The Hunt for the Golden Mole (20 page)

I'm afraid that my voice in this chapter may have become somewhat shrill, but it is impossible not to be aghast. Impossible not to reflect on the bloodbath, so proudly chronicled by Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming, that set the tone for all that was to come. I am anticipating with pleasure my visit to Ol Pejeta, but even as I pack my bag I have a hideous image in my mind. A winning portfolio in the 2012 World Press Photo awards, by the South African photographer Brent Stirton, includes a picture of a female rhinoceros, nose to nose with her mate. She has no horn. Somehow, four months before the picture was taken, she survived an assault by poachers in which the horn and a section of bone were removed by chainsaw. I don't know how they did it, and I don't think I want to.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ol Pejeta

Q
uite unexpectedly a long-forgotten question is brought to mind. In my early childhood I lived in a village in south Bedfordshire, surrounded by sprout fields and piggeries which gave the air a permanent faecal tang. To this generally agreeable, porky aroma would be added once a week the stomach-churning waft of the ‘lavender lorry' on its round of the cesspits. Sometimes this malodorous vehicle would be so overfilled that it would spill over and mark its passage with a glistening trail of brown along the road. It was not this, however, that pricked my curiosity. The only mystery about sewage was why people called it ‘night soil'. It was, rather, the dogs, which back then in the 1950s used to speckle the pavements with faeces of pure white. Being accustomed to this, we boys saw nothing odd in it and called it ‘dog chalk'. Until now this distant phenomenon had slipped from my memory, and so I had failed to wonder why modern dogs do things so differently. But now I think I may have an answer.

To find it I have had to make a journey of some 4,500 miles from my home in eastern England to a parched high plateau beneath the misted peaks of Mount Kenya. In the dog-chalk days this was a world I knew only from the limpid grey images of Armand and Michaela Denis, glimpsed through my parents'
veneered Ekco television. Then it seemed impossibly far away, exotic and bathed in dangerous glamour. Now it has to be filtered through more than half a century of televisual over-familiarity. It worries me. Perhaps a life in environmental journalism has left me incapable of surprise. Will I rediscover my hidden
naïf
?

My visit to Kenya has coincided with a leaf-storm of articles hailing Africa's ‘new economic miracle'. A writer in Kenya Airways' in-flight magazine complains about ‘knee-jerk journalism', by which he means the reflexive habit of referring to Africa as an economic basket case, and of sanctimonious hand-wringing about poverty, violence and corruption. There may indeed be a new spirit of entrepreneurism, and it may be true that more African-run companies are earning profits and enriching a new middle class. In the leafy Nairobi suburb of Karen you could easily believe it. Here, spread across the former coffee farm once owned by Karen Blixen of
Out of Africa
fame, vast mansions stand in gated five-acre plots. Wealth drips like honeydew from the trees. As you would expect in this subtropical simulacrum of Surrey, there is a Country Club with ornamental lakes and a championship-standard golf course.

But to reach it you have to brave the linear snakepit of the Mombasa road, a just-about-moving tailback of ancient Japanese saloons trailing petticoats of rust and hassled by the even more rackety private minibuses – the notorious
matatus –
which are as close as Nairobi gets to public transport, and whose unsignalled lane-switching could hardly be more alarming if the drivers wore blindfolds. On your right as you crawl out of the city, a vast rust-coloured stain spreads as far as you can see – the Kibera slum, whose tin-roofed shanties according to wildly varying estimates are home to between 235,000 and one million people, crammed in at a density of perhaps 200,000 per hectare, living in conditions that would struggle to be called medieval.
A long-term slum-clearance scheme is under way, but the average man on the
matatu
would boggle at any thought of an economic miracle.

