Читать книгу Rogue Lion Safaris - Simon Barnes - Страница 11

Caroline’s first response to Lion Camp almost got her thrown into the Mchindeni River for bisection by hippo. ‘My God, it’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘The things you could do with this place.’ Certainly I flung into the river the thoughts I had been having about reclaiming her for humanity.

It is true that the place didn’t look all that much. You hardly even noticed it; from a couple of hundred yards you might pass by without seeing it. Not a drop of paint in the place, not a square inch of concrete. I liked it like that: above all, it was right. But as I looked at the place through Caroline’s eyes, for an instant I saw a kind of shantytown: a handful of guest huts, walled in weathered and dusty bamboo matting, grass-hatted; staff huts that were little more than lean-tos. The only structure of any solidity was the sitenji: an African term used for a camp’s all-purpose shelter, the eating, drinking, reading, talking, writing area: a nicely thatched roof, more elaborate than the roofs of the huts, supported by stout wooden pillars, with a knee-high wall made from tied-together bundles of dried grass. Inside were a dining table and chairs. Beyond the sitenji, on the edge of the bank, a few ‘comfortable’ canvas chairs were grouped around a small pile of ashes: we had a fire here at night when there were clients in camp.

‘I mean, the potential of this place,’ Caroline said, looking at the elegant grove of ebony trees to the right of and behind the camp, which let through a dappled sunlight. There seemed to be in her eyes something of the same excitement that George and I felt when we saw a crowd of vultures perched high in a tree, and wondered what we might find beneath. ‘Fabulous. Just fabulous.’

‘What would you wish to do with the place?’ asked Joseph Ngwei politely.

‘This could be the hottest camp in the Valley,’ she said, ignoring, or perhaps unaware of, the hostility she was inspiring. ‘I mean, only six guest huts?’

‘Five,’ I said. ‘Ten beds.’

‘But you could double that easily, it’s perfect.’

‘I know it is.’

‘I thought Impala Lodge had the best location in the Valley, but this is better, the views along the river are better, and that wood is unbelievable. You could really do something with this place.’

‘Ebony glade,’ I said.

‘I can’t believe you don’t do more with it.’

‘We thought that improving on perfection was beyond us.’

She turned to me, eyes alight with delight, and said: ‘Come on then. What about a guided tour?’

‘It won’t take long. There isn’t much to see here. Only the bush.’ I showed her the sitenji; this had a bar at one end, at Joyce’s insistence, but no one had ever stood behind it. We used it as a shelf for our natural history books and the spare pairs of binoculars, all intended for the use of clients, and very dusty they got there. Caroline went out to the half-circle of ‘comfortable’ chairs and stood at the fireplace. She remained there for a long while in silence. A great white egret was fishing in the middle of the stream, beside him a spoonbill working furiously in comensal proximity. After a while, she asked: ‘Will you show me the huts?’

The huts were just huts, creaking baskets with light-permeable walls. Each contained two spindly, metal-framed single beds, two mosquito nets, and a small table bearing a Thermos jug of imperfectly chilled water. ‘Where’s the floor?’ Caroline asked.

‘What you are standing on is the floor of the planet earth,’ I said. ‘A light covering of sand from the Mchindeni river bank. What more could anyone want?’

‘Well, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you,’ Caroline said. ‘I can see why you keep hearing rumours about the National Parks Commission wanting to close you down. Who on earth can you get to come and stay here? Why don’t you put concrete down?’

‘It’s not allowed. We’re inside the park here: no permanent structures allowed.’

‘Impala Lodge is inside the park, and Leon got permission to lay down concrete.’

‘I’m aware of that. We don’t actually want concrete, though. We prefer Mchindeni river sand.’

‘What about lavatories?’

‘Oh, we’ve got them, don’t panic.’ I took her to the nearest of the two. ‘Long-drop. Sort of a deep pit, an oil drum at the top. But as you see, a real lavvy seat.’

