Possibly, the practice of the early explorers to consider all man-eaters as “mangy brutes” is better rooted in psychology than fact. Human nature being what it is, Homo sapiens are somehow loathe to entertain the thought that any mere animal would possibly want to eat them for food. For proof to the contrary, it is interesting to consult the excellent table compiled by Peter Turnbull-Kemp, the well-known South African game ranger and author, on the age and condition of eighty-nine known lion man-eaters at death: 91 percent of the killers were either in “good” or “fair” condition when disposed of; only 13.3 percent were “aged” and uninjured, and a mere 4.4 percent aged and injured by any cause, including man.
Aside from those lions forced through injury to a life of homicide, there are many ways that normal lions may take up man-eating. They may be the offspring of man-eating parents, weaned on human flesh and taught to hunt man as a normal activity. In heavy bush country men sometimes stumble onto lions that have no sense of humor. Lions may or may not eat people killed under these circumstances, but if they do, they don’t seem to forget how easily the meal was obtained and voilà, you have a budding, new man-eater. Look at it this way: why fool around with Cape buffalo and zebra when man is such a pushover?
There are many natural catastrophes, such as plagues and epidemics that litter the bush with corpses, that may lead to lions’ learning to eat man. The Tsavo man-eaters may have picked up their culinary preferences by dining upon the bodies of Indian coolies discarded along the railway line. Many African tribes still cling to the custom of discarding their aged and dying members without burial in the bush, which, when you think about it, is tantamount to teaching lions to feed on man. Lions are not at all above scavenging and take to moderately decomposed carrion quite nicely, thanks very much.
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Authorities have likened man-eating lions to homocidal maniacs among men; indeed, there are apparently some lions that kill just for the hell of it, but the most common cause of man-eating in Africa is the most obvious: hunger. If a lion is hungry enough, he will eat you. Period. Consider the recent case in Wankie National Park, Rhodesia, of the lions that in 1972 gave two white families a night of indescribable horror. Here is the story as I obtained it from direct interview at the time.
Len Harvey, a Rhodesian game warden, had recently been married and was honeymoon camping with his wife, Jean, at an old elephant control station near the Shapi pan, as natural ponds and flowages are called. At Shapi was another semivacationing ranger and his family, an experienced man named Willy De Beer, his wife, daughter, and her husband, a student from Salisbury called Colin Matthews. In a two-day period, three lions had become increasingly bold, even to the point of entering the camp and eating chickens belonging to the native staff. However, since they had attacked no one and were within the borders of the national park, nothing could be done despite their threatening behavior.
The second night, firearms locked away in accordance with regulations designed to prevent their theft for guerrilla purposes, Len and Jean were asleep in a pole-and-dagga (mud) hut. Slightly after 11 P.M. a large lioness leaped through the window of the hut, hurling Jean from her bed to the floor. Instantly the lioness bit her through the small of the back and shook her like a terrier with a lamb chop. Shrieking with pain and terror, the woman struggled to escape. Shocked awake, Len Harvey realized what was happening and, with the incredible bravery of the desperate, threw himself on the lioness barehanded, punching and scratching to make the big cat drop his wife. It did. In one lightning movement it flattened the man, driving long fangs deep into his shoulder. Still conscious, Len screamed for his wife to get out of the hut and run. She rolled under the bed and, hysterical with agony and fear, emerged from the far side of the hut near the door. Covered with gore from her wounds, she fled the black hut but, halfway to the De Beer house, she stopped, giving a desperate thought to helping her husband. As she neared the hut again with steel nerve, there was a scuffle of movement, and although she was a young woman who had never listened to anyone die, the sound that came through the darkness left no doubt that Len Harvey was beyond help.
Banging on the De Beers’ door, she poured out her story and collapsed. Willy awoke his son-in-law and sent him to start the small Honda generator while he went to the storeroom for the guns. In the light of the small plant he grabbed a Model 70 Winchester in .375 H&H caliber, and a Parker-Hale .243, both bolt-action rifles, along with a handful of cartridges for each. Fumbling, he loaded them both, jacking a round into each chamber. Locking the safety catches, he handed the .243 to Colin Matthews as he came up. Both men, still in their underwear, ran for the Harvey hut. The door was shut.
