Born Wild (5 page)

We parked the car and walked around to Elsamere's lakeside aspect. Joy was on the lawn with a monkey on her shoulder and an unsure smile on her face. She greeted us in her strong German accent and I asked her again for a job. She looked at me and Hector as if we were from another planet. ‘I have nothing going,' she said. ‘But I know my husband is looking for someone. His previous assistant has just been killed by a lion.'

2. Meeting George

George
Adamson's brother Terence and I arrived in Kora after a long and uncomfortable journey. It had been a hundred-mile drive on which we had seen hippo crossing the sandy track as well as a few startled elephant and cats that are only seen at night. Terence had collected me off the Malindi bus at Garissa and driven for hours in silence. At Kora, a musky perfume scented the still air, the silence broken only by the ping of the manifold and the wheeze and crack of the broken exhaust as the Land Rover cooled down. A lithe young lioness called softly as she paced up and down outside the twelve-foot-high chain-link fence that surrounded George and Terence's camp. Soon the calls of frogs, nightjars and black-bellied bustards began again, piercing the all-enveloping darkness of the moonless night. A white-haired old man walked out of the mess hut, his head haloed by a hissing Tilley lamp. ‘Hello, I'm George Adamson,' he said.

After supper, George poured himself a small White Horse whisky and I had a beer as we sat under the lamp. Terence, two years younger than George, grunted at the drink on the vinyl- covered table and took himself off to bed. I can't remember what was said but I'm sure it wasn't much. Everything was pure and simple. No adoring public, no colonial DCs, no sign of any wealth, no pictures and photographs, not a touch of pretension or vanity anywhere – just sand underfoot, enamel plates and mugs, some old packing cases and those hellishly uncomfortable fold-out camp chairs. I was hooked. I went to bed in a rickety old camp bed under the stars and stared at the heavens. As far as I was concerned, those heavens had come to earth and I had just
discovered them. But how was I going to pull it off? I knew damn-all about lions, nothing about tracking, Somalis or Kiswahili, and in spite of having been an Outward Bound instructor, I knew nothing about surviving in a place like this. I had fibbed a bit to Joy about my experience and now I had met George I felt a bit guilty. At least I was fit, I thought, as I fell asleep. I was going to need to be.

I woke up before dawn to hear George pottering around and getting ready for the day. Not much was said so I just followed along. His camp was extremely basic, just a few thatched huts built on sand and surrounded by the tall, chain-link fence. After a cup of tea, George opened the big gate and I saw the point of the fence. A lioness jumped up at him, laying her vast paws on his bare shoulders; unnerving as it looked, Lisa knew what she was doing. She kept all her weight on her back legs and never extended her claws. Terence and Erigumsa had hacked a route up from the river three miles away and George walked down it to the Tana, the two-year-old lioness playing at his heels and Juma, her wilder and much shyer playmate, following at a cautious distance. I trailed them slowly in the rattling and ancient Land Rover pick-up.

Having arrived at night, I had not taken in the stark beauty of Kora. Kampi ya Simba (Camp of the Lions) was very basic indeed. There was one mess hut surrounded by three sleeping huts in which it was way too hot to sleep: we all slept under the stars in cots with mosquito nets. Showers were of the bucket variety and water was in very short supply. The camp lay at the foot of a great series of sandstone gneiss rocks, or inselbergs. They change colour as the light upon them alters, from orange and ochre to pale yellow in the fierce heat of the day and a rich red at sunset. The camp was in harsh, dry country, surrounded by flat-topped acacia,
terminalia, commiphora
and a swathe of stick-like bush, but down by the river there is a totally different environment. Lush
riverine forest lines the perennial waters of the broad and muddy Tana, Kenya's longest river. Often sticky and humid under the doum palms, huge
Acacia eliator
and Tana river poplars, the land along the riverbank is cooled by the flowing water and breeze, a welcome contrast to the scorching heat in the bush and at camp. Temperatures at Kora consistently top 100 degrees Fahrenheit by ten in the morning, and by two o'clock the bush is dead quiet. Even the birds save their energy. That was why we took our walks with the lions at dawn and dusk. In the heat of the day it was impossible to get them to move.

I remember thinking then that it was a long walk down to the river for a sixty-five-year-old, but George was the same age then as I am now and I, too, feel like I can take on the world when I get up in the morning. As we reached the river a large, shortmaned lion charged out of the bush and came bounding up to greet George.

