In addition, the game matures and breeds much earlier than domestic stock, and no fencing, shelter, tsetse control, or veterinary service is required. So far, game ranching experiments in Kenya and Tanzania are still experiments, having failed to anticipate the complex problems, from local politics and prejudices to the mechanics of harvesting in a hot wilderness without roads: the animals soon become so wary that systematic shooting is impossible, at least in areas accessible to service vehicles and refrigerator trucks. For this reason, the emphasis on game-cropping seems less promising than the development of semi-domesticated herds that can be harvested where needed. Whatever the solution, it seems clear that game ranching is a promising approach, all the more so since the tourists on whom East African economies count heavily do not come here to see cattle.
The eland, which mingles readily with cattle and on occasion follows herds into Maasai bomas, has been raised domestically in Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, and Russia, and recent success with buffalo and oryx at Galana River suggests that other animals may also be tamed that will yield more protein with less damage to the land than the scrub cattle. Until this is proven, however, care must be taken not to penalize the pastoral peoples for conditions caused by rain cycles and climate. Amboseli, where wildlife and the Maasai herds share a game reserve that is turning to dust, is often cited as a habitat badly damaged by too many cattle, but recent studies6 indicate that the deteriorating vegetation is more a consequence of a raised water table with resultant high salinity than of overgrazing. Also, the contention that much of his herd is useless makes no sense to the Maasai, who knows that even the scraggiest of his cows can produce a calf in the next year. But one zebra skin is worth four times the price of such a cow, and eventually the tribe may be compelled to bring their myriad cattle into the economy by raising animals of better quality and permitting more of them to be sold and slaughtered. The population of the pastoral tribes rises between two and three percent each year, and landscape after landscape, wide open to settlement and the crude agriculture of the first comers, is ravaged by burning, subsistence farming, overgrazing, and erosion. The thin soil is cut to mud and dust by plagues of scrawny kine, following the same track to the rare waterholes, and goats scour the last nourishment from the gullied earth. Certain Turkana, after centuries as herdsmen, are reverting to the status of hunter-gatherers. Having no choice, they have given up their old taboos and will eat virtually anything, from snakes to doum palm roots; in recent years they have been seen picking through thorn trees for the eggs and young of weavers. A similar fate is threatening the Maasai, for once the earth has blown away, plague and famine are inevitable.
Tsavo East is so very vast that to get any sense of it, one must see it from the air. In two planes, we flew north over the waterhole at Mudanda Rock to the confluence of the Tsavo and Athi Rivers that together form the Galana, under the Yatta Plateau; from here, we followed the Yatta northward. This extraordinary formation, which comes south one hundred and eighty miles from the region of Thika to a point east of Mtito Andei, is capped by a great tongue of lava; all the land surrounding has eroded away. The Yatta rises like a rampart from the rivers and dry plains, yet its steep sides present no problem to the elephants, which that day were present on the heights in numbers. The elephants of Tsavo are the most celebrated in East Africa, being very large and magisterial in color, due to their habit of dusting in red desert soil. Yet they were not always common here: the great ivory hunter Arthur Neumann, traveling on foot through the Tsavo region on the way from Mombasa to Lake Rudolf in the last years of the nineteenth century, saw no elephants at all.7
The two planes cross the high land between rivers. Somewhere here there is a rock heaped up with pebbles tossed onto it for luck by Maasai warriors on the way to raid the Giriama of the coast. Along the far side of the Yatta flows the Tiva, and beyond the Tiva the dry thorn scrub stretches eastward one hundred and fifty miles to the Tana River. Away from the rivers, the only large tree in this nyika is the great, strange baobab, but the baobab, which stores calcium in its bark, has been hammered hard by elephants, and few young trees remain in Tsavo Park. For many tribes, the baobab, being infested with such nocturnal creatures as owls, bats, bushbabies, and ghosts, is a house of spirits; the Kamba say that its weird “upside-down” appearance was its punishment for not growing where God wanted.
