Rogue Lion Safaris

I told him, in a rather superior fashion, about friendship in zebras, for I was a field scientist, no mere safari guide. ‘How terribly interesting, I’ve always wondered about doing another study, perhaps of a herbivore, though I’d never thought about zebras, confusing things, after my stuff with, well, those lion, you know.’ For this, of course, was George Sorensen, the George Sorensen, African legend, co-author of Lions of the Plains. I was instantly ashamed, instantly impressed. I noticed that his glasses had been fixed across the bridge with Elastoplast. (In fact, I was to notice that George changed this bridge far more often than any other of his garments, Elastoplast replaced by Sellotape, replaced by masking tape.)

I also had the weird impression that the cigarette he was smoking was made from newspaper. This turned out to be the case. ‘The Guardian Weekly,’ he explained. ‘Airmail edition. Best for cigarettes. May I roll you one?’ I accepted. The tobacco, thick, coarse and crackly, delivered a powerful and pungent smoke. We discussed the usual problems of field work, and he asked with great attention about my zebras. The key to ethology is the recognising of individuals: no, I had not used coloured ear-tags, or anything of the kind. ‘Well, I have read that every zebra has a distinct stripe pattern, of course,’ George said. ‘But then I have also read that every snowflake is unique. It has always seemed an impossible business to me.’

‘It’s just a matter of getting your eye in,’ I said. ‘Same with all animals. A racehorse trainer can recognise every horse in his string. Zebras are easy – easier than lion, I would have thought.’

‘I’ve always found zebras exasperating. I can’t even tell males from females half the time, not without a long hard look.’

‘Well, I will take a bet that I can tell the dominant stallion from any breeding herd of zebra within, say, five seconds of seeing the herd, and I’d be right seven times out of ten. I’d bet better than even money. These cigarettes are good.’

‘Aren’t they? I get the tobacco in the village just down the road from here. How can you pick out the stallion so fast? Without peering at the undercarriage for half an hour?’

‘Body language. And the position he takes up relative to the herd. And especially the way the herd responds to him. Once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s amazingly straightforward.’

‘How terribly terribly interesting,’ George said, without a shred of irony. ‘Do you think you could show me? Perhaps we could take a drive tomorrow? I assume you’re staying here. I could pick you up after breakfast.’

‘Why not?’ I wonder now how many hundred times I have asked this same non-question of George. Why not, indeed.

3

I suppose it does sound rather melodramatic, but all the same I don’t suppose I ever will forget the sight or vision that greeted us as George, Helen and I turned into Mchindeni Airport. George, eschewing the tarred road, had taken an intriguing and bouncing short cut across open country – ‘I think a spot of bundu-bashing is in order’ – crunching and pitching through the scrub. Negligently wiping out a small bush, he jumped the vehicle heroically back onto the road, pounding up to the front of the airport building, eyes skyward as he remarked, ‘Wire-tailed swallows’ above the engine’s roar, and made, passengers listing crazily forward, his trademark crash-halt.

There, watching every yard of our arrival, was the sight or vision, and it affected my pulse rate as dramatically as the morning’s lion. This was Mrs van der Aardvark, no less, or to be formal, Caroline Sandford, caterer and deputy manager of Impala Lodge, mistress to Leon Schuyler, who, behind his extremely wide back, was nicknamed van der Aardvark. He was the owner and manager of Impala Lodge, the grandiosely named camp that lay across the river from our own.

She was dressed in khaki shorts and a singlet in umbrella-thorn green and gave an impression of arachnoid limbs. Her straggle of leucistic hair was worn in a style that looked self-administered or self-inflicted, perhaps with wire-cutters. Arms, shoulders, neck, face, legs: all copiously freckled: endless constellations, galaxies and nebulae of freckles, freckles that caused me to wonder, but not for the first time, with the curiosity that is at the base of the erotic impulse, exactly how far, and in what form, those freckles extended.

She was laughing as we pulled up, absolutely roaring with laughter. She was also apparently talking, which was not unusual, but inaudibly. George switched off the engine, and it was as if her personal volume had been switched on. ‘It’s like the clown’s car arriving at the circus, I keep expecting it to explode and all four wheels to fall off. Really, George, where did you learn to drive?’ She turned to me as I stood on the back replacing my hat, and she smiled, something that always had on me the approximate effect of swallowing a large Jack Daniels in one go, ice cubes and all. ‘And you with your trilby and George with his broken specs and, really, Leon and I are labouring night and day to drag this park up-market, and here come the pair of you standing for everything we try not to do.’ She was beautiful and I adored her, but I didn’t like anything she said or did.

