Born Wild (6 page)

Hard to believe now, we used to have to watch out for the numerous rhinos when we were tracking. They can go at quite a pace when riled, and relying on their poor eyesight is not always a successful tactic when trying to avoid them. If you literally have your nose to the ground, looking for small signs and indications of what has passed that way, it's very easy to miss the large and obvious signs like the vast elephant leaning against a tree, dozing in the heat. We had many lucky scrapes on coming face
to face with the larger wildlife but usually they were just as surprised as we were.

The lions were all old enough to hunt a little but they still needed a lot of looking after and protection from the wild lions in the area so in those early days we still tried to keep them in camp at night. The bush was thick and the game wary, so the lions had to adapt to hunting by sound first, smell second and then a sighting when they were already in full pursuit. Christian, who was of a similar age to Lisa and Juma, was still learning to hunt well. Nevertheless, he was independent and would usually meet us down at the river from which we would try to coax all three back to camp to avoid encounters with older, smarter and already established wild lions.

George had discovered that walking with the lions was the best way to get them acquainted with the bush and ready for a selfreliant life. As we strolled along they would head off into the surrounding country as dogs do when you take them out, following scent trails and searching for excitement. We found that by watching the lions we observed much more than we would on a normal walk as their ever-watchful eyes scanned the bush like snipers', their bodies stiffening as they spotted anything strange or unnatural. Christian, with whom I became ever more friendly, was particularly rewarding to watch. I think he saw similarities between Ace and John, who had loved him so much in England, and myself; it was very much as if we were growing up together. Soon he and Lisa began to bounce up and greet me as they did George, but Juma was always very wary of everyone – even the Old Man himself. We thought she had been mistreated on capture and she was never really able to look on humans with the warmth we felt from Christian and Lisa. At times she tried to be like the others, but it was too much for her. The damage had been done and she was always careful with Man.

Every week or so I would drive for about an hour and a half
to Asako, the closest village to our camp at Kora, and buy meat for the lions. Almost inevitably it would take longer – a leaf spring on the Land Rover would break, I would get stuck or have a puncture or two. The Trust that George and I created has done a lot of work in Asako over the last twenty years, but forty years ago there was nothing there except a few huts and some mangy livestock. There was no dispensary, no school, no security, no Land Rover ‘taxis' to our main town Garissa, no shops even, just a crocodile-infested river crossing to Mbalambala on the far bank and three islands, famed for their enormous elephants. The people of Asako are from a small tribe called the Korokoro. No one really knows their ancestry. Terence was convinced they were the indigenous people of that area, others that they are a subset of the much more numerous Oromo people of Ethiopia. For years they had been subjected to raids from both the Oromo and the Somalis. Scattered throughout the length of Kora are large stone mounds, supposed to be thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Oromo, or Galla – an ancient tribe from the Ethiopian border – graves.

The Maalim, or spiritual leader, of Asako was a great supporter of George and our lion project and, along with the village chief, would encourage his people to sell us livestock, which we would feed to the lions. This was an expensive way of doing things, but although we had permission to shoot for the pot outside the boundaries of Kora, we had all developed a distaste for killing wild animals – George and Terence after a lifetime spent working on game and predator control. Buying our meat from Asako had the advantage of providing the Korokoro villagers with a little extra money, which they desperately needed. The meat also helped a great deal in luring the lions back to camp in the evenings and meant that we could supplement their diets when they were learning how to hunt.

Maalim Shora Dirkicha, to give him his full family name,
would look around for likely cows for us. He still lives there today and, although pencil thin, can walk thirty miles a day in intense heat without batting an eyelid. We looked for beasts that would cost as little as possible. Even though they were for feeding to the lions, we always had them killed by the village in the Muslim way before taking them back to camp for butchering.

Butchering was a messy process at which I soon became expert. First I would remove the skin from the cow and the meat from the bones. I chopped the meat into two-kilo chunks and the skin into squares, then hung the meat overnight. If the lions weren't about we would put the carcass into the back of the Land Rover and drive around with it in the hope of attracting them. If they were near camp we tied it to a tree with all the guts and lungs hanging out, a strong chain through the pelvic girdle. This allowed us to have a good long look at the lions as they were interacting with each other and meant that wild lions were unable to steal the carcass. Over a very long period this had the effect of bringing the wild and introduced lions together. There's nothing like meeting for a meal to kick-start a relationship.

The meat went into the elderly propane gas fridge that we shared with the lions. Incredibly temperamental, gas fridges were the only way to keep things cool at Kora; thank God we have solar fridges today, which are so much easier to deal with. Each gas fridge has its own personality, seldom pleasant, and must be lit and fuelled with great care. As with the even more dangerous paraffin fridges, if you get it badly wrong, the fridge blows up and burns down your camp – this happened to Joy ten years later, when she was living in Shaba. More usually they allow your meat to go off or they freeze it solid. The lions used to lick the frozen chunks like lollipops, their sandpaper tongues gradually wearing down the flesh until it became chewable by their back molars.

Over many years we found that feeding the lions like this did
not – as many suspected – give them a taste for domestic stock and break down their fear of man, but it did give them a reason to come back to the safety of camp and encouraged a certain tolerance of man, which meant they didn't attack humans. Although there were issues about them eating domestic stock, we never had a problem with them attacking people out in the wild in my whole eighteen years at Kora. Where we did have difficulty was around camp, the centre of their territory, where they were often hungry and expecting food. A hungry lion is an angry lion, as all three of us discovered over the years. We had to be very careful with the blocks of meat we gave them as a reward for coming back to camp. These often triggered an attack reflex, of which we had to be aware. The lions loved butchering days and they were always a cause for celebration with George, Terence and me. Our one concession to our own stomachs was to cut out the fillets and eat them ourselves rather than give them to the lions. When we changed to camels we had to forgo even that treat.