De Beer looked the hut over carefully. Seeing and hearing nothing, he called Harvey’s name softly. A deep, warning snarl cut the thin light of the naked bulb outside the hut and De Beer cursed. Still inside. He edged up to the window, a small, black orifice in the mud wall. The safety snicked off the .375 as the Rhodesian paused. What if Len wasn’t dead but only unconscious? A blind shot might kill him. He would have to be able to see the lioness to risk a safe shot. Gritting his teeth, he eased his head into the window, catching a glimpse of Harvey’s bloody legs in a thin bar of light. But he did not see the paw stroke that tore through the skin of his forehead and grated on his skull bone. A sheet of blood burst into his eyes as he threw himself backward, gasping in pain.
Most men who had just had their foreheads ripped open by a man-eating lioness would not be anxious for an encore performance. Willy De Beer was not most men. Directing Colin Matthews to rip his T-shirt into strips, he had the young man bind the wound to keep the blood out of his eyes. Shortening up on the rifle, he approached the window once more. Waves of agony made him gag and wobble, but he pushed the rifle barrel through the window again. This time the lioness was ready and waiting for him. She lashed out of the blackness and caught De Beer behind the head at the base of the skull, the two-inch talons driving to bone and holding him like great fishhooks. The cat tried to drag him into the hut with her, but De Beer screamed, let the rifle fall through the window into the hut, and, gripping the edges of the opening with both hands, tried to push away. The lioness’ breath gagged him as she tried to get his face into her mouth, but, because the paw she was holding him with was in the way, she failed. The man-eater gave a terrific tug and the claws ripped forward, tearing De Beer’s scalp loose from his skull until it hung over his face like a dripping, hairy, red beret. The man fell backward onto the ground, and the lioness immediately launched herself through the window after him, landing on his prostrate body.
Although barely conscious, Willy De Beer had the presence of mind to try to cover his mutilated head with his hands, a feat he accomplished just as the man-eater grabbed his head in her jaws and started to drag him away. Perhaps covering his head was a conscious gesture, perhaps reflex. Whichever, it probably saved his life. As the lioness lay chewing on his head, she may have thought that the crushing sounds she heard beneath her teeth were the breaking of the skull bone instead of those of the man’s hands and fingers. De Beer, completely blind and helpless, could only scream as the lioness ate him alive.
Ten feet away, petrified with terror, Colin Matthews stood watching the cat ravage his father-in-law. In his white-knuckled fists was the .243 rifle, loaded with four 100-grain soft-point slugs and a fifth in the chamber. Colin could have easily shot the man-eater, but he did not. Never having fired a rifle before, he did not know where the safety catch was or even that there was one. As he fought with the little Parker-Hale to make it fire, the incredible, unbelievable, unthinkable happened: Colin Matthews put his foot into a galvanized bucket hidden in the shadows, lost his balance, and fell, dropping the precious rifle.
The lioness looked up, her bloody mouth twisted into a snarl. She had been too busy with Willy De Beer to realize Matthews’ presence but suddenly dropped the ranger and, with a hair-raising roar, charged the prostrate boy. Matthews was still struggling to remove the bucket f
rom his foot when the lioness slammed into him. As if in a dream, he shoved his right arm as far as it would go into the enraged animal’s mouth, the wood-rasp tongue tight in his fist. White flares of agony rocketed up his arm as the powerful teeth met against his bones, crushing them like pretzel sticks.
Slowly the blind, semiconscious De Beer realized that the great weight was gone, that the lioness wasn’t biting him anymore. As from a long distance, he could hear Colin shrieking over his pain. He rolled over, face-up on the dirt, listening to the lion chewing on the young man. Automatically his crushed hands began to feel around for a weapon, anything. His broken fingers touched something hard: in a flash he realized that it was a rifle barrel, the fallen .243. Ignoring the agony of broken bones, he tried to grasp it. It seemed stuck. It dawned on him that the lioness must be standing on the stock. Somehow he tugged it free, the sudden release making him fall backward. Awkwardly, he reversed the rifle, found the safety, and, still unseeing, listened to determine where to fire. By the sounds, the lioness was standing over Colin’s body. He triggered the first shot, then, as fast as his smashed hands could work the bolt action, fired twice more. Silence blanketed the camp.
