ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael McKeown was born in London of English and Irish descent. He has lived and travelled extensively throughout Africa where he contributed articles for wildlife magazines and travel guides, as well as establishing his own travel magazine, Impressions of Africa. In 1998 he moved to Crete for six years, a time which provided the impetus for a book Headlines Crete, attesting to his deep interest in the classical past, traditional societies and the natural world.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Headlines Crete
Half Way Down an African Moon
SOMEWHERE EAST
OF EDEN
Michael McKeown
Copyright © 2017 Michael Mckeown
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1788033 947
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
Cover design: with thanks to David Whitehead
For my children Maxine, Vanessa and James. And
to a younger generation Adam, Emma, Aimee,
William, Anna, Josh and Sofia.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
SHADOWLANDS
THE INDOMITABLE HORACE
THE NO-ONE KNOWS FOREST
RUN RHINO RUN
MOVEABLE ARTICHOKES
THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE DOVE
REDNECKS IN PARADISE
WHERE FOXES SAY GOODNIGHT
ABSENT FRIENDS
A BEAR IN BUCHAREST
ZAMBEZI DREAMING
ACROSS THE SPECIES BARRIER
A WORLD BEHIND BARS
LIZARDS AND LEOPARDS
SILENT SPRING
GLOSSARY
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that in my heart there is an invincible summer.
Albert Camus. Nobel Prize winner for Literature
Nature does nothing without a purpose.
Aristotle. 384-322 BC
PREFACE
We have reached a time when it is impossible to deny that the natural world is in big trouble. You would need to have been on a long-term spiritual retreat in one of the lost cities of the Incas not to have noticed that the world is slowly beginning to cook. Penguins and walruses queue for space on ice floes, polar bears contemplate their gradually melting ice kingdom and bird species that have lived for thousands of years are vanishing due to climate change, pollution and intensified chemical farming. Nor is it just the well-known iconic names like rhinos, lions, orang-utans and others whose numbers are plummeting. Hares, hedgehogs, cuckoos, curlews and the common house sparrow are all under the hammer too.
Reports, studies and anecdotal evidence all tell the same familiar story. One of our planet being trashed by multinational conglomerates who regard the earth’s resources as assets to be stripped and plundered with no consideration of renewability. It is insane of course, whichever way you slice it, because life on earth for all seven billion of us depends on a healthy, functioning ecosystem. But try telling that to the bespoke-tailored bankers and corporate moguls in New York, Dubai and London whose concern for the demolition of the Amazon rainforests and the pollution of the oceans extends only as far as the profits to be made for themselves and their shareholders. My own default position on this species was set a long time ago and occupies the same opinion I have for most politicians – that is to say venal and untrustworthy.
Time, most certainly, is not on Planet Earth’s side. Already the long shadows of extinction are reaching out to all corners of the globe touching mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and insects alike. But that is not a reason for standing around and doing nothing. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, it should be possible to ‘see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.’ It is a view implicit within this book.
For as we all know, there are moments when the natural world is a flat-out, wonderful place, reconnecting us, as it does, to something ancient and ageless within ourselves. It can come in many keys, major and minor, be it a lion roaring as dusk settles over the savanna, to a single butterfly pirouetting above a wildflower or a stone chat calling from a hedgerow in that most harmonious of landscapes, the Dorset downs.
Eden is still out there but it is shrinking fast.
SHADOWLANDS
The angels keep their ancient places –
Turn but a stone and start a wing
‘Tis ye. ‘tis your estranged faces
That miss the many-splendored thing.
– Francis Thompson
We had been following the elephant for nearly an hour as he moved unhurriedly along the lush riparian banks of the Uaso Nyiro River fringed by yellow-fever acacias and graceful doum palm trees. He was a monumental bull, wise and solitary in his ways, with one of his heavy, ground-reaching tusks broken off at the tip and ears like barn doors. For centuries, his forebears had trodden the ancient migration routes from the distant blue hills of Ethiopia, across scorching expanses of lava-strewn plains to the cool, moist network of game trails along the sun-dappled banks of this perennial river, life line of the region.
Bwana Mkubwa, Great Master, the local tribesmen called him and as he raised himself on his hind legs to pluck some choice cocktail of seedpods and fruit from a towering fig tree, he seemed like a symbol of an older and vanishing Africa. I watched with something close to awe, as rocking gently from side to side, he savoured the soft, pulpy fruit in the manner of a Frenchman relishing a plate of Valcuse truffles. No doubt about it. Here was a seriously epicurean elephant, devoting the sunset years of his life in pursuit of the Greek philosopher’s lifelong search for what constituted happiness in life.
