Another night in Sidamo Province, just across the Ethiopian border from the Northern Frontier District of Kenya, I was camped with the late, great Christian Pollet, a famous professional hunter from the Congo. By visual count we had eleven lions wandering around the trucks and tents at once, possibly a couple more in the murk we could not see. They stuck around for almost an hour, probably attracted by the odor of our hung meat, a fringe-eared oryx I had shot that afternoon. Our safari crew was scared white, but none of the big cats showed any aggressiveness and eventually melted off into the night. One, an absolutely immense black-maned male, was the biggest lion I have ever seen, certainly over ten feet in length. I have never seen his like since.
I am indebted to John W. Cox, my good friend and a noted sportsman, once the owner of such larger-than-a-breadbox items as Yankee Stadium, for permission to print an account of his adventures one dark night in the 1950s in Chad. It’s one of the more interesting lion-in-camp tales I have heard.
It was the first shooting day of Cox’s safari with the French hunter M. Cornon, and the party had driven all day from Fort Archambeau, on the Bahr Aouk, to their hunting area on the Chari River. Reaching their campsite, Cornon had some mechanical difficulty with the truck that hauled provisions, tentage, and such. Deciding that repair was imperative, Cornon elected to drive back through the night for spare parts. As Johnnie Cox tells it:
“We would miss him, but, after all, we were well ensconced at our water hole. Actually, before Cornon left, a group of nomads came to camp adjacent to us, so we had quite a gathering.”
“As night closed in, we retired to our cots and mosquito netting. I had heard lions roaring in the distance but thought nothing of it at the time. Although I was tired, sleep came fitfully; possibly the ever-nearing roar of those lions helped keep my mind occupied. A murmur of voices arising from somewhere in our camp indicated that I was not alone in my apprehension. Before long, these mutterings rose to a crescendo of gabble in a strange language which left me totally uninformed as to what was going on.”
“It didn’t take long to find out about the disturbance. The whole camp and our nomad neighbors broke into an uproar, people screaming and running all over the place. I looked out and saw the world’s biggest lion walking past my cot, growling in that low, gutteral tone they apparently use to scare things. It worked in my case. Those lions can’t do that for pleasure, because it has to scare them, too. There was nothing between me and that lion but a fairly fragile mosquito net, so I felt it incumbent on me to take a dive out the opposite side of the cot.”
“Where were my guns? Good God, we hadn’t unpacked them! I ran into Marie (a friend of Cornon’s) on her way to the top of a truck and implored her to find out where the guns were. She came through, and soon I was assembling my .308 rifle and shotgun. Where was the ammunition? Meantime, the whole camp and the nomads were frantically seeking higher ground. People were climbing on top of trucks, scaling trees and shouting in terror. Lions were everywhere. I was too scared to either climb or shout, but got some false courage by possession of my rifle and my over/under with pockets full of ammunition for both.”
“As I could see lions within what looked like biting distance, I started blasting away with the .308. They were dimly-lit in the semi-darkness of the camp. I didn’t hit one as far as I know, but the shots scared them out of camp. They did not go away, though; they just stayed out in the high grass adjacent the camp and growled. I wished they would quit doing that.”
“No one had been bitten. Marie, Marcel (Marcel Brochard, owner of the Studio de Bologne, a major Paris movie studio and Cox’s nonhunting companion), one of our trackers and I were the only ones left on terra firma. Everybody else was ensconced aloft somewhere except my partners, Steiner and Sherwin, Americans from Chicago.”
“What to do now? I tried to arouse those tired, intrepid hunters, Steiner and Sherwin, but I’ll be damned if they had not slept through the whole thing and told me I was nuts to wake them out of a sound sleep with such a wild tale.”
“I then entered into the stupidest misadventure of a mis-spent life. It seemed obvious that these lions were regrouping for another raid on the camp. I had learned in Asia that the best weapon against a thin-skinned animal at close range was a 12-gauge shotgun with magnum loads of buckshot. I beckoned to the remaining grounded tracker to go with me out into that black, high grass where all those lions were loitering. We started out to where a lion was grunting about 20 yards from the camp perimeter. Courage is a fleeting fault. We got within what seemed like inches of that lion, when he let out a fine roar, almost as if he didn’t like us there. That did it. That tracker turned and ran like a scared-ass ape toward camp, leaving me all alone except for one vocal lion. I passed that tracker before he got out of the grass.”
