Born Wild (12 page)

As the two Yemens moved towards unification the football authorities of peace-loving Kenya were at war with each other. The whole country had gone football crazy and Pele was visiting. I bought Freddie a football in Garissa. He soon caught the soccer bug and turned into an excellent dribbler although, with opposition like Leakey and me, he had no trouble looking good.

When I had arrived in camp with Freddie, George's first words had been 'not another male'. Juma was looking after three boys already and we really needed some girls to even things out. As if in answer to our prayers, Dr Aart Visee, a Dutch vet who would become a lifelong friend and supporter, got in touch to say he had a lioness he wanted to give to us.

In a
world of strange coincidences Aart worked at Rotterdam Zoo, which had connections with both Christian and Elsa. He was desperate to find a home for a lioness called Arusha. Like Christian, she had once been a pet that had grown too big for its owners to cope with. These were the days before satellite phones and email so it took some feverish letter-writing to the Game Department and the ministry before we obtained permission to import the cub from Holland. Before I drove to Nairobi to collect her, I reinforced the holding compounds to put her in when she arrived. She would need a place of her own in which she could have time to adjust before being introduced to the other lions.

I pulled all the seats out of George's new long-wheel-base Land Rover to make more room, welded on a few ring-bolts so we could tie down the container and made sure everything was ready for the new arrival. George looked a bit forlorn as I modified his new car but understood that it was for the greater good of the project.

I set off first thing to pick up Aart and Arusha from that night's KLM flight into Nairobi. It was a spectacular day and the drive down was eventless. I met up with my girlfriend, Tina Aschan, for dinner on the way to the airport. We had a wonderful meal, then walked out to George's new car. It wasn't there. I thought it was a practical joke. I looked up and down the street; I interrogated the security guards. No joke: someone had stolen George's car and the flight from Holland was landing in forty-five minutes. We threw out the contents of Tina's VW Combi, gunned the engine and arrived at the airport, flustered, late and slightly drunk, a few minutes after Arusha had been unloaded.

We were taking coals to Newcastle and there were many raised eyebrows at the airport: no one believed we had permission to import a lion. The paperwork, of course, was in the stolen car. All those carefully sought permissions from the wildlife authorities
were now in the hands of a car thief: I was going to have to talk my way out of it. I can't imagine what Aart must have thought as we tried to smuggle a large lioness through Customs. After a good few hours, I managed to blag our way past – but what were we going to do with the lion? I'll never forget Aart's face when he first saw the Combi. We squashed the crate into the back, then shoved Aart in on top of it and drove to Carol Bell's house in Langata on the outskirts of Nairobi. Carol had a big house and a garden shed so seemed like the obvious victim even if Aart had been expecting a holding cage at a wildlife veterinary clinic. We put a bewildered Aart in the shed with the lioness, Tina and I had the sofa – and Carol's kids slept on, unaware that there was a lion in their shed. It all came good the next morning. The car was insured so we were lent another Land Rover by Cooper Motors until we could claim. Only a short wheel-base, it was nonetheless more suitable for driving to Kora than the battered old Combi. Aart and I put the lion crate in the back, a beer crate between us, then drove the ten hours to Kampi ya Simba while working our way through it. George took it very well when I told him I had driven through a puddle and his new car had shrunk.

Fred was delighted with Arusha. She determined how their relationship would go and soon they were inseparable. Just a few months after she had arrived, the orphanage gave us another two female cubs, Gigi and Growlie, bringing our total up to a nicely balanced ten. There followed the most intense but enjoyable few months that I have ever spent, juggling the different needs of the individual lions and helping them to grow as a pride. From the sadness of losing track of Christian, and Lisa's probable death, things were suddenly going remarkably well for George, me and the lion project.

