Born Wild (14 page)

(George had a habit of mangling people's names, so ‘Haragumsa' is Erigumsa. And ‘Mad, Bad and Worse' were resident fan-tailed ravens.) George explained that the lion that had got me had disappeared, but then returned to camp thirty- six hours later. It was Shyman, one of Juma's now adult cubs. My blood was still all over his muzzle and paws; lions are just as obsessive about keeping clean as their domestic cousins so this was very unnatural behaviour, as was the attack itself. George studied him for a while and when Shyman drunkenly and nastily started going for the young lions with patently evil intent, he realized something was wrong, got between them and shot him in the brain. He was convinced that Shyman had been poisoned by the Somali poachers who were systematically killing all the rhinos in the reserve and poisoning the carcasses, an opinion informed by Shyman's uncharacteristic behaviour and the fact that a rhino had been killed nearby a few nights previously.

Shyman had always been a bit tricky compared to his brother Daniel and Lisa's cubs, with whom he had grown up. He took
after his shy and wary mother, Juma, but I had known him almost since the day of his birth and had never had a problem before. This was one of the reasons why the murderous attack was so shocking.

When at last I got back to camp a couple of months later, I was nervous that things would not be as they were. I need not have worried. As soon as I arrived George and I went off to find the cubs. They looked at me with amazement, then hurled themselves at me. Arusha threw herself into my arms; Freddie, who had come off worst in a scrap with a wild lion, limped down from the camp rocks and hugged me; Gigi bounded up to join in and Growlie came close but was just too shy to say hello so sat down under a bush and forgot to growl. It was a great moment and allayed a lot of my fears. But, from the perspective of two months away, I could see that things were changing in Kora.

The fact that Kora had become a national reserve was having scant effect on the poachers and illegal grazers. I would say that storm clouds were gathering but, in fact, we longed for them. Kenya was suffering from a terrible drought so the nomadic Somali and Orma people were travelling long distances to find grazing for their massive herds. Occasionally the Somalis would move through Asako or one of our other neighbouring villages, daring the cowed inhabitants to protest. Their herds were like locusts, eating crops and fodder and anything else they could find. Kora wasn't much good for grazing cattle but they could still strip it clean, hastening the process of desertification. And the riverine forest along the Tana was perfect browsing for camels and goats so they cut down hundred-year-old poplars for an hour's feed. Lions and domestic stock do not make happy companions, however well-brought-up the lions, so the encroachment was of real concern. John Mutinda had told me to 'keep it safe'. He had allowed me to get away with being mauled myself but,
as George had noted in his letter, if anything happened to an African – even one who was trespassing – there would be trouble. We owed it to John to make sure this didn't happen but it was a constant struggle and involved a lot of driving to Garissa to beg Philip Kilonzo to keep the illegal grazers away from us. He did the best he could but it was far from easy and there was nothing anyone could do about the poachers. They were determined, motivated and armed to the teeth.

As Esmond had discovered, the origins of the poaching problem lay in the increased demand for rhino horn from Yemen, but the supply was met by the Cold War. Kenya's northern neighbours were fighting a particularly nasty war over a patch of grey bush that divides Ethiopia and Somalia. The war was made yet more unpleasant by the cynicism of the two countries' backers. Until 1974 the United States had supported Haile Selassie in Ethiopia while the Russians had poured arms into Somalia. Ethiopia had become less strategically important and Haile Selassie's successor claimed to be Communist, so when the Soviet Union started flirting with Ethiopia, the Americans swapped their support to Somalia overnight. During the war that followed, thousands of US-armed Somalis encroached into Kenya, looking first for rhino horn and then for elephant ivory. At Kora, we had none to spare but plenty of both. The ivory wars were in the future, but the rhino poaching was a clear and present danger. Early in 1976, we saw six Wakamba poachers with bows and arrows down on the river. By the end of that year, the Somalis were on the attack and the slaughter was gaining pace; we looked fondly back upon the Wakamba poachers as bucolic figures of a bygone era.