‘You didn’t think of building them en suite, of course.’

‘Not a good idea. They get to whiff a bit by the end of the season, you see.’

‘Leon got permission to fit flush toilets at Impala Lodge.’

‘Yes, I know, and the water towers are a wonderful landmark for lost travellers.’ The sarcasm washed over her. She seemed to be rather overdoing the casual, professional interest in a competitor’s business. I felt like a house owner listening to a tactless potential buyer criticising the wallpaper and talking loudly about dismantling your favourite room.

Caroline asked: ‘And showers?’

‘Ah yes. Pièce de résistance, the showers. Clients love them. Follow me.’ I led her to the edge of the river bank, where three oil drums stood. Beneath the central one, a small fire of mopane wood was kept perpetually alight; mopane, hard as diamond, forms small coals that glow for hours.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Caroline said. ‘You splash yourselves down out here in the open.’

‘Would we be so coarse and unsophisticated? Come.’ I led her down a short flight of steps, cut into the river bank. At their foot was a small ledge, its outer edge guarded by a bamboo rail. Behind the rail were the two shower cubicles, each the size of a telephone kiosk, roofed with thatch, three walls and a floor cut from living river bank. The fourth wall was air; each cubicle gave a matchless view across the mighty Mchindeni. And from each, you could see both egret and spoonbill, and hear the grunting and guffawing of a pod of hippo in a deep pool a few yards away. Caroline inspected the shower head and the two taps, which were fed by the oil drums above: hot and cold. A straggling party of a dozen foxy-red puku was coming down to drink on the far side of the river; a pied kingfisher flashed before us, halted in mid-air, hovering hard, before plunging twenty feet into the river, emerging triumphantly fishfull.

Caroline placed both her hands on the bamboo rail, and looked out over the river. I said nothing; nor, for once, did she. A sudden piercing whistle, surprisingly close, cut the air, and she jumped. ‘Puku,’ I said softly. ‘Alarm call. Look, there he is, right below us.’

‘Antelope whistle? Is this a tease?’

‘Would I do such a thing? I know it’s an odd noise for an antelope, but it’s what they do.’

Obligingly the puku did it again, and Caroline laughed suddenly. ‘You know, there are moments when I see the point of you lot. The shower is lovely. But doesn’t all this neo-primitivism upset the clients?’

‘Some are a bit taken aback at first,’ I said, answering seriously because this was intended as a serious question. ‘Especially if they’ve been told to expect something different. And that happens more often than we would wish.’

‘But that’s dreadful. Can’t you control the way you are marketed? It’s the first rule of business, surely.’

‘Well, that’s our Joyce for you. But the thing is, once we’ve got the clients – on the rare occasions we get any, that is – it begins to work to our advantage. We tell them this is a camp, a bush camp, the real thing, no half-cocked lodge. This is where the real bush people go. And we give them lots and lots of bush, lots and lots of animals. They mostly get the hang of things. The ones who are nervy at first generally end up the biggest fans. They feel they’ve achieved something, which they have, and they end up really pleased with themselves. That’s great fun for us, when it happens, and it happens a lot.’

‘Yes, I can see how that might be a good strategy,’ Caroline said thoughtfully. ‘If you could market it properly, it would certainly be effective. If you could tap in to the right sort of clients.’ She laughed at herself suddenly. ‘God, if I stay here much longer, I might even start to see the point of George’s insane driving.’

‘You’re a lady very easily swayed.’ I realised that this was a rather risqué remark far too late to call it back.

But Caroline only laughed, and ran up the steps ahead of me.

Sunday coped well with the unexpected guest, producing a quiche from his hole-in-the-ground oven – that too fascinated and appalled Caroline – and putting together a salad. Over the meal, Caroline started to ask how we managed for light. Paraffin. What, no electricity? No generator? Leon had a generator. Yes, we knew that. We knew that very well indeed. We heard it start every evening, and when the wind blew in the right, or the wrong direction, we heard its mutter throughout the evening. We had no wish to impose further din on ourselves, on our clients, on the bush. ‘But how do you keep the animals out?’

