I drove to the campsite and picked the spot I usually choose. The tracks coming down from the top of the hill had been muddy. Here, the usually dry lugga beside the camp was a flowing stream. Dark clouds were beginning to fill the southeastern sky. I could hear the faint rumble of distant thunder. I had to assume the storm would eventually come my way, so I put up the tent immediately. I had purchased a new rain fly for it and it began to look as if I was going to need it. Dry and dusty this was not.
The afternoon clouded over completely. I decided not to bother driving to the swamp. I looked around with my field glasses. The elephants were there, and I could see a vehicle with a movie camera. They were watching a couple of lions that were sacked out on a termite mound. And nothing else. The storm moved in a westerly direction, staying just south of the campsite. The thunder boomed over Rhino Ridge and the wind came up blowing now this way, now that. But the storm kept to its course and passed the campsite, finally sweeping over the end of the escarpment. So much for that sunset.
I made dinner rather early, while I still had light to work in. The simple one-pot meal always tastes good in the bush: githeri with cabbage and onions over rice. I used curry cubes with the rice this trip and that added a nice touch of spice, just slightly hot. Cabbage is excellent on safari because it lasts a long time. After the meal I made coffee and sat in the camp chair in the fast failing light listening to the Mara night. The little depression just behind the spot where I put up the tent was filled with stagnant looking water in which I could not help noticing what appeared to be thousands of mosquito larvae. I could hear mosquitoes buzzing around me as I sat drinking the coffee.
A far more pleasant sound was the tinkling of thousands of frogs--they sounded a bit like very delicate wind chimes. A different frog joined the chorus, fortunately only intermittently, bleating loudly like a sick goat. As darkness spread over the Mara, millions of fire flies took to the air, weaving bright wisps of bluegreen light over the grass. And in the swamp, the lions stirred from their no doubt day-long naps and roared. Somewhere in the darkness, another lion answered. The lions were restless all night long. After I went into my tent I lay listening to the BBC on my short wave for an hour or so. As I turned the radio off and turned on my side to get comfortable, I could hear different lions roaring from different points. They seemed to wander about all night. About one o'clock I awoke and could hear them still. Now they were closer. They continued to roar and the sound got closer and closer. Some of them were in the field just south of me. Then I heard a lion walking around the stagnant pond. He stopped just outside my tent. I could hear his breathing and then it sounded as if he were vomiting, but it was just one of those giant lion yawns as heard from a distance of three feet. And then he roared. The roar of the lion is one of the special and wonderful sounds of the African night, but to enjoy it fully when you're only an arm's length away from the source requires industrial strength ear plugs. Not content with rendering me deaf, he wiped his chin on the tent and nosed about a bit before moving on.
........
We had seen cheetahs near Miti Mbili a few weeks earlier. The first morning I drove up the hill and headed east. I had no difficulty in remembering the way, even in the dark. The familiar lugga and the slingshot tree were there. I did not, however, find any cheetahs. I photographed a complex cobweb in a bush just before and during sunrise, merely as an experiment. As I wandered down the lugga, working my way toward Rhino Ridge and the Governors airstrip, I noticed a small group of vehicles on the top of a rise. I didn't need people, but I did make a note of the distinctive dead tree next to the parked cars. Given the distance, I could not make out what it was they were watching, but gangs of Governors trucks usually mean lions.
I drove slowly, nearing the airstrip at the end of the runway. Then, I turned back and headed in the general direction of the hill and the dead tree. I found it and zeroed in on what turned out to be a lioness and three cubs dealing with a wildebeest she must have killed shortly before dawn. She was hungry and fed eagerly. The little ones were fat and seemed more interested in moving down the hill. They would trot away and then look back to see if mama was following. Then they would come running back and generally get in her way at the kill. They tried to nibble on the wildebeest. They were big enough to be eating meat, but they also suckled when the mother lay down to nap.
As they continued to come and go, trying to entice her away from the kill, she would follow for fifty meters or so and then stop to look back. The first scavenger to appear on the scene was a lone marabou stork. It swooped down and landed at a discreet distance from the carcass. Mama came running back, heading straight for the stork. She wanted her kill left alone. Stork retreated and lioness went back to the carcass and ate some more.
Again she returned to her insistent cubs. The marabou stork was joined by a single hooded vulture. It parked in the dead tree and waited. The lioness returned to the carcass, and this time the cubs came with her. The whole family settled around the kill and the mother ate again. The cubs cavorted around her and chased each other about. But always, they tried to nudge the mother into motion, still intent on going down the hill. She followed them again and seemed finally resigned to leaving the carcass. A few white-backed vultures and Ruppell's griffons began to circle, at first high, then lower and lower. A couple of them landed near the kill. The lioness looked back but did not try to chase off the carrion birds. Soon the sky was full of vultures, and as if by some silent cue, they swarmed over the carcass, hissing and flapping their wings, goose stepping at each other in displays of dominance and animosity. Always great fun to watch at a kill.