“Colin! Are you all right? Colin!”
“Yes, Dad, I’m all right,” answered a pain-tight voice. “But you’ve shot my hand off.”
Before De Beer could answer, Matthews gave another scream, which mixed with a grunt from the dying lioness. In her death throes, she had moved down the young man’s body and, in a final reflex, bitten the kneecap completely off Colin’s leg. On De Beer’s legs and Matthew’s eyes, they staggered back to the house where Mrs. De Beer drove the thirty miles to Main Camp, Wankie, for the Rhodesian army helicopter that evacuated the victims at five the next morning.
Rescuers found Len Harvey’s body where it lay in the hut, partially eaten by the lioness. He was buried the next day. A post-mortem on the lioness revealed no reason for her attack beyond hunger. Her stomach contained a small snake, a wad of chicken feathers, and most of Len Harvey’s face. The first shot fired by De Beer had caught her in the lungs, the second in the shoulder, and the third, traveling at a muzzle velocity of 3,000 feet per second, pierced the cat’s right cheek, completely smashed Colin’s hand and knuckles, which were inside the lioness’ mouth, and then passed harmlessly through the left cheek. An inch or so higher or lower would have broken either her upper or lower jaw and prevented her from snapping off Colin’s kneecap a few seconds later. The luck of the draw.
Willy De Beer, surprisingly, survived his wounds. He had 222 stitches in his head alone and immense skin and bone grafting work on both head and hands. Two months after the attack his head was still swollen twice the normal size, and he continued to suffer from dizziness and ringing in the ears. Colin Matthews has had many operations on his hand, but it is not expected to be of much use to him again. His knee may someday support his weight once more, but that won’t be determined until years of grafting operations have been completed. Widow Jean Harvey recovered from her bites, if not her nightmares, and was released from the hospital within two months of the tragic night.
I have often wondered what became of the two other starving lions that were reported as accompanying the lioness that killed Len Harvey. They have not been heard from. Yet.
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Hunger can, of course, have many causes. As previously mentioned there are some lions injured or aged past the point where they can take their natural prey and therefore turn to man. Hunting conditions, such as the scarcity of game in an area or very high and dense grass after a wet season making hunting difficult, may also be responsible. Although it is almost a cardinal rule that a man-eating lion, once established in his profession, will kill and feed on man to the exclusion of other prey, there is one area of Africa where man-eating is decidedly seasonal. In the grasslands of Tanzania and parts of Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique) as well as in Malawi (formerly Nyasaland), man-eating activity rises to a crescendo when high grass inhibits normal hunting for lions. Yet, taking Africa as a whole, this behavior is definitely exceptional.
The brazen dedication of the experienced man-eating lion to his art can be spine chilling. Just as a normal lion learns techniques of killing and hunting animal prey in specific manners, so does the man-eater develop a modus operandi for catching humans. The fact that a man-eating feline is the most difficult animal in the world to hunt can be explained by the cat’s ability to learn well and quickly. As most men who have written about the hunting of man-eaters have confirmed, the majority of really high-scoring lions have been hunted badly by an amateur or clumsy professional before. Most often it’s an amateur because you don’t live very long as a pro if you get careless. The first time a lion returns to a human kill to finish his meal and receives a whiplash of bullet from a bad shot, you can bet the beer money he won’t make the same mistake twice. If you can catch him the first time and make an effective shot, you will end his career right there. But if you blow it, it may cost many dozens of lives before you have another chance.
