Rogue Lion Safaris

‘Success?’ George asked disbelievingly. ‘We’re going broke.’

‘I’m talking about the park, not about your or anyone else’s business operation. The pioneering has been done, it’s time now for the second-phase people to try and make sure that the work of the pioneers doesn’t get wasted. But you’re a pioneer; you shouldn’t be here any more.’

‘Thanks, Philip.’

‘George, I’ll tell you what you should do.’

‘Do, Philip, do.’

‘Go north. Go to the North Park. Open it up for tourists. Bring in the first wave. It’s a matter of starting all over again up there, no roads, no camps, no tourists. Just the bush. The South Park is too soft for you. Go north.’

‘Why don’t you go?’ I asked. This was a bit cheeky, from someone like me to a person of Philip’s eminence, but I thought on the whole that he deserved to be asked.

‘Too old. Too stiff to live in a tent, too tired to go where there are no roads. If I were twenty years younger, I’d go. Goodness, I’d go like a shot, because the North Park is now what the South Park was when I first came here. But I’m not. Young, that is. The South Park has kept pace with me. We’ve grown old together, old and soft. But you’re young, George; it’s what you should be doing.’

‘I don’t feel young,’ George said, feelingly.

‘Have a beer then,’ I suggested.

‘A good idea. Not totally devoid of initiative, are they, George, the young buggers? Are you training him well? Or does he still confuse the barking of heron and bushbuck?’

This was a reference to a brick I had dropped during my safari guide exam, the examiner being Philip Pocock. In fairness to myself, I must add that it was the only real error: I had passed with an A grade. Philip had given me a tough time during the exam; his principal technique for unnerving a candidate was to respond to a piece of proffered information with the single word ‘Elaborate’. But I had elaborated in a most elaborate fashion, and if my botany had been a little shaky, my large mammal stuff had been easily enough to carry the day.

So now I merely gave Philip the brief version of my normally elaborate impersonation of the call of the wood owl, and stood up to wave to the barman, indicating that four more Lion would be in order.

‘And what is it you are doing with Lion Safaris, Caroline? I know – they are abducting you from Leon and making you work for them as the caterer they so badly need.’ Philip glanced at George with amiable malice.

‘Yes, that’s something I’ve often wondered, George,’ Caroline said. ‘Why don’t you have a caterer? You must be the only camp in the Valley without one.’

‘Oh.’ George gave himself a vigorous scalp massage, changing the style from crested barbet to hoopoe. ‘It was a row I had at the start of the season with the office.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of the phone, meaning Joyce. ‘They wouldn’t let me employ a caterer, after I had taken on Dan as well as Joseph Ngwei. Said I had too many staff.’

‘How do you work it out, then?’

‘By sort of committee. Me, Dan and Joseph, and Sunday the cook. He’s done rather well, actually.’

‘So well you will surely pay me a double bone-arse,’ I said, in Sunday’s voice.

‘He’ll be furious about the bloody cheese,’ George said. ‘I daren’t tell him.’

‘I’ll get Joseph to do it,’ I said. ‘He’ll take it better from him.’

‘Excellent.’

‘Oh, you should join these people, Caroline,’ Philip said delightedly. ‘Look at the mess they are making of it all. Join them and sort them out. You’re just the person they’ve been looking for.’

‘I should bloody well think not,’ said Caroline, sitting up straight, all her primness returning. ‘I hardly think a business diploma, not to mention cordon bleu cooking qualifications, is the sort of thing they need.’

‘Exactly what we need,’ I said, with great heartiness. ‘Start this afternoon. No, you’re our guest this afternoon. Start tonight after supper. From nine o’clock tonight you must do everything I want, all right?’

‘No chance,’ she said. No teasing required today, clearly. Sod you then. How were we going to get through the day without coming to blows? ‘I am assistant manager of a properly run tourist operation that offers a luxury safari to top-drawer international clients. And that’s how I intend things to remain.’

‘We just show our people the bush,’ I said. ‘Food is not cordon bleu, but we offer the best lion in the Valley. Lion is the principal item on our menu.’

‘That’s why you get the sort of clients you get, and we get the sort of clients we get.’

