Christian now went off on ever-longer safaris along the banks of the Tana and across the river into sparsely populated Somali cattle country. I spent most of my time looking for him and trying to keep track of his movements. He roamed far up and down the river, often coming perilously close to human habitation and its easy pickings. A couple of times I saw him swimming back across the Tana into Kora, his nose and ears just above the hippo- and crocodile-filled waters as his paws thrashed in an undignified doggy-paddle that seemed only just to keep him afloat. For the first time in my life, I felt the acute anxiety of a parent as I watched his reckless flirtation with danger.
At times like these I felt like a father to Christian but most of the time it was more of a fraternal relationship. We’d go on adventures together, following tracks through the bush, getting chased by rhinos and looking for dik-dik, lesser kudu and ringed waterbuck for him to stalk. We used to play games, seeing how close we could creep up on animals before they noticed us; this soon developed into real hunting. He got better and better and wanted to leave me behind because I spoilt his chances with my clumsy movements and horrible smell. Still, though, we spent long siestas lying by the Tana, Christian with a huge paw on my chest as I read a book or me leaning against him, watching the river flow by. We were lying in our favourite spot under the poplars by the mswaki and henna thickets one day when George turned up in the Land Rover:Joy had come to camp with some guests so Terence and I were both keeping a low profile. Christian woke up and prepared to greet George, then did a huge stretch and fell off the bank into the river. He scrambled up and raced off into the riverine forest and for the next two days refused to greet George, slinking off when he saw him because he was so embarrassed.
I know anthropomorphism is disapproved of but we did become extremely close to the lions and I could feel Christian’s embarrassment just as easily as his fear and excitement. Never, though, have I shared his eyesight – I’ve worn spectacles since I was a child. A few weeks later we were all in the same spot when Christian became quite agitated and crouched, flicking his tail, as he stared at the far bank of the river. After a short while we saw an upturned canoe being swept down the river; we hadn’t seen any strangers for weeks and were amazed when we had caught the canoe to see a small figure waving at us from the opposite bank. It was the leader of a party of people from the World Bank who had chickened out at the rapids and lost all their kit. We managed to rescue them the next day and indeed to recover most of their kit. One of them wrote a book about it and called it Your Lion Saw Us First.
In this period I wasn’t just learning from Christian and George. Other friends, too, had to put up with my insatiable quest for knowledge of the bush and animal behaviour. Ian Hughes taught me a huge amount. That summer of 1972 I went on two trips with him, one with his anti-poaching unit from Isiolo and another up to Lake Turkana with my girlfriend, Susanne Turner. In those days poaching was only just starting to be a problem but even then the anti-poaching units had to be made up of tough men who could track all day and ambush a poaching camp at the end of it. It was an exciting safari. I remember thinking that this really was the life I had dreamt about when I had first met Campbell Whalley, instructor of the Oates patrol back in Ullswater.
Lake Turkana has about as much in common with Ullswater as Garissa does with New York. Known as the Jade Sea, it’s a 290-kilometre-long lake in the middle of harsh desert. It’s the world’s biggest alkaline lake so there is nothing gentle or pretty about it. Wordsworth would be stymied to describe it but a few people have managed to convey the brutality of the landscape, the independence of its people and the inhospitable beauty of its rugged shores. Bursting with fish, its shores carpeted with crocodiles and wary flamingos, Turkana is a mysterious place where rock paintings and archaeological finds made by the Leakeys and others show that people have lived there since the earliest of times.
George and his old friend Nevil Baxendale had been stranded on one side of Lake Rudolf – as Lake Turkana was then known – when, in their twenties, they were looking for the Queen of Sheba’s gold. They had sent their donkey off with their porters and cook to walk around the bottom end of the lake while they had planned to sail across in an old canvas canoe. During the night jackals ate the leather thongs holding their boat together, leaving them stranded with no food. George had solved the food problem by shooting the head off an Egyptian goose on its eggs with his 9.3mm Mauser rifle at a hundred yards. With this and some tree bark they had found on the barren shore, they had managed both to eat and fix the canoe before making it to safety a few days later. I own that gun now and carry it whenever the occasion demands.
