One problem was the superstition among villagers that a man-eater must be a mtu-ana-geuka-simba, literally, "a man-turned-into-a-lion", a witch with whom it was dreadfully dangerous to interfere. This superstition was often shared by the local game scout stationed in that village or sent out to dispatch the lion - including the mighty Nonga Pelekamoyo, or Take Your Heart, uncle of old Saidi (and also uncle of Rashidi Kawawa, Tanzania's first Prime Minister after Independence, and
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currently Minister of Defense). This two-hundred-pound Ngoni - the one who had set fire to all the Ngindo settlements on Brian's first tour through the region of Ngarambe - was sleeping in a bamboo stockade m a village beset by a man-eater when the lion burst straight through the bamboo in order to get at him. Miraculously the lion seized, not Nonga, but the wooden bed that the villagers had provided for their savior. The lion actually dragged the bed clean out of the stockade, and Nonga Pelekamoya, managing to roll off, escaped unharmed. But afterward Nonga refused to consider any further dealings with this mtu-ana-geuka-simba, and turned the whole case over to Bwana Nyama.
Brian reckons he has killed about fifty lions, of which perhaps nineteen or twenty were man-eaters; the rest were stock-raiders, which usually got that habit from feeding on dead cattle after drought or plague. Asked if fear had ever been a problem, he thinks a moment, as if such an idea had never occurred to him before. Frowning, he says, "One is bound to be tensed up, of course, but if it was really fear, you wouldn't bloody well do it, especially after you've put a bullet in some dangerous creature only to have him go thrashing off into the thicket. Then you've got to start all over again, and it's a lot worse than before." He shook his head, and changed the subject. "I recall one lioness over here on the Mbarangandu that jumped out and scattered the porters, then came towards me. I knew she was not a man-eater, in a place so remote from human habitation; I thought she must have cubs, so I didn't shoot, just held the rifle on her, backing up slowly. She kept on coming, keeping the same fifteen yards between us, snarling and thrashing her tail. And then, when she figured that her cubs were safe, she turned suddenly and bolted for the long grass. Quite interesting, really."
"In the north," Brian says, "man-eaters are rarely a problem, but here in the south they still occur regularly. Not so many in the settled areas any more, because the lions themselves are dying out, and there is still enough game around to feed those that are left. But two or three people have been taken along that foot path" - and he pointed south -"between Liwale and Mahenge. Except for that porter at Kichwa Cha Pembe, I've never lost any of my people to a lion, but you have to be careful."
By nightfall the humidity has lifted, and the flying clouds part on a cold full moon. All around the horizon, as the wind chases them, the flames of Goa's fires leap and fall in the black tracery of trees like a demonic breathing from within the earth.
Lying out under the stars, we reminisce about friends we have in common. When first approached about joining this safari, I had been told that Brian Nicholson had invited along Myles Turner, now a game warden in Malawi, who had befriended me in the Serengeti in 1969 and 1970; this evening I expressed regret that Myles was unable to join us after all. Brian stares at me. "I thought it was you who had invited
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Myles!" he said. I shake my head: I had been told that Myles was an old friend of Brian, and the suggestion was made that I could get a lot of good material sitting around the campfire at night listening to the two wardens talk about the late great days when the native knew his place. Although Brian knows that I am teasing him, he grins.
"Well, I've known Myles for a long time, that's true; I've known him since about 1948. Good hunter, too - very patient and painstaking. And as I recall, the first gun I possessed, some sort of air gun, once belonged to Myles. But I can't imagine what Myles and I would have reminisced about; never did one thing together that I can recall. Last year Myles was in Nairobi, and I asked him to stop by the house, talk over this safari. He said he was very busy, had to go to Nyeri and so forth, and as it turned out, he had no time for me when he got back. Can't say I was surprised when the news came that he couldn't get leave after all. In the old days, when he was a warden in the Serengeti, he used to say, 'I'd give anything to get down there and see that bit of Africa of yours.' I invited him, and more than once, but he never came."
