Death in the Silent Places Read online

  The weeks trickled past and pooled into months. The coolies at the bridgehead gradually began to lose their fear of the man-eaters, sleeping outside again as if their “demon” lions had never existed. Constant reports reached Patterson of continued terrorization of other places, but the lions had kept their distance from Tsavo since the big surprise back in April. On the other hand, the colonel realized that they could return at any moment and take up where they had left off, and so he decided to have an appropriate reception catered for their homecoming.

  Patterson launched himself into the design and construction of an elaborate lion trap. It was really quite a slick affair, made out of available materials of railway ties and sleepers, tram rails, telegraph wire and heavy chain, divided into two compartments. One section was to hold the lion and the other to accommodate the human bait that would have to be used. The idea was to utilize a sliding door in the rear of the trap to admit the men who, once inside, would be completely safe, as the compartment was separated from the front one by a grid of heavy iron rails only three inches apart, their ends deeply embedded in thick wooden sleepers. The front door, which would be open to admit the lion trying to reach the bait in the rear, was a powerful and flexible curtain of short lengths of iron rail, wired to logging chain that hung down on either side of the entrance when in the closed position. A trip release was rigged by means of a spring concealed in the dirt of the floor, which, when touched, triggered a lever holding the folding door open over the trap’s mouth. Upon touching the hidden spring, which he would be bound to do, the lion would cause the heavy door to come crashing down and lock into immovable position by wedging its lower edge between two carefully secured iron rails sunk into the ground of the mouth. Pretty tricky, old Patterson.

  The lion trap took a lot of time and ingenuity, one of the biggest headaches being the boring of holes through the many lengths of tough iron rail for the door so that they could be wired into position. Patterson finally solved this by firing hard-nosed bullets from his .303 rifle, the metal-jacketed slugs boring through the iron as neatly as if they were punched by a hydraulic press. When the great creation was at last ready, the colonel prepared the finishing touches by pitching a tent over the whole contraption and building a boma around it strong enough to stall a rhino, save for an entrance in front of the mouth and a removable gap at the rear, which was to be sealed by the human bait pulling a spiky bundle of thorns behind them. Patterson had to put up with a good deal of ribbing by other officers who inspected the unlikely trap, but he persevered, even sleeping in it as bait the first few nights himself. Unfortunately, he attracted nothing more of the man-eating tribe than a horrendous cloud of mosquitoes, which chewed him with nearly all the enthusiasm of the lions. During this period, while the lions were operating elsewhere, Patterson almost gave the impression that he wished they would return to give him another crack at them. Obligingly, they did.

  One particularly dark night several months later, the Tsavo Bridgehead was again aroused by the all-too-familiar screams of terror as one of the lions was discovered breaking through the boma of a compound. One thing was immediately apparent: they had gained in boldness and daring to a degree far beyond their previous behavior. On this first night of their return engagement, it was odd that the lions even bothered breaking into a boma; there were many men ripe for the picking, sleeping outside. They must have been overlooked, or the man-eaters had fallen into the habit of finding food inside the thorn enclosures and didn’t want to lose their touch. Although the alarm was given and sticks, stones and firebrands thrown at the lion, he remained undeterred, charging into the panicked coolies and killing one, whom he methodically carried and dragged back through the thorn. Gone now was the nicety of removing the corpses several hundred yards into the night before feeding. As soon as he was clear of the fence, the lion was joined by his companion, and together they completely ate the body within thirty yards of the spot where the victim had been caught. So brazen were they that they paid not the slightest attention to the shots fired at them by a Jemadar, who, at least so far, had enjoyed better luck than the late, lamented Ungan Singh.

  Although there was a very little left of the coolie’s body, Patterson elected not to bury the scraps, in the desperate hope that the lions would return the next night to the same spot. One can realize his need to take any opportunity, but it would be thought that he would by now understand that these lions did not, at least by pattern, normally return to the same place where they had killed the night before, a fact that had kept them alive so long. As usual, halfway through the long night Patterson heard an uproar in the distance that made it clear the lions had struck a camp two miles away.

  By this time, the Man-eaters of Tsavo had become genuine celebrities, rather in the same sense that Jack the Ripper had been; the fact that they had killed more than five times the number of Jack’s victims was not hurting their international notoriety. As such, they attracted many fame-seeking outsiders—mostly civil and military officers who came to hunt them—but all met the failure that Patterson had gotten to know so well. How the lions could continue to take a man every night without catching a bullet, even by chance, seemed almost beyond the laws of possibility. The sense of black-hearted frustration Patterson felt is clarified when he speaks of one evening when the lions chose to eat their man-kill within easy hearing of his tent, almost trying to taunt him:

  “I could plainly hear them crunching the bones, the sound of their dreadful purring filled the air and rang in my ears for days afterward. The terrible thing was to feel so helpless; it was useless to attempt to go out, as of course the poor fellow was dead, and in addition it was so pitch dark as to make it impossible to see anything.”