I jumped neatly to the ground and observed, ‘There is a difference between money and class, but not everyone knows that. Has the bloody plane gone yet?’

She smiled patronisingly: Impala Lodge would never get into such a mess about planes, oh dear me, no. ‘It’s only just landed,’ she said. ‘They’re running about an hour late.’

‘There you are, you see,’ George said smugly, as if he had personally arranged all this.

‘I’ll get Helen checked in.’

‘What a shame,’ Helen said. ‘I was beginning to like the idea of being marooned.’

‘Marooned with this pair of lunatics?’ Caroline asked her. Truly an insufferable woman. But she seemed completely unaware of either of the two effects she had on me: hopeless desire and helpless anger.

‘I wouldn’t wish to stay anywhere else in the world, given a choice,’ said Helen, suddenly and rather magnificently reverting to her tea-party manners. ‘Let alone in Mchindeni Park.’

I pointed a finger at Caroline’s freckled nose. ‘Class,’ I said. ‘You see, there are some clients you can’t poach from us, and that’s the classy ones.’ Then I seized Helen’s baggage from the back, and George and I escorted Helen herself into the airport building, a long, low hall thronged with tourists and safari guides from all over the Valley.

The meeting of planes was also a meeting of the clans. The dozen or so camps in the Valley were widely separated, relative solitude being rather the point of visiting a wilderness. Everyone knew everyone else at the other camps, but we tended only to meet when collecting or despatching clients. An airport run was always an opportunity to talk shop, swap gossip, lust at caterers and so on.

We steered Helen through various groups of already-checked-in tourists clutching boarding passes and phony items of African fetish, and a couple of hunter types looking sneeringly superior. At the head of the queue, actually checking in, we found Leon Schuyler: van der Aardvark himself. ‘Ullo, George, killed any clients this week?’ He accepted his boarding pass, yielding the check-in to Helen, and turned to us: a chunky, much moustached man, extravagantly epauletted and wearing at his belt a knife that reached almost to his knees. As his nickname suggested, or shouted, he was of Afrikaner extraction, but he had been born in Chipembere, the capital city. He had lived in Africa all his life, educated at school and university in South Africa, returning to the land of his birth to set himself up in the safari business. He was, in a distinctly African way, a great problem-solver: a man of practicalities. He was also said to be very good indeed in the bush and was much respected in the Mchindeni Valley. ‘Leon will know how to do that,’ people said, and he generally did.

‘Oh, not many,’ said George. ‘None to speak of, really.’

‘Is it?’ said Leon, one of the great Afrikaner question tags.

After a brief pause, George remembered his manners. ‘Business all right with you and so on?’

‘Terrific,’ said Leon, or rather, ‘Triffic. Got permission from the National Parks Commission to expand. I am seriously bloody pleased, I tell you. Going to build six more huts.’ Leon’s voice was not Pretoria-pure, but he separated his vowels and suppressed his aspirates in a wonderfully imitable – I imitated it all the time – Afrikaner fashion. Six maw uts.

‘Are you full right now?’

‘Wouldn’t be catching a plane if we were full, man. No, we have two days without clients, quite a relief, I tell you, it’s been non-stop. Going to Chip to talk a bit of business, couple of big meetings and so forth. Plenty clients coming Thursday, plenty-plenty clients. Party of bloody ten, bunch of people in England you’ve probably never heard of. Called Wilderness Express.’

After a slightly stunned silence, I managed to say amiably enough, ‘Bit of a squeeze on game drives.’

‘Nott!’ said Leon, another great Afrikanerism. ‘Bought a new Land Cruiser. Came in from Jo’burg three weeks back, just cleared customs this week, slow bastards. My partner had to move in and kick plenty arse, get the damn thing free. But tell me, George, what is happening with the Tondo Pride?’

Leon, I knew, had little time for George as a businessman; I suspect that even my poor father could have given him a few tips in that area. But Leon knew that when it came to wildlife, and especially when it came to lion, George was the man to ask. ‘George will know,’ people in the Valley said when a conversation about lion reached impasse, and George generally did. And lion were also business: if you showed your clients lion, they tended to go home happy.