Another friend of Brian in the early ^ays was a young Provincial Forest officer named John Blower, a wanderer whom I crossed paths with many years later, in Ethiopia, and again, years after that, in Nepal. Blower had been fascinated by the possibilities of the Selous and thought that the Lung'onyo River region might be best protected by making it part of the Forest Reserve. At one point, he made what Brian calls "a hell of a trek" from the Kingupira region west to the Ulanga River, then south to Shuguli Falls, then up the Luwegu River to Mkangira, and from there back to Liwale. "Half-killed his porters. He'd set out in the morning and never look back, and some of these chaps were still turning up weeks later. Couldn't hire a porter around the Liwale area for six months afterward." Hearing of this, lonides had been furious that a walk through the Selous should have been made without his permission, and subsequently, at some sort of Game Department function in Arusha, he asked a young man if he had ever come across "this bastard Blower". It was Blower himself, of course, whom he addressed, and after a decent interval, they became great friends.
In 1953 Nicholson was summoned to Kenya to serve with the Kenya Police Reserve, patrolling against Mau Mau terrorists around Nanyuki. By 1954, when he was called a second time, the hard-core Mau Mau had retreated up into the Aberdares, and Brian served with the Kenya Regiment in field intelligence operations about twenty miles northwest of Nairobi, where he participated in the "pseudo-gang" operations. "We'd black our faces and go out at night, wearing old clothes, and an African whom the Mau Mau did not know had turned against them would lead us straight into their camp. He'd do the talking to get us past the guard, and once we got into the middle of them, we'd shoot the place to pieces. That's what really won the war; it completely confused them, they never
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knew who was for them and who wasn't, and there were cases toward the end in which two genuine Mau Mau gangs were shooting up each other. John Blower was sent up there on the same thmg, though I didn't see him. I was with Billy Woodley and several others; we were very close friends in school, Billy and me, and we still are." Remembering something, Brian smiles. "When we were kids, we used to go hunting out on the Aathi Plain, where Embakasi Airport is today. One day we were trying to stalk some tommies, using cattle to cover our approach - no luck at all. Then more cattle came along led by a prize white heifer, and damned if 1 didn't forget that gun was loaded. I said to Billy, If that was a buffalo, this is how I'd shoot it-BLAM! Down it went! That must have been thirty-five years ago!" As Brian says this, he sits straight up, more startled by the passage of time than by the trouble he had brought upon himself with that fatal shot.
At dawn, the smoke of Goa's fires has gone, the air is clean and cool, with the wind from the southeast; the prevailing weathers all across East Africa derive from these easterly trades off the Indian Ocean. Until today, it has been hot an hour after sunrise, reaching 100 °F, or so we estimate, late in the morning and maintaining that temperature until mid-afternoon. For those who must carry loads through thorn and tall dry grass, over black granite and the lava-like black cotton of the mbugas, it is just as well that on most days we travel for no more than five hours. Since the porters are well rested every afternoon, their spirits are high - so high, in fact, that occasionally it is necessary to damp them down. "Usi piga kilele!" Goa whispers at them, turning on the trail. And they do not mimic him or mutter, only smile a little, walking along under the awkward loads with the swaying elegance of the women in their villages, arms close to their sides but hands curved out, fingers extended, the loads clinging somehow to their heads. Only after moments with big animal
s do they hoot and chatter, letting off steam, and if this makes me smile, and I cannot hide it, they then have the excuse they need to squeal with laughter.
