Death in the Silent Places Read online

  Considering that a man had been killed close by the night before and another just taken within a half mile an hour ago, Patterson doesn’t precisely tend to stun one with his smarts. His own tent was light canvas, as lion-proof as damp tissue paper, pitched in the open without any sort of barrier, an easy mark for even a dim-witted simba. In the wee hours, both Patterson and Dr. Rose were awakened by something stumbling over the tent ropes. With an even greater display of folly, they went outside with a lantern, but they saw nothing and returned to bed. The next morning revealed that it had indeed been one of the lions who had stopped by for a late snack, probably changing his mind about attacking when confused by getting tangled up in the ropes. Patterson got the hint and moved to quarters in a hut surrounded by a then-presumed-safe thorn enclosure with a fire burning all night, his roommate another medical officer named Dr. Brock.

  The next evening, Patterson decided to try his luck again at the tent where the last coolie had been nailed. As he would find later, he took quite a chance walking the half mile to the place in the dark, followed by a man carrying a lantern and another leading a goat, which he tied to the base of his tree in hope of the lions getting bored with their steady diet of coolie laborer. As further experience proved, light or fire was of absolutely no effect as a deterrent to the man-eaters’ attacks; they seemed to regard even a bonfire as a rather romantic touch of candlelight to a good dinner. Patterson Sahib, however, lucked out, and he and his men made the trip without any surprises with big teeth. Soon he was up the chosen tree, praying for a shot at his savage brutes. As the evening wore on, the rainy season chanced to begin, and the colonel had to sit through a chilling, steady drizzle until midnight, when, as if the lions had made a reservation, the usual terrified uproar of Indians sounded from yet another camp. Guess who had come to dinner?

  At this point, let’s take a harder look at the layout of the large camp and the pattern of the lion attacks. The bridge was, at the time, the end of the track, or railhead camp, so most of the personnel were concentrated over about a square mile around it, on the far side of the river. Patterson reckoned them at about 3,000, spread out into some eight subcamps. Since the lions had never been hunted before, the uncanny way in which they always managed to strike a camp while Patterson was waiting in another can only be attributed to luck rather than cunning. Unfortunately, as they were able to avoid the armed man for months on end, they quickly achieved the reputation of supernatural “demons” or devils in the minds of the Indians. This, of course, was at first considered by Patterson and his cohorts as ignorance typical of the coolie laborer. But, after a while, even the colonel had to be wondering deep in the back of his mind.

  The early “learning” period of the Tsavo lions is in itself a fascinating exercise in animal behavior and psychology. For much of this pattern-forming stage, only one lion would do the actual stalking and, normally, killing, while the second would wait for him in the nearby cover and join him in feeding. Later on, as their confidence and skill grew, they hunted together, showing a complete disdain for the densest, highest barriers, loud noise, rifle fire, campfires and anything else meant to keep them at bay, literally killing any time and place they damned well felt like and eating their prey casually in a sleet of bullets without ever being touched. No wonder the Hindus had them pegged as spooks! Yet, while they were still beginners, the Tsavo Man-eaters were far from invincible and pulled a series of boneheaded stunts that, viewed from the distance of years, actually seem humorous, at least in a graveyard sense.

  One night, when Patterson was undoubtedly numbing his bum on some tree branch, waiting for a shot or sitting over a half-eaten body, the killer lion came across a bunniah, or Indian trader, who was riding his donkey in apparent ignorance of the lions’ presence at Tsavo. As he picked his way along a black path, the lion sprang at him, knocking both the man and the donkey flat. The donkey was very badly hurt, and the lion, who clearly was not in the mood for a piece of—uumm, err—donkey, jumped again at the Indian. As he did, his claws somehow got tangled up in the rope by which a pair of oilcans were hung around the donkey’s neck. The metallic commotion these caused as he dragged them behind upset him enough to break off the attack and retire, clattering into the bush. The trader spent the rest of what had to be a very long night up a tree and was rescued the following morning. The ass died.

