Rogue Lion Safaris

Simon Barnes

ROGUE LION SAFARIS

Dedication

For Bob, Jess and Manny with grateful thanks; for CLW with eternal gratitude.

It is customary on these occasions to make some kind of disclaimer: I would like to begin by doing the opposite. The geography and ecology of Mchindeni National Park is based on a real park Somewhere In Africa; every observation of wildlife and every interaction between wildlife and people come from my own notebooks. The single exception is based meticulously on a personally communicated eye-witness report. However, the politics and the administration of the park are entirely fictional, as are all the human characters to be found there. I would also like to acknowledge the most frequently used reference material: The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations by George B. Schaller, Portraits in the Wild by Cynthia Moss, Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa by Gordon Lindsay Maclean and the bird-sound recordings of Baron Robert Stjernstedt.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

I: South

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

II: North

III: South

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Keep Reading

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

I

1

George Sorensen, ectomorphic, myopic, leotropic, pointed to the crown of an umbrella thorn, where three vultures sat waiting.

‘Lion?’ he asked, but with George, questions were often really statements. Lion: for sure: and I knew George would want to move in. Dread and delight, familiar fellows, gripped me again.

George pointed a courteous finger skyward, and said to Helen: ‘Striped kingfisher. A duet. Remember what we said about pair-bonding? Hear them? All right, we’ll move in, shall we?’

I heard at his word the razor-stropping duettists, male and female, at their hundred-times-a-day ritual of conquest and sex, and looked to the umbrella thorn. Three white-backed vultures: in a second thorn tree a little beyond, two more vultures, these white-headed. It was likely, then, that something lay dead beneath: and likely that lion had killed it. The vultures had not descended to the cadaver because the lion were still there. Very likely. Say, two to one on.

Well, naturally, lion had killed, and naturally, George wanted to move in. Between us and the thorn trees lay a smallish expanse of grass, parched and painted pale tawny by drought: lion-coloured.

George was seldom aware of people when lion were present, so, as was my habit, I checked the company, a short job, for we had but one client with us. Helen was a rather stately Englishwoman the far side of sixty, with tea-party manners. Vague, frail-looking and ladylike, she had done far better than I had expected when I (arriving rather more than forty minutes late, unfortunately) had met her at the airport five days ago. She had walked not swiftly but tirelessly, and she had taken great delight in the wilderness we had shown her. A client who falls in love with the bush warms a safari guide’s heart. With perfect politeness, she had denied any feeling of disappointment in our failure to find lion for her. Now, on the morning of her departure, we seemed no more than a couple of hundred yards from invisible and uncountable lion. And on foot, of course. But Helen didn’t look like a panicker.

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Phineas?’

Phineas, long and lean, with impossibly graceful fingers, was holding his rifle by the extreme end of the barrel and resting the weapon’s point of balance on his shoulder. This was not a suitable position for immediate action, but then I had never seen Phineas use his rifle as anything other than a leaning post and undergrowth-basher. He turned to me and offered a kind of facial shrug, a brief thrusting out of his lower lip. He stooped, picked up a handful of dust and let it trickle through his elegant fingers. A little cloud hung in the air and drifted towards us. Phineas nodded.

In the far distance, I heard the triple scream of fish eagle. Phineas motioned us to follow with a small movement of his head. We were at it again. Why not?

Well, as a matter of fact, The Safari Guide Training Manual provided a long list of reasons why not. The book was adamant on the point: with lion, there is no such thing as a safe distance on foot. Its author concluded reluctantly that feeding lion could be approached within two hundred yards, but then only if the wind was blowing from them to you, and the country was open and undergrowth-free, and every lion could be counted and accounted for.

The Manual had been produced by the Ministry of National Parks and Tourism, and it was a masterpiece of terror. Its persistent but never stated theme was the dread of the bad publicity that would follow the devouring of tourists by lion, or the impaling of tourists by elephant, or the bisection of tourists by hippopotamus, or the flattening of tourists by buffalo, or the vivisection of tourists by hyena.

