Somewhere East of Eden

by Michael McKeown

  It has long been my contention that since such people clearly love the excitement of killing things, they should be rounded up and dispatched to some remote, uninhabited island where they are free to roam and hunt and shoot each other to their hearts content. They could even take their own taxidermist with them so that the victors could hang the heads and skins of the vanquished on the walls of their dwelling. Or, as an alternative they could be institutionalized and medicated to enable their warped minds to obtain a more discerning view on their fellow species.

  I was told by an English journalist who worked for several years in South Africa of a conversation he had with a hunter from Dallas. Fascinated, and at the same time repelled, by the litany of animals this man had shot both in Africa and back home, he asked him why he hung their heads on the walls of his ranch house.

  “Because they’re beautiful,” replied the man in the tone of someone answering a needless question.

  “So is my wife,” my friend told him. “But I don’t hang her head on my wall.”

  It is, of course, entirely possible, as has long been suggested, that hunters are sexually inadequate and the moment of pulling the trigger acts as a release on their repressed penis syndrome. Support for this theory came in a recent report which revealed that over seventy percent of a group of female hunters interviewed, admitted to experiencing a significantly higher degree of sexual fulfillment following a kill.

  There will be those who think it takes a special kind of person to think like J. J. Jackson 111. Sadly however, a great many belong to his church, a high percentage of whom are members of the Arizona based SCI and includes such Republican luminaries as George. W. Bush 11, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other apostles of US military ventures in the Middle East.

  Welcome then, to those of you who are new to it, to the wealthy, elitist, blood-stained world of Safari Club International, otherwise known as Slaughterhouse Club International. This club, which was formed in 1957, is a powerful, politically connected pro-hunting advocacy group that conceals its goals under a flurry of misleading mission statements vowing its dedication to “promoting wildlife conservation, outdoor education and humanitarian services.” As an example of poo-bah humbug this takes some beating, for what SCI does both in the wild, and through its lobbyists on Capitol Hill, has a hugely damaging impact on wildlife and wildlife policies both in America and at international levels. With some 50,000 members, 150 chapters and over $10 million revenue, SCI has the means to implement a wholly disproportionate amount of lobbying power, shaping state and federal legislation as to how hunting is defined and regulated with policies that are framed in the hunters’ interests and which negatively impact on wildlife globally.

  The non-profit group, In Defence of Animals describes SCI on its website as follows: “Clearly leading the list of voracious hunting clubs with an appalling callousness towards wild animals worldwide, is the Safari Club International (SCI), a hunting advocacy group that promotes competitive trophy hunting throughout the world, even of rare species, and not shying away from canned hunts, through an elaborate awards program. The SCI continues to create and feed a culture glamorizing death and violence globally, across political lines, international borders, and against wildlife and even people. Fortunes are made on the back of millions of animals, whose lives are taken by trophy hunters for the sake of killing in an endless spiral of competition for rewards for the biggest tusks, horns, antlers and skulls of hunted animals.”

  I don’t pretend to know the answer to all the questions posed above, any more than I can begin to understand how one can admire and at the same time be moved to kill, a beautiful, wild defenseless creature. Nowhere is the senselessness of hunting better conveyed than in the following remark by a girl, recalled by Peter Matthiessen in his seminal book The Tree Where Man Was Born. Her father, a businessman of narrow sensibilities, flew out to Africa and shot an elephant. Standing there in his new hunting togs in a vast and hostile silence, staring at the huge dead bleeding thing that moments before had borne such life; he was struck for the first time in his headlong passage through his life by his own irrelevance. “Even, he,” his daughter said, “knew he’d done something stupid.”

  Let me, for now, rest my case and leave the last words on the absurdities of these people to the Edwardian poet, Walter de la Mare.

  Hi, handsome hunting man

  Fire your little gun.

  Bang! Now the animal

  Is dead and dumb and done.

  Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again

  Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun.

  WHERE FOXES SAY GOODNIGHT

  Rest, nature, books and music……Such is my idea of happiness.

  – Leo Tolstoy

  “I’d like you to have a look at these,” said Simon Burrows with undisguised enthusiasm. He reached across the desk to his in-tray in which a young, female genet cat lay curled up asleep and carefully extracted a green manila folder from beneath her. The genet eyed him reproachfully, stretched herself sinuously and moved across to the out-tray where she promptly went back to sleep again.

  “She’s called Justine,” Simon volunteered. “I was reading the Alexandria Quartet when one of the night staff found her by the workshop with one of her front legs badly lacerated from a snare.” Burrows was in his late thirties, tall, slim and with permanently tousled brown hair at odds with his impeccably ironed olive-green bush shirts and biscuit coloured chinos.

  “Neurotic and unpredictable as well as beautiful,” I reminded him. “If she follows the script, you’re going to have your hands full.”

  “Think so?” He paused for a moment as though wondering whether to take me seriously or not. I had the impression that the last thing he wanted in his seamlessly run camp was an unstable, neurosis-ridden cat.