The migration had not been a massive one, but probably a half a million gnus were scattered in groups from Aitong to the plains around Rhino Ridge. During the heat of the day, huge herds of wildebeest came to the marsh area to drink. It was September, time to be getting back to Tanzania and the Serengeti. Paradise was almost completely eaten down and held a large number of gnus. They seemed to be moving inexorably toward the "funnel" that pointed to the main crossing point.
We were not alone in our hopes for a good crossing. A film crew was at the river every day. A small independent company, they were doing a documentary in the IMAX format. That should be spectacular. The crew was camping at Jock Anderson's site across from Kichwa Tembo and Jock himself was overseeing the logistics. He's one of the old hands in the safari business. In the funnel were several thousand wildebeest, clearly keen on crossing. The last few crossings had forced the large group of hippos that had been collecting right at the point where the gnus like to enter the water to move upstream. The crocs were still there, hiding in the muddy waters, waiting-including tripod, an ancient monster that had lost a hind foot but seemed not in the least inconvenienced by the accidental amputation.
The question was, would the animals be allowed to cross in peace? So often, just as they are about to take the plunge, a vehicle comes up--on either bank-to "see how the crossing is progressing," only to drive the gnus away in fright. They are terribly skittish creatures. We had parked out of sight and chosen vantage points from which to shoot. Now we waited, anxious and frustrated, ears always cocked for the tell-tale sound of a diesel engine. An old looking Land Rover pulled up to the river on our side, at the downstream side of the area where the wildebeest exit. More bozos, we thought. The truck pulled away from the river and crept toward us.
It was a 20-year-old Land Rover that its owner had purchased in 1984. Its occupants were two Swiss from Zurich, Dominic and (the very pretty) Andria. She was about twenty-five; he was in his early thirties. They had set out from Morocco thirteen months before on a two-year safari through Africa. They had already been through Mali, Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Cameroon, CAR, Zaire, Uganda. Now they were in Kenya. Travellers with a lot of guts, I should say. He obviously knew the car well and was capable of doing even difficult repairs. It was well stocked with back-up spare parts. The box on the roof contained a fold-out tent platform that gave them a protected sleeping area off the ground.
They were good travellers: observant and interested, quiet and patient. We explained the etiquette of wildebeest crossings and they joined us in the cover of the croton bushes. The animals might cross at any time; they might not cross at all--that had been the case so many days in 1990. Our luck was good this time. Before eleven a.m. the gnus began pouring into the narrowing of the funnel just at the entrance point. Without pausing, a lead wildebeest simply walked into the river and began to cross. Others followed, and tommies swam on either side of the growing push of gnus.
They tend to head directly across the river rather than downstream where there are hippo runs they can use to exit. The shortest distance is what they take, and that puts them at what we call "suicide point": a sheer embankment which they cannot climb. As more and more swim across, they pile up on suicide point. In big crossings many of them are pushed under and drown. To get out they can either swim downstream or turn upstream and creep along the bank to a point where the hippos have thudded out a path of egress. The latter is what we wanted, because that meant they'd be coming right at us.
That is what they did. I crouched down behind a small bush at first. As the crossing got into full swing I simply lay on the ground with the 300 hand-held, propping the barrel of the lens on a mound of dried zebra dung. The wildebeest poured in from the funnel and down the opposite bank. Jock was standing upstream from the IMAX camera and nearly got trampled as the gnus swept all around him. One exciting kill we could not photograph because of the distance. Tripod, stationed downstream of the crossing gnus, had snatched a Thompson's gazelle. He flailed it about, tossing it like a rag doll and thrashing it against the rock to break it apart.
After about a thousand had crossed, the action stopped. Something spooked them. Now it became a matter of waiting for them to regroup. They didn't. Nothing the rest of the day. In the afternoon we and the Swiss couple (not married, but friends) went to Serena Lodge for a soda. We had decided to stay on the Serena side and camp at the Serena campsite. This is a crummy site, stony and trash-littered. Even for a night we missed the simple beauty of the Musiara campsite. But we wanted to be on the Serena side the next morning.
