Born Wild (19 page)

In the middle of the year we had to do some scenes down in Tsavo with Eleanor, an orphaned elephant. The night before the filming there was a huge party at Tsavo Headquarters to celebrate Bill Woodley's forty years as a warden. Bill was one of my heroes and quite a drinker himself, so the next morning I was feeling extremely hung-over when the film crew dragged me from my bed to make the best of the early-morning light. The director sent Eleanor and me off into a thicket from which I was meant to emerge appearing manly and action-packed. As is usual on a film set nothing happened for ages and we were left hanging around in the thicket. A big bull elephant followed us in and didn't like the look of me at all. Eleanor protected me from him with long swings of her enormous bottom while letting me shelter between her front legs. Discouraged, the bull elephant soon moved off and I was feeling so rough that I fell asleep, leaning against one of Eleanor's big wrinkled legs.

I awoke to the sound of very quiet shouting. ‘Tarzan-san, Tarzan-san,' called the producers, trying to wake me up without annoying Eleanor, of whom they were in considerable awe. I woke, puffed out my chest, pulled in my stomach and bounded from the thicket, looking purposeful. I asked them afterwards if they had the footage of me sleeping between the legs of a fully grown elephant.

'No, Tarzan-san. Not in script,' they blithely replied.

Shortly after I returned to camp I celebrated my thirty-sixth birthday. It was a great day – one that I will never forget. We could hear Koretta mating with Blackantan near camp. Naja, one of Jojo's daughters, was nearby. George and I were mending a gate when a plane flew low over the camp and I rushed off to the airstrip, thinking it was Khalid come to say happy birthday.
Instead, out of the plane hopped Michel Jeanniot, an Air France pilot who had been visiting us for years. In his hand was a little wicker basket that I recognized from earlier visits. The gingham cloth that covered it was renowned for hiding the wonderful cheese and wine that Michel would bring from Paris in his Boeing 747.

'Tony. I ‘ave a present for you,' he said, in his comedy French accent.

I hungrily opened the basket hoping for a baguette and some Brie. Inside was something much better: two six-week-old leopards that Michel had just smuggled from Paris via Réunion, Antananarivo, in Madagascar, and Nairobi. I was overjoyed, elated and utterly astonished. Forget permits, we'd work that out later. As my vicar friend Mike Harries says when he preaches his famous Tony Fitzjohn sermon: ‘Tony is the kind of person who would rather ask for forgiveness than permission.'

It turned out this was the best policy.

The cubs were dehydrated and hungry after their long flight so George and I tried to feed them while Michel explained their origins. Michel, it emerged, had a friend called Jean-Louis who worked in a Paris bar. The bar's main claim to glory was that at one end it had two leopards in a glass cage and at the other two cheetahs. Jean-Louis had become much attached to the cats and had been appalled when the bar closed and the owner sold the valuable animals to a circus. No cat likes to be kept captive but leopards hate it most; from that day Jean-Louis devoted himself to acquiring their freedom. It took him years to save up but eventually he earned enough money to buy them.

He had taken them home and set them up in a large compound in his suburban garden, separating them whenever the female came on heat. It wasn't ideal but it was better than a circus. And he loved them. A romantic man, as soon as Michel had told him he knew a place where leopards and lions were rehabilitated by
the famous George Adamson, Jean-Louis stopped separating the pair and the two angry little bundles George and I were trying to feed were the consequence.

Young as they were, they refused to drink milk from the teated whisky bottles George and I offered them. Tired out, we put the cubs down and as soon as we left them alone they started lapping hungrily at the bowl we had left in their box. It was our first lesson in the difference between leopards and lions: lions are gregarious, leopards solitary.

George was delighted with the leopards and with Michel's story. But we were worried: the authorities were not going to like the cubs' provenance.

'Oh, God, here we go again,' said George. But he was smiling broadly for the first time in ages. Kora was back in business.