  As Patterson lay impotently listening to the lions feeding, a half-dozen workmen who were living in a small boma near his also heard the gruesome symphony and lost their nerve, pleading to be let into the Sahib’s enclosure. Of course, he admitted them, realizing a few minutes later that one of them who had been sick appeared to be missing. Patterson asked what had become of him and discovered that the other men had callously abandoned him, too ill to move, back in their tent. Infuriated, Patterson got up a small rescue team and went out to bring him back. In the light of a lantern, he approached the still-open tent front and looked inside. The poor devil was beyond need of help. Deserted by his friends with the lions within hearing, he had died of fear and shock.

  It hardly seems possible, but things began to get even worse. Heretofore, only one lion had been the actual killer while the other kept back, merely joining in the feeding. Not any more. Now both lions began to attack together, each catching its own separate meal. Thus, instead of one man being taken a night, two were now often slaughtered. The more shy lion, who had not been killing until now, was still inexperienced, as is evidenced by the killing of two Swahili porters at the end of November. One was immediately carried off through the thorns and eaten, but the second continued to moan for a long time. When the men finally got up enough courage to investigate, they found him suspended in the boma, the only failure of the lions to escape with a victim through the thick thorn barriers. He was still alive—for all practical purposes crucified—in the morning when Patterson saw him, but he was so horribly mangled by teeth, claws and thorns that he died before he could reach the hospital.

  Several nights later, the pair of cats smoothly pulled some poor beggar right out of the middle of the largest camp, which was quite close to the iron hut of a permanent right-of-way inspector. While the victim was being eaten right outside the main camp, the inspector, named Dalgairns, fired more than fifty shots at the sound of the feeding lions. They paid not the least attention as bullets whined all around them. Finally finishing the man, they casually got up and wandered off a short distance, probably burping demurely. Patterson met with Dalgairns the next morning, learning that the inspector felt he had hit at least one of the killers, not a very consistent conclusion according to his description of the lions staying wh
ere they were under fire. But perhaps there was some chance that Dalgairns had scored; along the spoor was an odd, trailing mark that looked like a broken leg being dragged. After some mighty careful sneaking through the scrub brush, the two men were frozen in their tracks by a sudden growling from a nearby thicket. Rifles ready, they picked their way forward until spotting what Patterson thought was a lion cub crouched in a clump of bush. As they got closer, it turned out to be what was left of the body of the coolie, the legs, one arm and half the body eaten. The stiff fingers of the remaining arm trailing in the sand as the corpse was carried had made the strange drag mark, but by the time this was figured out, the lions had disappeared into the heavy bush beyond, where tracking was impossible.

  That did it. If the “demon” theory had had its adherents before, the firing of fifty rounds of ammo without a hit was enough to convince anybody that they were dealing with a lot more than lions. The same day, December 1, 1898, the entire labor force had packed it in and were waiting to speak to Patterson on his return with the shreds of the dead coolie. The meeting didn’t last long, the men simply stating that they had come to work for the government, not to be a delicatessen for a couple of devils. That was all, no discussion. They stampeded off to pick up their belongings and stopped the next train by lying down on the tracks. Swarming over the cars for any handhold, they chugged off, and the Tsavo Bridge project was shut down cold for the next three weeks.

  Of course, not all the Indians left, and a good deal of courage has to be recognized in those who decided to stick around, despite the very good chance of becoming a coolie on rye. From Patterson’s description, over one hundred laborers stayed, their whole time being spent constructing “lion-proof” shelters practically anywhere out of reach, such as on the tops of water tanks, roofs, girders, trees, anyplace that seemed safe. Some of the men decided to go down rather than up, digging deep pits in the floors of their tents where they would sleep at night with heavy logs pulled over for protection. Some of this got a bit overdone, especially the trees, as some very frightened Indians found out one night. One particular tree was so overloaded with beds lashed on to each substantial branch that it actually toppled over from the weight just as the lions were killing a man beneath it. Coolies were scattered everywhere around and almost on the cats. To their extraordinary good luck, the lions couldn’t have cared less, ignoring the panic-stricken men for the one they had already killed.

  In the early days of December, the most improbable and incredible incidents of the whole reign of terror occurred, the first of these centering around a district officer by name of Whitehead, who had been asked by Patterson to come up to Tsavo and lend a hand with his lions. Whitehead’s note of acceptance advised that he should be expected about dinner time on December 2, his train being due at Tsavo Station at six o’clock. Accordingly, the colonel sent a servant to meet him and help with luggage. No sooner was the man gone on his errand but he was back, shaking with terror, reporting that there was no sign of the train or anybody else, with the notable exception of a tremendous lion standing on the station platform.

  At the time, Patterson dismissed the tale as absurd on the basis that everybody was so tense they would imagine even a hyena to be one of the man-eaters. But the next day he found that the servant had been absolutely right, the stationmaster and signalman both having locked themselves in the station when they saw the lion stalking up. The colonel waited dinner for some time, in hopes of the arrival of the district commissioner, but finally decided that, for some reason, Whitehead had postponed his trip until the following day. During his late meal, Patterson heard several shots fired but paid them no mind; gunfire was no rarity in an area of man-eating activity. Finishing his dinner, he proceeded to take his position for the night in a structure he had had built atop an elevated girder, a heavy cage of crossed ties offering a good field of fire. Only a few minutes after he settled down, he was startled to hear the clear and now unmistakable sound of the lions eating a man, crushing bones and purring only about seventy yards away. It made no sense to him; there had been no outcry as was usual when the lions attacked a party of Indians, so he mentally marked the kill down to some native traveler whose luck had run out.