Kamba hunters, with a few nomadic Orma Boran and Ariangulo or “Waliangulu” have most of this hostile country to themselves. Like the Kamba, the Ariangulo, a little-known tribe of the nyika that speaks an eastern Hamitic tongue like that of the Galla, are expert trackers and bowmen and have long hunted elephant throughout this region, using arrows tipped with acokanthera poison brewed by the Giriama, and selling ivory to the coastal traders. After 1948, when the Tsavo bush country, considered hopeless for all other purposes, was ordained a national park, a number of Kamba and Ariangulo hunters—or poachers, as they now were called, a matter of some indifference to them—continued in their old ways for several years. In the winter of 1950, in this burning land east of the Tiva, a band of thirty-eight Kamba, tracing a series of waterholes toward Dakadima Hill, found all of them dry. Half of the band set off for the Tiva, on the chance that the seasonal river still held water, and the rest headed south toward the Galana, which was sure to have water but was much farther away. The first group disappeared without a trace; in the second, there was one survivor.8
In the years of Mau-Mau, when most wardens were away in the Kenya Regiment, the elephant hunters descended upon Tsavo, but subsequent campaigns led by Sheldrick and Bill Woodley, now warden of the Aberdares National Park, compounded the excess-elephant problem by sending most of the hunters to jail. After serving sentences that were difficult for them to understand, some hunters became safari gun bearers and trackers, or scouts for the Kenya Game Department, and great credit for finding them places must go to Bill Woodley, who would later do the same for ex-Mau-Mau in the Aberdares. A few reverted to poaching, and most have joined the many other Africans whose old way of life has vanished, leaving them without heritage or hope.
I flew back to Tanzania with Douglas-Hamilton, who had brought his new plane to the elephant conference. Iain’s plane is twenty years old, and looks it, but it “came with all sorts of spare parts—ailerons and wings and things. I shan’t be able to use them, I suppose, unless I crump it.” We took off from Voi at a very steep angle—a stalling angle, I was told later by Hugh Lamprey, a veteran flyer who once landed his plane on the stony saddle, fifteen thousand feet up, between the peaks of Kilimanjaro. Despite thunderheads and heavy rain, Iain chose a strange route through the Teita Hills, and I sat filled with gloom as the black rain smacked his windshield. There are bad air currents in the Teita Hills; it was at Voi that Karen Blixen’s friend, Denys Finch-Hatton, crashed and died.
Soon I persuaded Iain to give me the wheel, and after that the flight was uneventful. We crossed the Ardai Plain beyond Arusha and the smooth Losiminguri Hills, flying westward toward the dark cliffs of the Rift. But Iain would not suffer the flight to pass without incident, for just as we reached the cliff he said, “I’ll take it now.” He wigwagged the tourists taking tea on the lawn of the Manyara Lodge, on the rim of the escarpment, and no doubt caused a click of cups by banking in a violent arc over the void and plunging in a power dive at the ground-water forest, a thousand feet below. He then swooped up to cliff level again, and came in to a competent landing.
A year later, when I got back to Ndala, I found Iain in a state of some chagrin. A month after my departure in the spring before, he had walked away from the wreck of his new airplane, which was far beyond the help of his spare parts. And it had scarcely been repaired when he nosed it over in soft sand while attempting to land on the sea beach at Kilifi, on the coast of Kenya. At present he was unable to accompany me on a planned climb of Ol Doinyo Lengai, having been warned by his sponsors and superiors that his reputation was outstripping his accomplishment. Nor could he go on our other p
lanned safari to the Yaida Valley south of the Crater Highlands, where Iain’s friend, a young zoologist named Peter Enderlein, was in touch with the small click-speaking Tindiga hunters. Over a whiskey, we agreed that he had done a good deal of difficult and dangerous research that more prudent students of the elephant would never attempt, and that his work or lack of it should be judged on its own merits. It often appeared that the official disapproval had less to do with deficiencies in his research than with his various mishaps, or even perhaps his domestic arrangements at Ndala, which included a friend whom he would marry a year later. Oria Rocco, whose family has a farm at Naivasha in Kenya, is a live marvelous girl with a husky laugh, fierce gentle spirit, and a natural empathy with elephants, being related to the creator of Babar, the splendid elephant of children’s books. Worldly as Iain is conservative, she shares his intensity about the present and fatality about the future, and the camp was much more civilized for her presence.