None of us followed the Guide’s instructions to the letter, even though infraction of its code could mean the withdrawal of the Safari Guide licence. A certain amount of rule-bending was de rigueur for those who wished to be Cool in the Bush. We all liked to swap tales of our daring when we met up, at the airport or at the Mukango Bar. But no one thought George was Cool in the Bush. Most people thought he was a suicidal maniac. But then George had no aspirations towards coolness. He did not see lion as a virility test. He just liked them. He couldn’t get enough of them, couldn’t know enough. And he could never get close enough. He wasn’t in the least brave: but he was recklessly, perhaps, I sometimes thought, terminally, curious. Some people had tried to tell me that George was addicted to danger, but I knew better than that. I had worked with him long enough to see what the Cool-in-the-Bush brigade missed. George could not possibly be addicted to danger, because he was never aware of whether he was in a dangerous situation or not. It was an alien concept to him. No, it was not danger he was addicted to. It was lion.

So, for that matter, was I. George had shown me the way, so perhaps I was addicted to George too. Or perhaps just to the bush.

George once described the correct method of approaching lion as ‘cosmic courtesy’. Accordingly, we did not walk straight towards the umbrella thorn, and we did not walk away from it. We struck a line of about forty-five degrees. The path took us by a large brake of bush: once clear of it, they were revealed. Lion. A sand-coloured knot, 150 yards away, around an equivocal black shape. Ahead of me, I heard Helen give a brief gasp. As for me, I felt a warm clutch at the belly: the Darlin’ Girl Syndrome, I sometimes called this sensation, naming it for a horse that had once filled me with the same mixture of fear and delight.

And George walked on, neither creeping nor hurrying. Neither fear nor love was discernible: only his eternal curiosity. I watched the lion with the usual rapt anxiety. They were aware of us, but intent on their meal: all save one. She raised her yellow eyes from the carcass before her and with them followed our progress. And we walked on. And on. At length, we halted by a small bush, one that did not conceal us at all. It was another aspect of cosmic courtesy. We were not so bold as to approach openly, nor so timorous as to lurk behind cover. We were neither good nor bad, neither prey nor predator.

A walk through drought-dried grass fills your ears with the noise of your own passage. In the sudden silence of stopping, the sounds of the lions’ banquet came towards us. They were devouring a buffalo, a colossal and absorbing task. In the clarity of the morning, I could hear the slicing of the carnassial shear.

‘Buffalo,’ said George, to Helen and also to a small tape recorder, plucked from the bulging pocket of his khaki shirt. ‘Male.’

‘Definite male,’ I said, an ancient joke.

‘Clearly old, and presumably one of the group of five old males seen near the Tondo confluence yesterday. Remember to check the area this afternoon, try and find the same group, see if it has been reduced to four.’

‘Do you think these are the lion we heard last night during supper?’ Helen asked.

George shifted his specs to the extreme end of his nose, giving himself an air of prim stupidity. There was a new cigarette burn in his shirt, I noticed, just above the left pocket. There were moments when, even to me, George looked like a dangerous lunatic, one quite incapable of comprehending his own interests. It was hard to remember that he was a businessman: hard for him too, I suspected. ‘Well, yes, certainly, or at any rate probably, because it was rather a good chorus last night, wasn’t it? Not a full pride chorus of course, but I counted half a dozen individuals, I think, and we are now in the core area of their territory, around the Tondo confluence, this being the Tondo Pride, of course, territory insofar as lion have a territory, which they do, of course, but rule one of lion is that you must never make rules about lion, because lion certainly won’t stick to them.’

