Born Wild (15 page)

Nonetheless, despite all the poaching and the price rises, looking after the lions was so all-encompassing that it was only when
we glanced over the parapet that we noticed such things. As always, our every waking hour was devoted to the care of our growing family of lions. Arusha, Growlie and Gigi were pretty independent by this time, coming and going at will but still bringing their cubs to show them off to us. Jojo and Kaunda were beginning their integration back into the wild and in January spent their first night out alone. We hadn't seen Daniel, Oscar and Kora for a couple of months. Freddie and Leakey, we accepted, were long gone – off to the other side of the river where game was plentiful among the open spaces and heavenly herds in Meru National Park.

Arusha was desperate for a mate after the failure of her first pregnancy and competed with the gunfire to keep us awake at night, roaring her availability from the rocks just outside camp. There is a peculiar note in a lioness's call when she is looking for a mate and it can be heard for miles. Many were the nights we listened to the wild lions scrapping over her, then mating endlessly as we three men lay on our camp beds thinking of England. It didn't stop at night either. I once walked up on to Kora Rock to find Arusha and a wild lion having a post-coital nap that I should never have interrupted. The male looked utterly outraged but was so shocked that, when I charged him, he backed down and slunk off into the bush. Luckily Arusha didn't expect me to take his place.

Even with Gloria gone, more lions continued to come our way and, like children in a sweet factory, we were unable to say no. And when Gigi gave birth we called the cubs Glowe and Growe in honour of Gloria and her husband Graham Lowe. Our vet friend Aart Visee was staying in camp when we received a radio call saying that Galana had a couple of lion cubs for us. We patched up the holding pen and set off to Malindi on the coast for some fun. I had been staying with PA and Agneta in Malindi when I first received George's call so I knew it well; Aart and I
had a great couple of days, surfing, catching up with friends and lounging on the beach. It was the first proper time off I had enjoyed since Shyman had attacked me. After the harsh, dry heat of Kora, it was wonderful to be in the water, playing in the surf and diving on the reef. We made midnight excursions to the Gedi ruins and sailed up to Lamu with some easily impressed holidaymakers. It's hard taking a break when you're completely consumed by something you love and I had failed to do so for almost a year. As soon as I arrived, I could feel the tension in my back drifting away as I swam out to the break, opening my shoulders and powering through the surf. Our holiday was too short.

At eight months, the cubs were a little larger and a lot more rambunctious than we had expected so we stayed at Galana for a few hours while its wildlife manager, Ken Clarke, modified our capture cage to keep the two cubs separated on the journey back to Kora. He remade them as crush cages so that the lions would be held tight and wouldn't be able to injure themselves when the tranquillizers Aart administered wore off. Ken told us about the poaching problems he was facing on the million-acre ranch where elephant carcasses were turning up almost every day. Galana – like Kora – was being overrun by Somalis, keen to kill all of its rhino and elephant. The ranch was the last buffer zone left between the poachers and Tsavo National Park, the vast area whose elephant population would soon be left wide open to incursions from the north. Galana was a very successful operation so Ken had the financial muscle to run anti-poaching patrols by land and air but even then he felt he was receiving hindrance rather than assistance from the authorities and was probably fighting a losing battle. It was becoming increasingly apparent to him that, while the rhino poaching was mainly a foreign affair, the elephant poaching had local backing. It dawned on none of us then that the poaching could get any worse. But, in fact, it was about to enter a more industrial phase: this was the last time we would see Ken alive.

As Aart and I drove off towards Garissa, the lions turned right around in the tight crush cages Ken had made for them.

‘My God, did you see that?' I said to Aart.

‘They're cats, Tony,' said the vet, with a condescending smile.

Sheba was a captivating lioness, similar to Lisa in temperament and very beautiful. Suleiman on the other hand was an awkward SOB. Ken had killed his mother when she was attacking a cattle
boma
at Galana and one of the bullets had passed through her and into Suleiman. It was encapsulated in fat so we left it there as it was causing no harm – but it was a reminder that Suleiman was the offspring of a wild stock-killer rather than a store-bought hippie, like Christian or Arusha. We put the pair into the holding pens at camp and hoped they would adjust, but from the very beginning they didn't get on with the other lions at all – there were just too many. We weren't sure what to do. Every time Arusha, Gigi and Growlie came near they would charge the fence with spectacular ferocity. I remember being nervous that one day the mesh might not hold.