Fifty or so years ago, at the time Mkubwa was born there were more than three million elephants in Africa. Then came the devastating ivory wars of the 1970’s and 80’s that reduced the continental population to less than six hundred thousand. Peace reigned for a time but now with the skyrocketing demand for ivory in China, driven by an increasingly affluent middle class, the wholesale price for raw ivory had tripled. Sophisticated poaching syndicates ensured that an elephant was being killed for its tusks every twenty-five minutes and the previously unthinkable idea of a world without them was moving a step closer. For the moment though the peaceful tenor of Mkubwas’s life in this demi-Eden paradise continued undisturbed.
I had set out shortly after dawn in the company of Simon Leneyapa, one of the camp’s professional guides, a young Samburu moran from the Loroki District whom I had come to know well from two previous visits. Well over six-foot tall and with his red shuka falling like a toga in a single fold to his knees, the entire cast of his features with their high cheekbones and firmly moulded lips appeared to be straight out of a profile of Caesar or Marcus Aurelius on a Roman coin.
The Samburu are a nomadic people wandering at will
across the land with their cattle and goats seeking grass and water and living much as their forebears did when the migrated down from the Nile five or six hundred years ago. Tall and aristocratic in bearing they have somehow made their way into the twenty first century with their traditional customs and beliefs intact to a remarkable degree. It is a way of life I have always admired.
A small group of elephants were moving slowly upstream with two calves, probably no more than two months old. Suddenly, the leading matriarch came to an abrupt halt and the females grouped themselves protectively around the calves. Lulled into the familiar semi-trance that so often affects me when watching elephants in the wild; I was jolted out of it by Simon nudging my arm, his index finger pointing towards a fig tree on the far side of the river. “Leopard,” he said softly. “A female. Lower fork, on the right.”
I reached for my binoculars and followed his finger, straining with every nerve to see something – a flash of mottled gold among the dappled shadows and dense green leaves on the thick branches, interwoven with clambering vines. It was like looking for a harvest mouse in field of barley and I might never have seen it had not the leopard considerately flicked the white tip of her tail. Places like this with plenty of thick vegetation to conceal their body as they stalk their prey are ideal for leopards and the elephants had quickly scented her presence.
Few animals can match the streamlined grace and beauty of a leopard draped languorously along the branch of some riverine tree. Indolence reigned now but I knew that if chance dictated she would hit the ground in a blur of streamlined power, arrowing in on her prey like an Exocet missile. Now however, was not the moment. We waited but she showed no signs of relinquishing her vantage point and after a while the elephants moved slowly on, the calves wedged behind an impenetrable phalanx of legs.
It had been two years since I was last in the NFD, during which time Simon had become a father and he had invited me to see his son at his family manyatta. We drove northwards under high, drifting cotton-bud clouds in an immense ringing sky. The Northern Frontier District, as it was formerly known, is a huge, sprawling sparsely populated region, the size of the United Kingdom, stretching north to Ethiopia and Somalia. Around us the composite smell of camphor bushes, myrrh and wind-dried grasses was laced with the aromatic tang of wild sage. It is wild uncluttered land touched by a spare haunting beauty, home to the beautiful, dry country animals of northern Kenya, oryx, reticulated giraffe, Grevy’s zebra and gerenuk, a small, graceful antelope with stylised eyebrows that browses for leaves on its hind legs.
During the drive Simon told me a strange story concerning an oryx calf that had occurred in his district, a few years earlier. It was an extraordinary, possibly unique, tale in the annals of the natural world. A lioness had been seen by a Samburu herdsman caring for a baby oryx. Wherever the calf went the lioness followed, a phenomenon that nobody had ever heard of, or witnessed, before and one which contradicted the iron-cast laws of nature.
A Nairobi based wildlife conservationist Saba Douglas Hamilton, born in Kenya and familiar with the area, heard of the story and set out to see if she could find them. With the help of a local game warden she discovered them lying side by side near a thicket recalling, as she later remarked, the biblical reference to a lion lying down with a lamb.
By then, this oddest of couple had been together for over a week. The calf could only have been about two weeks old and desperately needed milk, for until it is weaned at approximately three and a half months an oryx calf is completely milk dependent on its mother. Now, it was reduced to nibbling at leaves which it couldn’t properly digest and occasionally trying to suckle from the lioness. For the next few days Douglas-Hamilton followed them, observing the extraordinary bond the lioness had developed with the calf, grooming it and driving potential predators away.
Predictably, the story could only have one ending and it came with merciful swiftness. Weakened by lack of food after a fortnight of protecting her protégé, the lioness dozed off under the shade of an acacia and for the first time the oryx was unprotected. A male lion who had been tracking them saw his opportunity and the calf didn’t stand a chance. Opinion amongst scientists and conservationists remains divided to this day. But to the local people the story was clear. The way they told the story is that the lioness, whom they had named Kamiak, was barren and God gave her a child and one day, as surely as the moon rose in the African sky, the child would return to her reborn.
