The unexpected, the exciting and the oh so unfogettable interactions with marvelous creatures.
From Andrew Clark: A Tryst on the Serengeti (written as a letter to our children)
Dear Samuel and John and Benjamin and Mary;
I am responding to your recent request that I write to you occasionally and relate bits of our family history in East Africa so that you will have a feeling for some of the things that happened before any of you were on the scene or were too young or innocent to realize what was going on. Our 16 years there held a wonderful variety of adventures that I will be happy to share with you.
During that time I was a superlative athlete and amassed four world records in track and field events – the 100 meter dash, the 50 meter dash, the broad jump and the high jump. Each one involved animals whose goal it was to bite, crush, rip apart, or smash and mash my flesh, thereby giving me reason to set the record. Admittedly these records are unofficial but I am, however, confident of having the records by comparing the abilities of each animal (lion, hippo, Cape buffalo, and spitting cobra in the order of the records noted above) with the fact that I am still in one piece. To have survived I had run faster or jump higher or longer or whatever needed doing to be here telling you this tale, and here I am!
I'm going to start with a bang - you will understand the literal use of the term shortly - and tell you the story of one of the funniest things that ever happened to us. This episode was a joint venture with your mother, early in our marriage, and in a single package involved lust, danger, potential disaster, and a sort of crazy funniness that makes it border on sublime. As was the case with many of our situations there, especially in the earlier times when you kids were just a happy thought for the future and we were living in Loliondo, there were animals involved - wild ones with large carnivorous appetites.
Loliondo village is in the northeast corner of the Serengeti ecosystem up near the Kenya border. The southeastern part of the Serengeti is a sea of grass interspersed with granite outcroppings called "kopjes" if you like the sound of Africaans or "inselbergs" if you prefer German. The inselberg term means "island mountain" and certainly captures the flavour of the setting, but somehow I like kopje (referring to “head”) for its brevity. These landforms vary in size from modest to enormous, and by that I mean from the size of a vehicle to the size of many buildings all piled atop each other. Huge piles of great granite rocks. It is the place in the world that I love more than any other, and my heart still lives there after more than 40 years now. For about three years we crossed this part of the Serengeti plain twice each month going back and forth to town, Arusha, the regional capitol. The trip is about 220 miles and we went to collect staff salaries, buy food, and do whatever business was necessary. Seeing as the road was just a two-rut track across the open country it was both possible and feasible to wander and meander through the countryside, navigating by the mountains, in search of whatever adventure might befall. And it often did - to find a rhino and her calf, or watch a cheetah family, or to discover a lion on a kopje looking out over his supposed kingdom, or a pack of hunting dogs on the make. These and many more were ours to enjoy on those back-and-forth trips in the late 1960's.
The particular event that I want to tell you about took place in this wonderland of wildness and adventure one brilliant afternoon as we travelled across the vastness of the Serengeti plain.
I was working as Veterinary Officer of Loliondo Division at the time and my Maasai staff would often ask me to buy things for them that weren't available in Loliondo, which was just a small village. I would always try to accomodate them. They were a hardworking, honorable group of men. I both enjoyed and respected them, and was always ready to do them a good turn in reciprocation for the favours they had done me. On this particular occasion Kashingo had asked that I bring him a foam mattress - a two inch thick one to fit a single bed. So as your mother and I crossed the Serengteti heading for home we had that mattress, among many other things, on board our Landrover.
Bear in mind that this was early in our marriage and I, like most young and newly married men, had a more-or-less continuous gleam in my eye. Your mother, in complementary fashion, was establishing herself as a good and accomodating wife and was williing to go along with whatever halfway reasonable plan I might generate, although she would come to learn better as time went by. On this occasion we were crossing the Serengeti on a lovely day with a clear sky and warm, brilliant sunshine. It was just the sort of day that makes the blood run hot when you are in a lonely, wild, isolated place, so when we came to a huge kopje with a gentle slope, kind of a whale-back sort of conformation with a fairly flat top, inspiration struck. My plan was to leave the Landrover at the base of the kopje, carry Kashingo's new mattress up to the top of it, and there in the warm breeze and clear sunshine and beautiful open country, break it in for him. As mentioned, Mom was in the mode of being an accomodating young wife and indeed to give her full credit, she too has a well developed sense of adventure.
