November 2010

There was nothing about Lake Paradise that suggested civilization. We seemed to be in another world, a Garden of Eden, in which it was easy to be good and happy, and in which men and animals lived at peace with one another.

–Martin Johnson

Osa Johnson in front of their house at Lake Paradise.

We were all anxious to see if anything remained of Martin and Osa Johnson’s 1924 camp. According to one book I’d read, they’d set up camp on a low sloping ridge on the southwest of the crater and here they built a small house with a fireplace in the center and a porch overlooking the lake as well as a separate kitchen, storehouse, garage, workshop, guest room, tool house, carpenter house, a building for the generator, an underground vault and, “the skyscraper of the village,” Martin’s film laboratory. Osa had also put in a 4-acre vegetable and flower garden.

She wrote that in the garden she grew “nasturtiums, cosmos, baby’s breath, cannas, carnations and roses. Cannas grew so profusely that I constantly had to thin them out and plant them farther and farther apart. Elephants often trod them down. I even planted canna bulbs out in the forest and there they throve, and I suppose are still thriving.

“I suppose that the winds and the birds have now carried the seeds of my garden throughout the forest, and I hope the crater is abloom with the flowers on which I spent so much care, and with which we left a part of our hearts.”

There was an obvious spot where we all agreed the Johnsons must have built their camp. It was just off the narrow road coming into Lake Paradise, a flat spot, dotted with old brown olive trees, where you had a magnificent view of most of the meadow. And it was on the southwest end of the shore.

Hardy and Fletcher searching for remnants of the Johnson camp. Photo by David Lansing.

We went over there early one morning and tromped around. The dry grass was knee high. Several areas, shaded by trees, looked like they’d been cleared and leveled. But there wasn’t any obvious signs of old foundations or the remnants of a chimney, which is what we were hoping to find. At one point I thought that perhaps we were looking on the wrong side of the road so I crossed over and started wandering off into the forest. I came over a rise and there before me where three elephants on their way to the meadow. I stood still and just looked at them, knowing that Calvin would have a cow if he knew what I was doing but so mesmerized that I didn’t do the logical thing which would have been to slowly back up and retreat.

Back in 1996, Calvin was leading the photographer and writer Peter Beard on a photo safari near his camp in the Mara when they were charged by an elephant. The whole thing was filmed (except when the cameraman dropped the camera and ran for his life) and is a popular video on YouTube. If you’re curious, I’ve included the video at the bottom of this post.

What you realize in looking at that video is how quickly things can go bad when you’re dealing with large animals like elephants. One minute they’re just standing there twitching their ears and the next minute they’re running you down and stomping on your chest. It’s amazing Beard survived the attack.

So I had all that on my mind as I stood there looking at the three cows. Like in the Beard attack, I was on foot and in the open. And, probably like Beard, I didn’t really feel like I was in imminent danger. But I’d seen the video; I knew better. So very, very slowly, while still facing the elephants, I began to back up, first getting off the elephant’s path to the meadow, and then just moving sideways, away from them, into the woods.

When I got back to where the others were still kicking around in the grass, Calvin asked me if I’d seen anything interesting on the other side of the road.

“Just a few elephants,” I said.

“Ah, good,” said Calvin. “Smelly ellies.”

I’m not sure he believed me. But that was fine with me.

Only Calvin's intervention kept me from ending up like this buffalo skull. Photos by David Lansing.

When we got back to the camp it was only 10:30 but I was so tired I felt like we’d just climbed Mt. Kenya. Everybody had thick black mud covering their hiking boots and clothes and we were all dirty and sweaty and anxious for a shower. I asked Kurani to heat some water and when it was ready, he and Keith poured it into a bucket that was tied with a rope to a tree limb. There was a pipe coming out of the bottom of the bucket and a lever attached to that so when you pulled it, water reached a small showerhead. The water was hot—scalding hot—and I thought about getting out of the shower and wrapping a towel around me and going back into camp and asking Kurani to add some cool water to the bucket but it seemed more trouble than it was worth. Instead, I just wet a wash cloth with the scalding water and let it cool off a bit before soaping myself down. This wasn’t the best method for cleaning up but I managed.

Everyone took a shower and then, exhausted, we all disappeared into our tents and collapsed on our cots to take a mid-morning nap. I can’t remember the last time I took a nap before noon but this one was truly necessary. When I woke up about an hour later, I was still aching all over. As soon as I swung my legs off the cot, I started cramping up. First in my thighs and then in my calves and then all over. Even the muscles in the soles of my feet and the short muscles around my ankles started cramping. It was so bad I couldn’t walk. I stood up and tottered out of the tent, afraid I might pass out. It was like I was hooked up to an electrical current and my whole lower body was being shocked and going into spasms. There was nothing to be done but try to walk so I just kept moving, like some sort of Frankenstein creature, through the camp and down towards the meadow. One by one the spasms went away leaving me with legs that felt bruised as if from a car crash.

