Born Wild (11 page)

This was a brilliant and necessary idea and much more than George and I could have hoped for but it needed a lot of work. In August Jack made two trips with council members, in very rough flying conditions, to sell the idea to them, and it was only after he had delivered them all back that he revealed to us he had had a bug flying around inside his skull all night. He was in agony as the creature crawled around his ear canal, buzzing like a benchsaw. I suggested I box his ears but ended up shining a torch into his ear and out flew the bug. Just like that!

On 19 October 1974 his efforts and planning came to fruition and Kora was declared a game reserve, a change in its status that offered it much more protection than when it had merely been property rented from Hola County Council. It also gave us a bit more legitimacy that helped in attracting benefactors and freed us from paying the rent, which had gone up to £1,250 a year – a fortune for George at that time. The lions now had a real home that was recognized by the wildlife authorities – but there weren't many of them left.

Around the time that Lisa disappeared, Christian started going away for longer and longer periods. We were happy that he was finding his feet and daring to go on long walkabouts but were worried that he might stray towards human habitation or come across the increasingly frequent illegal grazers invading Kora from the north. I travelled all over Kora and Meru looking for him – long hard safaris on foot and by Land Rover. Everyone we knew was always keeping an eye out for him. Eventually, after he had been gone for three months, we reluctantly decided that he must have gone across the river with no intention of returning and
had started a new life. We were upset that we didn't see him any more but it was tempered with gratitude as this, again, was an affirmation of our methods. The programme at Kora had been created with the express intention of introducing Christian to the wild and we had succeeded. I missed him like a severed limb.

By the end of 1974 Juma was the only full grown lion still at Kampi ya Simba. We were sure Lisa was dead. We hadn't seen Christian for most of the year although we did think occasionally that we had heard his roars over the river and seen his spoor so we felt he was still alive.Juma's cubs were growing up and would try to do a bit of hunting on their own but they were still too young to be fully effective and needed help from Juma and ourselves. We had stopped putting out Farex baby cereal for them but we often stayed up at night waiting for them to come home before we went to bed. All in all, it was a bittersweet end to the year. Juma and the cubs were thriving but where was the next generation? When John Rendall, one of Christian's keepers in London, came out for Christmas, we decided to give it one more try and go on a last search for Christian. He might be able to produce a litter that could mate with Juma's cubs.

I met John off the plane in Nairobi. He was all Bee Gees haircut and King's Road strides but he fitted in well with my reprobate friends, even though he was remorselessly un-bush. I had met Ace and John a couple of times when they had come back to visit the ever-growing Christian and watched the nervous look in their eyes as this enormous lion – who still loved them beyond measure – bounded up to greet them. This time, though, there was no Christian, and Joy had dragged George, kicking and screaming, to Naivasha, so I was worried about how we might get on – unnecessarily so. Forty years later, John is still on the board of the George Adamson Wildlife Trust, which he joined early on, and is one of our greatest supporters.

We had a wonderful Christmas together at Kora.John worked
on his tan while I did a lot of routine maintenance on the cars and the camp. We went for long walks in the mornings and evenings, often with the young cubs and Juma tailing us. Looking back now, it was strange how we were sure that Lisa was dead and that Christian was alive. We had scant evidence for either belief but that was very much the way we felt. We used the little rubber dinghy to thread our way through the hippos and cross the Tana rather than drive the ten hours around via Garissa.John and I made a couple of half-hearted searches for Christian over on the Meru side but we had no luck and didn't really expect any. Christian had gone for ever. He had moved from a Bentley in Chelsea to a Land Rover in Kora and now he had gone off to Meru, where they had the new Toyotas, to start his own lineage. We were proud of him but, God, I missed him.

4. Pride before a Fall

George
received a call over Christmas from Perez Olindo, the first African head of the National Parks Service, urging him to go and see him at his office. In those days, Parks and John Mutinda's Game Department were separate but we needed to be friends with both in order to operate successfully. Perez told George that he had far too many foundlings at Nairobi National Park animal orphanage. He wanted to give George a young lion called Leakey, who was becoming too big to stay there.

