Born Wild Page 9

  The routine wasn’t to last for long. In late February, I drove into Garissa on a supply run and went to see Brother Mario, the former nightclub-owning priest. His latest project was growing melons in the desert, three miles inland from the river. It sounds like a biblical parable but he did it for real. And, like everything else Mario did, it defied logic but worked: he made Garissa melons famous. As soon as I pulled up, Mario told me that I had to go and find Fred Leminiria, the new game warden. ‘He’s hiding from you,’ said Mario, ‘because he’s got a tiny lion cub from Wajir and he knows you’ll want it.’

  I charged around town – from the police bar to the shebeens by the river to Brother Mario’s petrol station – until I found Fred hiding in the army mess, cradling a tiny cub whose mother he’d been obliged to shoot for stock-raiding. I stormed over to him – all dust and hair and shorts. Fred just said, ’OK, Tony, you can have him.’ I gave him a Temptations tape and a T-shirt in return. And, of course, we called the lion Freddie.

  Fred Leminiria would never have let me have him if the cub hadn’t been so sick – he would have been sent to the orphanage like Leakey. Little Freddie was so weak I thought he might not make the journey home and drove the whole way back from Garissa with him on my lap. By the end of the journey it was love. He was my first lion cub and I was going to make sure he survived. He had terrible hookworm, one of the biggest killers of wild animals. We cured him of that pretty quickly and then he thrived on the Farex and cod liver oil we fed him before moving him on to solids. I was besotted with him and he would go nowhere without me. It was with Freddie that I really worked out how to communicate with lions; Christian and I had been close, but he had been brought up by Ace and John before he got to me. Freddie was less than a month old. I would have loved to show off and take him to the coast, to Nairobi and all the great places that George and Joy had gone with Elsa, but that wasn’t the purpose of our project: our goal was to give the animals we brought up a real life as lions, to help them survive and be lions in their natural habitat. So, I had to stay with Freddie: he couldn’t come with me. Everything went by the board – visits to Nairobi, girlfriends, trips to Garissa, even. I devoted my life to that cub.

  At first he and Leakey had a very strange relationship. Although Leakey was much older than Fred, he was utterly goofy. He didn’t like going for walks, he didn’t know how to play; hunting was a faraway dream. Freddie, on the other hand, was a proper Somali lion: although tiny he was already good at playing and he loved walking. Leakey was useless but he knew that the smaller cub had to kowtow to him and was pretty rough with him, beating him up and forcing him to show subservience. It was hard not to intervene in those meetings, but I knew they had to learn to get on – as lions – or life would become very complicated. Our restraint worked and we were rewarded with the discovery that Leakey had a talent – even if he did hunt backwards. He was the Henry Kissinger of the lion world and could make friends with anyone. His diplomatic skills would become extremely useful as we tried to keep the ever-multiplying prides from fighting with each other.

  Freddie was very gentle – like Lisa – but he was adventurous and brave as well. He and Leakey helped each other to learn about the wild as I guided them through the pitfalls. George and I would take them for walks and they became increasingly curious as they grew in confidence, setting off into the bush in pursuit of guinea fowl and dik-dik. It was quite some time, though, before they caught anything. The bush was starting to change: it became increasingly thick as the rhino that had browsed the shrubs and kept the roads and elephant paths open were systematically wiped out by Somali raiding parties. We met fewer and fewer rhino on our walks and we often heard shooting at night. For some reason the poachers kept out of our way but they were very busy all around us and we often came across vast grey carcasses with gaping holes in their snouts where their horns had been cut out. You could smell the rotting remains from miles away.

  The fact that Kora had become a game reserve should have given it some form of protection but the Game Department was understaffed and inefficient, and the Somalis now doing the poaching were not like the Wakamba with their poisoned arrows. They had powerful semi-automatic rifles, easily good enough for shooting rhinos and even more so for killing anyone who tried to stop them. Vast as they are, rhinos are surprisingly easy to kill: you just follow their tracks and shoot them when they charge. You don’t even need a heavy rifle as you do for buffalo or elephant. Within a couple of years there would be none left. No one understood why there was suddenly such an insatiable demand for rhino horn but after a lot of research – some of it very dangerous – our friend Esmond Bradley Martin discovered that, like everything else in the seventies, it was OPEC’s fault. By pushing up the price of oil, Sheikh Yamani and his cohorts had multiplied the Yemeni GDP seven-fold. A rhino-horn dagger in Yemen is a symbol of manhood, so an entire species was all but wiped out in order that a load of newly oil-rich Yemenis could have them.