  A few nights after this episode, a Greek contractor by name of Themistocles Pappadimitrini was sleeping in his hut when the lion broke in. Not yet having this people-grabbing thing down to a science, the lion must have been overexcited at the prospect of a change from coolie because, he sank his fangs into the mattress on which the Greek was lying and, with presumed triumph, carried it off into the night. I wish I could have heard the comments in Lionese when he and his pal tried to eat it!

  There’s an interesting aside on Pappadimitrini worth mentioning here, if only to show that when the bell tolls, brother, there’s no place to hide. Certainly, he considered himself lucky beyond belief that night; in point of fact, it might have gone easier with him had the lion killed him in light of his fate shortly thereafter. He went down to Mt. Kilima N’jaro—that big frosty lump that we call Kilimanjaro—to buy some cattle and on his way back decided to take a shortcut cross-country to the rail line. His water ran out, and he died the terrible, lingering death of thirst. If Africa doesn’t get you one way, it will another.

  As is so frequently the attitude of African natives, it was also the case with the Indian laborers that they, while the railhead camp was still at Tsavo, were not especially frightened or apprehensive about being the lions’ next victims. The attitude reported by Patterson was apparently based upon the odds being slim, with so many men around to choose from, of getting converted into a sand-box deposit. Whatever, man-eaters or not, the weeks passed into a month, and the temporary works for crossing the Tsavo River were completed, enabling the laying of track on the far side. The main labor force moved with the track, farther and farther from Tsavo, leaving only a few hundred workers with Patterson and his medical staff to finish the permanent bridge. All this greatly changed the dynamics of the situation.

  Up to this time, Patterson had dutifully and unsuccessfully hunted the lions, using every tactic he could think of; waiting up all night, even resorting to suicidal daylight forays into the unimaginably thick thorn nyika on both sides of the tracks for miles. This was really a very brave gesture, if futile, as he knew only too well that all the odds were with the lions seeing or hearing the hunter first and perhaps having an early dinner that particular day. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—he saw nothing despite his efforts, and, even after dark, the lions continued to kill and eat people just about everywhere the colonel wasn’t, with the demoralizing habit of hitting north if he was south, east if he was waiting west. Even so, if matters had been maddening previously with a widespread camp, they reached full-blown panic when the main labor force moved up the line, and the Indians assigned to work on the permanent bridge realized that the chances of being chopped had increased tenfold.

  Patterson Sahib must have been quite persuasive with the remainder to get them to stay, even though now clustered in one camp to the presumed shopping convenience of the lions. Only by permitting the men to knock off all work to build towering, thick bomas—ferociously spiked high fences of thorn—around every group of tents and huts would they even consider staying on. The results of this measure illustrate well what many of us professional hunters and game officers have found out over the years since Patterson’s Peril—that it is for all practical purposes impossible to build a boma, or zareba, as it’s called in up-country Kenya, high and strong enough to keep out a determined man-eating lion. I know it doesn’t make much sense, but, as Patterson was to discover, lions, even with their relatively thin skins and sensitive paws, have some Houdini-like method of penetrating incredibly thick and dense thorn barriers soundlessly with little more than a few scratches. Adding insult, they then normally pull their kill ba
ck through the barrier on the way out. In all the man-killings at Tsavo, only once was a body left stuck in the thorns, the cat apparently unable to force his way out with the corpse. Even when the bomas were built, despite all-night fires and the constant clatter of a bunch of empty oil tins being rattled steadily by the night watchman, men continued to be taken from their tents almost every night. One terrified Indian was dragged from a goods wagon, a type of freight car, with another man trying to hold onto his legs until sheer force tore him loose. He was eaten within grisly hearing of the other laborers in the wagon. Another night, five Sikh carpenters had built a platform upon which to pitch their tent in the very erroneous belief that the eight-foot height would place them out of reach. How they decided on this distance from the ground is unfathomable, as a lion can easily reach twelve feet into the air without even jumping. Questioned as to the safety of their perch by Patterson, they assured him that God would protect them.