George paused for a moment, perhaps contemplating the inevitability of leonine lawlessness. ‘Where was I? Oh yes, well, they probably didn’t kill last night, there’s rather a lot of buff left, and they are all tucking in, no one lying around digesting and waiting for second helpings. I suspect they killed at first light, and it is a little unusual that the vultures should be here so early. Check the thermometer when I get back to camp, maybe it’s warmer than it’s been so far this season, thermals available for the vultures earlier than previously.’ This last to the tape recorder. ‘But I could get a better idea if I moved around a little, and saw how much of the buffalo is left –’ George took a step forward, and Phineas stretched out a long arm and placed a hand mildly and briefly on George’s shoulder. It looked like nothing more than a gesture of affection. ‘Oh, Phineas, really, I was only going to – oh! Auntie Joyce!’

I heard Phineas’s voice, soft and delighted. ‘Ohhh. She is crazy, that one.’ For one of the lionesses, no doubt sensing a momentary lack of cosmic courtesy in George’s attempted advance, had, in a sudden instant of action, rolled to her feet. To receive the stare of an irritated lion is rather like being struck in the chest by a death ray. Enormous, unreadable yellow eyes, tiny dots of pupils in the ferocious morning light. One lion after another followed her lead, not standing, but raising a head from the carcass to stare at us: four cosmically discourteous intruders.

It was a near-certain fact that if we turned and ran at this moment of tension, the lion would pursue us. In the bush, nothing inspires pursuit so much as flight. But Phineas remained still, leaning on his gun, smiling very faintly to himself. He liked his animals fierce. George too was still, muttering quietly to his machine, recording details of position around the kill. I was also still, from long habit. Relish of the scene fed on its distant but distinct peril. I felt a slow smile crawl up my face: I wanted no other life than this. What if it should end? But I thrust the thought aside. And then, abruptly, Auntie Joyce sat down on her haunches, front paws together, like a domestic cat. She continued to watch: she was no longer considering immediate action. Stand-off.

Auntie Joyce, George said, was the oldest lioness in the pride ‘and probably the pride’s leader, insofar as lion have a leader, which they don’t of course’. She was easily the most crotchety. Lion on a kill are disposed to be peaceful and preoccupied, but Auntie Joyce didn’t go by the rules any more than did George. At the moment of stand-off, I moved half a pace sideways: I wanted to see how Helen was taking all this. No sign of panic. Quite the reverse. I wondered then how many people – how many men – had seen that expression on her face. Eyes wide, mouth slack, quite motionless. She was enraptured: ravished by the eyes of Auntie Joyce. Terror and beauty, or terrible beauty, had undone her. And all the while the lion but forty yards away.

We stood for a further fifteen minutes in flesh-ripping silence, while Auntie Joyce stared unwinking. At last, and slowly, she lowered her body to the ground and lay on her chest, her eyes never leaving us. We remained still. And then, almost reluctantly, she lowered her head and began once again to feed. Silently I released a long sigh. George did not. He had not for an instant ceased to alternate long stares at the lion and muttered comments to his tape recorder. I sometimes wondered what people would conclude if our party were ever devoured by lion, leaving nothing behind but bones, Phineas’s unready, inedible weapon and George’s tape recorder, like the little black box of an aeroplane disaster. Our finders would have every detail of the positions the lions took up relative to each other, how long each fed, where each one rested, who rested alone and who sought company. George could recognise every individual in the pride from scars and nicks, from size and age, from the individual freckling of whisker spots. So could I, for that matter, though rather less certainly. George loved information: he was a scientist long before he became a safari guide, and he believed devoutly that God dwelled in the details. I was never wholly convinced that George transcribed all those tape-recorded notes. Certainly, the tapes themselves were endlessly re-used and re-recorded, stratum upon stratum of leonine detail: a Grand Canyon with endless layers of lion. George’s mind was rather like that.

Phineas caught my eye and made a little gesture: let’s move in still closer. I grinned back at him. The previous night, we had had a silly conversation about who was the more terrified by George’s way with lion. ‘That time we had to climb the tree, Dan, we were stuck up the tree for half a day.’ ‘Phineas, you don’t want the story of the definite male again, do you? That was worse than anything you’ve told me about.’