When I went back to the tent to put some clothes on, I saw that all of our muddy clothes and boots had been washed while we napped. My green khakis and socks were spread out on the fly of my tent and my Italian hiking boots, which I’d assumed had been irretrievably damaged from the mud and ooze, were wet but spotlessly cleaned. Everyone else’s clothes and shoes were drying out in the sun as well.

In my shuka, ready to fight a buffalo.

We sat in the warm sun, half-dressed or, in my case, with just a shuka around my waist, talking over the morning adventure with the buffalos and our trek through the mud, everyone reminding me over and over that I’d been advised not to continue moving into the deep part of the meadow and wondering why I’d kept going and why I hadn’t indicated to anybody why I was stuck.

“Lansing, what were you going to do?” Hardy said. “Just stand there in the mud until the elephants came back?”

It was a good question and one I didn’t really have an answer to. I had gone against everyone’s advice and gotten myself stuck in the mud, like a mastodon in the La Brea tar pits, and once that had happened, I’d decided against calling for help. Maybe it was pride and maybe it was just stupidity but for whatever reason, I got myself stuck and I felt responsible for getting myself out. Except that wasn’t going to happen. Ever. I was in so deep that if Calvin hadn’t decided to come out and rescue me, I’d still be there. And the animals would have come down and finished me off and then my bleached bones would have stayed down in the meadow. Just like those of the buffalo Hardy had found.

While Calvin takes the high ground, I move into the muck. Photos by David Lansing.

After Hardy scared off the herd of buffalos with his cough, we continued on around the lake shore, passing, at one point, a pair of elephants who caught our scent and disappeared back into the forest. We slowly descended down towards the meadow, staying low, our heads just below the sight line of the heavy bush ringing the meadow.

The buffs—I counted 22 of them—stood still, their noses raised, facing our direction. When we got to within a hundred feet of them a big bull snorted and turned and the herd romped at a quick clip away from us and towards the northern shore.

We decided to give up stalking the buffs and to explore deeper into the marshy meadow where we thought we saw the bone-white remains of perhaps a buffalo. The mounds of coarse grass gave way to reeds and then semi-hard fields of mud that had the viscosity of modeling clay with deep impressions of where elephants had walked that morning.

Hardy comes across an old buffalo skull.

On a rock in the muck was the lower jaw of a bushbuck. We moved deeper into the mud and water trying to identify the other remains. Hardy came across the skull of a buff. At this point I was sinking a foot or more into the muddy bottom of the remnant lake with every step. The others had turned around and slowly retraced their steps through the mud out of the wettest part of the meadow but I decided to continue forward, thinking it was a shorter route, which was a mistake.

The mud got deeper and before long I was stepping into muck up to my knees and having to take several minutes just to extricate myself before I could move on. And then I took a tenuous step forward and began to sink, deep, deep, deep, going midway to my thigh, the vacuum suck of the mud so great I was immobilized like a fly in amber. There was no possibility of me pulling myself out.

The rest of the group had retreated to higher ground and were now gathered together, maybe a hundred feet away, looking at me, waiting for me to continue. But I could not. I didn’t call for help or do anything really. I just looked in their direction, breathing heavily, trying to stay calm, and they looked back at me. Some time went on and then I saw Calvin hand his gun off to Hardy and slowly start back across the muck, slipping into water almost up to his waist, as he made his way towards me. When he finally reached me his face was red and beads of sweat were dripping from his bald head.

He asked me if I was alright and I said fine, except I couldn’t move, and we both were silent, trying to catch our breath and figure out what to do. Calvin moved around me until he found a spot that seemed more solid than others and then told me to try and rock myself back and forward until I could point my foot down, like a ballerina, and when I was finally able to do that, he planted his two legs in the muck like tree stumps and pulled both my arms mightily until I slowly came out of the sucking mud. Then we both just stood there panting and breathing hard, bent over at the waist. After we were able to catch our breath again, Calvin took a small step forward and told me to try and follow in his path and ever-so-slowly we tiptoed through the mud and muck and ooze until we made it back to where the others were standing on higher ground. I couldn’t stop trembling and I didn’t know if it was from exhaustion or from the fear of being encased in mud up to my crotch, knowing elephants and buffalos were just on the edge of the forest watching us, or maybe both. Probably both.

We slowly headed across the meadow towards the far shore where Keith was watching us through the binoculars. And then we headed back towards camp.

Are we stalking them or are they stalking us? Photo and video by David Lansing.

Before setting off through the thick montane, Calvin issues instructions: Stay tightly bunched and follow his hand signals; make no noise; if we happen to spot a buf or a leopard in heavy bush after he’s already passed it, “Well, then you’re on your own,” he says with a small smile, “but don’t run. That only makes it fun for them.”

We walk through the eerily-quiet forest, silently scrambling over fallen logs and mossy boulders. If you look down at your feet to see where you are going, you run the risk of walking into an elaborate spider web, that of golden orbs the size of fists, strung between the trees head-high. Calvin says not to worry. The golden orb is quite poisonous but can’t bite anything flat—like a forehead. Still, it is disconcerting when one wanders across the top of your head.

