Sand rivers (8 page)

SAND RIVERS

he had invited to join us on this safari. Goa, who would arrive in a few days, had been Brian's gunbearer and tracker, a traditional African of the bush who cared about the animals, and that old man - Nicholson pointed at Saidi, who giggled - had been very good, too.

Saidi Mwembesi, who quit the Game Department in 1973 with the title of assistant game warden, was a tall, erect Ngoni Zulu. Like most of the people of southeast Tanzania, who have long since absorbed the Arabs who once ruled this coast, he was a Muslim and wore a white Muslim cap. The other Africans called him Mzee, a term of respect that literally means "Old Man"; when asked what year he joined the Game Department, Saidi looked away into the woods, working it out by speaking as he thought. When finally he turned to present his answer, Brian listened politely, then laughed for the first time that evening. "I like the way he tells the time," he said. "He reckons that he joined the Game Department 'the year that Bwana Niki was ordered to kill the man-eater at Songea, and lost a porter to other man-eaters at Kichwa Cha Pembe'."

Over the fire, Brian began talking about man-eating lions, which used to take about two hundred people in southeast Tanzania every year. (Though this figure seemed high, I have hfcard a similar estimate from Maria's father, who had to sew up the rare survivors of attack by lions at Mtwara Hospital.) The Songea lion that Saidi had referred to killed an estimated hundred people near that town in 1951, and it sometimes killed more than it could eat; if driven off, it soon returned to take somebody else. On one occasion, having killed a herd boy, it chased three others who were fleeing and killed all three before returning to consume its original victim. The local people had decided that this intemperate beast was a manifestation of a certain man who wished them harm, and they did not wish to incur the wrath of this witch by cooperating in efforts to destroy it, but news of the slaughter eventually got out, and Nicholson was dispatched to Songea. Since there were no roads, he had to walk all the way from Kilwa, a journey of twenty days, only to find that the people would not help him. Eventually, he said, the lion was killed by an African with a spear; the man did not survive the struggle.

On the way to Songea, just south of the Selous boundary, Nicholson's safari had made camp near a place called Kichwa Cha Pembe, which means "Head of Horns". About two a.m. on a humid rainy night, a pair of lions came into camp, circling Brian's tent and investigating the main group of sleeping porters before returning to a thatch shelter behind his tent that was occupied by two men, one of them a porter named Mbambako. Instead of going around to the open side, one lion scratched through the back of the shelter and stood upon Mbambako's companion while taking the head of Mbambako into its mouth. The shrieks of the man under its paws awoke the camp, and people fled hysterically in all directions. "The Africans in this part of the world are terrified of lions.

PETER MATTHIESSEN

due to all the man-eaters; they used to go screaming up the trees at the slightest disturbance. I jumped up and shone my torch, expecting to find nothing at all, but there they were, consuming Mbambako right in front of my bloody tent."

Surprised by the light, the lions dragged the porter's body off into the bush. The drag marks and blood spoor were easy to follow when Brian took up the trail a few minutes later, attended by an unhappy gunbearer who aimed the flashlight beam over Brian's shoulder. "Came up with them after only fifty yards," he said. "Could have followed them on those tearmg sounds alone. Came round a bush and there they were, ten feet away. The lioness had already disembowelled him: she raised her head up and I gave her the first bullet in the chest and she slumped right down. At the shot, the male raised up, he had torn an arm off and he had it in his mouth; I gave him the second bullet, and that was that."

Someone who has seen a man torn to pieces by two lions has a firm grasp on the realities, and since on this fly camp we had brought no tents, I was content that, at Brian's instruction, Saidi should build a second fire on the other side of our low cots and lay the Warden's rifle down beside his head. Nevertheless, Maria and 1, and Hugo too, had been mildly surprised by Brian's insistence that people leaving camp on foot be accompanied by an armed game scout, and even more so by the presence of a rifle in every Land Rover that went off on an excursion. (In fairness, I should say at once that three of my friends have had their Land Rovers attacked and seriously damaged by large animals of three different species.) Politely, I ignored the rule about the scout, since the presence of a guard with a loaded rifle would destroy the feeling of intensity and vague suspense that is one of the pleasures of walking about in Africa, and eventually Hugo, too, was able to disengage himself from the armed escort, who took up too much room in a car full of equipment. Just as politely, Brian had ignored our dereliction, though once he spoke to me about Maria: "You must tell her that she must not despise the bush," he said. "The fact that she walks from one place to another without an incident does not mean that incidents won't happen." When I warned Maria as instructed, she laughed. "When you stop walking all over the landscape, I might consider it," she said. She was quite aware of the presence of lions as well as of big herbivores, but the reward of entering the African silence was worth what seemed to us a negligible danger -negligible, that is, so long as one remained alert, kept away from high grass and dense thicket, and avoided crowding or cutting off any animal with the capacity to put an end to the unnatural two-legged apparition that had frightened it.

Karen Ross had told me that the previous owner of her car was a young American wildlife researcher in Kenya who was taken by a lion on her usual evening walk between the tourist lodge and the camp where she was staying at Amboseli. According to the ecologist David Western, who

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