I envied them the gold search, but even in the 1970s there were still adventures to be had at Turkana. It was fabulous to see the places George had talked about still in much the same state as he had remembered them. So much of Kenya was changing so fast that it was good to visit the areas like Turkana that seemed for ever stuck in time. It was also great to get out of the camp every now and then and go off with some people of my own age. It wasn’t long, however, before I began to worry about George and the lions. In between the two trips we flew over Kampi ya Simba in Ian’s Super Cub and parachuted a crate of food and whisky down to George and Terence but it wasn’t enough and I soon decided I had to get back.
Christian was becoming ever more independent of George, me and the girls. He would go off on long walkabouts and not return for weeks on end. He had killed a couple of cows when the opportunity presented itself, a new departure that we couldn’t allow to form into a habit or he wouldn’t survive for long in the wild. Under normal circumstances there was no opportunity for him to take cows because there were none in his radius. It only ever happened when illegal grazers moved their animals into the area we rented from Hola County Council – but the fact that grazing in Kora was illegal didn’t mean Christian’s behaviour wasn’t a problem. Whenever we knew there were illegal grazers around we had to watch him very closely day and night or he might have been poisoned or shot. It was also essential that we knew when the grazing happened so that we could do something about it. The people who lived near Kora – in Asako and further afield – were incredibly tolerant of the mad white folk who lived with lions. They could have caused us enormous problems and had us closed down at will, but instead, although they were shockingly poor, they were immensely supportive and helped us whenever they could. It was important that we did not abuse that tolerance and reciprocated their trust by ensuring that our lions didn’t eat their livestock.
The Somalis who came down from the north were another matter entirely. They didn’t know or care about our work: they just wanted to use our pasture and would poison our lions without hesitation. Like the Masai in Tanzania and southern Kenya, the Somalis would push their stock on to anyone’s property and die defending their ‘ right’ to do so. The residents of Asako suffered terribly from this and the Wakamba continue to do so.
As soon as we realized that Christian had killed a cow down on the river, George and I set off in opposite directions. George went to meet the police and I went off to babysit Christian. I found him and prepared to spend the night in the back of the pickup while he prowled nearby. It was a beautiful night and I lay watching the stars and listening to the sounds of the bush as I fell asleep in the flatbed. When I woke up in the morning Christian was nowhere to be seen but I could see his fresh tracks in the soft sand by the river so I wasn’t concerned that he had moved off in the night. I went down to the Tana to splash my face and brush my teeth, examining Christian’s tracks at the same time.
As I walked across the beach, Christian came bounding out from behind a rock and jumped up at me. He flattened and winded me. Then he grabbed me by the shoulder and shook me. I shouted at him to stop but he took no notice. There was nothing I could do and soon I was really scared. He put my head in his mouth, rolled on to his back and started kicking me with his back legs, like a leopard does. After all this time growing up together, I suddenly gr
asped – too late – how powerful Christian had become and I was terrified. As quickly as he had jumped me, he dropped me and bounced away. Then as I was getting up he knocked me down again and shook me. I stood up again, legs shaking, heart pounding, and shouted at him again to stop. He didn’t listen and came for me again. I punched him on the nose as hard as I possibly could and he went bounding off into the bush as if nothing had happened. I was seriously shaken. Still holding my toothbrush, like an idiot, I stumbled back to the car, screaming at him when he came at me again. ‘ Don’t you fucking dare!’ I shouted, as he charged at me again. And I slammed the door in his face.