After awhile we come across broken grass littered with still-steaming buffalo dung. Calvin motions for us to be perfectly silent and keep our eyes on the thick woodland ahead of us. The breeze swirling through the trees picks up; I smell the heavy, musky, barnyard odor of the buffalos. Just as Calvin reaches for the binoculars looped over his chest, Hardy coughs, involuntarily, and the forest explodes with the thundering rush of twenty or more buffalos crashing through the trees a stones throw in front of us. The sound, which thumps me in the chest like a fist, and the sight of such large, powerful animals crashing through the woods so close to us is magnificent and horrifying.

As Robert Ruark wrote in his fine memoir Horn of the Hunter, “I don’t know what there is about buffalo that frightens me so. Lions and leopards and rhinos excite me but don’t frighten me. But that buff is so big and mean and ugly and hard to stop, and vindictive and cruel and surly and ornery. He looks like he hates you personally. He looks like you owe him money. He looks like he is hunting you. I had looked at a couple of thousand of him by now, at close ranges, and I was scareder than ever. He makes me sick in the stomach, and he makes my hands sweat, and he dries out my throat and my lips.”

That just about sums up my feelings as well.

Here’s a short video of us stalking buffalos.

Breakfast at Lake Paradise. Photo by Chris Fletcher.

I eat better out here in the woods then I do at home. Every morning before we even get up, Julius, our mpishi or cook, bakes fresh camp bread. I don’t know how he does it but it’s finer than most bread you’d find in a bakery. He toasts it over the open fire and serves it with scrambled eggs and bangers and bacon. After we’ve had all that, he brings us some pancakes with syrup and after that a large plate of fruit—watermelon, oranges, mango. Along with copious amounts of tea and coffee and orange juice.

At home I could care less about breakfast but camping out here at Lake Paradise, I’m always starved. You’ll notice from the above photo that there’s a fair amount of whisky and wine mixed in with the juices. We try not to mix these up at breakfast, but sometimes mistakes are made and then, rather than tossing off the inch or two of good whisky that has been errantly poured into a coffee cup, we’ll just add the coffee and drink it off quickly. This seems to fortify us for whatever adventure we’re on that day.

This morning we were going to go stalk buffalos in the woods so while the rest of us downed our eggs and bacon, Calvin assembled his Rigby .500 double, a British gun made in 1898 for one Colonel DeCourcy who was in the British Raj, for tiger hunting, I believe. Colonel DeCourcy then sent the gun to Nairobi when guns that large were banned in India and Calvin’s grandfather, Mike Cottar, ended up with it.

Calvin with his Rigby .500 double barrel. Photo by David Lansing.

Calvin says his great-grandfather, Bwana Charles, hated all things British, including their guns, and tried to dissuade his son from using it but it became Mike’s favorite safari rifle. After Mike died, from injuries he suffered from a horrific buffalo attack, the family sold the gun. Then it popped up again back in Nairobi sometime in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s and Calvin’s father, Glen, bought it back. He had the old Rigby with him one day in 1965 when he and an Argentine client were hunting buffalo (you’ll notice that danger and buffalos seem to be a leitmotif with the Cottar clan). The client wounded the buff but didn’t kill it. Glen went off into the bush to finish the job. Unfortunately for him, the spring on the Rigby was broken so he had to borrow his client’s gun. According to Brian Herne, who wrote about the attack in his book White Hungers: The Golden Age of African Safaris, Glen fired at the wounded buff in the darkness of a brush tunnel at a range of ten yards.

Convinced the animal was now mortally wounded at last, Cottar and his men tracked it across a small plain as it neared another thicket. As they approached they could make out the vague shadow of a buffalo watching their approach. Glen fired, sure this time he would drop the animal in its tracks. Instead, the buffalo exploded from the bush and came straight for Cottar at a gallop. The massive horns slammed into Glen, smashing him to the ground. The buffalo turned in mid-stride and raced back to work on the fallen man, horns down, hitting Cottar’s legs as he desperately kicked. Glen tried to keep the horn tips from penetrating his chest by holding on to the horns as the beast worked him over. The buffalo kept its forehead close to the ground, its horn boss bulldozing Cottar as it tried to grind him into the dust and finish him off.

As suddenly as the buffalo had carried out its deadly attack, it just as quickly broke it off, heading for the brush at a trot.

In the center of the grassy glade Cottar lay bleeding from horn wounds in his thighs. His legs were ripped open, and the muscles torn away to expose bone on the calf of his leg.

The safari rushed to Glen’s camp, where his client immediately took charge, injecting Glen with an ampule of morphine and penicillin.

Then Cottar was put in the backseat of a Land Cruiser and driven to Nairobi, more than 250 miles away, at night, by his Kipsigi tracker, Pissey. Only this heroic 13-hour drive saved his life. Cottar later blamed the fact that he hadn’t been able to use his old reliable Rigby .500 on his inability to kill the buffalo. Which is why Calvin never goes into the bush on foot looking for buffalos without his father’s gun. I just hope he doesn’t need to use it this morning.