There had been a definite change in perception of our project from the authorities as the old-school colonial wardens were phased out and the new African leaders took over. Both Perez
Olindo at National Parks and John Mutinda, the chief game warden, were incredibly supportive. Perez kept us stocked with cubs from the orphanage and John gave us the authority to look after them. Both patriotic Kenyans, they valued the fame that George had brought to Kenya and its wildlife, and they got on well with him. Until Kenya had stunned the world with triple gold at the Mexico Olympics, almost the only thing most people knew about the country was the Adamsons and
Born Free. Born Free's
contribution to Kenya's GDP must have been enormous. In the eighties,
Out of Africa,
the movie, doubled tourism earnings overnight and still brings visitors today – then, as now, Kenya's main income is from tourism. It took another movie to teach the world about Happy Valley, a sad story involving a tiny number of selfish people indulging themselves while the rest of the population was fighting a war.

George had retired just before independence so never suffered the integration problems faced by some of our friends, like Bill Woodley and David Sheldrick. Both men were excellent game wardens and had to adjust to having under-qualified Kenyans promoted over their heads. Like Jack Barrah, and unlike many others, they managed the change masterfully but there were times when it had not been easy. The fact that Perez and John had never worked under George in the colonial system or over him post- independence made the relationship much easier. It wasn't as if George was going to say anything to offend them because he never said anything! They could look upon him as a relic of colonial times, admiring the bits they liked and overlooking the bits they didn't. In turn, we felt a great responsibility towards them. They took significant personal risks in supporting us and we did not want to let them down.

It wasn't just the wildlife authorities at Headquarters who were supportive of our lion project at Kora. While the army sat in their barracks playing darts, because all Kenya's problems were 'internal' not 'external', the other men on the ground in Garissa always
helped us when they could. When, as increasingly happened, Somali and Orma grazers invaded the reserve, Philip Kilonzo would always try to send his policemen to move them out. We had the run of the police and provincial authority's workshops and the Anti Stock-theft Unit always picked our brains for information. The support was a two-way street. We would always provide fuel and assistance if our neighbours needed a hand, and when elephants menaced crops at Asako we would help herd them back into the reserve. I once got called in to Rahole on the other side of the Tana to help out with a buffalo that had become stuck in the mud. Buffalo may look like large cows but they are actually one of the most dangerous animals in Africa, responsible for many more deaths than lions, crocodiles or elephants. I spent all day trying to pull it out with the Land Rover. This involved some very tentative lassoing and then some very careful pulling so I didn't inadvertently break its back or otherwise injure it. After hours and hours of this, it eventually popped out. The huge buffalo lurched to its feet, legs shaking and head nodding. It gave us a belligerent look, let out a massive bellow and dropped down dead.

Visitors from outside Kenya were beginning to see that our methods were working and to show their appreciation by donating money. We were incredibly bad at accepting donations, so bad in fact that we actually frightened away some donors by our 'frightfully British' reluctance. At this stage George, Terence, the lions and I were living off George's colonial pension and we needed all the help we could get. Luckily the pension was index- linked, but even so, the small cash injection brought in by the success of
Christian the Lion
made a significant difference. The whole world was in economic crisis and the price of everything – from posho, the Kenyan staple maize meal, to fuel and camel meat – was rising. It sounds a bit dramatic but away from the bubble of Kora it seemed that the world was going crazy. US
President Nixon resigned in 1974, Saigon fell a year later, marking the end of the Vietnam war, and closer to home, Haile Selassie's successor, Colonel Mengistu, and Uganda's Idi Amin were extremely scary neighbours, who laid claim to vast swathes of Kenya. After a while, we just stopped buying batteries for the radio and kept our heads down – completely immersed in the lions. We did, however, have an increasing number of visitors.

One of our most surprising and welcome guests was Henry Starkey, my old school chaplain who had saved me from expulsion dozens of times; he brought his whole family and seemed pleased that I had stayed out of trouble and done something useful. It was great to see them but even more exciting were the wildlife researchers who were taking an interest in our work. Hugh and Ros Lamprey from the Serengeti Wildlife Research Institute came and stayed for a few days. Hugh gave me a long lecture about hippo behaviour and a duck-like bird called the Peter's Finfoot while we were out on the river in the nine-foot rubber duck. As he delivered his talk a tiny pink hippo jumped off the riverbank and plopped into the water in front of us. Hugh described how hippos were fiercely territorial and protective of their young as I was feverishly pulling the cord on the ancient outboard like a maniac. 'What's up?' he asked. 'Why the engine now?' It coughed into life and we shot downstream just as the mother hippo charged towards us, mouth agape.