But George was now counting vultures; he had seen two lappet-faced vultures on the far side of the umbrella thorn, and was asking his tape recorder why no hooded vultures had shown up. I looked at him, made a head gesture: we withdraw? ‘Oh, well, all right, I suppose so. Helen, are you all right? Do you want to move in a little closer and take a photograph? Oh no, you don’t have a camera, do you? Happy? Don’t want a closer look? Very well then. All right. Phineas?’

‘Lead us out, Dan,’ Phineas said quietly.

I did so: forty-five degrees, cosmic courtesy, Phineas between us and the lion, rifle uselessly across his shoulders. Auntie Joyce watched every step of our crackling retreat.

About five minutes later, Helen had shifted from enraptured silence to compulsive talking. ‘Why did you call that lioness Auntie Joyce?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps you’d better answer that one, George,’ I said. I couldn’t bring myself to speak of the human Joyce: a female of infinitely worse temper, our sworn enemy in all her dealings.

‘Oh, well, really, just a joke, really; we called her after the lady who met you at Chipembere, off the plane from England, the lady who looks after our interests in Chip. Silly joke.’

Helen let it pass. Delight had filled her: and it filled me too, in the delight of showing. ‘The most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life, how can I ever thank you? So wonderful, so marvellous, and all the time I felt so safe with you and Phineas and everyone.’ Helen, in neatly pressed khaki slacks, a shirt buttoned at the wrists for fear of the sun, and a straw hat suitable for the sport of bowls, was in a frenzy of leonine love.

‘Safe?’ I said, smiling at her pleasure. ‘I never do.’

‘Oh, you’re just teasing.’

‘I am not. George has taken me closer to lion than any sane person would consider safe.’

‘Definite male,’ George said, rummaging around obscenely in the pockets of his shorts until he came up with a box of matches. He lit the cigarette he had just, with great concentration, rolled; a small shower of burning shards fell to earth. ‘Collared barbet,’ he said smokefully, vaguely brushing at the front of his shirt. He expected no reply to this observation.

The country was open as we returned to Lion Camp, and the discipline of the walk broke down. We moved in a line abreast, instead of the Manual’s strictly ordered single file. ‘But surely the lion are fairly safe here,’ Helen said. ‘I remember when we went for a drink at Mukango Lodge, one of the guests was telling me how docile the lions in this park were.’

‘Pretty docile,’ I said. ‘They only killed three people in the wet season this year.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes,’ George said. ‘One schoolboy, poor little sod, one jealous lover, and one old pisscart – oh, I do beg your pardon, Helen.’

Helen waved the apology aside. ‘Jealous lover?’

‘Chap from one of the villages,’ I said. ‘Apparently he thought his girl was dallying with another man. He wanted to catch the pair of them at it, and so he stayed up all night to spy on her. Lion took him while he was sneaking about.’

‘Found bits of him all over the village next morning,’ George continued callously. ‘Lion buggered off before dawn, I’d say, and the village dogs had a tuck-in before the village woke up. Terrible to-do. Lion prints all over the shop.’

‘Was it the same lion every time?’

‘They thought so. There was a lot of talk about the Rogue Lion at the time. Lot of jokes at the start of the season.’

‘It was the same,’ Phineas said. ‘I was with the party of scouts that went to track him. The warden, Mr Mvuu, he said to shoot him before he eat a tourist. But this lion, he is a very clever fellow. One day he kill the schoolboy, next day gone. We tracked him, but always he is ahead. As if he knows we are tracking him. North, always north. We travelled north until we lost him. We tracked him into the North Park, long long way, very beautiful trip, we make camp in a very special place, many many lion there. And that is where we lost him. Too many lion tracks, and he got lost amongst them.’

‘It was a male then?’ Helen asked.

‘Oh yes. Big tracks, big fellow.’

Helen laughed suddenly. ‘Is that why it says Rogue Lion Safaris on your Land Cruiser?’

‘Oh dear. Does it still show?’ George asked, dropping his cigarette butt to the ground and leaving it to smoulder.

‘Of course it bloody shows,’ I said, automatically treading out the cigarette.

