Born Wild (10 page)

We were very wary of going close to the girls with their cubs, but when we didn't approach Lisa she looked rather hurt. She would lick us and head rub us even when she was suckling. We could get nowhere near Juma and didn't try: she was still wild as hell, which, given that restoring the lions to the wild was our ultimate aim, was a blessing rather than a problem. That Christmas we felt very pleased with ourselves. Here was the complete vindication of our methods. Both Lisa and Juma had mated with wild lions, given birth to healthy cubs and were entirely capable of living freely and independently of us. They were not vicious man-eaters, as many had predicted they would become; neither did they require us to feed them. Lisa and Juma had been hunting very successfully for some time now and it seemed that, as long as they were able to support each other, they would be all right whether we were there or not.

They had other ideas – independent as they were, we still had
our uses. When the cubs got a bit bigger, the girls started dumping them at camp for us to babysit while they went off hunting each night.

George had told Joy about our success so she brought some friends from England to witness George's triumph when she came to Kora for Christmas. Of course Terence and I were chucked out of Kampi ya Simba for the duration and set up a rival camp on the river close to where Christian and I used to sleep in the afternoons. I jumped on a bus in Garissa and went off to the coast for Christmas itself. I had a great time with my friends PA and Agneta – I had been staying with them in Malindi when I'd first heard of the job with George so it was wonderful to be back with them. I could see how much my life had changed, and that New Year I reflected that I really seemed to have pulled it off. Despite my lack of skills on arrival, I was now a useful member of George's team and one of the pride. Months earlier he had written in my copy of his autobiography
Bwana Game:
‘ To Tony Fitzjohn, Latest of the Pride, George Adamson, Kora, Sept 1971'. (It was stolen from camp in the eighties by a souvenir hunter.) Now I could look after the lions and track them. I kept the vehicles on the road and dealt with the local authorities when George was too fed up to do so. With help, I had even set up a little twelvevolt darkroom, which enthralled George who loved photography.

Kenya had just banned elephant hunting, so for the professional hunters who were on the coast that Christmas, the writing was on the wall. All game hunting would follow: they were soon to be out of a job. Although I had many hunter friends, I'm afraid I felt little sympathy for them then – but we soon found out that they were much better than what replaced them in the years to come.

When I got back to Kora I still had to stay out of Joy's way so George and I used to meet up on the rocks before we went to look for the girls and the cubs. We had great trouble keeping
them away from Joy and her guests but we managed. The cubs were wild and we wanted them to stay that way; the last thing we wanted was another Elsa. We soon found that it wasn't just us who had been introduced to them. By checking the
luggas
in the mornings to read the tracks in the sand from the night before, we could tell that both Scruffy and Christian had met them. Around that time, when everything was going so well, George and I would often talk about how much help we should give to the lions after they had reached a certain level of independence. George – who had experience of it – was keen to keep them around, continuing to feed them and putting out water for them so that there was always something to encourage them back. I saw their leaving us as a sign of success and something we should be striving for at all times. But neither of us was prepared for the shock when Lisa disappeared with her cubs in early 1973.

We searched all over Kora. I went way inland into Ukambani, then headed off to the other side of the river and drove high up into Meru, looking for spoor and asking people if they'd seen a small lioness with three cubs. Just getting to the other side with a vehicle was a major safari – it took almost a day with the nearest bridge in Garissa, a hundred miles downstream. George searched on the Kora side of the Tana and we would meet every couple of days and shout across the river to compare notes. Sometimes I'd take the little dinghy with its hopeless three-horsepower engine on the back. But there was no sign of Lisa. After about a week on the Meru side of the river, I had found nothing and set off back to Kora.

George and I took to following Juma when she went hunting in the hope that she might lead us to Lisa but by the end of three weeks we had run out of ideas. We didn't know what to do. We'd been to all her favourite places, checked the
luggas,
stayed up all night calling her through a megaphone but we had never seen the slightest sign of her. We had even taken to driving around
Kora with an increasingly smelly dead goat in the back of the pickup and calling her every mile or so. We were doing this one afternoon a few miles from camp when I saw a small lion cub walking across a
lugga
and into a bush.

I looked across at George and said I thought it might be one of Lisa's. George harrumphed his disagreement but I jumped out to investigate. The sand in the riverbed was covered with the tracks of cubs – a good sign – so I pushed on further. The tracks led to a bush into which I gingerly stuck my head. There was an earth-shattering roar and a blast of hot breath hit me full in the face. I toppled over, falling flat on my back. I returned to the car, knees shaking and breath coming in panicked pants. George was chuckling happily and pointing behind me. It was Juma and we had disturbed her with her cubs. We hadn't fed her for a while so I chained the carcass to a tree and we sat down to watch what would happen. They were all shy so we had to wait for a while, but after a few minutes Daniel and Shyman poked their heads out of the bush and tottered over to the carcass. Then Juma's big head came out again. She looked around suspiciously. Suddenly, behind her, came Lisa's three cubs – Kora, Lisette and Oscar – but not a sign of Lisa.

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.