We had done a lot of work on the leopard camp during the Scots Guards' visit but progress had tailed off somewhat while I was away playing Tarzan. We threw ourselves into getting everything up and running, and within three weeks the leopards and I were ready to move. Kampi ya Chui (Camp of the Leopards) was about six miles from Kampi ya Simba, in the lee of another big inselberg that soared out of the
commiphora
bush a few miles back from the river. The camp was tight up under the rock, which climbed two hundred feet above it and was shaded by huge
Acacia tortilis
trees. It was entirely fit for habitation – by leopards. All I had, however, was a small hut with no door and a camp bed with a mosquito net until months later when we had time to build something more permanent. Nonetheless, after the first visit by the lions, I decided to put a door on the hut. When I could, I slept outside under the stars as it was so much easier to hear sounds at night.

The camp had few amenities – it was a nine-mile walk to the river for a shower – but what it did have was independence. I loved working for George and continued to do so for years, but
from day one at Kampi ya Chui I was in charge. The leopards were my project and I was assisting no one. With this freedom came great pressure. I was being given a chance and couldn't afford to fail. I immersed myself in the new challenge and, as when Freddie had first arrived, girlfriends and social life fell by the wayside.

The leopards loved the camp straight away. They shot into the artificial rock cave I had built for them and spent practically all their time in there while they adjusted to their new lives. Later they came and played in the tree that we had enclosed or on the swing we had made with an old tyre, but the cave was always their favourite spot. Unlike the lion compounds, the leopard compounds had to be fenced across the top as well as the sides. The chain-link was buried three feet into the ground and secured there with rocks before the earth was replaced and packed tight. This wasn't so much to stop the cubs escaping – although it did – as to stop predators getting in. As with lions, almost everything kills leopard cubs – from the usual suspects like lions and hyenas to more unlikely creatures, like snakes and baboons. Baboons are famous for their eyesight, waterbuck for their hearing, so they tend to live together, watching each other's backs and thriving on the symbiosis. In Kora this relationship had gone one step further – with the shooting of all the leopards in the 1940s, the baboons had multiplied in both numbers and effrontery to the point at which they constituted a heightened danger to the new arrivals. The ones that lived on the rocks above Kampi ya Chui were furious with the usurpers and were always looking for ways to get at them.

When I had first arrived at Kora, George had asked me what I'd like to do: be warden of the area or set up and run a leopard camp? ‘The leopards,' I replied, and ten years later I had got it. The lions had been George's – except for Freddie – but the leopards were mine. It was exciting to have a project of my own.
Although much of the work we had done with lions was transferable to leopards, I often had to review our methods because the leopards were so solitary, shy and small. After a couple of weeks I started putting minced meat into their milk. Gradually I added chunks and eventually whole animals. I once stole a dikdik from a martial eagle that had just killed it, and had no qualms about feeding the cubs roadkill or anything else I found. I wanted them to get used to wild animals rather than the domestic meat we bought in Asako for the lions. There was plenty around for them – leopards will eat anything, from lizards and birds to kudu and warthogs. The local elephants came to investigate the new camp, sniffing the poles and the mesh with their trunks, and after a month or two of great circumspection, Koretta and the other lions came for a look too.

I found that leopards were much more nocturnal than lions, which was handy because I had by no means given up on the lions. I spent most of my days with George, following our normal routines of looking for and walking with the lions, then returned to Kampi ya Chui where the leopards were just starting to wake up and play. Intrinsically cautious and untrusting, the leopards nonetheless allowed me into their lives, a privilege that came with huge responsibility. We called the male Attila, after PA and Agneta's surfing dog; the female we named Komunyu after the rocks above camp but we usually called her Squeaks because of her large compendium of strange noises. The leopards were at their most active between three a.m. and dawn so I didn't get much sleep. I had always drunk very little in the bush, making up for it when I was away, but with the arrival of the leopards I stopped drinking almost entirely: I didn't have time for a hangover.

