November 2010

Calvin leads the boys in search of a leopard at Lake Paradise. Photo and video by David Lansing.

To see a cheetah or a lion from the open roof of a Land Cruiser or some other safari vehicle is a wonderful thing but after the first encounter you lose any sense of fear you might have correctly brought with you into the bush and, after awhile, you even start to feel a bit blasé about the whole thing. Oh, look, another herd of elephants…shall we head back to camp for cocktails?

It can’t be helped. Viewing wildlife from a minivan is really very much like going to the zoo. You know the elephant isn’t going to charge your Toyota. You know the lion is unconcerned with your minivan.

But get out on foot in the bundu or the forest and it’s a very different thing. The elephant and the lion and the other masters of the wilderness are habituated to vehicles; they know what they smell like and look like and they aren’t afraid of them. A man on foot is a different thing. A man stalking them on foot is a predator to be feared; or perhaps a meal.

Last night camp was particularly noisy. The baboons and the leopards cursed at each other all night long. Robert Ruark in his fabulous description of a safari in the ‘50s, does this bit about an imagined conversation between baboons and leopards:

A baboon barked somewhere down the donga and followed it with an outraged squawk. A little later the leopard which had outraged him sawed at the foot of the tree, from which the nugu undoubtedly was swaying from a limber branch. “Bastard,” the baboon said “Spotted, evil, ugly bastard.” The leopard replied: “Just wait, nugu. I’ll have indigestion over you yet.”

Yes, this is exactly how you imagine the conversation to go between a baboon and a leopard, they are such mortal enemies.

Since we had been in camp now for quite some time, Calvin figured the leopard that lived in the caves above our camp might be getting used to us and becoming less cautious. Perhaps we could lure him into the open. So this morning after breakfast we bundled up in forest-green fleece and set off into the woods in search of the leopard that has been keeping us up most nights.

The plan was to find a spot in the forest above the camp and hunker down while Calvin made odd noises to imitate an injured bushbuck, a small, rather elegant member of the antelope family that is a favorite meal of the leopard (in our walk, we came across the lower jaw bone of a bushbuck, giving further credence to Calvin’s idea that our leopard friend might be enticed to come out of his lair if he thought there was a wounded animal so near to him).

Hunker down on the ground, Calvin whispered. Do not move; do not make any noise. Then Calvin found a perch on the rocks above us and, with the Rigby .500 in his lap, began to make his dying-bushbuck call which, to me, sounded more like a dying duck. In any case, the leopard wasn’t enticed to come and take a look. But we did get a response from an old lion somewhere further off in the woods. Which was a bit disconcerting.

Anyway, here’s a short video of Calvin making his bushbuck noises in the woods of Lake Paradise.

The Lake Paradise bar and sunset cocktails. Photos by David Lansing.

In the late afternoon, after everyone has cleaned up a bit and maybe even taken a bucket shower, we drive up to the summit above Lake Paradise, maybe two hundred feet of sheer drop over our campground, and set up a little bar over a spot that looks out across the caldera and all the way out to the Kaisut Desert. It’s a spectacular view. We build a little bonfire and pull up canvas chairs right over the edge of the cliff so that you can almost dangle your feet in midair and the wind blows and it feels like you are in a hot air balloon riding the thermals.

In the fading light you can just make out the dusty gray shape of elephants moving out of the meadow and back into the forest and usually there are several birds of prey—bateleur eagles, goshawks, African fish eagles—soaring almost at eye-level.

Me looking over Paradise. Photo by Chris Fletcher.

Yesterday when we were up there, sipping our whisky, smoking cigars, the fire roaring behind us, we watched as two fish eagles mated, dropped precipitously through the pale blue sky as if they’d both been shot and then, at the last minute, disengaged, stretched their wings, and, screaming, glided back up into the thermals. What an incredible way to make love.

“My god,” said Calvin to no one in particular, “have you ever seen anything like that?”

I got up to take a leak and wandered down the trail atop the escarpment, headed for a dead Brown olive tree where a pygmy falcon, with white breast and gray back, sat perched on a dead limb. Just as I got to the edge of the cliff to do my thing, I heard the distinctive cough of a leopard nearby. Probably he was perched on one of the outcroppings just below where I stood, just stirring from a late afternoon nap and getting ready to go out on the town for supper.

The wind was behind my back and no doubt he smelled me. I assumed that the cough was his polite way of letting me know that he was there and would prefer it if I went away. But, you know, here you are standing on top of the world looking down on the Garden of Eden and what you really want to do is be like St. Francis and commune with the animals, as crazy as that may be. So I just stood there and after a minute or two, there was another cough, this one seeming a little closer, a little more insistent. And while I didn’t feel any fear being this close to a leopard, even one I couldn’t see, I kept thinking how annoyed Calvin would be if I was attacked and he had to come running over here with his .500 Rigby and make a mess of the poor leopard and then stitch me up. No doubt it would put an end to the cocktail hour and delay dinner considerably.

So I coughed back, just to let the leopard know that two could play this game, and then I slowly backed down the trail. Before I even got to where the others were sitting around the fire, one of the armed askaris appeared magically out of the forest. It is always a little disconcerting when one of these ghosts appears out of nowhere. He walked beside me, his gun held in front of him.

I nodded towards the cliff. “Chui,” I said.

He smiled. “Ndiyo. Chui kubwa.” A big leopard.

So he’d seen the whole thing. Watched me go to the edge of the escarpment to do my business, knowing full well, no doubt, that I was pissing over the home of an old leopard. He probably thought it was rather amusing—a mzungu peeing over the home of a leopard. I just wonder what he would have done had the leopard come after me. I’m sure he would have shot it. At least, I think he would have.

We take cover after running into some elephants. Photos by David Lansing.

