me employ a caterer, after I had taken on Dan as well as Joseph Ngwei. Said I had too many staff.’
‘How do you work it out, then?’
‘By sort of committee. Me, Dan and Joseph, and Sunday the cook. He’s done rather well, actually.’
‘So well you will surely pay me a double bone-arse,’ I said, in Sunday’s voice.
‘He’ll be furious about the bloody cheese,’ George said. ‘I daren’t tell him.’
‘I’ll get Joseph to do it,’ I said. ‘He’ll take it better from him.’
‘Excellent.’
‘Oh, you should join these people, Caroline,’ Philip said delightedly. ‘Look at the mess they are making of it all. Join them and sort them out. You’re just the person they’ve been looking for.’
‘I should bloody well think not,’ said Caroline, sitting up straight, all her primness returning. ‘I hardly think a business diploma, not to mention cordon bleu cooking qualifications, is the sort of thing they need.’
‘Exactly what we need,’ I said, with great heartiness. ‘Start this afternoon. No, you’re our guest this afternoon. Start tonight after supper. From nine o’clock tonight you must do everything I want, all right?’
‘No chance,’ she said. No teasing required today, clearly. Sod you then. How were we going to get through the day without coming to blows? ‘I am assistant manager of a properly run tourist operation that offers a luxury safari to top-drawer international clients. And that’s how I intend things to remain.’
‘We just show our people the bush,’ I said. ‘Food is not cordon bleu, but we offer the best lion in the Valley. Lion is the principal item on our menu.’
‘That’s why you get the sort of clients you get, and we get the sort of clients we get.’
Philip was laughing at this exchange. ‘That will suffice, children, thank you. Ah, George, I used to put lion before the comfort of my clients once, but not any more. I am old, and my clients are too fat. It seems that this is the way clients want it to be: a taste of wilderness, and a lot of food and drink and lying around, and then off to Palmyra Resort for a rest, that is to say, lying around eating and drinking. That is the way it must be. So if you are not joining Lion Safaris, Caroline, what is this visit all about? A spying mission, no doubt. See what your deadly rivals across the river are getting up to.’
Caroline stiffened. ‘They have very kindly offered to show me some lion, since we haven’t got any clients in camp tonight. For once.’
‘Oh, a visit to the Tondo Pride,’ Philip said. ‘That should be part of every bush person’s experience. To visit the Tondo Pride with George. Are they well, the Tondo buggers.’
‘Killing left and right,’ George said.
‘Is George really as dangerous with lion as they say?’ Caroline asked.
‘You mean, as dangerous as Leon says,’ said Philip. ‘Oh yes, I should think so. But the thing is, I’ve never felt terribly safe with George. Even when there are no lion around. Even when we’re not in the bush. Not a terribly safe chap, George. You go with him and see the lion. You’ll have the time of your life.’
From the moment that I joined up with George, I felt as if I were becoming part of an African legend: a minor character in the great legend that was George. Though in fact there were really two legends about him. Among ethologists, and among readers of popular science, he was a ground-breaking genius. But in the Mchindeni Valley he was a dangerous lunatic. His book Lions of the Plains, popular science at its best, had hit me like a shell in my teens. The behaviour of animals, both wild and tame, or half-tamed, had always been the central part of my life; with this book, things acquired a clarity and a purpose they had never before possessed. Hence the zoology degree, hence the study on zebra.
George had produced both the long academic study and the popular work in partnership with Peter Norrie. The academic paper itself was extraordinary; I had wrestled long and hard with it over the course of my studies. Hours of observation, minute cataloguing of detail, and a final analysis in which every insight, every leap of intuition was backed up by a thousand statistics. It was a venerable piece of work, twenty-five years old, and still considered a template for all single-species work. It was a pioneering study, and it paved the way for an ever-proliferating number of similar projects, last and least among them my own.
The people of Mchindeni Valley had difficulty in reconciling the academic legend with everybody’s favourite crazy, with broken specs and open-work crochet crotch. It must be admitted they had a point. The lion study was endlessly meticulous: not George’s most obvious quality. And it was finished: George was a man with a thousand talents, but finishing things was not among them. In the end, I learned that the organising and completing side of things had been Norrie’s contribution, most of the observation and all the insights George’s. Norrie was an academic in shorts; after this joint paper was published he never again left his university. George stayed in the bush, and never published another paper.
Lions of the Plains made money, a respectable amount of the stuff if not a fortune. Norrie had laid his share down as the deposit on a house in Cambridgeshire; George had spent his setting up Lion Safaris with Bruce Wallace. Thus he had exchanged the awed respect of academe for the amiable derision of Mchindeni Valley. ‘George knows,’ people would say, especially when talking of lion, but soon they would be swapping George stories. The vehicle that fell into Kalulu Swamp. The vehicle that George drove off the pontoon and into the Mchindeni River with six clients on board. George’s fall from a tree, his night in the bush unconscious beneath it, covered in blood, his insouciant arrival twenty-four hours later at the Mukango Bar, ordering a beer while still blood-plastered. There were a million stories.
Mine was, and is, about the best. It concerns the first day we spent together: the day after Philip Pocock’s beginning-of-the-season party, when George and I went looking for zebras, so that I could show him how to recognise a stallion within five seconds.
George picked me up at Mukango in the morning and we set off in his terrible beaten-up Land Cruiser. We chose, as a random destination, the distant lagoon where Lloyd had claimed the sighting of his palmnut vulture, and then on, a great loop north to George’s camp. We bounced around the park at a great lick, George slamming on the brakes every time we saw zebra. After five seconds I would call ‘Stallion!’ and point. Then we would clamp our binoculars to our eyes and stare pruriently until we had a firm diagnosis. ‘Yes. Definite male.’
‘Definite male.’
And I was right way above chance expectation, and George asked me again and again about the clues that made instant diagnosis possible, and I rattled on endlessly about my zebras while the African Legend listened with extraordinary humility. It was almost as if I were the venerable, aged-in-the-bush legend, he the young, damp-eared know-nothing. It was certainly as if we were colleagues. A little later I diagnosed not humility but generosity: perhaps the only quality that really matters.
For the rest, we talked endless wildlife shop. George was, I soon learned, a generalist of bewilderingly wide knowledge, but still wider curiosity. We discovered a taste in common for wild speculation. Why not? So often in science, the intuitive leap comes first, the spadework second.