  Maybe they were right. A few nights after the platform was built, one of the man-eaters stalked it and easily jumped up to the opening. To the Indians’ great good luck, or perhaps some overtime on God’s part, the lion threw his full weight onto the end of a ladder protruding from the entrance, used to climb up to the tent. It tipped like a teeterboard under his great bulk, tore through the top of the tent and swatted him a solid thump on the head as it came down. The cat ran off into the night, although the raised tent suddenly lost popularity, God Almighty or not.

  Near the main campground stood the hospital compound tent of the departed main force, left behind under the care of the bridge builders. Surrounded as it was by a very heavy and high boma presumed to be lion-proof, it was somewhat isolated. It was here, early one evening, that a hospital assistant heard a small noise and opened his adjoining tent front to see what it was. To his understandable horror, a tremendous lion was standing a few yards away, looking right at him. As he froze, paralyzed with fear, the lion started to spring at him, which shook him out of his stupor and sent him reeling into a box of glass medical supplies. This fell with a shattering crash and startled the cat, which ran off to another part of the compound and immediately jumped onto and through the walls of a tent containing eight sick and injured Indians. Two of them were badly lacerated by claw wounds, a third killed on the spot and pulled through the ice-pick thorn boma, probably looking like a sack of bloody cole slaw from the spikes when he reached the other side. The two wounded coolies lay where they fell all night long under a piece of torn canvas, which must have been something less than a dull experience.

  Not illogically, Patterson ordered the survivors moved to a new hospital closer to the main camp and had an even heavier enclosure built around it. All the patients were “safe” inside before nightfall. I find it interesting that John Henry had gotten the idea from somebody that lions tend to visit recently abandoned camps and, therefore, decided to sit up all night in the vacated hospital where the lions had struck the night before. Armed to the molars, he was halfway through the night when—what else?—the new hospital exploded into a high babble of terrified human voices. The lions had won the deadly shell game again.

  Smart enough by this time to stay put for the rest of the night, he hurried over to the new hospital at daylight. This latest onslaught of the lions had been a real humdinger, the events of which were witnessed in the big circle of firelight by some other Indian patients. A water carrier had been lying asleep with his head toward the center of the tent, his feet radiating outward until they almost touched the canvas wall. Somehow, the more enthusiastic of the lions had actually jumped over the high boma and managed to get his head under the edge of the tent wall. He grabbed the water carrier’s foot in his teeth, tugging on it viciously to pull him out of the tent. Awakening to a real nightmare, the man desperately caught hold of a heavy box in an effort to keep from being dragged away, but his grip was broken when the box got hung up at the bottom of the tent. Still fighting for his life, the terrified coolie got his hands on a strong tent rope, which he clutched with insane strength until the lion jerked so hard that the rope broke in the man’s hands. Outside now, the lion instantly bit the Indian in the throat, shaking him like a cat with a mouse. With the body gripped across the middle, the man-eater was seen to run up and down the thick hedge until he chose a spot, plunged through and disappeared into the blackness, leaving chunks of the man’s flesh and shreds of his clothing all along his passage through the boma.

  Patterson and Dr. Brock followed the track after listening to the witnesses, finding that it only ran some 400 yards into the bush. The end of the trail held the inevitable horror, a well-chewed skull and jaws, some larger bones and part of the palm of one hand with a couple of fingers still remaining. Encircling one finger was a silver ring which, along with the teeth, Patterson arranged to have shipped back to the man’s widow in India.

  Well, what now? What else? Move the hospital again, and build a thicker and higher barrier. This being done and the enclosure finished by dark after much hard work by the men, Patterson and Brock decided their next round of strategy. Still hooked on the notion that lions love to visit deserted camps rather than those filled with nice juicy people, they left a couple of tents standing in the old—one- day old—hospital compound and tied a trio of cows in them for bait, despite the fact that the lions had thus far shown a clear disinterest in anything but human flesh. This night, however, rather than sitting up in a tree or hiding in a tent, the two white men had a goods wagon pulled up on a nearby track siding close to the hospital where they would set their ambush. It would seem that the water carrier must have left them hungry, as the man-eaters were reported all over the place that day, April 23. Four miles from Tsavo Bridge, they had tried to catch a coolie walking along the tracks in bright daylight, but he made it up a tree just in time. He was rescued, half dead with fright, after being sighted by a passing train some hours later. Then, the lions were reported seen together, right at Tsavo Station, and again, at dusk, actually stalking Dr. Brock as he was on his way back from the hospital to his compound.