Although Brian is fond of saying that these porters can't compare with those on his old staff, who were "trained up to it", they win his grudging respect as the days go by. "They're a very good lot," he acknowledges. "Out five days, and not a single complaint yet." Even the saucy and single-minded Mata, from whom at least impertinence had been expected, has decided to comport himself as a professional porter on the basis of his one previous safari, and sets a stern example for the others. (Only at Mkangira, in the ngoma put on by the staff, did Mata display his cynical opinion of the hospitality, greetings, and thanks to the white visitors that the songs were intended to convey. In woman's costume, Goa's straw hat pulled down rakishly over one eye, he went swanking in and out of the line of porters as they danced and chanted, mimicking their thanks to the White Bwanas with squirming hips and
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raised prayerful hands and eye rollings of burlesqued gratitude - Asante sa-a-na! - in a parody so wild and deadly in its execution that whites and blacks alike giggled uneasily, not knowing where to turn. Mata himself had laughed openly into our faces, and his revenge was the artistic high point of the ngoma, surpassing even the strange dance of Abdallah, who kept time to the tom-tom while hopping on his head and elbows all the way around the fire circle.)
Leaving behind the smoldering black land of Goa's fires, we wade the river and head south through long, rolling savanna hills between the Mbarangandu and Njenji rivers. The morning remains cool and pleasant, with no trace of humidity, and the high grass, bronze and shining, flows in the south wind and early light. A flight of the large trumpeter hornbills lilts along the dark lines of big trees where a karonga descends toward the river, and a solitary white egret stands immobile in the rank green margins of a spring; this is the common egret, a cosmopolitan species, the only bird in the Selous that is also common in North America.
Coming up swiftly over a rise, we run into an old bull buffalo perhaps thirty yards away. As Brian seizes Goa's rifle, the bull rears his snout, seeming to glare at us past flared wet nostrils, big horns shining; the depthless black eyes never blink in the long moment that it takes for nose and ears and eyes and modest brain to weigh the choice between attack or flight. We hold quite still. Given enough time and space, the buffalo will almost always take the most prudent course, and after a few seconds of suspense this one, too, gives the heave and snort that accompany these bovine decisions and goes crashing off downhill into the thicket.
Apart from this buffalo and a few small groups of elephant, animals in this long-grass country have been scarce, as if all the waning energy in the coppered hills and yellowed trees and sinking rivers of September had been distilled in the fierce greens of the parrots and the paradisal blues of the brilliant rollers. But on the far side of a rise, in an open hollow, the missing animals have taken shelter from the silent landscape - impala, wildebeest, wart hog, zebra, and elephant, with a flock of the huge batutu in attendance. Led by the hornbills, all but the elephant stream away uphill toward the blue sky, striped horses shining in the high bronze grass.
Goa follows the old paths of the elephants, which follow the ridge lines and avoid the stony depths and thorn of the karongas; it is pleasant to sense that most of these neat trails, two feet across, from which all grass has been worn away, have never been seen or walked by human beings. Eventually a path descends toward the river, and from a bluff we contemplate an elephant with calf, at rest on a clear shoal in the middle of the glittering Mbarangandu; in the new light of the river morning, they seem to dream, lulled to forgetfulness of where they might be going by the clear torrent from the southern mountains that casts sparkling
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reflections up the gray columns of their legs. We wait. Others have crossed ahead of them, feedmg calmly m rank canebrake by the river, and when the cow and calf move on, we wade out into the sun-filled flow and continue southward.
Before long we are stalled by another elephant, this one a young bull standing in the grass of the river margin. Since more elephants are visible in the dense thickets, Goa leads the file on to the sand bar, passing in front of the elephant, and a bit close. When the bull begins to flap its ears and paw the ground, Brian and Goa, exchanging guns, also exchange an old-days grin of recognition; they have met this situation many times before. Brian says later that they must have killed three hundred elephants together (of the estimated thirteen hundred he has executed in his lifetime), almost all of them on control work in Tanzania; it has been many years since he took one on license. Between one and three thousand elephants were destroyed annually in control operations throughout his twenty-three years in the Game Department, and this was only a fraction of the total number taken here in the southeast.
