Jeremiah Tolbert

Besides my ostrich encounter, there were really only two occa­sions where I felt that my life was threat­ened by wildlife in Kenya. There were sev­eral occa­sions of fear­ing for my life involv­ing other peo­ple, but that’s another post.The inci­dent hap­pened in Tsavo. Tsavo is famous for one thing in par­tic­u­lar. Man-​​eating lions. Around the turn of the cen­tury, Colonel Patterson was tasked with build­ing a bridge for the British Empire (a bridge that still stands today, and is not remotely impres­sive). He watched in hor­ror as worker after worker (mostly “coolies” from India) were dragged away, killed, and devoured. Eventually, Patterson killed two lions, but only after unbe­liev­able dif­fi­cul­ties. The lions were named The Ghost and The Darkness, and a film about this inci­dent star­ring Val Kilmer came out in the mid-​​90s. The lions’ bod­ies are on dis­play in the Chicago Museum of Natural History. They are male lions, but they have no manes. None of the male lions in Tsavo have them. Upon see­ing the area, you would imme­di­ately real­ize why.

photo credit: Oscar&Alessia

Tsavo was green and dense with thorny thicket when we camped there. It was not like the rest of the African savan­nah. It is almost cer­tain that the male lions of Tsavo do not have manes because if they did, they would never make it ten feet through the underbrush.

The first night we made camp, we could hear lions roar­ing as the sun set. It was the first time we had heard any­thing like it, and we were all thrilled. We put our tents, which were made for three peo­ple. After an evening around the fire, we all retired to our tents. I slept for a few hours, but woke some time after mid­night with a press­ing need to ah, relieve myself. There was only one problem.

The roar­ing con­tin­ued, but it was much, much closer now. Without open­ing the tent, it sounded as if a lion was not more than 30 yards away. Another lion was answer­ing this lion from the oppo­site side of our camp.

I tried to hold it as best I could, but even­tu­ally, I absolutely had to go to the bath­room. I roused my tent mates and we opened the ten flap just a bit and pointed our flash­lights into the dark­ness. The eyes of some­thing flashed green at the very edge of the light. The roar­ing stopped.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to step right out­side the tent, and piss to the left. You guy watch those eyes, and if they start com­ing towards me, say some­thing.” And that’s what I did. It seemed like I was uri­nat­ing the con­tents of a small ocean. I kept my eyes on my busi­ness and did not look at the lion. If I did, I, well, froze up. Finally, I squeezed out the last drop of fluid and not even paus­ing to zip my fly, I dove inside the tent.

The eyes never moved. We sealed up the tent and went back to sleep as best we could with mas­sive cats roar­ing all night. In the morn­ing, the lions were gone.

I can’t remem­ber where the sec­ond brush with death hap­pened. It was either Tsavo also, or Amboseli. We were rid­ing in a Land Rover down a muddy road in the park, and the brush was fairly thick on either side of the road. Everything that wasn’t green with life was a dark red from the clay mud. Wildlife was hard to spot. I stood on my seat, hold­ing onto the edges of the hole in the roof, and scanned with binoc­u­lars, look­ing for some­thing inter­est­ing. Then, the dri­ver spot­ted it.

A bull ele­phant came out of the brush not even twenty feet from us. His skin was streaked red, and his tusks were almost four feet long. He took a hes­i­tant step, then flared his great ears for­ward. I snapped a shot with my cam­era. Then, he charged.

Our dri­ver gunned the engine, and we tore off down the road. The ele­phant stopped in the road behind us and raised his trunk in dis­dain. For less than a sec­ond, I was pretty sure I was going to be thrown from the Rover and tram­pled to death. Everyone in the vehi­cle laughed hys­ter­i­cally, and I mean that lit­er­ally, for half an hour afterward.