George turned to me. ‘Come and say hello to Christian,' he said.

I screwed up my courage and stepped out of the car. Christian took one look at me with his unreadable yellow eyes, growled loudly and crouched, ready to pounce.

‘I think you'd better get back in the vehicle,' said George. ‘He's a bit frisky today.'

I obeyed his instructions, feeling somewhat ashamed as the Old Man talked to the three lions and sat down to smoke a pipe and watch the river with them. So this was the famous lion man whose attempts to reintroduce lions to the wild had been immortalized in Joy's multi-million-selling book,
Born Free.
And this was the lion I had heard about that had been bought from Harrods as a cub by Ace Bourke and John Rendall, a couple of Australian hippies, and had lived on the King's Road until he had become too big to handle. I looked at the fine young beast, not fully mature but still huge and powerful, his muscles rippling clearly
under his loose skin. I found him hard to equate with the Chelsea furniture shop where he had been raised: a bull amid crockery would have been much easier to handle.

Crocodiles lolled on the banks of the Tana while herons and egrets waded in the shady shallows as the heat of the sun built up. I looked across at the Old Man, who was already inspiring my loyalty. Shirtless, in a pair of tattered old shorts and Afghan
chapli
sandals, he held a rifle loosely in his right hand. His long white hair contrasted with the neat Vandyke beard that emphasized the point of his chin. His strong shoulders were a rich reddish brown after a lifetime spent in the sun – in India where he was born and in Kenya, to which he had devoted his adult life. There was a quality of peace and stillness about him that clearly put the lions at ease. Everything he did, he did competently, deliberately and calmly.

I had just finished reading George's book
Bwana Game,
which speaks of the years he spent patrolling the NFD, protecting its people and animals. George had tried his hands at many things – gold prospecting, road haulage, hunting and farming – before he joined the Game Department. He had led a solitary and independent life, even during his marriage to Joy, a twice-married Austrian painter with whom he had fallen hopelessly in love in 1942 when she was on a safari through Garissa, soon to be my home town. Theirs was a tempestuous relationship, whether they were living together or apart in a marriage that was so unlike its celluloid re-creation that it was a standing joke among their friends and acquaintances. The fact that George was one of the most famous people in the world at this time was the unlikely outcome of his shooting a lioness in 1956 when out in the bush with his successor and colleague as warden at Isiolo, Ken Smith. The film of
Born Free
(I966),Joy's book about bringing up the lion cub he had orphaned and then returning her to the wild, had been a stunning success. Starring Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna, it had
broken all sorts of box-office records, won two Oscars and made George, Joy and Elsa into household names. Since then people were always trying to meet George and asking him to speak at events: in vain. He was the most taciturn of men, who communicated mainly in grunts. His harrumphs, however, spoke volumes.

I've only met one person who spoke less than George and that was his brother Terence. I think they must have gone weeks without talking before I arrived on the scene. He had a crumpled face with huge bags under his eyes and was much given to scowling. A perpetual rather than confirmed bachelor, Terence was one of the strangest men I have ever met. After a lifetime of building houses and working as a game warden in a subordinate rather than leading role, he had ended up at Kora, living with a brother who quietly and unconsciously dominated him. They camped miles from anywhere in an environment Terence himself had designed entirely for the welfare of his brother's lions. Kampi ya Simba was split in two – one part for the humans, the other for the lions, with a simple system of gates and chain-link fences dividing the two. The lions' comfort and safety always came first. When George first moved there with Christian and Boy all he had needed to say to Terence was ‘Build me a camp for my lions,' then turn up when it was ready. The road system that Terence designed and his team of labourers hacked from the bush with machetes remains unchanged to this day: Kora would not function without it. The airstrip he sited ninety minutes away, paced out and cut, remained for years the only one for miles and was in the only place it could be: there was no other suitable ground. In short, without Terence, George and I would have been completely unable to do our work with the lions we both adored. Yet Terence would have absolutely nothing to do with them: he built a complicated infrastructure for them but actively disliked living with lions. He thought George and I were quite mad.

