Sand rivers (24 page)

No doubt Brian is right in terms of game management; it is the necessity of all this "management" that I resist. One day I ask him if any of these fires ever occur accidentally, through lightning or other random events, and he says that he thinks it very unlikely; even if they did, they would not travel far. This poses a question that neither of us can answer: since it is thought that this "dry forest" is a recent habitat type, created, perhaps, by the fires of those early hunters who left their flaked tools on

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almost every high place and granite outcrop in this landscape, and spread and maintained by human activity ever since, how is it that such creatures as Lichtenstein's hartebeest are endemic to the miombo, since they must have evolved many thousands of years before mankind had fire at all?

As we talk, Brian makes an odd drumming with his fingers on a log, two soft beats followed by two hard, and noticing that I notice, he says "Mgalumtwe. That's the local dialect for 'A man has been eaten.' They drum this message on a hollowed-out log with a bit of hide stretched over one end: M-ga-LUM-TWE! The villagers come to the call of the drums, armed with spears and bows and arrows. Sometimes they harass the lion but they rarely kill it; it just goes off, more dangerous than before. That man-eater might be raiding in an area of a hundred square miles, which makes it very difficult to come up with, especially when you're traveling on foot. It might take two people in two nights in the same place, then disappear entirely for two weeks, presumably taking animals instead. Often man-eating is seasonal, during the rains; in the dry season, when animals are concentrated near the water points, these lion seem to prefer animals, returning to human beings in l;he rains when the animals scatter. But man-eating was certainly most prevalent where game was scarce because of human development; the lion that were unable to catch what game was left - especially lion that were old or crippled - turned to human beings. 1 remember one 1 shot, still on the man whom it had killed outside his hut and dragged into the bamboo. That lion was in terrible condition, half-starved really, due to porcupine quills and an infection in its throat that kept it from swallowing. It could only take little bits at a time, which was why it was still feeding on that man when 1 arrived.

"But most man-eaters 1 saw were in good condition, and they were wary. Baits rarely worked on them, they were too clever. You had to wait until the next person was taken, doing your best to persuade the villagers not to drive it off the kill but to let it gorge itself. After that, it wouldn't go too far before it fell into a heavy sleep, and I'd have a chance to reach the place before it woke up again and moved away. Tracking it, you'd find places it had lain down and then got up again, until it found the place where things felt right. Usually that was in deep thicket, and sometimes all you could see when you crept up was a patch of hide. Finally you had to shoot at that and hope the bullet would disable it. Otherwise, you might have it right on top of you."

One problem was the superstition among villagers that a man-eater must be a mtu-ana-geuka-simba, literally, "a man-turned-into-a-lion", a witch with whom it was dreadfully dangerous to interfere. This superstition was often shared by the local game scout stationed in that village or sent out to dispatch the lion - including the mighty Nonga Pelekamoyo, or Take Your Heart, uncle of old Saidi (and also uncle of Rashidi Kawawa, Tanzania's first Prime Minister after Independence, and

PETER MATTHIESSEN

currently Minister of Defense). This two-hundred-pound Ngoni - the one who had set fire to all the Ngindo settlements on Brian's first tour through the region of Ngarambe - was sleeping in a bamboo stockade m a village beset by a man-eater when the lion burst straight through the bamboo in order to get at him. Miraculously the lion seized, not Nonga, but the wooden bed that the villagers had provided for their savior. The lion actually dragged the bed clean out of the stockade, and Nonga Pelekamoya, managing to roll off, escaped unharmed. But afterward Nonga refused to consider any further dealings with this mtu-ana-geuka-simba, and turned the whole case over to Bwana Nyama.

