Born Wild (7 page)

Everything at Kora had started well. It was almost perfect lion country – sparsely populated and remote, if a little low in hard- to-catch prey species. Boy had reacted well to the move. He had charged at Christian with stunning violence when George had first introduced them, but with the help of Katania, who was still a small cub of which both were fond, they had soon become friends. The process was memorably filmed by Simon Trevor in the documentary
Christian the Lion.

Just before I arrived on the scene everything had gone badly wrong. Boy had killed Stanley Murithii, one of George's longstanding employees, who had known Boy since he had first come to Kenya as a nine-month-old. No one will ever know why it happened. Stanley was outside the chain-link fence near the rubbish dump against George's express orders. He might have been looking for honey or tidying rubbish. We don't know why he was outside or what he was doing but even then Boy had known him for years – yet he killed him. Maybe Stanley ran away from the huge lion or fell over, two actions that trigger lion attacks.

George heard Stanley's screams while he was eating lunch. He rushed from the camp, forcing Boy to retreat, then stepped across Stanley and shot Boy through the heart. He carried Stanley back to camp where the young man died in his arms. This incident was a tragedy for all who knew Stanley. It also prompted much debate over George's lion project, which was nearly closed down. Instead George was given another chance and allowed to continue for a short while: there were to be no more lions, and feeding of
the existing ones must be phased out as soon as possible. It was also made patently clear by the wildlife authorities that if anyone else was harmed by one of George's lions, the experiment would be brought to an immediate close.

When I arrived George was down to just three lions but they still needed constant care. They roamed free but were in danger from all sorts of threats, including wild lions, crocodiles, snares and poachers, particularly Christian, who was always being beaten up by other lions trying to keep him off their occasional territory. George and I had to do our best to protect him without hurting the wild lions, a never-ending and often dangerous struggle. Most nights Terence and I would go to our cots and sleep soon after supper while George stayed up reading and writing, but I would soon be up again, woken by roaring fights going on outside the fence. In later years my experience of nocturnal existence made me a useful father. Even now I am up most nights, saving tents from marauding elephants or dealing with fence alarms in the rhino sanctuary and it doesn't affect me at all. But I do stick with an afternoon siesta whenever I can.

When roused, George and I would pick up our rifles and run outside the fence, clutching torches that never seemed to work. We often ended up on the rocks above the camp, trying to work out what was going on around us. With lions roaring on all sides, strange crashes and howls from the undergrowth, it was extremely frightening as we stumbled around in the dark. And not just for us. Christian would hear us and come bursting from the bush, having shat himself he was so scared. At speed and in the dark, a lion charging towards you for safety looks much the same as one with homicide in mind and is always a terrifying sight to behold. One night when we had forgotten the bullets for our rifles (my fault!), we found throwing stones around the wild lions strangely effective. It distracted them at crucial moments but was a tad nerve-racking. At such times, it was essential to stay upright and
stand up to the lions both wild and semi-wild. To crouch on the ground was an invitation to attack, even for Christian – a lessonm George had learnt the hard way on the set of
Born Free.

In my early months at Kora, Christian was constantly being clobbered by the wild lions and would come hobbling back to camp, his hindquarters scratched and bleeding. It was hard to know what to do. Lions are fiercely territorial and Christian had to be able to fight his own corner – Kora Rock – and defend it against all comers. The fact that he was brilliant at football, which he used to play with Ace and John, was of no use to him now and there was very little that George and I could do to improve his boxing and wrestling skills. I remember the gratification we felt when it dawned on us that his wounds were now all on his front. Christian was wandering ever further and taking on the wild lions, asserting his territorial dominance. Poor boy, though, nothing we could do would help his balls to drop any faster.

Lionesses reach sexual maturity before their male peers. This meant that Lisa and Juma, Christian's constant playmates, came on heat before he knew what to do with them. Tough for Christian, this was nonetheless wonderful news for the lion project. Like learning a foreign language, adjusting to life in the wild is best done through sex. When Lisa and Juma came on heat they attracted shadowy males from miles around Kampi ya Simba. Eventually they mated with the wild lions and ended up spending most of their time in the bush with their new boyfriends, learning to hunt and fend for themselves. Once George and I sneaked up when Lisa was mating. We could only have been ten yards or so away. My heart sounded as loud as the male's ecstatic roars. It was one of the most exhilarating and frightening times of my life – especially when the wind changed!