‘We don’t.’

‘But don’t you get animals in the camp? I mean, we use the generator to run an electric fence. So the clients can walk about camp in comfort and safety.’

George broke into the conversation suddenly, with his mouth full of quiche. ‘Course we get animals in camp. It’s in the middle of the bloody bush, isn’t it? Where do you think you are, Kew bloody Gardens?’

‘I’m sorry, George,’ Caroline said, quite humbly. ‘I’m not used to the idea of animals in camp. Impala Lodge is sort of a safe area, an island, if you like, surrounded by bush, where the clients feel safe. You look out at the bush from the safety of Impala Lodge, if you see what I mean. You do it differently here, and I’m not used to it.’

‘Out here we’re awash with animals,’ I said. ‘Going for a pee in the middle of the night is one of life’s great adventures.’

‘And the animals really come into camp? What sort of animals?’

‘Elephant the other night,’ said George. ‘Hippo round the edges every night.’

‘Heard leopard this morning,’ I said. ‘Did I say? While I was waiting for you and Helen, right on the edge of the ebony glade.’

‘And bloody honey badger,’ George said.

‘We bear good will to all living creatures at this camp,’ I said. ‘Except honey badger.’

‘What do they do?’ asked Caroline. ‘Steal honey?’

‘They steal bloody everything, and last week they managed to rip open a tin trunk full of food. A tin trunk! They bit it open.’

‘We had lion in the camp last night,’ Joseph said. ‘I found tracks after you had left on the walk.’

He had George’s full attention immediately. ‘Really? How many?’

‘Just one. Female, I think, not a full-grown male, certainly. She passed between your hut and Dan’s, round the back of the sitenji, and then in front of huts four and five.’

George considered this for a moment.

‘But what are you going to do about it?’ Caroline asked, alarmed, and no doubt already considering the adventure of the nocturnal pee.

‘Not sure. I’d like to have followed her,’ George said. ‘But it’ll be too late now, of course. Perhaps she was going to look for our old friend, the alpha male. Because he wasn’t with the rest of the Tondo Pride this morning, was he? Perhaps there’s a honeymoon going on.’

‘But the rest were all there on the buff this morning, George, all twelve of them.’

‘I know. That’s why it’s interesting. She must have come from another pride, probably the one to the south of us. Seeking a spot of exogamy, perhaps.’

‘Exogamy?’ Joseph asked.

‘Copulation outside the pride. Very healthy thing, of course. Refreshes the gene pool.’

Caroline said nothing, but you could see that she badly wanted to. She could not understand how lion, rather than the camp, were George’s priority.

‘I know,’ George said. ‘Perhaps we could do a little detour tomorrow and look for her. On the way to the airport to collect the vegetarians.’

‘They’re not coming tomorrow,’ I reminded him.

‘Nor are they, bugger it. Oh, bugger this bloody season. Bugger everything. Well, never mind. We’ll listen out. Maybe drive out tomorrow if we hear anything in the night.’

‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘We’ll do it. Now, here’s the plan for today. We have coffee. Then we go and see lion on the kill. I’ll pack a cool box for sundowners. Beer, everybody? You coming, Joseph? Lion, Coke?’

‘Sure. Lion.’

‘Caroline, you haven’t got binoculars, have you? A few spare pairs on the bar, the small ones at the end are the best. All right?’

And so, half an hour later, we set off. I must confess to a paltry stratagem. Joseph and I conducted a constant, never admitted competition for the front seat of the vehicle. Travelling up-front with George was always instructive; you could never learn enough. But on this occasion, I ‘forgot’ my hat and went back to fetch it at the last minute, returning to find George and Joseph in the front, Caroline on the back. I swung jauntily into the back alongside, trilby at a dashing angle. Cool in the Bush.