  It was surprisingly late by the time the two men finished dinner and, with astonishing lack of caution, walked the entire mile through the dark to the goods wagon, getting set up at ten o’clock. The railroad car had a “Dutch” door design, and Patterson and Brock kept their vigil outside the thorn corral with the bottom half of the door closed and the top half open for a shooting port, facing the second abandoned hospital which they could not even see due to the darkness of the night.

  A few hours passed with oppressive, stygian silence, the hunters becoming restless. Then, with bone-chilling crispness, a dry stick cracked somewhere outside. Instantly, nobody was bored. A few minutes later, a dull thud could be heard, just the sort of sound a lion would make on landing after jumping over the boma, as he had done the night previously. Even the cattle were stirring nervously but then settled down again. Silence crept back like an invisible fog through the blackness, but it was not the silence of emptiness. Patterson, who was half-mad with frustration for a shot at the killers, suddenly got another one of his bright ideas. He proposed to Brock that the doctor stay there while he got out and lay on the ground below, in hopes of seeing the lion better if he came in their direction with his kill. Brock, fortunately, was still mentally firing on all cylinders and dissuaded Patterson from leaving the shelter of the goods wagon. As they would find out in just a few seconds, it was superb advice, for, at that very instant, at least one of the lions had spotted them and was oozing up for a quick, decisive charge.

  What neither man realized, besides the fact that they were now the bait, was that the hospital boma, ordered carefully locked, was in fact wide open! So, while they were expecting the sound of a lion bulling his way out through the wall of the fence with a dead cow, in actuality the lion or lions were never inside the enclosure at all but had been prowling around the goods wagon all this time.

  As they continued to stare out the top of the door, Patterson suddenly felt a mixed
thrill of fear and excitement, fancying he saw something dark edging with lethal stealth toward them. However, his eyes were so strained by prolonged staring that he was afraid to trust them, concerned that if he fired and the blob turned out to be only a shadow or his imagination, any chance to kill the real lions would be missed. Under his breath he asked Brock if he saw it too, but the doctor was careful enough not to answer. Or maybe he never had time.

  The silence throbbed on for the space of a few more seconds, and then the dark shape was in the air, launched straight at the open door. “The lion!” Patterson shouted involuntarily as both men fired, blinding themselves with the muzzle flashes, their ears deafened as the twin crash of shots reverberated beneath the sheet-iron roof of the wagon. In the confusion, neither man saw what had become of the lion, which must have sheered away at the shots. For certain, had they not been so alert one or the other would have been killed. As it was, the big cat was long gone, and first light showed that Brock’s bullet had struck the sand close by a pug mark, while Patterson’s was never found. The bullet had, however, not touched the charmed “demon” lion, as no blood or other damage showed on the spoor. It was back to the old drawing board for Patterson Sahib.

  By simple mathematical interpolation, it’s a fair guess that the Tsavo Man-eaters may have killed and eaten between thirty and thirty-five railroad personnel between the beginning of March and the twenty-third of April; additionally, there were bound to have been some African victims, which would possibly raise the fatality total to forty. Yet, from Patterson’s records of dates and events, it became clear that the ambush that he and Brock had laid in the goods wagon had at least succeeded in throwing a scare into the lions, as they left the Tsavo Bridge area and proceeded up the line to the advanced railhead, where two men were carried off on successive nights shortly after the twenty-third, and another at a place called Engomani, some ten miles away. The man-eaters liked Engomani, as they hit it twice more the same week, killing and eating one man and tearing up another so badly that he died in a couple of days. Tsavo remained unmolested, for the moment … .