The Tree Where Man Was Born (27 page)

Soon I persuaded Iain to give me the wheel, and after that the flight was uneventful. We crossed the Ardai Plain beyond Arusha and the smooth Losiminguri Hills, flying westward toward the dark cliffs of the Rift. But Iain would not suffer the flight to pass without incident, for just as we reached the cliff he said, “I’ll take it now.” He wigwagged the tourists taking tea on the lawn of the Manyara Lodge, on the rim of the escarpment, and no doubt caused a click of cups by banking in a violent arc over the void and plunging in a power dive at the ground-water forest, a thousand feet below. He then swooped up to cliff level again, and came in to a competent landing.

A year later, when I got back to Ndala, I found Iain in a state of some chagrin. A month after my departure in the spring before, he had walked away from the wreck of his new airplane, which was far beyond the help of his spare parts. And it had scarcely been repaired when he nosed it over in soft sand while attempting to land on the sea beach at Kilifi, on the coast of Kenya. At present he was unable to accompany me on a planned climb of Ol Doinyo Lengai, having been warned by his
sponsors and superiors that his reputation was outstripping his accomplishment. Nor could he go on our other planned safari to the Yaida Valley south of the Crater Highlands, where Iain’s friend, a young zoologist named Peter Enderlein, was in touch with the small click-speaking Tindiga hunters. Over a whiskey, we agreed that he had done a good deal of difficult and dangerous research that more prudent students of the elephant would never attempt, and that his work or lack of it should be judged on its own merits. It often appeared that the official disapproval had less to do with deficiencies in his research than with his various mishaps, or even perhaps his domestic arrangements at Ndala, which included a friend whom he would marry a year later. Oria Rocco, whose family has a farm at Naivasha in Kenya, is a live marvelous girl with a husky laugh, fierce gentle spirit, and a natural empathy with elephants, being related to the creator of Babar, the splendid elephant of children’s books. Worldly as Iain is conservative, she shares his intensity about the present and fatality about the future, and the camp was much more civilized for her presence.

I had not been in Ndala a half-hour before Iain had us in emergency. A cow-calf herd led by an old cow known as Ophelia came up the river bed to drink at a small pool at the base of the falls. The camp lies on the ascending slope of the escarpment, at the level of the falls; just below, the river levels off, flowing gradually toward Lake Manyara, and downriver a short distance, Iain has a makeshift hide or blind. From here, he thought, he could get pictures of the herd with a complex camera device of his own invention which makes double images of the subject on the same negative; using parallax, animal measurements may be made with fair accuracy without destroying the animal itself. (The animal’s shoulder height is a clue to its age, and the age structure of the population—the proportion of old animals to young—is an important indication of population health: despite the density of its elephant, Manyara at present has a healthy “pyramid” population, with many young animals at the base.) Though the device works, it
is so unwieldy that another person must be present with a notebook to record the data, and that other person was me.

We descended the steep bank under the camp and made our way downriver to the hide. The herd was busy at the pool, but I disliked our position very much. The animals were cut off; their only escape was straight back down the river past the hide, which was skeletal and decrepit, utterly worthless. And here we were on open ground, a hundred yards downriver from the steep bank leading up to the camp. . . . “They’ll never scent us,” Iain decided, setting up his apparatus, an ill-favored thing of long arms, loose parts, and prisms. But scent us they did, before he could get one picture. Ophelia, ears flared, spun around and, in dead silence, hurried her generations down the river bed in the stiff-legged elephant run that is really a walk, keeping her own impressive bulk between man and herd. We didn’t move. “I don’t think she’s going to charge us,” Iain whispered. But the moment the herd was safely past, Ophelia swung up onto the bank, and she had dispensed with threat display. There were no flared ears, no blaring, only an oncoming cow elephant, trunk held high, less than twenty yards away.

As I started to run, I recall cursing myself for having been there in the first place; my one chance was that the elephant would seize my friend instead of me. In hopelessness, or perhaps some instinct not to turn my back on a charging animal, I faced around again almost before I had set out, and was rewarded with one of the great sights of a lifetime. Douglas-Hamilton, unwilling to drop his apparatus, and knowing that flight was useless anyway, and doubtless cross that Ophelia had failed to act as he predicted, was making a last stand. As the elephant loomed over us, filling the coarse heat of noon with her dusty bulk, he flared his arms and waved his glittering contraption in her face, at the same time bellowing, “Bugger off!” Taken aback, the dazzled Ophelia flared her ears and blared, but she had sidestepped, losing the initiative, and now, thrown off course, she swung away toward the river, trumpeting angrily over her shoulder.

From high on the bank came a great peal of laughter from Oria. Iain and I trudged up to lunch; there was very damned little to say.

Another day we took a picnic to the Endobash River, which descends in a series of waterfalls that churn up a white froth in its pools. To reach it, one must push a short ways through the bush, and Iain, who has had two bad scrapes in this region, was carrying his heavy rifle. At the river, we climbed to a high pool where we stripped and swam in the cool current. Then we sat on a hot rock ledge to dry, and drank wine with Oria’s fine lunch. Afterwards, like three Sunday strollers, we walked down the river bed toward the lake. In the sun and windlessness, enclosed by leafy trees, it was intimate and peaceful, with none of that vast anonymity that subdues one in the spaces of East Africa. But we had scarcely started home when the road a quarter-mile ahead was crossed by a herd of elephants. “Endobash baddies!” Iain said, grabbing his notebook. “I’ll have to have a look at those! Load up the gun!” Because we would have to approach on foot to get close to these strange elephants, he needed gun support; Oria would take the pictures. We walked quickly and quietly down the river road.