So there we were up on top of our kopje having a lovely tryst when ---- Mom whispered very forcefully into my ear, which happened to be quite near her mouth at the time, "I hear lions!!" Bear in mind, now, that I wasn't a newcomer to East Africa. My defensive senses were very well developed. I had been living in the deep bush for quite some time and I was in the habit of hearing almost anything that might mean trouble, be it a bearing going bad in the Landrover or an animal on the prod in the bush, and I hadn't heard anything at all. Admittedly I had been paying close attention to the activity at hand and my focus was there, but to not hear lions was out of consideration. Mom was, however, adamant and becoming definitely uncooperative, so what could I do? Resentfully I disassociated and walked out across the top of the kopje in the direction she indicated the sound had come from to check on what was happening. When I reached the northern edge of the kopje and looked out I was horrified with the scene of three lions, all young males, about 100 meters away and coming directly toward me at a fast trot.
When encountering situations of extreme stress, human cerebral function speeds up logrythmic multiples and processes information with stupefying rapidity. So it was on this occasion. In less that 1/10th of a second, or perhaps a 1/100th or even a 1/1000th of a second, I had determined that these were young male lions, that they were advancing in a spread out side-by-side hunting fashion rather than the one-behind-the-other traveling formation, and the sound your mother had heard was the sort of grunting burp they use in some sort of communication and I assure you that when a grunting burp comes out of a cat that big it is impressive! There I stood on my kopje, the quintessential naked ape – bare-assed, barefoot, bereft of any defensive cover or weaponry and wearing only a sheen on what was becoming the most rapid and complete detumescence in human history!
What in the world had alerted them to our presence, and why were they behaving so aggressively? My God --- it must be pheromones!! They must have caught a breeze, caught the scent, looked at each other and said "what the hell is that?? and they were out to investigate what it was all about. What might be the reaction of male lions to concentrated human pheromones? I didn't immediately think of anything positive, at least not from Mom's or my perspectives.
I glanced back at Mom. There was my golden girl with her golden hair lying in the golden sunshine. There was my lovely young wife, my own private Venus, trusting in my judgement and resultantly in mortal peril. There was the most important pheromone factory in the world!! She was lying in complete naked vulnerability on the mattress, propped up on one elbow, watching me quizically. Her face wore the expression women get, one I have learned well over the years, that says “Now, Andrew – I was right and you were wrong about this, isn’t that true?? And so what do you have to say about it now??” And at that point I was entirely willing to concede total wrongness without discussion.
I turned back toward the lions and they were much closer, perhaps 50 or 60 meters away. Everything about them signified alertness – heads up, tails up, ears up, moving quickly and purposfully– and lions can move very, very fast for short distances.
It was at this point that I set the world’s record for the 50 meter sprint. I judge it to be between 2-1/2 and 4 seconds.
As I turned away from the lions and started back toward her, Mom got the message that all was not well. Perhaps it was the fact that I was setting the new world record. Or the expression on my face might have been a clue. Or the look in my eyes that had changed from lust to terror. Whatever the case, never was a tryst broken more quickly and a love nest disassembled with such alacrity. Clothing, shoes, and mattress were all swept up in a matter of tenths of a second and we fled down the rock to the waiting security of our Landrover where we sat - naked, trembling, laughing - and watched the lions retake their territory and disdainfully mark the area where we had so recently lain. So much for the superiority of the human specie - cerebral function, opposable thumb, whatever. When push and shove met, we were happy to lose and live!
We drove away for a bit, stopped and got dressed, and continued on home to Loliondo in a very subdued mood.