I had not been in Ndala a half-hour before Iain had us in emergency. A cow-calf herd led by an old cow known as Ophelia came up the river bed to drink at a small pool at the base of the falls. The camp lies on the ascending slope of the escarpment, at the level of the falls; just below, the river levels off, flowing gradually toward Lake Manyara, and downriver a short distance, Iain has a makeshift hide or blind. From here, he thought, he could get pictures of the herd with a complex camera device of his own invention which makes double images of the subject on the same negative; using parallax, animal measurements may be made with fair accuracy without destroying the animal itself. (The animal’s shoulder height is a clue to its age, and the age structure of the population—the proportion of old animals to young—is an important indication of population health: despite the density of its elephant, Manyara at present has a healthy “pyramid” population, with many young animals at the base.) Though the device works, it is so unwieldy that another person must be present with a notebook to record the data, and that other person was me.
We descended the steep bank under the camp and made our way downriver to the hide. The herd was busy at the pool, but I disliked our position very much. The animals were cut off; their only escape was straight back down the river past the hide, which was skeletal and decrepit, utterly worthless. And here we were on open ground, a hundred yards downriver from the steep bank leading up to the camp. . . . “They’ll never scent us,” Iain decided, setting up his apparatus, an ill-favored thing of long arms, loose parts, and prisms. But scent us they did, before he could get one picture. Ophelia, ears flared, spun around and, in dead silence, hurried her generations down the river bed in the stiff-legged elephant run that is really a walk, keeping her own impressive bulk between man and herd. We didn’t move. “I don’t think she’s going to charge us,” Iain whispered. But the moment the herd was safely past, Ophelia swung up onto the bank, and she had dispensed with threat display. There were no flared ears, no blaring, only an oncoming cow elephant, trunk held high, less than twenty yards away.
As I started to run, I recall cursing myself for having been there in the first place; my one chance was that the elephant would seize my friend instead of me. In hopelessness, or perhaps some instinct not to turn my back on a charging animal, I faced around again almost before I had set out, and was rewarded with one of the great sights of a lifetime. Douglas-Hamilton, unwilling to drop his apparatus, and knowing that flight was useless anyway, and doubtless cross that Ophelia had failed to act as he predicted, was making a last stand. As the elephant loomed over us, filling the coarse heat of noon with her dusty bulk, he flared his arms and waved his glittering contraption in her face, at the same time bellowing, “Bugger off!” Taken aback, the dazzled Ophelia flared her ears and blared, but she had sidestepped, losing the initiative, and now, thrown off course, she swung away toward the river, trumpeting angrily over her shoulder.
From high on the bank came a great peal of laughter from Oria. Iain and I trudged up to lunch; there was very damned little to say.
Another day we took a picnic to the Endobash River, which descends in a series of waterfalls that churn up a white froth in its pools. To reach it, one must push a short ways through the bush, and Iain, who has had two bad scrapes in this region, was carrying his heavy rifle. At the river, we climbed to a high pool where we stripped and swam in the cool current. Then we sat on a hot rock ledge to dry, and drank wine with Oria’s fine lunch. Afterwards, like three Sunday strollers, we walked down the river bed toward the lake. In the sun and windlessness, enclosed by leafy trees, it was intimate and peaceful, with none of that vast anonymity that subdues one in the spaces of East Africa. But we had scarcely started home when the road a quarter-mile ahead was crossed by a herd of elephants. “Endobash baddies!” Iain said, grabbing his notebook. “I’ll have to have a look at those! Load up the gun!” Because we would have to approach on foot to get close to these strange elephants, he needed gun support; Oria would take the pictures. We walked quickly and quietly down the river road.