“In the security of camp fires and lanterns which had been lit, I just happened to check the shotgun in case those lions did return. Both barrels were empty! I had bearded that lion in deep grass at night with an empty gun! My dear, dumb friend, who had never fired a gun in his life, Marcel, had unloaded it without my knowledge. He thought it unsafe to have a loaded gun around the camp.”
“What remained of the night, I spent firing at lion noises in the grass with the .308. At least those shots might keep the lions in the grass and out of camp. Sometime before dawn, the lion sounds stopped. Apparently, the pride had left, so I went back to my cot and fell asleep, lions or no lions.”
“There was a large tree in our camp area. In the dawn light, that tree proved to be the residence of all the nomads as well as most of our crew. Nobody had any interest whatever in coming down until we found out what ‘gave’ with those lions. With a loaded rifle and shotgun, I ventured into the now-lighted grass which had so nearly proved my undoing. We found two dead lions, which were triumphantly dragged back to camp by the now-intrepid occupants of the tree. One of the lions had a shot which had broken its tail—a testimony to my marksmanship. Shooting a lion in the tail in high grass with a rifle in the dark of night is difficult.”
The fact that those lions were not driven off or particularly intimated by repeated rifle fire is fair evidence, I believe, that they were reasonably desperate. Presumably, since the natives were nomads, there were some livestock, camels, or horses in camp. Yet, the lions paid them no appreciable interest. Were they a man-eating pride? We’ll never know, but the odds surely tilt in that direction. At very least, it was quite a first night on safari for Johnnie Cox.
* * *
In a life of professional hunting one is never short of potential close calls. With most big game, especially the dangerous varieties, one slip can be enough to spend the rest of your life on crutches, if you’re lucky, or place you or sundry recovered parts thereof in a nice, aromatic pine box. Of course, many individual animals stand out in one’s mind or nightmares as having been particularly challenging or having come extra-close to redecorating you. One of the hairiest experiences I have had was with the Chabunkwa lion, a man-eater with nine kills when my gunbearer Silent and I began to hunt him in the Luangwa Valley. We came within waltzing distance of becoming still two more victims.
The spoor told the whole story. A rounded edge of half-moon was just beginning to creep over the black horizon as the lion covered the last few feet to the edge of the sleeping village. He could surely smell the human odor mixed with the smoky scent of dying campfires, urine, and stale tshwala beer. His preying eyes slipped carefully across the village, but all was still—none of the hairless animals in sight.
In a low, hunch-shouldered crouch, he slinked toward the rear of a darkened hut, his huge paws soundless against the packed red clay. He stopped. The heat of the African night pressed heavily against him, and, as he paused, the hush of quiet breathing came to his pricked-up ears. Flattened to the ground, he crept across the open space between two huts and froze into tawny stone as he saw the three huddled forms in the shadows against the side of a hut, near the dying embers of a small fire. He lay perfectly
still for several moments deciding which man would die, then began to flow through the shadows toward the three deeply sleeping men.
He passed the first two, sniffing softly at their heads, and stood over the closest to the mud wall. His jaws opened and the long, white canines drove into the unsuspecting victim’s temples, piercing the thin bone past the eye sockets, and sank into the brain like driven spikes. The man gave a single, convulsive tremor and lay still. Without releasing his grip, the lion tugged, gently pulling the body from between the hut and the sleepers a few inches away. When it was clear, the man-eater straddled the corpse and, holding it by a limp shoulder, dragged it across the open and into the blackness of bush.
The lion easily carried his kill for three miles, pausing only twice to shift his grip. A dark green stretch of towering conbretum loomed ahead in the moonlight, and the killer made for it, dragging the man deep into one of the tunnels of the tangled boughs. A single hyena had crossed the blood spoor and followed the lion, but a threatening rumble from the man-eater kept the other animal shuffling twenty feet away.