  After some minutes of listening to the awful sounds, Patterson wrote that, despite the darkness, he was able to make out the lions’ eyes glowing through the blackness. He mentioned no nearby fire or other illumination, so this was clearly an impossibility, although he referred, on several occasions in his two books, to seeing animals’ eyes glowing in the dark. Sorry, J.H. No way. Shine is from reflection, and without an outside source of light to be reflected there can be no glow. To be fair, his nerves were in a state that would permit his believing he could see the eyes. In any case, he took careful aim and opened fire. The lions, as usual, ignored him but to move a few yards away, over a slight rise, where they were hidden from the line of fire. Not disturbed further, they leisurely finished the unidentified corpse.

  When daylight started to bloom, Patterson climbed stiffly down from his fortress and started toward the place where he had last heard the lions. On the way, he was completely nonplussed to run into none other than his missing guest, District Commissioner Whitehead, who looked as if he’d spent quite an interesting evening. Astonished, Patterson asked where on earth he’d come from and why he hadn’t turned up the night before.

  “Nice reception you give a fellow when you invite him to dinner,” replied Whitehead laconically.

  The colonel asked him what he was talking about, and Whitehead allowed that the lions had just about nabbed him the previous night. Still incredulous, Patterson told him that he must have been dreaming. Without another word, the commissioner turned his back and asked Patterson if what he saw looked like a dream. The engineer shut up at the sight of Whitehead’s back—a mass of shredded cloth and clotted blood from four long claw marks that had scored the skin and meat. While having his wounds dressed at Patterson’s quarters, Whitehead recounted what had happened in the earlier darkness.

  The train had been very late, arriving well after sundown. Whitehead, along with his sergeant of native troops, a man called Abdullah, had elected to walk to Patterson’s camp along a track spur which ran through a rise that was cut some four or five feet deep to reduce the grade, leaving a lip of earth on each side. Abdullah walking behind with a lantern, all went well until they were in the middle of the cut when, without warning, a lion sprang off the embankment, smashing Whitehead to the ground and tearing his back with a paw stroke while trying to grip the man. More by good luck than planning, the impact caused Whitehead’s carbine to fire, startling the lion enough that it left him and swarmed over the native sergeant. Abdullah had time only to say, “Eh, Bwana, simba,” or “Hey, boss, lion,” a wonderfully distilled observation. In the same moment, although Whitehead was able to get off another shot from a few yards and miss cleanly, the lion and Abdullah were gone over the embankment. Of course it had been the body of Abdullah that Patterson had heard being eaten while in the fortress, which solved the mystery of the kill, although darkly. Just what Whitehead had been doing since the attack was never recorded, but it’s probable he spent the night up a tree. The district commissioner had come about as close to death by lion as you’re likely to hear of, but his wounds healed well and without septic complications.

  Confirming the African version of it never raining but that it pours, the same day, December 3, reinforcements arrived under a Mr. Farquhar, the superintendent of police, who had in tow some twenty sepoys (native troops of the Indian Army), armed with Martini rifles. Together with Patterson, Whitehead, Farquhar, the sepoys and other sportsmen officers, there was now quite a reasonable army arrayed against the lions. Not only that, the lion trap was given a fine tuning and set with two sepoys, armed to the eyeballs, as bait. We may presume they accepted their assignment with understandable reluctance. Patterson had taken plenty of ribbing from what he calls “wise-acre officers” about the trap, but he finally prevailed
to have it at least tried out. With riflemen hanging from every tree and elevated position in sight, darkness fell with a tangible feeling of expectancy. Nothing happened until about nine o’clock, when, with a wild surge of satisfaction, Patterson heard the rumbling clank of the lion trap being sprung, the heavy door falling into place, echoing over the bridgehead. At last, one of the man-eaters was as good as dead.

  Wasn’t he?

  Hunting big, dangerous game is an excellent method of culturing one’s sense of fatalism. People die from the slightest error, while others survive without a scratch the most mind-boggling acts of idiocy. Who knows why? In the Xingu Basin of Brazil, a remote southern Amazon tributary where I was a jaguar hunter years ago, the Indians had developed this philosophy almost into a religion. If we failed to connect with what had looked like virtually a sure kill at the last moment through some quirk of fate, they would merely shrug and observe that “it was not the jaguar’s day to die.” That was that.

  But how could this possibly not be the man-eater’s night to die? Look at the facts: He is trapped in a cage strong enough to restrain King Kong and three of his closest associates; two armed men are near enough, although completely protected, actually to touch the lion with the muzzles of their rifles. Even after he is dead, it will take six strong men ten minutes even to free the heavy door from its locking slot with pry bars and drag him out. Ah, friend, but never underestimate Africa, the hoary motherland that spawned and nurtured Murphy’s Law.