Over the next hour the lioness inscribes a large circle through the heavy riverine cover and incredibly, despite her wounds and the men following her, returns to the man she has killed and resumes feeding. Joubert, half-retching with horror and disgust, executes her with a shot from his .458 Brno, the 510-grain Winchester soft-point dropping the man-eater lifeless across the body of her victim. Inspection establishes that the lioness is in the prime of life and previously uninjured or disabled although very lean and, with macabre obviousness, hungry. A post-mortem on the body of Peter Hankin determines that, mercifully, he died instantly of a broken neck from the lioness’ first bite.
* * *
America in the last quarter of the twentieth century is something of an odd place from which to contemplate the fact that, contrary to popular belief, man-eating lions (not to mention leopards, crocodiles, and hyenas who will receive their due later in this book) are still very much in evidence in large areas of Africa. Due, most likely, to the Sea-to-Shining-Sea garbage we are force-fed by the Network Nature Fakers, including such prime-time pap as the happily now-defunct Born Free television series, it’s understandable that most Americans don’t regard the average lion as much tougher or more dangerous than Rima the Bird Girl.
And speaking of the Adamson lions, you might be interested to know that one of those cuddly creatures sprang upon an open car driven by one of Kenya’s top game officers, who was riding with his wife and young son in a game reserve a year or so ago. It grabbed the boy by the skull from between the unarmed mother and father and dragged him out of the Land Rover, severely mauling him until, somehow, the father was able to reclaim his son. At the time I was given this report by the father, who stayed several days with us in Rhodesia this past season, the complete extent of the boy’s injuries was yet unknown, although some brain damage was suspected. That lion still roams free. I was also given an unconfirmed report during this same conversation that one of George Adamson’s lions killed and ate one of his African domestics, a cook as the tale goes. Knowing the reputation of the man who told me this, I do not personally doubt the information offered, but cannot prove it.
There are several very good reasons why, despite the surprising number of maneating incidents that occur today in Africa, most are hushed up like an epidemic of social disease at a bible school. It’s the same reason that Florida Chambers of Commerce don’t go out of their way to spread the word of shark attacks along their beaches. One doesn’t tend to pack the tourists in when word gets around that there is an outside chance of seeing the inside of a lion on a trip through the Tsavo National Park. How many Detroit schoolteachers do you think the tour mongers in Kenya’s national parks would have signed up last year if word had gotten out about the photographer who was pulled out of his tent by the head and eaten down to his toenails by a solitary Simba with a taste for white meat? If most of the emerging, game-rich countries ever published figures on how many people are killed and eaten by a variety of carnivores within their borders, there would be a tourist recession that would make Black Tuesday look like St. Swithin’s Eve.
Of course, nobody knows for certain exactly how many people are eaten, the very nature of man-eating having a decided tendency to make evidence somewhat scarce. Man-eating lions, if undisturbed, commonly eat almost every vestige of their victims, even the blood-soaked clothes and shoes as well as the bones. Whatever may be left falls to the African Sanitary Department and, after even a few days, it’s difficult to examine a piece of skullcap the size of a demitasse saucer and state unequivocally that the cause of death was a lion. Yet, in only one six-month season as a professional hunter in Zambia, I learned of six definite cases of man-eating by lions in just one concession area of twenty by sixty miles. I wonder how many more there were who were simply reported as “missing” or, considering the primitive conditions of the more remote tribes, never reported at all.
Certainly, there are any number of cases of men being killed but not eaten by lions. Unlucky bwanas and unfortunate natives get pounded with monotonous frequency by running inadvertently into females with small cubs, mating lions, feeding lions, and the like. Wounded lions’ scores for homicide are probably about as high as genuine man-eaters, but obviously the moral considerations are quite different. However, unless you’ve promised your carcass to Harvard, the difference between being nabbed by a certifiable man-eater or having your face bitten off by an irate lady lion are, at best, academic. After all, if the lion doesn’t eat you personally, you won’t have to wait long until the vultures, ants, hyenas, and jackals do. Africa is astoundingly efficient in the disposal of protein.