The big cat rolled the body over and, holding it down with his forepaws, began to feed. The scissor-shaped incisors sheared away huge chunks of meat from buttocks and thighs, the lion chewing with the side of his muzzle until his face and chest were covered with dark gore. By the time dawn lightened the sky there was little left, but still plenty to interest the hyena. The Man-eater of Chabunkwa, thirsty from his ninth kill, padded from the thicket to drink at the nearby river.
The safari season was over and I was puttering around camp, taking care of the last-minute details of tagging trophies and sorting and packing equipment when I heard from the district commissioner of the area, who had sent a runner with a note wedged in a cleft stick asking me to come on my SSB radio as soon as I got it. When I had the aerial rigged after breakfast, he answered my call immediately. We went through the usual amenities, the Thin-Red-Line-of-Empiah voice hollow over the speaker. I asked him what was up.
“Sorry to bugger your holiday,” he told me, “but something’s come up.… I thought you might be able to help me out. That bloody Chabunkwa lion chopped another Senga last night. The Tribal Council is screaming for action. Suppose you might spare a day or so to pop over there and sort him out? Over.”
“Stand by, please,” I answered. We both knew that man-eating lions didn’t usually get sorted out in a day or so. I lit a cigarette from the flat thirty-pack of Matinees. Well, I reasoned, I’m stuck. He must have already cleared it through my company or he wouldn’t have known I was free. Also, one just doesn’t turn down official requests from district commissioners, not if one wants to hang on to one’s professional hunter’s license. I reached for a pencil and pad.
“Right, Cyril,” I answered. “What are the details? Over.”
“Bugger hit the village just this side of the Munyamadzi—know it?—around midnight last night, so far as the report goes. Grabbed a young man sleeping off a beer bust with two others, but neither of his pals awoke. Smells like that same chap who ate the other bunch over at Chabunkwa, about five miles from this village. We don’t have any Game Department people in the area and it’ll be a few days before we can get somebody up from Valley Command or Nsefu. Can you give it a try before the trail cools? Over.”
“Roger, Cyril. Roger. I’ll leave in an hour. Shall I give you a radio sched at eight tonight to see if anything’s new? Over.”
He reckoned that would be a fine idea. We went through the usual jolly-goods and signed off. I whistled up Silent and told him to get cracking with the normal katundu for a three-day trip. Less than an hour later we were boiling through the growing heat and billowing dust to the village of Kampisi.
Kampisi looked like most in Zambia’s Eastern Province—shabby and dusty with a ragtag collection of snarling curs and tired-looking people, hordes of spindle-legged children who would not reach puberty. We were greeted by the headman, a born politician who always wore eyeglasses and carried a fistful of ballpoint pens despite the fact he could see perfectly well without glasses and couldn’t write a letter. Status symbols are as important in the African miombo as they are on Park Avenue. He treated all within earshot to a tirade on the lack of government protection from the horrors of the bush. I asked him why in hell the three men had been sleeping outside when there was a known man-eater in the vicinity.
“The young men thought it was too hot to sleep inside their kaia, Bwana,” he replied. “Also,” he said, shuffling the dirt with a big toe, “they were a little bit drunk.” He shrugged with typical African fatalism. Most Africans believe it can never happen to them, something like the attitude of front-line troops. The millet and sorghum beer the tribes brew and drink keeps fermenting in their stomachs until the celebrants pass into a comatose sleep wherever they happen to lie down. In this case the price of the binge wasn’t a headache, but death.
The headman pointed to the north when I asked him in Fanagalo where the lion had carried his kill. Silent whistled for me, and I walked over to see the pool of dried blood on the crusted blanket where the man had received his fatal bite. He had backtracked the lion’s stalk, showing where he had lain watching the village, how he had stalked the sleepers, and where he had begun to drag the body. I loaded my .470 Evans double-express rifle with soft-points and stuck another clump of the big cartridges into various pockets of my bush clothes where they wouldn’t rattle against each other. Silent started off on the now-cold trail carrying the water bag, a pouch of biltong (wind- and shade-dried meat), and his long spear.
