Death in the Long Grass: A Big Game Hunter's Adventures in the African Bush

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Lion

It is nearly three o’clock in the sweltering morning of September 2, 1974. In four hot, still hours dawn will hemorrhage like a fresh wound in the sky over the eastern Muchingas, the great, towering walls that confine the upper reaches of the Luangwa River in Zambia’s Eastern Province. In the anemic wash of a dying Central African moon, three canvas tents gleam bluely in a sparse grove of sausage trees near the water’s edge. One of them, older and more weather worn, is pitched fifty yards from the others. Behind its bleached cloth and netting walls, a slender white man sleeps fitfully, tossing in the humid spring silence as greasy sweat darkens the sheets of his camp bed. On the dirt floor beside the tent’s walls, a watery moonbeam glows on the scratched white stencil of a footlocker: Peter Hankin, Box 72, Chipata. Inside the travel-dented locker lie three flat five-packs of Kynoch 300-grain soft-point cartridges for the battered, silver-worn, old rifle, a Cogswell and Harrison, .375 Holland and Holland Magnum in caliber. But the rifle, as bush-scarred as the face of its owner, is not leaning in its usual place beside the bed. Operating in a photographic safari area, professional hunter Peter Hankin has had to leave it at his hunting camp, Chitangulu, forty miles downstream. His friends will later decide that even if he had the rifle now he would still have less than one minute to live.

Fifty yards from Hankin’s tent, in the shadowy skeleton of a fallen muSassa tree, there is a tiny, silent movement. Dilated wide to gather the pale light, two hard, amber eyes flicker across the broken ground and lock on the indistinct form of the man sleeping behind the netting. Seconds pass, then the lioness rises and begins to ooze forward, gliding like a tawny wraith between deep clumps of shadow. There is no sound as she slips along on thick pads, the white sickles of her claws sheathed, the aching throb of hunger hollow in her chest and loins.

At twenty yards she freezes, the thick, acrid man-scent dank in her nostrils. She stifles an involuntary growl, her black upper lip curled back to show thick, long fangs. For a moment she hesitates, but her ancestral fear of the smell is washed over by the desperation of her hunger. At five yards she gathers her hind legs beneath her flattened, lean body, the hind claws gripping the earth for purchase. The man-thing is still asleep, unaware of crouching death so near, his breathing deep and regular in the cat’s lain-back ears. In a flash of dark motion she is in the air, claws extended like naked linoleum knives, the light mosquito netting shredding before her charge. Her impact hurls the man from his bed and onto the ground. Before he is even awake, there is the soggy snap of crushing vertiebrae, then silence. For Peter Hankin, one of central Africa’s most experienced professional white hunters, the last safari is over.

It is light before Hankin’s clients, unarmed and cowering in their tents while listening to the wet feeding sounds, can escape and seek help. In a few hours Joe Joubert, a professional hunter employed by Hankin’s safari firm, a Zambian game guard, and Joubert’s safari client, Samuel Lenher of Wilmington, Delaware, are driving hard along the bush road from Joubert’s camp at Zokwe to the scene of the tragedy. When they arrive, the lioness is still feeding on Hankin’s corpse, which has been dragged a few yards out of the tent. Before Joubert can come up with his express rifle, the Zambian foolishly wounds the man-eater with a blast of SG buckshot from his single-barrel-issue Greener shotgun/carbine. The big cat runs off into the bush where Joubert takes up the blood spoor.

Over the next hour the lioness inscribes a large circle through the heavy riverine cover and incredibly, despite her wounds and the men following her, returns to the man she has killed and resumes feeding. Joubert, half-retching with horror and disgust, executes her with a shot from his .458 Brno, the 510-grain Winchester soft-point dropping the man-eater lifeless across the body of her victim. Inspection establishes that the lioness is in the prime of life and previously uninjured or disabled although very lean and, with macabre obviousness, hungry. A post-mortem on the body of Peter Hankin determines that, mercifully, he died instantly of a broken neck from the lioness’ first bite.

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America in the last quarter of the twentieth century is something of an odd place from which to contemplate the fact that, contrary to popular belief, man-eating lions (not to mention leopards, crocodiles, and hyenas who will receive their due later in this book) are still very much in evidence in large areas of Africa. Due, most likely, to the Sea-to-Shining-Sea garbage we are force-fed by the Network Nature Fakers, including such prime-time pap as the happily now-defunct Born Free television series, it’s understandable that most Americans don’t regard the average lion as much tougher or more dangerous than Rima the Bird Girl.

And speaking of the Adamson lions, you might be interested to know that one of those cuddly creatures sprang upon an open car driven by one of Kenya’s top game officers, who was riding with his wife and young son in a game reserve a year or so ago. It grabbed the boy by the skull from between the unarmed mother and father and dragged him out of the Land Rover, severely mauling him until, somehow, the father was able to reclaim his son. At the time I was given this report by the father, who stayed several days with us in Rhodesia this past season, the complete extent of the boy’s injuries was yet unknown, although some brain damage was suspected. That lion still roams free. I was also given an unconfirmed report during this same conversation that one of George Adamson’s lions killed and ate one of his African domestics, a cook as the tale goes. Knowing the reputation of the man who told me this, I do not personally doubt the information offered, but cannot prove it.