The non-African attitude toward man-eating lions is typical of the whistling-in-the-graveyard humor of cartoons showing missionaries in the cannibal pot. Large, well-fed lions are drawn burping over a rifle and pith-helmet with the caption: “I never met a man I didn’t like.…” To nearly all of us, the concept of being eaten, actually eaten, is so remote as to be unthinkable. However, if you spend the best part of eleven years, as I did, living with big, live, genuine lions all around, you might discover that your balding head never hits your pillow without that little niggling of doubt. Just maybe tonight …
Man-eating lions have had an almost unbelievable influence on the continent of Africa since the first European explorers and developers began to open up the bush in earnest. A classic example took place at the close of the last century when no less a power than the empire of Queen Victoria was thwarted in its imperial designs by eight man-eaters who halted construction of the so called Lunatic Express, the Uganda Railroad, as it passed through southeast Kenya. The Man-eaters of Tsavo treated the project as one extended buffet table, their accomplishment having been to have eaten more imported Indian coolies than it took to film Bhowani Junction. These incredibly brazen killers finally had their hash settled by a pith-helmeted paladin working for the railway, a Lieutenant Colonel J. H. Patterson, DSO, but only after a period of several months of frustrating hunting, during which time the colonel very nearly got the chop himself on several occasions. His book on the episode is a classic of hunting literature and, due to its immense popularity, is still often available in used bookstores. The Man-Eaters of Tsavo has been so widely quoted in works about lions and man-eaters as to make a further retelling merely lily gilding, save to mention that, a bit after Patterson killed the Tsavo pride, a single man-eater of considerable talent took residence further up the line displaying, to quote Colonel Patterson, “an extraordinary taste for the members of the railway staff,” culminating in the catching, killing, and eating of the superintendent of police, a Mr. Ryall. Very bad form, indeed. The lion, as if he had a shopping list, entered a railway car and killed the man in the company of two other whites, one of whom the lion had to stand upon to reach the sleeping Ryall in an upper berth. He was later trapped and, after being displayed, shot.
Although there is virtually no area in Africa that has not recorded a degree of man-eating activity, some localities are historically much more dangerous than others. One of the worst is Central Africa, especially near the Great Rift Fault that crosses the continent perpendicularly. There have been literally hundreds of man-eaters reported in the area since 1900 and, as the case of Peter Hankin so horribly demonstrates, there is still not much of a shortage.
One pride, for example, the Ubena man-eaters, had been in operation for a full ten years before George Rush-by, a game officer of Tanganyika (now Tanzania), and one of the greatest man-eating lion hunters of all time, began to put the screws on them in their thirty by fifty mile range in 1942. In the two years of hard hunting he needed to wipe out the pride, the lions added an additional 249 human kills to their record. Imagine the number of people they had eaten in the ten years they operated unmolested! Four years later, in the Njombe District of Tanganyika’s Southern Province, Rushby was again enlisted to hunt the Njombe man-eaters, a collectivity of feline mayhem that, between the fifteen members of the grisly pride racked up a confirmed score of over 1,50
0 natives and colonists. And, remember, those are just the ones we know of.
The scores of other man-eaters in central and southeast Africa, such as the Mpika lions, the Revugwi man-eaters, the Chabunkwa lion that I killed, and literally dozens of others, less famous because of remoteness, have killed without question many tens of thousands of people in this century alone. All indications are that the end is far from near.
One of the most consistant danger points of this area is the Luangwa Valley of Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia), a northern tributary of the Zambezi and one of the better hunting grounds of Africa. The death of Peter Hankin in the Luangwa Valley came to me as more than a news item; I had worked for him as a professional hunter in the area quite near where he was killed. I knew him as one of the most experienced and talented professional hunters in all Africa, an immensely respected gentleman and a good friend. But, he knew the odds and they caught up with him. One night they nearly caught up with me, too.
