davidlansing.com

Baboons hate leopards. The feeling is mutual. Photo by David Lansing.

Cottars 1920s Safari Camp is spread out in the acacia woodlands at the base of the Olenturoto Hills which call out to us, literally, every evening when the large troop of baboons that make the tree tops their home bark and scream belligerently at the leopards prowling about the granite koppie below.

Leopards and baboons have an interesting relationship; they despise each other. During the day the baboons scamper over the rocks and in the trees, taking fruits and leaves, insects, lizards, even small snakes, the babies regally riding on the backs of mom, the adolescents batting each other about, rolling on the ground like kids on a playground. Then at night, they roost in the trees, keeping watch below, and should a leopard be in the neighborhood they’ll make this ungodly racket alerting not only the troop to the leopard’s approach but everyone else in the woodland as well, including us.

Which, of course, really annoys the leopard (it also annoys me, but I have less skin in the game). Sometimes if the leopard is really annoyed, he’ll kill a baboon or two. Not to eat but just for fun. Or perhaps to shut them up. But here’s the thing: baboons kill leopards as well. In a very organized fashion. A troop will surround the leopard and when the cat attacks the point man, usually a young male—but not the dominant male—other, larger males will quickly close in from all sides. The leopard, of course, will take out many of the baboons but eventually the numbers overwhelm him and sooner or later the troop will rip the cat to shreds. It is, in short, nothing less than a war between the species.

Yesterday afternoon, about an hour before sunset, we decided to hike to the top of the hill behind us, both to enjoy the sun setting over the Rift Valley and to see if we could spot one of the leopards that the baboons are always barking and screaming at. But you don’t just put on your hiking boots out here and climb a hill. There are too many unseen dangers. Like the leopards and the baboons. So Calvin sent us out with one of his young Masai guides, Jackson Oletura.

Pete shooting Jackson atop the Olenturoto Hills. Photo by Chris Fletcher.

Jackson is tall and powerfully built with long legs and long arms decorated with beaded bracelets and colorful bands just below his knees. He wore the traditional orange red shuka, knotted at his shoulder like a Roman toga (the Romans once occupied North Africa, where the Masai originally lived, and it is thought that the shuka as well as the Masai panga, which resembles the short Roman fighting sword, and even their sandals, were copied from the Romans). A bandolier of metal amulets ran across his chest. Low on his hip was a leather belt with a sheath holding his panga, a sort of broad bladed machete that everyone carries in the bush, and in his hand every Masai warrior’s most precious possession, a spear with a razor-sharp blade on the end. He looked regal, as do most Masai, and there was no doubt in our mind that should we surprise a leopard (or he us), Jackson would dispatch him with utmost haste.

We climbed the trail up the hill in single file, staying behind Jackson, who moved with the ease and grace of a gazelle. Twice Jackson gave us a hand signal to stop, peering intensely at a dark cave or boulders in a depression, but there was no leopard. At least not one we could see.

Cottar’s camp is at 6,200 feet and we were even higher than that and the air was surprisingly crisp, the sky gray with slow-moving clouds that looked like the remnants of a thunderstorm that we had seen earlier coming in from the east. At the top of the hill you got the full effect of the camp’s setting; the umbrella acacias spreading across the upslope just to the camp’s edge where the woodland then turned to a green forest of cedar and kigelia and commiphora, the thorny, small-leaved flowering bush that is so prevalent across East Africa. It really was a beautiful setting.

The sun had already set behind us and slowly the day was losing light. Pete, sensing the evocative mood of the setting sun, took some photos of Jackson standing on a granite boulder, his spear in hand, looking out over these plains where he’d grown up. Then we quickly descended the hill, listening and looking at the shadows, breathlessly both hoping and fearing we’d hear that distinct, rough sawing sound of a leopard alerting us to his presence, but we never saw or heard a sound. Not even from the baboons.

My camp bedroom with its foldaway beds from the '20s. Photo by David Lansing.

The weather has been quite comfortable and even in the middle of the day unless you are on the ground with the heat rising through your shoes and the dust in your nostrils it’s very pleasant. Still, after a languid lunch in the cool shade of the mess tent and maybe a couple of Tusker beers, everyone wanders off to their tents for an afternoon nap. I’ve tried doing this but it just doesn’t seem possible. I lie on my foldaway bed, draped with an open mosquito net, and study the rolling hills of the Siana plains and the distant Kuka Hills, thinking of the animals coming down from the Serengeti, listening to the white noise of unseen birds and insects, smelling the wild sage and lilac, dazed, groggy, the way one is on a very long flight, but unable to sleep.

Calvin's father, Glen, in 1963.

This afternoon instead of a nap I stayed in the mess tent, abandoned except for William, in his crisp white kanzu and crimson vest and fez, who brought me a pot of tea while I sprawled on a settee with tapestry cushions and flipped through a book I found on the coffee table called White Hunters. In it was a photo of Calvin’s grandfather, Mike, wearing a hat—the same hat now sitting on top of the bookcase behind me.

