FEATURE - Book explores man-eating lions of Tsavo
Date: 11-Oct-02
Country: USA
Author: Andrew Stern
Entire African villages were abandoned to stalking lions viewed as evil incarnate, their eventual slayers paraded as heroes and the animals' carcasses burned.
Attacking singly, in pairs or as a pride, lions can be hunting geniuses capable of breaking the neck of truck-sized Cape Buffalo and evading rifle-toting hunters.
Lion researcher Tom Gnoske recalls helplessly clinging to the roof of a Land Rover as a male lion circled menacingly beneath, roaring, while a female and her cubs stood by - perhaps awaiting a meal.
"He could have easily jumped up and attacked, but he didn't," Gnoske said. "You never stop being scared of this stuff."
Gnoske, who studies lions when not at his full-time job as an artist who creates bird displays at the Field Museum of Chicago, and some fellow researchers figure prominently in the book published earlier this year by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Caputo, "Ghosts of Tsavo: Stalking the Mystery Lions of East Africa" (National Geographic's Adventure Press).
Armed with notebook and camera, Caputo ventured into Kenya's rugged Tsavo National Park with local safari leaders and scientists tracking the region's elusive lions.
Along the way, Caputo revealed some of the latest research about the king of beasts and unraveled the lore surrounding the carnivore's supposed taste for human flesh.
Caputo said the dangers he faced in Tsavo paled compared to being shot at in Vietnam's jungles, recounted in his prize-winning 1977 soldier's memoir, "A Rumor of War," but there were scary moments.
He was nearly trampled by elephants, and had a near-fatal toxic reaction to an anti-malarial drug. One night, on his way to the camp shower, a lion's shuddering roar sent Caputo scurrying back inside his tent.
"I feel as ridiculous as I'm frightened, standing naked with a knife in my hand. If one of those monsters charges through the canvas, I'd better hope the impact drives the blade through my heart," he wrote.
The tale began in Chicago, Caputo's hometown, where he first spied the Field Museum's popular diorama displaying the two notorious man-eaters of Tsavo, named Ghost and Darkness, blamed for the deaths of more than 130 railroad workers.
"I never forgot that," Caputo said from his home in Connecticut of seeing the museum's two marauders glaring with glass eyes. "Everybody becomes mesmerized by these powerful cats that live out their lives in this rough terrain."
The enshrined pair raided the camps of imported Indian laborers building a bridge over the Tsavo River, magically eluding British engineer John Patterson for nine months before he shot them dead. The episode temporarily halted construction on the Ugandan railway linking Mombasa on the Kenyan coast with Lake Victoria.
The lions were "enormous brutes" and "outlaws" who broke the laws of nature, according to the myth popularized by Patterson in his 1907 book and later lecture tours. The lions' "reign of terror" was the basis of two Hollywood movies, most recently "The Ghost and the Darkness" in 1997.
But according to his own diary, Patterson greatly exaggerated the lions' lethal prolificacy to pump up sales of his best-selling book. Lions likely killed between 14 and 28 of Patterson's workers, and the pair he shot may not even have been the culprits.
Gnoske, who rediscovered the lions' skulls in the bowels of the museum decades after they were donated by Patterson, said hair found jammed inside the skulls' broken canines belonged to several animal species the lions had eaten, but not to humans. Many other lions might have participated in the carnage, given the tradition of man-eating in Tsavo, he said.
Gnoske and museum colleague Julian Kerbis Peterhans have written a paper about the history of man-eating by lions, which Caputo summarizes in his final chapter. The scientists cite several man-eating binges by lions, including the 1,500 people taken by three generations of lions in a wildlife-depleted strip of Tanz