Philip was laughing at this exchange. ‘That will suffice, children, thank you. Ah, George, I used to put lion before the comfort of my clients once, but not any more. I am old, and my clients are too fat. It seems that this is the way clients want it to be: a taste of wilderness, and a lot of food and drink and lying around, and then off to Palmyra Resort for a rest, that is to say, lying around eating and drinking. That is the way it must be. So if you are not joining Lion Safaris, Caroline, what is this visit all about? A spying mission, no doubt. See what your deadly rivals across the river are getting up to.’

Caroline stiffened. ‘They have very kindly offered to show me some lion, since we haven’t got any clients in camp tonight. For once.’

‘Oh, a visit to the Tondo Pride,’ Philip said. ‘That should be part of every bush person’s experience. To visit the Tondo Pride with George. Are they well, the Tondo buggers.’

‘Killing left and right,’ George said.

‘Is George really as dangerous with lion as they say?’ Caroline asked.

‘You mean, as dangerous as Leon says,’ said Philip. ‘Oh yes, I should think so. But the thing is, I’ve never felt terribly safe with George. Even when there are no lion around. Even when we’re not in the bush. Not a terribly safe chap, George. You go with him and see the lion. You’ll have the time of your life.’

4

From the moment that I joined up with George, I felt as if I were becoming part of an African legend: a minor character in the great legend that was George. Though in fact there were really two legends about him. Among ethologists, and among readers of popular science, he was a ground-breaking genius. But in the Mchindeni Valley he was a dangerous lunatic. His book Lions of the Plains, popular science at its best, had hit me like a shell in my teens. The behaviour of animals, both wild and tame, or half-tamed, had always been the central part of my life; with this book, things acquired a clarity and a purpose they had never before possessed. Hence the zoology degree, hence the study on zebra.

George had produced both the long academic study and the popular work in partnership with Peter Norrie. The academic paper itself was extraordinary; I had wrestled long and hard with it over the course of my studies. Hours of observation, minute cataloguing of detail, and a final analysis in which every insight, every leap of intuition was backed up by a thousand statistics. It was a venerable piece of work, twenty-five years old, and still considered a template for all single-species work. It was a pioneering study, and it paved the way for an ever-proliferating number of similar projects, last and least among them my own.

The people of Mchindeni Valley had difficulty in reconciling the academic legend with everybody’s favourite crazy, with broken specs and open-work crochet crotch. It must be admitted they had a point. The lion study was endlessly meticulous: not George’s most obvious quality. And it was finished: George was a man with a thousand talents, but finishing things was not among them. In the end, I learned that the organising and completing side of things had been Norrie’s contribution, most of the observation and all the insights George’s. Norrie was an academic in shorts; after this joint paper was published he never again left his university. George stayed in the bush, and never published another paper.

Lions of the Plains made money, a respectable amount of the stuff if not a fortune. Norrie had laid his share down as the deposit on a house in Cambridgeshire; George had spent his setting up Lion Safaris with Bruce Wallace. Thus he had exchanged the awed respect of academe for the amiable derision of Mchindeni Valley. ‘George knows,’ people would say, especially when talking of lion, but soon they would be swapping George stories. The vehicle that fell into Kalulu Swamp. The vehicle that George drove off the pontoon and into the Mchindeni River with six clients on board. George’s fall from a tree, his night in the bush unconscious beneath it, covered in blood, his insouciant arrival twenty-four hours later at the Mukango Bar, ordering a beer while still blood-plastered. There were a million stories.

Mine was, and is, about the best. It concerns the first day we spent together: the day after Philip Pocock’s beginning-of-the-season party, when George and I went looking for zebras, so that I could show him how to recognise a stallion within five seconds.

George picked me up at Mukango in the morning and we set off in his terrible beaten-up Land Cruiser. We chose, as a random destination, the distant lagoon where Lloyd had claimed the sighting of his palmnut vulture, and then on, a great loop north to George’s camp. We bounced around the park at a great lick, George slamming on the brakes every time we saw zebra. After five seconds I would call ‘Stallion!’ and point. Then we would clamp our binoculars to our eyes and stare pruriently until we had a firm diagnosis. ‘Yes. Definite male.’

‘Definite male.’

And I was right way above chance expectation, and George asked me again and again about the clues that made instant diagnosis possible, and I rattled on endlessly about my zebras while the African Legend listened with extraordinary humility. It was almost as if I were the venerable, aged-in-the-bush legend, he the young, damp-eared know-nothing. It was certainly as if we were colleagues. A little later I diagnosed not humility but generosity: perhaps the only quality that really matters.