We needed Leakey to do some diplomacy but he'd gone off with Freddie and we hadn't seen either of them for ages. In the time being we kept walking Jojo and Kaunda and hoped that a solution would present itself as we immersed ourselves once more in the lions' world. We stayed in touch with the other world by playing host to a slow trickle of visitors who would bring us supplies, gossip and news. Despite the growing insecurity of Kora and Kenya as a whole we still had a good many. Father Nicky Hennitty, a wonderfully hyperactive and dedicated Irish Catholic priest who lived in Kyuso, came over often. He had a sixth sense about us and used to load up his new Toyota Stout and resupply us with fuel, gas for the fridges, food and whisky when he judged we were getting thirsty. The fact that we no longer listened to the radio led to odd juxtapositions of news. Eras ended simultaneously. We learnt, for example, that Elvis had died and
‘sport' hunting had been banned on the very same day. The latter was of rather more significance to us.

Although George and Terence had stopped hunting long before they began working for the Game Department, many of their friends – and, indeed, mine – were professional hunters or had been, so it was with mixed feelings that we heard of the destruction of our friends' livelihoods. We had seen few hunters near Kora recently; the area had been famed for its elephants but elephant hunting had, of course, already been banned. Also, the bush around us was so thick that it was hard country for hunting anything smaller, and none of the licensed hunters would think of going after lions in the hunting block adjacent to us for fear of killing one of ours. However, the ban proved positive for some affected by it: Ben Ng'anga, with whom Mike Wamalwa and I had been partners in the Mateus Rosé venture, came to run a new camp at Bisanadi, thirty miles away on the other side of the river. It was a long way to go for a drink but it was good to have such a close friend nearby. Ben had been one of the first professional black hunters but the ban meant his triumph hadn't lasted for very long. Even today the safari business remains dominated by white Kenyans and expatriates, testament more to the racism of the clients than of the safari business itself. Visitors still want to be guided by Robert Redford in his Denys Finch Hatton role: black Kenyans just don't attract the rich clients the way white ones do so Ben's achievement had been significant. He was also worth every penny.

Former hunters always insist that their departure hastened the slaughter of the elephants and I don't suppose we'll ever know the truth. We were on the very front line and it was total war up there for a while. I can't see how a few professional hunters could have stood up to the mechanized killing outfits sent down from the north, like Geronimo trying to stop the buffalo killing in the US. And I still find it hard to believe that you have to legalize
something's killing to protect it. It's the old apartheid defence and it just doesn't pass muster. Nevertheless, it must be said that as soon as game no longer had a value, people stopped investing in protecting it. On Galana, for example, the owners immediately squeezed funding to Ken Clarke's anti-poaching teams. The results were shattering and immediate. The ranch was overrun by poachers. On 2 August, I heard the scratchy voice of Ken's eighteen-year-old daughter Caroline on the radio. She was trying to get through to Nairobi Control but they couldn't hear her because of a bad 'skip'. She had to relay her news through me. 'Daddy has been killed,' she told me. The poor girl was in a terrible state, unable to call directly for help and stranded on Galana with her father's bullet-torn body.

It was one of the most frightful things I've ever had to do. We had only been with Ken – a big, happy, tough, kindly man – a few brief months before. He was one of the few, the new breed of rancher/wardens who would lead the way in the preservation of wildlife against well-armed gangs of poachers. Others after him turned a blind eye. But for now there were family to inform in Nairobi, the radio was crackling and fading, everyone was shouting and repeating back fragments of messages, and other people were trying to barge in as they couldn't hear anyone else on the frequency. It was awful. When it was all over and I'd told everyone I had been asked to, George and I had a silent drink to Ken and tried not to think of our own vulnerability.