Nigel de Winser, who went on to be a very big cheese at the Royal Geographical Society, set up camp in Kora for his Tana River Expedition. He brought a small group of scientists from a London polytechnic to study the flora and fauna from Kora to Kipini on the coast. He was wonderful to have around and his crew taught us a huge amount about the area. A colleague of Hugh's, Bernard Grzmiek from Frankfurt Zoo, also visited and checked us out. Gratifyingly, he took one look at our project and said we needed to open up the reserve if we were to continue
successfully. To that end, he gave us the money for a tractor, a road grader and two years of manning for them.

After a great deal of research, combined with advice from friends, I was despatched to Nairobi to buy the aforesaid tractor. We had decided on the most basic model we could find with absolutely no extras. The thinking behind this was that the simpler it was, the less likely it would be to break down in the harsh conditions of Kora – that, and the fact that I heartily disliked Terence's proposed tractor driver and wanted him to be as uncomfortable as possible. I went to pick up the tractor from CMC – a Massey Ferguson MF20 with a three-ton trailer – and was delighted to see that, although it was a beautiful piece of machinery, it was just as uncomfortable as I had hoped, with a thin metal seat and no suspension to speak of. Then it dawned on me that I was going to have to drive it the whole way to Kora. It took me three days, travelling in the baking sunshine at 12 m.p.h. and camping by its side at night. When I arrived Terence thought Christmas had come early and set off to play with his new toy. The equipment made a huge difference to our lives and those of the lions by speeding up all the lengthy processes, like getting to Asako to fetch staff, collecting firewood and water. Mainly used for road-building, it took the heat off the Land Rovers and meant we could track down the lions more quickly with fewer breakdowns. My intention might have been mean but my logic was correct. That tractor still delivers the water at Kora.

The people that utterly transformed our daily routine were Esmond and Chryssee Bradley Martin. Chryssee is a conservation writer and worked with Gloria Lowe at the Nairobi National Park to make sure all the orphans came our way. Esmond, with his working partner Lucy Vigne, is the world's expert on the illicit trade in ivory and rhino horn. They first came to visit us because Chryssee had worked with Leakey at the animal orphanage. Leakey had playfully nipped Esmond's leg when they were
walking with George, a slight for which Esmond seemed to bear him no grudge even though it must have hurt considerably. Having seen the laborious methods we used to track the lions, Esmond told us that if we found out about radio collars he would find the money to pay for them. This was very new technology at the time and we didn't have the Internet to help us search but I was eventually put in touch with Barbara Kermeen at AVM Instrument Co. in California. She designed our first lion collars and still produces all our collars today. The original system was very primitive indeed and required a lot of trial and error because batteries were unreliable. We and AVM were learning as we went along.

The first collars came in a huge box with an H-shaped aerial – about the size of an old-fashioned television aerial, attached to a wooden pole – which connected to a radio set and a pair of headphones. The collars themselves were constructed from very strong webbing made of machine belting. They had to have holes drilled in them so that they could be bolted together at a point that fitted the lions' necks. Next to the holes lay the transmitter and the batteries, which had to be soldered together, then covered with pink dental acrylic so that the system didn't short-circuit when wet. This is a complicated and fiddly process for dentists, let alone in the middle of the bush. The next step was yet more challenging: getting the collar round the lions' necks without having an arm chewed off.

We decided not to immobilize the lions. We didn't have any experience of using anaesthetics – even now a very hit-and-miss science – and we were frightened we might kill a lion by getting it wrong. It fell upon me therefore to convince the lions, using my hands and my voice, that what I was doing was for their own good, and persuade them that it was the right thing to do. The first lion we collared was Leakey, who was a big boy now – standing above our waists and weighing close to three hundred pounds – but
had a gentle character and was very easy-going. George stood in front of him with a stick for him to chew and I moved towards him holding the collar in front of me. It was important to be very calm, relaxed and firm. 'This is good for you and needs to be done,' I said, as I moved towards him. I put the collar round his neck in one fluid movement, pushed through the bolts, put on the lock washers and nuts, then tightened them with a spanner. God, I loved it. I loved the fact that I could do it.