The elephants were upwind of us, and before we knew it we were right among them, so close, in fact, that we dove for cover underneath the high bush beside us when it quaked with the movements of the elephant behind. A moment later, another walked out into the open a few yards ahead. It was a large cow with odd warped tusks. “Oh hell,” said Iain, “it’s only Jane Eyre after all.” Blithely he stepped out onto the road, hailing his old friend, and there was a moment of suspense when the cow turned toward him. Then she went off sideways, ears flapping in half-hearted threat display, and her herd came out through the wall of bush and fell into step behind her.
Iain’s disappointment was matched by my own relief, and Oria, who was pregnant, felt as I did: we had gotten off easily. It was a lovely late afternoon, and whirling along the lake track in the open car, exalted by wine and wind, I reveled in the buffaloes and wading birds in the bright water of the lake edge, and the great shining purple baobab that stands on the lake shore between Endobash and Ndala. But just past the Ndala crossing there were two lionesses in an acacia, and one of them lay stretched on a low limb not ten feet above the road. Oria said, “I’ll take her picture as we pass underneath,” and Iain slowed the Land Rover on the bridge while she set her camera. At Manyara the tree-climbing lions are resigned to cars, and there is no danger in driving beneath one. But this animal was much closer to the road than most, and the car was wide open: Iain had removed the roof to feel closer to his elephants, and even the windshield was folded flat upon the hood. Lions accustomed to cameras and the faces in car windows see human beings in the open as a threat; when the car passed beneath her, the lioness and I scowled nervously, and I felt my shoulders hunch around my head.
Oria said she had missed the shot, and we passed beneath again, and then again, as she shot point-blank into the animal’s mouth, which was now wide open. “Once more,” she said; both Oria and Iain seemed feverish with excitement. “Christ,” I said, scarcely able to speak. “You people—” But already the car had been yanked around, and seeing Iain’s stubborn face, I knew that any interference short of a blunt instrument would only goad him to some ultimate stupidity that might get one of us mauled. I considered jumping out, but not for long. The lioness, extremely agitated, had risen to her feet, and a man on the ground might well invite attack. Insane as it seemed, I decided I was safer in the car, which proceeded forward.
The lioness crouched, hindquarters high, pulling her forepaws back beneath her chest, and the black tuft of her heavy tail thumped on the bark. Awaiting us, she flared her teeth, and this time I saw the muscles twitch as she hitched herself to spring: Ears back, eyes flat in an intent head sunk low upon her paws, she was shifting her bony shoulders and hind feet. Apparently Iain noticed this, for when Oria murmured, “She won’t jump,” he snapped at her, “Don’t be so bloody sure.” Nevertheless he carried on—I don’t think it occurred to him to stop—and a second later we were fatally committed.
The lioness hitched her hindquarters again, sna
rling so loudly as the threat came close that Iain, who should have shot ahead, passing beneath her, jammed on the brakes and stalled. The front of the car stopped directly under the limb, with the cat’s stiff whiskers and my whey face less than a lion’s length apart; I was too paralyzed to stir. Land Rover motors spin quietly a while before they start, and while we waited for that trapped lioness to explode around our ears we listened to the scrape of claws on bark and the hiss and spitting and the heavy thump of that hard tail against the wood, and watched the twitch of the black tail tassel and the leg muscles shivering in spasms under the fly-flecked hide. The intensity, the sun, the light were terrifically exciting—I hated it, but it was terrifically exciting. I felt unbearably aware. I think I smelled her but I can’t remember; there is only a violent memory of lion-ness in all my senses. Then Iain, gone stiff in the face, was easing the car out of there, and he backed a good long way from the taut beast before turning around and proceeding homeward through the quiet woods.