* * *
I was on a twenty-one-day safari with two Italian clients, hunting from a base camp called Nyampala, an Awiza tribal area located at the juncture of the Munyamadzi and Luangwa rivers. It was near midnight on a cool winter’s night in July, and I was asleep in one of the grass and pole huts we preferred to canvas tents because of better ventilation when the weather warmed up later in the season. I was awakened by one hell of a commotion—roaring, snarling, and growling some hundred yards away where my native staff was quartered in similar huts. Grabbing my big, five-cell torch, I stuck a pair of soft-points into my .475 No. 2 Jeffery’s express double-barreled rifle, flipped up the ivory night-bead sight, and burst out of the door in my sandals and kikoy, a wraparound loincloth. As I neared the huts, I caught the flash of a big, male lion in the probing beam, moving off into the bush and high grass. Silent, my gunbearer, heard my call and stepped out of the hut with his brother, Invisible. In Fanagalo, our common language, I asked them what had been going on.
Silent had been asleep near the door on his rush mat, his brother at the rear of the hut. He wasn’t certain what had awakened him but realized that he could hear the breathing of a heavy animal just through the grass of the walls. The next instant a lion crashed into the door, closed and jammed with a stick through the frame. One paw ripped through the grass like shredded newspaper, the lion tearing chunks from the hard mopane wood frame with his teeth. Snarling fit to freeze the man’s blood, he tore away a section of the grass wall and squeezed his head through, right next to Silent’s waist.
The little gunbearer scrambled around the floor trying to find his spear without success. Then he touched something smooth and hard, snatching up a bottle of beloved Coca-Cola, a still unopened gift from the Italians. With all his strength he belted the lion across the muzzle with it, then again. It grunted at the blows and pulled its head back partially, then with a furious roar stuck it back into the hut. Silent hammered the lion one in the nose twice again until, probably confused by my torch and shouting, it ran off into the darkness. Silent finished the story sucking at the gashes on the heel of his hand that the cap of the bottle had cut. It had to be the only recorded instance of a man driving off a marauding lion with a Coke bottle!
Not much fancying the probable results of following a hungry man-eater into the dark, I gave Silent my Beretta over/under 12-bore shotgun and a handful of buckshot shells, sending him and Invisible over to the large hut where the rest of my staff slept. I stopped by the Italians’ hut to advise them of the state of affairs and was able to talk them out of their .460 Weatherby magnum elephant guns, figuring that a pair of tyros opening up blindly at some night noise with those cannons could well have tragic consequences. I told them, and myself, that the odds of the lion returning were pretty slim, but when I left, that hut was better defended than the Alamo. Pinching a bottle of cold beer from the condensation bag, I went back to my hut and lashed the door shut with a long piece of buffalo hide thong.
Anybody who is not at least slightly terrified by the prospect of a man-eating lion dropping by for a late snack is, in my opinion, suffering from soft spots in the head. I have no soft spots. I checked the Jeffery, shook the panatella-sized cartridges to hear the satisfying rattle of cordite against the cool, brass cases, closed the rifle’s action and, sitting on the bed with a cigarette and the bottle of beer, waited to see what would happen.
Perhaps an hour went by, a hell of a long time when you are sitting in the dark wondering if something big and hairy is going to burst through the frail grass walls and grab you. You will likely recall the sensation from your first childhood camping trip. There were the usual bushveldt sounds of insects, the wet swirls of catfish and crocs on the river, the honking of hippos and the sleepy chatter of insomniac baboons in the grove of fever trees over the ridge. Then, somehow, with prehistoric certainty I knew he was there, very close. I could absolutely sense him. The hackles were crawling around on my neck like a nest of maggots, and my palms were slippery cold on the Circassian walnut stock of the rifle. My heart slammed in my ears like Gene Krupa on speed as adrenalin pumped through my system. With my heightened senses, I could now hear the animal padding through the soft dirt outside the hut, looking for a weak point. There was a long pause and I knew he was coming. A low, incredibly sinister rumble welled up through the dark, and the hut shook under a heavy shock. Pieces of dry grass and dust shook down cloudlike from the roof into my hair and eyes. Frantically, I tried to locate the lion, but his roars drowned everything out, a solid vortex of impossible sound saturating the hut. Then, against the eighteen-inch open strip that ran under the flat roof for ventilation, a dark lump was silhouetted against the slightly lighter sky. It was the lion’s head, looking in, and I realized in a flash that he was crouched or lying on the roof, a flimsy network of slender poles and bunched grass. Two big feathers of flame erupted from the muzzles as I raised the double rifle, sighted on the spot where the cat seemed to be, and pressed the triggers. As the thousand grains of lead tore through the roof (happily without setting fire to it with muzzle blast), there was a tremendous roar that blended with the twin crash of the shots. There followed a scratching, thrashing sound and a thump like a meal sack dropped down an empty elevator shaft. I automatically broke the action and dunked in two fresh rounds from between the fingers of my left hand, the greasy cordite fumes stinging my eyes.