In spring 1976 I went to visit Bill Woodley in Mweiga on the slopes of the Aberdares where he was warden of the Mountain Parks, which included the Aberdares and Mount Kenya. He told me poachers were moving into Tsavo. Jack Barrah told us that
further down the Tana from us, the Somali poachers were following 'a policy of total extinction'. Poaching on a major scale had not yet come to Bill's Mount Kenya National Park but he was having a problem with people getting lost or injured when climbing the mountain. He took me on a mountain rescue and discussed his plans for setting up a real mountain rescue team. As we were hurtling down a gorge in his Piper Super Cub he asked me if I wanted another lioness. 'Of course,' I replied, and returned to Kora a few days later with Jojo, who had been orphaned in the Masai Mara.

Kaunda, who had come to us from the Nairobi orphanage, joined Jojo as the newest recruits. We now had three separate prides. Daniel, Oscar and Kora were thriving without Shyman and Juma. We still tracked them and saw them occasionally but they were completely independent. Freddie, Arusha, Growlie and Gigi were moving around together and had started interacting with each other and with wild lions. Leakey continued his shuttle diplomacy, bouncing between the three groups and helping us to keep tabs on them with his collar. Keeping track of them all was exhausting work, particularly when George was away. George would get ill occasionally – pneumonia and malaria usually – and I felt a huge responsibility not to let any harm come to his lions while he was out of camp. In retrospect we probably had too many and I should have taken a break but I loved it so.

My life was totally, utterly and completely absorbed in Kampi ya Simba. I felt no need to go abroad: I loved Kenya, I loved George and I loved the job. And, of course, I adored the lions. It was startlingly hard work, though, and very intense. Determining how the groups would behave, bringing them together or keeping them apart as we saw fit, required a lot of thought and then arduous work to put into practice. We were incredibly lucky to have Leakey's help with the diplomacy – we could always use him as an emissary between the groups.

Friends
came and went, brought supplies and were fascinated by the lions and our relationships with them. We had to be very careful not to involve them with the lions: they were used to us but always got a bit twitchy when strangers were around. People used to drive hundreds of kilometres to see George with the lions and then be furious that we made them stay in the cage or, as we often had to do, pretended we didn't know where the lions were.We were lucky that Arusha was around when Jack Barrah arrived one day with two planes and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Although she had a habit of knocking over George, she was incredibly friendly and easy to get along with. We fed the prince on corned beef and tinned fruit but he was so enthralled by Arusha that he didn't seem to mind the rather basic food.

After lunch we climbed up on to Kora Rock to look at the sky. It was blood red. A massive dust storm had blown up in Tsavo and stained the sky from horizon to horizon. George treated the prince just as he would anyone else and was astonished when he made an enormous unsolicited donation to help develop Kora. His money allowed Jack Barrah to start the rangers' base in Asako and man it for years. Donors who have vision enough to fund the boring things, like ranger lines, drains and roads, are rare indeed. Later that year, Frankfurt Zoo's tractor, another unglamorous but invaluable donation that Terence had been using daily, at last broke through to the Kyuso road on the main drag to Mwingi. The job would have taken years without it.

As ever, the lions were our
raison d'être
and we wanted to make that journey to Nairobi as seldom as possible. Adrian House, who was George's editor and biographer, came out at about this time to help George write
My Pride and Joy.
He asked me to work out the linkages between the different lions from which scrappy piece of paper he created the meticulous family trees (see the Kora Family Tree, page 318). I think we had done pretty well. By the end of 1976, Daniel, Oscar and Kora were living proof that returning
lions to the wild was possible and sustainable. We hardly saw them but we knew they were still around. Arusha was pregnant again, having had an earlier miscarriage. Freddie and Leakey were increasingly independent and the cubs were growing up. On Boxing Day 1976, George and I took the cubs down to the river for the first time. It was wonderful to see their faces light up when they came through the forest and saw the Tana in all its glory. We were happy that Christmas.

5. Trial by Simba

A radio call
came through on New Year's Day 1977 announcing the death of Gloria Lowe. A good friend and one of our staunchest supporters, she had campaigned for us at National Park Headquarters with Chryssee Bradley Martin and together they had made sure that the orphanage sent lions our way. It had been at Gloria's urging that we took on Leakey, a mark of official approval we sorely needed at the time. We then went on to prove the efficacy of our methods by reintegrating him successfully. It was a sad start to the year and, although we didn't see it at the time, Gloria's death stands out as a signpost of things to come.