Brian reckons he has killed about fifty lions, of which perhaps nineteen or twenty were man-eaters; the rest were stock-raiders, which usually got that habit from feeding on dead cattle after drought or plague. Asked if fear had ever been a problem, he thinks a moment, as if such an idea had never occurred to him before. Frowning, he says, "One is bound to be tensed up, of course, but if it was really fear, you wouldn't bloody well do it, especially after you've put a bullet in some dangerous creature only to have him go thrashing off into the thicket. Then you've got to start all over again, and it's a lot worse than before." He shook his head, and changed the subject. "I recall one lioness over here on the Mbarangandu that jumped out and scattered the porters, then came towards me. I knew she was not a man-eater, in a place so remote from human habitation; I thought she must have cubs, so I didn't shoot, just held the rifle on her, backing up slowly. She kept on coming, keeping the same fifteen yards between us, snarling and thrashing her tail. And then, when she figured that her cubs were safe, she turned suddenly and bolted for the long grass. Quite interesting, really."

"In the north," Brian says, "man-eaters are rarely a problem, but here in the south they still occur regularly. Not so many in the settled areas any more, because the lions themselves are dying out, and there is still enough game around to feed those that are left. But two or three people have been taken along that foot path" - and he pointed south -"between Liwale and Mahenge. Except for that porter at Kichwa Cha Pembe, I've never lost any of my people to a lion, but you have to be careful."

By nightfall the humidity has lifted, and the flying clouds part on a cold full moon. All around the horizon, as the wind chases them, the flames of Goa's fires leap and fall in the black tracery of trees like a demonic breathing from within the earth.

Lying out under the stars, we reminisce about friends we have in common. When first approached about joining this safari, I had been told that Brian Nicholson had invited along Myles Turner, now a game warden in Malawi, who had befriended me in the Serengeti in 1969 and 1970; this evening I expressed regret that Myles was unable to join us after all. Brian stares at me. "I thought it was you who had invited

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Myles!" he said. I shake my head: I had been told that Myles was an old friend of Brian, and the suggestion was made that I could get a lot of good material sitting around the campfire at night listening to the two wardens talk about the late great days when the native knew his place. Although Brian knows that I am teasing him, he grins.

"Well, I've known Myles for a long time, that's true; I've known him since about 1948. Good hunter, too - very patient and painstaking. And as I recall, the first gun I possessed, some sort of air gun, once belonged to Myles. But I can't imagine what Myles and I would have reminisced about; never did one thing together that I can recall. Last year Myles was in Nairobi, and I asked him to stop by the house, talk over this safari. He said he was very busy, had to go to Nyeri and so forth, and as it turned out, he had no time for me when he got back. Can't say I was surprised when the news came that he couldn't get leave after all. In the old days, when he was a warden in the Serengeti, he used to say, 'I'd give anything to get down there and see that bit of Africa of yours.' I invited him, and more than once, but he never came."

Another friend of Brian in the early ^ays was a young Provincial Forest officer named John Blower, a wanderer whom I crossed paths with many years later, in Ethiopia, and again, years after that, in Nepal. Blower had been fascinated by the possibilities of the Selous and thought that the Lung'onyo River region might be best protected by making it part of the Forest Reserve. At one point, he made what Brian calls "a hell of a trek" from the Kingupira region west to the Ulanga River, then south to Shuguli Falls, then up the Luwegu River to Mkangira, and from there back to Liwale. "Half-killed his porters. He'd set out in the morning and never look back, and some of these chaps were still turning up weeks later. Couldn't hire a porter around the Liwale area for six months afterward." Hearing of this, lonides had been furious that a walk through the Selous should have been made without his permission, and subsequently, at some sort of Game Department function in Arusha, he asked a young man if he had ever come across "this bastard Blower". It was Blower himself, of course, whom he addressed, and after a decent interval, they became great friends.

In 1953 Nicholson was summoned to Kenya to serve with the Kenya Police Reserve, patrolling against Mau Mau terrorists around Nanyuki. By 1954, when he was called a second time, the hard-core Mau Mau had retreated up into the Aberdares, and Brian served with the Kenya Regiment in field intelligence operations about twenty miles northwest of Nairobi, where he participated in the "pseudo-gang" operations. "We'd black our faces and go out at night, wearing old clothes, and an African whom the Mau Mau did not know had turned against them would lead us straight into their camp. He'd do the talking to get us past the guard, and once we got into the middle of them, we'd shoot the place to pieces. That's what really won the war; it completely confused them, they never