  As the two Yemens moved towards unification the football authorities of peace-loving Kenya were at war with each other. The whole country had gone football crazy and Pele was visiting. I bought Freddie a football in Garissa. He soon caught the soccer bug and turned into an excellent dribbler although, with opposition like Leakey and me, he had no trouble looking good.

  When I had arrived in camp with Freddie, George’s first words had been ’not another male’. Juma was looking after three boys already and we really needed some girls to even things out. As if in answer to our prayers, Dr Aart Visee, a Dutch vet who would become a lifelong friend and supporter, got in touch to say he had a lioness he wanted to give to us.

  In a world of strange coincidences Aart worked at Rotterdam Zoo, which had connections with both Christian and Elsa. He was desperate to find a home for a lioness called Arusha. Like Christian, she had once been a pet that had grown too big for its owners to cope with. These were the days before satellite phones and email so it took some feverish letter-writing to the Game Department and the ministry before we obtained permission to import the cub from Holland. Before I drove to Nairobi to collect her, I reinforced the holding compounds to put her in when she arrived. She would need a place of her own in which she could have time to adjust before being introduced to the other lions.

  I pulled all the seats out of George’s new long-wheel-base Land Rover to make more room, welded on a few ring-bolts so we could tie down the container and made sure everything was ready for the new arrival. George looked a bit forlorn as I modified his new car but understood that it was for the greater good of the project.

  I set off first thing to pick up Aart and Arusha from that night’s KLM flight into Nairobi. It was a spectacular day and the drive down was eventless. I met up with my girlfriend, Tina Aschan, for dinner on the way to the airport. We had a wonderful meal, then walked out to George’s new car. It wasn’t there. I thought it was a practical joke. I looked up and down the street; I interrogated the security guards. No joke: someone had stolen George’s car and the flight from Holland was landing in forty-five minutes. We threw out the contents of Tina’s VW Combi, gunned the engine and arrived at the airport, flustered, late and slightly drunk, a few minutes after Arusha had been unloaded.

  We were taking coals to Newcastle and there were many raised eyebrows at the airport: no one believed we had permission to import a lion. The paperwork, of course, was in the stolen car. All those carefully sought permissions from the wildlife authorities were now in the hands of a car thief: I was going to have to talk my way out of it. I can’t imagine what Aart must have thought as we tried to smuggle a large lioness through Customs. After a good few hours, I managed to blag our way past – but what were we going to do with the lion? I’ll never forget Aart’s face when he first saw the Combi. We squashed the crate into the back, then shoved Aart in on top of it and drove to Carol Bell’s house in Langata on the outskirts of Nairobi. Carol had a big house and a garden shed so seemed like the obvious victim even if Aart had been expec
ting a holding cage at a wildlife veterinary clinic. We put a bewildered Aart in the shed with the lioness, Tina and I had the sofa – and Carol’s kids slept on, unaware that there was a lion in their shed. It all came good the next morning. The car was insured so we were lent another Land Rover by Cooper Motors until we could claim. Only a short wheel-base, it was nonetheless more suitable for driving to Kora than the battered old Combi. Aart and I put the lion crate in the back, a beer crate between us, then drove the ten hours to Kampi ya Simba while working our way through it. George took it very well when I told him I had driven through a puddle and his new car had shrunk.

  Fred was delighted with Arusha. She determined how their relationship would go and soon they were inseparable. Just a few months after she had arrived, the orphanage gave us another two female cubs, Gigi and Growlie, bringing our total up to a nicely balanced ten. There followed the most intense but enjoyable few months that I have ever spent, juggling the different needs of the individual lions and helping them to grow as a pride. From the sadness of losing track of Christian, and Lisa’s probable death, things were suddenly going remarkably well for George, me and the lion project.