The afternoon sun seared our shoulders as we followed the spoor into the bush and finally found the spot in the conbretum where the lion had settled down for his meal.
The prints of the hyena were over those of the cat, and the most we could recover was a tooth-scarred chunk of lower jawbone and some splinters of unidentifiable bone. Silent wrapped the pitiful fragments in ntambo bark fiber and we started back to the village. Too late. There was no point in continuing to follow the cold trail since darkness was only an hour off and we both knew the most heavily armed man is no match for a lion’s stealth at night.
Arriving back at Kampisi about dark, I had two hours to kill before my radio schedule with the D.C. I fished out my flask of Scotch and poured a hair-raising shot into the little, scratched plastic cup while Silent recruited men to cut thorn for a boma, or as it is called in East Africa, a zariba, a spiky barrier or fence to keep out nocturnal unpleasantries. I felt the first lukewarm slug burn the dust from between my teeth and form a small, liquid bonfire in the pit of my stomach. It was that sun-downer or three that made you forget the saber-toothed tsetse flies and the pain in the small of your back, like a hot, knotted cable from too many miles bent over tracking. Four wrist-thick sticks of the biltong washed down with a cool Castle Pilsner from the condensation bag on the Land Rover’s bonnet completed my dinner. I sent one of the tribesmen to fetch the headman, who came over to my fire. In a few curt sentences I gave him the succinct impression that anything found wandering around tonight would be shot as the man-eater, so he’d better keep his boys on the straight and narrow. He looked hard at the two asparagus-sized cartridges in my hand and decided that would be a fair idea.
The commissioner came on the radio right on schedule to report everything quiet, so far, from the other villages. “Keep on it, Old Boy,” he told me.
I did not think the man-eater would kill again tonight because of the size of his meal the night before. Still, I knew that there had been cases of lions killing as frequently as twice the same night and that, anyway, man-eaters have an uncanny way of showing up where least expected. To be on the safe side, I would sleep in the open car with the big rifle against my leg. Not overly comfortable, to be sure, but those two barrels contained better than 10,000 foot-pounds of wallop, which gives a man considerable peace of mind. I’m not the squeamish sort, but when you have just finished putting what is left of a man in a coffee tin for burial, it does give pause for t
hought. I had hunted man-eating cats twice before this experience: the Okavango man-eater, a famous killer-leopard, and a lioness who had developed a sweet-tooth for Ethiopians. I had come close enough, theoretically, to being a statistic on both occasions to never again underestimate a man-eating feline.
I rigged the mosquito netting and took my weekly malaria pill as Silent maneuvered the extra thorn bushes across the barrier. The humidity hung about like a barber’s towel, and sweat poured from my body. After fifteen minutes of tossing, I took another bite at the flask and dozed off shortly after.
You don’t have to live in the African bush surrounded by dangerous or potentially dangerous game very long before you develop a sixth sense that may mean the difference between life and the alternative. After enough experience, you find your brain never goes completely to sleep, but, like an army posting sentries, keeps partially awake while the main body sleeps. A parallel may be found in the case of the new mother who awakes instantly at her infant’s faintest cry. This reflex seems better developed in humans than in most big game, who have few if any natural enemies. I have walked up to within a few feet of sleeping lions, elephants, and rhinos, who never noticed me. But then, what do they have to fear?
I don’t know what awakened me a few hours later—perhaps a sound I didn’t remember hearing, but more likely that sixth sense of apprehension. I sneaked my eyes open but saw nothing in the pale moonlight filtering through the tall acacias. I lay listening for long minutes but decided it must be only nerves. Just as my eyes closed, the night was slashed by a shriek that would curdle Bearnaise sauce. Three more unearthly screams followed. I grabbed the rifle and electric torch, pulled the thorn fence away, and dashed barefoot toward the screams. The beam showed nothing as I pounded through the village until I came to a hut at the far side with the door hanging from a single leather hinge. A gibbering man was inside, his bloodshot eyes wide as poached eggs with terror.
Death in the Long Grass Page 4