PETER MATTHIESSEN

knew who was for them and who wasn't, and there were cases toward the end in which two genuine Mau Mau gangs were shooting up each other. John Blower was sent up there on the same thmg, though I didn't see him. I was with Billy Woodley and several others; we were very close friends in school, Billy and me, and we still are." Remembering something, Brian smiles. "When we were kids, we used to go hunting out on the Aathi Plain, where Embakasi Airport is today. One day we were trying to stalk some tommies, using cattle to cover our approach - no luck at all. Then more cattle came along led by a prize white heifer, and damned if 1 didn't forget that gun was loaded. I said to Billy, If that was a buffalo, this is how I'd shoot it-BLAM! Down it went! That must have been thirty-five years ago!" As Brian says this, he sits straight up, more startled by the passage of time than by the trouble he had brought upon himself with that fatal shot.

At dawn, the smoke of Goa's fires has gone, the air is clean and cool, with the wind from the southeast; the prevailing weathers all across East Africa derive from these easterly trades off the Indian Ocean. Until today, it has been hot an hour after sunrise, reaching 100 °F, or so we estimate, late in the morning and maintaining that temperature until mid-afternoon. For those who must carry loads through thorn and tall dry grass, over black granite and the lava-like black cotton of the mbugas, it is just as well that on most days we travel for no more than five hours. Since the porters are well rested every afternoon, their spirits are high - so high, in fact, that occasionally it is necessary to damp them down. "Usi piga kilele!" Goa whispers at them, turning on the trail. And they do not mimic him or mutter, only smile a little, walking along under the awkward loads with the swaying elegance of the women in their villages, arms close to their sides but hands curved out, fingers extended, the loads clinging somehow to their heads. Only after moments with big animals do they hoot and chatter, letting off steam, and if this makes me smile, and I cannot hide it, they then have the excuse they need to squeal with laughter.

Although Brian is fond of saying that these porters can't compare with those on his old staff, who were "trained up to it", they win his grudging respect as the days go by. "They're a very good lot," he acknowledges. "Out five days, and not a single complaint yet." Even the saucy and single-minded Mata, from whom at least impertinence had been expected, has decided to comport himself as a professional porter on the basis of his one previous safari, and sets a stern example for the others. (Only at Mkangira, in the ngoma put on by the staff, did Mata display his cynical opinion of the hospitality, greetings, and thanks to the white visitors that the songs were intended to convey. In woman's costume, Goa's straw hat pulled down rakishly over one eye, he went swanking in and out of the line of porters as they danced and chanted, mimicking their thanks to the White Bwanas with squirming hips and

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raised prayerful hands and eye rollings of burlesqued gratitude - Asante sa-a-na! - in a parody so wild and deadly in its execution that whites and blacks alike giggled uneasily, not knowing where to turn. Mata himself had laughed openly into our faces, and his revenge was the artistic high point of the ngoma, surpassing even the strange dance of Abdallah, who kept time to the tom-tom while hopping on his head and elbows all the way around the fire circle.)

Leaving behind the smoldering black land of Goa's fires, we wade the river and head south through long, rolling savanna hills between the Mbarangandu and Njenji rivers. The morning remains cool and pleasant, with no trace of humidity, and the high grass, bronze and shining, flows in the south wind and early light. A flight of the large trumpeter hornbills lilts along the dark lines of big trees where a karonga descends toward the river, and a solitary white egret stands immobile in the rank green margins of a spring; this is the common egret, a cosmopolitan species, the only bird in the Selous that is also common in North America.

Coming up swiftly over a rise, we run into an old bull buffalo perhaps thirty yards away. As Brian seizes Goa's rifle, the bull rears his snout, seeming to glare at us past flared wet nostrils, big horns shining; the depthless black eyes never blink in the long moment that it takes for nose and ears and eyes and modest brain to weigh the choice between attack or flight. We hold quite still. Given enough time and space, the buffalo will almost always take the most prudent course, and after a few seconds of suspense this one, too, gives the heave and snort that accompany these bovine decisions and goes crashing off downhill into the thicket.