The thrashing continued outside the hut for a few seconds less than it took me to untie the rawhide lock with quivering fingers. The bare, beaten earth outside the hut was empty. My back flat to the wall, I swung the torch in a slow, wide arc, the dark, grape-jelly gleam of blood spoor reflecting in the lightbeam. I stopped and fingered it. Arterial. One pussycat that wasn’t going far. Forty yards away, collapsed in a heap of tan putty, lay the dead lion. One big slug had taken him from below at a slight angle, punching a cantaloupe-sized hole through his chest that broke his off-shoulder into atoms, the other just creasing his side in a long, red welt that cut the short hair of his flank like a barber’s razor. I released a very large breath that I had been holding for the past hour and wandered over to the dining hut for a similarly proportioned Scotch before the shakes arrived.
The whole camp poured out and came over to view the punctured pussy. The killing of a lion seems to excite Africans more than any other species, and this was no exception. I eventually declined the presidency of the republic and got to thinking about the consequences of having bashed this chap. Aware, from related incidents, of the Zambian Game Department’s policy on the killing of unlicensed game, I knew that the department would conclude that since the lion had not actually eaten me, there was no proof that it was a man-eater, and I was therefore guilty of lion poaching. If I had let it eat maybe a leg or two before shooting it, all would have been well. Catch-22, Afro style. One of the Italians kindly took it on his license for me, solving a very real legal problem.
Interestingly, a rash of killings that had been taking place over the past few months in an area some fifty miles upriver abrup
tly stopped after the incident. There was no proof, but circumstantial evidence pointed to the fact that the big, healthy, glossy-coated cat (who is now a full-mount in Milano) had decided that things were getting a bit hot where he was operating and moved south, just happening to pick the wrong hut for his first foray in a new zone. If he wasn’t a man-eater, what do you suppose he had in mind trying to get into Silent’s house and then returning to give me a try? Perhaps he just wanted to borrow a cup of zebra.
* * *
Over the years since the first Europeans began writing about African game, there has been a consistent controversy over just why lions and other Felidae become man-eaters. In researching this book among many hundreds of previous works that date as far back as the first decade of the eighteenth century, I have noticed one conclusion as to the cause of man-eating that seems to recur. Almost without exception, until the publication of Patterson’s book on the Tsavo lions in 1907, man-eaters were traditionally reported to be poor, broken-down, tooth-worn, crippled “brutes” who ate people for a living only because they had been injured by nasty hunters, porcupine quills, and the like. The fact is, it’s not necessarily true.
It is my experience and belief that there are many classes of man-eating lions. Although injured carnivores who cannot fend for themselves in a normal hunting manner may, indeed, turn to sneaking a native or two between meals, most people-preying lions are generally healthy, sleek, and often oversized specimens more than fit to pursue their normal food. Actually, all of the man-eaters I have shot or inspected after someone else killed them have been in the blush of health with the exception of one old lioness in Ethiopia who had a horribly deformed lower jaw, from the bone of which I extracted a two-and-a-half-inch chunk of iron curtain rod shot there by a hydrocephalic moron with a muzzle loader. I can only hope he was her first victim. Most of her frontal lower teeth were missing, but she still managed to gum fourteen Galla tribesmen with quite definitive results.
Death in the Long Grass Page 2