Sand rivers (14 page)

To get a rough idea how far a vehicle might get, we took a Land Rover upriver that afternoon, accompanied by Simon, one of the young Ngindo recruited at Kingupira; the other Ngindo were working hard to restore the Mkangira airstrip under the direction of Bakiri Mnungu. Simon was smart, able, and willing, and Rick described to Brian and me how a few nights before when the truck had got mired on the way down here, the rest of the crew had been satisfied with some makeshift preparations to extract it, but Simon had said, "No. If we're going to do a job, let's finish it properly!" Brian grunted, in mild disbelief. "When you find a chap with that attitude, you don't let go of him," Rick said. "I'm going to try to take him back to Kenya."

Though the broad Mbarangandu, several hundred yards across,was nowhere more than three feet deep, that depth was unusual for this time of year; Brian had heard from the game scouts that there had been heavy rains in late spring. Crossing the river to the broad flat on the far side, the Land Rover got stuck in mid-stream, and having extracted it by jacking it up and pushing hard, we continued another mile or so over the sand to the point where the next crossing would be made. There we abandoned the whole idea of Land Rover travel on the sands of the Mbarangandu: we would carry enough for a foot safari of ten days.

Because it was a lovely afternoon, we went on for a mile or more, wading upriver. Far upstream at the next bend, an elephant moved peacefully, walking on water. "Not bad ivory, that!" Brian remarked, then adjusted his enthusiasm quickly. "Nothing special, of course, not much more than fifty, I should say." Large groups of waterbuck nuzzled the green haze appearing on the damp flats of the river, and two lionesses which had been lying on the far end of the flats trotted away over the sand to the high grass of the riverbank as Simon, excited, cried out, "Simba! Simba!" At the mouth of a small river of white sand that came in from the north, a heavy lion spoor included many neat prints made by cubs; there were also the fresh pug marks of a leopard. Not far up the sand river, feeding placidly in rank green swale, was an elephant cow

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with a juvenile and a young calf, and Brian, seeing calm elephants close at hand for the first time since he had arrived in the Selous, sat down on a high bank and watched them in contented silence. He is obviously very fond of elephants (1 am, too; indeed, I thmk that anyone not fond of elephants cannot be of sound mind) and observing them, he permitted himself a fleeting smile, pursuing some elephant reverie or other, perhaps of the sort described in his own writings:

As already mentioned, elephants graze a great deal during the early rains . . . When feeding on this new grass they appear to get into a very contented frame of mind, and by moving slowly, even where the only cover comprises four-inch grass, it is possible to approach to within fifteen yards without much risk of being seen. The reason they do not see one is, apart from the abo\^ explanation, because when grazing they either close their eyes completely or else look down on to the ground at their feet, when all one can see of the eyes on close examination are the top eyelids and the beautifully long eyelashes.'

After some minutes, the cow's trunk stiffened as she got our wind; the trunk rose slowly in an awkward question mark. Then she hurried her young into the cane at the edge of the riverain thickets, and in moments the vast animals were gone.

Barefoot in cool shallows on clear sand, we wandered upriver. Overhead, a white-crowned plover - a brown bird when alighted and a white one when it is flying - mobbed a kite that had circled out over the sands, but the kite was ignored by the flock of green sandpipers, twelve or more, that was feeding along the edges of the bars; this was a migratory flight returning from Eurasia, the birds having completed the breeding season and raised their young. Sneaking up close to see them better, I was startled by the explosion of a hippo from a small side channel near the bank, not twenty yards away. At this range, one is very much aware that excepting the elephant, the hippo is the largest land animal on earth, and since 1 was between it and the main channel, I was damned glad that this one knew there was no deep water left in the Mbarangandu; it made for the thickets, where its huge shining hindquarters soon disappeared.

Water dikkops flew from beneath a stump and crossed the river, and a young crocodile, dirty yellow with black stripes on the heavy tail, thrashed off the bank and, seized by panic, skittered rapidly along over the surface before subsiding. Though we did not speak of it, all three of us were feeling that here on the Mbarangandu we had arrived at last in the Selous. In contentment, we strolled slowly back along the south bank of the river, pausing to investigate the twin scrapes that the rhino makes by rooting and kicking while scattering its dung. Africans say that God sewed skins on all His animals with a big needle and, becoming tired.

