had, or had not, been seen. We pulled into the shade of a kigelia tree, and scanned about with binoculars. George produced lunch from the inaptly named cool box. We flipped off the tops in the door-latch of the Land Cruiser and drank it.
I found the palmnut vulture too. George fetched his telescope, an instrument which, I was to learn, was forever falling off its tripod without warning, and focused on the bird for a closer inspection. ‘It’s actually a fish eagle, isn’t it? An immature?’ The question was a statement. I took a look myself.
‘I see what you mean. I’m completely wrong.’
‘Well, they do look quite similar.’
‘George, do you know what I think?’
‘That the fish eagle is the bird that Lloyd identified as a palmnut vulture.’
‘I’ll give you –’
‘Better than even money?’
‘Much better. Heavy odds-on. Outrageous stringing.’ I then had to explain to George that ‘stringing’ was birding slang for faulty diagnosis, and so the bogus palmnut made Lloyd a stringer of heroic dimension. Pleased with the thought, we finished our beer, restored the bottles to the ‘cool’ box, and George started up. Or rather he didn’t. He turned the key, but nothing happened. ‘Oh dear, I wish it wouldn’t do that.’
‘Do what?’
‘Well, there’s something wrong with the ignition switch. It sometimes turns the heating on by mistake when it’s in the off position. And that drains the battery. And sometimes the wires fall off the battery, too. Perhaps it’s that and not the heating. I’ll have a look.’
He opened the bonnet and discovered that it was, indeed, the detached wire at fault. I passed him, at his request, a wallet of tools from the glove compartment. After a few moments of fiddling, George asked me to try the key again. Success. He slammed down the bonnet, and we drove off again, travelling fairly briskly towards Lion Camp. We stopped a lot on the way, especially for zebra. George was now trying to diagnose the stallions himself and was getting the hang of it fast. But then the vehicle went lame on us. ‘Sod it.’ Puncture: a routine emergency. ‘Give me the wallet of tools again, Dan. I’ll get the jack.’
‘What tools?’
‘The ones you gave me before.’
‘You never gave them back to me.’
‘Of course I bloody did.’
‘You bloody didn’t. Anyway, they’re not here.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Anything vital in there?’
‘Wheel wrench.’
‘Oh, bugger it. Perhaps we can bodge the wheel nuts loose with a shifting spanner. Have you got one?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘That’s all right, then.’
‘It’s with the wallet of tools.’
‘Oh, arseholes, where the hell is the tool kit?’
‘I rather think I left it on the front bumper after I closed the bonnet. After I had fixed the wire back onto the battery. It will have fallen off, probably still under the kigelia tree.’
‘About two hours’ drive away.’
‘About that. Oh well. We’d better walk.’
‘Walk? It’d take two days.’
‘No, no, no, to camp, to my camp, to Lion Camp, you know. It’s only about a mile off, and I’ve plenty of spare tools there.’
It was an iron rule of The Safari Guide Training Manual that when in trouble, you stayed with the vehicle. Walking safaris were, of course, permitted in the Mchindeni National Parks, but only in the company of an armed scout. George and I, unarmed, set off into the bush. ‘You hardly ever see any game around here,’ George said airily.
‘Oh good.’
Within five minutes we had walked almost straight into a lioness. She was lying stretched out beneath a tree, as soundly asleep as only a lion can be. She did not move a muscle. I loved her. We swung away from her, altering course to follow the bank of the dry Tondo River, aiming to cross at its confluence with the Mchindeni. That was enough bad luck for one walk, anyway, I thought.
After five minutes or so, my pulse had slowed a little and I had stopped mouth-breathing. I felt extraordinarily exposed: naked. We reached the high bank of the Mchindeni: three hundred yards away, I could see the framework of a couple of incomplete huts, signs of rather desultory human activity. This was my first sight of Lion Camp.
Our path took us to the confluence, the wide funnelled mouth of a river of sand, its banks studded with thick combretum bushes. It was at this point, about ten yards from the first bush and a hundred yards from camp, that there was a small, localised nuclear explosion. The first bush blew up in front of us; with a great detonation of snarls and a rip and snap of breaking twig, there before us was the biggest lion I had ever seen in my life, dark-maned and colossal, with carthorse-huge feet, an eye-filling sight of teeth and mane and yellow eyes. Afterwards, I felt the experience was rather like the playing of a fruit machine, a subject on which I was an expert: a wait for the flashing symbols to settle on a decision and to spell out your fate. For about one hundredth of a second, the symbols seemed to flash through the yellow eyes – fight or flight, fight or flight, fight or flight – before settling on jackpot. Flight. The lion, surprised and horrified almost as much as us, opted for discretion, and with a sudden flick of the hips, revealing balls like footballs, he turned and covered thirty yards in an instant of time, spinning around on an eminence above us to lash his tail and show us the whiteness of his teeth.
There followed one of those lifetime three-second pauses. And then George said quietly, without turning his head, ‘Definite male.’
After that, of course, there was no escape. That lion did something to me, you see. I was never quite sure what: only that it was irreversible. That night, as we dined at Lion Camp, George invited me to join him as his assistant for the season, and I accepted at once. I took my safari guide exam a fortnight later and the day after that, I was showing our first clients the bush, talking hard on zebra, swotting hard on birds and plants, badgering George to teach me more bird calls. I took up residence in a hut on the banks of the Mchindeni, and every night, I slept to the sound of lion music.
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