There is something about the whole Cottar lineage thing that I find striking and evocative. It’s not just knowing that this camp is so close to where Calvin’s father, Glen, established the first tourist camp in the Mara or that these golden plains and acacia woodlands are where Calvin learned to hunt at 15, but that Olenturoto Hill, where Calvin has built his elegant little camp is, as he says, “the epicenter of the Cottar soul.”

Imagine having a place in the wilderness like that? A spot where your father and his father all camped, walked the miles of thorn-bush and undulating hills of golden grasslands, a place that has become what Calvin calls “a cellular memory.” Something you retain in your subconscious even if you didn’t directly experience it.

While I was sipping my tea and thinking about all this, Calvin wandered in and sat with me. I told him what I’d been thinking.

He pulled some other books and memorabilia out of the old bookcase behind me, showing me old photos of his greatgrandfather, Charles, as well as shots of some of the old tent safaris and such. It’s so odd. This landscape seems so familiar to me—in a primal sense. I guess it’s part of what Calvin calls le nostalgie d’Afrique, perhaps best described by Hemingway when he wrote, “All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already.”

Like Hemingway, I am still in Africa. And yet a part of me is missing it already.

A Masai giraffe in front of a flat topped acacia. Photo by David Lansing.

We’ve fallen into a pleasant routine here in the Mara. We try to gather in the dining tent by 6:30 for a quick breakfast of fruit and coffee (Calvin would like us to be up by 5:30 but it’s just not going to happen). Early morning is the best time of day. The air is cool and fresh, the sky alive with chattering starlings and weavers and mourning doves. It is the cooing of mourning doves that, for me, is the soundtrack of Africa.

We might spend three or four hours looking for game, always with a specific species in mind, yet we are easily distracted. In search of a leopard in a tree we instead come across three or four Masai giraffe browsing on a flat topped acacia or cautiously sipping at a water hole, their ridiculous legs splayed out in all directions, like a dog on an ice-skating rink, which is when they’re most vulnerable to an attack by a lion. Do you know how easy it is to spend your morning just watching a giraffe drink?

And then there’s always the wild goose chase like the one we went on this morning. Yesterday Calvin heard a report that a pack of wild dogs was in the area. Very rare. Once common in the Serengeti and Masai Mara, they’ve been reduced to almost nothing as a result of disease and persecution by the Masai and other tribes because they are a threat to livestock. I’ve read that even 20 years ago there were probably 500,000 wild African dogs and now there may be less that 4,000 remaining.

Pound for pound African wild dogs may be the most efficient hunters in East Africa. Hunting in a pack, they pursue their victim relentlessly, handing off chase duties much the way cyclists do in a peloton until their prey is exhausted. Then 20 or 30 or more wild dogs come in for the kill, dragging smaller antelopes or even a zebra to the ground.

African wild dogs. Photo by Chris Mahoney.

Anyway, Chris Mahoney, one of the guides at Cottars Camp, was told by the local Masai yesterday that there were some of these rare animals in the area so he spent most of the day looking for them, finally coming across 15 or 20 of them with pups in a den just before dusk. He snapped this photo of three of them with his cell phone just to show us. The quality of the pic isn’t very good but you get the idea.

The thing is, wild dogs don’t stick in any one place for very long. They have an incredible hunting range that can extend for hundreds of miles and tend to hang out at one place for maybe three weeks before moving on. Which is why Calvin was rather keen to take us out looking for them early this morning (they hunt mainly at dusk and dawn and tend to hide in their dens during the heat of the day). They’re extremely elusive however, particularly around man (as they should be) and we never could find them. Not that it really mattered. Just being out in the open grassland for the morning was reward enough.

What's left of a wildebeest just a few hours after its death. Photo by David Lansing.

The easiest way to find lions is to look skyward. Early this morning as we were driving through the woody area not far from camp, Calvin stopped the Land Cruiser and pointed towards three or four vultures dropping down from the sky about half a mile away. “They’re going in for a meal,” he said. “Probably from a lion kill. If we’re lucky they might still be there.”

We cut through the bush, taking a straight line to where Calvin thought the birds had landed. The lions were gone. In their place were a dozen or so vultures, huddled around a dark shapeless mass, pecking at it and each other, spreading their wings in a fury when one of their brethren dared to go for the same scrap they were after. Several maribou storks stood quietly off to the side looking like undertakers.

The white-backed vulture, with his bald black head and stony stare, is an ugly bird but the maribou stork is even more hideous with its coat-like wings and back and its pink scab-encrusted head, sprouting whisps of hair, making it look like a burn victim. Just looking at these grotesque creatures gives me a chill worse than anything except maybe hyenas.