‘They knocked down an old buff this morning,’ George said. He gave the location precisely. ‘I fancy that they will stay on the riverine strip now until it rains. I know it’s early, but the drought conditions have altered things. Game concentrations are higher round the river than I have ever seen this early in the season, and practically all the standing water has gone. I think the pride will stay where they are till the end of the season. The plain after the ebony grove due north of ours is currently their core area. Not that that helps you on the opposite bank.’

‘Well, you’d be surprised at what I have in mind, George. But tell me, have you heard any talk about the bloody road? I need information.’

‘That old story again?’

‘Shit, George, you never hear anything unless it’s a bloody bird. ‘It’s all started again, man: second strike of natural gas out in Western Province, want to build a road straight through the middle of the park to make the journey time to Chip down to six hours, open the area up. People from the Ministry of National Resources spent a day with the old man, Chief Mchindeni, talking about a four-lane highway.’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked, not a good question.

‘Jesus, of course I’m bloody sure, and I’m going in to Chip to get even more sure.’

‘That would be the end of the park,’ I said, naïvely stating the obvious. But I was suddenly dismayed: the end of the park, the end of my life in the bush.

Leon shot me a brief look of contempt. ‘It would be the end of my bloody business, man,’ he said, Afrikaner-tough. ‘Bastards don’t bloody care. I’m going to shake a few trees down in Chip, I tell you. These bastards are going to get a fight.’ Git a faart.

At this point, Helen joined us, boarding pass in hand, and Caroline also arrived, having shepherded her clients into the departure ‘lounge’. She placed her elbow on Leon’s shoulder, which immensely solid item was located at a convenient height for her. Leon was built on the principle of the cube, with a khaki baseball cap (marked ‘Impala Lodge’ and bearing a leaping impala logo, nicely made – ‘got ’em done in Jo’burg, man, none of the local rubbish’) perched on the top.

‘I have to go through now, they tell me,’ Helen said. ‘Perfectly dreadful. I feel like running away, coming back to stay with you for ever at Lion Camp. I don’t suppose you’d consider smuggling me back?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Any time.’ I kissed her cheek, not without affection, and said, not without truth, that it had been lovely having her. ‘Oh Helen, do you think you could be awfully kind and not actually mention to Joyce that we nearly missed the plane? She’ll be waiting for you at Chipembere Airport, you’ll be seeing her in an hour.’

She smiled. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘And George. Thank you so much, it really was the most – most wonderful – oh dear –’ and there and then, this stately and self-possessed lady was overcome by a deluge of tears. She seized George in a bear hug, kissed him soundly and fled, sniffing, while George and I said more nice things, wonderful having you, come back any time, Auntie Joyce will miss you.

‘What have you been doing to that poor woman?’ Leon asked.

‘Oh, nothing really,’ George said. ‘Found lion for her this morning, that’s all.’

‘It wasn’t the showing that affected her,’ I said. ‘It was making her walk up and shake hands with them.’

‘Tell you what, let’s get back to them this afternoon in the vehicle,’ George said. ‘We’ll drive right into them. I think that should be possible in this terrain. Worth a try, don’t you think, Dan?’

‘Why not?’

‘Right into them?’ Caroline asked. ‘You don’t do that, do you, Leon?’

‘Listen, sweetie, what George does with lion and what I do with lion are two different things. I try to keep my clients alive. Don’t want them eaten by lion, or dying of bloody heart attacks.’ Art attacks. ‘You want to have a art attack, sweetie, you go driving with George.’

‘Well, you can if you like,’ George said vaguely. ‘Very welcome, any time, come now, come with us this afternoon, we’ve no clients today either, you know.’

To my considerable surprise, Leon pounced avidly on this invitation. ‘What a bloody brilliant idea. Triffic, brilliant. Look, sweetie, why don’t you do that, go and look at George’s lion, find out where he is hiding them. Look round his camp, give me a full run-down of their operation. Have a good time. Look after her nicely, you guys, right, and don’t get her bloody eaten or I’ll come across that river with a bloody gun.’

At this point the airport manager approached us. ‘Mr Schuyler, the plane is leaving now, all the passengers are on board.’

‘Christ, sorry, James, all right, I’m out of here.’ Out of year. He kissed Caroline on the lips, the bastard, said, ‘Goodbye, sweetie, don’t get bloody eaten,’ and was gone.