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asked the rhino, which was last, to do it himself; the rhino did not make a good job of It, which is why it has so many loose folds and wrinkles, and furthermore, it swallowed the needle with the job half-finished, which is why, still searching for the needle, it keeps on scattering its dung.

The hippo does the same, though its reasons differ. When it asked God if it might take up residence in the water, God refused, declaring that an animal so enormous would cat up all His fish and water plants and spoil His rivers. The hippo promised it would feed on land, and to this day waggles its dung about on bushes just to prove to God that it is going properly about its business.

Since it seemed quite likely that lions with small cubs were in residence where we had seen them on the river, Hugo decided he would spend the day there. Maria went with him, and Renatus, and old Saidi with his faithful rifle. Saidi was apparently disappointed that so many of the wa-Zungu (Europeans) on this safari were knowledgeable about animals and had no real need of his expertise; he was delighted that this young African, Renatus, was so eager to learn. Although Renatus could get a well-paid mechanic's job almost anywhere, he was happy to remain with Hugo, who not only told him about animals but was very gentle, like himself, and did not raise his voice even when their new blue Land Rover burst into flames. "I am lucky to know him," Renatus said, and Hugo felt the same. While the wa-Zungu busied themselves with notebooks and cameras, the old African and the young one watched animals together, and Maria reported that when the day became hot, and the animals were dozing in the shade, Renatus went straight off to sleep with his head on the old Ngom's bony shoulder.

That day the lions never appeared, but elephants came and went across the water, and Renatus was delighted to see a pair of Egyptian geese drive a fish eagle off their young, not just once but twice, the second time after the eagle had already seized a gosling: the disgruntled bird finally flew away and sat down beside the water, composing itself for a little while before deciding to give itself a bath.

Having pointed out this lion place to Hugo, I walked back to camp, perhaps an hour away, crossing the plain on the north bank of the river. In the early light, the fiery eyes of the lesser blue-eared starlings shone as bright as the yellow cassia blossoms in which they fed, searching out beans from old brown pods that had not fallen. On this windless morning of heavy, humid sun, I noted a shifting in the tall grass just off my route, perhaps thirty yards ahead; I would have been grateful for the cool feel of a rifle. I went a little wide and kept on going.

At camp I described the episode to Rick Bonham, just back from the bush with Robin Pope and David Patersou; they had shot a buffalo to feed the camp. Like the rest of us, Rick had been puzzled by Brian's insistence on armed escorts and on guns in the Land Rovers, but in his opinion Brian was probably right. "Men like that who have had encounters with a

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lot of animals have learned not to take chances; they know how very fast things can go wrong. He doesn't do it to dramatize things or anythmg. My father was a game warden, too, and he felt the same; you never caught him out without his rifle."

Rick's father, who came from a good English family, had run away from school and fetched up eventually in Kenya, where he found a job managing the coffee plantation of an old-time elephant hunter named Bill Judd. "It was Bill Judd who taught my father to hunt," Rick remembers, and Jack Bonham kept right on hunting after Judd himself was destroyed by an elephant. He also did some gold-mining, became an ivory poacher, worked in animal cropping in the years when it was thought that wildebeest and zebra spittle in the grass was causing abortions among Maasai cattle, and did some lion-hunting for the Kenya Game Department, which later hired him to crop elephants along the Tana River. Eventually he ioined the Game Department as a warden, assigned to the Tana River and the coast, and helped to make a game reserve out of the Shimba Hills, south of Mombasa. About 1950, Jack Bonham had been crippled when a cow elephant knocked him flat with a blow of her trunk, tried to tusk and kneel on him, stamped on^is leg, then picked him up and threw him into a thornbush. It took his porters five days to carry him in to Mombasa Hospital. Eventually his injured leg was amputated, and in 1971 he died of a thrombosis apparently related to his old injury.

That morning Rick brought me up to date on the wildlife situation in Kenya, which has undergone dramatic changes. Though Rick himself used to hunt a lot, he thought the hunting ban that was announced in May 1977 was absolutely necessary. "They had to do it, because things had been wildly out of control for a long time. Everybody had elephant licenses - they were taking them out for their grandmothers - and the licenses were expensive, but the price of ivory made it worth while. And for every legal elephant taken, four or five others might be shot by the same gun for the black market, and all this in addition to those being taken by the poaching gangS; they reckoned that only about 2 per cent of the elephants killed were taken legally, on license. Hunting elephant was banned in 1974, but the illegal hunting kept on going, and tons of ivory were still being exported, mostly to Hong Kong.