  There had been a definite change in perception of our project from the authorities as the old-school colonial wardens were phased out and the new African leaders took over. Both Perez Olindo at National Parks and John Mutinda, the chief game warden, were incredibly supportive. Perez kept us stocked with cubs from the orphanage and John gave us the authority to look after them. Both patriotic Kenyans, they valued the fame that George had brought to Kenya and its wildlife, and they got on well with him. Until Kenya had stunned the world with triple gold at the Mexico Olympics, almost the only thing most people knew about the country was the Adamsons and Born Free. Born Free’s contribution to Kenya’s GDP must have been enormous. In the eighties, Out of Africa, the movie, doubled tourism earnings overnight and still brings visitors today – then, as now, Kenya’s main income is from tourism. It took another movie to teach the world about Happy Valley, a sad story involving a tiny number of selfish people indulging themselves while the rest of the population was fighting a war.

  George had retired just before independence so never suffered the integration problems faced by some of our friends, like Bill Woodley and David Sheldrick. Both men were excellent game wardens and had to adjust to having under-qualified Kenyans promoted over their heads. Like Jack Barrah, and unlike many others, they managed the change masterfully but there were times when it had not been easy. The fact that Perez and John had never worked under George in the colonial system or over him post- independence made the relationship much easier. It wasn’t as if George was going to say anything to offend them because he never said anything! They could look upon him as a relic of colonial times, admiring the bits they liked and overlooking the bits they didn’t. In turn, we felt a great responsibility towards them. They took significant personal risks in supporting us and we did not want to let them down.

  It wasn’t just the wildlife authorities at Headquarters who were supportive of our lion project at Kora. While the army sat in their barracks playing darts, because all Kenya’s problems were ’internal’ not ’external’, the other men on the ground in Garissa always helped us when they could. When, as increasingly happened, Somali and Orma grazers invaded the reserve, Philip Kilonzo would always try to send his policemen to move them out. We had the run of the police and provincial authority’s workshops and the Anti Stock-theft Unit always picked our brains for information. The support was a two-way street. We would always provide fuel and assistance if our neighbours needed a hand, and when elephants menaced crops at Asako we would help herd them back into the reserve. I once got called in to Rahole on the other side of the Tana to help out with a buffalo that had become stuck in the mud. Buffalo may look like large cows but they are actually one of the most dangerous animals in Africa, responsible for many more deaths than lions, crocodiles or elephants. I spent all day trying to pull it out with the Land Rover. This involved some very tentative lassoing and then some very careful pulling so I didn’t inadvertently break its back or otherwise injure it. After hours and hours of this, it eventually popped out. The huge buffalo lurched to its feet, legs shaking and head nodding. It gave us a belligerent look, let out a massive bellow and dropped down dead.

  Visitors from outside Kenya were beginning to see that our methods were working and to show their appreciation by donating money. We were incredibly bad at accepting donations, so bad in fact that we actually frightened away some donors by our ’frightfully British’ reluctance. At this stage George, Terence, the lions and I were living off George’s colonial pension and we needed all the help we could get. Luckily the pension was index- linked, but even so, the small cash injection brought in by the success of Christian the Lion made a significant difference. The whole world was in economic crisis and the price of everything – from posho, the Kenyan staple maize meal, to fuel and camel meat – was rising. It sounds a bit dramatic but away from the bubble of Kora it seemed that the world was going crazy. US President Nixon resigned in 1974, Saigon fell a year later, marking the end of the Vietnam war, and closer to home, Haile Selassie’s successor, Colonel Mengistu, and Uganda’s Idi Amin were extremely scary neighbours, who laid claim to vast swathes of Kenya. After a while, we just stopped buying batteries for the radio and kept our heads down – completely immersed in the lions. We did, however, have an increasing number of visitors.

