A Guide to the Beasts of East Africa (14 page)

‘What's that?' said Mr
Gopez. ‘There, did you hear it?'

‘Hear what, A.B.?'

‘Shh. Listen.'

As the guests departed, so had the clouds.
The Milky Way now stretched clear across the African sky. Though it was now too late for
a night drive Mr Patel, emboldened by the cool night air and his third bottle of Tusker
beer, had challenged the Tiger to a game of snooker and in the seventh tent was already
fifty points behind. Sitting on stools round the campfire, enjoying a postprandial
Johnnie Walker beneath the stars, sat Mr Gopez and Mr Malik. There is something about
sitting out under the stars. You don't have to be an astronomer, you don't
need a religion. To gaze up at the heavens on a clear Kenyan night is to be aware of
something else, something other, something beyond. The fly in this celestial ointment,
though, is the noises.

‘There – hear it? Hyenas, I'm
sure of it. Sound pretty damned close too.'

Mr Gopez looked around him at the darkness
beyond the light of the fire and the lanterns, and shivered.

Those of you who grew up as I did in the
English
Home Counties may think yourselves inured to the sounds of the
wild creatures of the night. The long sad screech of the barn owl or the mournful hoot
of the brown owl will barely register on your consciousness. The scream of a vixen on
heat will not curdle your blood, nor the sharp high bark of the dog fox send shivers
down your spine; the diabolical snuffle of the marauding hedgehog will cause you to
neither blanch nor quail. But even Buckinghamshire men may feel, if not disturbed, then
far from turbed by the sounds of the African night. For there are things out there that
want to eat you.

‘Hyenas?' said Mr Malik.
‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes. I saw a programme about them on
the Discovery Channel. They're not the cowards everyone thinks they are. They
don't just chew on lions' leftovers, they like fresh meat. Damned clever
too.'

Mr Malik thought he had been on enough
safaris to recognize the vocal repertoire of a hyena in all its variations. This was not
one of them, but he knew better than to contradict his friend straight out.

‘I wonder if it could be anything
else,' he said. ‘I know, let's go and ask Benjamin.'

Benjamin had not, of course, grown up in the
English Home Counties. He had been born in Kenya's Eastern Province, where he
spent his early childhood playing in dust or mud according to the season and had later
been given the responsibility of first looking after the chickens and then the goats (on
the whole, he preferred the chickens). When the village judged him old enough, he was
sent to school. He learned to read and write English and
Swahili and
still had lots of time on his three-mile walk to and from school to climb a tree and
look into a bird's nest, or watch a wasp dig a hole and fill it with comatose
caterpillars, or confuse a mongoose by imitating its chattering alarm call. Each morning
he looked forward to seeing which animals had crossed the road or walked along it the
night before. The tracks of four-footed beasts were not too difficult to work out, but
how to tell the difference between a millipede and a centipede, a python and a mamba,
was a source of endless fascination. Mr Malik and Mr Gopez found him in the cooking
tent, where Ally Dass was piling up his plate with rice and curry.

‘Very good food, Mr Malik.'

‘Indeed it is, Benjamin. I was
wondering, though, if you heard that noise just now. We weren't sure what it
was.'

It is widely known among naturalists that as
soon as you ask someone if they can hear a noise, the creature that has been making the
noise stops making it. The bullfrog that has been calling solidly since dusk to attract
a cow-frog to his patch of pond glances at his wristwatch and sees it is time for a
coffee break; the bittern that has been booming away in the bulrushes beside him decides
on a whim to give up the musical stage and join a silent order. For some reason the
creature Mr Gopez had heard decided not to play by the rules. They heard a soft whistle,
gradually getting louder and turning into a sound not unlike the one an eight-year-old
child might make while being slowly garrotted.

‘That noise?' said Benjamin
through a mouthful of biriani.

‘That one,' said Mr Malik.
‘My friend Mr Gopez thought it might be a hyena.'

‘No, Mr Malik, it is much smaller than
a hyena.'

‘Is it a jackal?'

‘No, Mr Malik, much smaller than a
jackal. It is the little dassie, the one that lives in the trees.'

Dendrohyrax arboreus
, usually known
in Kenya as the tree hyrax, is a mammal about the size of a small cat – though being
without a tail it more resembles an inflated guinea pig. Unlike its more sociable
relation the rock hyrax, the tree hyrax prefers to spend life with just a single member
of the opposite sex, and whereas groups of its promiscuous cousins can be seen
scampering round their holes and burrows during the hours of daylight, tree hyraxes
emerge from their hiding places in hollow trees only at dusk. They wander through the
night munching leaves, gazing at the moon and scaring the bejesus out of anyone
unfamiliar with their impressive vocalizations. By the time the sun has risen they will
have retired to their tree hollow to rest and digest. They are slow, unremarkable
animals. The hyraxes' main claim to fame is to be found in their family tree
which, if you follow it back fifty million years or so, reveals that their closest
relation is neither the cat nor the guinea pig but the elephant – an interesting fact
that you seldom hear the latter mention.

