelled all over Kora and Meru looking for him – long hard safaris on foot and by Land Rover. Everyone we knew was always keeping an eye out for him. Eventually, after he had been gone for three months, we reluctantly decided that he must have gone across the river with no intention of returning and had started a new life. We were upset that we didn’t see him any more but it was tempered with gratitude as this, again, was an affirmation of our methods. The programme at Kora had been created with the express intention of introducing Christian to the wild and we had succeeded. I missed him like a severed limb.

  By the end of 1974 Juma was the only full grown lion still at Kampi ya Simba. We were sure Lisa was dead. We hadn’t seen Christian for most of the year although we did think occasionally that we had heard his roars over the river and seen his spoor so we felt he was still alive.Juma’s cubs were growing up and would try to do a bit of hunting on their own but they were still too young to be fully effective and needed help from Juma and ourselves. We had stopped putting out Farex baby cereal for them but we often stayed up at night waiting for them to come home before we went to bed. All in all, it was a bittersweet end to the year. Juma and the cubs were thriving but where was the next generation? When John Rendall, one of Christian’s keepers in London, came out for Christmas, we decided to give it one more try and go on a last search for Christian. He might be able to produce a litter that could mate with Juma’s cubs.

  I met John off the plane in Nairobi. He was all Bee Gees haircut and King’s Road strides but he fitted in well with my reprobate friends, even though he was remorselessly un-bush. I had met Ace and John a couple of times when they had come back to visit the ever-growing Christian and watched the nervous look in their eyes as this enormous lion – who still loved them beyond measure – bounded up to greet them. This time, though, there was no Christian, and Joy had dragged George, kicking and screaming, to Naivasha, so I was worried about how we might get on – unnecessarily so. Forty years later, John is still on the board of the George Adamson Wildlife Trust, which he joined early on, and is one of our greatest supporters.

  We had a wonderful Christmas together at Kora.John worked on his tan while I did a lot of routine maintenance on the cars and the camp. We went for long walks in the mornings and evenings, often with the young cubs and Juma tailing us. Looking back now, it was strange how we were sure that Lisa was dead and that Christian was alive. We had scant evidence for either belief but that was very much the way we felt. We used the little rubber dinghy to thread our way through the hippos and cross the Tana rather than drive the ten hours around via Garissa.John and I made a couple of half-hearted searches for Christian over on the Meru side but we had no luck and didn’t really expect any. Christian had gone for ever. He had moved from a Bentley in Chelsea to a Land Rover in Kora and now he had gone off to Meru, where they had the new Toyotas, to start his own lineage. We were proud of him but, God, I missed him.

  4. Pride before a Fall

  George received a call over Christmas from Perez Olindo, the first African head of the National Parks Service, urging him to go and see him at his office. In those days, Parks and John Mutinda’s Game Department were separate but we needed to be friends with both in order to operate successfully. Perez told George that he had far too many foundlings at Nairobi National Park animal orphanage. He wanted to give George a young lion called Leakey, who was becoming too big to stay there.

  John Rendall and I were elated when the news came through on the radio. We had spent Christmas discussing the problem of not having a lion to replace Christian and here was a late Christmas present landing in our laps. And from such a source! To receive a lion from the head of Parks gave us a nice official nod. We rigged the pickup for a translocation, then drove to Nairobi, where I dropped John at his plane, and scraped together some cash for more fuel so that I could collect George and the new lion. We were always operating on a shoestring at Kora but this was the time of the Yom Kippur war, and the resulting global fuel crisis, so things were worse than usual. The price of fuel in Kenya went up 500 per cent between 1972 and 1976 so we had to be very careful about how and if we drove. The same applied to the gas we used for the fridges, and the build-up of lions over the coming period meant we had to buy much more meat than we had in earlier years. It was a long time before we realized that thousands of people out there would be willing to sponsor us to get over such problems because they admired the work we were doing.

  The orphaned Leakey had been named after Louis, the great archaeologist who discovered the origins of man in East Africa and was the mentor and friend to so many ’Monkey Women’: the late great Diane Fossey (gorillas), Shirley Strum (baboons) and Jane Goodall (chimps). Louis and his equally talented wife Mary’s children went on to be very influential in Kenya and indeed the wider world. Philip became an MP when no other white Kenyan dared join the political fray and indeed became a minister under President Moi. Richard made major archaeological discoveries, headed up the National Museums of Kenya, then took on the poachers and beat them when, many years later, he sat in Perez Olindo’s chair. Yet more bravely, in the mid-1980s he used his position as CEO of the East African Wildlife Society to take on the minister, the directors and the government as a whole over poaching, corruption and law and order. He then went into politics himself. I have had many run-ins with the Leakeys over the years but I have always admired their balls while remaining keenly aware of their less shining parts. When most white Kenyans have sat on their butts, sure in the knowledge that they can reclaim their nationalities of birth at the drop of a hat, the Leakeys have embraced being Kenyan, involved themselves in politics and worked in the Kenyan civil service for the greater good of the country. They are almost alone in this regard and I admire them both.

  Perez told us that Leakey had been badly treated on capture and that recently he had been put on display at a fair in Nairobi. At around one year old he was going to be difficult to integrate and reintroduce to the wild, but it was either take him or leave him in the orphanage. George and I were rather wary of what we might be letting ourselves in for but we took him without hesitation. Juma, too, had been treated badly on capture and was still very cautious and jumpy around humans. A distrust of humans is a healthy attribute in a wild lion – humans are their only predator – but dislike can be dangerous for both man and beast. George drove back to Kora with Leakey in a large cage on the back of the pi
ckup and I followed in the station wagon in case of breakdowns. I saw some tremendous double-takes from passers-by as we made our way out of Nairobi on the main Thika highway. As quickly as possible we got him into the compound and stashed in the holding area within our camp, which Terence had reinforced while we were away. We need not have worried about Leakey being aggressive towards humans. He was a hopeless lion he had a great deal in common with the one in The Wizard of Oz.

  Hopeless Leakey might have been but he also had a lovely personality. He soon developed an incredibly endearing habit. In addition to nudging our thighs in greeting, as all the lions did, he took to nudging the front wing of the Land Rover as soon as we came home. We tried to take him out into the bush, as we had with the others, so he could learn about life in Kora, but he hated walks. There was one place he liked going just near camp. He would charge in and out of the thicket there for a while, then sneak back to camp when we weren’t looking. It was maddening, particularly as, in the bush, a ready-made family was waiting to teach him the tricks of his trade. Lisette had died but Juma was doing a sterling job bringing up the other cubs and they were all about the same age as Leakey. We had to keep them apart from each other because – due to his incarceration at the or phanage – he had not even learnt how to play when the others were already hunting successfully. We had to drag him out of his compound by the dangerous method of pulling a piece of meat on a rope but sometimes he just wouldn’t come. After a while we managed to get him to come on a long walk down to the Tana, and he gradually fell into the daily routine that we had worked up with Christian and the girls, but he was way behind his peers.