Out in the country things are not much different. From Nairobi's local airport, Wilson (named after Mrs Florence Kerr Wilson, a feisty widow who set up Kenya's very first airline in 1928 with a two-seater Gypsy Moth), I am bounced around various dusty, miles-from-anywhere airstrips before touching down eventually at Nanyuki, in Laikipia county. Here I am met by Andrew Odhiambo, from Kicheche Camp, an hour away at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, who will be my guide for the week. Being exactly on the equator, we are constantly dodging back and forth between hemispheres, defining Latitude Zero with a rooster-tail of grit. This is such hard country that you could say it's an economic miracle that anyone scratches a living from it at all. There are many flimsy churches and evidence of prayers in urgent need of answer. Shopping centres are dirt roads edged with tumbledown
dukas
, more like sheds than shops, which are approached through a moonscape of axle-deep potholes. Arable fields bear scrawny remnants of wheat, or sun-scorched grass forlornly scoured by a few ribby cows, sheep and goats (this is the end of the dry season, when the entire country gasps for rain). A community of Maasai pastoralists occupies a row of huts that would not look out of place in Kibera. Miracle of tenacity and last-ditch human resourcefulness? Yes, probably. Economic miracle? I don't think so. Not here. Not yet.

Living in England, I am no stranger to wide discrepancies between rich and poor. But poverty in Britain is relative, not absolute. There is a loss of dignity, self-esteem, opportunity and enjoyment, for which liberal opinion can feel ashamed, but there is not usually a threat to survival. The contrast with Africa is stark. The incongruity of so much of the world's anxiety,
including my own, being focused on the well-being of
animals
is a searching test of moral perspective. Right now I am struggling to cope – just as Alfred Russel Wallace and Julian Huxley must have done – with a blitzkrieg of the senses. As I said, I am no kind of Africa hand. I am not even a very competent traveller, being unable to shake off anxieties about missed connections, lost baggage, misread timetables and sniffer dogs (on a previous trip, one of these nailed me at Johannesburg for carrying piri-piri in my luggage). In the tropics I fret about malaria pills, sunblock, insect repellent and how I'm going to get home again. At Ol Pejeta, all that evaporates like spit on a barbecue. At the penultimate airstrip in my sequence of low aerial hops, a herd of elephants was stripping the trees next to the runway. As the horizon breaks open at Ol Pejeta, the first thing I see is a giraffe, lolling through the acacias with that strange Anglepoise gait that it shares with camels. And suddenly, right here, the opposing worlds of the mundane and the imagined merge into a single moving frame. I am struck daft, as if by a bolt from boyhood. A real giraffe in real Africa! Like hundreds, thousands, millions before me, I am overwhelmed. My scepticism withers and is forgotten; the
naïf
steps blinking into the sunlight.

And dog chalk? Andrew is a brilliant naturalist who will not leave the smallest detail unexplained. Even as he drives, his eyes are scanning the horizon, the tree-line, the very dust in the road where the imprints of hoof and paw tell the story of the day. One morning we stop by the bleached skull of a buffalo ill-met by lions. Not far away is what looks like a pile of dog chalk. ‘Hyena,' he says, crumbling it with his shoe. The hyena is a remarkable animal which deserves better than its pejorative reputation as scavenger and thief. It is a skilful hunter in its own right. What it lacks in speed it makes up for in stamina,
running for miles in pursuit of prey that might at first outpace it. A zebra, for example, will be run to exhaustion until it stands defenceless and surrenders to its fate. It has to be said that the fate is not a good one. Unlike lions, which kill usually by suffocation, hyenas begin their meal while the dish is still on its feet. The power of their jaws is terrifying. If there were any nutritional value in granite, then they would sink their teeth into it. As it is, every part of the victim is ground up and swallowed. The faeces are white, Andrew explains, because of the powdered bone in them, and it is now that I am reminded of my Bedfordshire childhood. Back then, long before supermarket aisles were lined with tinned gravy dinners, dogs were given bones to chew. The chalky pavements are explained.