The bull does not yet have our scent, nor does he see what makes him nervous, although Brian claims that elephants' sight is better than people imagine; perhaps he has heard us, or perhaps what has come to him is some subtle shift in atmosphere that affects his sense of elephant well-being. Testing the air with lifted trunk, he steps down on to the river bed, then swings around to dig a hole under the bank. When the water wells up, he picks up a trunkful and hurls it overhead, so that it falls with a fine splat upon his back; he sprays himself behind his ears and under his belly. In the process he develops an erection, but the lumbering penis is gingerly, first lowering a little like a boom, then bobbing upward in alarm as its owner moves out over hot sand. Wearing the river at a point downwind of us, the elephant stops short, then turns toward us, trunk held high; the gland takes cover as he wheels away and hurries into the bush.
A big pan not far away up the east bank of the river has always been a famous place for elephant and game; in other days, this pan held a large pool that was permanent home to crocodiles and hippos, but the hippos eventually wore their runway to the river so deep that at last the whole marsh emptied out, obliging these two species to gain a living elsewhere. It was here at Likale, Brian says - and he points to an open wooded hill on the south side - that he saw the greatest and most splendid kudu of his life. On the north side, sixteen elephants feed on the green carpet of an mbuga, and a number of others are in sight, including two that cross the river to join those on the western bank. In the dry pan, one hundred buffalo stand in a compact herd, with nearly that number of impala, thirty wart hog, a band of kongoni with a new calf, a zebra herd at the far wood edge where had been seen the great kudu of yore, and a quorum of the elongated birds that stand about at the water's edge the world over.
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Brian looks about him, saying, "I feel as if 1 was just here the other day. Nothing seems to have changed very much." I couldn't make out w^hether he was glad or sorry.
Having always been wary of returning to any wild place that has meant a lot to me in case it might have changed, and not for the better, I ask him why he has been so anxious to return to the Selous. At this, he glares at me, defensive. "Who said / was anxious to return here? Tom Arnold tell you that?" When I say nothing, but just meet his gaze, he comes off it with a sheepish smile. "No," he says quietly. "I get a lot of pleasure out of being here. See how the game is doing. Visit the old places. See my old staff." He glances at Goa, then blurts out, "The Selous is home to me, you see; it's the only place on earth where I feel 1 belong." Asked if he wanted to be buried here, as lonidea had been, he answers stiffly, "Don't give it much thought. Doesn't pay to be morbid. Don't expect 1 care very much what they do with me after I'm dead."
We wade the river and make camp just opposite the pan. To the east, the land rises to steep red escarpments; these broad valleys with steep cliffs may well be indications of ancient fault lines of the Great Rift that runs south from the Red Sea to the blue Zaiftbezi. On all sides is an airy view of the Old Africa, and I am delighted that Brian wished to camp here
and sorry to see the look of discouragement upon his face. "I'd been looking forward to this place," he says, "and it's the best we've seen, yet it just doesn't compare with the way it was. That buffalo herd used to be three or four times that size! And we have yet to see a single elephant with decent ivory!" It was just about this time last year that he and Arnold had flown up the Mbarangandu on a reconnaissance for this safari, "and there was a lot of game here, a lot of game, and all the way along: I don't believe we were ever out of sight of elephant." I protest that even a poaching epidemic, of which we have found no sign at all, could not have wiped out so many elephants in a single year, and at this he brightens; we should not forget, he reminds me, that the rains were very late this year, while last year they were normal. "We're well into September, and the Mbarangandu still looks as it normally does by late June or early July! The dry season is two months behind schedule, and the animals are still scattered. There's no need for them to concentrate along the rivers. There's water everywhere out in the bush, you've seen it for yourself!" For a moment Brian's voice is elated again, as if this familiar litany has cleared his doubts, yet, as I am beginning to perceive, a part of him has no wish to be consoled, for a moment later he is glum again. "I suppose it's a mistake to revisit a place you loved, to make this sort of sentimental journey. I haven't made a foot safari since 1963 - everything was Land Rovers after that - and a place can change a lot in sixteen years."
I repeat my arguments, to reassure myself as well as him: the scarcity of big bulls with large tusks is bothersome, of course, but it is simply not possible that the thousands of elephants observed from the
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