"Of course it was said that putting a stop to hunting didn't help much, that a complete ban on the trade in skins and ivory was the only way to control poaching. And it was true that months after the hunting ban those curio shops were as full of stuff as ever. But actually it did help a lot, because all the licensed firearms had to be turned in and that accounted for most of the amateur poaching. In the beginning, things got worse, because the professional hunters had known their territory and had kept a lot of the bush country clear of poachers; now the gangs moved in and operated as they pleased, and nobody in government seemed to care much. It wasn't like the old days when the Tsavo wardens were

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chasing after a few Kamba and Liangulu armed with bows and arrows. A lot of these new poachers were common bandits, especially the Somali around Tsavo; they weren't just killing elephants and takmg ivory, they were looting villages and shooting up manyattas and shooting people, too, if they resisted. It wasn't until those Somalis killed Ken Clark, down at Galana, that the government realized that it had to act."

On the day Ken Clark was killed, I was co-leading an ornithological safari out in the Maasai Mara, which in that year of good rains was green and beautiful and overrun with wildebeest that had wandered north out of the Serengeti; I believe it was that day, 3 August 1977, that our lucky clients heard leopard and saw lion, hyena, cheetah, and a wild-dog den with fifteen romping pups, all in one day. But down on the Galana Game Ranch, where Clark, a former professional hunter, served as manager, a gang of poachers was resisting arrest in a day-long skirmish that ended in Clark's death. As Rick said, a number of local people had been killed before that, but nobody ever paid much attention to the deaths of a few peasants out in the bush, least of all their fellow Africans. With the death of a white man, however, and the rush of publicity that followed, the extent of the poaching industry and its connections to people in government, including President Kenyatta's family and the highest officials in the Game Department, could no longer be concealed, and belated action was taken against the poachers, in the fear that the tourist trade so crucial to Kenya's foreign exchange might soon be threatened. In a show of force, several hundred armed men were dispatched to the Galano-Tsavo country, and some armed Somali were summarily shot in the hope that a few of them, at least, were the guilty parties. Just four months later, in December 1977, President Kenyatta decreed a ban on any further trade in animal parts, including ivory, giving Kenya's proliferating curio shops - an estimated two hundred in Nairobi and two hundred others elsewhere in the country - just three months to get rid of their stock.

With Kenyatta's death in 1978 came a symbolic end to the uneasiness in black-white relationships that had followed Independence: his successor, Daniel Arap Moi, regarded the survival of the national parks and the tourist industry as more important than the color of the warden. It was too late for David Sheldnck, who had died in 1977 not long after his removal from Tsavo East, but the present warden, Joseph Kioko, is working very effectively with the former warden of the Aberdares, Bill Woodley, who has now been assigned to Tsavo West, while Ted Goss, once warden of Tsavo West, assists a Kenyan Somali, Mohamed Adan, in the operation of a mobile airborne anti-poaching unit. With the new laws and anti-poaching measures, together with a few years of good rain, the game throughout Kenya has recovered so fast that there is already talk of re-opening the licensed hunting for certain plains game. But almost all of Kenya's parks have seriously deteriorated in recent years - beautiful

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Marsabit has been so encroached upon by tribesmen, and poached so heavily, that few tourists bother to go there any more - and could deteriorate further again with the next drought. In the thirty years of its existence, Tsavo East has been transformed from dense woodland to what looks like desert by excess elephant populations and drought, compounded by mistaken management efforts such as digging boreholes, which concentrated the animals and caused them to destroy the vegetation; both elephants and rhinos were already suffering a drastic decline before the poaching gangs came in to finish them off. When I visited Tsavo in 1969, both Tsavo parks had sheltered an estimated 7-8000 rhinoceros; ten years later there were thought to be no more than 180, with a figure of 1500 for all of Kenya. But now the ground cover has been restored, and some young baobab have started to appear. "People exaggerate the destruction of Tsavo," Douglas-Hamilton sayC "because they don't understand the extreme effects that shifts of climate have upon that thornbush country."