Just as he does when hunting zebra or wildebeest, a lion, having chosen a victim, will usually stick with his choice, no matter how many other animals pass within easier reach. The singlemindedness of a man-eater was amply demonstrated by C. A. W. Guggisberg in his definitive work on lions, Simba. In the vicinity of Fort Mangoche there was an isolated hut some hundred yards from the main village. At dusk one evening a woman was mixing a meal of posho while her husband sat nearby chanting, playing a small drum. A large male lion had been stalking him from cover and charged, grabbing him, presumably in the chest, with its teeth. He managed to shout that a lion had him, and his wife bravely snatched up a flaming stick from the campfire and beat the lion in the face with it. Surprised at her audacity, the cat dropped the man, and the woman was able to pull him into the hut, closing and jamming the door shut. Unfortunately, her heroism was for naught since the man died shortly from his wounds. Seconds later, as the woman sat mourning her husband, she was terrified to hear the lion scratching at the hut. Many times the animal tried to break in, and finally the woman’s nerve broke. Snatching up a new flaming brand, she opened the door and ran for the village, right past the lion, who let her go. The lion simply walked into the hut, dragged out the body of the man, and carried it off to eat.
When a man-eating lion takes a human from a hut or from a ring of sleepers around a campfire, it is usually by the method of a bite in the skull, which causes instant death. Curiously, there have been many cases of lions actually stepping over one man to pick another, like a bored matron at the canapé platter of a cocktail party. Sometimes, however, the victim is grasped by the body and dragged off to be eaten alive. A “big” bite in the thoracic region by a lion is almost sure death, but victims caught by a shoulder or leg can live a long time in the most unspeakable horror and agony. Hans Besser, a German hunter early in this century, told of a missionary of the White Fathers in Tanganyika being carried off and taking fifteen minutes to die while the lion ate him. Nobody had the nerve to go to his aid. In East Africa there are several cases recorded of a lion eating his victim within the sight of paralyzed onlookers.
I still get the old flutter-guts when I recall the night in Ngamiland, Botswana, in 1970 when I was sharing a tent with Daryll Dandridge, a fellow professional hunter at the time with Ker, Downey, and Selby Safaris, Ltd. Our camp was pitched hard on the edges of the Okavango Swamp, and, the night being warm, we had not zipped the ends of the tent closed. There had been lion noises throughout the night, but since we were used to them, neither of us had any trouble sleeping. I was shaving at first light when I heard a muffled curse from Daryll, who was sitting up in his camp bed, staring at the powdery dirt of the floor. Two feet from the end of my bed, where my head lay, was a very fresh set of immense lion pug marks. He had almost without doubt stood there to sniff my head as I slept blithely on. To add insult, he then had walked smack between our beds and out the other side of the tent.
Li
ons in camp are a fairly normal state of affairs in Africa today. I personally suspect that the increase of tourism and the expanded game reserves have taken the edge off the traditional fear lions have had of man since he first developed the sharp stick. If they have less apprehension about the scent of man through familiarity, I feel they are more likely to attack. In 1969 on the Luangwa I was sharing a hut with Brian Smith, a young professional hunter, in Mwangwalala camp, which was located about 150 yards from the main camp used by the clients. I had just poured a sun-downer and, armed with nothing more formidable than a fly switch, walked through the half-light down the path along the river separating the camps. I should have known better since Martin, my head waiter, had reported seeing a lioness with three cubs that very afternoon close to camp. A very attention-getting grunt sounded from the grass about twenty feet away, and a most determined-looking lioness stepped onto the path and flattened herself. I froze. The banks of the river in this area are perhaps forty to fifty feet high, and below them is one of the niftiest collections of large crocodiles and hippos you would ever want to see. My mind raced like a flywheel: What’ll it be, boy, lion or crocs? Interesting choice. I finally decided, after locking eyes with her for at least six months, that I would prefer the devil I didn’t know to the one lying there watching me like a butcher reading a cuts chart. I marked a spot on the trail that would allow me to go over the edge out of her reach. Slowly, and I do not misuse the word, I eased a step back. She came forward one. Impasse. There was no way I could possibly make it the seventy-five yards back to the rifle. Still measuring our relative distances carefully, I decided to take a step toward her. It worked, since she backed up, but not without some violent muttering. Another yard and she seemed uncertain. Well, I reckoned, double or nothing. I dropped the drink, clapped my hands as loud as I could, and screamed a very unprintable phrase, tensed for that long fall to the water if she took it unkindly. My heart hit the top of my skull as she growled and dashed almost past me to disappear into the grass. I did not make that walk ever again without a rifle.
Death in the Long Grass Page 3