Predators I Have Known (14 page)

“Say, did you know that your front left tire is completely flat?”

My mind still reeling from the image of charging female lion and towering male, I digested this information blankly. While commendably pithy, I’m afraid my polite response to our fellow traveler’s query fell somewhat short of memorable.

“Really?” I mumbled.

The man nodded, his expression somber. “Completely flat.”

I looked at Ron. Ron looked at me. I looked back at the helpful visitor in the other car. The nearest help was at Timbavati Camp, ten miles away. Our concerned fellow travelers were not going that direction. They were headed due south and had a schedule to keep. What to do?

“Listen,” I told him, “when you get to Satara, would you tell them that they’ve got a vehicle stuck up here?”

“Sure.” The man hesitated. “Are you going to be OK?”

I nodded, secure in knowledge I didn’t possess. “We’ve got plenty of water and food. We’ll be all right.”

The visitor and his friends drove off, heading south. I could only hope that they would be as good as their word to report our situation.

We did have ample water, and snacks. Something else we had in plenty, and what I had not considered when assuring the other visitors that we would be fine, was the heat. As the day wore on, the tropical sun rose steadily higher in the sky. The hours passed and our car’s interior periodically grew unbearably hot. I say periodically because from time to time we would fire up the engine so we could run the air-conditioning. Of course, as soon as we turned it off, it took about two minutes for the interior to become stifling all over again, whereupon we had the choice of opening the windows or suffocating.

Meanwhile, off in the tawny high grass to the right and just in front of us, the remaining lions were quietly polishing off the last of the impala carcass.

Maybe
, I thought,
the man had been hasty in his appraisal of our condition. He had spoken with an accent. Perhaps where he came from even a slightly flat tire counted as completely flat. Could he have been mistaken? Were we sitting there baking in the African sun for no good reason?
There was just one problem with this encouraging possibility.

How to find out.

I turned to Ron. “Watch the lions.”

He looked back at me. “I am watching the lions.”

“No,” I corrected him, “I mean keep an eye on them. I’m going to check the tire.”

He stared. “O-o-o-o-h . . . k-a-a-a-y,” he said finally.

The road offered a certain amount of open space. At least, out on the pavement, nothing could sneak up on me. The remnants of the pride were a good thirty yards away and busily occupied. I tried to tell myself they would stay that way. Opening the door as quietly as I could, I gingerly put first one foot on the asphalt, then the other, careful to make no noise. Emerging from the car and straightening, my eyes were in constant motion as I tried to inspect the front end while simultaneously keeping watch on the tall grass on the other side of the vehicle. Needless to say, my inspection was a quick one.

Sliding as quickly as possible back into the car, I looked at Ron.

“Well?” he asked me.

“You never saw such a flat tire.”

“Then we’re still stuck.”

My reply was uncharitable. “Unless you want to get out and change the tire,” I said helpfully. “I’m sure there’s a spare and a jack in the back.”

He had turned back in the direction of the feeding pride. “Umm . . . no, I don’t think so.”

Another hour passed without any sign of an approaching vehicle, much less a tow truck or repair van. We were alone. The sun continued to rise. By my casual estimation, it was now at least 150 degrees outside the car and 200 or 300 within. The road in front of us stayed empty, as did the road behind us. How long would it take for our fellow travelers to reach Satara, inform someone in a position of responsibility of our predicament, have someone in authority authorize a tow truck or other service vehicle to start our way, and actually get here? Assuming any of that transpired, of course, and that the other travelers had not forgotten about us completely.

I pictured our erstwhile saviors sitting in the café at Satara discussing their day’s adventures and sipping cold drinks. I pictured the little streams of condensation running down the sides of their ice-cold bottles of beer or soda. I pictured . . .

Ron was suddenly sitting forward and gesturing excitedly. “The lion, the lion!”

What lion?
I thought. Oh, he must mean the one that’s walking straight toward us.
That
lion.