What would have happened if the lions hadn't made that noise Mom heard, or if she hadn't heard it? What would be the scenario if they had just come silently up on the rock to investigate and surrounded us at close range? What would they have done, and what course would their actions have taken? In that very peculiar situation of cross-species mammalian chemical communication the potentials are legion and most probably disasterous from the standpoint of the humans involved. I imagine that you kids would never have had the opportunity to be conceived.
So that is our personal history lesson for today. This is the first installment of a proposed series and as I drive along on my work travels I will contemplate other adventures to relate to you so that you understand why we were so in love with the wonderful life we lived there both before and after you kids were with us. What a place! What a wondrous place!! As our friend Beverly commented, that piece of country is “big, handsome, wild, sweet, and vicious”. And how we loved it!
A sweet goodnight to each of you - Dad
From Roland:
Weisburd and I and a couple others took a game park tour together. Well, of course, everything was spectacular. But that isn't the point, you all know that the parks are a treasure. One time on that trip, however, our guide, suddenly stopped the Rover as we were driving through a somber, thickish forest. We asked why, to which he said nothing and curtly told us to cool it. We waited for about seven minutes, all the while the guide making it absolutely clear that we should shut up and be quite still. He tilted his head listening intently, but to something our hearing was missing.
Shortly, a godawful sound not unlike two scram jets passing each other amidst 5000 screaming teenagers rent the air and shook the Rover. We could see nothing anywhere in the trees even though the sound itself was strong enough to be nearly visible in the air. The guide continued to motion us to be quite still as the sound increased in intensity well beyond seriously loud. No, the guide did not want to back up and get out of there. Not even for "please". At that Weisburd tensed scared as I had never seen him before. As for myself, let's just say I was counting seconds trying to shorten them by rushing the beat of the second hand of my watch.
After the noise subsided the guide said, "I'd guess it was 40+ elephants being chased by a warthog. The warthog nips at their feet. Really pisses the elephants off. They stampede and wail. Not a good idea to call attention to yourself when they are like that. Does a real number on a Rover. No, I don't know where they were - ahead or behind, left or right." How did he know it was about to happen? "I'm a guide, it's my job to know," he said and continued, "never travel in the parks without a guide." Which advice we naturally ignored in the next park, but that is another story.
From Norrie Robbins:
When I first got to the Geological Survey of Tanzania (GST), the Chief Geologist said to me (in his Scots brogue): “you’ll niver go into the field.” But he went on leave and in 1965 my boss was intensely curious to know if the giant job I was doing, assessing spectrographic trace chemical data from rocks covering 70% of the country, would have a payoff. So he sent me into the field with a field crew, thereby sealing my place forever in Tanzania history as the first female field geologist with GST.
We went off to take stream sediment samples, prospecting for mineral deposits around the town of Kondoa, in central Tanzania. We were working during the dry season, walking upstream in a dry river bed when we suddenly disturbed two water buffalo. One charged us and one stood behind to watch. My field crew all climbed trees. They were yelling at me in Swahili to do the same: climb a tree (panda mti). Having had polio as a child, my stomach muscles aren’t strong enough to do this. I remembered there was a knoll about a quarter mile back, and I decided to run for it. My field crew was in a bind. As I learned later, they had been told that their main job was to bring me back alive; samples were secondary. So, they climbed out of the trees.
I don’t exactly know everything that happened behind me. I know we had two big guns. I know the men put themselves in danger for me. I ran in circles around the knoll, water buffalo following me. Someone got it diverted off of me, and the two animals ran away. I sat down and started to cry. My field tracker, Issa, came over to me and said: are you alive? (U mzima?) I said: yes (Ndiyo). And Issa said: so why are you crying? (Kwahiyo kwanini unelia, mama?) I couldn’t think of a reason, so I quit crying, got up, and we continued on our way. Of course, we were skittish for the rest of the day.