On the rocks above Kampi ya Simba we toasted our departed friend and assessed how the lion programme was going. As we sat on the striated gneiss rocks, the view emphasized our isolation. The camp lies in the lee of three spectacular inselbergs, rising from a sea of thick bush: the huge rock outcrops soaring three hundred feet from the flat bush give parts of Kora the look of Monument Valley, where John Ford filmed all those old Westerns. From the rocks, the view stretched for hundreds of miles in which it was impossible to see anything man-made that we hadn't built ourselves. Even so, the wider world was beginning to encroach upon the idyllic life we led at Kora; the most apparent change was the smell. The stench of death was beginning to pervade every corner of the reserve. Drawn south by the lure of horn, the Somali poachers had wiped out all the rhino and were now setting their sights on Kora's elephant population. Given that they were AK47 sights it wasn't going to take them long. Many nights we were awoken by the sound of shooting and the
first thing we saw from the rocks in the mornings would be teetering towers of vultures, spiralling down on to the latest victim. Nowadays there are few vultures left – they have all eaten poisoned carcasses left out by herders to deter predators.

There is something obscene and wasteful about the slaughter of a vast elephant, its tusks hacked out with axes, an enormous cadaver left to rot in the sun. In Kenya that year – as in most years – people were starving. The price of meat had soared 75 per cent; staples were less severely affected but the whole nation was suffering. The wasted elephant meat was particularly grotesque: if they were going to kill the animals, they could at least have used their carcasses efficiently. This was indicative of a larger change in the Somalis. Traditionally the herders had always dug wells in the dry riverbeds as they moved with their stock. Whenever they did this, they would always dig another well a few hundred yards away for the wild animals and never use it themselves. Custom and the example of the elders who led them dictated this. George, who had worked in the north of Kenya for decades, was well known to the elders: sometimes in person, always by renown. They respected his right to be in Kora. But the poachers and herders coming to Kora now cared naught for the Old Man, not a jot for the animals and nothing for the environment.

They were not pastoralists from northern Kenya, grazing their own animals; increasingly they were from Kismayu on the eastern Somali coast, Bosasso in the north of Somalia and all points between. A Western-primed population explosion was laying waste to East Africa. Young Somali men were herding for livestock barons, vast unsustainable herds that had to roam many hundreds of miles in search of forage and grazing. Simultaneously they established themselves to be the heart of the domestic and export markets for cattle throughout Kenya. Now, we noticed, there were no elders accompanying the young men and fewer families too. The herders never dug an extra well for the wild
animals as they used to: they took only the most valuable parts of the animals they killed; they left poisoned bait in wide circles around their camps and burnt extravagantly wherever they went. The ancient doum palms, Tana river poplars and
Acacia eliator
that lined the banks of the river were being burnt by pyromaniac youths, merely for the hell of it – hundreds of years of growth destroyed in a matter of minutes. Such wanton destruction would never have been allowed under the elder system with which George had worked throughout his time as a game warden. And there wasn't much we could do to halt it. The forces of law and order in Kora consisted of George, myself and Terence. The warden and rangers confined themselves to Asako. We chased after the poachers with hunting rifles when we stumbled upon them but they played with us, always keeping one step ahead and, if we got too close, shooting over our heads with their modern automatic weapons. Bizarrely they never tried to kill us but neither would they go away. It was incredibly frustrating.

Five hours away in Garissa there was more formidable opposition but the poachers were well aware of its capabilities. My friend Noor Abdi Ogle and his anti-poaching teams did a grand job. I'm sure it was because of our friendship with him that the poaching gangs didn't just kill us outright. The police, General Service Unit (GSU) and army all fought brave battles against the invaders but they were neither equipped nor authorized to fight what was in effect an all-out war. The Kenyan authorities had to tread extremely carefully as the Somali government had ambitions upon Kenyan territory that they had no wish to provoke. Protecting us and the lions was not high on their list of priorities when held against maintaining peace among their neighbours in 1970s East Africa. These were tough days and they would only get tougher.