For the rest, we talked endless wildlife shop. George was, I soon learned, a generalist of bewilderingly wide knowledge, but still wider curiosity. We discovered a taste in common for wild speculation. Why not? So often in science, the intuitive leap comes first, the spadework second. George recorded all these pieces of speculation onto his tape recorder, vowing to investigate them further, to seek out evidence. After a long morning of it, we reached the lagoon where the palmnut vulture had, or had not, been seen. We pulled into the shade of a kigelia tree, and scanned about with binoculars. George produced lunch from the inaptly named cool box. We flipped off the tops in the door-latch of the Land Cruiser and drank it.

I found the palmnut vulture too. George fetched his telescope, an instrument which, I was to learn, was forever falling off its tripod without warning, and focused on the bird for a closer inspection. ‘It’s actually a fish eagle, isn’t it? An immature?’ The question was a statement. I took a look myself.

‘I see what you mean. I’m completely wrong.’

‘Well, they do look quite similar.’

‘George, do you know what I think?’

‘That the fish eagle is the bird that Lloyd identified as a palmnut vulture.’

‘I’ll give you –’

‘Better than even money?’

‘Much better. Heavy odds-on. Outrageous stringing.’ I then had to explain to George that ‘stringing’ was birding slang for faulty diagnosis, and so the bogus palmnut made Lloyd a stringer of heroic dimension. Pleased with the thought, we finished our beer, restored the bottles to the ‘cool’ box, and George started up. Or rather he didn’t. He turned the key, but nothing happened. ‘Oh dear, I wish it wouldn’t do that.’

‘Do what?’

‘Well, there’s something wrong with the ignition switch. It sometimes turns the heating on by mistake when it’s in the off position. And that drains the battery. And sometimes the wires fall off the battery, too. Perhaps it’s that and not the heating. I’ll have a look.’

He opened the bonnet and discovered that it was, indeed, the detached wire at fault. I passed him, at his request, a wallet of tools from the glove compartment. After a few moments of fiddling, George asked me to try the key again. Success. He slammed down the bonnet, and we drove off again, travelling fairly briskly towards Lion Camp. We stopped a lot on the way, especially for zebra. George was now trying to diagnose the stallions himself and was getting the hang of it fast. But then the vehicle went lame on us. ‘Sod it.’ Puncture: a routine emergency. ‘Give me the wallet of tools again, Dan. I’ll get the jack.’

‘What tools?’

‘The ones you gave me before.’

‘You never gave them back to me.’

‘Of course I bloody did.’

‘You bloody didn’t. Anyway, they’re not here.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Anything vital in there?’

‘Wheel wrench.’

‘Oh, bugger it. Perhaps we can bodge the wheel nuts loose with a shifting spanner. Have you got one?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘That’s all right, then.’

‘It’s with the wallet of tools.’

‘Oh, arseholes, where the hell is the tool kit?’

‘I rather think I left it on the front bumper after I closed the bonnet. After I had fixed the wire back onto the battery. It will have fallen off, probably still under the kigelia tree.’

‘About two hours’ drive away.’

‘About that. Oh well. We’d better walk.’

‘Walk? It’d take two days.’

‘No, no, no, to camp, to my camp, to Lion Camp, you know. It’s only about a mile off, and I’ve plenty of spare tools there.’

It was an iron rule of The Safari Guide Training Manual that when in trouble, you stayed with the vehicle. Walking safaris were, of course, permitted in the Mchindeni National Parks, but only in the company of an armed scout. George and I, unarmed, set off into the bush. ‘You hardly ever see any game around here,’ George said airily.

‘Oh good.’

Within five minutes we had walked almost straight into a lioness. She was lying stretched out beneath a tree, as soundly asleep as only a lion can be. She did not move a muscle. I loved her. We swung away from her, altering course to follow the bank of the dry Tondo River, aiming to cross at its confluence with the Mchindeni. That was enough bad luck for one walk, anyway, I thought.

After five minutes or so, my pulse had slowed a little and I had stopped mouth-breathing. I felt extraordinarily exposed: naked. We reached the high bank of the Mchindeni: three hundred yards away, I could see the framework of a couple of incomplete huts, signs of rather desultory human activity. This was my first sight of Lion Camp.