Bedfordshire, however, does not stay long in the mind when you've got wild Africa in your face. It seems almost absurd to have so much dished up at once – so over the top that it makes me laugh, like a child at a fairground. How can this be
real
? There are fences around the conservancy, but the area within them is huge, 350 square kilometres, and they are there to channel the movement of wildlife, not to obstruct it. Well-used corridors through the fencing allow animals to move freely in and out, while steering them away from villages and farms. This crucially prevents the ‘island effect', a weakness of nature reserves isolated from their surroundings which leads to the local extinction of some species and over-population of others. As its chief executive, Richard Vigne, will explain, Ol Pejeta
accommodates
wildlife. It doesn't farm it. What I am seeing therefore is recognisably the same place that Alfred Russel Wallace saw in the 1870s. In fact, I am very likely seeing even more then Russel Wallace did. Unlike him, I have an expert guide at the wheel of a Toyota Land Cruiser, an indefatigable, go-anywhere hyena on wheels in which Andrew can deliver me
into close proximity with almost any animal of my choosing. But that ‘almost', I now confess, means the sad exclusion of golden moles. Truthfully, deep down, I have always known I wouldn't see one and so have delayed the question until after my arrival. In that rather cowardly way I have kept alive a slender thread of hope and justified a thirty-hour journey to the middle of Africa. But I block the thought. The mole, I guiltily acknowledge, was always an excuse – a detail, seductive but arbitrary, that would draw me into the bigger picture. And now here it is, a picture so enormous that I can't take it all in.
Calcochloris tytonis
and its tribe can wait a bit longer. In any case, I feel it is here in spirit, represented in its absence by myriad tiny scurriers and burrowers that only civets, hawks and owls can see. At breakfast one morning a tiny striped mouse boldly darts out to feed on a handful of muesli – the smallest animal I see, and my mole by proxy. The economic principle of Fritz Schumacher's
Small is Beautiful
may now be derided by the more macho kind of free-marketeer, but it holds good in nature. Small is not only beautiful but, as my pursuit of the mole will make abundantly clear, it is also essential.

Andrew is a great talker. He explains the byzantine intricacies of African politics and tribalism – he is of the Luo tribe, though the people of the district are mostly Maasai and Kikuyu – and he has an insatiable appetite for news. Who did I think would win the Republican primaries currently being fought in the USA? Mitt Romney, I say, and he agrees, but he wants to know what a Republican victory would mean for American minorities. I wish I could tell him. Andrew's passion for wildlife matches even that of my old friend (and genuine Africa hand) Brian Jackman, on whose advice I am carrying a new pair of 10x42 binoculars and a fleece to keep off the evening chill. Being on a plateau I get no sense of elevation, but we are actually 2,000
metres above sea level, slung between the northern slopes of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares. I do at least manage to astonish my guide by showing him what Europe looks like at this altitude. The photographs on my camera were taken from a ski station high in the Swiss Alps at Verbier, in mid summer but still hemmed in by snow-capped peaks.

I learn soon to abandon my own swivel-eyed scouring of the plains and rely on Andrew's seemingly supernatural ability to read nuances of light and shade. He has sharper senses than any other human I have ever met, including even Jackman and the angling writer Brian Clarke, who once pointed at a ripple on the River Test and predicted to within a few ounces the weight of the trout that was causing it. Andrew has wraparound eyes and ears. Distant pinpricks, invisible even to my 10x42s, turn into rare Jackson's hartebeests. Faraway murmurs swell into waterbuck. Time and again, quietly and carefully, he plants me within a how-do-you-do of elephant, buffalo, rhino, giraffe, eland and their supporting casts of jackals and hyenas. On one memorable afternoon he ushers me into the presence of a hippopotamus. Cheetah and leopard require more luck than comes our way (though both are here in numbers); otherwise nothing escapes him. A jackal trots past with something in its jaws – the head of a baby hyena, Andrew says, ‘very unusual'. A dot of sky blue becomes the scrotum of a vervet monkey (the colour is what separates the men from the boys – adolescents display an immature shade of green). Young baboons lark and dart through a fever tree, playing a kind of Kenyan roulette with gravity while their elders hunch in the branches like giant rooks.

One morning we set out at six fifteen to look for lions. For the first couple of hours we have no luck – or, rather, our luck is of a different kind. Serendipitously in the dawn light we find a black rhinoceros and her calf standing rock-still in the bush. There are
giraffes wallpapered against the lightening sky, buffaloes trudging head-down across the plain, a group of oryx. We meet elephants, warthogs, a hyena carrying the leg of a gazelle, eagles, ostriches and uncountable zebra. But no lions, and we are getting hungry. On a curve of the Uaso Nyiro River, away from the trees, Andrew sets up the table for breakfast. Red checked cloth, cereals, yogurt, sausages and bacon, vegetable pies, pickles and preserves, fruit, tea, coffee . . . This time we have no need of Andrew's enhanced sensory perceptions. The sudden deep, guttural cough,
Wugh!
, is no distant murmur. It is nearby, urgent and loud. Twenty metres away a lioness pads out of the trees, glances at us without interest and lopes off along the river.