Expressive of mane, mouth open, tongue lolling, and weighing between 400 and 500 pounds, the pride’s dominant male had come out of the grass and was ambling coolly across the road toward our stranded vehicle. I hastily recalled everything I had ever read about lions regarding people inside cars as being part of the car. I strove mightily to generate around myself a dense air of inedibility. I also remembered that my window was completely rolled down. Our rental had power windows.

I stared at the oncoming big cat the way one does at other awe-inspiring natural phenomena like tornados or tidal waves: momentarily too paralyzed by the overwhelming sight to move. Beside me, Ron was hissing tersely.

“Get the picture. Get the picture!”

That moved me to action. “Get the
picture
? The hell with the picture!
You
get the picture!” The lion was very close now. Much too close, approaching the front bumper on my side of the car. As I reached for the button to raise my window, I remembered that the engine was off. The window stayed down. Frantically, I began fumbling with the key in the ignition. I couldn’t find the position on the rented car’s steering column that would allow me to activate its accessories. I pushed the key hard over. The engine refused to start.

I began to panic.
I was part of the car
, I told myself. There was nothing to worry about. Unless this particular lion was unaware of that bit of information. Spread wide, his paw would be large enough to cover my entire face. Or remove it. I struggled with the key, trying to watch it and the lion at once. If I put too much pressure on the key and broke it, or jammed it in the ignition . . .

I looked again to my right. The lion’s mouth, which at the now greatly reduced distance between us was as big as the mouth of a trash can and just as commodious, had drawn parallel to the car’s radio antenna. Something inside the steering column clicked softly. Whirling, I jabbed a finger at the button mounted on the armrest. Much too slowly, the window started up. As it was rising, the lion, attracted either by the noise or by the movement inside the car, turned his head in my direction. His eyes passed over me and for just an instant, met mine. I froze. All he had to do was reach up, stick a paw inside the car, and fish out the paralyzed food trapped inside. Dropping his eyes, he turned back to the pavement in front of him and continued on without pausing next to the car. I was just another component of the peculiar unchewable object on wheels and therefore of no interest. Or maybe he was not interested because he had just eaten.

Since I was already sweating about as profusely as possible from the heat, I can’t say that I noticed much difference in the amount of perspiration trickling down my body. But it would have been interesting at that moment to have taken my pulse. Had the window remained wide open and the lion been disinclined to conform to standard lion practice, I would not be recalling the close confrontation now. I would have joined the unfortunate impala on the afternoon’s buffet. My breathing eased as I watched the big cat recede behind the car.

“Did you get the picture?” I finally asked Ron.

“Picture?” He looked at me sheepishly. “No, I was too busy watching.”

I stared at Ron for a long moment. My fingers may have twitched. Then I turned the key fully in the ignition. I’d had enough of baking in the sun and playing potentially fatal peekaboo with hungry apex predators.

Driving at a consistent speed of precisely three miles per hour, we eventually succeeded in limping into Timbavati. There, a curious mechanic contemplated our completely flat front tire, eyed me disapprovingly, and asked, “Why didn’t you just change it?”

I don’t remember my exact reply, but I do recall that I managed to respond in words of more than four letters.

* * *

Tanzania, August 1984

AS TANZANIA’S FIRST PRESIDENT, JULIUS
Nyerere was admired by many, both inside Africa and out. Opinions regarding the rest of his government and many of his policies tended to be considerably less complimentary. Under the communist-socialist system he imposed, the usual inescapable afflictions of state-run commerce affected every aspect of Tanzanian society. Shortages of basics became even more commonplace than elsewhere in East Africa, industry stumbled along deprived of raw materials, and traditional African subsistence agriculture found itself subsumed into the familiar dreary people’s communes where no one is inspired to work one iota harder than they absolutely must to avoid the approbation of their fellows.

For years, a reader of mine named Bill Smythe had been imploring my wife and me to visit him and his wife, Sally, in Tanzania. Bill was a rodent control expert who had worked for various international aid programs everywhere from Fiji to Pakistan to Somalia and was, at that time, posted to Morogoro, a medium-size city about three hours’ drive inland from Tanzania’s capital of Dar es Salaam.

