Simon Barnes - Rogue Lion Safaris

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 shantytown: a handful of guest huts, walled in weathered and dusty bamboo matting, grass-hatted; staff huts that were little more than lean-tos. The only structure of any solidity was the sitenji: an African term used for a camp’s all-purpose shelter, the eating, drinking, reading, talking, writing area: a nicely thatched roof, more elaborate than the roofs of the huts, supported by stout wooden pillars, with a knee-high wall made from tied-together bundles of dried grass. Inside were a dining table and chairs. Beyond the sitenji, on the edge of the bank, a few ‘comfortable’ canvas chairs were grouped around a small pile of ashes: we had a fire here at night when there were clients in camp.

‘I mean, the potential of this place,’ Caroline said, looking at the elegant grove of ebony trees to the right of and behind the camp, which let through a dappled sunlight. There seemed to be in her eyes something of the same excitement that George and I felt when we saw a crowd of vultures perched high in a tree, and wondered what we might find beneath. ‘Fabulous. Just fabulous.’

‘What would you wish to do with the place?’ asked Joseph Ngwei politely.

‘This could be the hottest camp in the Valley,’ she said, ignoring, or perhaps unaware of, the hostility she was inspiring. ‘I mean, only six guest huts?’

‘Five,’ I said. ‘Ten beds.’

‘But you could double that easily, it’s perfect.’

‘I know it is.’

‘I thought Impala Lodge had the best location in the Valley, but this is better, the views along the river are better, and that wood is unbelievable. You could really do something with this place.’

‘Ebony glade,’ I said.

‘I can’t believe you don’t do more with it.’

‘We thought that improving on perfection was beyond us.’

She turned to me, eyes alight with delight, and said: ‘Come on then. What about a guided tour?’

‘It won’t take long. There isn’t much to see here. Only the bush.’ I showed her the sitenji; this had a bar at one end, at Joyce’s insistence, but no one had ever stood behind it. We used it as a shelf for our natural history books and the spare pairs of binoculars, all intended for the use of clients, and very dusty they got there. Caroline went out to the half-circle of ‘comfortable’ chairs and stood at the fireplace. She remained there for a long while in silence. A great white egret was fishing in the middle of the stream, beside him a spoonbill working furiously in comensal proximity. After a while, she asked: ‘Will you show me the huts?’

The huts were just huts, creaking baskets with light-permeable walls. Each contained two spindly, metal-framed single beds, two mosquito nets, and a small table bearing a Thermos jug of imperfectly chilled water. ‘Where’s the floor?’ Caroline asked.

‘What you are standing on is the floor of the planet earth,’ I said. ‘A light covering of sand from the Mchindeni river bank. What more could anyone want?’

‘Well, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you,’ Caroline said. ‘I can see why you keep hearing rumours about the National Parks Commission wanting to close you down. Who on earth can you get to come and stay here? Why don’t you put concrete down?’

‘It’s not allowed. We’re inside the park here: no permanent structures allowed.’

‘Impala Lodge is inside the park, and Leon got permission to lay down concrete.’

‘I’m aware of that. We don’t actually want concrete, though. We prefer Mchindeni river sand.’

‘What about lavatories?’

‘Oh, we’ve got them, don’t panic.’ I took her to the nearest of the two. ‘Long-drop. Sort of a deep pit, an oil drum at the top. But as you see, a real lavvy seat.’

‘You didn’t think of building them en suite, of course.’

‘Not a good idea. They get to whiff a bit by the end of the season, you see.’

‘Leon got permission to fit flush toilets at Impala Lodge.’

‘Yes, I know, and the water towers are a wonderful landmark for lost travellers.’ The sarcasm washed over her. She seemed to be rather overdoing the casual, professional interest in a competitor’s business. I felt like a house owner listening to a tactless potential buyer criticising the wallpaper and talking loudly about dismantling your favourite room.

Caroline asked: ‘And showers?’

‘Ah yes. Pièce de résistance , the showers. Clients love them. Follow me.’ I led her to the edge of the river bank, where three oil drums stood. Beneath the central one, a small fire of mopane wood was kept perpetually alight; mopane, hard as diamond, forms small coals that glow for hours.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Caroline said. ‘You splash yourselves down out here in the open.’

‘Would we be so coarse and unsophisticated? Come.’ I led her down a short flight of steps, cut into the river bank. At their foot was a small ledge, its outer edge guarded by a bamboo rail. Behind the rail were the two shower cubicles, each the size of a telephone kiosk, roofed with thatch, three walls and a floor cut from living river bank. The fourth wall was air; each cubicle gave a matchless view across the mighty Mchindeni. And from each, you could see both egret and spoonbill, and hear the grunting and guffawing of a pod of hippo in a deep pool a few yards away. Caroline inspected the shower head and the two taps, which were fed by the oil drums above: hot and cold. A straggling party of a dozen foxy-red puku was coming down to drink on the far side of the river; a pied kingfisher flashed before us, halted in mid-air, hovering hard, before plunging twenty feet into the river, emerging triumphantly fishfull.