‘Are you sure this is all right?’ Caroline asked, suddenly a little taken aback by all these arrangements being made on her behalf. ‘It’s a nice idea, but I don’t want Leon to impose me on you, you know what he’s like. If it’s not really convenient just say – I was planning to spend the day doing the books, anyway, so I’m not being left high and dry or anything.’

‘Well, all we’ve really got planned today is a look at the lion,’ George said, ‘once I’ve made a phone call to the office. We’ve got to call in at Mukango on the way to use their phone. Look at lion, have a few beers, perhaps. No clients till tomorrow.’

‘George, aren’t we expecting a parcel today?’

‘Oh, so we are.’

George and I walked over to the place where the luggage from the planes was unloaded. ‘George, they’re up to something,’ I said. ‘Caroline and bloody Leon. I don’t like it.’

George looked benign and mildly surprised. ‘Sorry, Dan, I thought you rather liked her, I wouldn’t have invited her if …’

‘There’s a difference between fancying and liking, George. Not my type. No bloody parcel, of course. Another of Joyce’s cock-ups. Oh, well. Let’s go and take the bitch to the lions.’

We walked back to Caroline. ‘Let’s go to Mukango, then,’ George said.

‘If we’ve got to go to Mukango, we won’t get back till mid-afternoon,’ I said. ‘So maybe we should take the spot and have a little go for leopard as well.’

‘I’d love to see leopard,’ Caroline said.

‘You haven’t seen leopard?’ I was amazed. Leopard were rather a speciality of the Mchindeni Valley.

‘Well, I don’t normally go out with the clients,’ Caroline said. It’s not the way we do things. I tend to be a fixed point at camp, apart from when I go out to get vegetables and so on. There’s not much time for game viewing when you are running a lodge full of demanding international clients. I’d love the chance to get out into the bush, actually.’

‘Come along, then,’ George said. ‘If you can face it, after Leon’s dire warnings.’

‘Rather because of Leon’s dire warnings.’

I turned to her with sudden pleasure. ‘Is there a latent craziness in this apparently sane woman?’ I asked George. Caroline laughed. I thought then that there was a chance of reclaiming her for the human race.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Here’s the plan.’ This was something I quite often said. This was because it was something George never said. ‘We drive to Mukango, both vehicles. George calls the office, talks to Joyce and hears her latest plan for ruining the company. Then we all have a beer. We drive to Lion Camp in two vehicles. Sunday gives us late lunch. Then we drive off and look for lion. Sundowner. Spotlight on, and cruise back looking for leopard. Get back for supper. How does that sound?’

‘Admirable,’ George said. Caroline smiled at me again, but I coped.

We drove in convoy to Mukango, an hour’s journey south. Philip Pocock’s lodge had one of the two telephones in the Valley – the other was at the airport but they kept it for themselves – and other camps were permitted to use it for a fee. Philip often pretended that the telephone was his principal source of income; he ran Mukango from a planter’s chair beneath a colossal leadwood tree in the Mukango garden. Now in his seventies, he had of late, he boasted, learned the art of delegation. His staff were inclined to dispute this.

I went up to the Mukango Bar, an establishment so grand it had a real barman, and asked for three Lion, Lion being the name of the beer of the country, and it came out a good shade of lion colour, if occasionally a touch cloudy. George was preparing his mind, or perhaps not preparing his mind, for his call. Lion Safaris was a partnership between George and a charming, generous man named Bruce Wallace, and the booking and administration were carried out from Bruce’s office in Chipembere. Most generously, Bruce had delegated the day-to-day running of the company to his poisonous ex-mistress. Her name, as it happened, was Joyce.

George drank half his beer and took the other half to the telephone, which was in reception a few paces away. Joyce, of course, would already have met Helen at the airport, and helped her to make her connection to Palmyra: the standard tourist trip to the country involved a visit to South Mchindeni for the game viewing and then to Palmyra Resort to wind down.