The next day we went straight to the crossing point. The funnel was hardly what one would call teeming with gnus. But before 7:30 they had moved in and suddenly began crossing at a point upstream of the main crossing. This was a dribs and drabs affair, aborted by the arrival of the IMAX truck, which pulled into a close position but frightened the wildebeest. They did not resume the crossing. We decided to visit a spot upstream, a high, level expanse of river bank shaded by a giant fig tree, that had always seemed an ideal camping site. Of course, one cannot camp outside official camping areas in the Reserve. Lovely as the spot was, it had drawbacks as a campsite. For one thing, about a dozen hippos lounged in the pool the site overlooked. That would mean an awful lot of coming and going during the night. For another, the fig tree was a favorite bivouac of a large troop of baboons. We knew this because a number of them were still in it when we drove up and stopped in the shade of the tree. They were not amused. The little ones hurtled down the trunk and dashed into the bush. Others, older and more malign, sprinkled the vehicles with pee. Then a turd came down from the highest reaches of the tree, splat onto the Suzuki. Dried on by the hot morning sun, it proved extremely difficult to remove.
By noon it had become clear the wildebeest were not going to cross. We decided to return to the Musiara campsite, stopping at the River Camp on the way to take Mich up on his offer of a shower any time we wanted one. We returned to the Musiara campsite refreshed and clean. Dominic and Andria also camped there one night. The next morning we said goodbye and they set out for Turkana.
The first several days in the Mara the weather had been quite pleasant— more or less clear mornings, and the usual clouding over during the afternoon, but no rain. No more. Now the evenings brought hard rainstorms. The first time we were caught about half way through preparing the meal. We had put up a contraption designed to protect us from the rain, but this first trial demonstrated that not all the bugs had been worked out. Rain came in through the gap made by the roof rack (the frame and plastic sheet were attached to the rack). Getting inside a dry tent felt very good. The rain picked up and hammered the tent, drowning out all other noise.
The morning after the first heavy evening storm we found the lioness and her three cubs at the top of the rise not two hundred meters from the campsite. They were wet and bedraggled. There were several males in the vicinity as well, and all the adults had been feeding on a wildebeest. As the sun came up, the lioness led her cubs back down the hill and into the lugga right at the campsite. There they remained all day. As we prepared the meal that evening, she and her offspring walked right past us up the track to the Musiara road. Cheeky.
I found a hyaena den quite serendipitously. I had gone out to Paradise Plains one morning to look for the cheetah mother and daughter we had been seeing there regularly. I found them, but only after they had killed and finished off an impala. I watched them walk up the plain and disappear in the thickets on a ridge. I drove up the south side of this ridge and met a Governors truck. They had seen the rhino not long before. I told the driver where I had last seen the cheetahs and headed up the hill. I didn't see the rhino, but I did notice a bumping sound in the car, as if something was knocking against the frame. I stopped, got out and looked: the tail pipe had broken; the end was dangling from the mounting bracket. Another trip to the Governors service yard, this time for some welding.
I followed a track that went straight over the top of the hill I had climbed, in the direction of the Paradise road. It was as I drove along the top of the hill that I noticed hyaenas. Lots of them. I pulled off the road toward them, and discovered the den. The matriarch lounged on the remains of a termite mound. Around her were three cubs about seven months old and one black-grey cub about two months old. This youngest was clearly hers. I approached slowly and turned off the motor. The cubs were all very interested in me and came toward the car, heads turned up to sniff all the information they could. Adults wandered around near the den, some toying with the head of a wildebeest. That must have been the night's kill. A young male was interested in the matriarch, sniffing and pawing around the termite mound, but she paid not the slightest attention to him.
We returned to the den on our last morning in the Mara. Again, a large number were there, including the cubs I had seen earlier. At one point a group of them came together in a kind of greeting ceremony; it made a pleasing picture. As I watched the activity right at the den, some of the adults chased off after a group of Thompson's gazelles and their fawns. The hyaenas cut off one of the fawns, and notwithstanding its swift zigzag flight, it wound up in the jaws of a young adult. This hyaena was not in the mood to share its prize and dashed away with the gazelle in its mouth. Others tried to grab the fawn, but none succeeded. The successful hunter moved several hundred meters away from the den and quickly consumed the entire gazelle; the meal took about three minutes.
Not all the action in the Mara was with the carnivores. I frequently spent the early afternoon in the forest between the marsh and the river. It is a shady place in which to hide from the afternoon sun, and by staying in one place and letting the animals approach, one often sees very interesting things. Photographing is tricky but sometimes rewarding: the animals are half lit in the dappled light filtering through the branches. On one afternoon a large extended family of elephants came up from the river and began working their way through the forest and toward the marsh. More and more animals appeared, walking with that complete silence that is so amazing in such a huge creature. I didn't hear the sound of their steps but rather of their feeding as they wrapped the ends of their trunks around tufts of grass, pulled them out of the ground roots and all, and shook off the clods of dirt. Soon I was completely surrounded by elephants, some so close I could almost reach out and touch them. They paid no attention to me. Only the last elephant to come up from the river was upset by my presence. He was a young male, probably just going into musth. He bellowed and circled around me flapping his ears and feinting with mock charges. The other elephants ignored him. I thought it best to do the same. He hurried on toward the marsh, snorting and huffing.