Our path took us to the confluence, the wide funnelled mouth of a river of sand, its banks studded with thick combretum bushes. It was at this point, about ten yards from the first bush and a hundred yards from camp, that there was a small, localised nuclear explosion. The first bush blew up in front of us; with a great detonation of snarls and a rip and snap of breaking twig, there before us was the biggest lion I had ever seen in my life, dark-maned and colossal, with carthorse-huge feet, an eye-filling sight of teeth and mane and yellow eyes. Afterwards, I felt the experience was rather like the playing of a fruit machine, a subject on which I was an expert: a wait for the flashing symbols to settle on a decision and to spell out your fate. For about one hundredth of a second, the symbols seemed to flash through the yellow eyes – fight or flight, fight or flight, fight or flight – before settling on jackpot. Flight. The lion, surprised and horrified almost as much as us, opted for discretion, and with a sudden flick of the hips, revealing balls like footballs, he turned and covered thirty yards in an instant of time, spinning around on an eminence above us to lash his tail and show us the whiteness of his teeth.

There followed one of those lifetime three-second pauses. And then George said quietly, without turning his head, ‘Definite male.’

After that, of course, there was no escape. That lion did something to me, you see. I was never quite sure what: only that it was irreversible. That night, as we dined at Lion Camp, George invited me to join him as his assistant for the season, and I accepted at once. I took my safari guide exam a fortnight later and the day after that, I was showing our first clients the bush, talking hard on zebra, swotting hard on birds and plants, badgering George to teach me more bird calls. I took up residence in a hut on the banks of the Mchindeni, and every night, I slept to the sound of lion music.

5

Caroline’s first response to Lion Camp almost got her thrown into the Mchindeni River for bisection by hippo. ‘My God, it’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘The things you could do with this place.’ Certainly I flung into the river the thoughts I had been having about reclaiming her for humanity.

It is true that the place didn’t look all that much. You hardly even noticed it; from a couple of hundred yards you might pass by without seeing it. Not a drop of paint in the place, not a square inch of concrete. I liked it like that: above all, it was right. But as I looked at the place through Caroline’s eyes, for an instant I saw a kind of shantytown: a handful of guest huts, walled in weathered and dusty bamboo matting, grass-hatted; staff huts that were little more than lean-tos. The only structure of any solidity was the sitenji: an African term used for a camp’s all-purpose shelter, the eating, drinking, reading, talking, writing area: a nicely thatched roof, more elaborate than the roofs of the huts, supported by stout wooden pillars, with a knee-high wall made from tied-together bundles of dried grass. Inside were a dining table and chairs. Beyond the sitenji, on the edge of the bank, a few ‘comfortable’ canvas chairs were grouped around a small pile of ashes: we had a fire here at night when there were clients in camp.

‘I mean, the potential of this place,’ Caroline said, looking at the elegant grove of ebony trees to the right of and behind the camp, which let through a dappled sunlight. There seemed to be in her eyes something of the same excitement that George and I felt when we saw a crowd of vultures perched high in a tree, and wondered what we might find beneath. ‘Fabulous. Just fabulous.’

‘What would you wish to do with the place?’ asked Joseph Ngwei politely.

‘This could be the hottest camp in the Valley,’ she said, ignoring, or perhaps unaware of, the hostility she was inspiring. ‘I mean, only six guest huts?’

‘Five,’ I said. ‘Ten beds.’

‘But you could double that easily, it’s perfect.’

‘I know it is.’

‘I thought Impala Lodge had the best location in the Valley, but this is better, the views along the river are better, and that wood is unbelievable. You could really do something with this place.’

‘Ebony glade,’ I said.

‘I can’t believe you don’t do more with it.’

‘We thought that improving on perfection was beyond us.’

She turned to me, eyes alight with delight, and said: ‘Come on then. What about a guided tour?’

‘It won’t take long. There isn’t much to see here. Only the bush.’ I showed her the sitenji; this had a bar at one end, at Joyce’s insistence, but no one had ever stood behind it. We used it as a shelf for our natural history books and the spare pairs of binoculars, all intended for the use of clients, and very dusty they got there. Caroline went out to the half-circle of ‘comfortable’ chairs and stood at the fireplace. She remained there for a long while in silence. A great white egret was fishing in the middle of the stream, beside him a spoonbill working furiously in comensal proximity. After a while, she asked: ‘Will you show me the huts?’