  I was with Burrows in the office of his small, eco-friendly tented camp, spread out under a grove of acacia tortillas in Tsavo East National Park. He was, I knew, a keen amateur photographer and I looked dutifully and then with growing attention at the dozen or so A4 size black and white photos of assorted animals and birds he had handed me. I was no expert on the subject but in terms of lighting, composition and a palpable feel for his subjects, they were exceptional and I congratulated him.

  “Only they are not mine.” He shook his head ruefully. “These were taken by a wildlife photographer based in Nairobi. Name of Hans Bekker. He is staying here for a couple of nights and I suggested that you two should meet.”

  As if on cue there was a knock on the door and a stocky, powerfully built man with closely cropped hair and an immediately engaging smile entered. Simon effected the introductions, then sat back and smiled benignly like a broker who had just negotiated a favourable deal between two of his most valued clients.

  “Hans photographs wildlife and you, Michael, write about it, so you should both have plenty to talk about.” He leaned forward and stroked Justine who acknowledged him with a flick of her long black and white banded tail. “We’ll meet for dinner later and you can tell me. In the meantime, if there’s anything I can do…….” But Hans had already produced his camera.

  “A picture of you and your genet, please.” And he began to click away happily.

  A mauve twilight was merging imperceptibly to dusk and the resident colony of weaver birds were noisily taking up their positions for the night as we made our way to the open-ended bar in the lodge’s riotously flowering garden. Hans ordered – a Tusker beer for me and a whisky and water for himself. We clicked glasses.

  “First of the day.”

  “Always the best,” he smiled.

  Hans, I quickly discovered was an easy companion, only too happy to share in his passion for photography and I asked him what had taken him to Kenya.

  “Simple. One of the oldest impulses in the world,” he said with a disarming grin. “You meet a girl, you want to be with her and you follow her.”

  He had met Carolyn, his Kenya-born English wife, when she was ba
ck-packing through Europe and they had married six years ago. Now, they had two young children and she was unable to accompany him on field trips as often as she had before.

  “But they are four and five now, so soon it will be possible for her to bring them on short trips. Carolyn is a wildlife aficionado like me and can’t wait to start brainwashing the kids.”

  As often happens, I was mildly embarrassed by the effort Europeans make to learn English, compared to the other way around. In the Netherlands, for example, English is routinely taught at school along with German and French.

  I asked him how he had become a wildlife photographer and thought I must have misheard when he said Sarajevo.

  He registered my surprise and nodded.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We have nearly two hours until dinner,” I pointed out.

  He had been working as a photojournalist with a magazine agency in Amsterdam. It was his first job after leaving university. Tensions in the Balkans had begun to spill over into what was to become one of the most corrosive ethnic wars of the last two centuries. A year after the Bosnian Serb army, under the command of Ratco Mladic, had begun shelling Sarajevo, one of the agency’s representatives was wounded by cross-fire whilst crossing the infamous Sniper’s Alley, and a replacement was needed. Even today Hans still had no idea what made him volunteer. He shrugged deprecatingly. “Maybe, I dreamed of becoming another Robert Capa.3 Who knows?”

  By the time he arrived, the Bosnian Serbs forces had encircled the city with their artillery, looking down on it from the surrounding hills dotted with red roofed villas from which they operated a non-stop bombardment of incendiary bombs, rockets and mortar fire on the residents below. All major access roads were blocked, cutting off food and medical supplies as well as electricity, water and heating. They lay siege to the city from the beginning of May 1992 until the end of February 1996, one thousand, four hundred and fifty-two days, making it the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare, three times longer than that of Stalingrad by the Germans in WW.11.

  “The only way in or out of the city,” he recalled, “was by military or United Nations aeroplanes known as Maybe Not Airlines because no-one knew until the last moment when they would take off.”

  “I had no idea how bad things were. If I had known even half of it, I would never have gone,” he told me candidly. He had been in Sarajevo for nearly six months and was looking to photo something different from the endless images of twisted steel girders and fallen masonry. But what? He did a series on children attending make-shift schools, playing in bomb craters, watching a puppet show performed in the ruins of the municipal theatre and, on another occasion, the efforts of an elderly woman who had set up a rescue home for abandoned dogs and cats. Then one morning he found himself near to the zoo.

  “A zoo in Sarajevo? There was still a zoo in Sarajevo?” I asked him incredulously.

  Hans favoured me with a sardonic smile. “Not one you would recognise. Most of the animals had been killed by the shells and artillery fire directed at it from the heights immediately above, or deliberately used as target practise. Others had simply starved to death. The zoo was almost right on the frontline.”

  “I found myself standing beside a badly shelled building of what looked a former stable and at that moment a man in his fifties with long, greying hair and a limp appeared down one of the overgrown paths. He was holding a hand-woven basket full of grass and leaves and tears were streaming down his face. ‘They shot her,’ he told me in a dazed voice. ‘Why? Why would they want to kill a giraffe?’ He looked as if he was lost in some Kafkaesque nightmare”.

  It turned out he was the only keeper left. One of his colleagues had been killed, shot by snipers three weeks earlier and another wounded. He indicated to Hans that he should follow him. The giraffe lay horizontal on its side on the dry, hard ground with no visible marks of the bullets that killed it. In the next enclosure, huddled together as though seeking protection, were the decomposing bodies of three wolves. Horrified at what he was seeing, and feeling vaguely guilty at the same time, he had taken photographs of the giraffe together with the wolves and some terrified looking chimpanzees in a nearby cage.