George got through surprisingly quickly, but the line, judging from his bellow, seemed a poor one. And, all too audibly, it was clear that George was in receipt of a royal bollocking. ‘No, she liked it … Joyce, she may well have been frightened, but … Joyce, she said it was the most marvellous day of her life. No, she was not in any danger. She enjoyed it, I promise you. Ah, Heuglin’s. What? Oh, sorry, no, a Heuglin’s robin has just started singing. No, I know. Sorry. It’s just singing. No, of course not, Joyce, it was a great success. Joyce, I’m sure she didn’t tell you that she had a terrible time. She said she wanted to come back. Well, next time, don’t apologise on my behalf. Oh Joyce, remember Wilderness Express? They’re going to stay at Impala Lodge. That was seventy bed-nights you turned down. Oh, all right then, sixty-three. We can’t afford those mistakes, Joyce. It was a mistake. No, I tell you it was. Oh, never mind. Oh, yes, I knew there was something I wanted to ask you, what about that parcel you promised? There was nothing on the plane. Can you get it to us tomorrow? Why not? Look, Joyce, I know cheese is expensive, but so is meat, and this couple coming tomorrow are vegetarians. Oh, not coming tomorrow? Oh God. Not another cancellation, I can’t bear it. Joyce, this is ruination. Oh, I see. They’ve cancelled one night and are coming the day after tomorrow. So we’re empty two nights now, oh dear. But we still need the cheese. For Christ’s sake, Joyce, I know cheese is expensive, but we’ll save money on meat. Do you want to starve them or something? Sorry, Joyce, I know you don’t. How should I know why they’re vegetarian? Shall I send them to another camp where they’ll get properly fed then? Joyce, this doesn’t make sense.’

Caroline was listening unashamedly, and to George, not the Heuglin’s robin singing strenuously in the shrubbery. More gossip of Rogue Lion Safaris would be spinning round the Valley. Bitch. Bitches both of them. I listened myself, hearing doom in every word George spoke. I had a terrible fear that, one day, Joyce would take the bush away from me. But what could I do?

Philip entered the bar, chuckling to himself. He looked smaller than ever, tortoise neck protruding from the collar of a beautifully pressed khaki shirt. ‘Hullo. Is George having problems,’ he stated rather than asked.

‘George always has problems with that insane woman in Chipembere. And so does everybody else. He’s calling the office, you see.’

‘Oh, I guessed that. Tying George down, it won’t do. George is a free spirit, you do know that, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do,’ I said, mildly nettled. ‘I work with him.’

‘Not you, this charming – er –’

‘Caroline.’

‘Yes, of course, and you do realise that George is a great man, don’t you? George is bush, you see, pure bush.’

‘I see,’ Caroline said. ‘And you approve of that, do you?’

To my surprise, instead of getting cross, Philip laughed his wheezy old man’s laugh. ‘I was pure bush myself, once,’ he said. ‘Then I started being a sort of politician, when we needed to get the park established all those years ago. And then I became an old man running a tourist business. But I was pure bush first. And last too, I think.’

‘I see,’ said Caroline.

‘Yes, maybe you do, and maybe you don’t. Humour the old bugger, eh? What do you think of life out here, now you’ve been in the Valley for – what? – four months?’

‘It’s been wonderful. I love it. I never want to leave. Can’t imagine any other way of living.’

Philip began laughing again at this, and followed with a bout of coughing. ‘I’m so sorry, er, Caroline, but your words have a dreadful ring to them. I have known three ladies, each one as lovely as yourself, who said the same thing to me. I can’t imagine any other way to live. I never want to leave. And I married them, all three of them, consecutively, not simultaneously. And do you know what else they said? After a while, they all said the same thing. It’s me or the bush, Philip. Face facts: me or the bush. And so I faced them; the facts, that is. And I always said the same thing, or maybe I just thought it: awfully sorry, old girl, but that is not really a fair contest, is it? And so I have a wife in Cape Town, a wife in Chipembere, and a wife in Wiltshire. And I’m still here.’

‘Is there a moral in this story?’ Caroline asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Philip said. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Perhaps the moral is that you’ve always been faithful to your true love.’

Philip stared at her for a moment in some surprise; he had not expected acuteness. Nor, it must be said, had I.

George came back, running his hand through the growing-out stubble of his haircut, making himself look rather like a crested barbet. He and Philip exchanged greetings. ‘And is all well back in Chipembere, George?’

‘Oh, well enough. But I just feel I’m getting a bit old for all this. I spend my life worrying about cheese.’

‘Oh no, you’re not, George. You’re just the same; it’s the park that’s grown older. It’s older and softer and easier, and it doesn’t suit you any more. It’s not what it was when you first came here, let alone what it was like when I came here, all but fifty years back, and started killing all those poor animals. The park has become a success, and that is not what you are made for, George.’