It emerged that Ken had chased some poachers after he had come across a herd of slaughtered elephant on the ranch. One poacher had stayed behind and shot Ken in the stomach as he set off in pursuit. It was a terrible way for a brave man to die. Ken's death was yet another example of how the country was buckling under pressure from its northerly neighbour. The Northern Frontier District and the Ukambani region of Kenya were already destabilized by the poaching gangs and they were now
threatening the rest of the country. The government had been trying to sweep the problem under the carpet but the problem was bigger than the carpet. Just a few days after Ken's death, Game Department pilot Wazir Ali's plane was hit by poachers in Tsavo, bordering Galana. Young rangers were being killed weekly – giving their lives to save the elephants. Vast swathes of the country were becoming inaccessible and the Somalis had long ago formed a bridgehead south of the accepted geographical Tana river dividing line. I still had to make supply trips to Garissa every three weeks or so and they were becoming increasingly hairy. It wasn't just us under threat: the army and police were always tearing about the place, trying to take the fight to the poachers but, with little support from Headquarters, they too were fighting a losing battle. Philip Kilonzo – the deputy head of police in Garissa – said that he was happy to provide me with an escort to Kora. 'But who would escort the escort back?' he asked, shortly before he was transferred.

Even with the threat of ambush, going to Garissa was always fun. I usually took Erigumsa along to help with any breakdowns or punctures on the way because the only thing that was certain about a trip to Garissa was that it would never be eventless. The road was so rough that bits always fell off the car, yet more so because we had to keep the speed up in order to get there and back in a day. As the months went by and the poachers became more daring, speed became even more crucial: a speeding car provides a harder target. Luckily there was almost no traffic: if you met someone, you didn't just wave, you stopped for a chat and a drink. Once I had a car full of people and was hurtling along the sandy track when I hit a rock and the radiator fell out of the Land Rover. It took all our ingenuity to get it back into working order. I tapped a frankincense tree for some of the thick gooey incense, then heated it on a spade and used it to plug the radiator's holes. Erigumsa braved the crocodiles to get some water
from the river two miles away to refill the radiator and we made rope out of strips of bark to tie the thing back into the engine compartment. We were late into Garissa but we made it.

The first thing I would do on arrival in Garissa was to stop for a drink at Mathenge's Bar just before the bridge on the way into town. An old-style shebeen on the edge of the river, its toilets and short-time rooms were always falling into the muddy waters below as the torrent eroded the foundations. The bridge was a magnificent structure, always guarded by a collection of police and soldiers from the nearby camps. I knew almost all of them by name. The town was on the other side of the bridge, dwarfed by it – just three streets, a couple of mosques and a petrol station, all there because this was the only bridge for hundreds of miles. A frontier town indeed, and one in which I have always felt at home.

My first stop after the bar would be Fahim Bayusuf's house. A real wheeler-dealer, Fahim was a Kenyan Arab with fingers in many pies. From his small office behind the counter of his hardware shop, he would send minions in all directions, looking for parts for the cars, pipes, tools or anything else on my shopping list, which would then be delivered back to his shop. The Bayusufs now own one of the biggest trucking companies in East Africa. While we waited for things to arrive, Fahim's mother would feed me up in the knowledge that I would need a full stomach as a foundation for my day's drinking. I had many wonderful breakfasts there of tea, deep-fried doughnuts and whatever fruit was available before I started the day's meetings.

I found a typical shopping list of the period just the other day:

sugar

30.06 ammo

1 case tinned carrots

drill bits

sardines

1 snake-bite serum

1 tin Cape gooseberries

whisky

orange squash

corned beef

Ours was not a luxurious life!

After breakfast with the Bayusufs I would do the rounds of the tiny but throbbing town. I always visited the police and army messes, greeted Philip Kilonzo at the police station, and went to see if there was anything to learn at the Game Department office. Usually I called in at the police workshop to scrounge a part or two for the cars. There were many other small shops where I would receive a welcome as warm as that from Fahim's family but none looked after me so well as the Bayusufs. Every now and then I would nip into the bar by the bridge for a sharpener until all my errands were finished. I would often have to leave orders with Fahim for things to be collected at the next resupply. Amazingly they would appear before our return from camp, delivered by bus or brought up by a friend in a pickup.