What do I get for my $153? Well, as far as I can gather from the catalogue, a walking munitions dump. ‘Added shell pockets, recoil pad, expandable chest pockets, two huge bellowed cargo pockets for shells and a sleeve pocket for shooting glasses.’ The last item is a reminder that Hemingway suffered from poor eyesight for most of his life and, before dealing with a charging rhino, had to pop on a pair of little round specs which made him look more like a professor of poetry than a great white hunter.
First we drive a couple of miles or so to Lake Amboseli which, despite a year of drought, still retains water from the El Nino downpours of the year before. The grass cover is still green, and rich stands of vegetation mark fertile lava flows from the mountain.
In the near distance we pass ostriches ruffling their feathers and a pair of zebra mating and the occasional elephant plodding, but the most common beast in the bush is the cow, usually preceded by some solitary walking figure, often no more than a child.
A larger herd of elephant is indicated by footprints on the track, so we climb down off the vehicles and proceed on foot - something generally discouraged amongst tourists.
Jackson wears his Masai cloak, red with yellow stripe, thong sandals, and a coloured bead head-strap. Ali is in his green safari gear.
The presence of any large animals is advertised in advance by numbers of white birds called cattle egrets that ride the big game around with a proprietary air. The bigger and heavier the creature the more the egrets like them, for their feet break up the soil and bring to the surface fresh supplies of the locusts, flies and grasshoppers on which the birds feed.
There are maybe a dozen elephant, including young, making their way slowly towards their next meal. They have almost insatiable appetites. A fully-grown elephant chews up 300 lbs of vegetation and drinks thirty to fifty gallons of water every day, but their metabolism is poor and less than half what they eat is digested. So they make their way across the bush rather like a line of combine harvesters, stuffing it in one end and depositing it, semi-digested, from the other.
Jackson and Ali approach the herd slowly and carefully. Elephants’ eyesight, like their digestion, leaves something to be desired. They walk with their head and eyes down and are more likely to see you approach from the back or the side than they are from the front.
Ali says you can get to within a dozen feet of a herd if you’re upwind of them. He bends down, picks up a handful of dust and tosses it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.
As he does so the elephants’ ears flap and their highly sensitive trunks are up sniffing for trouble. As there are young with them Ali keeps his distance. I’m not complaining, just watching them is therapeutic. Elephants have a combination of mass and grace that is impressive and compelling. When they are threatened they can transform their bulk to a powerhouse of aggression which, once seen, is something always respected and never forgotten. Even Hemingway would never shoot an elephant.
The lion is another thing altogether.
Being British, we regard the lion as a symbol of pride and invincibility. To the Masai he is Simba, killer of cattle and Public Enemy Number One. Jackson was in his teens when he was one of a group of ten young Masai who confronted a lion and killed it with spears. I ask him from how far away.
He grins. ‘As close as possible.’
Which, when pressed, he reckoned to be no more than four feet.
Though the Masai see the lion as a pest, the tourist sees him as a star whom he will pay good money to see. There have been recent moves to try and reconcile these positions. Any agreement ultimately rests on whether the Masai believe they can make enough money from tourism to justify the loss of their cattle.
As we draw a little closer to the swamp, bird life proliferates. The delicately pretty lily-trotter, or African jacana, with its enormous clown’s feet, and the black-winged stilt, whose most striking feature is a pair of long, very red legs, pick at the mud with their beaks whilst brown herons and crowned cranes with jazzy yellow crests take a more leisurely approach. Tawny eagles turn and turn above, and swallows, migrated here, like us, from Europe, dart around, low to the ground.
Where there is a stretch of clear water a flock of flamingos has settled. Startled by our approach they peel off into the sky, turning in a perfect curve, wings catching the light. Jackson warns me that snakes like these lakeside conditions. He has seen pythons here and urges me to walk carefully and make heavy footfalls to warn them of my approach. That would be something, a Python killed by a python.
A grazing herd of thirty Cape buffalo regards us warily. These are big animals, weighing in at around 1500 lbs and dangerous. At the back of the herd a buffalo calf is being born. The cow stays standing and as the calf drops to the ground, she turns and begins to lick it extensively and thoroughly, chewing up the placenta. The new-born calf looks around, blinking and startled as if this is the last thing it wanted to happen. Within a couple of minutes it is standing unsteadily, staggering, falling and being urged up again by the mother. Within five minutes it is standing on its own. A domestic calf would take several hours to stand unassisted, but in this hostile environment such helplessness could be fatal.
At the end of the day we climb up to a small steep bluff called Kitirua Hill. Below us the plain is streaked with vivid splashes of crimson and scarlet as columns of Masai herdsmen, driving their cattle before them, return to the boma, their encampment, before nightfall.
Ali pours us all beers but this is Ramadan and he cannot take a drink himself until the sun has set.
It dips close to the horizon, but seems to linger there most provocatively.
‘Has it gone?’ Ali keeps asking anxiously.
Though we tell him it has, near enough, it is not until he’s satisfied that the very last trace of the rim has disappeared that he reaches for a bottle of Sprite. It’s the first food or drink that has passed his lips since ten o’clock last night.
Back at Tortilis camp, I shower and check myself for ticks. ‘Small black things, about this long,’ warns Hans, the manager, parting his thumb and forefinger by at least an inch. We’re treated to Italian food tonight, dispensed by Jackson, who has traded his Masai cloak for a waiter’s black tie.
The exhilaration of a day spent walking in the bush merely confirms that Africa can never be reduced to European intimacy and cosiness. I fall asleep, having struggled to read Green Hills of Africa in the dim lamp-light, listening to the birds and bats above me in the thatch and the occasional indefinable grunt or shriek from much further away and the evening wind that grows hour by hour until, in the middle of the night, it suddenly dies and I am woken by total silence.
I‘m in a twin-engined Cessna 206, built thirty-one years ago, flying east from Tortilis camp towards a low range called the Chyulu Hills, which lie between the National Parks of Amboseli and Tsavo.
Hemingway knew of Tsavo by reputation, for it was immortalised by one J. H. Patterson in his book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, an account of two lions who preyed on men building the Mombasa-Nairobi railway, eating twenty-eight of them before being caught. The lions’ stuffed remains became star exhibits at the Field Museum in Chicago, one of young Ernest’s favourite haunts.
Hemingway knew the Chyulu Hills from direct experience, for in his second African trip, in 1953, he stayed close by when he took on the job of Honorary Game Warden. The man who is flying my plane there today, skimming it over a sand-coloured plain sprinkled with zebra and wildebeest and herds of Masai cattle, is the current Honorary Game Warden in the area. His name is Richard Bonham, a Kenyan with an interest in up-market safari lodges. He’s short, wiry and weathered and somewhere around fifty, though his outdoor complexion and sun-bleached hair make him look much younger. He’s anxious about the fate of two Masai children and their herd of goats who went missing from their village last night.