John Rendall and I were elated when the news came through on the radio. We had spent Christmas discussing the problem of not having a lion to replace Christian and here was a late Christmas present landing in our laps. And from such a source! To receive a lion from the head of Parks gave us a nice official nod. We rigged the pickup for a translocation, then drove to Nairobi, where I dropped John at his plane, and scraped together some cash for more fuel so that I could collect George and the new lion. We were always operating on a shoestring at Kora but this was the time of the Yom Kippur war, and the resulting global fuel crisis, so things were worse than usual. The price of fuel in Kenya went up 500 per cent between 1972 and 1976 so we had to be very careful about how and if we drove. The same applied to the gas we used for the fridges, and the build-up of lions over the coming period meant we had to buy much more meat than we had in earlier years. It was a long time before we realized that thousands of people out there would be willing to sponsor us to get over such problems because they admired the work we were doing.

The
orphaned Leakey had been named after Louis, the great archaeologist who discovered the origins of man in East Africa and was the mentor and friend to so many 'Monkey Women': the late great Diane Fossey (gorillas), Shirley Strum (baboons) and Jane Goodall (chimps). Louis and his equally talented wife Mary's children went on to be very influential in Kenya and indeed the wider world. Philip became an MP when no other white Kenyan dared join the political fray and indeed became a minister under President Moi. Richard made major archaeological discoveries, headed up the National Museums of Kenya, then took on the poachers and beat them when, many years later, he sat in Perez Olindo's chair. Yet more bravely, in the mid-1980s he used his position as CEO of the East African Wildlife Society to take on the minister, the directors and the government as a whole over poaching, corruption and law and order. He then went into politics himself. I have had many run-ins with the Leakeys over the years but I have always admired their balls while remaining keenly aware of their less shining parts. When most white Kenyans have sat on their butts, sure in the knowledge that they can reclaim their nationalities of birth at the drop of a hat, the Leakeys have embraced being Kenyan, involved themselves in politics and worked in the Kenyan civil service for the greater good of the country. They are almost alone in this regard and I admire them both.

Perez told us that Leakey had been badly treated on capture and that recently he had been put on display at a fair in Nairobi. At around one year old he was going to be difficult to integrate and reintroduce to the wild, but it was either take him or leave him in the orphanage. George and I were rather wary of what we might be letting ourselves in for but we took him without hesitation. Juma, too, had been treated badly on capture and was still very cautious and jumpy around humans. A distrust of humans is a healthy attribute in a wild lion – humans are their
only predator – but dislike can be dangerous for both man and beast. George drove back to Kora with Leakey in a large cage on the back of the pickup and I followed in the station wagon in case of breakdowns. I saw some tremendous double-takes from passers-by as we made our way out of Nairobi on the main Thika highway. As quickly as possible we got him into the compound and stashed in the holding area within our camp, which Terence had reinforced while we were away. We need not have worried about Leakey being aggressive towards humans. He was a hopeless lion he had a great deal in common with the one in
The Wizard of Oz.

Hopeless Leakey might have been but he also had a lovely personality. He soon developed an incredibly endearing habit. In addition to nudging our thighs in greeting, as all the lions did, he took to nudging the front wing of the Land Rover as soon as we came home. We tried to take him out into the bush, as we had with the others, so he could learn about life in Kora, but he hated walks. There was one place he liked going just near camp. He would charge in and out of the thicket there for a while, then sneak back to camp when we weren't looking. It was maddening, particularly as, in the bush, a ready-made family was waiting to teach him the tricks of his trade. Lisette had died but Juma was doing a sterling job bringing up the other cubs and they were all about the same age as Leakey. We had to keep them apart from each other because – due to his incarceration at the or phanage – he had not even learnt how to play when the others were already hunting successfully. We had to drag him out of his compound by the dangerous method of pulling a piece of meat on a rope but sometimes he just wouldn't come. After a while we managed to get him to come on a long walk down to the Tana, and he gradually fell into the daily routine that we had worked up with Christian and the girls, but he was way behind his peers.

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.