The elephants were upwind of us, and before we knew it we were right among them, so close, in fact, that we dove for cover underneath the high bush beside us when it quaked with the movements of the elephant behind. A moment later, another walked out into the open a few yards ahead. It was a large cow with odd warped tusks. “Oh hell,” said Iain, “it’s only Jane Eyre after all.” Blithely he stepped out onto the road, hailing his old friend, and there was a moment of suspense when the cow turned toward him. Then she went off sideways, ears flapping in half-hearted threat display, and her herd came out through the wall of bush and fell into step behind her.

Iain’s disappointment was matched by my own relief, and Oria, who was pregnant, felt as I did: we had gotten off easily. It was a lovely late afternoon, and whirling along the lake track in the open car, exalted by wine and wind, I reveled in the buffaloes and wading birds in the bright water of the lake edge,
and the great shining purple baobab that stands on the lake shore between Endobash and Ndala. But just past the Ndala crossing there were two lionesses in an acacia, and one of them lay stretched on a low limb not ten feet above the road. Oria said, “I’ll take her picture as we pass underneath,” and Iain slowed the Land Rover on the bridge while she set her camera. At Manyara the tree-climbing lions are resigned to cars, and there is no danger in driving beneath one. But this animal was much closer to the road than most, and the car was wide open: Iain had removed the roof to feel closer to his elephants, and even the windshield was folded flat upon the hood. Lions accustomed to cameras and the faces in car windows see human beings in the open as a threat; when the car passed beneath her, the lioness and I scowled nervously, and I felt my shoulders hunch around my head.

Oria said she had missed the shot, and we passed beneath again, and then again, as she shot point-blank into the animal’s mouth, which was now wide open. “Once more,” she said; both Oria and Iain seemed feverish with excitement. “Christ,” I said, scarcely able to speak. “You people—” But already the car had been yanked around, and seeing Iain’s stubborn face, I knew that any interference short of a blunt instrument would only goad him to some ultimate stupidity that might get one of us mauled. I considered jumping out, but not for long. The lioness, extremely agitated, had risen to her feet, and a man on the ground might well invite attack. Insane as it seemed, I decided I was safer in the car, which proceeded forward.

The lioness crouched, hindquarters high, pulling her forepaws back beneath her chest, and the black tuft of her heavy tail thumped on the bark. Awaiting us, she flared her teeth, and this time I saw the muscles twitch as she hitched herself to spring: Ears back, eyes flat in an intent head sunk low upon her paws, she was shifting her bony shoulders and hind feet. Apparently Iain noticed this, for when Oria murmured, “She won’t jump,” he snapped at her, “Don’t be so bloody sure.” Nevertheless he carried on—I don’t think it occurred to him to stop—and a second later we were fatally committed.

The lioness hitched her hindquarters again, snarling so loudly as the threat came close that Iain, who should have shot ahead, passing beneath her, jammed on the brakes and stalled. The front of the car stopped directly under the limb, with the cat’s stiff whiskers and my whey face less than a lion’s length apart; I was too paralyzed to stir. Land Rover motors spin quietly a while before they start, and while we waited for that trapped lioness to explode around our ears we listened to the scrape of claws on bark and the hiss and spitting and the heavy thump of that hard tail against the wood, and watched the twitch of the black tail tassel and the leg muscles shivering in spasms under the fly-flecked hide. The intensity, the sun, the light were terrifically exciting—I hated it, but it was terrifically exciting. I felt unbearably
aware
. I think I smelled her but I can’t remember; there is only a violent memory of lion-ness in all my senses. Then Iain, gone stiff in the face, was easing the car out of there, and he backed a good long way from the taut beast before turning around and proceeding homeward through the quiet woods.

Nobody spoke. When Oria pointed out more arboreal lions, we ignored her. I felt angry and depressed—angry at having our lives risked so unreasonably, and depressed because I had permitted it to happen, as if I had lacked the courage to admit fear. At camp, I said in sour tones, “Well, you got some fantastic pictures, I’ll say that much.” And Iain, looking cross himself, said shortly, “I’ll never use them—those were for her scrapbook. I can’t stand pictures of frightened animals.” Two years before a friend of Iain had given him a book of mine on travels in wild parts of South America, and now he commented that I had taken a few risks myself. But calculated risks to reach a goal were quite different from risks taken for their own sake; I was thinking of George Schaller’s account of his solitary camp in the grizzly tundra of Alaska, and the care he had taken, the awareness of every step on river stones, of each swing of his ax—the disciplined courage that it took to live alone in wilderness where any mistake might be the last. What we had just done, by comparison, was merely stupid.

For once, Iain failed to argue. He was silent for a while, then said abruptly that he expected to die violently, as his father had, and doubted very much that he would live to see his fortieth year. Should he maintain his present habits, this romantic prediction will doubtless be borne out. “I’d hate to die,” he said on another occasion, “but I’d rather risk dying than live nine-to-five.” Yet people like Iain who hurl themselves at life with such generous spirit seem to rush untouched through danger after danger, as if the embrace of death as part of life made them immortal.

Months later, when his work at Manyara had ended, Iain came with Oria to America. We discussed elephants and the fine days at Ndala, arriving eventually at the adventure with the lioness. “Those times with the elephants weren’t really dangerous,” he said; he glared at Oria when she laughed. “Honestly. I knew what I was doing. But that business with the lion was absurd.” He shrugged, and after a pause said quietly, “We just did it out of love of life.”