‘Ah yes. Thank you, Benjamin. And oh,
I nearly forgot. Would you like to go up in a plane tomorrow morning, first thing? If
the weather's fine, that is. Mr Johnson says he has a spare seat.'

‘Mr Malik,' said Benjamin,
grinning from ear to ear, ‘I
very much would.' He thought
for a moment. ‘Mr Malik …'

‘Yes, Benjamin?'

‘In that case … please be
careful. If you see another
juali
, perhaps not to touch it.'

Rose Mbikwa rubbed her eyes. Though it was
only just getting light outside, she had already been sitting an hour in front of her
computer. Shouldn't she still be sleeping in rather than waking early? She sat
back in her chair and looked around the sitting room. Yes, nothing had changed – yet
after four years away everything was different. Life in Nairobi used to be so simple.
Monday, correspondence. Tuesday, bird walk. Wednesday and Thursday guide training at the
museum. Friday, shopping – with Elizabeth to help with the bargaining and Reuben to help
with the carrying. But now?

She had already decided not to go back to
leading the bird walk. It wouldn't be fair on Jennifer Halutu – from what Hilary
had told her, Jennifer had been doing a fine job (and though numbers had dropped at
first, they were now up again). And the guide training programme at the museum that she
had started nearly twenty years ago – well, it had clearly been running smoothly enough
without her. Perhaps it was time to start something new. Or perhaps, thought Rose, she
should slow down. Those last few months looking after her father had not been easy.
Maybe it was time to hand on the baton to the next runner
in the relay
race of life. Time to sit and watch the flowers. As she gazed out of the window at the
brightening sky, she heard in her mind the voice of her father. She was not surprised to
hear it – she had heard it often enough since his death. She was, though, slightly
surprised at what she heard him say.

‘Slow down?' said the broad
lowland voice she loved so much. ‘Away, lassie.'

Mr Malik was woken by what sounded like
rain on the roof of the tent, which was strange as he was sure he hadn't touched
another chameleon, even in his dreams. But as his brain shook off its blanket of sleep
he realized that dawn had broken and the sound was growing louder and nearer. It was an
aeroplane. He put his head out of the tent just in time to see Beryl roar overhead with
a saucy waggle of wings, leaving behind not silence but the chatter and screech of a
hundred invisible but nonetheless indignant bush creatures.

By the time the joyflying party made it back
to camp the sun had risen high into a blue sky, showing Mount Kenya in all its majestic
glory. The mountain looked so much closer than the grey glimpses of yesterday. The
hungry flyers headed straight for the dining tent, where Mr Malik watched another
mountain appear as Ally Dass piled rice and dhal on to Benjamin's plate. In
between mouthfuls, Benjamin told him of his aeronautical adventure – the elephants, the
huge herds of wildebeest, the leopard they saw right at the top of a thorn tree.

‘That reminds me. Last night, did you
by any chance hear a leopard near the camp?'

The sound of a leopard, once heard, is
unmistakable – a sort of cross between a grumble and a roar and a sigh.

‘Yes, indeed, Mr Malik. There were
two.'

‘Really?' said Mr Malik.
‘I could only hear one.'

‘Yes, you are right. Only one of them
made a sound.'

Which to Mr Malik didn't really seem
to make any sense.

‘Er … forgive my asking,
Benjamin,' he said, taking a small sip from his glass of fresh passion-fruit
juice, ‘but if you could only hear one, how do you know there were two?'

‘Their feet, Mr Malik.'

‘They were close enough for you to
hear their footsteps?' Leopards are notoriously light on their feet. ‘That
sounds a bit too close.'

‘No, Mr Malik. I mean I
saw
their feet, this morning, just now. Come, I will show you.'

Putting down his plate, Benjamin led Mr
Malik, now joined by Mr Patel and Tiger Singh, fifty metres down the sandy track still
damp from the previous day's rain.

‘There, you see,' said Benjamin,
pointing to some marks in the sand. ‘First one leopard, walking slowly. Then
another behind, walking faster. The first one woman, the second one man. I think the man
is chasing the woman.'

Mr Malik stared down at the marks on the
sand. If he concentrated hard, he could make out that there were indeed two sets of
prints. But why Benjamin thought one was going faster than the other, or why he thought
they were different sexes, he had no idea.

Nor, it seemed, did Tiger Singh.

‘How on earth do you know
that?'

‘The first track is here – do you see,
Mr Tiger? The prints are flat – walking feet.' Benjamin pointed to four prints,
then another four in a regular pattern. ‘Then the second leopard comes along –
see, here, second leopard steps on track of first leopard.' He pointed to four
prints that they now saw made a separate pattern overlaying the first one. ‘The
second prints have moved the sand backwards just a little, and they are further apart –
hurrying feet. And look, they are wider than the first prints. The first is a woman
leopard, the second is a man leopard.'