It was fortunate that around the time I started living with the leopards a Nairobi doctor called Andrew Meyerhold started visiting Kora. He and Fritz Strahammer often came up for the
weekend in separate planes, merely for the joy of flying and spending some time with George and the lions. Wonderful guests, they always brought fresh food and other supplies and Andrew was able to keep an eye on both Adamsons' health and, indeed, mine. George and Terence were getting old and often fell prey to infections brought in by the myriad visitors. Terence had suffered a stroke during one of his bouts of malaria and George was developing all sorts of strange allergies that eventually required him to sleep with an oxygen cylinder by his bed and cut down heavily on his pipe. Andrew's visits took a great weight off my shoulders and I'm sure the Flying Doctors were pleased too as Andrew spotted many of George and Terence's illnesses before they became emergencies.

Shortly after I had moved down to Kampi ya Chui, Bob and Gill Marshall-Andrews came out with their kids. It was wonderful to be able to show them my achievements. One day I went in with the leopards and got scratched on my hand. Laura, their nine-year-old daughter, who is now a highly qualified doctor, remembers to this day my coming out and washing my hands in Ajax cleaner. ‘Best stuff for it,' I said. I had nothing else around.

We now had a leopard and lion programme going strong, and although we lived on the breadline, our achievements then were pretty impressive to an outsider. Jojo's daughter Naja had two new cubs, Koretta had hers and the leopards were thriving on their diet of milk powder, cod liver oil, minced meat, Farex and calcium lactate. It was good to show people who had spent so much of their own time setting up the Trust for us that we were genuinely doing something useful. In Kora, I was in my element. When they had seen me last I had been in theirs. Nevertheless, things were not running as smoothly as they might have been. The origin of our leopards was still a problem, although George had driven to Nairobi and written to Daniel Sindiyo, the new director of Wildlife, pleading to be allowed to keep the cubs.

The leopards were so different from the lions that it was hard to adjust from minute to minute. I had to be careful that I treated them appropriately and remembered which particular big cat's world I was living in. You have to watch your back with lions but they are much more friendly than leopards – they are always greeting each other and they greeted us but you can't force a greeting out of a leopard. Although they can inflict a great deal of damage, leopards are much smaller than lions. Leopards hide and never show themselves unless they have to, while lions only hide when they are hunting or protecting their cubs. Leopards still live right in the centre of Nairobi but the residents never see them. They only notice they're around when they return home to find their Labrador's eviscerated remains at the bottom of the garden – one of our leopards came to us when it was trapped, drinking out of a bath, on a new Nairobi housing estate. Lions are gregarious and relaxed in the open; leopards are nervous and solitary and hide in caves. They can also run up to the thinnest of branches in the tallest of trees.

I had learnt from George and the lions that it's no use trying to treat a wild animal as a pet. If you do, you take away their innate wildness, which is the exact opposite of what we were trying to do at Kora. You cannot impose yourself on a big cat. You have to attune yourself to working with it so you think and react as it would, behaving naturally and firmly without a hint of fear. They can smell pretence and panic from miles away. It's hard to learn
how
to do this; you just have to do it. Gradually you get better and better. George, even at the end of his life, was able to work with lions born in the wild and in captivity in a way that I don't think anyone will ever rival. They knew he was old and frail, yet they treated him with respect until the very end.

George and I survived with big cats for so long because we came instinctively to understand not just their behaviour, their flicking tails and their crouched shoulders, but something more
than that. ‘It' had to be felt. And over the years we felt ‘it' more and more. The key was to embrace their wildness, not try to tame them. Sometimes that wildness would trigger something in them: lying down in front of the lions, for example, triggered a charge. Sometimes in play they wanted to get rougher with us but were stopped by our voices, which reminded them that we were just human beings. It wasn't us ordering them to stop as one would with a dog. It was them deciding to stop.

I, too, had what might be called ‘a way' with lions and leopards. It came, I think, from total absorption and from the fact that they knew I would do anything for them. As with the lions, I offered the leopards my friendship; I spoke kindly to them and looked after them when they couldn't look after themselves. Initially they were deeply suspicious but gradually they let me do more for them, to the point at which I was able to fit them with radio collars and tend even the most painful of their wounds. I felt an extraordinary responsibility for them and threw myself into providing their care. And I would like to think they felt safe with George and me because they saw that we understood them and were sympathetic towards them.