Simon Barnes - Rogue Lion Safaris

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. George recorded all these pieces of speculation onto his tape recorder, vowing to investigate them further, to seek out evidence. After a long morning of it, we reached the lagoon where the palmnut vulture 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.