‘Now that you have shown us, Benjamin,
I think I can see it,' said Mr Malik. ‘But why do you think the male is
chasing the female?'

Benjamin grinned.

‘I think man is always chasing woman –
is that not so, Mr Malik?'

My friend Kennedy told me he often used to
go and stay with a Maasai friend in his village – somewhere out near Kilimanjaro, I
think it was. The Maasai have a very special relationship with cattle – in fact, believe
that all the cattle on earth are rightfully theirs. Lions and leopards have
traditionally disputed this claim, and around this time one animal in particular had
been making a regular nuisance of itself by sneaking into the brushwood enkang at night,
always around the new moon, and making off with a goat or newborn calf. No matter how
carefully the men of the village wove the fence, no matter how many fires they lit, this
sneaky predator would find a weak spot, creep in and manage to make off with its booty
without being seen. In the morning the crime was only too clear, but there were
never any footprints. Whatever animal it was entered and left through
the same weak point in the enkang and, in dragging its prey behind it, erased any trace
of its identity. For months all attempts at excluding or capturing this marauder had
failed. Rumours had even started that supernatural agencies were involved. Though Irish
by ancestry, my friend Kennedy holds strictly rationalist views. Could it be, he
suggested to his friend, that the calf-killer was neither lion nor leopard nor
leprechaun – but human?

And so it turned out. Two nights later, a
moran from a neighbouring village was caught in flagrante with one of his friend's
young female cousins. He soon admitted that after each previous visit he had taken home
with him not only sweet memories of love but, in an attempt to throw a false scent, a
small article of portable livestock. The young man was duly chastised, reparations
agreed and the marriage arranged. My friend Kennedy was quite the man of the hour and
was offered the traditional Maasai honours of a bowl of fresh milk mixed with
cattle's blood and the nocturnal company of his host's wife. He told me that
as he hardly deserved such generous thanks for so trifling a service, he only felt able
to accept one of them – though he never did tell me which.

The leopards were, it seemed, not the only
animals that had been wandering around near the tents that night. Benjamin was able to
identify the tracks of a kudu, a couple of dik-diks, a family of bush pigs and a troop
of monkeys. ‘
Tumbili
, I think. The feet of the
mbega
look the
same but they would cross there up in the trees, not on the ground.'

Mr Patel spotted what he thought was another
leopard footprint.

‘No, this one is the little leopard,
the
mondo
.'

Benjamin followed the tracks to where they
seemed to end abruptly.

‘What happened?' asked Mr
Patel.

Benjamin scouted round a tuft of grass. From
about three yards away he picked up a feather and returned to where the others were
still standing at the spot where the animal seemed to have vanished.

‘Here, do you see these deep prints,
and the marks of the claws?' He squatted, pointing to the pair of footprints.
‘
Mondo
is walking slowly. He hears something over there. He turns. He
jumps. There he lands, right on top of a bird.'

‘And what kind of bird would that be,
Benjamin?' said Mr Malik.

Benjamin turned the pale grey feather round
between his finger and thumb.

‘I am sure that you know more about
birds than me, Mr Malik. I think perhaps a plover.'

Mr Malik took the feather from his hand.

‘Benjamin, I am sure you are
right.'

On their way back to the camp Benjamin
pointed out to them other, smaller tracks. Here the fussy trail of a hurrying beetle,
there the little bunches of four small prints widely spaced that had been made by a
mouse. They saw the sinuous trail of a snake which, as Benjamin pointed out, must be
very fresh. It had gone over the prints their own feet had made only minutes before.

Back at the camp Petula described more of
their early morning flight. Beryl had taken them all the way to Mount Kenya.

‘Not to the top. Dickie – Mr Johnson –
says that's too high for an unpressurized plane. But we flew right round it. And
because we were low we could see so much. We saw a family of elephants with two babies –
the small one must have been only a few weeks old. They were drinking down by the river.
And we saw a black rhino and two white rhino, and we saw an ostrich on her nest. Then a
huge line of pelicans flew along the Tana River, just a few feet high, with the sun on
their backs. They were so beautiful.'

For someone whose three-year engagement had
just ended she seemed remarkably cheerful.

‘I believe,' said Mr Malik,
‘that it is the male ostrich that sits on the nest. But indeed, how wonderful to
see all this from above. And where is Mr Johnson now – did you not ask him to join us
for breakfast?'

‘Uncle Dickie's just putting
Beryl to bed,' said Angus Mbikwa.

Petula laughed.

‘Yes, he says she gets tired when she
has to get up so early. And we saw a leopard up a tree – oh, Benjamin told you about
that – and a family of warthogs all in a line, and thousands of zebras,
and … What else did we see, Angus?'

‘Oh … many, many things. But
I have to agree that those pink-backed pelicans were something special, flying so low in
the early light. That is a sight I shall never forget.'

Mr Malik smiled. Of course, any son of Rose
Mbikwa would be able to tell a pink-backed pelican from a great white, even from a
hundred yards.