George
was easier to read. There was something about Kora and about George that gripped and inspired me. I couldn't be him but from the moment I arrived I knew that this was it. This was how I wished to live my life. I want some of that, I thought. To get a part of it, though, I was going to have to prove myself first. I wasn't going to be much use to George if I couldn't even make friends with Christian. The next morning we followed the same routine – up before dawn, then the slow drive down to the river in George's footsteps. There was Christian again, tail swishing, an unfathomable look in his eye. I thought, If the Old Man can do this, so can I. I walked straight across and said, ‘Hello, Christian, I'm Fitz.' Christian got up, rubbed his head against me and just sat there on my feet while I scratched his head. It was the beginning of one of my life's most valuable relationships.

The feeling of tranquillity and unity with nature that we experienced when we were out walking with the lions was a major part of why I loved my life so much. It was a feeling and code of behaviour that went entirely unexpressed, indeed would actually dissolve if I thought about it. Integral to everything we did was that the lions came before ourselves. We lived very simply and would go hungry rather than ration the lions; we wouldn't sleep if we needed to watch out for them; we wouldn't leave camp so that they were always protected. I had been living a pretty dissolute, aimless and selfish life since leaving England, yet within a few weeks of being at Kora I was a better human being. I felt spiritually and morally refreshed. That's not to say I didn't behave badly and have a lot of fun when I was away from camp but the core of my life now had some meaning.

We lived a life of quiet routine at Kora, punctuated with memorably disgusting meals cooked by Hamisi, a Sudanese cook who had been with Terence for decades. We didn't give him much to work with – tins of carrots, bits of goat and posho, Kenya's staple maize meal – but even with better ingredients he was no
Escoffier. Every morning George and I would take the lions for a walk down to the river. There was always something to do as we walked along – the lions would follow trails and George would show me what to watch out for and which tracks were made by what animal. He was a shower, not a teller, and by this method he taught me a huge amount very quickly. I soon recognized the songs of birds and the tracks of animals; it would be a while longer before I could recognize individual animals but it came with time. When we reached the river, the lions would lie down with explosive sighs and we would sit with them, shaded by the palms and giant figs, to watch the river go by. At eleven o'clock or thereabouts George would make himself a pipe and pull out his battered Stanley flask. Then we would have a cup of gin and Treetop orange squash before walking back to Kampi ya Simba for lunch.

The camp Terence had built did the job but that was all. The fence kept the wild lions out and allowed those that needed a safe place to stay inside. Life for us revolved around the sand-floored mess hut, with its thatched roof and three cement-covered hessian walls. Where the fourth wall should have been, a sandy area led to the fence and, beyond it, the bush. George's ancient typewriter sat on the table, much as Ruark's or Hemingway's must have done, the litter of books, papers and
objets trouvés
that surrounded it shuffled to one side for meals. He was a great correspondent and was always writing to some old friend or dealing with the council or Game Department. Rough bookshelves housed his collection of photographs, novels and reference books and quite often a snake or two looking for a quiet place to rest. The sand floor displayed the spoor of George's menagerie of guinea fowl, ravens and seed-eating birds, which to Terence's disgust would beg at meals or at the very least clear up afterwards. I'm sure George did most of it to tease his brother, but he also had a definite St Francis of Assisi streak that allowed him to hand-feed even
the shyest creatures, like the hornbills, ground squirrels, dik-dik and vervet monkeys. It was one of the reasons for his great success with the lions.

The lions ate rather better than us. I bought them fresh meat in Asako, our nearest village. We usually lived off corned beef, camel, maize meal or rice and tinned vegetables. Pudding was tinned fruit and evaporated milk – just like school dinners back in Enfield. Because of this we didn't usually linger over our meals. This left more time for a siesta in the brutal heat of the day, something I insist upon to this day. Little goes on at midday: the bush is still, sounds are dulled and only the most intrepid lizards move around. At about four o'clock we would get up, have a cup of tea, go out into the bush again and look for the lions. If they were nearby they would come to George's call but if they were tired or had killed and eaten too much we would have to go and find them. This was hard work and not always fruitful. The baked earth around camp and the rocks were hard for tracking so we often had to cut through the
nyika
bush on buffalo paths to the narrow
luggas
(dried-up riverbeds) that ran down to the Tana and flowed only when it rained heavily every twenty years or so. Picking up tracks on the sand in the
luggas
was a much easier proposition and often met with success, particularly when the sun was not too high. Sometimes, though, the lions would cross rocky outcrops and we would have to circle through the thick bush at their base to see which way they had gone.