We had to practically drive over the kill before the vultures would abandon it. What they’d been picking over were the remains of a small wildebeest—probably an adolescent. Calvin figured it had been killed last night because although there was very little left to be picked over, even by the vultures, there were still a few morsels of red flesh above the hoofs and inside the vacant eye sockets (the eyes being a particularly prized delicacy by the carnivores).

Still, if you take a good look at this photo, it’s amazing how picked over this animal had been in probably four or five hours. First the lions had their fill, feasting, in particular, on the organs. Then the hyenas came along, maybe even chasing off the lions at one point, and quickly devouring entrails, crunching up ribs and leg bones, tearing off the snout. Which is when the vultures come in for clean-up, basically scrubbing the hide and bones clean, picking at the head and anything left on the bony legs. Eventually the marabou storks would elbow their way in and fight for anything that was left, leaving the ants and flies and other insects to dispose of hair and hide. If we came back tomorrow, all we’d probably find would be a few bleached bones and perhaps a skull. That’s how quickly Mother Nature disposes of the dead in Africa.

These buffs probably can't see us but they can smell us. Photos by David Lansing.

It was a Cape buffalo, of course, that ended the short happy life of Francis Macomber in Ernest Hemingway’s classic short story of the same name.

“(They saw) the bull coming, nose out, mouth tight closed, blood dripping, massive head straight out, coming in a charge, his little pig eyes bloodshot as he looked at them. Wilson, who was ahead was kneeling shooting, and Macomber, as he fired, unhearing his shot in the roaring of Wilson’s gun, saw fragments like slate burst from the huge boss of the horns, and the head jerked, he shot again at the wide nostrils and saw the horns jolt again and fragments fly, and he did not see Wilson now and, aiming carefully, shot again with the buffalo’s huge bulk almost on him and his rifle almost level with the on-coming head, nose out, and he could see the little wicked eyes and the head started to lower and he felt a sudden white-hot, blinding flash explode inside his head and that was all he ever felt.”

That is all he ever felt because his wife, sitting in the safari vehicle behind him, had shot him. On purpose? Accidentally? Accidentally on purpose? That’s a question lit majors have been pondering for more than 50 years. What’s never been in question is just how dangerous Cape buffalos can be. Particularly when they’re wounded, as the one in Hemingway’s story was. Wound a rhino or a lion and they’ll go off into the brush or high grass and lay in wait for you. But wound a buff and it might very well circle back around you and begin to stalk the hunter, taking them from behind. Which is why in Africa, where they regularly kill over 200 people a year, they are known as “Black Death.”

After we left the cheetahs, we drove up a slight rise and across a grassy plain inhabited by zebras and wildebeests with the odd Thomsons gazelle mixed in as well. The dry grass was waist-high making it difficult for Calvin to know where to go so Hardy climbed up on the roof and gave him directions to avoid wart-hog holes and hidden boulders. Still, every once in awhile, the bottom of the Land Cruiser would scrape over an unseen hazard and Calvin would curse under his breath.

Calvin stopped the car and studied the grass around us, pointing at it and saying, “There.” I couldn’t see what he was pointing at. It just looked like more dry grass and a couple of smallish termite mounds to me. Calvin got his field glasses and studied the slope in front of us.

Buffalos trying to get our scent to see if we're dangerous or not.

I asked him what he was seeing. He put down the field glasses and looked at the grass again. “You see how it’s shorter?” he said. And now that he’d pointed it out, I could. The grass we’d driven through was at least three feet high and the area he was pointing at was a foot high at most. But I didn’t know what that meant.

“There’s a relationship all of these animals have with one another,” he said. “Buffalos graze on tall, coarse grass—like what we’ve been driving through. But they don’t eat it down to the ground. They leave a foot or so of the grass for the grazers who come behind them—dik-dik, oryx, impala. So look here,” he said, pointing at the clipped grass, “and follow the path with your eyes.” Then he nodded towards a green patch of acacia trees down a sloping hill maybe a hundred yards away. “The buffs are in there.”

And they were. About fifty or so. Mostly females and their off-spring (the bulls tend to form their own sub-herds around the cows). Buffalos can’t see worth a damn and their hearing is poor but they can smell a lion—or a human—at a great distance. And spook easily. Which makes it extremely difficult to sneak up on them. Calvin got us as close as he thought possible and then stopped the vehicle and we just sat looking at each other, the herd of buffs and us. Calvin said from this distance they couldn’t make us out. We were just a dark boxy shape to them. So they weren’t quite sure if we were dangerous or not. Which is why they had their heads up and were sniffing the air. Trying to get our scent. This lasted for three or four minutes. And then they decided, for whatever reason, that they’d had enough of us. And thundered off, their thousand-pound bodies rushing through the high grass like a fullback trying to pick up a first down, while the Land Cruiser gently shook as if from a small earthquake.