“Come on over,” he kept writing. “I’ll save up our gas ration coupons, and we’ll take a couple of drives around the country.”

This invitation finally being too tempting to ignore, JoAnn and I eventually found ourselves on a British Airways flight from London to Dar, with brief layovers in Cairo and Khartoum. As a harbinger of interesting developments to come, even these two brief stops proved themselves of interest.

Assigned to the forward section of the plane, we turned in our seats as in Cairo group after group of white-clad men and women boarded the aircraft. A number of the men sported ritual scars on their cheeks. Noting our curious stares, one of the crew proceeded to enlighten us.

“They all live in Khartoum. This is their shopping flight. There’s nothing to buy in Khartoum, so they take this middle portion of the flight back and forth to do their shopping in Cairo.”

Sure enough, when we arrived in Khartoum and parked on the tarmac, every one of the passengers who had boarded in Cairo promptly got off. As the last of them deplaned and the aircraft sat, I was able to steal a look out the door. No terminal was visible. In the warm desert night, the lights of the capitol of Sudan glistened in the distance. Driven by a steady breeze, swirls and whorls of sand danced across the runway while a pair of guards armed with AK-47s stood guard on either side of the rolling stairway. At any moment, I expected Sydney Greenstreet to arrive in a jeep and make a mad dash for the plane with an agitated Peter Lorre in tow.

Bathed in sunshine and carpeted with flowers, Morogoro sits at the foot of the imposing Uluguru Mountains. For days, we enjoyed Bill and Sally’s hospitality (Sally’s chicken-fried warthog is to die for . . . perhaps I should rephrase that: It’s wonderfully good), traveling to little-visited spots like Ruaha National Park. The finale of our visit was to consist of a long drive northward, in the course of which, we would visit several better-known national parks. At its conclusion, our hosts, unable to legally cross into Kenya with their little Subaru wagon, would drop us at the customs and immigration station at the border. There, we could walk across the dividing line and on the other side hire a taxi to take us to Nairobi.

Our first stop was Lake Manyara National Park, full of hippos, herds of antelope of several species, and the oldest elephant I have ever seen. Our next was Tarangire National Park.

Like every other business in Tanzania, the tourist industry had taken a huge hit thanks to the communist government’s inherent ineptness. Over the years, word of chronic shortages and mismanagement had driven away all but the most determined and dedicated visitors. In the course of our travels, we experienced firsthand just what a central bureaucracy can do to a previously thriving business.

For example, in the formerly excellent hotels where we stayed, lightbulbs were nowhere to be found. Staff had purloined every one of them for personal use or resale. This proved to be true of many hotel basics, from toilet paper to towels. At the spectacularly sited hotel on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater, we had to pass a small bribe to one of the staff to get an extra blanket. This was necessary so we wouldn’t freeze to death during the night because the hotel had no heat. Repeated attempts to order off elaborate dining room menus invariably met politely apologetic replies of, “I’m sorry, sir, but that selection is currently unavailable.” We learned quickly enough that instead of wasting time participating in this charade, it was much quicker and easier to simply ask which one of the sixty-three listed choices the kitchen actually did have on hand that day, and be satisfied with that. Compared to trying to identify an edible entrée, dessert was a simple matter. We ate more canned fruit salad than we ever had before or since.

At the Mount Meru Hotel in Arusha, the center of northern Tanzania’s tourist trade, we encountered something that to this day remains utterly unique in all my travels. Turning on the hot water tap in the bathtub brought forth an immediate gush of steaming hot water. Attempting to moderate it by turning on the cold water tap produced a furious stream of . . . steaming hot water. The same was true of the water that flowed from both sink faucets.

Talk about your surreal travel experience. A hotel bathroom that serves up only
hot
water.

The rolling hills and plentiful wildlife of Tarangire were rendered all the more stunning and memorable by the fact that the four of us were the only visitors. Having the park to ourselves made us feel as if we had taken a step back in time, to when visits to Africa were the sole province of the very rich or the very daring.