We were delayed on the way to the lion kill by a small group of kudu females, tall, stately and gorgeous, a deep maroon, almost a purple colour, painted with white stripes by a wavering hand. They had ears like satellite dishes, large eyes in faces also picked out with slim white stripes. They stopped motionless at our approach, an utterly characteristic antelope attitude: neither quite trusting nor quite fearful, they gazed unwinking. ‘Oh, the lovely, lovely things,’ Caroline murmured beneath her breath.

‘Surely you’ve seen them before.’

‘Not close. Look at those faces, it’s like the hymn; you know, that line about “looked down with sad and wondering eyes”.’

‘Bateleur,’ said George. ‘Oh, and hear the brubru, sounds just like a telephone.’

‘So it does,’ said Caroline. ‘I’ve never heard that before.’

We drove on. ‘How odd, to start singing hymns in the middle of the bush.’

‘Not so odd. I sing hymns everywhere. My father is a vicar.’

‘Oh,’ I said, rather inadequately. ‘What does he think about you being in the bush?’

‘He thinks I’ll grow out of it.’

‘My mother thought that,’ George called from the front. ‘A lot more vultures.’

He was right. The umbrella thorn above the kill was now thick with them, motionless, like weird and probably poisonous fruit, as they surveyed the banquet from which they were still excluded.

‘All right,’ George said. ‘Ready for a spot of bundu-bashing, Caroline?’ Without reducing speed, he drove off the track and onto the bush-studded plain. This had a drastic effect on the motion of the Land Cruiser: on the road, it rolled like a Channel ferry in mildly inclement weather; the plain imparted a violent pitching and yawing motion that mimicked a sea passage in a typhoon. Caroline, propelled from her seat, made a desperate lunge for the grab-bar. I was already standing high, one foot on the spare wheel and the other on the vehicle’s side, holding onto the grab-bar with one hand. Though it looked fairly cool, this position was not, in fact, for Caroline’s benefit: good bush-driving in these circumstances is a team job. With the height, I could give George useful information.

The way between us and the lion was blocked by the dry watercourse. ‘Left. No, on a bit. Past the bushes. There, you can get down and up here.’ George inched the vehicle down, and then took the rise on the other side with a sudden rush. At the lip, the vehicle twisted giddily, one wheel lost contact with the ground, but after a moment it toppled and fell back with a gratifying thump, and we were across. The way ahead was across a wide area of black cotton soil. This is perfectly horrible stuff. The ground, flooded, dried out and baked, cracks into cobbles. It feels like crossing a sea of cricket balls. You can make walking pace at the easy parts.

‘Is it legal to drive so far off the road?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘Leon says you need a fast escape route when you drive near lion.’

We drove on. ‘The kill’s where it was this morning,’ I called from my crow’s nest. ‘Two, maybe three lion on it. I can see six lying around still under the thorn tree.’

‘Two more under the bush on the right,’ Joseph said.

‘I was just coming to them,’ I said with dignity. I hadn’t seen them at all.

‘Bullshit,’ Joseph said. ‘And a single female there, that makes twelve.’

‘I still can’t see them,’ Caroline said anxiously.

‘Take the nearer of the two thorn trees. Follow the trunk down to the ground. Then left, just a little.’

‘Oh.’

We drove juddering on, pitching and yawing across the merciless ground. George cut away from the line we had walked that morning, coming back to the lion from a more open area. The bushes fell away: we had an uninterrupted view: sandy shapes in sand-coloured grass, a hundred yards away.

George halted for a moment, looking around, and said encouragingly: ‘Perfect. Perfect.’ And then, without any more ado, he drove straight into the middle of them.

He drove furiously on at the not quite walking pace that the conditions demanded, and once comfortably and utterly surrounded by lion, he stopped. And, to an audible gasp from Caroline, switched off the engine.