I was too rattled to deal with him there and then so I sat in the cab of the pickup, trembling and sweating until I had calmed down a bit. This was my first big fright with any of the lions and I realized I had been getting a bit lazy and complacent. It dawned on me then that Christian had grown up a lot since I had first met him eighteen months earlier and he wasn’t going to be with us for much longer. He was almost a fully grown lion: he needed to get away from our protection and to fend for himself in the wild. George had seen and heard him mating a couple of times and we knew he could kill big game as well as livestock, but he had always come back to camp for a drink, to see the girls or to say hello to George and me. I loved him, but if our programme could ever be judged a success Christian would need to set up his own pride independently of us. If he failed to do so it would be an indictment of our project, proof for the nay-sayers that you couldn’t take a lion from SW3 and expect it to thrive in the NFD. I sat in the car for two hours, pretending to read a book as Christian made greeting sounds and nudged against the car. At last I got back my courage, climbed out of the car and gave him a hug; he had been playing and there wasn’t a mark on me, but he’d given me a hell of a shock.
While Christian had yet to produce a litter, Lisa and Juma were both heavily pregnant and spending a lot of time up on the rocks near camp. Juma was still hard to approach but Lisa was always a darling. She was so easy and funny and affectionate. She always had a silly smile on her face and would come and greet me with a head rub the moment she saw me. Sometimes she would jump right over our heads, like Tigger in The House at Pooh Corner. Lisa and Juma had been much more independent than Christian and would go off for long periods at a time, hunting up and down the river together and swimming the channel to the other side, but they always came back for some meat or to have any wounds tended. They roamed up to eight miles inland, so providing water after they had been away from the river allowed us to keep an eye on them even when they were almost entirely independent. We first had to find them and then give them a drink in a cutdown oil drum, which we filled with water from jerry cans. Unless it had rained, the river was the only source of water nearby, so if they wanted a drink it was much easier for them to come to the camp. When they did, they would always greet us. Lisa would jump up like Christian and give us a proper hug, but after Juma had acknowledged us, she hung back and skulked in the bushes. She was perfectly safe to be around but she just didn’t have the faith in us that Lisa had. We had been tremendously proud when they both became pregnant by wild lions, even more so when Juma showed us her cubs in November.
As George had predicted, Kora Rock was an excellent place to raise cubs. Lionesses like to find good hiding places for their cubs, which are born totally blind and helpless, and they move them every couple of days for safety. Baboons, leopards, hyenas, eagles, almost anything will kill a lion cub if it gets a chance so they require good parenting if they are to survive, and moving them is of key importance. We first saw Daniel and Shyman, Juma’s cubs, in late November 1972. We didn’t go close, but it was wonderful to discover that they had survived and were thriving. Lisa gave birth in December, and the two lionesses helped each other to bring up their families, suckling each other’s cubs as lionesses in a pride will do. We named Lisa’s cubs Lisette, Kora and Oscar and were almost immediately invited to come and meet them by their fabulously laid-back mother. They had just opened their blue eyes and were tiny spotted kittens, only weighing a kilo or two when we first glimpsed them. Juma’s were slightly bigger and darker than Lisa’s, Shyman with a personality very similar to hers and Daniel more relaxed. All the cubs were wild, so we avoided making any unnecessary contact with them.
We were very wary of going close to the girls with their cubs, but when we didn’t approach Lisa she looked rather hurt. She would lick us and head rub us even when she was suckling. We could get nowhere near Juma and didn’t try: she was still wild as hell, which, given that restoring the lions to the wild was our ultimate aim, was a blessing rather than a problem. That Christmas we felt very pleased with ourselves. Here was the complete vindication of our methods. Both Lisa and Juma had mated with wild lions, given birth to healthy cubs and were entirely capable of living freely and independently of us. They were not vicious man-eaters, as many had predicted they would become; neither did they require us to feed them. Lisa and Juma had been hunting very successfully for some time now and it seemed that, as long as they were able to support each other, they would be all right whether we were there or not.
They had other ideas – independent as they were, we still had our uses. When the cubs got a bit bigger, the girls started dumping them at camp for us to babysit while they went off hunting each night.