  One of our most surprising and welcome guests was Henry Starkey, my old school chaplain who had saved me from expulsion dozens of times; he brought his whole family and seemed pleased that I had stayed out of trouble and done something useful. It was great to see them but even more exciting were the wildlife researchers who were taking an interest in our work. Hugh and Ros Lamprey from the Serengeti Wildlife Research Institute came and stayed for a few days. Hugh gave me a long lecture about hippo behaviour and a duck-like bird called the Peter’s Finfoot while we were out on the river in the nine-foot rubber duck. As he delivered his talk a tiny pink hippo jumped off the riverbank and plopped into the water in front of us. Hugh described how hippos were fiercely territorial and protective of their young as I was feverishly pulling the cord on the ancient outboard like a maniac. ’What’s up?’ he asked. ’Why the engine now?’ It coughed into life and we shot downstream just as the mother hippo charged towards us, mouth agape.

  Nigel de Winser, who went on to be a very big cheese at the Royal Geographical Society, set up camp in Kora for his Tana River Expedition. He brought a small group of scientists from a London polytechnic to study the flora and fauna from Kora to Kipini on the coast. He was wonderful to have around and his crew taught us a huge amount about the area. A colleague of Hugh’s, Bernard Grzmiek from Frankfurt Zoo, also visited and checked us out. Gratifyingly, he took one look at our project and said we needed to open up the reserve if we were to continue successfully. To that end, he gave us the money for a tractor, a road grader and two years of manning for them.

  After a great deal of research, combined with advice from friends, I was despatched to Nairobi to buy the aforesaid tractor. We had decided on the most basic model we could find with absolutely no extras. The thinking behind this was that the simpler it was, the less likely it would be to break down in the harsh conditions of Kora – that, and the fact that I heartily disliked Terence’s proposed tractor driver and wanted him to be as uncomfortable as possible. I went to pick up the tractor from CMC – a Massey Ferguson MF20 with a three-ton trailer – and was delighted to see that, although it was a beautiful piece of machinery, it was just as uncomfortable as I had hoped, with a thin metal seat and no suspension to speak of. Then it dawned on me that I was going to have to drive it the whole way to Kora. It took me three days, travelling in the baking sunshine at 12 m.p.h. and camping by its side at night. When I arrived Terence thought Christmas had come early and set off to play with his new toy. The equipment made a huge difference to our lives and tho
se of the lions by speeding up all the lengthy processes, like getting to Asako to fetch staff, collecting firewood and water. Mainly used for road-building, it took the heat off the Land Rovers and meant we could track down the lions more quickly with fewer breakdowns. My intention might have been mean but my logic was correct. That tractor still delivers the water at Kora.

  The people that utterly transformed our daily routine were Esmond and Chryssee Bradley Martin. Chryssee is a conservation writer and worked with Gloria Lowe at the Nairobi National Park to make sure all the orphans came our way. Esmond, with his working partner Lucy Vigne, is the world’s expert on the illicit trade in ivory and rhino horn. They first came to visit us because Chryssee had worked with Leakey at the animal orphanage. Leakey had playfully nipped Esmond’s leg when they were walking with George, a slight for which Esmond seemed to bear him no grudge even though it must have hurt considerably. Having seen the laborious methods we used to track the lions, Esmond told us that if we found out about radio collars he would find the money to pay for them. This was very new technology at the time and we didn’t have the Internet to help us search but I was eventually put in touch with Barbara Kermeen at AVM Instrument Co. in California. She designed our first lion collars and still produces all our collars today. The original system was very primitive indeed and required a lot of trial and error because batteries were unreliable. We and AVM were learning as we went along.

  The first collars came in a huge box with an H-shaped aerial – about the size of an old-fashioned television aerial, attached to a wooden pole – which connected to a radio set and a pair of headphones. The collars themselves were constructed from very strong webbing made of machine belting. They had to have holes drilled in them so that they could be bolted together at a point that fitted the lions’ necks. Next to the holes lay the transmitter and the batteries, which had to be soldered together, then covered with pink dental acrylic so that the system didn’t short-circuit when wet. This is a complicated and fiddly process for dentists, let alone in the middle of the bush. The next step was yet more challenging: getting the collar round the lions’ necks without having an arm chewed off.