The huts were just huts, creaking baskets with light-permeable walls. Each contained two spindly, metal-framed single beds, two mosquito nets, and a small table bearing a Thermos jug of imperfectly chilled water. ‘Where’s the floor?’ Caroline asked.

‘What you are standing on is the floor of the planet earth,’ I said. ‘A light covering of sand from the Mchindeni river bank. What more could anyone want?’

‘Well, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you,’ Caroline said. ‘I can see why you keep hearing rumours about the National Parks Commission wanting to close you down. Who on earth can you get to come and stay here? Why don’t you put concrete down?’

‘It’s not allowed. We’re inside the park here: no permanent structures allowed.’

‘Impala Lodge is inside the park, and Leon got permission to lay down concrete.’

‘I’m aware of that. We don’t actually want concrete, though. We prefer Mchindeni river sand.’

‘What about lavatories?’

‘Oh, we’ve got them, don’t panic.’ I took her to the nearest of the two. ‘Long-drop. Sort of a deep pit, an oil drum at the top. But as you see, a real lavvy seat.’

‘You didn’t think of building them en suite, of course.’

‘Not a good idea. They get to whiff a bit by the end of the season, you see.’

‘Leon got permission to fit flush toilets at Impala Lodge.’

‘Yes, I know, and the water towers are a wonderful landmark for lost travellers.’ The sarcasm washed over her. She seemed to be rather overdoing the casual, professional interest in a competitor’s business. I felt like a house owner listening to a tactless potential buyer criticising the wallpaper and talking loudly about dismantling your favourite room.

Caroline asked: ‘And showers?’

‘Ah yes. Pièce de résistance, the showers. Clients love them. Follow me.’ I led her to the edge of the river bank, where three oil drums stood. Beneath the central one, a small fire of mopane wood was kept perpetually alight; mopane, hard as diamond, forms small coals that glow for hours.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Caroline said. ‘You splash yourselves down out here in the open.’

‘Would we be so coarse and unsophisticated? Come.’ I led her down a short flight of steps, cut into the river bank. At their foot was a small ledge, its outer edge guarded by a bamboo rail. Behind the rail were the two shower cubicles, each the size of a telephone kiosk, roofed with thatch, three walls and a floor cut from living river bank. The fourth wall was air; each cubicle gave a matchless view across the mighty Mchindeni. And from each, you could see both egret and spoonbill, and hear the grunting and guffawing of a pod of hippo in a deep pool a few yards away. Caroline inspected the shower head and the two taps, which were fed by the oil drums above: hot and cold. A straggling party of a dozen foxy-red puku was coming down to drink on the far side of the river; a pied kingfisher flashed before us, halted in mid-air, hovering hard, before plunging twenty feet into the river, emerging triumphantly fishfull.

Caroline placed both her hands on the bamboo rail, and looked out over the river. I said nothing; nor, for once, did she. A sudden piercing whistle, surprisingly close, cut the air, and she jumped. ‘Puku,’ I said softly. ‘Alarm call. Look, there he is, right below us.’

‘Antelope whistle? Is this a tease?’

‘Would I do such a thing? I know it’s an odd noise for an antelope, but it’s what they do.’

Obligingly the puku did it again, and Caroline laughed suddenly. ‘You know, there are moments when I see the point of you lot. The shower is lovely. But doesn’t all this neo-primitivism upset the clients?’

‘Some are a bit taken aback at first,’ I said, answering seriously because this was intended as a serious question. ‘Especially if they’ve been told to expect something different. And that happens more often than we would wish.’

‘But that’s dreadful. Can’t you control the way you are marketed? It’s the first rule of business, surely.’

‘Well, that’s our Joyce for you. But the thing is, once we’ve got the clients – on the rare occasions we get any, that is – it begins to work to our advantage. We tell them this is a camp, a bush camp, the real thing, no half-cocked lodge. This is where the real bush people go. And we give them lots and lots of bush, lots and lots of animals. They mostly get the hang of things. The ones who are nervy at first generally end up the biggest fans. They feel they’ve achieved something, which they have, and they end up really pleased with themselves. That’s great fun for us, when it happens, and it happens a lot.’