Heartbeats in the Night

     On a quiet June night in 1898, two railwayworkers in southeastern Kenya were snatched from their tents and devoured at the edge of their workcamp. The next night, three more were missing; by the end of the week, the total waseight.

The British were building the Uganda railway line across Kenya to link Lake Victoriato Mombasa and each night, as darkness fell over the Tsavo River, close to 3,000 workers campedalong its banks. These were the victims.

Easily a hundred bullets were fired over the courseof that first week, some at point-blank range, but the lions kept coming. There were just two largeyoung males, identifiable by their maneless necks. As time passed, the animals became more daring,not bothering even to drag their prey from the sight of others before eating the men alive. Theattacks continued into the winter and by spring, Ghost and Darkness, as the lions had come to beknown, had devoured an estimated 150 railway workers as well as countless women and children insurrounding villages. Eventually, after several massive hunts, the lions were captured and killed,but their reign of terror earned them a legacy that would not go awayquietly.

***

Over a century later, I sat at a research camp in Tsavo, Kenya, not amile from the site of the first attacks, listening to Dr. Alex Kasiki speak passionately aboutman-lion conflicts. This time, however, the lions were on the losing end.

“One hundredyears ago, this area was overflowing with lions. They were in the mountains, in the trees,everywhere. At least two thousand. But tribes have rushed in like a flash-flood. They bring theircattle and their guns. And they remember how the lions ate their people. Now there are only nineleft. Nine lions left in Tsavo.”

Alex, a quiet man with a sad smile, usually keeps tohimself, but he could talk forever about the lions; they are his life. I can tell, though, that hewas not very comfortable addressing the ten of us - eight women and two men - who were there tohelp.

Earthwatch is a global nonprofit organization dedicated to environmental and wildlifepreservation. It funds grants and research expeditions worldwide with the goal of providing abetter tomorrow. “A better tomorrow” was something I could get my mind around;“Nine lions left in Tsavo” was not.

Some of us, though, apparently thought weshould move on to more pressing issues, since the time for our first meeting was almost over.

“What do we do if we get bitten by something poisonous?” chirped Maureen, aslender, slightly jittery, chemistry professor from Georgia.

“What do you mean?”Alex blinked at her as if she were a bit slow. “You die.”

After a ratherpregnant silence, Simon, Alex’s more talkative assistant, continued, “You don’thave to worry too much since we’ll be in the trucks most of the time. Really, all you have tobe careful of are scorpions, tarantulas, and spitting cobras when you’re walking around thecamp after dark.”

Just as Maureen began to ask whether Alex had more specific advice,he added, “Just don’t wear flip-flops, even in the tent. Your feet should be protected.Oh, and when you are need the pit, keep an eye out because it is warm in there. Sometimes littlethings crawl in out of the cold.”

Maureen was quiet.

At midnight, ourfirst shift began. It was time to find the lions.

Looking up from the top of the jeep,the enormity of the blackness took my breath away. I found my bearings with the Big Dipper, butthen noticed it was flipped, as if pouring out its contents. The earth was stained as red as thesky was black, from all the iron in the soil, scientists reasoned, although the Masai laugh at thisWestern logic. It’s the blood of their people, they say. It runs like rivers through theirearth. Indeed, everything about Kenyan nights was as magnificent as it wasunsettling.

Balancing on my perch, I used one hand to maneuver the tracking equipment andthe other to secure and rotate the spotlight. This type of multi-tasking would normally have beenhard for me, but it was magnified by Chui (the team leader) who was driving his truck through thebrushland the way my mother drives her SUV on the back roads of Virginia.

Meanwhile, belowme in the jeep’s cabin, Julian, a British freelance journalist, punched data into our PDA. Hewas the only other one (aside from Alex and Chui) who was not unfazed by the time of night. Atmidnight everyone was still going strong, but by 2 a.m., our other compadres had melted into a pileof black polar fleece in the back of the truck.

Julian and I didn’t mind, though; thenight was incredible. Wandering through the echoing blackness, I had to remind myself to breathe.Great gray mountains rose from the sea of brushland like giant humpbacked sea creatures; termitemounds climbed up the seemingly endless acacia trees in gnarled archways and towers.

It waseasy to see why one of the obstacles researchers face in Tsavo is the density of the bush. Theacacia trees grow in thick clusters of eight or nine with branches coiling into each other until itis almost impossible to separate one from the next. Even in the fierce light of the Kenyan sun, itis hard to tell what lurks in the underbrush; under the cover of darkness, it is almost impossible.Quite simply, Alex liked to remind us, with the aid of a 100kw floodlight, you could be standingless than ten feet from a 600-pound Tsavo lion and have no idea.