Soon the girls were coming back to Kampi ya Simba only if they were sick, thirsty, hurt or hungry. This was a glorious success, vindication for George and his methods. Christian,
though, took much longer to adapt. He was doing very well, disappearing into the bush for days at a time, but always coming back because, as yet, he had nowhere else to go.

In this respect he was a little like me. I was living the dream I had nurtured since reading
Tarzan
under the bedcovers in Cockfosters. I loved the atmosphere in camp, those peaceful regular days of happy routine, but I was twenty-seven years old with a raging thirst. Occasionally I would go into Garissa, five hours and a hundred miles away, to stock up on tinned food for us, fill the forty-four-gallon drums with petrol for the Land Rovers and buy rations for the staff. Garissa was a real frontier town. Just three streets on the edge of Kenya's North Eastern Province, it was where the government's writ ran out. Garissa boasted the only bridge over the Tana for hundreds of miles so it was a natural meeting place for Arab and Kikuyu merchants, Somali herdsmen or anyone else who was trying to trade between cultures. Since independence the new Kenyan government had made Garissa into a major administrative hub and had drawn a line in the sand there. South of Garissa was Kenya proper, north was no man's land, home to ethnic Somalis and a buffer against Somalia itself. Convincing the Somalis to respect the line was the unenviable task of a young generation of Kenyan civil servants, from soldiers to teachers.

The Kenyan government's treatment of its Somali citizens had been consistently bad but it must also be said that Somalis are an expansionist people, who have been pushing south for generations in search of a ‘Greater Somalia'. Lawless and independent, they make great friends and implacable enemies; they will laugh as they kill you and cry as they listen to a poem. Many didn't really understand what the government meant when it imposed law and order upon them, and those who did were having none of it. One of the people obliged to urge this new regime upon the Kenyan Somalis was one himself, Mahmoud Mohammed,
the head of the army in Garissa. He was a great ally of ours in the early years at Kora and would never interfere when our friends in the police helped us out with the poaching and banditry in later years.

Garissa was a town of extraordinary characters. If you weren't one when you got there, the heat and the flies would drive you into characterhood before too long. One of my best friends there was Brother Mario Petrino, a former nightclub owner from Chicago. A portly man with a Hemingway beard, he would sit in the police mess sipping warm Tusker beer with me and telling tales of when he had driven a powder-blue Cadillac and drunk champagne all day. A truly good man, he built a school for orphans in Garissa where he taught them carpentry, mechanics, welding and agriculture. He transformed the town in his short time there, setting up a pipeline and water-purification system, building a school, a fuel station and the orphanage. A few years later, when he was moved on by his order, the Consolata Fathers, there were howls of outrage from his resolutely Muslim flock.

Like many Kenyan towns in Muslim areas, Garissa's police mess and the Kikuyu-run dives were the only places, until quite recently, where you could get a drink. The latter were a hotbed of debauchery where all the heathens would meet. Dark, tinroofed shacks that never seemed to close, the bars were normally a raw wood counter protected above by the same wire mesh that we used for discouraging the lions from sleeping on our beds. I don't think those shebeens were ever cleaned and they always smelt of warm beer and Rooster filterless cigarettes but they were home and I loved them.

I once burst into the Catholic mission to tell Mario a pretty risqué political story. Halfway through I realized he was looking at me rather oddly. At the next table sat a Gammarelli-socked cardinal sent from Rome to ensure that Brother Mario was
making the right sort of friends. He must have been hard of hearing because apparently he approved of me.