Our evenings were spent under the Tilley lamps in the mess, reading the
Encyclopedia Britannica
and the old Penguins Terence bought by the yard when he was at his house in Malindi, or talking quietly about safaris of the thirties, forties and fifties. Terence would occasionally join in and tell stories of elephant he had saved from sink holes and swamps or of his work for the Game Department when he had shot buffalo by the hundred to protect crops from wildlife. George would chuckle quietly and match Terence's stories with his own. When we could still afford batteries, and before the news being broadcast became too depressing, we used to listen to the BBC World Service on a battery-powered short-wave radio. Nixon was the American president and the war in Vietnam was raging; he had devalued the dollar, which had knock-on effects in Kenya, as did the accession of Idi Amin in neighbouring Uganda. Nonetheless, everything reported seemed
very otherworldly while I was living in these simple, severe conditions with two men old enough to be my grandfathers.

There was no generator for electricity at Kampi ya Simba so keeping the lamps in working order was an important knack I had to learn. They had to be primed every evening by pumping a little piston on the fuel tank to build up the pressure within. They ran on kerosene but had to be ignited with a small amount of methylated spirit as part of a complicated sequence that required a great deal of patience. The key was never to touch the mantle, the ‘bulb' of the lamp. Fiddly to replace, they were made of thin silk net. As soon as they had been lit, they took on the consistency of ash and became extraordinarily fragile. The whiteflamed Tilleys were an essential part of our lives and far superior to yellow-flamed hurricane lamps for reading by. Getting them organized was a chore we had to remember to do before we'd had a drink.

Gin was George's daytime tipple. By night he was a whisky man. He collected the plastic white horses that came around the necks of his whisky bottles, a habit that irritated Joy so much that he hid the ever-growing stable whenever she visited. Once, on a visit to Nairobi, I found hundreds of these horses and hung them up in camp, leading Joy to think George had become a raging alcoholic. Joy did not like me at all – or Terence, with whom she had been fighting for thirty years. When I first went to Kora she looked on me as a potential ally and spy: ‘I'm sure George keeps women up there,' she had said. ‘I want you to tell me about them.' I had refused – not that there was anything to tell her for we led the most blameless of lives in camp. But when I heard her voice on the HF radio at the end of my first week at Kora something about it immediately made me feel apprehensive.

‘You must get rid of that boy, George,' I heard her say, through the hiss of static on the radio. ‘He wastes money and crashes cars.'

‘Hmph,' said
George. ‘Sorry about that, Tony.' He switched off the radio.

This vast contraption, which ran off a car battery, was our only access to the outside world. It was linked to a central controller in Nairobi who used to listen in and join people up with telephone calls and other radio callers. It still functions today in a slightly modified form, although there are now satellite and mobile telephones to augment it. Back then radios were pretty primitive with big glass valves and they often broke down; ours was always needing new parts that were expensive and fragile and thus took weeks to fix. When it worked, we were able to get in touch with people across the country but it was a very public means of communication and we usually used it only for resupply lists and emergencies. As there was just one channel the whole country could listen to anything that was said. I used to ache for George as Joy harangued him about this or that, imagining the hundreds of people listening in on the frequency before or after making their own radio calls.

It seemed then as though I was one of the few people in the world who had neither seen nor read
Born Free.
I had read
Bwana Game
but it was mainly about George's earlier years as the warden of the Northern Frontier District so I was still not sure of the philosophy behind his lion-release programme. It was not the sort of thing he discussed so I had to work it out for myself. As a hunter and a game warden, George had shot hundreds of wild animals, large and small, and had come to realize in his forties that it was not something he or anyone else should be doing. I think Adrian House described it just right in his joint biography of the Adamsons,
The Great Safari.
George believed:

If it is wrong to thrash a human being, draw his nails, subject her to involuntary medical experiment, to lock him up or kill her without trial, it is morally wrong to treat an animal in this way. The more evolved the animal, the greater its
potential to suffer, and since it is handicapped by the double disadvantage of not speaking our language or possessing a vote, we have a double duty to protect it. Its unnecessary injury, captivity or death diminishes each one of us.
¹

George devoted his later life to assisting as many animals back into the wild as he could. Having started with Elsa, he continued with the lions that were used in the filming of the movie
Born Free.
He was on the set in charge of the only lions that could interact with the actors, Boy and Girl. They had previously been mascots for the Scots Guards based in Kenya, and went off after the movie to the Meru Game Reserve with George, where he started his pioneering work of training them for release. There followed a series of incidents, the most far-reaching and influential being that Boy bit the warden's son, Mark. Warden Pete Jenkins and George's assistant had met on the road and stopped to chat one day and Boy had taken the opportunity to bite Mark's arm.

The resulting injury had little lasting effect on Mark (who became warden of Meru himself many years later) but it lost George a lot of support for his lion project from old colleagues, many of whom believed that all lions habituated to man inevitably became man-eaters. Pete Jenkins and George didn't speak for years afterwards. Indeed, it took Joy's death to bring them together again. Despite Mark's mauling, George had been allowed to stay, but when Meru was promoted from a game reserve into a national park, he was obliged to leave. With nowhere else to go he took Boy, who had broken his leg, to Elsamere,Joy's house on Lake Naivasha, an area he hated, where the lion had to be caged rather than roaming freely. Boy spent months recovering before George was able to move him to Kora in 1970. But by then
Boy had company in the form of a tiny female cub called Katania and permission had been given for Christian to be brought out from England. It was Christian who speeded up the search for a new area, and had it not been for him, things might have gone very differently for George, Boy and Katania. We all had a lot to thank Christian for.