There are several very good reasons why, despite the surprising number of maneating incidents that occur today in Africa, most are hushed up like an epidemic of social disease at a bible school. It’s the same reason that Florida Chambers of Commerce don’t go out of their way to spread the word of shark attacks along their beaches. One doesn’t tend to pack the tourists in when word gets around that there is an outside chance of seeing the inside of a lion on a trip through the Tsavo National Park. How many Detroit schoolteachers do you think the tour mongers in Kenya’s national parks would have signed up last year if word had gotten out about the photographer who was pulled out of his tent by the head and eaten down to his toenails by a solitary Simba with a taste for white meat? If most of the emerging, game-rich countries ever published figures on how many people are killed and eaten by a variety of carnivores within their borders, there would be a tourist recession that would make Black Tuesday look like St. Swithin’s Eve.

Of course, nobody knows for certain exactly how many people are eaten, the very nature of man-eating having a decided tendency to make evidence somewhat scarce. Man-eating lions, if undisturbed, commonly eat almost every vestige of their victims, even the blood-soaked clothes and shoes as well as the bones. Whatever may be left falls to the African Sanitary Department and, after even a few days, it’s difficult to examine a piece of skullcap the size of a demitasse saucer and state unequivocally that the cause of death was a lion. Yet, in only one six-month season as a professional hunter in Zambia, I learned of six definite cases of man-eating by lions in just one concession area of twenty by sixty miles. I wonder how many more there were who were simply reported as missing or, considering the primitive conditions of the more remote tribes, never reported at all.

Certainly, there are any number of cases of men being killed but not eaten by lions. Unlucky bwanas and unfortunate natives get pounded with monotonous frequency by running inadvertently into females with small cubs, mating lions, feeding lions, and the like. Wounded lions’ scores for homicide are probably about as high as genuine man-eaters, but obviously the moral considerations are quite different. However, unless you’ve promised your carcass to Harvard, the difference between being nabbed by a certifiable man-eater or having your face bitten off by an irate lady lion are, at best, academic. After all, if the lion doesn’t eat you personally, you won’t have to wait long until the vultures, ants, hyenas, and jackals do. Africa is astoundingly efficient in the disposal of protein.

The non-African attitude toward man-eating lions is typical of the whistling-in-the-graveyard humor of cartoons showing missionaries in the cannibal pot. Large, well-fed lions are drawn burping over a rifle and pith-helmet with the caption: I never met a man I didn’t like.… To nearly all of us, the concept of being eaten, actually eaten, is so remote as to be unthinkable. However, if you spend the best part of eleven years, as I did, living with big, live, genuine lions all around, you might discover that your balding head never hits your pillow without that little niggling of doubt. Just maybe tonight …

Man-eating lions have had an almost unbelievable influence on the continent of Africa since the first European explorers and developers began to open up the bush in earnest. A classic example took place at the close of the last century when no less a power than the empire of Queen Victoria was thwarted in its imperial designs by eight man-eaters who halted construction of the so called Lunatic Express, the Uganda Railroad, as it passed through southeast Kenya. The Man-eaters of Tsavo treated the project as one extended buffet table, their accomplishment having been to have eaten more imported Indian coolies than it took to film Bhowani Junction. These incredibly brazen killers finally had their hash settled by a pith-helmeted paladin working for the railway, a Lieutenant Colonel J. H. Patterson, DSO, but only after a period of several months of frustrating hunting, during which time the colonel very nearly got the chop himself on several occasions. His book on the episode is a classic of hunting literature and, due to its immense popularity, is still often available in used bookstores. The Man-Eaters of Tsavo has been so widely quoted in works about lions and man-eaters as to make a further retelling merely lily gilding, save to mention that, a bit after Patterson killed the Tsavo pride, a single man-eater of considerable talent took residence further up the line displaying, to quote Colonel Patterson, an extraordinary taste for the members of the railway staff, culminating in the catching, killing, and eating of the superintendent of police, a Mr. Ryall. Very bad form, indeed. The lion, as if he had a shopping list, entered a railway car and killed the man in the company of two other whites, one of whom the lion had to stand upon to reach the sleeping Ryall in an upper berth. He was later trapped and, after being displayed, shot.

Although there is virtually no area in Africa that has not recorded a degree of man-eating activity, some localities are historically much more dangerous than others. One of the worst is Central Africa, especially near the Great Rift Fault that crosses the continent perpendicularly. There have been literally hundreds of man-eaters reported in the area since 1900 and, as the case of Peter Hankin so horribly demonstrates, there is still not much of a shortage.

One pride, for example, the Ubena man-eaters, had been in operation for a full ten years before George Rush-by, a game officer of Tanganyika (now Tanzania), and one of the greatest man-eating lion hunters of all time, began to put the screws on them in their thirty by fifty mile range in 1942. In the two years of hard hunting he needed to wipe out the pride, the lions added an additional 249 human kills to their record. Imagine the number of people they had eaten in the ten years they operated unmolested! Four years later, in the Njombe District of Tanganyika’s Southern Province, Rushby was again enlisted to hunt the Njombe man-eaters, a collectivity of feline mayhem that, between the fifteen members of the grisly pride racked up a confirmed score of over 1,500 natives and colonists. And, remember, those are just the ones we know