It was in the police mess that I first met Philip Kilonzo, who became a true friend over the years and a great and worthy success in Kenya's ever more corrupt police force. The fact that Garissa bred so many notables is a testament to how hard it was to work there. New York it was not, but if you could make it there, you could make it anywhere. Philip helped us enormously when we were under threat from the gangs of poachers and the Somali bandits who were soon to infiltrate the area, but back then Garissa was relatively peaceful. I would buy a crate of beer and work my way through it as I drove back along the sandy dirt road to camp. The main danger then was driving into a ditch or shunting an elephant rather than being ambushed.

Keeping the Land Rover on the road was a constant challenge both literally and metaphorically. Old and knackered, it was always breaking down but the fact that there were so many of them about helped a lot. Now everyone drives Toyotas in the bush but in those days it was all Land Rovers. I became as fast as a Formula One team at removing bits from laid-up government vehicles and swapping them with broken parts from ours. Always when I was in Garissa I was on the hunt for carburettor needles, seals, springs, mountings or other parts as there was inevitably something wrong with our engine or a steering rod about to break. We needed the car for resupplies from Garissa but its most crucial function was ferrying water from the river. We lived off the Tana's heavily silted water for eighteen years but it needed treating before we could drink it. Watched by highly opportunistic crocodiles and wallowing hippos, I would collect the water in big drums, then add alum to get rid of the worst of the sediment. After a few days Hamisi boiled it over an open fire, then filtered it through diatomite candles (which was the classic way of filtering water) to further reduce the sediment. It was a lot of
effort to go to for a glass of water but, given the heat at Kora and the lack of sodas, we needed it for mixers. George used to mask its taste with Treetop orange squash. To carry the drums from the river to the camp three miles away we really needed the Land Rover to be working.

I learnt everything there was to know about that vehicle. I took it to pieces and put it back together again, modified parts and replaced others with ones I made from scratch. It makes me hell to work for today as everything that needs doing in our workshop now I can do myself. I started on my dad's Vauxhall 10, moved on to his Singer SM1500, then the Land Rovers; now I can even work out the hydraulics on the JCBs that Anthony Bamford sends us from England. For the wiring on our Dutch-donated Suzuki Grand Vitaras I need a bit of help from the computer.

The Land Rover's worst enemy at Kora was a natural one: the vicious thorns that grew around the camp.
Commiphora
myrrh trees are very beautiful but the thorns that protect their buds and fresh shoots from rhino, elephant and other browsers are death to tyres. We had punctures the whole time and seemed to spend half our lives repairing them. When I first arrived at Kora, we didn't have a proper workshop so mending a puncture was a major performance. First we would have to break the bead – the part where the rim meets the tyre. We did this by jacking the whole weight of the car on to the sidewall of the tyre. This had to be done very carefully so as not to damage the wall. Tyres were very expensive and we had no money. Bead broken, we took the tyre off the rim with a couple of tyre irons, pulled out the inner tube, located the hole in water and mended it with patches vulcanized to the tube. After levering the tyre back on to the rim came the fun part – forty-five minutes to an hour of hard work with a foot pump to get pressure back into the tyre. It was back-breaking labour, often required on drives to Asako, the small village twenty-six miles away.

Kora lies
a hundred miles to the east of Mount Kenya, the stately mountain that stands snow-covered and alone on the equator, its silhouette unmarred by foothills or ranges. Snow has never fallen on Kora's yellow soil where the low altitude ensures that the temperature is always high. Waterbuck, lesser kudu, giraffe and eland were all common then, as were the predatory hyena and caracal. Elephant and rhino were ever-present and widespread – the rhino almost common. We always had to watch out for them on our walks, as we did for buffalo. There were also decent numbers of zebra and oryx, Grant's gazelle and bushbuck. There were, however, no leopards: they had been hunted out when the fashion for leopardskin was at its height in the 1940s.

Neighbouring Meru had suffered a similar fate – but it was a neighbour only on the map. There was no bridge between the two banks of the Tana river for hundreds of miles so for us to get to the other side opposite our camp it was a ten-hour drive. Because of this isolation Kora was more protected and did not fall victim to poachers until later than Meru, which became a notorious poachers' lair in the years to come. That's not to say there was no poaching at all.