George had told Joy about our success so she brought some friends from England to witness George’s triumph when she came to Kora for Christmas. Of course Terence and I were chucked out of Kampi ya Simba for the duration and set up a rival camp on the river close to where Christian and I used to sleep in the afternoons. I jumped on a bus in Garissa and went off to the coast for Christmas itself. I had a great time with my friends PA and Agneta – I had been staying with them in Malindi when I’d first heard of the job with George so it was wonderful to be back with them. I could see how much my life had changed, and that New Year I reflected that I really seemed to have pulled it off. Despite my lack of skills on arrival, I was now a useful member of George’s team and one of the pride. Months earlier he had written in my copy of his autobiography Bwana Game: ‘ To Tony Fitzjohn, Latest of the Pride, George Adamson, Kora, Sept 1971’. (It was stolen from camp in the eighties by a souvenir hunter.) Now I could look after the lions and track them. I kept the vehicles on the road and dealt with the local authorities when George was too fed up to do so. With help, I had even set up a little twelvevolt darkroom, which enthralled George who loved photography.
Kenya had just banned elephant hunting, so for the professional hunters who were on the coast that Christmas, the writing was on the wall. All game hunting would follow: they were soon to be out of a job. Although I had many hunter friends, I’m afraid I felt little sympathy for them then – but we soon found out that they were much better than what replaced them in the years to come.
When I got back to Kora I still had to stay out of Joy’s way so George and I used to meet up on the rocks before we went to look for the girls and the cubs. We had great trouble keeping them away from Joy and her guests but we managed. The cubs were wild and we wanted them to stay that way; the last thing we wanted was another Elsa. We soon found that it wasn’t just us who had been introduced to them. By checking the luggas in the mornings to read the tracks in the sand from the night before, we could tell that both Scruffy and Christian had met them. Around that time, when everything was going so well, George and I would often talk about how much help we should give to the lions after they had reached a certain level of independence. George – who had experience of it – was keen to keep them around, continuing to feed them and putting out water for them so that there was always something to encourage them back. I saw their leaving us as a sign of success and something we should be striving for at all times. But neither of us was prepared for the shock when Lisa disappeared with her cubs in early 1973.
We searched all over Kora. I went way inland into Ukambani, then headed off to the other side of the river and drove high up into
Meru, looking for spoor and asking people if they’d seen a small lioness with three cubs. Just getting to the other side with a vehicle was a major safari – it took almost a day with the nearest bridge in Garissa, a hundred miles downstream. George searched on the Kora side of the Tana and we would meet every couple of days and shout across the river to compare notes. Sometimes I’d take the little dinghy with its hopeless three-horsepower engine on the back. But there was no sign of Lisa. After about a week on the Meru side of the river, I had found nothing and set off back to Kora.
George and I took to following Juma when she went hunting in the hope that she might lead us to Lisa but by the end of three weeks we had run out of ideas. We didn’t know what to do. We’d been to all her favourite places, checked the luggas, stayed up all night calling her through a megaphone but we had never seen the slightest sign of her. We had even taken to driving around Kora with an increasingly smelly dead goat in the back of the pickup and calling her every mile or so. We were doing this one afternoon a few miles from camp when I saw a small lion cub walking across a lugga and into a bush.
I looked across at George and said I thought it might be one of Lisa’s. George harrumphed his disagreement but I jumped out to investigate. The sand in the riverbed was covered with the tracks of cubs – a good sign – so I pushed on further. The tracks led to a bush into which I gingerly stuck my head. There was an earth-shattering roar and a blast of hot breath hit me full in the face. I toppled over, falling flat on my back. I returned to the car, knees shaking and breath coming in panicked pants. George was chuckling happily and pointing behind me. It was Juma and we had disturbed her with her cubs. We hadn’t fed her for a while so I chained the carcass to a tree and we sat down to watch what would happen. They were all shy so we had to wait for a while, but after a few minutes Daniel and Shyman poked their heads out of the bush and tottered over to the carcass. Then Juma’s big head came out again. She looked around suspiciously. Suddenly, behind her, came Lisa’s three cubs – Kora, Lisette and Oscar – but not a sign of Lisa.
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