September 2010

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.