  Hans sipped at his whisky and pulled a face. He had wanted something different to photograph but now that he had he felt only a profound weariness. The keeper touched his arm and indicated they should move away. They were directly in the snipers’ line of fire. ‘It was people who started this war,’ he told me when we were safely behind one of the shell-scarred enclosures. ‘Not the animals and now they have no-one to take care of them.’ “At a time when everyone was thinking about their own lives and how they were going to survive, this man’s thoughts were about the animals.”

  Two weeks later he resigned. He had been in Sarajevo for nearly eight months and had experienced more than enough of the madness of war but it was the morning at the zoo that had finally tipped the scales. Like most journalists accredited to conflict areas he had a contract with a let-out clause. There was a steady turnover of reporters – a few from casualties but mostly from those who, like him, had had simply seen enough. “We were the lucky ones,” he said with a shake of his head. “We could get out. Hundreds of thousands couldn’t.”

  Despite his resignation, the magazine was keen to retain his services and soon after he returned he had been asked to travel to Slovakia to do a three-part feature article on the resurgence of brown bears in the deep valleys and ancient forests of the Carpathian Mountains. “And that was it.” Hans paused and spread his hands. “From that moment, I knew that what I wanted to do was to be a full-time wildlife photographer. I was completely smitten – hook, line and sinker as you say.”

  These days he worked freelance and was in Tsavo filming a lion pride whose territory was near to a stretch of the Galana River and he suggested that if I didn’t have other plans I might like to accompany him tomorrow. Do ducks like to swim? I didn’t hesitate.

  That evening we were joined at dinner by an amiable Belgian, Francis Bruyn, a marine biologist working on an EU funded coral preservation project on the coast near Malindi. During the meal, he told us about a guide whom he had gone out with a few days earlier on an organised walking safari trip in a conservancy bordering the Maasai Mara. Before they set out, the guide had gathered Francis and the other three members of the group and impressed on them the basic rules of walking in the bush, including what, and what not to do, if a lion charged. Four pairs of eyes regarded him intently.

  “Never ever run,” the guide impressed on them solemnly. “If it charges you, stand your ground and talk to it quietly.

  “What like Androcles and the lion?” a rude man had asked. But the guide ignored him.

  “Running only encourages it, so you must always remain still,” the guide repeated and added; “You can never outrun a lion in any case.”

  “It was, the Belgian said, the least likely to-be-followed advice he would ever receive.”

  By eight the next morning we were on the road. The air was deliciously cool and filled with the scent of wild flowers and herbs released by the early morning dew. Ground hornbills flapped clumsily in the undergrowth and a male impala with magnificent lyre-shaped horns shepherded his small herd of ewes into the treeline. A martial eagle, one of the world’s most powerful avian predators, surveyed the land from the top of an umbrella acacia. Through my glasses, I studied its hooked beak and fearsome hooked talons capable of lifting and carrying off young antelope, monkeys and even young warthogs.

  “Alpha-alpha eyesight,” Hans commented following my gaze. “A friend who is into raptors told me they can spot prey up to five kilometres away.” I reflected how I had struggled to read a car number plate from twenty metres during a recent re-driving test and decided to keep quiet.

  It was just before ten when we came upon the two lions lying under the dense shade of a jacalberry tree on the banks of the Galana River. Hans had last seen them two days before, a little way downstream.
At the time, he told me, the female had been shamelessly flirting with her partner. There was no other way to describe it, he added with a boyish grin. It was coquetry elevated to an art form as, purring through half-closed yellow eyes, she nibbled his ear and provocatively flicked her sleek rump at him before suddenly and contrarily withdrawing her charms, leaving him in a lather of testosterone-heightened frustration. Now however, their relationship had clearly entered an altogether more permanent and satisfying phase and they lay stretched out luxuriantly side by side like exhausted lovers in a French movie.

  The male, named Juno, had recently taken over the leadership of the pride, upon which one of his first acts had been to kill the two young cubs belonging to one of the lionesses. Over a quarter of all lion cubs are killed in this manner by invading males seeking to take-over the pride. This seemingly brutal purge ensures that the female quickly becomes fertile again and the new males can rear their own progeny. Knowing the score, their mother had removed them to an overhang by the river but to no avail. The new leader had quickly located the two helpless, and probably still blind, cubs lying where their mother had tried to conceal them. A single crunching bite on each tiny skull had sufficed.

  Harsh though it may seem, I knew that in killing the cubs, Juno was only following ancient genetic instincts buried deep within him. Sentiment plays no part in the daily, uncompromising struggle of the wild. The cubs belong to a rival male whom he had usurped and he had no interest in their survival. If he had not killed them, the mother would not have given birth again for another two years but the distress of losing her cubs would have the effect of bringing her quickly back into oestrus. For Juno, it was essential to sire as many of his own cubs as possible during his sovereignty of the pride. His dynasty alone mattered.