I must be crazy because running into these elephants in the cloud forest at Lake Paradise didn’t scare me. In fact, what I wanted to do was just stand there and look at them and wait for them to decide what to do. But Calvin has been charged by elephants. Calvin has had a client stomped by an elephant. And Calvin was not going to let us stay where we were.

Using hand signals, he motioned for us to get off the elephant trail and slowly go back the way we came. We stepped as lightly as we could, aware of every crunch and snap, listening like dogs on alert for the crack of a split tree that would be our signal that an elephant was coming after us. And if we had heard a trumpet and the smashing of trees, what were we to do? I had no idea.

We got off the elephant trail and back to where the Land Cruiser was stuck behind the log and Calvin signaled for us to get down on the ground and silently wait. The elephant trail was maybe twenty feet to our right and he figured that eventually they’d come down that way. He had the safety off his Rigby .500 and had the gun sitting on his lap. And so we waited.

This baboon was waiting to see what happened when the elephants found us.

It’s amazing how much better your hearing is in a situation like this. All your senses really. I could smell the elephants and hear the buzz of forest bees and then I saw just the slightest movement, deep in the woods to my right, and my heart raced, the blood pounding in my ears. But it wasn’t an elephant. It was a young baboon, sitting on the root of an old fig tree, watching us. He looked like a child sitting on a fence by the side of the road where an accident has just occurred, not quite part of the activity but not completely outside of it either. No doubt he knew where the elephants were and he had a good view of us sitting in the forest and now he was just going to hang around to see what happened next.

We sat there for quite some time and then Calvin went off on his own into the forest. We could see him slowly moving up the elephant trail, crouched over, his loaded Rigby pointed in front of him. He got almost up to where we had first seen the elephants and then he stopped and just stood still in the forest, listening. When he came back he told us that the elephants had either gone back the way they came or, more likely, had detoured around us.

“They’re wary of humans up here,” he said. “Probably they chose to escape rather than confront us. Just as well.”

We waited another few minutes, just to make sure, but there were no more sounds in the forest. Even the baboon had moved on. So we did as well.

This is what happens when you look for a shortcut through the woods at Lake Paradise. Photo by Chris Fletcher.

The plan was to drive down off the mountain and into one of the villages around Marsabit to check out the local culture. When we’d met the head warden of Marsabit, Robert Obrien, he’d told us that the tribes in this area—Rendille, Borana, Gabbra, Turkana—are fascinating and worth a visit.

“When the road comes (the one the Chinese are building) it will bring tourism to this area for the first time,” he told us. “I don’t want tourists to come for the animals. I want them to come for the culture. The culture is unique. The thing is the cultures of the people.”

And then he told us of a couple of villages that we might go to. So that was the plan. But in Kenya plans are meaningless. We planned for the KW (Kenya Wildlife) to bring us water because we were running low and they did; but they brought the water in used petrol barrels and we couldn’t use it. We planned to restock on Tusker in Marsabit but there was none to be had. That’s the way it is in Africa.

Rather than take the same road down the mountain that we’d taken to get here, Calvin decided that it would be quicker to try the trail to the north. You would think by now that we would know better than to look for shortcuts (particularly considering that it was Martin Johnson looking for a shortcut to Lake Paradise that started all the problems with Calvin’s great-uncle Bud), but we have not learned that lesson.

The track was narrow and overgrown. Hardy and Fletch and Pedro sat on the roof of the Land Cruiser, giving Calvin instructions on how to avoid a fallen log or a large bush that seemed to block the trail. Sometimes we’d stop the car and all get out and evaluate the situation and Pedro would take his Swiss Army knife which had a 3-inch serrated blade on it and hack away at some sapling or a branch. Then Calvin would push into the growth like a rhino charging through the bundu and miraculously make it through. It was cool and moist in the forest and smelled of decay and greenery and, once in awhile, of fresh dung. The webs of golden orb spiders were everywhere and every few minutes one of the boys sitting on the roof of the vehicle would shout and Calvin would stop the car and we’d all watch Fletcher or Hardy try to brush away the long-legged creepy crawly that had fallen on their hat or their shirt.

It wasn’t long before we came to a spot in the forest where a good-sized tree had fallen across the road, probably pushed over by an elephant, and it was impossible to go on. The log was fresh and wet and too heavy to move. After surveying the situation, we determined that by moving a few fallen branches to the side of the road and knocking over some of the smaller inch-thick saplings it might be possible to go around the fallen tree through the forest. We did this once and then we did it again, taking a good half-hour every time, and then we came to another tree across the road, this one several feet in diameter, and it looked like it would be impossible to go any further.

We all got out and walked through the forest, looking for some possible access, following the line of least resistance, going deeper and deeper into the woods, which is when we stumbled across a small herd of elephants making their way down the forest path to the meadow. There are three situations in which animals like the elephant are dangerous: when they are with their young, when you surprise them, and when you are between where they are coming from and where they are going.

We’d hit the jackpot.

After dinner, we take a walk to the forest or over to the cliff, or if we are very tired we sit on the veranda and watch night fall over the Lake. There is always life at the Lake, whatever the hour, and in the evening birds in great numbers are usually leaving the water to go to roost. They give the air a constant movement and color. Night comes swiftly and the animal calls increase until we have a tremendous symphony of jungle sound all about us. It throbs through us and we seem to become a part of it. I can feel my heart keeping the beat of it, and its rhythm lulls us to sleep.

Below our veranda is a natural clearing with great brown olive trees standing about. We have named this Paradise Park. Practically all the trees have had their bark rubbed off by elephants. And since they are bare for as high as fifty feet, I suppose that elephants have scratched their backs here for fifty to a hundred years.

–Osa Johnson