It was hard to believe Iwas in the same country that includes Nairobi. Nairobi makes all of lower Harlem, West Baltimoreand South Detroit look like Beverly Hills. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of aluminum shacks line thered-clay streets with pieces of cowhide for doors and typically eight or nine people to a room. Thebest housing on the outskirts has indoor plumbing, but downtown, there are simply clay pits in theground. There is a single highway, if you can call it that, that leads out of Nairobi, and duringrush hour, which seems to last all day, the road is crammed with ringing bicycles, braying donkeys,yipping dogs, blaring armored trucks, and basically any variation of these that has either legs orwheels. Children play with balls of newspaper by the side of the road, dodging the chaos hurtlingtoward them.

Your ears ring. Your head spins. The ground slips.

“Small and blue- that’s another dik-dik,” Alex yells from the front of the truck. Given the density ofthe bush and the night, it was hard to see what was moving in front of us. So, for documentationpurposes, researchers identify animals by their eyeshine (the color produced by the retinareflecting light from our spotlights.) Elephants, hippos and bushbabies were red. Cheetahs,leopards and lions were green. Dik-dik’s were blue.

The idea was to see everythingthat moved to gain a rough understanding of what the lions were relying on for their prey. Thatfirst night (and every night, for that matter), we saw a lot of dik-diks, which are basicallyminiature deer. They scurry around the underbrush like squirrels and are as common as pigeons arein New York. They were relatively harmless, but we had to be careful because our floodlights couldblind them. Occasionally, you would see one weaving in and out of the trees, disoriented -that’s when you knew he’d seen the light.

“The lions can’t beliving off just dik-diks,” Julian reasoned. “Five would be like just a couple chickennuggets to a lion. What else are they eating? I mean, besides people.”

“To behonest, we are not entirely sure. This probably has to do with why we only know of nine lions. Whenthe people bring in cattle, they clear-cut so the cattle will have room to graze, which drives awaymost of the lions’ natural prey. Actually, though, in terms of humans, there have only beensix serious attacks in the last year, five of which were not fatal. The lion, in all of thesecases, was able to be beaten away by fellow tribesmen,” Alex said with an interesting tone inhis voice, almost as if he wished the lion had been successful. “Unfortunately, Iguess,” he continued, “in the sixth case, the poor man’s compatriots were soscared by the lion that they ran off. When they returned all that was left was a piece of shatteredskull.” Apparently, it pays to have true friends in Tsavo.

Minutes later, Alexlistened intently to the radio and then said, his eyes shining in the moonlight, “The otherteam has found lions near the Mpiya waterhole. We’ll head right overthere.”

Chui hunched over the steering wheel, the inevitable cigarette hanging fromthe corner of his mouth, fitting nicely in the space where his molars should have been.Incidentally, almost everyone I met in Tsavo was a serious smoker. And by serious, I mean heprobably breathed more tar and nicotine than oxygen. No one seemed concerned with health risks,though, probably because a man would rejoice if he died of a smoking-related illness since thatwould mean he had lived to 50.

At first all we could see were her eyes - two green glowinglights in the trees, hanging there, drinking you in. Her name was Hera, Alex told us. Kabochi(named after the Kenyan God of Fire), her brother, was probably nearby.

Before this moment,our evidence of the lions’ existence was scattered. Footprints by a water hole, claw marks ona baobab trunk, a couple of gleaming vertebrae picked clean. But, all of a sudden, one was sittinghere, just five feet above us. As the spotlight bathed the area, you could see all of her,stretched out in the tree, the moon resting on her shoulder. She could see for miles, Alex said,even in the dark.

I could understand why they were named after gods.

As she turnedtoward the spotlight and stared, I saw the scar, long and jagged, running from her right ear to thebottom of her jaw. “She was caught in a hunter’s snare as a cub,” Chui explainedquietly. “She just managed to rip herself free.”

Back at the camp at five a.m.,we gathered be the waterhole, facing toward the brushland. Alex briefly outlined the day’splan, said that breakfast was available in the tent, and told us to go to bed after we ate. Behindhim, an elephant, silhouetted in the sunrise, wandered to the watering hole to take a long, silentdrink.

“It’s all so wild here,” Julian remarked. “Butthere’s a gentleness, too, a kind of love affair.”

“Your words are pretty,Julian,” Alex said quietly. “But Africa is no love affair.”

In the quietthat followed, a low rumbling pulse began to echo. The sound was so deep that it trembled on thethreshold of what you could actually hear and what you could simply feel. It was almost like aheartbeat.

“He’s roaring,” Alex said, softly. “A mating call.Kabochi wants to expand his family, He’s looking for another lioness. Fifty years ago, thatwould have been answered in minutes.”

“But I thought you said Kabochi’swas one of the only prides left in Tsavo,” Julian interrupted.

“You’reright, Julian. But he doesn’t know that. So he just keeps calling.