An hour or so after setting off, we arrived at the manyatta, surrounded by a circular enclosure made from a tightly woven wall of thorns. Inside, were several ‘igloo’ shaped houses whose walls, constructed with grass and leleshwa sticks, had been sealed with a mixture of cow dung, ash and earth from the base of termite mounds. Each evening, the cattle and goats are driven into a holding pen in the centre of the enclosure as a precaution against predators. But now the long-horned cattle with their lustrous flanks and clear moist eyes had long ago been released and, under the watchful eyes of young herd-boys, were grazing on the plains in a wave of dark chocolate browns and white and black. Cattle are revered by the Samburu, who have as many as thirty words with which to describe their assorted colours and a family’s herd are named and cared for as though they were children.
Simon shook hands with his relatives before taking me to see his son, a solemn faced two-year old swathed in a dark blue blanket, whose young mother greeted me with a graceful inclination of her head and a shy smile as she murmured a welcome. On our return, one of the elders was waiting to see Simon. He was a lean, spare, hawk-eyed man wearing a faded blue robe and carried a fly whisk. He listened attentively whilst Simon explained why I had come and nodded courteously for me to be seated. Stools were produced along with hot and very sweet tea served in enamel mugs. Mine was handed to me by one of the elder’s wives, an animated, bright-eyed woman wearing a necklace of intricately woven multicoloured beads and whose earlobes were weighed down with more copper bangles than I would have thought possible without causing them permanent damage.
I looked around me. A woman wearing a brightly coloured shuka wrapped loosely around her body was pounding grain with a heavy wooden mortar. Two young warriors were styling their hair, dividing each section into two and then twisting them, first separately and then together into heavy ochre plaits that fell below their shoulders. A donkey with two wicker panniers on either flank stood patiently beside a well around which young goats chased each other with stammering cries. The accumulated smells of wood smoke, goat’s milk, animals and dried cattle dung exuded an agreeable and reassuring aroma. A young girl walked by carrying a gourd of water on her head, her movements as graceful as any model on a fashion cat walk. It was very still, like the slow pulse beat of another world. I felt completely but pleasantly out of place.
From the corner of my eye, I noticed that the elder had broken off his conversation with Simon on water, milk yields and other vital community matters and was studying me thoughtfully. He turned and said something to Simon who shook his head, concealing a smile.
“He is asking how many cattle you have in your country.”
“Tell him I have none.”
Simon translated, listened and continued.
“What about goats and sheep?”
I shook my head.
“Camels?”
“None.” I was beginning to feel mildly uncomfortable. The Samburu, like the Maasai, calculated their wealth by the number of cows, goats, sheep and camels they owned. At this rate, I must appear impoverished, almost to the point of being destitute. The elder nodded commiseratingly in the manner of someone confronted by a situation, beyond his understanding.
Sipping my tea, I studied him covertly. There seemed to be an air of quiet fatalism to him. How much, I wondered, was he aware of the tumultuous changes going on in the world outside? Did he perhaps have a dim intuition that the Samburu way of life, was entering a twilight zone, a time of change and uncertainty and one in which the young would begin to quest
ion the traditional ways. Our twenty-first century world is one of dizzying speed and innovation, of instant, click-button knowledge, a largely 24/7 virtual reality showcase. Were the Samburu, with their society built on a sense of respect, now on the cusp of becoming part of the moral disorientation that distinguishes so much of Western society, with its relentless pursuit of consumerism? Would this community still be here in twenty or thirty years driving their cattle out of the enclosure at dawn and counting them when they returned in the evening or the young morani still plant their spear outside the hut of their chosen maiden? I wasn’t holding my breath.
On my return to the lodge, I found a note from the lodge’s manager, Ewan Laidlaw, suggesting we meet for a drink at the bar around seven. I treated myself to a lengthy and lavishly hot shower, relishing the feeling of the stiffness slowly draining out of my limbs after the long drive before taking a forty-minute cat-nap on my bed. The country I had been travelling through with Simon was exhilarating in its space and silence and I felt an immense satisfaction at having returned.
A few fat drops of rain began to fall as I made way from my tent to the reception. “The rain is playing with us, sir,” a distinguished-looking Turkana in a flowing blue kanzu, greeted me from behind the desk. “But when Allah is ready he will send it.” He folded his arms in a gesture of sublime fatalism and I nodded. The rains here were notoriously unpredictable and it would be another six weeks at least before they arrived.
Ewan waved and I joined him at the bar. He was, I calculated, in his early thirties, a second-generation Kenyan. He was tall with tousled brown hair and an engagingly youthful smile and wore a single gold earring that lent him a vaguely piratical air. I had first met him when he was assistant manager at a lodge in the Maasai Mara and I liked him. He was enthusiastic and incurably optimistic.
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