‘But I painted over it,’ George said peevishly.

This demonstrated very clearly George’s selective vision of reality, no doubt an essential adaptation for his survival. ‘Your paint job makes it more obvious, not less.’

‘Oh dear. Do you think another layer will do the trick?’

‘We’ll have to do something before Joyce comes out again.’

‘Oh God. We’re in enough trouble as it is.’

‘But why are you called Rogue Lion Safaris?’ Helen asked.

‘We are called Lion Safaris,’ George said, rather primly.

‘The people at Mukango Lodge called you Rogue Lion Safaris. So did that nice boy who looked after me while I was waiting for you to turn up at the airport.’

‘Bloody Lloyd the Stringer,’ I said, or rather muttered beneath my breath.

‘I really can’t apologise enough for being so late that day,’ George said. He didn’t explain that we had found a leopard on the way, and had watched it for half an hour while it stalked fruitlessly about in the unconcealing daylight, after what had plainly been an empty night of hunting. ‘But, no, I think people like Lloyd think that, well … the point is that our operation is –’

‘Not so dull as the others,’ I suggested. ‘Rather more concerned with the bush than with anything else. I bet it was van der Aardvark who wrote on our vehicle, or his eejit assistant, your friend Lloyd. Even money it was them. Better, I’ll take six to four.’

We dropped into the Tondo, a dry riverbed, floored with sand, a wet-season river that flowed, when it flowed, into the mighty Mchindeni River itself. We made our crossing about a hundred yards upstream from this confluence. Ahead, a couple of hundred yards further, we could see the tiny scatter of huts that made up Lion Camp. From any sort of distance, it always appeared absurdly vulnerable and small: no mighty stockade against the perils of the bush, rather, a small hiding place lurking beneath the ebony trees. The few huts, each walled with bamboo matting and wearing a small hat of thatch, looked, from the banks of the Tondo, like abandoned laundry baskets. To one side, no more obtrusive and as deeply stained with the colours of the bush as the huts, the vehicle. Bush-weathered, it seemed as if the camp and the vehicle had all sprung from the floor of South Mchindeni National Park.

Then, coming to meet us at an unprecedented run, was Joseph Ngwei, trainee safari guide. ‘George!’ he shouted. ‘George, why aren’t you at the airport?’

‘Airport?’

‘Well, I am catching a plane today,’ said Helen mildly. ‘Isn’t it this morning?’

‘Oh dear,’ said George, quite unperturbed. ‘I wonder what time it leaves?’

‘I heard van der Aardvark’s vehicle leave more than an hour ago,’ Joseph said, voice filled with urgency. This was a reference to the camp across the river from us, invisible but intermittently audible. ‘That can only mean he is going to the airport himself. So the plane must be leaving at ten.’

It was now close to nine, and the journey normally took a couple of hours. ‘Oh dear,’ said George cheerfully. ‘Well, we’ll probably make it. Possibly anyway. Have to miss breakfast, though, awfully sorry. I suppose we’d better be off pretty soon, really. Have you packed, Helen? I suppose you’d better pack.’

There were times when even George’s most devoted supporters wanted to pick him up and shake him. ‘I already put Helen’s kit on the vehicle,’ Joseph said. ‘Excuse me for taking the liberty, Helen. And Sunday has made some egg and bacon sandwiches for breakfast, they’re on the front seat. So just go, George, yes?’

George gave no sign of appreciating this initiative. ‘All right then. We’d better be off.’

‘I’ll just check my hut,’ Helen said.

‘Have we got anyone to collect?’ George said vaguely. ‘Have you got the bookings book, Joseph?’

‘No one to collect, George, we’re empty.’

‘Are you sure? I’m certain we had a booking.’

‘We did. There was that big Wilderness Express party, but they’re not coming, are they?’

‘Oh God. I’d forgotten that. What on earth possessed Joyce to get rid of them? I wish you hadn’t reminded me. Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh well. Better go, I suppose. Helen? Anybody else coming? Joseph, Dan?’